This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life. I'd ask everyone to please read it because it is incredible.
One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity."
Plus there's all the stuff about the miners shoveling bat poop for weeks and then dying of coronaviruses, and the Wuhan institute collecting and doing gain of function research on these similar-to-SARS samples. And then several of the lab's gain of function researchers became ill in late 2019. And there's the weird renaming of samples to hide the unmatched closeness of the mine samples and covid. This is just the absolute surface of the article. There's too much to list here
Edit: here's another amazement for the list: "Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories." And the article says "BSL-2 [is] roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office."
I can’t find sources for this right now but apparently Dr Anthony Fauci played a key role in getting the ban lifted. He’s also the head of the NIAID ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci ) which (apparently) is the ultimate source for all funding on gain of function research.
So the lead guy we’ve been listening to (and still are) for scientific advice on this pandemic is entangled in a massive conflict of interest.
Edit: I assume this is getting down-voted either because is sounds like conspiracy theory or just everyone has already heard it and it's not news. Fauci has already admitted having been involved in funding Wuhan - https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/fauci-admits-nih-funding-of-wu... - that on it's own should not have been something he first admitted to in May 2021, while holding such a responsible position. Looking for more sources right now...
> "Given these uncertainties, important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory."
It doesn't explicitly mention gain of function but - while raising the concerns, it's arguing for research which would include gain of function. Meanwhile listening to this panel discussion which included Fauci from Nov 2017 - https://www.c-span.org/video/?437187-1/johns-hopkins-forum-e... ... again he's arguing for more aggressive types of research
You are getting downvoted because it's muckraking. There is nothing shady about NIAID giving a (verrrry small for this type of research) grant to a foreign research lab, which is doing research about a topic of interest. That's how you ensure the U.S. government gets a copy of the results.
I'm not saying it's shady to provide that funding. What I'm saying is it demonstrates conflict of interest. Last year in May 5 2020 Fauci dismissed the idea that the virus came from a lab that his own organisation was providing funds to - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthony-fauci-wuhan-lab-coronav...
Whether or not anything shady was happening, the conflict of interest is clear.
Would Fauci have even known? Budget numbers say NIAID clears around $5 billion in grant funding per year and this grant was more at the $100k per year level. Another source shows that NIAID receives around 3,000 grant applications per year and that's just in two of their multiple grant types. It seems most likely to me that the grant was approved and funded by a subject-area committee without Fauci being involved at all. I would guess that when he "admitted to it" was probably the first time he knew.
Pretty sure if I ran an organization that funds a bunch of labs that do virus research, and a global pandemic started in the neighborhood of a lab doing virus research, and people started floating the theory that the virus leaked from that lab, one of the first things I'd do is call my grant-funding team and ask them if we funded that lab. If Fauci didn't do that, he's a strange dude.
100K from a 5B budget is peanuts and you couldn't reasonably expect the person at the top to know the details of what each recipient of 100K is doing exactly.
If all of the 5B is spent on coronavirus research then it's a different story. Most likely it's spent on an incredibly wide array of topics.
This is the difference between responsibility and accountability.
The person at the top might not know what each recipient is doing, but is still accountable for the funding decisions that were made (and oversaw the people and process that made those decisions on the organisations behalf).
Is this a different grant than what I'm thinking of? The institution that got the grant is a global non-profit(I think, and run by americans afair). They actually appealed this and said how damaging this is because they've had a long term working relationship with various labs across the globe relating to virus research. They've been on This Week on Virology many times on a variety of different subjects. Is the funding in question here different from that? Rand Paul makes it sound like the money went directly to China, which isn't the case.
This amuses me because some people are going to incredulously think "you would never keep such important information in excel" and others are going to skeptically say "there's no way they've managed to consolidate that down to just one excel file".
I inherited a application for grants tracking database last year and the grants themselves do not have a location. There are persons and institutions associated with each Application/Grant, and each of those has a location.
Interestingly, the application is designed for a very specific workflow, audit and review as part of the intake, but has no facilities for auditing after the fact. The data and relationships exist and there is a wealth of information in the database including known conflicts of interest but there's no easy way to query or browse this data from the application unless you're reviewing a specific grant or application.
For example:
The application doesn't allow you to search for persons by location and doesn't show you grants associated with persons. Rather you can only see persons associated with grants.
You can search for institution by address but again, it doesn't show you grants associated with an institution.
These interfaces were designed to just update Persons or Institutions when changes occur. They weren't intended as a way to back into a Grant or Application.
Or the person searching it ctrl+f’d a typo. Or a Chinese intern who helped compile the spreadsheet deleted that row on “accident”.
People are too quick to notice conflicts of interest. Everyone of us lives a life filled with such conflicts, yet we manage somehow to rise above, for the most part. Fauci seems like a nice guy to me.
In our org there's an entire team in the Research department dedicated to maintaining grants/applications and they rely on staff in IT and Finance for continuous support. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say it's at least 15 people.
to expand on just how small comparatively that number is... 100,000 seconds is a little over 1 day worth of seconds... 5 billion seconds is a little bit over 158 years of seconds.
This isnt a good political argument for Fauci though, because the next question from a reporter would be something like:
> “So you are saying that the organisation you lead helped fund a lab that caused a pandemic, but that funding was without your oversight because you thought it wasn’t important/big enough for you to look at? Are you going to resign?”
Note, I don’t believe the above is a fair question, but Fauci has to be careful to not set himself up for a gotcha.
Given the extreme danger of gain of function experiments, whatever their claimed benefits, while Fauci per his early February FIOA found email(s) wasn't aware his NIH institute was funding at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it could be argued he should have arranged to be in the loop for all of such grants and was doing his best to make sure they were done as safely as possible.
That's not to say it would have made any difference, unless per the article per the Bat Woman "The coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories," "our" includes all the WIV's coronavirus research—it's a fair size outfit with a number of labs and there's no reason to assume she was the Principle Investigator for all of its coronavirus research—and he or a direct report could have insisted the funded research would be done at the BSL-4 lab or maybe one of the BSL-3 labs. This assume the gain of function research was being done at a lower level, which starting with the 2011 bird flu work in the West has been too often true, one or both of those labs were BSL-2, one of the reasons it was controversial and so alarming to a lot of people watching this including myself.
But it turned out without his knowledge gain of function research there was being funded by his institute through the EcoHealth Alliance, and in another email he's thanked by it's leader Peter Daszak for helping to push the zoonotic transfer explanation, which the latter was or had arranged through a group letter to The Lancet to be the only acceptable narrative until around now.
It would also have been good if someone had done a gut check on the EcoHealth Alliance's MO, which as described by a Rutgers' biological chemistry professor was "looking for a gas leak with a lighted match" by as the author of the Vanity Fair article as "bringing samples from a remote area to an urban one, then sequencing and growing viruses and attempting to genetically modify them to make them more virulent."
Again, nothing unique to the Alliance or China, the US is in the process of moving the research on animal pathogens done at Plumb Island, New York to college town Manhattan, Kansas. Which I'm sure is a much more pleasant place to work at, but just happened to be in the heartland of American animal agriculture. Someday one or more Congressmen who fought to bring home the bacon may be called to account for this, to the extent that ever happens.
There are many emails stating Fauci did know and people that worked for him panicking. Worried that it would be discovered and their research would get canned.
I think the first thing you would probably do is try and protect the population as best as possible instead of trying to find your tracks. As an organization that large why do you think Fauci would even know suspect that there is any funding connection.
Hindsight is wonderfully clear.
Maybe you should be in charge since you are so clearsighted and clearly so wise.
Does it really matter though ? The fist thing I would do is find how to keep people from my country safe, not worry about where did my funding go (especially since the lab's funding has absolutely nothing to do with how we can find a cure or a vaccine).
Yes, because you need to keep up the appearance of neutrality. If there is a conflict of interest, then you need to be careful to ensure that everyone knows you are ensuring those conflicts don't happen. That means you need to know and admit a lot of things that don't happen.
My company wants to know if my brother in law works for a competitor. It won't change my job, but they will be careful to ensure that I don't work on things that it would matter if I let something slip over dinner.
It does though. If it is a lab leak Fauci has to be fired for political reasons given that he made the mistake of funding the lab. Therefore he has incentive to hide evidence if it was.
We don't know that it was a lab leak or natural; and probably never will. There is the possibility the if it was a lab leak Fauci used his position to hide that evidence to protect himself.
Because of the above Fauci should have disclosed his potential conflict of interest. That way the rest of us can consider his actions to ensure we are more likely to catch him abusing his position.
The above is a normal thing that happens all the time. I'm accusing him of doing wrong by not disclosing this over a year ago. Do not expand that to accusing him of actually doing anything else wrong in handling the pandemic.
And it makes a big difference to the world if there is a pandemic of 2018 flu and COVID-19 intensity every century or more often. Wikipedians found a gain of function experiment from 2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gain_of_function_research, but it became a big issue in science policy in 2011 when two groups used serial passage of H5N1 avian influenza in ferrets (a favorite animal model for respiratory diseases) to get it to transmit between them by respiratory droplets. This got a lot of people very concerned, including myself at the time, especially since one or both of the groups did this with no more than BSL-2 level protection against a leak.
So if this COVID-19 origin hypothesis is true and it took only 8 to 19 years for a lab leak of a gain of function experiment to cause the worst pandemic in a century, we ought to be very interested in making sure this happens a lot less often. Ideally not at all, but I see no way to impose a world wide ban on this type of research.
Until computational biology (including at the systemic macro level) becomes a viable alternative, GoF is one of our best tools to prevent nature from killing us.
That this should be done under the strictest protocols is obvious (and internationally-monitored, no less).
But pretending that dice aren't continually rolling in nature and hoping for the best seems shortsighted.
Please name a single consequential advance in science relevant to protecting people that's come out of the last 8 years of heavy duty gain of function research starting with bird flu and ferrets in 2011.
Considering it was a scientific ethical live wire from 2011 to 2014, and banned in the US from 2014 to 2017, that's a bit of a tall order.
I would point out that the some primary points against GOF utility in the 2014 survey report weigh very differently now: (1) lack of viral genetic surveillance at national levels, (2) inability to quickly generate novel vaccines, (3) inability to distribute vaccines worldwide.
Whatever chilling effect it had, tall order at this stage of this general program of research or not, it's high time its advocates including yourself point to tangible progress of one sort or another, for we now can reasonably assess the risk side of the risk benefit trade off.
See this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398081 on why the advancements in vaccines don't even begin to cover the risks, or note as of now how long it looks it'll be before the Third World gets vaccinated against as much as is humanly possible, no sooner than sometime in 2022. Consider the possibility of a sufficiently good escape variant requiring another dose or two.
Consider how little the the whole world can afford the expense of a pandemic, and the Third World in particular, including viral surveillance of any sort, "molecular" (PRC based) tests or sequencing samples. And this time they're lucky, COVID-19 mortality risks are highly weighted with age, something that hits the young harder will hit them a lot harder.
Consider how many possible, probable, or proven lab escapes will it take before the world's governments clamp down on a lot more than gain of function research.
Yes, nature wants to kill us, although your itemized points also address that issue. It's just not very good at it, and almost all of that was before the germ theory of disease was accepted in the end of the 19th Century.
mRNA vaccine technology is just a platform for presenting antigens to the immune system, the fastest one to make vaccine candidates by far, literally over a weekend for Moderna after the first SARS-CoV-2 sequences were published by Chinese researchers. It also has many advantages in simplicity.
That doesn't mean we'll be able to provide safe vaccines for sufficiently novel pathogens, behind Moderna's candidate was a decade and a half of research into making safe vaccines for SARS type coronaviruses, with researchers at the NIH finding one solution in 2017 for the antibody-dependent enhancement issue that had been plaguing such attempts starting with SARS and inactivated whole virus vaccines.
A fast pandemic can also get a long distance before you can ramp up production and vaccinate 8 billion people, with vaccines that so far need freezing for shipping, and medical grade refrigeration afterwords until used. Plus you need to make at least 8 billion syringes and needles and so on.
What's been highlighted of the FOIA released emails so far suggests he didn't know if his NIAID was funding Wuhan Institute of Virology SARS type coronavirus gain of function experiments, but he was quite concerned that might be the case. Look for the one where he tells someone to keep his cell phone on.
It's something he'd likely be concerned about, because he's been a big booster of gain of function research, and the Institute famously houses China's first BSL-4 lab, although the article claims the Bat Lady said prior to the pandemic they were only using BSL-2 and -3 labs for their coronavirus research. This assumes she'd know about all that was going on the Institute.
The email trail is damning. Fauci knew that the possibility was there. Instead of pushing for discovery and transparency of what actually happened, he publicly and vehemently denied the possibility and gave fuel to those who wanted to call the "lab leak theory" people "conspiracy nuts".
Fauci's elevation to sainthood was way too premature. His constant media appearances where he hasn't been questioned on any of this should be an object lesson to the public on media bias and the subsequent narrative bubbles that impact our society.
It's not surprising that the same people pushing Michael Avenatti as the next great politician have been the same people promoting Fauci.
This is an issue for sure. The core reason though, IMO, was the contrast - for example, you have the president calling for injecting bleach, publicly. Any reasonable person is going to drift away from that, and towards someone who seems more reasonable, and thoughtful. Now that there is less extreme rhetoric, the seams in this particular leadership are starting to show. Can't say the same for Michael Avenatti, who seemed unhinged from the beginning although again just my opinion.
"you have the president calling for injecting bleach"
Please don't repeat that. If you do even a little bit of research, you'll see that he didn't say that, and by repeating it you're lowering the dialog you want to raising.
Seems like a live press conference is a bad time to just "ask questions". It's a very idiotic time, in fact, to start spitballing medical treatment ideas to the general public.
That trope is only slightly wrong. He didn't say bleach, he said disinfectant. And that was in the context of disinfectant used to clean surfaces.
"And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?
"So it'd be interesting to check that."
Pointing to his head, Mr Trump went on: "I'm not a doctor. But I'm, like, a person that has a good you-know-what."
I think yes. Perhaps not upfront, perhaps not in the following days or weeks. But if your organization had funded a laboratory's gain of function research, and that laboratory is suddenly the topic of global speculation for potentially leaking a virus, a virus which is ostensibly a product directly of your funding and became one of the deadliest global pandemics ever... I think it would be hard to not know at some point.
I've lost faith in Fauci when he admitted he lied about the efficacy of masks early on in the pandemic. He literally came
out and stated he lied in order to make sure frontline healthcare workers had enough PPE. That was the most insane statement I've ever heard a public health leader make - lying about healthcare to the public that may result in more infections. That is how you destroy public trust.
What's sad is that the population would understand if you just told them the truth, namely that masks help, but our frontline works desperately need them so getting them masks and PPE is a priority.
And in case there was any doubt he also came out and said he intentionally lied about the required level of vaccination needed to achieve herd immunity [0] so that people don’t get too discouraged. He seems to be squarely in the “ends justify the means” camp. While the effectiveness of that is debatable, I find it hard to believe anything he says at this point.
[0] “In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...
I don't like these "strategic" lies either. And I agree the population in general would understand, but I think there'd still have been plenty of people that would've hoarded every mask possible, and at the time they had to make decisions based on possible scenarios, whereas now we have hindsight. Especially if things were handled differently in the beginning and the mask vs non-mask polarization manifested differently, who knows.
>And I agree the population in general would understand, but I think there'd still have been plenty of people that would've hoarded every mask possible
And many people did hoard masks, and toilet paper, and sanitizers. So Fauci solved nothing except destroy trust in public health authorities. It also wasn't the last time that he lied for 'people's own good'.
I believed him. I did. I don't believe him anymore.
> What's sad is that the population would understand if you just told them the truth, namely that masks help, but our frontline works desperately need them so getting them masks and PPE is a priority.
Maybe elsewhere, but not in America. This is one of the most selfish/individualist countries on earth.
>Maybe elsewhere, but not in America. This is one of the most selfish/individualist countries on earth.
That's a disgusting statement. People are people. And the vast majority of people in every country are good people.
It's also not true, but even if it was, he has no right to lie to people about their healthcare and well-being. You can't do that because this kind of lie actually hurt people who would have wore a mask (homemade or otherwise) but didn't (and maybe got sick or died), all because they trusted him.
Firstly, he has no excuse to be ignorant. Secondly, I’d wager every administrator and CEO who has any involvement with viral biomedical research were making urgent albeit possibly discreet inquiries into any possible involvement around February 2020.
Would Fauci have known that gain of function research was now legal again?! Of course he would. Whether or not to fund that sort of risky research that has gone back and forth in legality is precisely the kind of thing that his job required him to know, isn't it?
According to Wade's article it's actually even murkier than that. Only Fauci or one other person could have actually overridden the ban to keep the money flowing and prevent oversight of it:
The moratorium, referred to officially as a “pause,” specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. It defined gain-of-function very simply and broadly as “research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.”
But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”
This seemed to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the exemption in order to keep the money flowing to Dr. Shi’s gain-of-function research, and later to avoid notifying the Federal reporting system of her research.
Right you are. But you're supposed to run grant proposals past a board which was created as part of the end of the funding moratorium, and it's been alleged this wasn't done, and that was routine for either Fauci's institute or the NIH as a whole.
It's not a conflict of interest because Dr. Fauci wasn't gaining anything. The agency he is head of is specifically interested in infectious disease and has a large budget for grants. $120K per year pays for a couple plate of genetic samples and tech time to run them. Maybe in China you can run a few more for that cost, I don't know.
As head of that agency, it's also his job to share his professional opinion with the public. For this, his reward is a public servant's salary. Seriously, what's he getting here for his supposed "deception"?
A conflict of interest does not depend on whether a person actually gains (or prevents himself from losing) anything, but whether he has some personal interest (such as fame, money, even gifts for a family member, etc.) that coexists with some duty-bound interest to some other party/society (e.g. fiduciary duty, professional ethical duties, etc.), and the person is entrusted with making a decision that implicated either interest depending on the outcome. Conflicts of interest are usually resolved either by disclosure or isolation from the adverse interest.
In this case, Fauci has sort of a small, debatable conflict. His personal stake is not money per se, but his reputation and clear preference for gain-of-function research. If it came out that gain-of-function research caused the pandemic, and Fauci was one of the leading cheerleaders for that since the early aughts AND Fauci may have provided some of the funding for this particular research, then Fauci would stand to lose quite a bit of reputation and standing. That's a real adverse incentive to determine that lab leak of a gain-of-function virus is not possible.
If his job is to share his opinion to the public, then he has a conflict of interest with respect to that decision, since the public doesn't know if Fauci-the-expert is talking or Fauci-the-reputation-seeking-bureaucrat. If he had merely disclosed any of his involvement with restarting funding of gain-of-function research in 2017 or his past advocacy for gain-of-function research, that would significantly resolve the conflict.
In my opinion, Fauci is simply an opportunistic bureaucrat and a liar (I repeat myself), and the conflict of interest claim against him is weak. Peter Daszam has much, much more problematic conflicts of interest. This is a guy who (1) discredited fellow scientists in the Lancet for considering an alternative hypothesis and (2) led a sham WHO investigation into the WIV lab, all while funneling NIH grant money to WIV, not complying with disclosure and review requirements and standing to lose his career if gain-of-function were to be seriously discredited. It would be hard for him to be more conflicted.
Also, for what it's worth, Fauci is the highest paid federal employee. He makes more than the president. Most "public servants" make $150k/year or less. Not to mention, Fauci had also made a book deal as a result of his celebrity.
By these standards, everyone (in such a position) is always in some "conflict of interest". Had Fauci blamed that lab, he certainly would have been, as his organization also funds its competitors, and of course because he works for the US administration.
The ideology behind throwing around this kind of allegations is: all facts are fabricated by somebody, nobody can be trusted (they all have a conflict of interest), so we can as well make up our own "alternative facts" that fit our ideology best. In the end, it's just "us against them", so arguments and facts don't matter any more.
As a side-note: I doubt that Fauci just spontaneously pushes out his personal opinion about this kind of affairs, so I suppose his organization largely agrees with him. All corrupt and in a "conflict of interest"?
And I think his position should definitely be paid better than the president. Why not?
None of this says anything about Fauci as a person. He might be opportunistic, a bureaucrat, and whatnot, but that is hardly relevant in this context (other than discrediting everything he says).
> By these standards, everyone (in such a position) is always in some "conflict of interest".
Yes. But not everyone becomes the leading figure in a global pandemic which has killed 3.7 million people and thrown the world into complete disarray. At the point where you realise you're in that position, the correct, ethical thing to do is put all your cards on the table.
How is he "the leading figure"? Fauci is hardly relevant outside the US. As you mentioned we are discussing a global phenomenon and it's useful to distinguish between global and US specific matters.
If Fauci is responsible (in part, vis funding) for "assembling" the virus that caused the pandemic and is also responsible (in part) for abetting a sham WHO investigation, then certainly he would be relevant globally. The fact that the US NIH is sort of a clearinghouse for top-tier global medical research, by virtue of US hegemony, also makes him more relevant than just about any other national expert.
EDIT: Please don't downvote Pyramus. He asked a legitimate question and as far as I can tell followed HN rules. There are ~7.7B people who are not in the US.
You are mixing accountability and responsibility here - to give a less politically charged analogue: was Steve Ballmer responsible for the spread of the ILOVEYOU virus? No, but he held ultimate accountability for VBA being enabled by default.
I'm not disagreeing with the importance of US R&D spending, which is huge (25-30% of global spend), or that Fauci is an important public health official.
I'm simply telling you that the rest of the world is mostly indifferent to the persona Fauci, based on what I'm observing in the EU & UK and extrapolating to Asia.
> The ideology behind throwing around this kind of allegations is: all facts are fabricated by somebody, nobody can be trusted (they all have a conflict of interest), so we can as well make up our own "alternative facts" that fit our ideology best. In the end, it's just "us against them", so arguments and facts don't matter any more.
That isn't true at all. Mere disclosure (e.g. "Full disclosure: I ran gain of function research for years at NIH, a couple years ago got a ban on gain-of-function research lifted at the White House and our team is currently looking into whether WIV received our funding") is sufficient to mitigate most conflicts of interests. Conflicts of interest exist all the time, but they're fairly easy to disclose (as long as someone has an ethical backbone), and in extreme cases can be mitigated with things like divestment or blind trusts (in the case of financial conflicts of interest).
Suppose your doctor was also a paid consultant for a pharmaceutical company, advising them on their new drug X. One day, your doctor starts telling you all of the benefits of drug X for certain medical issues you have, and she's very enthusiastic about it. If she simply disclosed, "full disclosure: I'm consulting with the manufacturer on the effects of this drug; that said, I really believe in it," wouldn't that entirely change the ethical dynamic vis-a-vis nondisclosure? If she disclosed, you could get a (non-conflicted) second opinion, or maybe you implicitly trust your doctor and go along with her recommendation as is. But if she didn't disclose and you later learned some other way that she has this conflict, you would lose trust.
This is what happened with Fauci and the gain-of-function crowd. They stood on the pedestal of unbiased scientific expertise, failing to disclose their conflicts, and then enabled the browbeating of anyone with alternative hypotheses (literally anyone: scientists had their professional reputations and research funding threatened; social media users had their accounts suspended or posts deleted). Without alternative hypotheses, science entirely falters. Full disclosure on the part of Fauci and especially Daszak would have gone lightyears in evaluating their credibility.
I should note that conflicts of interest do not change facts or true scientific conclusions themselves; that would be ad hominem. But conclusions are typically dependent on myriad facts, and experts have a much better idea about the universe of discourse around these facts than laypeople. A conflicted expert may thus present cherry-picked facts that support his conclusions, ignoring those that cut against them. To be fair, non-conflicted scientists may do this as well, but their credibility is only harmed insofar as they should have addressed countervailing evidence when presenting conclusions. Having a non-disclosed conflict of interest undermines a scientist's credibility and a commitment to ethical inquiry.
In my opinion, the scientific community has severely undermined their ethical and persuasive capital over the past year and even longer. If disclosure were a normal part of scientific discourse where it impacted policy, we likely would have more people who believe that vaccines work, that climate change is a threat (though likely not an apocalyptic one) and that the scientific process generally works. Instead, we have this browbeating culture where not trusting the "experts" is like some sort of scarlet letter, at least until we learn the experts were looking out for their own interests and suddenly they lose their luster. I love science, so I wish the scientific community would get its fucking act together so that large segments of the population on my "side" start to believe in the scientific method again.
Finally, lost in all of this is the fact that gain-of-function was supposed to produce vaccines more rapidly. As far as I can tell, this never happened. The vaccines we received had been researched for a decade through a different program not funded by NIH, and did not depend on gain-of-function research, but instead used unmolested SARS viruses.
Is a scientist actually a scientist if they don’t adhere to the scientific method and try their best to maintain skepticism and abstract themselves from personal and political bias. I would say they are not actually scientists, they just think and claim they are.
Humans are flawed, biased, and fundamentally limited creatures that are wrong a lot of the time. So we invented a system to evaluate hypothesis based on experiments, data, etc... A person speaking gospel or pushing a trust “The Science” while prematurely rejecting unproven hypothesis is NOT a scientist. They are no better than those who sought to banish or kill Galileo and the like.
In my opinion, the scientific community has severely undermined their ethical and persuasive capital over the past year and even longer
I would agree with the "even longer". I think it most noticeably started with the scientific community's intermixing of concerns regarding climate change with political forces who have had their own agendas. It's made it extremely difficult even for scientifically-minded and informed people like myself to sort through the bullshit vs the good information. People without even my background have no hope of knowing whom to trust, so they've fallen back to just trusting their political inclinations.
