Thursday, March 1, 2012

Much press coverage going on trying to decide what went wrong. Jon Cohen from Science is coming close to figuring it out. However, when he asked several members of NSABB to answer some questions, it become clear that they are being defensive and saying that it is the mere fact of making the virus “transmissible” that prompted them to recommend against publication, even if it was not clear that the aerosol-transmitted virus did not kill the ferrets. We are going to reconvene the NSABB ASAP to review the revised manuscripts from Ron and Yoshi to that they can see the additional and clarified data. I am afraid that they will not change their minds because they need to save face that they actually dropped the ball badly. I believe that Mike Osterholm and to some extent David Relman aggressively persuaded the others to vote not to publish. HOWEVER, I believe if the other members of NSABB knew that the aerosol transmission did not result in death of the ferrets, they would not have been convinced by the histrionics of Mike who told the press that this was equivalent to “thermonuclear war” if this virus gets out.