This past year and the politicization around pandemic issues has definitely seen an increase in the the problem, though. It's been a sad year for Science. Hard-won public trust in scientists has been thrown away. You can see it in the hesitancy to get the vaccine.
But it could be perceived as a conflict of interest, and that of itself is the reason to at least declare it (for transparency). This is how it works in ethics.
Indeed, avoiding the perception of impropriety is second only to avoiding impropriety itself. When people perceive impropriety, even when there is none, trust in the system is undermined.
At the end of the day it's up to everybody to apply their own version of the "reasonable person" test. Might a reasonable person misconstrue what you're doing to be unethical? If so, rethink your approach. Maybe there is no other option, but often there is.
Anything could be perceived as a conflict of interest. This entire subthread is an argument about whether it’s reasonable to consider this case a conflict of interest.
EcoHealth secured a NIAID grant of roughly $3.7 million, which it allocated in part to various entities engaged in collecting bat samples, building models, and performing gain-of-function experiments to see which animal viruses were able to jump to humans.
It was a $3.7million dollar grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which I wouldn't doubt he was involved with. $600,000 was sent from EcoHealth to Wuhan Institute of Virology.
He has now been called in to testify in front of congress on it ... twice. However insignificant the dollar amount, knowing the details of it is his job.
Ultimately yes - but not at grant time, just like how a CEO is responsible for everything in a company either directly or indirectly. Shit flows up, he may not be personally involved in the decision but he absolutely has to be briefed on it (or know who to ask) if things go sideways so he can answer to Congress/President (just like a CEO to the board).
It’s an obvious conflict of interest. To be making public judgments about whether a lab could be responsible when you are partly responsible for what that lab has done is precisely the definition of conflict of interest.
It’s called self-policing elsewhere, and anybody would see the conflict of interest immediately at FAANG, for example. Was FB causing teen depression? Researcher says no. (Then it turns out the researcher had done consulting work for FB or had been in contact with FB, advocating that they use the timeline feed to run experiments on unsuspecting teens…
Just playing devil's advocate, not convinced fauci had any malicious intentions, but he has one of the most highly public jobs in America, he gets to keep his job/power and maintain a future in politics. But he definitely does not seem like some power hungry egomaniacal player to me. His beliefs before and after and actions after the outbreak seemed to be consistent with someone that was trying to do the right thing for our country.
I don't know about malice, but covering up or downplaying the possibility of a global pandemic being caused by activities he was involved in or encouraged... shit can be corrupt even if a person is not trying to take advantage of a situation.
Placing blame isn't really all that important. Making sure none of this happens again for the same reasons is.
If I was placing a bet, I'd say Wuhan researchers regularly got a handle on patents zero for cross species infection. In the course of the research a virus infected workers because of lax, sloppy, or otherwise inadequate controls; then despite the threat in order to save face government did everything they could to hide the mistake until it was far too late for anything to really be done about it.
So you’re criticizing a scientist for expressing skepticism toward a scenario that had (especially at the time) very limited evidence, and then just placing your own bet on a far more extreme, also non-substantiated version?
The article states that at the time people were denying the possibility of a lab leak, there was a lack of credible evidence for zoonosis. If I’m evaluating hypotheses, it’s generally better that I wait for hard evidence before ruling one out. e.g. some kind of patient zero animal population.
The lancet letter was at best extraordinarily premature.
Errr... yes? None of that is relevant to the claim GP goes on to make. Not only was skepticism warranted toward the lab leak hypothesis (and it continues to be), but going on to speculate that this "regularly" happened is a bit rich.
Seriously, what's he getting here for his supposed "deception"?
Fauci has been covering this up since early on. Have you not followed the story of the released emails from the FOIA request? He knew this research was being conducted. He gave cover to those who attacked people like Sen Tom Cotton, who was trying to get this looked into from the beginning.
For this, his reward is a public servant's salary
Fauci is the highest paid employee in the Federal government.
> It's not a conflict of interest because Dr. Fauci wasn't gaining anything. The agency he is head of is specifically interested in infectious disease and has a large budget for grants. $120K per year pays for a couple plate of genetic samples and tech time to run them. Maybe in China you can run a few more for that cost, I don't know.
So it is not a conflict of interest because of the sum of money? Someone doesn't need to gain anything to be in conflict, by definition: "a situation in which the concerns or aims of two different parties are incompatible."
Do you at least think he had a duty to disclose his involvement/investment in gain of function research? Specifically with the Wuhan lab at the center of this?
> As head of that agency, it's also his job to share his professional opinion with the public. For this, his reward is a public servant's salary. Seriously, what's he getting here for his supposed "deception"?
Did you know he's the most highly paid government official? His measly public servant salary only paid him $417K. [0]
It's still not clear to me what the conflict of interest is. The amount of money is kind of important, because it gives you an idea of the level of involvement. As I said, $600K over 5 years is very little money, it basically makes sure you get the results of whatever research is already being done.
> His measly public servant salary only paid him $417K.
The top scientist in the country, with several Ph.Ds, 50 years of experience in a both public leadership and an incredibly complicated branch of biology, is making roughly what a staff engineer at a FAANG company makes...and you are complaining? That's the bargain of the century. He's a sick fuck for actually sticking it out - he could have bailed and consulted on "return to the office" for all the big tech and entertainment companies. He is 80 years old, working insane hours, and probably would have made more money in 6 months than he has in his whole public career from a really nice beach. You will never convince me that THIS is the smoking gun that proves Dr. Fauci corrupt, finally, after 50 years in public service. It's too stupid.
> It's still not clear to me what the conflict of interest is. The amount of money is kind of important, because it gives you an idea of the level of involvement. As I said, $600K over 5 years is very little money, it basically makes sure you get the results of whatever research is already being done.
Maybe he's covering his own ass? Maybe he's trying to protect gain of function research? He was, after all, the most vocal proponent that the risks with gain of function research were worth it. [0]
> The top scientist in the country, with several Ph.Ds, 50 years of experience in a both public leadership and an incredibly complicated branch of biology, is making roughly what a staff engineer at a FAANG company makes...and you are complaining? That's the bargain of the century. He's a sick fuck for actually sticking it out - he could have bailed and consulted on "return to the office" for all the big tech and entertainment companies. He is 80 years old, working insane hours, and probably would have made more money in 6 months than he has in his whole public career from a really nice beach. You will never convince me that THIS is the smoking gun that proves Dr. Fauci corrupt, finally, after 50 years in public service. It's too stupid.
Oh, ok. So before his only reward was his "public servant salary", but now that you know he's the most highly paid government official (including the President) his salary is now being compared to FAANGs and he's underpaid. What a sacrifice.
> Oh, ok. So before his only reward was his "public servant salary", but now that you know he's the most highly paid government official (including the President)
He is far from the top paid government official. That honor, by a long shot, in nearly every state in the country, goes to college athletic coaches[1].
I assumed this was a typo the first time, but since you repeated it - it's gain* of function. As in a virus gaining a new function.
Did you even read that paper? I doesn't say what you are claiming at all. It says they're going to hold a conference to determine if it's worth the risks, and says they should continue the moratorium while they do more research. Ah jeez.
> Oh, ok. So before his only reward was his "public servant salary", but now that you know he's the most highly paid government official (including the President) his salary is now being compared to FAANGs and he's underpaid. What a sacrifice.
Compared to what he could be making right now? Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate his sacrifice — he's criminally underpaid for how valuable his skills and experience are to the country.
You've broken the site guidelines repeatedly and egregiously in this thread. We ban accounts that do that.
Most of the accounts that have been doing that in this thread, I've let off with just a warning. Yours, however, seems clearly to be using HN primarily for ideological/political/nationalistic battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for, because they're destructive of what this site is supposed to exist for. Therefore I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
> You've broken the site guidelines repeatedly and egregiously in this thread. We ban accounts that do that.
What guidelines have I "repeatedly and egregiously" broken in this thread? Was it the pointing out that a monetary gain is not a requirement for a conflict of interest? Was it where I asked the other poster if they thought Fauci had a duty of care to disclose his involvement in activities that some might see as a conflict of interest? Was it pointing out the fact that Fauci is the highest paid government official in the federal government (with citation)? Was it referencing and quoting Fauci's paper from 2012? Or was it me pointing out the other poster's bad faith responses to my comments (with the "Aw jeez")?
I've read the HN guidelines and this decision is not inline with them.
No, it has to do with name-calling, flamebait, and generally posting in the flamewar style. It's perfectly possible to do all the things you mentioned without any of that.
Also, it's against HN's rules to use the site primarily for political battle, which you've obviously been doing, and we warned you about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25692385. Not cool.
That comment was four months ago. And it wasn't directed at anyone in particular. Guess that qualifies as "repeated" in your book? Seems like a stretch.
What name did I call the other poster? I remarked that he appears to have a Fauci bromance, but that was after the "Aw jeez" sarcastic / flame bait comments. Prior to that I was commenting in good faith. And frankly, pointing out someone has a bromance for someone else after they've lavished praise upon that person in two separate comments does not name calling make. It's an observation, one that wasn't refuted by the other poster. Furthermore, despite being accused of having not read a paper because of a typo, I stuck to good faith commenting by quoting directly from said paper.
Can't help but notice I'm being banned for largely benign comments in a thread where I speculate about Fauci's conflict of interest. Comments other commenters expressed agreement. But the poster making sarcastic / bad faith comments who is defending Fauci gets off with a warning.
This conduct is your political battle, dang. Which is both not cool and, in my opinion, actively hurting debate on HN. HN would benefit from more balanced moderation.
"You continue to sidestep and move goal posts. Ah jeez. You cling to an obvious typo instead of addressing my questions. Ah jeez. Your obvious (and frankly cringeworthy) Fauci bromance aside..." is filled with name-calling (pejorative 'you' language).
I must admit that you have a point, though: I shouldn't have said that you'd broken the site guidelines "repeatedly and egregiously in this thread". You may have broken them repeatedly, but when I looked back I only saw one comment that was egregious in this thread (the one I initially replied to). I'm sorry for the overstatement. I usually try to make sure my statements are strictly accurate, and that one wasn't, and I apologize.
It doesn't change the ban, because that wasn't the reason for banning you. As I explained, we ban accounts that use HN primarily for political/ideological battle. Surely you're not arguing that your account hasn't been doing that? It plainly has.
Everyone in this situation feels like we're only banning them because we secretly disagree with their politics, but the truth is that we do these bans regardless of what the account is battling for or against. We're trying to enforce the guidelines because the guidelines are the best blueprint we have for the kind of forum HN is supposed to be.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. That means using HN for curious, thoughtful conversation, not getting into flamewars, not trying to smite enemies, and so on.
> Did you even read that paper? I doesn't say what you are claiming at all. It says they're going to hold a conference to determine if it's worth the risks, and says they should continue the moratorium while they do more research. Ah jeez.
A bad faith comment ("did you even read your link?") followed by a sarcastic "Aw jeez". Sure, two wrongs don't make a right, but only one wrong is being banned. For rthe record, I don't think the other poster should be banned, either.
> It doesn't change the ban, because that wasn't the reason for banning you. As I explained, we ban accounts that use HN primarily for political/ideological battle. Surely you're not arguing that your account hasn't been doing that? It plainly has.
I used HN for debate. It is difficult, if not impossible to avoid treading into political/ideological realms. I've gone through your comment history and have found numerous examples of you entering into the political/ideological yourself. If you need examples, I'd be happy to provide some recent ones. But I brought more than political/ideological debate to HN, I also submitted scientific papers, recently declassified documents and other materials that (at least to me) were of interest. But that's not the point, the banning of all "political/ideological battles" is a shortsighted policy that will eventually render HN a dead sea where nothing interesting is discussed because no ideas can be openly challenged.
> Everyone in this situation feels like we're only banning them because we secretly disagree with their politics, but the truth is that we do these bans regardless of what the account is battling for or against. We're trying to enforce the guidelines because the guidelines are the best blueprint we have for the kind of forum HN is supposed to be.
Well, you had to go back four months for a previous guideline violation and my account is only six months old. Two strikes and I'm out I guess, and the previous violation was a throwaway comment that wasn't targeting anyone. Seems like I was on a list (of sorts) and this was as good an excuse as any to ban me. But banning posters for expressing political/ideological viewpoints is itself a political/ideological battle. The political/ideological views that survive on HN (and they do) are nested firmly in your political/ideological blindspots. Which is why I suggest a more balanced approach to moderation would ensure that at least this poorly thought out policy is applied more evenly.
> If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. That means using HN for curious, thoughtful conversation, not getting into flamewars, not trying to smite enemies, and so on.
No, that's ok. I think I brought considerably more good faith debate to HN than anything else. It may not have aligned with your political/ideological sensibilities, but there's little I can proactively do about that minefield. The "rules" won't save me here.
How have I moved the goal posts? I've maintained that there is no conflict-of-interest here. I like Dr. Fauci, but I mostly don't understand the point of this line of reasoning. Right wing media sources have a long history of vendettas against individuals they perceive to be liberal or against them in some way - that's what this appears to be.
I specifically didn't focus on the "typo", except you said it 3 times, so I figured you'd want to know.
...and that quote hardly conveys to "the most vocal proponent". Talk about moving the goal posts!
> His measly public servant salary only paid him $417K
Oh please. The median CEO pay at a pharmaceutical company is nearly $5 million. It take all the way up to nearly $50 million per year, which someone with the incredible experience (not to mention government contacts) of Dr Fauci would be on the upper end of, and that's not too mention the tens of millions in signing bonus and retirement packages. [1]
Fauci is clearly dismissing the notion that it was engineered. He says pretty clearly that if a natural virus escaped the lab it would still be a natural virus and hence not a useful topic when it comes to treating it. I don't think he ever said it wasn't possible just that there's no reason to believe it. And it's understandably not his primary concern to figure out.
I just want to point out that there is no real evidence of this. Statistically, I'm sure it happened at least once, you can find one example of anything, but this phrase originates with a single anecdotal story from a single nurse.
There was no trend or array of stories. Just one lady who said she had someone denying it on their deathbed with zero corroboration, and then she got 2 days of news cycle.
There were random interviews in the capitol saying all these weird stuff from the internet, and people in US often know someone who'd be convinced this way.
So its not like this crazy stuff is hard to prove is prevalent (pun intended) among certain groups.
What is hard is actually putting figures on it when worldviews get so warped due to circular logic. This is bad, because there are real reasons people are upset. Underlying reasons that need to be properly addressed.
> Local mainstream “fact checkers” have even called Covid-19 a “right-wing conspiracy theory” in early 2020.
Would love a citation or two. I remember the right-wing administration saying it would disappear as if by magic and Fox News saying "0 deaths" and that playing up covid was a left wing invention at least up to april or so.
I don't know about this particular wording, but from my point of view here is what happened:
At first the loosely defined right-wing were panicking about the virus. Myself included, although I wasn't really panicking, just getting myself mentally prepared that this might possibly be the second black plague that could wipe out a similar percentage of the population. Meanwhile the loosely defined left-wing was ridiculing it, laughing about it, saying that there is no evidence that the virus is dangerous and calling people fearmongers and racists (?). And then everything switched. As it turned out, the virus wasn't as nearly dangerous as I initially though it'd be and the left-wing suddenly started acting like we're all going to die.
Fascinating how your PoV is so fundamentally different from mine, even when archive browsing the web a bit now.
Regarding:
> calling people fearmongers and racists (?)
I remember asian (or of asian descent) acquaintances being spit on and yelled at in the vein of "you're killing us!" on the subway for ostensibly looking Chinese (I'm guessing), at a time when the virus was already likelier to spread from other countries, and I'd say the more left leaning were pointing this out. People doing that don't reach that stage of racebased profiling independently without someone drumming up "chinavirus" as soon as it was no longer feasible to shrug it off. Is that maybe what you're referring to?
Yes, it really is fascinating how there are basically two entirely different worlds out there. But we're not in disagreement that the positions switched at some point, right?
I've seen people talking about the rise in anti-asian hate crimes and it being incorrectly blamed on white supremacy, but that happened somewhat recently. At the point in time we're talking about I haven't really heard about anything too much, although it's not hard to imagine it being the case. I think it's to be expected, what are you supposed to do about it? Should you ignore the actions of Israel, because it's associated with Jews? Or actions of Russian government, because someone could discriminate a Russian person over that? Or what happens in some Islamic country? And we're fine with talking about about "systemic white supremacy", so I find these concerns to be hypocritical frankly. I also don't believe that pretending like the virus didn't originate in China would help anything. People might be stupid, but they're smart enough to figure out that this is just BS.
> But we're not in disagreement that the positions switched at some point, right?
I think we are in disagreement. I don't remember such a switch, nor can identify one browsing backwards.
> I think it's to be expected, what are you supposed to do about it? Should you ignore the actions of Israel, because it's associated with Jews? Or actions of Russian government, because someone could discriminate a Russian person over that? Or what happens in some Islamic country?
I doubt everyone in Israel agrees with the decisions of the state of Israel, just as half of Americans don't agree with any current administration. Even further beyond that you shouldn't equate every jew with Israel, just as you shouldn't every muslim with Iran.
Talking about China as it relates to covid is fine. Calling it "chinavirus" (repeatedly) has no practical benefit, and is only used as a polemic.
> And we're fine with talking about about "systemic white supremacy", so I find these concerns to be hypocritical frankly.
I don't equate every white person with white supremacy, including myself. I don't see the hypocrisy.
> I think we are in disagreement. I don't remember such a switch, nor can identify one browsing backwards.
Well, I definitely remember left-leaning people ridiculing it when people were buying out the toilet paper, saying that there is no virus and stuff.
> I don't equate every white person with white supremacy, including myself. I don't see the hypocrisy.
And I don't equate every Chinese person with the virus or the Chinese government. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the criticism is that the narrative or the words you use, even if factually correct, might cause some people to have prejudice against the members of a certain group. You're (maybe not you specifically, I don't know) concerned about backlash against Chinese people over the virus, but you aren't concerned about the backlash against white people over systemic racism theory. That's what I find hypocritical.
But yeah, "china virus" might be a little bit over the top.
> Well, I definitely remember left-leaning people ridiculing it when people were buying out the toilet paper, saying that there is no virus and stuff.
I didn't even realize buying up toilet paper during early pandemics was partisan, but I definitely remember memes about how inconsiderate it is to buy up years worth of toilet paper at once, emptying the cache for everyone else with no indication that toilet paper manufacturing was affected. I admit I made fun of this too, but drew no political association to it. It had nothing to do with (the existence of) the virus.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the criticism is that the narrative or the words you use, even if factually correct, might cause some people to have prejudice against the members of a certain group.
Yeah, I guess, but I don't think there's any valid and accurate criticism that would lead anyone to blame random Chinese people.
> You're (maybe not you specifically, I don't know) concerned about backlash against Chinese people over the virus, but you aren't concerned about the backlash against white people over systemic racism theory. That's what I find hypocritical.
I haven't experienced any backlash against white people for any and all systemic racism built by other white people. I still do not see your point.
I don't think there really should be any political association to the virus in general, it just so happened that the issue divided itself along the partisan lines as usual. The buying out toilet paper was just to give you the time frame, that's when overall people were being ridiculed over concerns about the virus. Personal anecdote, one somewhat heavily left-leaning friend we know was insisting on a meeting and we got laughed at when we refused, because we were afraid of virus.
> I haven't experienced any backlash against white people for any and all systemic racism built by other white people. I still do not see your point.
And I'm really glad you didn't. Not every Chinese experienced any backlash either. That's great for them too. But not everyone was so fortunate. Example from a BLM protest: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5ebji8
I don't know if that NPR article has been edited, but the only thing it's saying is that in january 2020 there was low risk of contracting covid compared to a regular flu, not that the virus was less dangerous, which at the time seems accurate.
From your vanityfair link:
> As Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and much of the GOP parroted the president’s no-worries line, MAGA originals like Steve Bannon and Mike Cernovich sounded the alarm.
I did notice the difference in Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity coverage, but you're right, there seems to have been a split within the grouping. Seeing as how many on the right are Trump loyalists (to a fault), that was the generalization I was drawing.
If you don't remember that, then you should question your information sources. I remember the accusations of racism online quite vividly as I voiced my concerns in early February that people should start taking precautions: buying quarantine supplies, PPE, etc.
Tucker Carlson had some early reports on COVID and was attacked for fear-mongering by his usual left-leaning political opponents.
This is Fauci (serving under Trump) saying in January 2020 that he didn't think it was a threat, or am I missing something?
Are you saying that a then Trump official, now Biden official was speaking out of partisanship?
> I remember the accusations of racism online quite vividly as I voiced my concerns in early February that people should start taking precautions: buying quarantine supplies, PPE, etc.
I stocked up on ~3-4 weeks worth of supplies too, and replenished bi-weekly since early february, as well as many of my friends, neither of whom politicised it.
> Tucker Carlson had some early reports on COVID and was attacked for fear-mongering by his usual left-leaning political opponents.
Conservative media has been and is almost exclusively doing the vocal delusional pandemic denial. You are completely right about this. The source claiming the right-wing conspiracy theory has been an outlier here.
There was an article from a popular outlet I've been particularly surprised about, since left-wing media otherwise mostly took the pandemic seriously here and around the world, and tried to stay science-based.
This article remained in my memory because they present themselves as fact checkers and are popular with many prominent people in my primary political and media spectrum.
This is from 27th January 2020, while many people here on HN likely have read the first concerning reports about this virus at the end of December 2019. I started being careful from mid January.
Until today this page self-righteously claims that "the available facts at that time" pointed towards nothing to be concerned about in the Western world, which is simple not true if you took your research seriously.
I mentioned that Men in Black scene. There were several other topics where I could find concerning evidence by carefully browsing otherwise questionable sources very early on – the lab leak theory (ProjectEvidence, Zerohedge), the aerosol transmission, that mask wearing is reasonable, the unclear and potentially harmful effects of the spike protein itself –, while I've been completely ignoring such websites before covid. ( Other things like people just dropping dead on Chinese streets did not turn out true ofc. )
Separate from the article, the damming thing in his email release is the strong suggestion that he knew it was engineered early on and may have participated in hiding this fact.
er, who has shown any evidence at all that covid-19 was "engineered"? this whole discussion is about the unproven possibility that it leaked from a lab.
The “engineered” component is about the Furin cleavage site on the sars-cov-2 spike protein.
The virus shares 92% genetic similarity to bat coronaviruses, except the spike protein, which is nearly identical to a pangolin coronavirus(which is otherwise only ~38% similar) with one key exception: The Furin cleavage site using “lab standard” sequences.
The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that are rarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair. For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.
According to Andersen, the CGG codon isn't quite as rare in coronaviruses. He also comments that the stability of the CGG codon in the Furin cleavage site has been remarkably high over the course of the pandemic, which is a hint that the CGG codon may be selected for and crucial for the virus.
Quoting him:
> Now, the codons. Here, Baltimore is talking about the two codons coding for the first two arginines (R) following the P - CGG. The CGG codon is rare in viruses because it's an example of an unmethylated "CpG" site that can be bound by TLR9, leading to immune cell activation.
> Despite being rare, however, CGG codons are found in all coronaviruses, albeit at low frequency. Specifically, of all arginine codons, CGG is used at these frequencies in these viruses:
> Furthermore, if we go back to the FCoV sequences and compare them to SARS-CoV-2 at the nucleotide level you'll see that FCoV also uses CGG to code for R immediately following the P. The next R is CGA (non-CpG) in FCoV, while it's CGG in SARS-CoV-2 - one nucleotide difference.
> We see CGG multiple times in different ways - here's an example comparing another "PR" stretch between SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, and SARS-CoV in the N gene. Note how SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 both use CGG, while SARS-CoV-2 uses CGC for the first R, while later R's are coded by CGT or AGA
> One final point about the CGG codons in the FCS - if they were somehow "unnatural", we'd see SARS-CoV-2 evolve away from "CGG" during the ongoing pandemic. We have more than a million genomes to analyze, so what do we find if we look at synonymous mutations at the "CGG_CGG" site?
> Remarkably stable. Specifically, CGG is 99.87% conserved in the first codon and 99.84% conserved in the second.
> This is very strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 'prefers' CGG in these positions.
I'm only a former bioinformaticist (not a clinical practitioner), but people tend to anthropomorphize the blind idiot god of evolution a bit too much. "Selection" is just the end result of survivorship bias.
CGG-CGG is the most potent furin cleavage site because it works on the outer cell membranes and on the interior. Viruses that have it will outcompete all others -- but all this means is that SARS-Cov-2 with the CGG-CGG FCS has been well adapted to humans since the beginning of the pandemic and less potent mutations haven't been able to keep up. There's no "natural/unnatural" axis to consider. The most infectious virus "prefers" to be the most infectious, indeed. It's tautological. Evidence of efficacy doesn't disprove laboratory alteration.
Fauci was responsible for the work of large swathes of the US medical research establishment, and was questioned on that work on a daily basis. Does it make any sense to say he can't comment on the work of an organisation he runs because he runs it?
In this case the lab didn't even work for him, it just got some small amount of funding from his organisation's budget but he had no say in it's operations. So he can comment on the work of his organisation, but not about the work of an organisation he partly funded?
We know perfectly well he is not an external observer. That's not the capacity in which he's commenting, any more than a president is commenting in an external or impartial capacity about the work of the executive branches, or e.g. UN agencies partly funded by the US.
Why is disclosure of potential conflict of interest made out to be such a high bar? And why do you put arguments forth that did not exist in what you replied to?
> Does it make any sense to say he can't comment on the work of an organisation he runs because he runs it?
Is a straw man argument, because what was said was that the conflict of interest should have been disclosed. And, not that he cannot make a comment.
Ok, that's fair, but what I'm saying is no reasonable person would consider Fauci to be an independent observer of any of this. That's just not his role.
"Conflict of interest" primarily describes situations in which you're deciding policy that applies to personal financial stake.
A situation in which you've (a) contributed to decision-making on multiple public funding priorities including this lab and (b) state a judgment that lab was not the source of the outbreak isn't a conflict of interest, it's everyday policy life. Especially given that there's nothing glaringly wrong with the reasoning Fauci gave for that judgment in the article you linked.
If you think that reasoning has shortcomings, by all means, feel free to actually come up with something resembling a counterargument instead of vaguely implying "whether or not anything shady was going on."
The conflict of interest is with Trump. He lifted the ban and should take all the blame for any bad outcome from gain-of-function research. Instead he pushed a deliberate leak conspiracy as cover.
Wow you weren't kidding. His wife, Christine Grady, Christine is Chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. She's cited in papers on "conflicts of interest" in medicine. They must have some interesting dinner table talk...
Here's an interview with her... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhwrICQTcQg ... her opening statement (paraphrased) is "saving lives in the context of vaccines ... is about firstly maximising benefit and secondly about fairness and equity" ... make of that what you will.
It isn't muckraking. Fauci has a clear conflict of interest. Further he argued in favor of GoF research while acknowledging it could lead to a pandemic. He literally wrote that in an academic paper.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fauci-argued-benefits-of...
>In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario...
>Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.
So the basic risk calculation Fauci is using (which is disputed by many scientists and virologists) is this:
Lives saved by GoF research > lives lost by inevitable lab leak + lives lost by inevitable natural pandemic
Gain of function research has been going on for decades now. What evidence is there that this research has actually served its purpose to help save lives? Did GoF help us at all with the current pandemic?
There is a lot of evidence that Fauci had quite a bit of conflict of interest, and knew about the gain of function research long before he denied it to Rand Paul in May.
It's not muckraking. There is heavy smoke, and people denying the existence of fire while trying to get people to stop looking for it.
Since when has muckraking taken a pejorative meaning - especially one that would justify somebody’s downvote. The early 20th century muckrakers enabled much-needed and widespread reform.
Plain Jane American here: my gut sense is something is off : you do not give funding to the Chinese (that's government to government) for research in this area. Something does not sit right. In the recent 25 years the US outsourced too much ... There's no implied or explicit coequal on this kind of R&D.
Why wouldn't you? All the research is (supposed to be) shared with the world anyway. If you're interested in a topic, and some other country is also interested, and they have a lab ready to go - why not throw some money at them to study your thing? Cheaper than building your own lab - especially when the phenomenon is regional.
At the height of the Cold War, when the U.S. and Soviet Union governments were sworn enemies and on the verge of shooting nuclear weapons at each other, U.S. and Soviet scientists collaborated openly and productively on a wide variety of subjects. Even with government funding.
It’s not unusual to expect scientists to collaborate openly across national borders despite political winds, and in fact it is desirable.
Because they are competing on a vaguely equal footing with all the other researchers around the world. Funders want published results in return for funding, and will typically give funding to the researchers that have the perceived highest chance of publishing results if given the money. This incentivises researchers to publish anything they can. It means that money gets sent to China if it looks like the Chinese researchers are likely to make good use of it and return results. That's how academia works.
No, we're not. That wasn't the stated purpose of the research, and is deeply unlikely to have been a covert purpose either. What is the use of a "weapon" you can't aim?
Article gave me the impression that the Obama ban wasn't real. It included an "unless its important" exception and everyone just kept on doing it anyway.
>Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO framework was largely met with shrugs and eye rolls, said a longtime agency official: “If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research anyway.”
Your May 2021 story includes the following quotes:
> But Fauci emphatically denied that the money went toward so-called “gain of function” research, which he described as “taking a virus that could infect humans and making it either more transmissible and/or pathogenic for humans.”
> “That categorically was not done,” he insisted.
> Earlier in the hearing, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins told Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) that researchers at the Wuhan lab “were not approved by NIH for doing “gain of function research” before adding “we are, of course, not aware of other sources of funds or other activities they might have undertaken outside of what our approved grant allowed.”
Are you saying these are still lies? It doesn't really matter if the NIH funded some other kind of research on coronaviruses if that research was not risky. Presumably the question is whether gain of function research performed there created covid-19. And the grant, which I assume is public record, is claimed not to be for that. Maybe there's more to the story, but seems like guilt-by-association at this point. If Wuhan used the funding for some research it was not supposed to be used for, then it might just as well have been funding for any other disease anyway.
They indirectly gave WIV funding to support research into Pig SARS -- Swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus (SADS-CoV).
There is exactly fuckoff zero evidence that funding wound up supporting gain of function research for anything.
And giving China money to study diseases in pigs happening in China that are closely related to a human disease that we were worried about it (or maybe a close relative) spilling over into humans only makes sense.
> There is exactly fuckoff zero evidence that funding wound up supporting gain of function research for anything.
From the Fauci e-mails: People Fauci directly worked with seemed surprised and shocked to learn otherwise, and could not even instantly say if their funding had made it abroad.
There are papers resulting from GoF research of concern at the WIV. There are grant proposals, which specify the exact modifications they will do to Bat SARS to increase infectivity on mice with humanized lungs. How can you speak so certain, if you are unaware of this?
> And giving China money to study diseases in pigs happening in China that are closely related to a human disease that we were worried about it (or maybe a close relative) spilling over into humans only makes sense.
It makes sense, but you'll see through studying the records that it was the cover for military funding. What was the Defense Threat Reduction Agency funding doing at the WIV where military researchers shared floors with civilian researchers working on the same animals? Making sense to research spillover?
- There was GOF research done on US soil at UNC Chapel Hill which collaborated with WIV. They took a SARS-CoV-1 backbone and splied in a surface protein from another coronavirus and ran it through mice to produce a mouse coronavirus.
- There's no papers out of WIV indicating GOF research
> but you'll see through studying the records that it was the cover for military funding.
You're offering a blatant conspiracy theory now with no substantiation.
The funding to WIV had nothing to do with GoF and there's no evidence of anything else. But it HAD to be GoF research. Circular, evidence-free logic.
> There's no papers out of WIV indicating GOF research
This is something I'm confused about. There are a bunch of papers from the WIV and the North Carolina lab which describe "reverse genetics", spike protein modification, and other obvious gain of function research which acknowledge funding from USAID and EcoHealth Alliance. (The most recently famous of these is Menachery et al, Nature 2015.) But it looks like the actual GoF was done at the Baric lab in North Carolina. The closest I could find was serial passaging experiments done at Wuhan to isolate viruses and test vaccines. One could argue that testing virus infectivity by serial passage is dangerous enough...
> The funding to WIV had nothing to do with GoF and there's no evidence of anything else.
The funding to EcoHealth Alliance specified GoF under such terms as "reverse genetics", "virus infection experiments ... humanized mice."
EHA may have put restrictions on how this money was used, but with the revelation in this article that WIV has lied about doing military research... I'm not so confident we can say no GoF was done there.
I wouldn't say that all GOF research is for bioweapons, part of it is to see where the virus is likely to evolve next and protect against that, which is more on the defensive side of that.
Doesn't mean it's less risky, mind you, and this is convincing me that the experts on this need to reassess whether it's worth the risks and if so, what safety precautions are needed. I would think that BSL-2 is just way too low, but I would defer to the scientists on this and only say that I think this shows that anything done to make something more infectious to humans should be treated as though it already was highly infectious to humans.
> I assume this is getting down-voted either because is sounds like conspiracy theory
I would imagine that is true and it's because how you are presenting it is absolutely conspiratorial. You seem to be very adamant about involving Fauci with weak evidence which is the MO for almost all other biased conspiracy theorists in regards to this topic.
Fauci seems to be a scapegoat for many peoples frustrations with very little rational reasoning - similar to Soros and BLM. Conspiracy theorists rarely talk about the repercussions of their perspectives or tangible calls to action and instead get obsessed with who to blame and nefarious-by-default tangential financial associations.
Maybe if you addressed some of the evidence in the article or even the content of the comment you are replying to then your comment wouldn't be perceived in the same light.
The conflict of interest is: was this statement actually what he believed to be true at the time, or was it to draw attention away from the Wuhan lab, so there wouldn't be ugly questions about why his organisation provided funding to it?
You write this as if NIH is a privately run foundation with Fauci at the head. He's not even head of the NIH, and while I have no doubt that he was directly involved in decisions to fund research at the Wuhan lab, this is a government agency, which as we're told over and over (when it's convenient to say so) means layers upon layers of bureaucracy and red tape , particularly when handing out money.
Is it your position that he was able to run it as some personal fiefdom?
Suppose that Fauci had known for a fact in May 2020 that SARS-COV-2 originated in that lab. How would that have changed the advice he (attempted to) offer regarding public health and safety?
> Suppose that Fauci had known for a fact in May 2020 that SARS-COV-2 originated in that lab. How would that have changed the advice he (attempted to) offer regarding public health and safety?
If he had known the virus was being researched and escaped the lab, certainly his recommendation should have included requests for any and all research and records related to the virus research. As such records have been very pertinent to public health guidelines and guidance, if not potentially toward treatments and future vaccines.
Also there is the very real financial and legal component if that were the case. On a much smaller scale it would be on par with destroying video evidence of a slip and fall, denying it ever existed, then when caught claiming it’s immaterial to the medical treatment of the injured…that’s still fraud and at minimum a clear attempt to escape legal and financial liability.
When I do incident command at my workplace, there are two goals in dealing with an incident: solving the problem, and preventing it from happening again. They are both extremely important, but they happen in order.
While the incident is ongoing, any attempts to prevent the problem from happening in the future are a complete distraction. Write down notes and ideas somewhere so we don't forget, but the priority is on solving the incident that actually happened and is causing problems. If you say "What if we fixed this longstanding piece of tech debt that led up to the incident," however reasonable it is to fix it in light of the fact that it caused an incident, it's useless to bring it up now if you can't fix the tech debt immediately to resolve the incident. Along the same lines, attribution is interesting if it will help you deal with what is going on (e.g., there's high load on a low-level system and you want to know if anyone deployed anything recently, so that you can ask them to roll back); it's not really interesting if you know what's broken (e.g., a machine is powered off and needs to be turned back on... figuring out who pressed the power button isn't yet relevant).
Similarly, "We should stop funding gain-of-function research" may (or may not) be a valid conclusion, but it wouldn't have dealt with COVID-19 in particular. It might be worth doing it to make sure there's no COVID-22.
Even if it turns out to be true that COVID-19 came directly from research that would not have happened if it were not for Fauci, absent a reason to believe that anyone's response to COVID-19 specifically would have been different if they knew that, I don't see any reason it was improper not to draw attention to it at the time, and quite a few reasons why it was proper to focus attention on the problem at hand.
His comments in that May 2020 article are spot-on. If we knew that it was engineered, then yes, publicizing the lab notes that were used to build it could perhaps speed up the process of a vaccine or other countermeasure (but COVID-19 had already been sequenced by January 2020 and the sequence published, and vaccines were already in development then). But theories like "what if the researchers brought it in from the wild, and then it escaped their lab" should just have prompted the response "yes, so what." It's interesting now to prevent the next COVID; it's irrelevant re COVID-19.
And I certainly don't see the conflict of interest - what was Fauci gaining? His continued role? Again, at the time, the role was not determining whether to fund gain-of-function research, the role was figuring out how to get rid of COVID-19.
You could say that the NIH should have paused all funding for new virus research projects (unless they specifically related to dealing with COVID-19 in the short term), but that would have been a good idea regardless of the NIH's previous role in funding.
And I certainly don't see the conflict of interest - what was Fauci gaining? His continued role?
Yes. Obviously you don't put an arsonist in charge of fighting fires, so if this information had come out early last year then he would have lost not only his role much sooner, but also his social status and career. If what's coming out now came out last year, Trump's replacement of him with Scott Atlas would have been more widely supported (maybe), and Biden may not have dared to put him back in his post.
That would have been a huge financial hit. Fauci does very well out of his position. "Very well" might even be an understatement. He is the highest paid federal employee [1], earning more in 2019 alone than the US President. Despite this fact, he has deflected questions about conflicts of interest by laughing it off and saying he has a "government salary", creating the impression he is paid far less than he really is.
Fauci charges between $50,000 and $100,000 per hour for motivational speeches [2].
Despite being theoretically in charge of a crisis situation in which nobody has time to ask how it started, Fauci has found time to write a book called, "Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward". He has also appeared on TV more than 300 times [3].
This is not a man who is too busy to investigate basic questions that may have direct relevance to developing treatments for the virus. And given that knowing where it came from would be of immense scientific value yet he has every incentive to cover it up, he is also not a man who should be running things.
This is a global pandemic that came out of China. In the worst possible case, Fauci hid the fact that an org he's involved in donated a minuscule portion of its budget to the lab from where the virus leaked due to incompetence.
It's not like he took the vial home for lulz and dropped it on the subway. His role in the origin of this thing is so small it's irrelevant.
The only thing that's up for discussion is that he may not have been 100% correct during one of his many public statements, hardly something that can be held against him considering the shitcreek the whole world is in.
Personally I'd give the guy some credit for everything he's done right, I mean he's been at it since 1968.
What is there to gain by nailing him to the cross, or pointing out his income and book deals?
> This is a global pandemic that came out of China. In the worst possible case, Fauci hid the fact that an org he's involved in donated a minuscule portion of its budget to the lab from where the virus leaked due to incompetence.
> It's not like he took the vial home for lulz and dropped it on the subway. His role in the origin of this thing is so small it's irrelevant.
By dissuading an investigation into the cause at the time, he might have shot down our only chance of ever knowing for sure. I sure as hell don't trust China to be truthful about it. There's no incentive on their part.
> The only thing that's up for discussion is that he may not have been 100% correct during one of his many public statements, hardly something that can be held against him considering the shitcreek the whole world is in.
He's been spreading mixed and misinformation for months and possibly lying to Congress. Many give him the benefit of the doubt by saying that he either did not know or he did it in the interests of the public as a whole (ex: We need the N95 masks so let's lie and say nobody else does). Neither is acceptable to some of us.
> Personally I'd give the guy some credit for everything he's done right, I mean he's been at it since 1968.
Past good behavior doesn't get you out of a trial. At best it's a factor during sentencing.
> What is there to gain by nailing him to the cross, or pointing out his income and book deals?
The book deal looks like a last minute cash grab before he gets sacked.
> He's been spreading mixed and misinformation for months and possibly lying to Congress. Many give him the benefit of the doubt by saying that he either did not know or he did it in the interests of the public as a whole (ex: We need the N95 masks so let's lie and say nobody else does). Neither is acceptable to some of us.
That very advice was offered here in Belgium as well and it smelled like BS. Obviously they had to make a hard choice: tell people they need masks, stocks get plundered and medical professionals have none. Or, say the opposite and grab every mask you can find for medical personnel. The second option was probably the best, hopefully you can understand that these kind of hard choices need to be made and this guy shouldn't lose his job over it.
Interestingly, in Jan / Fed before it really hit Europe and nobody was wearing masks in public they were already sold out in most places. At the time it was probably Chinese plundering EU stores and govt must have picked up on it.
No, this is the problem. Fauci and others in public health have confused everyone with their lies so badly now they're being defended.
There was never a mask crisis. Masks don't work, they have never worked, this had been known for a long time partially because the world went through this exact process with the Spanish flu. And scientists knew that which is why they originally said masks don't work.
This all fell apart quickly because they are collectivists at heart and were being lobbied by political forces that wanted something they could tell everyone to do. The WHO actually admitted this to the bbc! Masks seemed like a good fit, so the scientists promptly jumped on board and started saying masks worked. Problem: how to explain their prior position? So they came up with this double layered lie: we said masks didn't work because it was a noble lie to protect healthcare workers.
But it was never the case. All the documents before March 2020 are consistent on this, including the new Fauci emails.
There's plenty of peer-reviewed evidence that masks are aerosol barriers and that aerosol barriers help reduce transmission/infection.
The term "collectivist" has no particular meaning other than to those who have what they consider to be an opposite worldview.
This is just several lines of misinformation, the same nonsense that's been an issue since SARS-COV-2 emerged. It's all be debunked hundreds of thousands of times, both on HN and elsewhere.
But "peer reviewed evidence" is frequently either wrong, or irrelevant (e.g. lab studies without external validity), or both. The whole discussion here is that scientists have been engaged in political manipulations since the start.
Mask mandates don't work. If they did then the removal of masks would have caused a noticeable spike in cases in Texas, to pick just one example of many. The complete uselessness of masks has been "debunked" in the same vein the lab leak theory was "debunked" - a bunch of people asserting that scientists cannot be wrong, even as they say things that are clearly and very obviously wrong. Anyone can see the truth just by looking at government data sets for a while. It is ridiculous that people still aren't learning to think for themselves, even after all that's happened.
Their usefulness in non crowded spaces in open air is probably debatable but if you're in an elevator with 10 people sneezing wouldn't you rather wear one? Why does every surgeon in the world wear one?
So the question is in what exact circumstances are they useful. I'd say during a pandemic it's probably better to err on the safe side.
The internet is full of them but my favourite source is just the raw data. Look at case graphs for different regions. Look at the dates when mask mandates were added and removed. There should be very sharp, inorganic looking drops and spikes but there are none.
Many people have put together the charts with arrows indicating the dates when things changed, for example
That site is old now but there have been many since.
You can also find plenty of studies saying the same of course, but you can also find studies saying the opposite - academic research has failed on this topic. Fortunately the question in simple, so you don't need any research papers to see the truth: mask mandates do not work because if they worked, we could see it in the graphs, and we can't.
Wore mask at all times: 11% got infected
Wore mask never: 23% got infected
Mask mandate doesn't mean people actually wore them. Maybe in shops they did cause it was illegal not to. If people kept having gatherings with friends & family then a mask mandate is meaningless.
And honestly, you should be ashamed to link to these type of websites. They don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny.
A poll by a news website that relies on self-diagnoses? Really? I was expecting at least a scientific study. Come on, you could try harder than that - it's easy to find peer reviewed published scientific studies that conclude masks "work" yet which are wrong.
Mask mandate doesn't mean people actually wore them.
Well, people do wear them, that's been studied quite extensively. Compliance >95% in the studies I've seen. If mask mandates don't affect the data even with the very high levels of compliance seen during COVID times then they will never work, because compliance won't be higher in future.
But even if "not enough" people wore them or didn't wear them 24/7 or whatever, that still means mask mandates failed. People were forced to wear masks a whole lot, in any crowded space, and they had no impact on the data at all. Affecting the data was the only justification for mask mandates, so their failure to do so is fatal to the concept - why they failed might make for an interesting debate, but given how tiny viruses are, how much airflow can occur around masks and that most transmission happens inside homes, care homes and hospitals where mask wearing 24/7 is not practical, their failure is no big shock.
And honestly, you should be ashamed to link to these type of websites. They don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny.
Look in the mirror, my friend. I've linked to examples of actual case curves, which is what matters. Mask mandates aren't intended to affect opinion polls on obscure news sites, they're meant to affect whole countries. They do not. Therefore they have failed.
Google will easily point you to mountains of evidence that they do work, from scientific studies. If you don't want to look at them or convince yourself you know better than the people who conducted these studies then that's unfortunate.
I've looked at a lot of COVID related research papers over the last year, which is exactly why I don't take them seriously anymore. The quality is extremely low and they routinely do things that aren't scientifically valid without any obvious repercussions for the authors.
Fortunately, again, one more time. You do not need scientific studies to see the truth here. The goal of mask mandates was to change case curves. That was their only justification. In a large number of places mask mandates were added or removed without the case graphs changing. Therefore, they do not work. Everything beyond that is irrelevant and frequently confused, e.g. studies on masks are not relevant to the question of mask mandates.
Please do. Perhaps after a few more years of articles like the one this thread is originally about, you'll look at it in a new light. The sort of "scientists" who inhabit our universities have no monopoly on the truth, as the world is slowly coming to accept.
Nailing public figures who lie for personal gain to the cross serves a very important function by dissuading other public figures from doing the same. Otherwise, the math suggests that every public figure should be lying for personal gain since they can just get away with it. At least in the US, there are far too many politicians who think they can get away with lying through their teeth to the public.
However, it looks like Fauci has outlived his usefulness to the ruling class, and they are currently in the process of throwing him under the bus.
> Yes. Obviously you don't put an arsonist in charge of fighting fires
Sure, but to go back to my analogy, you absolutely do put the guy who hit the power button by mistake in charge of pressing it again - they know exactly where it is and they're already in the datacenter. You put the team that deployed a new service that's DoSing your infrastructure in charge of rolling it back. You don't say "You broke the system, so we're finding someone else to do the rollback."
If the allegation is that Fauci intentionally funded a lab in Wuhan to work on gain-of-function research with the express purpose of having the virus escape and cause a global pandemic because Fauci is a murderer rivaling Hitler, that's a very different (and much harder to substantiate) claim than that he merely was causally involved in an accident and like anyone else wants the accident to not have happened.
And if that is the claim, the "conflict of interest" argument becomes clearer: Fauci is on the side of COVID-19 and in charge of stopping it. It's the same conflict of interest as putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires.
Short of that, the idea that he had a conflict of interest is like the idea that the team that accidentally DoS'd the infrastructure has a conflict of interest because they each get Fauci-scale salaries and they might be fired. Technically yes, but we all know that firing them wouldn't help solve the problem and losing their expertise would make other things work, so it's not even on the table unless we suspect malice is involved.
(And if it is on the table, either at my workplace or in Fauci's case, so is criminal prosecution. Loss of salary is the least of your worries.)
I don't think anyone is claiming anyone wanted it to escape, only that it was very likely, they know it was likely, that's why it had been banned but Fauci overrode the ban then started constantly lying about it and many other things for career and financial reasons.
You make comparison to tech workers. Sure, if someone makes a genuine honest mistake then you can argue they should be retained as they won't make that mistake again. But that does require deep and total honesty. If a tech worker caused an outage and then manipulated management for a year to cover up their involvement, there would be no such leniency.
Because you can't trust him. Full stop. That's the problem with conflicts of interest.
And to get more particular, the reason you can't trust his advice about the pandemic is because you can't trust him to give advice that would be based on or would reveal information related to the conflict of interest. Pretending as if that's impossible is silly. It's obvious it could happen, whether it did or not.
> It gets worse - gain of function research was banned under Obama until the ban was lifted in 2017 under Trump
It was never really "banned", there was a moratorium on such research after a string of safety lapses in US laboratories, moratorium's are always only of a temporary nature [0].
The often mentioned "GoF research" involving bats with US participation and funding, didn't even fall under that moratorium [1].
> you have Fauci making the case for creating viruses in a lab
Of course he would make that case, because that's a useful tool to have in research. No offense, but trying to make this out as something so binary and only bad, reminds me a lot about the more radical and clueless takes on GMO that see "All GMO as bad".
JANUARY 9, 2017 AT 9:06
Recommended Policy Guidance for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight
"Adoption of these recommendations will satisfy the requirements for lifting the current moratorium on certain life sciences research that could enhance a pathogen’s virulence and/or transmissibility to produce a potential pandemic pathogen (an enhanced PPP)."
_IF_ Covid-19 is the result of a lab leak on research that Fauci funded and promoted AND he colluded w/ a group of scientists to hide this fact, it literally is the greatest conspiracy of our generation.
It isn't a big if. The recently released e-mails support this line of reasoning but don't confirm it. To argue the opposite of this, you should have better than ad hominem attacks.
> gain of function research was banned under Obama until the ban was lifted in 2017 under Trump
There's no need to politicize the discussion.
1) There's no evidence any recent president or cabinet member had a clue, or if they did have a clue it was off their radar anyway.
2) All this gain of function research was administered either in academic circles or at lower governmental circles where politicians are not involved. See for yourself. Fauci's own email from January 2020 referenced research already published in 2015. (That's during Obama's gain of function research ban, for those of you keeping score at home). Start at 5:00 into the referenced video.
EDIT: The paper was published after the ban was initiated. The research began before the ban, but apparently continued.
The whole video is well worth watching and walks trough Fauci's immediate responses as soon as it became apparent this is the real deal, and still 6 FULL WEEKS before the WHO declared a pandemic. A whole lot of CYA going on here. Fauci knew enough to reference this paper in the wee hours of the morning after a very busy day and before another hectic day he was headed for. Think he was familiar with the topic?
> Fauci said the Trump administration will not only be challenged by ongoing global health threats such as influenza and HIV, but also a surprise disease outbreak.
Well, of course. Disease outbreaks happen all the time. Just from the top of my head I remember tropical fevers (like Zika and yellow fever), Ebola, Corona viruses (such as MERS and SARS), zoonotic flues outbreaks that threatened to become a pandemic. This happens every other year. Fauci said "thing that happens every 1-2 years likely to happen during a 4-8 year period".
Supposedly, Fauci only got an approval from a low level Trump administration official.
IMO it’s not clear anyone even approved the research. I wouldn’t be surprised if the NIH just pulled a fast one. There’s also no evidence Fauci never mentioned the research to anyone near the beginning of the pandemic. Several Trump officials came out and said they were never told.
So it sounds like Fauci is saying they didn't fund gain of function research in the Wuhan lab.
If they did doesn't that really mean Trump is either more responsible for Covid or equally as responsible as China?
Trump allowed the ban to be lifted after the Obama whitehouse explicitly shut down this kind of research. Fauci just worked for Trump. It was ultimately on Trump, not an employee of his.
The other astonishing things is the sudden about face by the media. I'm glad they allowed themselves the liberty of looking at alternative origins. But... they were SO adamant and complicit in any discussion about alternative theories being shut down under the guise of conspiracy, Trumpism, anti-China, etc. (These are the same people who have no qualms about attributing anything to Russia even if evidence is thin, so it's clear there is hypocrisy involved).
Edit: It looks like Twitter is suspending the account of the Fauci email leaker(s). So the MoT is still on it.
China supported this in a psyop. Remember when they tried repeatedly to push the origin of the virus to Italy?
I'm ethnically Chinese, so I'm in contact with a lot of mainlanders. The brainwashing is very effective. Even if most mainlanders know that their state media is bogus, and that Xi is a dictator, they'll take it deeply personally when you say anything that threatens the whole China # 1 narrative. All they had to do was hire a few shitposters, feed a few media narratives and the US fights with itself over stuff like anti-china, racists etc, while the CCP takes over Hong Kong.
Or all the effort to not call it China Virus/Wuhan flu because that's racist and we don't name viruses after places anymore.
Virus variants named after places on the other hand are apparently perfectly fine. So we don't have the Chinese virus but we do have British, Brazilian and Indian variants.
Except it is TVs and newspapers that were lecturing us that it was racist to call it the chinese flu and that are now happily using the xx-variant designation. It is the obvious bad faith that I find appalling.
By the time it is deemed a variant, it has been sequenced number of times across the country and the health authorities always have a code or name to refer to this particular strain.
They had a code but not a name. The media can't refer to things by a confusing jumble of letters and numbers, they need a name, and if there's no official name then the media will create one themselves. Hence "India variant".
This is basic PR, e.g. when Heartbleed was disclosed it was given a name so that people could discuss it and attach meaning to it.
It's good, but it's not exactly easy to remember. Hence why the papers here in the UK now tend to say something like 'the Delta variant, which was first seen in India' - that's only marginally better than 'the Indian variant' tbh.
> It's good, but it's not exactly easy to remember [[.]
Saying "$origin virus" is _definitely_ easier to remember than - say - something like "Covid19".
Except that we were told that using "$origin" was racist, so we had to stop, and we had to use the non-easy-to-remember version.
Where we are the media has been happily talking about "the British variant" and "the Indian variant", but no-one seems to be calling _that_ racist. At least no-one who the media cares about.
Back in the early days Singapore very quickly created a fantastic web based information panel on the state of the Virus in the city. It's still running but they no longer use the original url:
http://wuhanvirus.sg
The Spanish Flu most probably originated in the US, not Spain. Spain just had a pretty free press and published much about it. Never heard about the Brazilian Flu and couldn't find out when and where this was supposed to be, so can't comment here.
The question wasn't historically if the place-of-origin names were accurate. The question was if they were historically common.
I think naming diseases after places is a bad practice we should probably do away with, but it certainly has precedent. Offhand, there's also the Marburg virus. My understanding is also that it was unusual to name the Ebola virus after the nearby river instead of the nearby town.
Isn't it similar to naming medical conditions after the people that discover them? After all, it's naming pathogens after the place where there were was adequate diagnostic expertise to identify them and in which there was sufficient scientific and press freedom to report on them. And geography is obviously important in the context of epidemics/pandemics. No country or locality should receive special treatment in this regard, but much of the MSM appears to have been bought or cowed into submission by the geopolitical influence of the CCP.
Does no one else remember the videos out of China with people laying dead in the streets, falling over as they walked, convulsing behind the steering wheels of cars? Who paid for all that acting, scenes, and filming and then have it presented as “news”?
CCP owns Hong Kong, that was over in 1997, the only surprising thing about HK is that China waited this long to make it better known. Now... The country of Taiwan on the other hand, it’s going to be a bit more tense there for some time.
EDIT: Added links from Jan, most videos have been removed but the articles and screenshots are there. The one I specifically wanted was removed from YouTube and I can’t find it, showed a guy being checked by a PPE marshmallow then nearly immediately going into spasms in his car.
EDIT2: To whoever might have been upset at my thoughts on Taiwan; I updated it with some italics for you.
> Does no one else remember the videos out of China with people laying dead in the streets, falling over as they walked, convulsing behind the steering wheels of cars?
Could you provide a link? I never saw such video on YouTube.
These videos [1] were published by a number of tabloids such as The Daily Mail [2] and The Sun [3]. I also remember that a very popular french TV show (Quotidien [4]) published them as well.
I saw the videos but they weren’t on YouTube. There were pastebins listing dozens of links to videos and photos BUT there was also zero proof it was connected to the virus or any timestamps, so who knows.
I saw these too, mostly on Twitter. I shorted Boeing based on them and made some nice money. My friends didn't believe me that this was looking real bad.
> didn't believe me that this was looking real bad
I think the problem was the world also didn't believe it. Perhaps if every other country had had the balls to just shut down travel in/out of China for a month or so back at the very start it might never have been so bad. I remember when the very first reports of a novel Coronavirus in Wuhan were making the news that it had the potential to be really bad, but also had some wishful thinking that it was probably just a storm in a teacup.
China should have shut down international flights. Instead they shut down internal travel and happily exported the virus to the world. They have lost the last bit of good will I had for them and I suspect this is a sentiment shared the world over. The WHO are also complicit.
I share your feeling and this concerns me most: China's leadership don't care anymore what the world think of China. China gave up the PR war because their next big move might be ugly.
Hang on a second, remember Trump was called racist and xenophobic for shutting down travel to China?
And how weird that Zuckerburg sent an email to Fauci about vaccine funding and offers of help exactly the same time Nancy’s Pelosi was literally saying come to Chinatown and hug and Asian person. How were they talking about a vaccine at that point?
There seems to have been a lot of public and private statements going on, and everyone wants to memoryhole it.
I remember when he shut down travel from China... On January 31st. There were ~2k new cases every day, and internal travel was heavily restricted.
Meanwhile, it took until March 11th to ban travel from Europe, which at the time was seeing ~10k new cases a day, with full freedom of movement from affected areas to unaffected ones.
The problem wasn't that he banned travel from China. The problem is that he didn't ban travel from Europe, until it got way worse than China.
You: The problem wasn't that he banned travel from China. The problem is that he didn't ban travel from Europe, until it got way worse than China.
Okay. Yes, you're a very pro-lockdown Seattlite with access to almost every comfort you could want without leaving your home. I believe that you were probably not mad at Trump for stopping flights, and wanted more to be stopped. That is within your character as read by your comments. I'm skeptical you understand what lockdowns actually meant for other people, but that's besides the point.
Me: [Democrats and the media called Trump racist for shutting down travel from China]
Okay, so we agree then? I don't think I said anything about Europe or if Trump Admin had gone far enough and when.
I could both have preferred a harder lockdown, and also be cognizant of the hypocrisy of banning travel from one country, but not from another region, when the other region is worse off by nearly every metric.
Was accusing him of racism for that particular thing on February 1st a bit early? Maybe.
Did history prove the critics right? Yeah. It did. It only took six weeks.
Addendum: I appreciate that you have gone to some length to research the context of my character and my previous posts, in order to best form a context in which to interpret my current ones. I suggest that perhaps Trump's critics on this subject may have done something similar. The man has given them a few years of material to work with by that point, after all.
There is a guy on r/China I think who archived a bunch of disturbing videos from last January /February. I think I saved them or links, but I'm away from my computer. Will update if I find it.
Well, this is genuinely irritating. I'm pretty sure I saved the post on reddit, saved a link, or saved some videos, but I cannot find anything. I must not have wanted to have a bunch of videos of people dying, so I think I might have just saved the post on reddit... Other reddit posts with a link to the archive had been deleted, so I should have taken more care.
It's a new acount which only posted this link - likely just some automated link spam detection. If you to to the comment's page (click the timestamp) there should be an option to vouch for it.
> Even if most mainlanders know that their state media is bogus, and that Xi is a dictator
I am an ethnic Chinese, I don't see this impression at all.
Disclaimer: this is quite normal, China is huge with 1.4b people, there are a lot of social bubbles. And the readers should read this comment and the parent of proving that. Not that this comment or the parent is true.
Well its turtles all the way isnt it, "And the readers should read this comment and the parent of proving that. Not that this comment or the parent is true.".
That's the weird think about propaganda. Even if you know it's propaganda, it works pretty well when it's heavily pushed. I come from a former communist country, and most people despised the communist party and risked their lives in a revolution. After the revolution, they began to parrot the same talking points the heard in the decades before. Even with all the information we have today, the talking points induced by communist propaganda remain alive.
This is the Iraq war situation all over again, by which I mean the same people (literally) are pushing the same angle through the same media outlets in the same way.
It was obvious wmd angle was bs from the start. The was never any concrete evidence for it. None. It just appeared out of thin air. Hearsay. It was also obvious that the lab leak hypothesis is worth investigating because there is active documented research on these viruses happening there. I don’t think they are comparable.
Most of the folks I recall from last year shutdown the thought that the virus was bio-engineered, not that I couldn't have come from the lab in Wuhan. Yes, people said there was no evidence of a lab leak (because there isn't) but few people were saying it was impossible.
People are conflating the virus being bio-engineered (pretty sure this did not happen) with it coming from the Wuhan lab (might have happened, need more evidence).
IMHO, we were in the middle of the problem. The important part to was to figure out how to get out of it. The investigation at that point would not be helpful as it may make cooperation more difficult. Even if the result is that is natural origin and it escaped from a Wet Market. It was China's responsibility and the whole world must make sure to force China to ban wet markets. But as I said before, it will come a time for that.
Suppressing the truth because you want to game the outcome is an extremely dangerous position to take. It never ends well for the little guy, who ends up getting neither truth nor the best outcome.
> It was China's responsibility and the whole world must make sure to force China to ban wet markets.
lol, have you ever been to a wet market? Are you sure you even know what they are? It’s a typical Asian stall market that they hose off every night.
I’ve been to “dry” markets that they’re still cutting the faces off hogs and slaughtering chickens next to fruit vendors. That’s not particularly better.
I’m not sure if you think “banning wet markets” is a thing, but it’s definitely not.
Essentially banning all slaughtering on place and relegating it to specialty businesses which would be no better regulated than any slaughterhouse anywhere.
Meaning, you'd change nothing besides forcing Chinese to use more transport and freezer cars.
> The other astonishing things is the sudden about face by the media. I'm glad they allowed themselves the liberty of looking at alternative origins. But... they were SO adamant and complicit in any discussion about alternative theories being shut down under the guise of conspiracy, Trumpism, anti-China, etc.
I agree. However, I can empathize with the media's position. Their business model has been under intense pressure for decades, so they're far too understaffed to do the kind of job we'd all like them to do; and viral disinformation/misinformation has become far more prevalent and influential in the last several years. Donald Trump also acted as a siren (in the Greek mythology sense) during his presidency to greatly exacerbate both difficulties. It's not surprising that, when they were faced with a crisis where they were arguably on one of the front lines, they were forced to take shortcuts out of expediency that were ultimately mistakes. After all the lab-leak theory is both 1) extremely plausible, 2) conspiracy-theory bait.
An alternative explanation is that the other COVID-19 narrative - that vaccines work, but those who are hesitant are essentially beyond convincing, and this is going to be both a long and boring years long slog to control globally and longer to find the origin - makes for exceedingly boring news.
On the other hand, talking about "If X is true, then..." and spending the rest of the section talking about the lab leak hypothesis as if it was true" is much more exciting.
Especially given there are now three "lab leak" camps - Bioweapon, GoF Gone Wrong, and Genuine Accidental Release of a Natural Virus all of whom claim they have the smoking gun for three mutually exclusive theories.
All over this thread, for one thing. Nate Silver and a number of other "data driven centrist" type commentators acting like there has been a massive shift in the weight of evidence. Dozens of "We're not saying this is true, but the next 10 pages will act entirely based on that supposition..." articles.
at the same time he was saying Xi handled the situation perfectly, had it completely under control, and that COVID would be gone from the US by April 2020
This is not at all what happened. This article has a good overview of the shifting narrative. The initial position was that it was crazy to even consider a lab leak.
Parts of the media listened to a bunch of people who all had good reason to dismiss theories that would point to them as in some way connected to research they knew was dangerous and this assessment was used for widespread censorship of contrary opinions.
The media is supposed to be a bit more skeptical of their sources than that. At this point I follow rules that look a lot like these:
Right, while ignoring their previous protests and their censorship of opposing voices who offered alternative theories from the beginning while theories were being developed and discussed. The CCP said "wet market" and that made it authoritative?
To me, the only really horrible thing is the way that anything other than the mainstream version of events was treated. I think there are different plausible theories, and I'm not surprised they have different adherents that are mostly all motivated by something other than a pure quest for the truth. That's life. If this was e.g. a civil or criminal trial, you'd see the same thing.
The only difference is, in a trial, nobody would try and brand the other side as a conspiracy theorist, racist, denier, anti-xer, whatever the most popular inflammatory term is. Nobody would try and block dissent from all mainstream communication forums.
To me, that's the only thing that's new, is the institutional suppression of any suggestions outside of an orthodox version. And it's honestly way scarier than the idea that government labs are doing biological research, or that diseases can jump from animals to people.
That’s another symptom of the same disease. People have an idea that “trust the experts” can replace all the messy, gross, and often wrong processes we have developed to deal with the fact nobody can be trusted. Trusting scientists involved in gain of function research will neutrally investigate the origins of the pandemic is one manifestation of that conceit. So is trusting fact checkers and review panels to decide what’s “misinformation” and what’s factual.
The marketplace of ideas is better than trusting gatekeepers of knowledge. That’s one of the huge lessons of the enlightenment that we have somehow forgot. We think “it’s different this time.”
There is a problem though. Without access to source material of any real journalist (not a reporter) you have no way of knowing whether whatever they're saying is true.
Marketplace of ideas is just measuring the average of views at best and fringe views may on occasion be valid, or not. It is also gameable by promoting "truthy" or plausible explanations with no data behind them.
In this case, it is irrelevant what the source of the pandemic was, securing the labs doing viral research to BSL-4 is prudent. The only issue faced is one of funding, which is vastly insufficient to maintain these facilities.
Or at least placement in remote locations with quarantine in place to prevent leaks.
Data only weakly suggests a composite and does not categorically exclude natural origin. Leak of a natural or modified virus would be just as bad. Same if it's from consumption of rare animals sent from remote places or research on the samples from them. In either case, only different degree of luck is required for a pandemic.
"In this case, it is irrelevant what the source of the pandemic was ..."
...
"Leak of a natural or modified virus would be just as bad. Same if it's from consumption of rare animals sent from remote places or research on the samples from them."
I disagree.
I actually think "lab leak" is better and more optimistic news than a natural outgrowth or animal consumption, etc.
Lab leaks are a problem we can fix - probably without too much trouble. They don't represent a fundamental problem with accelerating globalization, urbanization and travel.
On the other hand, a natural origin or a human-animal crossing due to animal husbandry in or near urban areas ... or "bush meat" consumption ... those vectors could indicate that globalization, urbanization and travel have crossed a threshold where events such as this become likely and will recur regularly.
Given the relatively recent emergence of SARS and MERS, I have been fearful that our very connected, urbanized and globalized world (which I enjoy greatly) is at risk.
The world of easy travel may be doomed either way.
If it's a lab leak? The rhetoric may shift to blaming China and trying to punish them (especially in more conservative circles). New Cold War, more Iron Curtains, less freedom of travel.
If it's just globalization making things risky? Then maybe we can't let people fly from Wuhan to Bergamo for public health reasons. Less freedom of travel, for an entirely different reason.
This "Marketplace of ideas" is run by English speakers, in our case, and completely ignores the idea that we or our allies may have been involved in a biological attack on China. Very convenient, in my opinion, since history says NATO countries are the most likely to deploy biological weapons.
It's very unlikely anyone was doing any research on directly using SARS-CoV2 as a weapon. It kills or maims too low a percentage of people to have tactical value, and it's too difficult to contain. (The most effective weapons severely handicap their victims and allow them to live into old age, taking fighters off the field, and turning them into long-term liabilities and living reminders for anyone who might think about fighting you in the future.)
I'm not saying SARS-CoV2 leaked from a lab, but if it did, it was probably more of a basic science/weapons background research rather than an engineered weapon itself. You might want to add some SARS-CoV2 characteristics to a bioweapon, but you'd want to start out with something with greater morbidity and more easily quarantined as a starting point for a weapon.
North Carolina lab was shipping covid around the world. Wouldn't be surprised if the lab in Fort Detrick was doing similar research.
You seem to assume a bio-weapon has to cause mass death to be effective and meet the deployer's objectives...you are wrong in the case of economic attacks.
> You seem to assume a bio-weapon has to cause mass death to be effective and meet the deployer's objectives...you are wrong in the case of economic attacks.
> The most effective weapons severely handicap their victims and allow them to live into old age, taking fighters off the field, and turning them into long-term liabilities and living reminders for anyone who might think about fighting you in the future
I do not believe that covid was intentionally designed and released as a bio weapon.
The number of people with long COVID symptoms is a tiny tiny fraction of those exposed to SARS-CoV2. If it's a designed feature of SARS-CoV2, it's very poorly implemented, unless it's actually very specifically targeting some as-of-yet unidentified demographic. (This seems very unlikely.)
Why should I believe this is any more real than "chronic lyme"? There are a whole lot of hypochondriacs out there; something proponents of "long covid" and "chronic lyme" never seem willing to acknowledge.
The groups promoting both of these organize and operate the same way, and make similar claims. Huge lists of nonspecific generic symptoms and facebook groups full of uncritical believers mutually reinforcing each others' beliefs (parallel to the well understood phenomena of "support groups" which promote eating disorders and create social feedback loops for reinforcing/worsening body dismorphia.)
>I do not believe that covid was intentionally designed and released as a bio weapon.
History says you are wrong to discount NATO countries (I include Japan as an unofficial member) using bio-weapons. They have a long history of deploying and supporting deployments of these kinds of weapons against military and economic foes.
Ridiculous to think that it was deployed by NATO because NATO countries were affected by it just as much if not more. That would be the most idiotic weapon used ever. It literally makes no sense.
Sorry, but the idea of NATO deploying the most idiotic weapon imaginable on the entire world vs. the idea of an accidental escape from a lab are NOT equally plausible at all. In fact, this entire article goes thru evidence that it was not NATO because of all of the internal investigations and such.
What you are suggesting is tin foil hat conspiracy theory crazy.
I disagree, NATO countries (including Japan) have benefited from sabotaging/disrupting Chinese trade for more than a century. They know what they stand to gain by making China the "virus spreader/origin" of the world.
The Fauci emails in March 2020 that described the exact components of the virus with subject 'coronavirus bio-weapon production method' hints at the actual purpose of this release.
> The Fauci emails in March 2020 that described the exact components of the virus ...
which is a complete lie. The email does NOT describe the components of the virus at all. You clearly are lacking in any sort of biochemical background as this is obvious. Do you actually fact check anything you are posting?
>The marketplace of ideas is better than trusting gatekeepers of knowledge.
That's such a simplification of the real situation that it's harmful to apply as an axiom.
There are many levels of the marketplace of ideas. Ideally, the gatekeepers of knowledge also create a marketplace of ideas so that expert opinion is varied and shifts as new information come in. This is in inline with what we're seeing here.
The marketplace of ideas with no experts to guide discussion often results in crank ideas that seem plausible but heavily influenced by our biases bubbling to the top. That's how things like the Anti-vax movement gained a foothold.
No one argued that it should be applied as an axiom. You're responding to an argument that wasn't made.
Also, the "gatekeepers of knowledge" have a mostly.....negative past when you look at the sum of recorded human history. Are you arguing that humans today are just way better and far more trustworthy than the rest of history?
>Also, the "gatekeepers of knowledge" have a mostly.....negative past when you look at the sum of recorded human history.
The gatekeepers of knowledge have a past that reflects those that are in power. People that challenge them can be on the right or wrong side of history. Just because they were wrong in the middle ages doesn't mean the gatekeepers of today are wrong. If the gatekeepers can and do apply scientific principles, then logically it is a self-correcting system. This is in theory what we see more or less today (or should at least).
Furthermore, the gatekeeper system is not mutually exclusive to the marketplace of ideas model, as the latter operates on many levels. However, by bringing down the gatekeeper model, it is harder to enforce discussion based on scientific principles, merit and sound arguments. This is the exact reason why we have moderation in almost all forums, and the ones that don't end up as cesspits of people shouting crazy ideas at each other and hence counterproductive places.
Giving everyone a voice doesn't necessarily mean we are bound to give everyone a equal voice in everything. Any weighing is in essence introducing a gatekeeper.
Let's be sure to use the same definition of "gatekeepers" for the past and present knowledge. What I see is, people look at the past examples of politicians and religious leaders telling people what to believe, and try to use those to dismiss opinions of present-day domain specialists. Which is a nasty case of motte-and-bailey fallacy.
I'm saying that I think past and present day "specialists" are not as different as we are inclined to think, it's the opposite of a motte-and-bailey position.
Perhaps it would've been easier for the scientists involved in gain of function research to remain unbiased, if they weren't fully aware that anything but total denial will make the world think they're responsible - as a profession and individuals - without as much as shred of evidence to support it.
> People have an idea that “trust the experts” can replace all the messy, gross, and often wrong processes we have developed to deal with the fact nobody can be trusted.
I observe the opposite. People seem to have the idea that experts are always in on it, or out to get something out of a crisis, and thus should be ignored. The alternative is, of course, to listen to whatever uninformed opinion piece confirms one's worldview the most. I think we'd all do better with trusting the experts more - they may be wrong, but they're also in the best position to discover and correct that. They may be also right. Most people - including journalists, pundits and bloggers - are not capable of telling whether experts are right or wrong. So trusting them seems like a better bet than trusting random opinions (unless yourself you have enough familiarity with the field, at which point your own interpretation may be valid too).
> To me, that's the only thing that's new, is the institutional suppression of any suggestions outside of an orthodox version.
This isn't new at all. It's been a staple of many human cultures throughout history, including US culture for much of the 20th century (and, I would say, all of the 21st century). I think what's probably a new experience for most of us is just how all-encompassing the pandemic has been as an issue of discussion.
The problem with this is that the American public discourse is broken.
The Republicans (I can't tapdance around the direct call out with weasel words) and the right-wing media have lost all credibility because they often DO behave as racist, selfish, inconsistent conspiracy theorists. On those rare occasions when they are right or properly play the role of opposition rather than pushing an absurd agenda alongside their media manipulation, their prior behavior causes an automatic immune-like response. You can't trust anything they say or their intentions, and they are experts at the Gish Gallop (constantly coming up with new bs you have to respond to, when response takes far more effort) - why would this particular action be any different? Also, this seems more of a case of "a broken clock is right twice a day" than an indication that the right should be taken seriously as a general rule.
Non-credible actors that are known to be untrustworthy should never be the people who put forth any hypotheses if you want them to be taken seriously. The American far-right politicians/media and 4chan are not credible actors, and any idea associated with them will face an uphill battle.
Unfortunate, the "left media" also faces massive credibility problems due to their willingness to uncritically publish anything they could spin as negative for Trump, regardless of veracity or verifiability.
Partisanship is a disease that is destroying our democracy.
Part of it was also probably that Trump was known for bucking expectations when those expectations where based on "surely this is ludicrous to consider true", to the point that lots of things that would have previously been held back for more verification were allowed forward because things that used to stretch credulity no longer did.
That's not an excuse, just what I think is a partial explanation.
What is even more shocking is that the mass media and big tech have done everything to keep this covered. Most of the revelations are nothing new if you read alternative news sources where true journalism still exists. Big tech and mass media are now more like China state television, they decide what and how to tell you something based on what they want you to believe.
The greatest threat of our times is not the Corona pandemic or lies about it's origins. It is the loss of true journalism from mass media and free speech on social media. Mass media journalism and big tech are so terribly corrupted that due to that billions of people around the world are being fooled all the time. They are lying to you "for the greater good".
When you start reading alternative news sources you'll find out soon enough something is very wrong. From all over the world renowned scientists, doctors, politicians, lawyers, noble price winners, and many more, are being totally silenced and criminalized. It's truly horrifying.
Isn’t it mass media covering this now? It seems like this is a credit to mass media in that it moves as data moves. I always feel this is a highly underrated attribute in organizations and individuals.
How exactly are alternative news sources more trustworthy than mainstream news sources? Your reasoning is that "mainstream" (I truly hate this moniker) news serves to present biased information, how do alternative non-vetted sources avoid this pitfall?
> From all over the world renowned scientists, doctors, politicians, lawyers, noble price winners, and many more, are being totally silenced and criminalized.
This sentence literally tells me nothing. Which specific people are being "criminalized" and by whom?
The reason that big tech is corrupted is mass media and activists (here I mean anyone who pushes for their company to do good things rather than just neutral thinhs) within the big tech organization.
The (non-rightwing) news orgs had constantly been going on about the evils of Trump and racism and fake news and virus misinformation how very bad it all was, the activists were convinced (because most people don't know how the "news" sausage is made and how it misleads) and pushed to stamp out what they saw as dangerous behaviour. The solution is probably to stop trusting the news media and bring back freedom of communication.
This New York mag article [1] published eons ago already made it clear to any sane biologist that all you mentioned are important things to consider. However the issue is sane biologists or scientists in general are actually in extreme short supply, the vast majority are often under the delusion that they “understand the system” better than they actually do. They also are often knowingly and unknowingly more interested in persevering their personal agenda (for eg. Gain of function research in the general sense in this case) than the overall good of humanity or scientific rigor.
Take Fauci for example, is he a good scientist? Yes. But it’s also clear that he too subconsciously has pushed for the method of approaching pandemics that coincidentally he was good at, and now we are left with this mess. I doubt him or anyone in between is going to acknowledge it even if they realize it. I was downvoted here to oblivion for pointing this out weeks back but doesn’t matter. I threw away a decade of my life’s experience because I didn’t believe in this cult of an academic system, downvotes don’t hurt nearly as much.
> Was there some other, better, established method?
We may learn from Taiwan*.
Quote: "Extensive public health infrastructure established in Taiwan pre-COVID-19 enabled a fast coordinated response, particularly in the domains of early screening, effective methods for isolation/quarantine, digital technologies for identifying potential cases and mass mask use."
It's really obvious at this point that Taiwan got lucky and that the geographical luck of not being close to Europe or having lots of visitors from there helped a lot. The moment Covid-19 actually got a foothold in the country they really started struggling and their testing for it collapsed under the load - and this was in May 2021, when we knew a lot more about Covid and tests for it were a commodity item produced in massive numbers. Western Europe and the USA hit this point in March 2020 with much less information available about the disease, no treatment options, and far less production capacity for Covid tests. (Probably due to all the people travelling there from a country that was reporting zero cases whilst a substantial proportion of their population was infected. Something seems to have gone seriously wrong in Italy that's been almost entirely ignored by the media, maybe because it's lead by the kind of boring technocrat they like.)
Unfortunately, all the media reporting on which countries have succeeded or failed and why seems to have been incredibly inaccurate and blatantly partisan.
In the US at least, given our culture of individualism/“freedom” we would never be able to replicate Taiwan. Isolation/Quarantine seem to have dubious political and legal support. Mask wearing is also seen negatively.
I meant Fauci at al.’s approach of proactively looking for the next pandemic via sample collection and lab engineering of new variants which predates the trump administration. By all appearances Faucis performance during the pandemic is nothing to be questioned. These are different topics.
I read Biohazard by Ken Alibek years ago and the current situation reminds me of one of the anecdotes in it.
He was a Soviet scientist in charge of creating bio-weapons- the book starts with him planning world war 3.
In one of the anecdotes talks about a lab leak they had, caused by someone not replacing a filter and the the lab accidentally pumping out anthrax all day and killing a lot of people.
The government blamed it on local meat sellers at the market and executed them all. Blaming the local market seems to be part of the bio-weapon-denial playbook.
"This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life."
Dare we inquire how long you have lived. :)
But seriously, I am not sure that the scientific community, nor all national governments, have reached a clear consensus on gain of function research. It is still a developing issue. Welcome to be corrected on that. Such research could potentially help to prevent pandemics as well as accidentally start them. The idea that scientists in the US might have been working with scientists in other countries, including China, on GoF research is not shocking to me. Here is a paper from 2016 on the ethics of GoF research:
Perhaps the old saying about mistakingly attributing malice to incompetence applies here.
As for the cover-up, it is difficult to imagine that David Baltimore is wrong. I used a textbook he co-authored when I was in school; he is one of the pioneers of the biotech industry. It seems unlikely this was not created in a lab. Then again, it is probably easier to prove someone in a lab made a mistake than to prove soemthing exists in nature.
Gain of function research outside of hyper-secure settings is, frankly, idiotic. It’s massively more dangerous than criticality experiments because of the potential for exponential spread.
From the beginning gain of function research has been done at levels as low as BSL-2, and this article claims the Bat Lady said that all their coronavirus research prior to the pandemic was done at BSL-2 or -3 levels. The Wuhan Institute of Virology's BSL-4 lab would likely be booked up for research known to be very dangerous, and as you go up in levels it's more and more inconvenient to get anything done from the physical protections (there are also supposed to be biological ones).
Plus it appears that the lab was poorly run: She noted that a September 2019 paper in an academic journal by the director of the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory, Yuan Zhiming, had outlined safety deficiencies in China’s labs. “Maintenance cost is generally neglected,” he had written. “Some BSL-3 laboratories run on extremely minimal operational costs or in some cases none at all.”
Even if it wasn’t created or modified in a lab, it’s not hard to imagine it was known and known to be dangerous. The conditions described about how these researchers were sifting through bat guano are quite poor to say the least. From the start of the pandemic I sort of shrugged about how it started. I thought denying a lab leak so early on was quite odd, or at least no one should trust that. For simple reasons: governments lie and do dangerous things, harming its citizens and other global citizens in the process. Then they classify it all and lie about it. There are so many examples of this, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. See: Rocky Mountain flats plutonium production, etc.
We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. Scientists are human and have human motivations and flaws. They are political, they cover their ass, they suffer from results oriented thinking.
“Science” should be trusted within its domain, but it’s not a replacement for all of the processes western society has developed to address the reality that nobody can be trusted with power. Everyone needs to perform their roles. Reporters still need to be skeptical and question scientists’ motivations and investigate the story. And politicians still need to be in charge of translating scientists’ judgments as to various scenarios and probabilities into the political decisions of figuring out what to do accounting for the entire universe of economic and social considerations that are within their ambit.
> "Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity."
The interesting part of this - and I'm curious about the personal experience of others here - is that the scientists I know have been the strongest questioners of the wet market theory from the get-go.
I don't think anything resembling scientific unanimity ever emerged, or even appeared to emerge.
Heck, here on HN we've been talking about this consistently at least since the PNAS letter, and probably since the beginning of the pandemic.
And, for this thoughtful observation, you get... DOWNVOTES. These Covid origins comment threads are so brutal!
But yeah, I agree. I’m just a lowly PhD student (an older one, though) but it’s pretty clear from my limited experience that “scientific consensus” is a PR term that bears little relationship to how scientists perform their work and engage with their colleagues.
To be fair they (on This Week in Virology) said they think it's unlikely that it leaked, but urge anyone with actual evidence to come forward. Their guest on that episode also said that, while RaTG13 is indeed a SARS-like coronavirus, the nucleotide sequence of the genome is only 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2. The guest said it's not similar enough to do gain of function research with. Bats with other similar SARS-like coronaviruses appear in (at least) Japan, Thailand, and Cambodia, and migratory bats have a range of several thousand kilometers.
I don't think lab workers getting sick is really a useful data point. People get sick all the time. Could have very easily been seasonal flu or whatever.
It also seems The Lancet letter doesn't actual address the question of lab leak. Only that it wasn't engineered. That was a pretty hot conspiracy theory at the time and one that remains far fetched. They didn't positively say it couldn't be a naturally occurring virus that leaked. I don't know enough to comment on gain of function leaves any hallmarks but I'm guessing it doesn't since it tries to replicate evolution.
I quoted this bit in another comment, but Steven Quay (interviewed by the US gov as mentioned in tfa)
The “engineered” comments refer to common amino acid sequences from lab practices, they leave a signature because ordinary biology is more random.
The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that arerarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair. For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.
I grant it's totally possible for this to occur naturally, at random (thank you, genetics) -- but when we haven't found any intermediate host animals and there's a lab at the outbreak location that:
Developed chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses
Conducted ’dangerous’ gain-of-function research on the SARS-CoV-1 virus, some of which had been funded by the US government (Asia Times)
Established a 96.2% match with SARS-CoV-2 and a virus they sampled from a cave over 1,000 miles away from Wuhan
Injected live piglets with bat coronaviruses as recently as July 2019
Published a paper on a close descendant of SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, in November 2019
Was hiring researchers to work on bat coronaviruses as recently as November 2019
You have to imagine the very real possibility that it was just an accident.
This kind of pattern hunting easily steps into a logical fallacy where meaning is derived from noise. We also need to know how many other viruses contain codons not typically found in other viruses. If in fact every virus has one or two unique traits, then we could likewise claim that all viruses are engineered.
Not saying that is the case, just want to caution against the perils of searching for patterns in large data sets like this.
Lab workers getting sick should be a starting point to begin analyzing archived blood samples for instance. Also, you don't usually visit a hospital for seasonal flu. And three people from the same lab at the same time suggests a wider outbreak in the lab. Even if it were the seasonal flu, it would have warranted a wider investigation, given what that lab was working on.
> you don't usually visit a hospital for seasonal flu
there's numerous posts in previous discussions saying that in China people do, because they don't typically have a GP and so go to the hospital for any acute ailment.
I think lab workers researching viruses are some of the less likely to do so, unless they're in a really bad state. If they were in a very bad state, it's less likely that it was the seasonal flu.
It's so far fetched to think a lab with known safety issues could be responsible for leaking a virus. We all know that humans are infallible and never make mistakes and accidents rarely occur in place with poor safety standards. Its just so crazy....
Thanks for correction, I think that's still an alarming rate for a specific mission to fetch samples of Bat feces for virology research. That should be a clear, undisputably abnormal indication of something wrong.
" When Trump himself floated the lab-leak hypothesis last April, his divisiveness and lack of credibility made things more, not less, challenging for those seeking the truth."
Maybe this is naive, but what the issue here? These people are alive, the documents exist, the physical locations are accessible. This isn’t archeology.
Couldn’t we ... just... check? Like maybe the UN or the group of 7 or something similar?
You shut down the globe for a year, seems like it’d be worth running down all the Rabit holes.
Hollywood actor Cena just begged in Mandarin for forgiveness after mentioning Taiwan is a country (which it is). Local Amsterdam politicians are not allowed to go on the photo with Taiwanese politicians etc.
The Communist Party is overly controlling and will not allow anything that will challenge their vision.
While Europe and the US were busy with their internal quarrels the last decades, China has been making moves.
China has blocked any and all independent access to the site, the only group allowed access was the WHO research group that somehow happened to include the most rabid opponents of the lab leak theory (Peter Daszak, mentioned in the article).
In all honesty, why would they be? Without them addressing anything, the west, particularly the U.S., has had their pitchforks out and ready since day one. With our idiotic president calling it the Chinese virus from the start, why in the hell would China want to be upfront about what they knew about the origin if it indeed was a lab leak? I wouldn’t. That’s all on the assumption that they themselves even knew or know. If our president had been less like a child, it would have been a better environment to get to the truth.
You and others act like this is some elementary school incident where honesty is the best policy. But with politics involved and the already prevalent mass hysteria and propaganda going on everywhere, it makes sense, on a realist and not idealist level, why one would not be forthright.
There’s also the idea that the U.S. was terribly ill-prepared and ill-equipped to handle the virus. The U.S. needs to be prepared for such viruses, no matter their origin, because zoonotic crossover events will remain a possibility with even higher likelihood going forward. My worry is if the virus origin is or is even believed to be of lab-based origin, that will weaken the prerogative and narrative to be prepared for zoonotic diseases. Because then, it was something “done to us” rather than a natural event we should be prepared for, an event which remains a big possibility even if this particular virus was of lab origin.
What kind of an insane statement is that? Because that's the right thing to do when it comes to something like a GLOBAL pandemic.
>Without them addressing anything, the west, particularly the U.S., has had their pitchforks out and ready since day one.
Is that a rationalization for not being forthright about the pandemic and origins of the virus (regardless if it was accidentally from a lab, or came directly from nature)?
And China is not some timid wallflower. Stop pretending like they are. They are a global superpower that really fucked up here in multitude of ways and if they get some criticism then so be it - China is a big boy, it can take it.
>With our idiotic president calling it the Chinese virus from the start, why in the hell would China want to be upfront about what they knew about the origin if it indeed was a lab leak? I wouldn’t.
You would lie to the global public because you don't like Trump? How could you say something like that and even try to justify it. I'm flabbergasted. It's such an immoral statement that I'm surprised anyone would seriously make.
Trump said many dumb things but there's a lot of crazy shit that came out of very high-level Chinese officials as well, such as that the virus came from America. But that's all immaterial. They have a responsibility to be transparent.
>You and others act like this is some elementary school incident where honesty is the best policy.
It's a GLOBAL pandemic. It affects everyone. Transparency is critical! Fault the west for many things, but these kinds of things tend to have full transparency around them. Communist authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, can never find a way to be truthful. The truth always seems to be needed to be dragged out of them. This is shaping up as another Chernobyl moment for another authoritarian communist regime. Ultimately, it's everyone else that pays the price.
>To be frank, your responses show a naive understanding of how the world works and human behavior.
When it comes to pandemics, this is how the world health authorities have done things. There very much was a lot of world collaboration and transparency around epidemics and pandemics. So don't gaslight and say that this is somehow 'naïve'. That's how everybody did things, until China decided it would be embarrassing to them. Hell they were silencing and incarcerating doctors and frontline workers when they suggested there is some sort of a new virus out there as late as January 2020.
This is the modus operandi of communist and authoritarian regimes.
>My comment is simply an observation of the way things are, not the way I would want them to be.
You literally said that had Trump insulted your honor you would have lied and obfuscated the same way that China did. Here's your statement (emphasis mine): "our idiotic president calling it the Chinese virus from the start, why in the hell would China want to be upfront about what they knew about the origin if it indeed was a lab leak? I WOULDN'T."
How is that not an immoral statement.
>If you believe that, then I don't know what to say.
I'm under no illusions when it comes to the general idea that nations are always truthful - they aren't. I didn't make a general statement. I scoped it to transparency around epidemics and pandemics. And yes, the vast majority of nations (not just the West) are very transparent on this point. China is a major outlier here.
“I wouldn’t” is taken within the context as if I was a nation governing people in the current global environment. It’s a hypothetical because I’m not a nation state. Would I actually if I was? Who knows? I put it there to basically say I can see why all this has happened the way it has. I thought all of this context was obvious.
And what you say I said about Trump is not at all what I said. You say I literally said something that I literally did not. My point is that he created a certain environment, a highly politicized and biased environment, not conducive in any way to discovering truths about the virus and damn near everything else. He was a catalyst for non-truths and has been his entire life. It has nothing to do with honor or insults.
This is just about what I would expect from governments to behave (both US and China).
This kind of bullshit where people are more concerned about their departments future funding and prospects, and try to bury "unfortunate" incidents is happening in all the governments(and even inside larger companies) I am familiar with. It's a lot easier to bury if you can prevent investigation, than bury results of such investigation. As shocking as might sound this is pretty much businesses as usual in bureaucracy .
For me that doesn't even comes close to Snowden revelations (even though, again we suspected some of it).
IMO the most upsetting part about this is people like Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak being repeatedly caught in outright lies and coverup behavior. These people seemed to have the best of intentions at some point in their career but they are doing irreparable damage to their field and science in general with the public lies and coverups.
One example is Shi Zhengli publicly stating the the 6 miners that died after shoveling bat guano in a mine in Mojiang died from a fungal infection while the DRASTIC group was able to dig up two papers that specifically stated the miners died from a SARS-like virus. They also dug up evidence that Zhengli's lab visited the mine multiple times since 2012 to take samples after the miners died and retrieved as many as 9 unique Coronaviruses similar to SARS-Cov-2 from the mine.
It's a tremendously good bit of reporting, especially for a generalist outfit like Newsweek. I didn't notice anything wrong in it or the science of the Vanity Fair article this topic is based on, or contradictions between the two articles.
The DRASTIC team's story is an amazing example of "open source intelligence," for that primarily focused on an anonymous Indian who goes by the handle The Seeker who dug up a bunch of papers and theses for the data scientists and others on the team to assemble into a picture that is more and more convincing about the lab leak hypothesis, although having wet lab experience I'm predisposed to suspect this over the zoonotic transfer hypothesis.
But speaking of predispositions, it's exactly the sort of thing the US intelligence community could have done if most of the government and world scientific establishment hadn't already decided on the zoonotic transfer narrative, which is detailed in the Vanity Fair article.
Also an example of how Silicon Valley censorship can backfire, his first posting on this to Reddit got his account permanently banned, which suggested to him he was on to something. On the other hand Twitter didn't have any problems mentioned in either of these articles hosting the discussions of the DRASTIC team.
"One obvious demand would have been access to the WIV’s database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, which had been taken offline. At an event convened by a London organization on March 10, Daszak was asked whether the group had made such a request. He said there was no need: Shi Zhengli had stated that the WIV took down the database due to hacking attempts during the pandemic. “Absolutely reasonable,” Daszak said. “And we did not ask to see the data…. As you know, a lot of this work has been conducted with EcoHealth Alliance…. We do basically know what’s in those databases. There is no evidence of viruses closer to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13 in those databases, simple as that.”"
What did she mean when she said that the database is offline? It's not like the data would be gone if the service is not running?
Not really clear why it hasn't been released, it would be technically trivial and save a lot of speculation.
There is a bit of a pattern of DRASTIC researchers finding interesting tidbits in various science portals, followed by those portals going offline or being restricted.
>"Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories."
This is important for another reason that may not be immediately obvious. The WIV (BSL-4) is ~8 miles from the Wuhan Market. There's a BSL-2 lab (the CCDC) that's literally just a few hundred yards from the market. If the lab leak theory is correct, it may have escaped from the latter rather than the former. Or a visiting worker may have inadvertently transmitted it from the former to the latter before it escaped from the latter.
The calculation is simple and could have been made in early 2020. What's the joint probability of occurrence given everything you know about the origins of SARS-CoV-2?
There is _very_ high probability that this is just a human error.
I don’t dispute it is one point of suspicion, but Wuhan is also one of the 10 biggest cities in China. It isn’t a surprise the first US outbreak was in the biggest city. The first cases could have been anywhere.
If there were more evidence that it was lab made then the location would be another point, not to me without further evidence it doesn’t mean all that much.
And there have been 2 emerging coronavirus outbreaks in the last 20 years due to natural origin. Why is it so hard to believe there would be another one.
> I don’t dispute it is one point of suspicion, but Wuhan is also one of the 10 biggest cities in China. It isn’t a surprise the first US outbreak was in the biggest city. The first cases could have been anywhere.
Is that really so for animal-borne viruses though? I thought they came from place with lots of animals, hence the focus on the market. If it just showed up on some random high-rise employee downtown that would be hard to believe.
And after it starts, of course a highly-infectious virus shows up at densely populated places quickly. But for the same reason, I would also think it's hard for the first cases to travel to dense areas and spread the disease there without leaving a trail of cases along the trip. Ultimately they should point back to the animals they came from and testing can confirm it. Or at least rule various places out, if the govt was accommodating.
Plus wasn't the first US case somewhere in Washington state.
The first death in the U.S. was only discovered at least a month later, and this is long after we knew about the existence of the virus.
In China before there was a huge outbreak there is absolutely no way you can expect a small number of cases of a virus that nobody knows exists to be picked up. By the time of the big Wuhan outbreak there are already different variations in the virus. It had been in some population for a while before it broke out.
So the first outbreak in NYC is analogous to Wuhan. It could have started in Wuhan or it could have started anywhere else and then Wuhan had the right combination of factors for the outbreak to surge. We don’t know for sure.
We do know for sure that it started in Wuhan. The viral phylogeny is extremely clear. We have hundreds of thousands of viral sequences that describe a tree that is rooted in Wuhan around October 2019. That's incontrovertible. No evidence has arisen to contradict this despite an extensive search by thousands of scientists.
>There are two subclusters of A which are distinguished by the synonymous mutation T29095C. In the T-allele subcluster, four Chinese individuals (from the southern coastal Chinese province of Guangdong)
This reply only makes sense if covid-19 popped up at a random spot in Wuhan....and not literally right next to their coronavirus research lab.
It's not hard to believe that there could be another spillover event, and I don't have any certainty where covid-19 came from, but you're unfairly downplaying the level of circumferential evidence that does exist. There has been a significant effort against evaluating the lab-leak as a reasonable hypothesis (I say that in the scientific meaning of the word), and that effort has significantly damaged the reputation of scientific institutions around the world, and for good reason.
Yes I have read more than the articles, which is why I’m correctly saying it was unlikely to come from the lab.
I’m not saying it is impossible, just unlikely. And automatically degrading the opinions of experts who have detailed their arguments because you think they are biased is not proof of anything either.
Other pertinent data point, how many epidemics have been positively traced to a lab leak since virology has been widely studied? The Wuhan lab was founded in the 1950s. You can say the likelihood that a virus would one day escape from one of these labs is pretty high. The likelihood that a given virus would be from a lab is very low. All of which brings us back to where we were at the start. It's plausible and possible but not really likely.
A 2007 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (an important virus affecting cattle) was traced to effluent released from a laboratory in the UK [1].
A small number of SARS infections in 2003-2004 are also believed to have been due to laboratory accidents [2].
This article [3] gives an introduction to the subject from the perspective of a journalist who has reported on laboratory safety in the US.
This article [4] published in Nature in January 2012 by members of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity reviews the risk of a release of an engineered form of H5N1 influenza. It includes some alarming remarks such as:
'We found the potential risk of public harm to be of unusually high magnitude' and;
'A pandemic, or the deliberate release of a transmissible highly pathogenic influenza A/H5N1 virus, would be an unimaginable catastrophe for which the world is currently inadequately prepared'
The authors take the possibility of release of a dangerous pathogen from a laboratory seriously, though the article is prospective rather than retrospective.
For an epidemic to occur, you need not just a lab leak, but a population sufficiently naive to the pathogen. H1N1 was displaced by H2N2 in the late 1950's pandemic, which in turn was displaced by H3N2 in the late 1960s pandemic. Thus it hit the cohort of people aged 25-6 or less who'd never been exposed to H1N1.
That article doesn't support your argument. It just says it was suspected.
I found an NIH article that says the likelier origin is that the 1950 virus was used to produce a weakened live virus vaccine candidate that lead to the reemergence and not an accidental leak. It also concludes by saying there has never been a likely lab leak epidemic ever observed.
That article's definition of "lab accident" seems narrow and legalistic to me. In either case, the virus spent 1950-1977 in a lab freezer. It ended up in the wild, with ~700k people dead. The only question is whether it escaped in an infected researcher (or in infectious lab waste, or in whatever else you'd consider a proper lab accident) vs. in that failed vaccine candidate.
Those details do inform some details of the correct policy response. For example, they determine the relative importance of better PPE at the bench vs. better QA before allowing the vaccine to leave the lab. They don't change the overall question of whether scientific research has ever caused a pandemic, though. That causality is what matters, not whether the sign on the door said "lab" vs. "experimental vaccine nurse".
For example, if the pandemic originated from a WIV researcher who became infected in the field (during their many expeditions to remote bat caves that no other humans would routinely enter), was that a "lab leak"? Literally no, since they weren't in the lab. The causality would still be the same, though--if not for that scientific research, that virus would likely have never left the cave.
To avoid such confusion, it's probably better to say something like "unnatural origin", or "origin arising from scientific research". A much bigger mouthful than "lab leak", though.
I'd add that the article does not state that there have never been cases of accidental releases of pathogens from laboratories, only that such accidents had likely not led to a 'global epidemic' as of the date the article was written (2015).
The article's abstract opens with the statement 'The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event'.
These labs are in major cities. Epidemics are likely to be detected in Major cities. The chance of an outbreak being near a research lab aren't as long as you seem to think.
As pointed out in the article, there were exactly 3 cities in the world working on gain-of-function research related to bat-originated coronaviruses. Galveston, Texas, Chapel Hill N.C, and Wuhan. It’s way more narrow than just being near a biological laboratory.
That's not what the person you are responding to said at all. Please stop dishonestly conflating the two theories. You can believe that a coronavirus accidentally leaked from a lab that was studying coronaviruses without believing that it was intentional, or that the disease was a bioweapon.
Honestly, this is not a difficult distinction to understand. You have to wonder why people are so eager to conflate the two.
If it's nothing to do with an engineered virus conspiracy then there's no reason to constrain ourselves to the 1 or 2 labs doing that kind of research. If we don't have that constraint then appearing in Wuhan is much less coincidental.
Listen, if the virus originated in a city that simply had an infectious disease lab, that’s one thing.
For a virus to originate in a city with one of three labs in the entire world conducting heavy-duty researching involving the exact kind of virus that unleashed this pandemic, with the stated intention of working with said viruses to make them more infectious (NOT for the purposes of making a bioweapon) that deserves special consideration. Especially with the fact that the animal the virus is thought to come from ranges 1500 miles south from said city, and started during a time that animal is typically hybernating.
You do know that there's genetic evidence that seems to point to an origin 600 miles from Wuhan?
> Of 23 samples that came from Wuhan, only three were type A, the rest were type B, a version two mutations from A. But in other parts of China, Forster says, initially A was the predominant strain. For instance, of nine genome samples in Guangdong, some 600 miles south of Wuhan, five were A types. [0]
> with the stated intention of working with said viruses to make them more infectious (NOT for the purposes of making a bioweapon)
Why is this relevant unless you're claiming that the virus that we've observed has been engineered in that way? Otherwise it seems like the chance of a coronavirus outbreak caused by poor handling in a lab is the same for any lab that's studying them for any purpose.
Good point, now that you mention it, it does now seem possible that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of some sort of engineering tests. Not saying it’s a certainty, but it’s surely at least a plausible consideration.
Why? Im not passing judgement on whether it was engineered as a bioweapon. But there was a lab that was actively engaged in research of viruses that are exactly what COVID is. They were conducting research on making said viruses more infectious. I’m not sure why the more likely thing is that it was just a virus sitting in a lab that spilled out, as opposed to a virus that was actively being worked on using the techniques the lab was known to be studying.
You've artificially limited the number of possible labs to those doing bioweapon research. If this isn't your claim there is no reason to do so and if there are more labs studying coronavirus it's far less coincidental.
There is zero evidence that anyone, anywhere in the world was working to develop SARS-like bioweapons. The gain-of-function research in question would have been basic research, intended to develop more dangerous variants of the viruses in order to predict future pandemic emergence, develop more universal vaccines, etc. I believe this research was reckless and should never have been funded (by the USA!) or permitted, even considering only what they knew at the time. It wasn't malicious, though.
In any case, beyond gain-of-function, the WIV and Wuhan CDC also had the biggest program in the world to sample novel SARS-like coronaviruses from nature, from remote bat caves that no other humans had any reason to enter.
If SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus accidentally released by scientists, then Wuhan is the obvious place for it to emerge. That could have been directly from a lab, or a researcher could have become infected on a sampling trip, traveled home from the sampling sites (~900 miles away, to be clear; Wuhan was not an expected natural spillover region), and seeded the infection there. None of this is anywhere close to proven, but the previous dismissal of any unnatural origin as a "conspiracy theory" was an outrageous, unscientific smear.
> There is zero evidence that anyone, anywhere in the world was working to develop SARS-like bioweapons
How do I square that with this claim from the article?
> Eleven of its 23 coauthors worked for the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the Chinese army’s medical research institute. Using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs, then studied their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. As the NSC officials worked backward from the date of publication to establish a timeline for the study, it became clear that the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic even started. The NSC officials were left wondering: Had the Chinese military been running viruses through humanized mouse models, to see which might be infectious to humans?"
What this describes seems like it could be circumstantial evidence of the PLA developing bioweapons. Certainly it isn't proof of anything, and as evidence it's not very strong. But I wouldn't call it 'zero.'
"Running viruses through humanized mouse models" is a pretty normal (though frightening) part of virology. For example, Ralph Baric was doing it back in 2005:
So if the Chinese military had in fact been doing this, I'd guess it was just basic research, in the same way that lots of American basic research links back to DARPA. Of course they fund it because they believe there might be a military application, but I see no reason to think that application would be bioweapons (vs. the same kind of beneficial applications described in the open literature).
Perhaps "no evidence" would have been better phrasing than "no reason"? I do think it's possible that some Chinese (or American, or British, or ...) military officer has at some point wondered if coronaviruses would make good bioweapons, but there's still no evidence.
They don't seem like obvious candidates to me, though. Both SARS v1 and SARS-CoV-2 show unpredictable, stochastic person-to-person spread, via super-spreader events. For a bioweapon that would ideally infect all the enemy but no one else, that's the last thing you want, hard to reliably get started and hard to reliably stop once it starts. So that reinforces my belief that if SARS-CoV-2 was of unnatural origin, it was almost certainly an accident during basic research.
Non-scientists obviously go into bat caves all the time, for guano collection, mining, etc. This certainly is a possible pathway for the emergence of zoonotic diseases, including SARS-CoV-2. Those aren't the bat caves I was referring to, though.
The WIV and Wuhan CDC sent grad students to hike through the wilderness to remote bat caves too far from any road or farm to have been exploited yet for any practical use. They chose those caves based on their expert predictions of where they expected to see the greatest diversity of novel coronaviruses.
There's obviously far fewer WIV grad students than guano harvesters; but the risk per person seems orders of magnitude higher, for an expert deliberately seeking a virus vs. a merely indifferent laborer. So that seems like a new and non-negligible risk to me, and thus one that requires investigation. Note that I'm not alone in this; Marc Lipsitch, for example, often mentions this possible pathway.
Very easily, you can get to the other side of the world before you even become infectious, which can be days after contracting the virus. Even if there were a trail of infectious they were probably chalked up as the flu and is likely to be undetected. If it was spreading then the virus may not have been adapted enough for the explosive growth we saw in Wuhan.
Good question; I would guess that like SARS and MERS, whichever viruses they picked up, assuming that's what happened, didn't transmit well.
That's one of the independent vectors the author mentions that makes so many of us suspect very specifically a lab leak of a gain of function experiment: the virus started out very well adapted to humans.
A lot of emerging viruses are well adapted to humans… that’s why become outbreaks. How can you judge what level of adaption is expected vs unexpected in a virus.
Most virologists say the way this virus works is unlike anything they’ve seen or expected so they can’t imagine how a human would have engineered it. Why do you think your feeling about the virus’s level of adaptation trumps the experts opinions?
"A lot of emerging viruses are well adapted to humans…"
This is literally not true.
Most virologists say the way this virus works is unlike anything they’ve seen or expected so they can’t imagine how a human would have engineered it. Why do you think your feeling about the virus’s level of adaptation trumps the experts opinions?
1) Citation on "most" please. The world is a big place, so you will be able to find a citation for any opinion. If you are going to say "most" then please back it up with a source.
2) gain-of-function research doesn't require a human to engineer a new virus. It is a way to essentially speed up evolution and allow nature to do the heavy lifting. You're arguing points that no on here is making.
How can you judge what level of adaption is expected vs unexpected in a virus.
It's a long article so I don't expect you to find the argument in it; it highlights the work of Alina Chan who compared a fast mutation rate of SARS-CoV as it better adapted itself to human to SARS-CoV-2. Here are titles of three of them I've saved but not read, May through September of last year:
SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans. What does this mean for re-emergence?
Single source of pangolin CoVs with a near identical Spike RBD to SARS-CoV-2
COVID-19 CG: Tracking SARS-CoV-2 mutations by locations and dates of interest
The lab wasn’t conducting bioweapon research. Gain of function research isn’t to create a bioweapon, nominally. It’s to examine the behavior of viruses under manipulation in order to better understand how we can respond to them given an outbreak. It’s not nefarious by nature, though it does seem like its usefulness hasn’t panned out as was thought.
But again, you really should read the article to understand what gain of function research is instead of insinuating I said COVID was a bioweapon.
They may be, but the WIV wasn't. In the words of Dr. Shi herself:
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
The closest animal virus to SARS-CoV-2 was found in nature about 900 miles from Wuhan (RaTG13, in Mojiang), closer to Chongqing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, or HK.
According to Wikipedia the lab had been established many decades ago, "The WIV was founded in 1956 as the Wuhan Microbiology Laboratory" and got its current name in 1978. For better or worse, open, public labs tend to be set up in urban areas, see the insane move of the work done at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center to college town Manhattan, Kansas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan,_Kansas in the heartland of American agriculture.
Ebola Reston evolved naturally, and emerged in humans due to an infected lab monkey imported from the Philippines to a contract research organization in Reston. Anyone who guessed that it came from Fort Detrick would have been wrong about which lab it came from, but right that it came from a lab.
Put differently, if scientists there hadn't been experimenting with monkeys, Ebola Reston wouldn't have entered humans there. We don't absolve exotic wildlife traffickers or farmers of the consequences of their actions in releasing novel, naturally-evolved viruses; so I'm not sure why we'd absolve scientific researchers.
The lab leak theory doesn’t imply that the virus was created, or gain of functioned, in the lab, merely that it was studied there and escaped. The lab leak theory doesn’t imply unnatural origins.
An example of this would be the Marburg virus (unrelated to CoVs): leaked from a lab, but of natural origin, through an infected lab animal caught in the wild
When bats weren't even being sold in that market? When the nearest ones were hundreds of kilometers away and in hibernation? No it was just easier to call a guy racist and bury your head in the sand.
So when we find Anthrax outside its normal "range" but close to a lab we can just say, yeah, no, while it's not endemic to this location it is 1000 miles away, so nothing to worry about? Oh, and never mind the lab.
This is not remotely comparable. Russia uses Novichok as a signature "we did it, don't F around".
This one was, yeah, this is a virology institute, we study corona viruses, we were hiring for corona virus experts, we do GoF work, but trust us, just because it first appeared blocks from our facility, it did not come from us. Also, don't believe our former virologists who skipped town.
Doesn’t it seem likelier that zoonotic transmission from an animal in Yunnan would infect a local and result in an initial local outbreak, which we have no evidence of? What do you think the ratio of locals in Yunnan are to visitors from Wuhan or potential visitors to Wuhan are at any given time? 100 to 1, 1000 to 1? I have no idea, but excuse the incredulity. It’s less likely that a virus from Yunnan would break out somewhere other than Yunnan, perhaps by a couple of orders of magnitude or more.
I mean sure, anything’s possible, but we have only circumstantial evidence right now and this observation isn’t a smoking gun, but it ain’t worth nothing.
This presumes COVID-19 had to evolve in the place people are looking for possible coronaviruses and had to jump directly from bats to people, and not in surrounding or isolated areas where the bats might roam. Or that their wasn't - as is suspected now - one or several interim species.
SARS after all was found in civets, and then later several other species as well despite originating in bats.
It doesn’t presume that it had to, it just conjectures that it is either more likely or not significantly less likely than the scenarios you listed.
We can’t rule it out, ie. we only have evidence right now to try to make a determination based on the preponderance of evidence, not beyond a reasonable doubt. The story that is emerging is that we may never be able to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt because the debate was quashed for a year by political concerns, institutional biases, and motivated reasoning.
You're taking this the wrong way. You have to update your priors and calculate a joint probability knowing everything we know about the origins of this particular virus.
We know enough to calculate a joint probability. Just update your estimate with new information. This should be pretty non-controversial. Everybody does this every day especially in the face of uncertainty.
Are you expecting a number? The joint probability of low-probability events is itself very low.
I'm not saying you should calculate it like P(10 000 tails coin flip) * P(1 000 000 tails coin flip). That can be done numerically. I'm saying that based on everything I've read, the highest probability hypothesis according to my own evaluation is the unintentional lab leak. To me, that's as uncontroversial as it gets. Human error happens _all the time_. Arguing against the lab leak, knowing what we know about China's refusal to allow an actual thorough scientific investigation into it, seems quite a bit more controversial to me.
Labs burn down, medical errors happen, bridges collapse, whatever. That's just reality.
Yes, but, I've seen people try to do that both on here and on rootcause, and the probabilities are anything but objective. It's just people math-washing what they already thought
good time as any to highlight how "fact checking" suppressed the "lab leak" talk for over a year [1] and how "fact checking" is just groupthink by another name and people promoting "fact checking" driven censorship are the 2020 version of the useful idiots of the olds.
There's a lot of post-hoc engineering arguing for BSL-4 research into coronavirus when even if the lab leak theory proves true wasn't in evidence at the time.
There is a very important thing to mention: Both the US and Europe depended on China's supplies in order to fight the virus in the first place.
Guess what Chinese officials did? They called each individual country prime minister and said: Your news reporters are criticizing China, it seems like you don't want supplies.
So politicians will talk with the boss of the news Media and explain the situation, the journalist will shut up.
This happened in two big European countries I personally know of. I suspect the same happened in the rest.
This is a beautiful reminder that you should never outsource your strategic resources like essential food, energy or medical supplies and if you do, you better don't do that from totalitarian regimes.
I am not at all shocked. All this was known and reported over a year ago. Social media companies and the MSM actively censored this information then in the name of squashing fake news. It was called conspiracy theory. What is different now? The only new and shocking revelations are the release of Fauci's emails.
Potential mistakes across different countries should put to rest the idea that investigating COVID origins is a nationalistic endeavor. The motivation should be as straightforward and objective as investigating airplane crashes.
> Edit: here's another amazement for the list: "Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories." And the article says "BSL-2 [is] roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office."
"SARS-like" could mean quite a few things and without defining what they mean by that it strikes me as fear baiting or being intentionally misleading to further their thesis.
The state department memo disclosing the sick researchers story isn't anywhere near as strong as the article implies. It's not US original reporting and there is disagreement about how strong the unnamed sources really are.
I'm also going to attack the sources... This was strongly pushed by the Trump administration which was looking for this result. And originally reported by in the WSJ by Michael R. Gordon who is also one of the original reporters about the Iraq Aluminum tubes/centrifuge story that turned out to be wildly false.
It took about 15 years to trace the origins of SARS [1] to a specific bat cave. We cannot be this confident this early on SARS-CoV-2.
After reviewing most of the arguments in favor of a lab leak origin, I eventually concluded that when confronted to their counter arguments, the Occam's razor would be in favor of a natural origin for the sars-cov2.
Indeed, when I heard of the report about WIV workers being sick with covid-like symptom I immediately checked who reported that, and ended up with the same conclusion as you.
While a lab leak origin cannot be entirely dismissed, one should keep in mind that all this fuss is politicaly motivated.
I’m not sure the writing style promotes objectivity. It doesn’t explore certain threads enough to feel like you are reading a trustworthy and complete briefing on the story
Honestly, reading comments like these and articles like the OP has convinced me that we, as humans, will not at all be prepared for the next pandemic. And the one after that.
These viruses and their potential recombinations are out there, we don't need some virologist to go out and maybe catch it. People will catch them, we'll just know even less about them when the next pandemic starts.
If this is the most shocking article you have ever read in your life, I feel you haven't read many articles in your life.
There is absolutely no evidence in it. Just a pile of conjecture. It is absolutely the stuff of conspiracy theories.
The truly shocking thing is that world does not hold China liable for this disaster. It really doesn't matter if it started in a lab or in one of their wet markets; it was incompetence and negligence on China's part in either case. China should pay reparations to the world for turning it off for what looks to be like multiple years, and killing millions of people.
There is absolutely no evidence in it. Just a pile of conjecture
There is much more evidence in the article for a lab leak than there was for the wet market story which was uncritically parroted in the media for over a year.
> There is much more evidence in the article for a lab leak than there was for the wet market story which was uncritically parroted in the media for over a year.
There was zero evidence of a lab leak in the article, only conjecture. So the bar of "same amount of evidence as the article for lab leak" is pathetically easy to reach. The fact you are throwing the "parroting" term around is ridiculously ironic as well, the "lab leak" has been parroted around the world since day one.
More importantly, who gives a shit even if *was* a lab leak? It's literally the less evil/worse of the two possibilities (wet market vs lab leak). Since that means it was "only" a lapse in lab security (one which will probably be learned from and not repeated) rather than the result of negligence in keeping open these markets despite being told over and over again that they are going to cause outbreaks just like this one, and these markets are still open!
This did not happen as far as I can discover - there were stringent lock down measures in Wuhan, but they came very late. In fact six weeks into the outbreak the Wuhan authorities held a party for 40k people. So - in fact it was the opposite, they treated it recklessly, which makes me think that they didn't have much to hide (until they realised that they had recklessly let it, whereever it came from, get out of control).
China could - rightfully - point out that they in fact did get the situation more or less under control and that in spite of being fully aware of the seriousness of the situation the bulk of the governments in the West (those who presumably would be first in line to demand reparation) messed it up all by themselves.
> If it evolved in a lab, it is highly likely that the virus is better at infecting people in lab conditions, for example that would mean inside.
Zoonotic diseases jump from animal to human regularly. Countless recommendations from health organizations around the world warned about and predicted a zoonotic disease event base around one of these wet markets.
> If it evolved in a lab, it is highly likely that the virus is better at infecting people in lab conditions, for example that would mean inside.
Feels like you pulled that out of your ass. Random is random and evolution is a thing. The fact that covid is effective at infecting people means only that, it has no definitive statement on it's origin. Yes, we know that a virus can be engineered in a lab to be more infectious, but billions of humans come in contact with billions of animals so it don't matter if the chance of natural zoonotic boundary jump is small.
I would agree that it doesn't seem like much. But the article says that the director of the wuhan institute's BSL-4 laboratory wrote in 2019 that “Maintenance cost is generally neglected ... Some BSL-3 laboratories run on extremely minimal operational costs or in some cases none at all.”
Most importantly, "the WIV housed numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses. Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol: BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen. Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office."
"Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research—some involving live SARS-like viruses—had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories."
There is apparently a history of SARS escaping from Chinese labs on multiple occasions, and the bat coronavirus from the mine that was human transmissible was the "only one whose genome closely resembled SARS". And according to the Wuhan lab itself, the coronavirus is "96.2%" similar to this sample, though they tried to hide this.
The strain that was 96.2% similar was a well known strain inside and outside of China.
Experts do not believe that the many, many differences between those two virus look like anything a human would or could engineer. Again, not impossible, but seems unlikely. This research would also have to be done covertly in a lab that was not covert at all which routinely had foreign collaborators.
I also do not think “they” were trying to hide this. Remember that in the US the leadership was anti-WHO and anti-China and you can’t take on face value their value judgements of what the Chinese researchers were doing when they were asked what they were doing and had explanations.
I’m not saying that the WHO and China are unbiased either, they aren’t, but the initial actions of the US’ investigation were also heavily heavily biased and would hardly be described as impartial truth seeking efforts.
Crossing into personal attack is not allowed and will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. We've had to warn you about this kind of thing before. I don't want to ban you, so please fix this.
...yes? Listen, if you are prepared to seriously consider a lab leak, then you have to assume that any public statements from Chinese authorities are dubious. I’m pretty sure my own government makes dubious statements all the time so it’s not hard to imagine.
I’m seriously considering it and put it higher than 0%. But if you think your hypothesis is the most likely outcome (>50%), and your defense at any evidence that discounts your view is that it is a giant and incredible cover up by the Chinese government then I guess we have very different priors about how easy it is to pull off massive conspiracies.
And also remember the people that leaked that 2-3 employees were hospitalized without any additional details or evidence also had an agenda.
Are you familiar with the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak? The Soviets successfully blamed that on tainted meat, and the truth wasn't revealed until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Before that, the Western scientific consensus agreed with the Soviets, discounting speculation otherwise as a conspiracy theory, with reasoning similar to yours above.
(For emphasis, nothing above is meant to imply that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon. An accident in reckless but not malicious basic research seems far more likely to me, and natural origin certainly hasn't been excluded either.)
I’m not saying it is impossible, I’m saying it is not likely.
I think it is great for people to research the origins and dig into all the details and try to find the truth. But if the virus were of natural origin, which to me is the most likely truth, then all of this talk and speculation are just maligning completely innocent people. And many of the comments here are maligning left and right.
The tone of many comments is certainly unfortunate, and we certainly shouldn't go from unjustified confidence in natural origin to unjustified confidence in lab origin; I'd put the odds near a coin flip myself. That's perhaps a backlash to the last year, though, during which anyone pushing for investigation of this reasonable hypothesis was maligned as a conspiracy theorist or worse.
For example, here's a message from an academic virologist quoted frequently in the mainstream media with a wide Twitter following, who calls Yuri Deigin's summary of the evidence for lab origin a "Turner Diary-esque manifesto". (The Turner Diaries is a novel about a race war, popular among violent white supremacists including Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.)
That kind of rhetoric is nothing unusual from anonymous Internet trolls, or even from politicians. It was strange to see from scientists, though. I don't think the backlash is good, but it's not surprising.
Finally, if the CCP wanted to stop this speculation, then they could allow an open investigation, giving international scientists full access to the WIV's documents and samples. Perhaps the reason that the CCP hasn't is just an authoritarian state's reflexive secrecy, and there's nothing to actually cover up; but if that's the case, then they have only themselves to blame for the suspicion.
There was an investigation! International teams went over data and samples! Researchers were questioned! All of this is public and in reports. The problem with saying it is a cover up is that no matter what is provided you can just say nothing is enough.
Can we get more details about how we know for sure that 2-3 researchers were actually hospitalized? Oh, it’s classified, eh? Well I can’t imagine the US ever falsifying intelligence.
I’m not suggesting that the US is lying and CCP isn’t. But I think if you rationally look at the data and the reports and listen to the people that did the investigation they do not believe in the conspiracy. And yes, they are biased, but at least they have arguments and actual data to defend their position.
Are you referring to the team led by the WHO's Peter Ben Embarek? If yes, please note that he said explicitly that it wasn't an "investigation", despite the media widely using that word:
They reviewed summaries of data provided by Chinese scientists. They generally did not review raw data themselves, let alone physical samples, and took no steps (analogous e.g. to a financial audit) designed to uncover deliberate attempts to mislead.
For a specific example, what is your opinion of the WIV's virus database? This is a database-backed website that went offline in September 2019. The WIV has cited "hacking attempts" as the reason for this. Do you believe their explanation? If so, why are they still refusing to provide it in a different format (e.g., a dump on a flash drive) that would obviously present no computer security risk?
You obviously have no idea how much control and influence the Chinese government exerts over its citizens. I really don't know how people can still be so blatantly naive about how communist parties operate and how they maintain power over their citizens.
> I guess we have very different priors about how easy it is to pull off massive conspiracies.
Is it that difficult when you manipulate the media and control the narrative? This is why the principles of free speech are as important as the law itself.
Covid antibodies may or may not be produced and if they are seem to fade quickly. This has been widely researched and documented [1]. T cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 are a better indicator of exposure [2].
If several people were hospitalized that means several dozen to hundred people in the lab actually had COVID (hospitalization rates are low, especially among people who haven’t reached retirement age yet).
Testing was done on those people and nothing was found.
This means we would be looking at a huge coverup, not false negative testing results.
Also interesting to note that (per the leaked emails) Fauci was in regular correspondence with the guy who thinks everyone should die by age 75 or else they're a waste of space[1]....Discussing strategy on the pandemic that primarily kills people over 75.
> the guy who thinks everyone should die by age 75 or else they're a waste of space
You linked to an article where he expresses the opinion that he personally doesn't want to live past the age of 75. That's a far cry from advocating mass murder of the elderly.
> Fauci was in regular correspondence... Discussing strategy on the pandemic
Emanuel is the head of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy. It would be unusual if he wasn't in regular correspondence.
> That's a far cry from advocating mass murder of the elderly.
Not what I said. But you obviously didn't read between the lines of why he feels that way, or his statements on the second order effects of a small % of people causing a large drain on the overall healthcare system. I still consider this "Interesting to note".
> is the head of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy
Why would an employee at a random private university be expected to have correspondence with a public official?
The guy has a personal preference for not wanting to live a reduced quality of life, and you're using that to insinuate he wants to genocide old people?
The WaPo article where I first read about the theory said most of this stuff. I didn’t understand then why people were so quick to dismiss it - it is eerily plausible, and we just don’t have much other data to go on. But it’s like having an opinion one way or the other is a political dog whistle that puts you into one of two bins, neither of which I fit into comfortably. This article makes a decent point of that: now that Trump’s racism is out of the way, maybe we can more critically examine the facts. I still think the lab leak theory is less likely than evolution, but it’s at least a bit compelling.
> This article makes a decent point of that: now that Trump’s racism is out of the way, maybe we can more critically examine the facts.
I highly doubt it, in most cases "Reductio ad Trumperum" will remain a useful sleight of hand. This is a different matter, being "tough on China" is a bipartisan issue, it's just about showing how the other side was "doing it wrong". For instance, you could say that Trump had "no evidence" supporting his lab leak theory.
While this article is quite illuminating on the political side of the lab leak theory, on the evidence side it's mostly a rehash of some long-standing speculations.
The only recent evidence it contains is the fact that 3 researchers from WIV sought hospital care back in autumn of 2019 with symptoms similar to COVID. However, this piece of evidence is hardly consequential without further details:
- First, most common symptoms of COVID are indistinguishable from common cold. If the researchers were known to have any "signature" symptoms like loss of smell the article would certainly mention it.
- Second and more importantly, China doesn't have a robust GP/family doctor system found in western countries. As a result, many people would go to hospitals directly whenever they're mildly sick.
Taking the evidence as we know it now, the straightforward explanation is that 3 researchers caught cold, got mildly sick, so went to the hospital to get prescriptions or doctor's notes for sick leave (in China it's common for employers to require a doctor's note even for a short sick leave).
That said, I believe the lab leak theory is still plausible, and shouldn't be ruled out unless a clear transmission path from bat to human has been identified (which was done for the 2002 SARS outbreak). But I also think that we may never know. I trust that some theories put forward were in good faith, but so far they are little more than speculations.
I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse towards assuming that the lab leak theory must be true. It's not so much the theory itself that's surprising. Lab leak remains plausible but less probable then natural origins.
The sudden shift is just baffling to me though. This huge new furor is due to anonymous CIA sources saying three people got sick? That's extremely tenuous evidence, as you state above.
As far as I can tell, the only biological evidence is the furin cleavage site, which is not uncommon in related viruses. Also, this has been known since the beginning, when the Chinese CDC released the first genome of the virus.
This seems more like people declaring victory because they're finally getting a hint of public support for their suspicions, rather than some truly damning evidence.
Natural origin and lab leak are in no way exclusive. The lab was collecting viruses and creating new ones - either one could have leaked.
I don't have strong views as it's incredibly difficult to prove a negative (that it was not a leak), essentially you would have to identify and prove exactly the actual vector and even then it might be difficult to be conclusive. Lab leak seems however like a very likely scenario and it is crazy how people try to dismiss it without any actual evidence either way - and China's approach to handling the investigation and information flow definitely should cause anyone to be suspicious.
I guess at this stage thr only way we cam find out is if in 10-20 years there's a whistleblower from the lab.
1. The Wuhan institute for virology collected a naturally occurring virus then did gain of function research which subsequently resulted in infected lab workers. There's not a known virus with close enough genome sequence similarity to SARS-Cov19 for this to be plausible. It would be a monumental undertaking to induce >1k mutations in the closest known relative virus. If someone pokes around WIV or a cave in the area and finds a virus with much, much higher but not identical sequence similarity, then that's very strong evidence for gain of function research followed by a leak. In the meantime it seems unlikely that WIV would start doing gain of function research without first publishing about their newly discovered virus.
2. SARS-Cov19 in more or less its current state was naturally occurring in a location that WIV researchers sampled. The virus then escaped while WIV researchers were characterizing it. This requires one to believe that WIV workers, in a biosafety lab, were the first humans to encounter and contract and spread this virus. This is in contrast to the alternate hypothesis that unprotected workers shoveling guano, or maybe a wet market vendor got the virus. I know which possibility I would bet money on.
The point is that we don't have to prove a negative, just weigh the evidence.
Consider the priors. There's one lab of that type doing that kind of work in China. What is the likelihood that an epidemic emerging in China next to that one lab while not being from the lab?
Also lab leaks are a type of industrial accident. Industrial accidents happen even in the places with the most stringent security protocols. Were that lab's protocols the best in the world? Can't say. And those that are best in the world have contingency plans, for when shit hits the fan.
There have been two serious epidemics of coronavirus disease in recent history: SARS and MERS. There is overwhelming evidence that both have a natural origin. Indeed, the fear of further crossover events is precisely why there was a lab studying these viruses in Wuhan.
I'm not saying that this wasn't a lab accident. What I'm saying that is that if you were actually "considering the priors" (in the statistical or strictly literal sense), you'd be concluding the exact opposite of what you're saying in this post.
> There have been two serious epidemics of coronavirus disease in recent history: SARS and MERS. There is overwhelming evidence that both have a natural origin.
This supports the idea that a jump from animals is a possible explanation. It does nothing to indicate that a lab leak is a unlikely explanation (especially with a sample size of two.)
However, the fact that this arose in one of 3 cities on the planet where this research is conducted does provide significant evidence that lab leak is a likely explanation.
Given the lack of evidence, it seems irresponsible to make strong assertions that one theory is more likely than the other.
But SARS has leaked from these labs before. Obviously we already knew about SARS-CoV-1 when it leaked, but this could be one of those situations where the virus leaked from the lab as its first exposure to humans.
You're misreading the context. The furor comes from the fact that the lab leak hypothesis (distinct from the engineered virus hypothesis) was dismissed by fact checkers as a debunked conspiracy theory for a year based on nothing but assurances from the few scientists they interviewed.
The fact checkers were definitely too eager to mark this as debunked, but it still lacks real evidence. No fact checker would mark this theory as true even now.
So let's not make the same mistake by eagerly jumping to conclusions that it was engineered in a lab based on assurances from a different set of scientists.
So are we to believe that, out of 200 million square miles on this planet, this novel bat-related coronavirus just naturally emerged within 8 miles of a facility that specializes in novel bat related coronaviruses?
During a season when bats hibernate to areas thousands of miles away?
If you look at the circumstances behind this pandemic's origins, and do some basic back-of-the-envelope math, the lab-leak hypothesis is close to a certainty.
> So are we to believe that, out of 200 million square miles on this planet, this novel bat-related coronavirus just naturally emerged within 8 miles of a facility that specializes in novel bat related coronaviruses?
No, of course we are not "to believe" that. What we are to do is to consider it is a possibility. Or are we to believe that SARS-CoV-2 could only have emerged as a lab leak? Both the natural and the lab-leak hypotheses are feasible, but treating either of them with near certainty or as impossible is not justifiable with the current evidence.
Imagine an alternate universe where all events played out the same as in our own, with the exception that the Wuhan laboratory's existence was a perfectly kept secret by the PRC. In that case, would the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan lead to the certainty that there must be a secret facility nearby that specializes in novel bat-related coronaviruses?
>Imagine an alternate universe where all events played out the same as in our own, with the exception that the Wuhan laboratory's existence was a perfectly kept secret by the PRC. In that case, would the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan lead to the certainty that there must be a secret facility nearby that specializes in novel bat-related coronaviruses?
The natural emergence of a virus from an animal is much more likely than the existence of a secret, unknown research facility, but much less likely than a lab leak (particularly in the circumstances surrounding COVID19).
All these mistakes in reasoning that I keep seeing in these discussions is making me truly understand the definition of "gaslighting".
Well hey now, I think people are too quick to call gas light these days, such that the term is losing some of its meaning, seriousness, or utility. The people you're talking to (at least in this thread) are stating their own beliefs with their own evidence. No one (that I can see) has directly attacked your self confidence (unless you're extremely sensitive) or attempted to convince you that you're in a different reality to exert control over your personal self expression, esteem, or confidence. Gas lighting implies direct personal attacks and what I see here is thoughtful interesting, but serious debate. I would say that you saying you're being gas lit here is strong indication you truly do not understand what that term is.
We’ve been searching for intermediate animal species for 15 months and none have been found (SARS and MERS were found quickly), SARS-Cov-2 is actually quite bad at infecting bats, and the key thing: arginine-based (i.e DNA amino acid, not RNA) furin cleavage site on the spike protein (widely regarded in the GoF research as a great way to increase human infectivity).
To say nothing of the incredible coincidence of the WIV.
What makes you think it's less probable than natural origins? The wet market has probably been there for 1,000 years and this hasn't happened. Compared to the virus appearing in one of 3 labs in the world that would be studying it.
The Wuhan wet market episode, in retrospect, was almost certainly a superspreading event rather than a patient zero situation. The virus's effects are so variable from person to person (lots of asymptomatic carriers, people who just get a little cold, symptoms undistinguishable from the flu) that it was almost certainly already circulating in Wuhan unnoticed, until it became big enough to be hard not to notice.
Consider for example what happened in the US, in Washington state at the beginning of the pandemic. The first local community transmissions were detected weeks after they had already started happening, even though there was already a relatively high degree of alertness. Without testing, it wouldn't have been detected at all until a similar superspreading event finally took place.
The very fact that miners got sick a few years ago makes it also sound likely, based on Wuhan's history and based on the virus's characteristics, that bat-to-human transmission took place in similar circumstances as the miners' a few weeks or months before the Wuhan wet market event, had some low-key human-to-human transmission simmering in the community which people wrote off as the flu (at worse), until that one superspreading event.
You wouldn't call your local farmers market a 'wet' market because it isn't.
Wet market is the standard English term for a market that sells live animals, typically seafood. They are full of tanks and water filled buckets and polystyrene boxes etc., thus the "wet" adjective. There are 2 less than a mile from my home and I've never heard anyone use a different name for them.
You'll find this term used by the HK (i.e. China) government, so I fail to understand how you came to the conclusion that it's based on racial paranoia:
"As at October 2019, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department ("FEHD") managed a total of 74 public markets, of which 35 were standalone wet markets and 39 contained both a wet market and cooked food centre." [1]
In Cantonese, it's "濕貨街市", which is literally wet goods market/area.
Fair enough. I don't think I made my point exactly how I wanted on second though. Let me clarify.
The term in and of itself is not racist. But the way it was used in American media, and the negative connotations that were fed to us along with it, are very problematic.
The term 'wet market' has never really been used in the American lexicon. The first time the majority of Americans heard it was in regards to the pandemic. And it was instantly being using in a derogatory way. The media and day to day talk was filled with negative and inaccurate depictions of what these places really are.
They were said to be dirty, filthy places, where people are eating bats and all kinds of weird animals. And if only those Chinese people weren't being filthy and eating weird 'dirty' animals in their 'wet' markets, we wouldn't have this pandemic! I can't tell you how many times I heard this lane of thought early on last year.
And how many people still believe this to be the case? Probably a lot. Meanwhile, these places are just normal markets, where many people go to buy fresh meat, seafood & produce. And they spray water on the floors to wash them off (this by the way is my understanding of where the term 'wet' comes from, it doesn't have to be a seafood market).
This was what I was really trying to say, it's not the term 'wet' itself, but the way it was introduced to an audience who was not familiar with he term.
"Farmers' markets may be indoors or outdoors and typically consist of booths, tables or stands where farmers sell their produce, live animals and plants, and sometimes prepared foods and beverages. Farmers' markets exist in many countries worldwide and reflect the local culture and economy. "
"A wet market (also called a public market or a traditional market) is a marketplace selling fresh meat, fish, produce, and other perishable goods as distinguished from "dry markets" that sell durable goods such as fabric and electronics."
Sounds like a farmers market is a kind of wet market.
This is exactly my point. What exactly makes you think this is the case? How do you know there are animals in 'poor health' there?
Maybe the term itself isn't the problem, but the way it was used in American media, especially during the Trump administration. The term, and it's connotations were used in a way to disparage Chinese people. It has been used to suggest the reason we have this pandemic is because these 'inferior' people are eating bats and weird animals in their 'dirty' wet markets.
Your comment confirms that it is a problematic term.
I quote from the Oxford Dictionary:
"wet market n. South-East Asian a market for the sale of fresh meat, fish, and produce."
There is no mention of animals in poor condition and on-the-spot slaughtering. That's your prejeduce.
I don't think I made my point very clear. And don't assume I did no research before you offer nonconstructive insults. Let me clarify.
Sure the term, in and of itself isn't racist. It's the way it was used in our media, and the negative connotations that were implied by it. Especially under the Trump administration.
A good definition: "A wet market is an open marketplace with stalls of vegetables and other food items presented for sale. Many wet markets are found in China and the Philippines. The name is based on the fact that these informal market environments usually have wet floors. Shoppers tolerate sloppy floors and items piled on mats or boards as the foods sold at wet markets are known for their fresh quality and low price. The moisture is created by market workers regularly spraying the produce and floors with water."
Now if that's the way it was presented to us in Western media, there would be no problem. But that's not how it was portrayed. They tried to make it sound like some horrific place. Some god awful disgusting place, where people are eating bats and other weird animals. And it's dirty, really dirty. "If only those dirty Chinese people weren't eating disgusting animals in their 'wet' market, we wouldn't have this pandemic!"
How many times did we hear this repeated by people early on last year? And how many people still believe this depiction of the market? Probably a lot, even in this comment thread it was parroted. Meanwhile in the real world, that market isn't any different than most other markets in another country in the world.
There is no way anybody could have gleaned this explanation from your original post. And yeah, your original post did not indicate any prior research, so don't try to justify yourself ex post facto. The fact that you have to quote wikipedia indicates you've never been to one.
Well, we know for a fact that a >96% similar virus was found to infect the miners naturally in 2006… how hard is it to imagine a few more tweaks since then?
We’ve already had many mutations of COVID occur in the past year. Is it crazy to think virus which infected the miners couldn’t have mutated into what we know as COVID?
No, there is no public evidence that the miners were infected by the virus. The common story is the WIV sent people there to check if it was a virus. From there it diverges to the WIV saying "turns out it was a fungus" and then an obscure masters thesis about the cases that just assumes it was a virus.
> This seems more like people declaring victory because they're finally getting a hint of public support for their suspicions, rather than some truly damning evidence.
I think this is the main thing driving these comments. Instead of being totally against the idea, these articles are providing a shred of hope (despite not having any new proof as far as I can tell) for the people who are locked in on the lab leak theory. Definitely people getting overexcited about it and trying to claim they were right the whole time and were being "censored".
There was censorship in the form of calling the hypothesis of a lab leak (distinct from the hypothesis of an engineered virus) a debunked conspiracy theory. The fact that the theory is considered acceptable again is what people are claiming vindication for, and rightly so.
People can be censored but wrong, however, that doesn't mean the censorship policy was good. Censorship distorts your information market and makes getting to the truth harder. Sure, only the general public might be being censored but that makes said public (and the news media) associate taking the censored hypothesis seriously with craziness and evil. Which makes it substantially harder for university scientists (and to an extent, government ones) to research (this can take the form of cancellations, like Steve Hsu, lack of funding or just reputational damage)
It's like everyone has forgotten or never even knew the context of the original strong pushback. It wasn't against the possibility of a lab leak, it was against the rhetoric (lies) coming out of our own Whitehouse trying shift blame to China. Lies that were dangerously feeding anti-asian sentiment in the USA.
I can't believe you're putting me in a position to have to even slightly defend Trump. You are giving Trump supporting whack jobs credibility when you give deference to this sort of revisionism.
The news articles that require the most analysis are the ones of which we are least critical (i.e. those which are prima facie the most factual), yet here you are with a lazy article about Rush Limbaugh. I mean come on, we know he was there to spread propaganda.
Now here's a CNN article, posted May 1, 2020. Let's lightly analyze it:
My favorite part about this article is that, coming back to it today it's so easy to plausibly deny the associations they were making, but in the context of the time the conclusion from the article is that the lab leak theory is a conspiracy that the intelligence community is pushing back against.
>President Donald Trump contradicted a rare on-the-record statement from his own intelligence community by claiming Thursday that he has seen evidence that gives him a "high degree of confidence"
POP QUIZ!
1. Did Trump say he had a high degree of confidence that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the lab?
2. Why would CNN need to misrepresent something Trump said when he says enough BS the way it is?
Answer key: (1) No, watch the video (it was the interviewer who projected that statement onto Trump). (2) I don't know, but it doesn't seem like they have any good reason to do so.
The reporter drives the sentiment. The reporter is who the viewership listen to on how to feel about a particular statement. And what has the reporter done in this article? They have first suggested that Trump claims to have strong evidence the virus was leaked from the lab. Then they move on to suggest the intelligence community disagrees with this claim:
>In acknowledgment of that effort, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued an unprecedented public statement Thursday prior to Trump's comments making clear the intelligence community is currently exploring two possibilities but cannot yet assess if the outbreak "was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan" or began "through contact with infected animals."
Then they create an association with conspiracy theories:
>While the statement suggests the intelligence community has not yet developed a clear assessment as to how the outbreak started, it does say that officials have ruled out the possibility that the virus was "man-made or genetically modified," agreeing with a near consensus among scientists and refuting conspiracy theories.
The article says both theories are plausible! you might think, but the reporting brings us back to this central claim:
>But the lack of evidence to back up claims that the outbreak began in a Chinese lab has not stopped top administration officials, including Pompeo, and some Republican allies of the President from raising the possibility in public comments.
(emphasis on possibility is mine)
So when you say
>It wasn't against the possibility of a lab leak
I have to disagree. The mass media artfully manufactured the consensus that the possibility of the lab leak theory was unfounded. They did so while producing factual information that suggested we didn't have much evidence backing either theory, but used skillful narration to direct all attention to denying the possibility of the lab leak.
Fuller video of what lead of to those questions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3BRQ7scbqc . Trump was already starting to spread the FUD about the virus situation being China's "fault" and strongly insinuating it was somehow malicious.
Also, in that CNN article video he is asked a question not asked in the above video. A very direct question and NOT leading:
> What gives you I high degree of confidence that this originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
> I can't tell you that. I'm not allowed to tell you that.
Seriously though, I was alive and not under a rock in 2020. I was paying attention to all of this while it was happening.
Great, I don't have to do any Trump apologetics now. But while you were busy adjudicating what Trump did or didn't say, you forgot about what CNN was doing in its article - the most important part (and CNN isn't the only one who did this). They created an association of the WIV lab leak theory with Trump, suggested he was in disagreement with the intelligence community, and wrapped that up with denials of the lab leak theory.
Let's not go into semantics and technicalities here - journalists know how to write and they know how to clarify. They had ample opportunity on air and in writing to say something to the effect of "while Trump is a fucking idiot and mischaracterizes the lab leak theory, we can not rule it out". Instead they manufactured an association and a denial instead of separating the valid parts of the theory away from what Trump claimed.
Well look, I didn't bring up Trump. I just said the WH because there were a lot of people within the admin and in their circles who were trying to offer up China as the "enemy" in the COVID situation with a bunch of BS supposedly backed by secret evidence that has yet to be seen in order to deflect blame for the situation in the USA away from.. Areas they didn't want the blame to fall. Probably related to the 2020 run-up.
I wasn't posting that article as the word of god. It contains information about conspiracies and BS that was being spread around at the time. To add context to what was being pushed back against at the time. Interviewers will also setup questions like this:
> Last night so-and-so indicated he has seen evidence that China is responsible for the coronavirus outbreak and may have manufactured it in a lab and released it on purpose. Let me ask you this: What do you think of the lab leak theory?
> Sigh Let me be clear, there is NO EVIDENCE THAT THIS yada yada yada.
So now a year later, with all the context apparently down the memory hole, this is being shortened to:
> Let me ask you this: What do you think of the lab leak theory?
> Sigh Let me be clear, there is NO EVIDENCE THAT THIS yada yada yada.
"OMG, this was so-and-so then and look at him now:"
> I have never ruled out the possibility of a lab leak. I just thought then and now that the highest likelihood is a jump between species.
Oh please. Your one article doesn't change the fact that even mentioning the lab leak theory got you labeled a right-wing conspiracy nut and in some cases banned from social media.
The furor about the lab leak theory isn't solely due to the 3 hospitalized workers, but also due to a well-sourced article [0] written by a editor of the Science section of the New York Times (as well as for Science and Nature), Nicholas Wade. Those two broke on the same day. Papers hadn't been covering the theory in depth since last summer.
In my opinion the most damning part of the article is the section about the human-adapted furin cleavage, I recommend reading that part. The working assumption is that we should find people with precursors to covid without that furin cleavage adaptation, and we don't. If China wants to prove it wasn't a lab leak, they'll need to find instances of the virus that predated that adaptation- as was the case with SARS.
> I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse
I've witnessed the same exact pattern multiple times in the last few years- often in relation to China. It's as if suddenly everyone not only shifts opinion, but exhibits the same amount of faith in it as if that opinion had been the most accepted for years.
This speaks volumes about 1) the ability of media (and possibly of powerful, interested parties) to sway the public opinion; 2) the easiness with which people align themselves to a (perceived) majority without ever looking back.
In particular, what has happened here is probably that the presence of Trump prevented half of the US from aligning to a narrative that would have been otherwise quite successful, given the political times. Trump gone, that half of the country suddenly was free to align itself with that narrative.
It’s how imperialist propaganda works. When material interests shift, suddenly and with one voice all “independent” western media pushes the same unsourced narrative.
If you remember the lead-up to the Iraq was, it was the same surreal experience.
Sorry, I was being hasty (replying in too many locations to produce a good and thoughtful response -- instead I produced a factually incorrect one)
Damns my credibility a bit, doesn't it? Well, I should have more accurately mentioned that the FCS insertion (CT CCT CGG CGG G (PRRA)) Is rather unusual by betacoronavirus standards in that arginine is not typically coded as CGG (~5% of the time), and that RR coded for as CGG-CGG has not been seen in any betacoronavirus to date.
But my quality quotient on this thread has been all over the place. Probably too invested in getting people to consider the possibility of the lab leak as most probable until we see an animal population to prove the natural hypothesis.
Maybe the Biden administration has concluded that it's possible there may have been a lab leak. It would be damaging to them if they did nothing and ended up unable to conclusively prove there was no lab leak, because Trump has been banging on that drum for a long time now.
So, they don't really have much choice in this. They have to convincingly look like they're pushing to find the truth, or they'd be handing ammunition to the Trumpists.
And when I say "find the truth", I'm not taking a stance on what that is. I personally don't rate the lab leak theory very highly, but then I don't know enough to say one way or the other.
So you’re saying because there’s no new evidence the new furor is not worth it? It was clear for some of us from the beginning that the evidence is damning enough from the beginning.
If you’re going to demand incontrovertible evidence that might never come up. But considering the scenario, viz. a cabal of careless scientists accidentally unleashed a plague that is killing millions , even the slightest hint of a cover up needs to be taken seriously.
Having worked with enough scientists I don’t for a moment doubt this hypothesis either. Ego and arrogance is what drives most of them, they’d rather choose self-perseverance over accidentally killing millions and go home to have lasagna as if it was just another Thursday without a sweat.
> The only recent evidence it contains is the fact that 3 researchers from WIV sought hospital care back in autumn of 2019 with symptoms similar to COVID.
Even that is something people uncovered online and we were talking about a year ago.
I think in articles like this there are verifiable claims about facts, and reasonable speculations that have mostly been circling for a while now. These are of course worth considering.
And then there's the completely over the top narrative building based on non-evidence (which also swings wildly based on current trends), legends about mavericks doing secret fact finding missions online etc... stuff that should stay in a bad movie script.
At the end of the day I still think the facts will come up with enough time. If for example the hypothesis is that it's through GoF research, then a group of experts can examine the plausibility and the genomic evidence, try to replicate some of the possible steps etc. Real world research is hard and incremental, it's not done with black magic no one can find out about.
What’s really missing in the analysis is the base rate of WIV workers visiting the hospital with cold symptoms. I’ve heard plausible explanations for why it might be pedestrian or why it might be exceptional, but it’s all meaningless without the base rate.
> First, most common symptoms of COVID are indistinguishable from common cold.
I was under the impression that the symptoms were quite different to the common cold and more inline with influenza (fever, dry-cough, aches, no mucus production – symptoms that are rarely caused by the cold).
It would be interesting to know how many scientists there are and how often they are admitted to the hospital. Then you could say how likely or unlikely the event was. Obviously there would be other factors like season, etc. But maybe this is a big outlier. We can't say without more numbers.
I used to work in and around BSL 2 and 3 labs. A leak was highly unlikely. I was way more concerned about catching something where the animals were kept.
I’ve also been curious what hospital these scientists went to. You would think that they might have some sort of self contained medical unit for when any researchers at these types of facilities get sick. Just to make absolutely sure they aren’t sick with something particularly dangerous that they picked up at work.
Do you know anyone who's gone to hospital for a common cold? I never have nor can I recall anyone I know or anyone I've heard of. I'll give you that flu is a possibility.
My recurring shower thought at the moment is that there will eventually be strong evidence of a natural origin and this whole debacle will be rubbed in the faces of people who dared challenge the medical/media industrial complex and its infinite wisdom. Let's be clear: there's no strong evidence either way.
The take away is that it doesn't matter whether it was from a lab or whether it was naturally originating. What matters is that it was (and still is) completely reasonable to question the official narative. The CDC chose to favor the CCP wet market story because they wanted to maintain a positive relationship in order to ensure they got accurate numbers -- they broadly lied to the American public about the certainty of the science in order to achieve political goals. The media, who should have kept the CDC accountable in such a situation, instead could not resist to tell a story about a disagreement between the Trump administration and the CDC/Fauci (both sides did this).
It does not matter where it originated. What matters is the media didn't do their job and the American public was intentionally misinformed by the federal government in a time of crisis, and the people who called out the government and called out the media were ostracized for it. American institutions broadly failed to meet their responsibilities to the public.
The fact the most ancestral strains of active Covid-19 virus we know of are from outside Guandong, some hundreds of kilometers away from Wuhan, is pretty strong evidence the epidemic didn't originate from the WIV though?
Assuming the chance of a lab leak is non-zero, it is worth considering how this will ever end.
- If there was any hard evidence actually proving they had SARS-CoV-2 in the lab before the pandemic, it will be long gone. Only an independent full access forensic level investigation would ever find any sign that evidence was destroyed, and that is never going to happen.
- It seems extremely unlikely to me that anyone from within China will A) blow the whistle or B) that we would hear about it.
- If a whistleblower were to escape the country, China would be able to claim they are lying, and it is a plot by the West to oppress the Chinese people etc. The chance that the whistleblower would be carrying irrefutable evidence of a lab leak is again almost zero.
We can keep shaking the tree, but I don't think anything truly satisfying is going to fall out. Consider that even if the USA for example had actual evidence of a lab leak, they would be better off using this as leverage over China secretly than releasing it publicly.
What actually can and should happen, is that some major change comes to virology research to absolutely minimise the chance of another lab origin pandemic. Wherever SARS-CoV-2 came from, we have had lab leaks before and we will have them again, that much is certain.
Not to mention fixing all of the other failures that allowed COVID to kill millions worldwide. Everyone's pointing fingers but hardly anybody's talking about improving epidemiology and public health policy (which the US is long overdue for a reckoning on).
One of those failures, by the way, was the seeming assumption that whatever state a global health emergency started in would act in something resembling good faith. Regardless of how COVID came to be, China wasted precious time deflecting when it should have been diligently helping to sound the alarm and properly investigate.
And how many other countries might have prevaricated in the same fashion, if the pandemic had started within their borders? This is not a failure concerning China specifically. Indeed, there will come a point where blaming China for COVID, however cathartic that might be, will be counterproductive to preventing future catastrophes.
My takeaway was the huge denial most of the rest of the world put itself into.
When it was still only Wuhan, everyone assumed it would go down like sars again, it's just "a Chinese thing" and could never happen in the developed world. We feasted on the images of overcrowded hospitals, people collapsing in waiting rooms, and felt good about or country.
Then when it became clear that China messed up containing the spread and it would not only hit other cities in China but the rest of the world too, we did.... Nothing. Like a toddler we tried solving the problem by ignoring it. Forgotten were the images of chaos and death from Wuhan, politicians would assure us "that it's under control and go away soon". Just how can you suddenly pull such a 180 as soon as it arrives at your country? Then the first cases popped up and "we did contact tracing and stopped the chain". Great, but hoe does it prevent new cases from entering the country?
I came from beijing back to germany on Feb 26, 2020. Getting out of the plane there was... nothing. No temperature checks, no masks, no form to fill in, no "hey please stay at home for two weeks". It went from sitting in a plane for 8 hours with a mask to just randomly boarding a train across germany with nobody giving a shit. It was unreal.
But then, when it eventually got real bad in the West, we pulled yet another 180 and stopped ignoring covid and started going "well China should have prevented it", when we got a head start of about a month where we could perfectly see what this virus does, yet didn't take any measures on our side whatsoever and just let it happen. I know, it's always easier to blame someone else across the planet, but I'm most surprised and disappointed by my own government. I'm wondering how things would have gone if this had originated in Germany.
Exactly the same. Things would be the same. There are just as many shitty liars (by proportion at least) in Germany as there are in China. Covering your mistakes is a natural human behavior, if not the nicest thing to do.
I agree with you. I am not sure what driving around the WHO delegation in wuhan 1 year after the facts was ever going to achieve.
At the end of the day the only people who most likely know whether it was a lab leak or not are the chinese authorities. So we will likely know in 50 or 60 years if those archives are made public (like for the Katyn massacre). The CIA/NSA can possibly get its hand on incriminating communications, but who is going to trust those guys?
Also I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the chinese authorities got all covid lab samples destroyed without being analysed. The best way to not leak that you may be responsible is to ensure no one, even yourself, can ever know whether you were responsible.
Evidence could come from communications. Such a large scale coverup would have required quite a lot of exchanges. Even with China being somewhat opaque and inaccessible to foreign intelligence, there could be digital trails.
You can't assume a coverup proves a crime, though. Is it bad? Yes. Do agents of totalitarian governments cover things up routinely because they assume something bad was done or they don't want to be blamed for it, even if no wrongdoing was behind it? Yes.
(i.e. politically punished by the west for covering up facts is fine but scientifically concluding this proves a leak is not.)
>even if the USA for example had actual evidence of a lab leak, they would be better off using this as leverage over China secretly than releasing it publicly.
They did have samples of a 98% similar virus collected from the miners working in the bat cave who had died years earlier. The virus had a different name like ratg or something.
It’s covered in the article and it’s called RaTG13 and no one can get a straight answer on where it was acquired or when. However independent researchers found it is identical to a virus previously known as RaBtCoV/4991 that made several miners ill in 2012.
It’s 96.2% similar not 98%. The issue is that coronaviruses in nature don’t mutate fast enough for that to be the missing link, and they have tested something like 80,000 animals since the outbreak without finding anything closer. One possibility is that the gap was closed through gain-of-function or serial passage research.
It’s a claim that I’ve seen often referenced by people like Brett Weinstein and reporters who have been covering this story. I’m not sure where I first heard it, but here’s a quick reference published on a recent PLOS blog: [0]
> Clues to the transition from bat virus RaTG13 to human virus SARS-CoV-2 may lie within the 4% of the genome sequences that diverge. Evolutionary biologists estimate it would have taken at least 50 years for the bat virus to have mutated itself into SARS-CoV-2, considering known, natural mutation rates of viral genomes.
It goes on to say, that it’s possible this virus is just different.
This paper states 20-50 years an an estimate. [1]
> Bats belong to the usual suspects for zoonosis, and indeed, a bat virus that shared 96% sequence identity with SARS-CoV-2 was isolated in Yunnan /China in 2013. However, a 4% sequence difference (>1000 bp) would indicate 20 to 50 years of separation from SARS-CoV-2, making this bat isolate an unlikely direct source for the nascent epidemic. Chinese researchers explored tissue and faecal samples from 227 bats representing 20 species living in China, collected between May and October 2019 and analysed them by metagenome sequencing. This investigation found that the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 in this sample set shared 93.3% sequence identity over the entire genome, less than the bat coronavirus isolated in 2013 from the same province, Yunnan (Zhou et al., 2020).
I’m not a virologist, just trying to keep up with this story. It seems like a consensus that 3.8% is a large chasm to cross in that time frame, but there could be things we don’t know or possibly viruses that are closer to SARS-CoV2 that we haven’t sequenced yet. I think the most important thing to note is that there hasn’t been enough evidence to rule out a gain-of-function lab leak hypothesis given what we know today about viruses and there wasn’t a year ago either.
I believe the furin cleavage site has been quoted to be an exceptionally rare mutation. It is extremely unlikely for this particular mutation to exist without being accompanied by other less-rare mutations in a natural-spread scenario. For this particular mutation, a gap of greater than 3.8% would be expected. It may (I'm not an expert) may be unlikely for a 3.8% drift, but is less likely for only a 3.8% drift given the rarity of the ACE2 spike.
Holding people from China accountable might be a tree we can’t bark at, but we can sure as hell hold everyone even marginally accountable in the US side if it’s clear they covered up their involvement in the unleashing of this plague.
> Wade devoted a full section to the “furin cleavage site,” a distinctive segment of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it to efficiently enter human cells.
> Within the scientific community, one thing leapt off the page. Wade quoted one of the world’s most famous microbiologists, Dr. David Baltimore, saying that he believed the furin cleavage site “was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus.” Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate and pioneer in molecular biology, was about as far from Steve Bannon and the conspiracy theorists as it was possible to get. His judgment, that the furin cleavage site raised the prospect of gene manipulation, had to be taken seriously.
Furin cleavage sites have evolved and are present in multiple coronaviruses:
- HCoV-OC43 (infects humans)
- HCoV-HKU1 (infects humans)
- MHV-A59
- ChRCoV-HKU24
- BtCoV-ENT
- BtNeCoV-PML-PHE1
- BtCoV-HKU4
- BtCoV-HKU5
- MERS-CoV
- BtHpCoV-Zhejiang2013
- SARS-CoV-2
Phylogenetic analysis suggests that it has evolved independently at least 6 times that we know of.
After that article was published a team in Thailand found furin cleavage sites in sarbecoviruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 called RacCS203 (91.5% similarity to SARS-CoV-2) and RmYN02 (93.3% similarity to SARS-CoV-2)
There are so many "shocking" articles, but here's something I don't get:
The closest genetic match is only 3.8% similar. When it only has 29,903 base pairs, that's 1,136 mutations. I'm no bioscientist but my friends who are tell me that's a lot of changes, and that experiments might change a few base pairs or proteins at a time. A lab leak theory doesn't explain how gain of function study resulted in so many mutations, unless they were blasting these viruses with radiation, and what would be the point of that? Radiation mutations would cause too many changes to do useful science.
Everyone keeps looking at bats but the closest bat coronavorus is 20 years of evolution away. SARS and MERS came from palm covets and dromedary camels respectively, so what's the deal?
Every time I read about this I keep thinking "huh that's sketchy but circumstantial" and I've yet to find an answer to how the lab would've gotten to this point, undiscovered, with no published papers or research or notes or preprints anywhere
but my friends who are tell me that's a lot of changes, and that experiments might change a few base pairs or proteins at a time. A lab leak theory doesn't explain how gain of function study resulted in so many mutations, unless they were blasting these viruses with radiation
Or explicitly creating chimeric coronaviruses, which has been the state of the are for some time. Here's https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26552008/ one of the sources of smoke on this, a 2015 paper co-authored by the Bat Woman (2nd to last author), the key sentence from the abstract:
Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.
Have you read the fine article? It cites more than a few papers.
I've read a few articles, skimmed a few papers and sent them to friends. The counterargument is that there still aren't enough similarities.
The mutations on covid 19 are Really Different compared to the known and studied viruses. If it was a lab leak of an engineered chimera, you'd be able to see that A proteins came from virus X and B proteins came from virus Y and Z, but that hasn't been shown to be the case. From what I understand there are a bunch of smaller mutations across a lot of proteins resulting in something that doesn't really line up with known and studied genomes.
RaTG13 is decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2, all over its genome.
You don't get there by splicing an ACE2 spike onto an RaTG13 backbone and passing it through a dozen mice. That gives you something that still looks similar to RaTG13 and infects mice.
The ACE2 spike also looks most similar to a previously unknown ACE2-binding spike protein found in malaysian pangolins.
So WIV would have had to have discovered that pangolin spike-protein, kept it secret, spliced it into an RaTG13 backbone, then not used mice but passed it through a species like that had a human-like ACE2 for a decade and millions of animals.
An alternative hypothesis is that Charles Darwin did that experiment.
Of course that says little about SARS-CoV-2 relative to all the other viruses we don't know about, either sitting in a Chinese government lab, or in a bat cave somewhere.
I guess I don't find the argument "we can't figure out how to reconstruct SARS-COV-2 from known viruses" very convincing on either side.
That's fair. I wouldn't say that it's "we can't figure it out" but rather that "doing so takes a lot of mutations and thus resources that may be difficult to do under the table"
Sitting in a cave somewhere implies not being studied, right? Which is more the "natural mutation" thing.
Sitting in some government lab is a different story and depends on belief in scientific institutions to do science and publish peer reviewed papers and all that jazz.
Another question is how you can make a virus evolve in the direction you want. 20 years of bat evolution would not necessarily bring a furin cleavage site, so how do you make sure it does?
The spike protein is the biggest difference between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2. To produce SARS-CoV-2 from it that would imply that WIV had unpublished sequences from the Pangolin-CoV spike protein that they used to combine with an RaTG13 backbone. You then do not get SARS-CoV-2 out of passing that through mice, you get a mouse virus. You'd need to pass it serially through something with a human-like ACE2 like minks. Then you need to do that enough to accumulate a thousand mutations which takes decades in nature and would take millions of animals.
That likely did happen, but Charles Darwin was the geneticist that executed the gain of function experiment via serial passage through that many animals.
> Have you read the fine article? It cites more than a few papers.
Yes, i read it. The ability to construct bibliographic references is also a fairly widely-held and unimpressive skill.
> To produce SARS-CoV-2 from it that would imply that WIV had unpublished sequences from the Pangolin-CoV spike protein
According to the article, the database of sequences for the WIV samples had been deleted before the pandemic became widespread, so there was no way to verify this, but also somewhat suspicious.
>you then do not get SARS-CoV-2 out of passing that through mice, you get a mouse virus. You'd need to pass it serially through something with a human-like ACE2 like minks.
From the article:
>Using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs, then studied their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. As the NSC officials worked backward from the date of publication to establish a timeline for the study, it became clear that the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic even started.
So, it's likely they had mice with humanized lung and ACE2 receptors, no?
What's the deal with you continuously referring to Zhengli-Li Shi as "Bat Woman" or "Bat Lady"? Is there some reason you can't or don't want to call her by her name?
Because everyone knows whom I'm referring to when I use that title she earned through a lot of hard work, while I've seen multiple Romanized versions of her name.
Humans are 98.8% similar to chimpanzees genetically. That 1.2% is critical. Now viruses have shorter lifecycles, blah blah blah, but 3.8% is a huge gap to overcome.
Also, "circumstantial" doesn't mean weak. It means "pertaining to circumstance". For example, the fact that the virus's origins are in the same area as the lab would be circumstantial evidence that it was created in that lab.
Many circumstances can point to a conclusion. Even the phrase "the smoking gun" which has been bandied about in the discussion of this article, is an example of circumstantial evidence. Circumstantial evidence is opposed by direct evidence, which would be eyewitnesses, video/photos of the thing taking place, etc. And eyewitness is actually one of the weakest forms of evidence because memory is faulty. So circumstantial evidence is usually the evidence that convicts a criminal.
To illustrate that, I like to point to my two favorite circumstantial convictions, Hans Reiser and Scott Peterson.
They convicted Scott Peterson based on buying porn, a dye job, and selling cars.
The convicted Hans Reiser of first degree murder of his wife, Nina, despite not even having any direct evidence that she was in fact dead. They only found the body after Reiser himself led them to Nina's body in exchange for pleading guilty to second-degree murder.
A cleaned car, a missing seat, and some books on murder investigations were the evidence they used. Entirely circumstantial. And they deduced that Nina was murdered from those same circumstances.
There's around one mutation each time it transmits between hosts (for flu it is one each time it goes cell to cell). 1,136 doesn't seem that high, say it hops 100 bats a year, that's just a divergence of 11 years of bat hopping (the more mutations that add up maybe the rate doesn't hold due to conserved regions though?). 5X less hops a year, 55 years: still a blink.
Keep in mind there is an estimated 1.5 million viruses that have not been identified yet. There might very well be a virus in nature which is the 'missing link'.
It's not. From the article, it's 96.2% identical. 3.8% different.
"But they also reported that it was 96.2% identical to a coronavirus sequence in their possession called RaTG13, which was previously detected in “Yunnan province.” They concluded that RaTG13 was the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2.
In the following months, as researchers around the world hunted for any known bat virus that might be a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2, Shi Zhengli offered shifting and sometimes contradictory accounts of where RaTG13 had come from and when it was fully sequenced. Searching a publicly available library of genetic sequences, several teams, including a group of DRASTIC researchers, soon realized that RaTG13 appeared identical to RaBtCoV/4991—the virus from the cave where the miners fell ill in 2012 with what looked like COVID-19.
In July, as questions mounted, Shi Zhengli told Science magazine that her lab had renamed the sample for clarity. But to skeptics, the renaming exercise looked like an effort to hide the sample’s connection to the Mojiang mine."
It's not in Nicolas Wade's article, which I now see has been unfairly maligned along with David Baltimore who's been selectively quoted to leave out the technical detail of what made the latter say the SARS-CoV-2 is a smoking gun, see the 4) A Question of Codons:
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th... If correct, that's getting strongly into bioengineering evidence.
You are of course more likely correct about the alignment issue, I can't find my source now, and the above is probably much stronger evidence. For the alignment you'd have to be a virologist, probably one specializing in coronaviruses, to be able to really judge this. Of course a whole bunch of biologists have shifted their focus to coronaviruses in the last year and a half.
So you don't have any idea what you're talking about and don't have any ability to weigh if what you're looking at is human bioengineering or natural bionengineering, but you're going to strongly assert that its evidence of human tampering.
The author is contradicting himself: said that virus engineering is done by splicing of existing other coronavirii, and then also said that the two codons CGG is very unusual for coronavirii.
Splicing is also naturally done everywhere and all the time, just by natural genetic events, so if there was splicing to create the two CGG codons, it can be natural.
So still nothing to point out to bioengineering in my opinion.
In one of these recent articles (the Wade piece?) they explain it's not the presence of a furin cleavage site, it's this particular furin cleavage site pattern including its flanking regions. There's discussion about the existence of furin cleavage sites in other coronaviruses, but also explanation for why it's unusual in SARS-CoV-2.
The “smoking gun” was the “human” (arginine as CGG) way the AA seq was coded for at the furin cleavage site: Only 5 percent of SARS2’s arginine codons are CGG, and the double codon CGG-CGG has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus.
> has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus.
That does not mean it doesn't exist, just that we haven't found it.
We didn't know of any other sarbecoviruses that had furin cleavage sites, then we found them in bats in Thailand, then the goalposts moved to how this paricular furin cleavage site is weird.
Once a decade passes and we find animals with beta-coronviruses which have the same kinds of furin cleavage sites, I'm sure the goalposts will move again.
Granting that, or even granting that the virus wasn't modified in the WIV (merely collected and then accidentally released) at all: we need to find the animal population that it supposedly jumped into people from -- and 18 months later we haven't.
>There are several curious features about this insert but the oddest is that of the two side-by-side CGG codons. Only 5 percent of SARS2’s arginine codons are CGG, and the double codon CGG-CGG has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus. https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
This is a good article. There's been so much junk over the past couple of weeks or so that it's been very frustrating. I've mostly been watching the debate unfold on Twitter, and it's confirmed for me that Twitter is a terrible place for real intellectually-curious discussion (probably social media in general).
I've been wondering certain things, especially why Marc Lipsitch (one of the most consistently trustworthy voices throughout the pandemic) signed that Science letter, knowing that it would add weight to the "it's a lab leak" propaganda, and stood by the assertion that lab leak is plausible[1].
I hope we do get the true answers to these questions, though think it's not especially likely.
I'll say a couple other things. For an audience of honestly intellectually curious people, the Trumpian right-wingers did enormous damage to their theory, even if it was correct, by being racist and scientifically willfully stupid. Similarly, the Chinese authorities, even if they were correct did enormous damage to their theory by being authoritarian and stifling real communication. But it is very easy to see why both sides acted as they did: these mythical honest intellectually curious people are a tiny fraction of the entire audience, and have relatively little power, so they were quite incentivized to act as they did. And, maybe a little too early to say for sure, but it probably worked.
The same media that was reporting on the lab leak being a conspiracy theory were the ones reporting that Trump and Trump supporters sided with the theory due to racism. There was no proof that racism was the reason, only that they referred to Covid19 as China Flu or Wuhan Flu. Both of which represent the origin and not a race.
The idea of a lab leak could either mean that legitimate research was happening on this virus and it got accidentally leaked, or that the virus was being prepared as a bio-weapon and was intentionally or unintentionally released. The reason I think those scientists disavowed the lab leak theory initially was to avoid confusion between whether COVID-19 was an intentional bio-attack by China as many believed then and was pushed by Trump.
Oh, so the idea that it was an intentional bio-attack is what's "racist".
Why? Xi and the top leadership of the CCP/PLA are not a race, they're an oligarchy, maybe monarchy.
They receive many benefits from a pandemic, such as cover to crack down on rebellion in Hong Kong, a counter to Western propaganda for open societies, an excuse for economic recession.
I've read that the PLA believes that plagues such as SARS and Swine Flu are actually US bioweapons. That would make COVID19 merely symmetrical retaliation. The PLA also believes the USA is fomenting dissent and rebellion in China's territory to divide her. This is casus belli.
The US oligarchy cynically cornered Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor and ultimately nuked two Japanese cities while Japan tried to surrender. The USA also firebombed Dresden, a refugee city. Are these facts racist?
If you insist that the idea of China making an unrestricted biowarfare attack is so unprovoked and irrational that the mere thought is motivated purely by racial bigotry, then guess what? If it turns out the PLA really is guilty, you have condemned China as the wholly evil side. Shall we declare a second Pearl Harbor and demand unconditional surrender?
I certainly won't enlist for that war. I suspect China would happily leave the USA alone if the USA returned the favor. The Pacific is wide and deep.
> For an audience of honestly intellectually curious people, the Trumpian right-wingers did enormous damage to their theory, even if it was correct, by being racist and scientifically willfully stupid. Similarly, the Chinese authorities, even if they were correct did enormous damage to their theory by being authoritarian and stifling real communication.
Eh? And no mention of American urban blue check marks who are being racist, scientifically willfully stupid and who are stifling real communication?
The amount of wildly delusional oppression complex in this thread is staggering, HN has really gone downhill.
On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence.
There were tons of articles and threads on it everywhere including HN, no one was being silenced, give me a break. The oppression complex is really out of control, as if people were being visited by the secret police and forced to immediately cease all discussion about the lab leak theory. It just had no credibility due to lack of evidence. As more info comes to light it's being given more credence, simple as that.
Really seems many want to feel like they've been oppressed and silenced when that couldn't be further from reality, reaching absurd levels of delusion here.
Citation needed. Please direct me to any user or accounts banned or suspended for discussing the lab leak theory. You're the one rewriting history here.
Zero references of any users suspended or banned in your linked source.
Posts were removed for 'Asserting Covid-19 Was Man-Made' which is very different from discussing the possibility and calling for further investigation.
> Facebook in February began the ban on claims the virus was man-made or manufactured as part of a list of misleading health claims that aren’t allowed.
During that period with the widespread dangerous misinformation spreading all over socials (questioning mask usage, recommending false treatments etc) it's easy to see how this was caught by that web.
Still waiting for a citation of your claims of 'censorship on their platform on anything related to the lab leak theory for more than a year.' or users being suspended for discussing it, not asserting it, which are very different.
> There were tons of articles and threads on [the lab leak theory] everywhere including HN
Until relatively recently lab leak discussion was censored from Twitter and Facebook. I didn't see much of it in the period Feb 2020 - May 2021.
> On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture
There was no brilliant evidence for any source of the coronavirus. Regardless of that, the idea of a lab leak was quickly ruled out and that was unjustified.
I think the problem for the media was that a controversial American president publicly endorsed the lab leak theory, as it supported his broader agenda, and that made people in the media prefer to disbelieve it, even to wrongly suggest that it was not credible. In short: bias.
I came across this article on Twitter about the lab leak hypothesis back in September 2020. The scientist in the article also was actively tweeting about the theory, she was definitely not being censored.
The rational thing was to agree the lab leak was a perfectly decent theory from the beginning.
Saying you have ‘no evidence’ of something is not a reason to discard a hypothesis. On the contrary, it is a reason to figure out how to get more data, a reason to figure out how to falsify the hypothesis.
It’s a common logical fallacy to conflate absence of evidence with evidence of absence.
When there is no evidence, the discussion is purely in the sphere of priors. And that doesn't make it very fruitful to discuss, as different people will likely have different priors. I think I agree that the likelihood of lab-leak was downweighted previously probably too strongly, but in the same time, I still don't see too much evidence in favor of it now.
The point I was trying to make is that the idea of it naturally occurring was mainstream. If you tried to guess it might have come from the lab, it'd be just dismissed completely. However, both of these claims had no evidence, so why was just one claim labeled as a conspiracy theory and dismissed entirely by the mainstream media?
Do you disagree? Do you think it might have been political?
Historically, and happy to be proven wrong here, we've never seen a lab-leak of a novel virus cause a widespread outbreak. We have seen zoonotic transmission cause an epidemic/pandemic. So at least for me, I was working off of, "Is it likely that we're seeing something for the first time? Or is it likely this happened the way it's happened before?"
Depends on your definition of widespread. There have been level-4 leaks multiple times in the past. England had an outbreak from a level 4 lab in the past 20 years:
What were the arguments that support the hypothesis of it being a natural occurrence? That there was a seafood market nearby? Ok. There was also a lab nearby that did experiments with corona-viruses. Which theory is more likely? I don't know, do you? My question is: why is one theory more likely than another? Why was the lab leak theory completely rejected and people who played with it were called nuts?
The argument that supported natural occurrence was to point to past global pandemics as having been of natural origin. Laboratory research of viruses is a relatively new thing, while pandemics have been happening for a very long time throughout the history of civilization. So in the case where no other evidence is readily available, I'm going to go with natural origin just because that's been the most likely origin historically for pandemics.
No, the a argument in favour of the natural origin of SARS-COV-2 is that it's a novel virus. There are a lot more unknown viruses outside in nature than there are people working on making new ones.
Also, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is not exactly "nearby" the seafood market. It's 25 km away, well across the city and on its outskirts.
> On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants.
Virtually none of the evidence being discussed here, aside from 3 workers at the lab getting sick in November, is new. Its all the same info that has been available for well over a year. And much of it not coming from "misinfo merchants".
> Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence.
This cuts both ways. There have been many who haven't been saying that the lab-leak is definitively the source of the virus, but simply saying that its a credible possibility with at least as much evidence as any other theory, and should therefore be investigated. Throughout the last year, it was pretty consistently called a conspiracy theory or "debunked", when clearly it was neither. Declaring something to be misinformation when it is not, isn't any more skeptical that declaring something to be the truth with no evidence.
You can try and poo-poo all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the mainstream narrative, both on social media and in the mainstream media, has been wildly off about this for over a year, and virtually nothing has changed from an evidence perspective to warrant their about face. The general narrative was simply wrong, due to a combination of hubris, partisanship, and lack of skepticism.
Regardless of which hypothesis turns out to be true, there are fouls in either direction. Certainly overblown claims of both silencing and misinformation peddling.
The "human story," conflicts of interests and such, gets most of the attention... unfortunately. Some of those interests were/are personal. The most onerous interests seem to be narrative. One narrative or the other suits a grander political narrative, for a variety of reasons. That kind of stuff sucks us in, unfortunately.
There can be a fine line between skepticism and orthodoxy though. Skepticism defaults to ambiguity. I'm sure that ambiguity is the majority position, but "I don't know" isn't a position that gets much journalistic and political attention.
Media, both new and traditional, gravitates towards hard positions... poop slinging and human conflict stories.
The media also insisted masks were useless for the general public. The media demonstrated a real inability to critically evaluate the statements authority figures feed to them over the past year.
You can attribute that to being unprofessional. Which is not great, but not terrible.
What is absolutely terrible is for the media and big tech to ACT like they are the absolute authority in any field they have interest in. We're heading towards "ministry of truth" levels of censorship.
> On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants.
As far as I can tell, it makes two logical errors, 1) that absence of evidence is reason to not take an idea seriously, in a space of known unknowns, & 2) that a possibility can be discredited because dishonest people are pushing it.
On the former point: "evidence = likely" does not necessarily imply "no evidence = unlikely" as you seem to believe (if by evidence you mean like courtroom evidence; we use probabilistic reasoning in the absence of such "evidence" for any one explanation.) we have gathered 0 evidence for many (probably most) true things.
Finally, there's a lack of understanding of how power works in the US. If you could get censored for saying something that the US government knew for months, then yes, you were being silenced, the absence of literal NKVD notwithstanding.
Not to mention, the "origin of COVID" fails my test of relevance.
If it came from a lab, does anything change? No, not really. It's still a virus that we need to protect against.
The only thing that would change any sort of response is if COVID was deliberately released. And that doesn't even change the medical side of the response, just the political side.
> HN has really gone downhill.
Yes, it has, but mentioning the reason for that will bring the brigade of the very same element that has made it go downhill.
It’s not surprising. The lab leak hypothesis was one of several obvious and logical hypotheses, but it’s the only one that we were consistently told was Dangerous and Disallowed Thought.
Even if it turns out to be a false hypothesis, it’s outrageous that it was treated the way it was for so long, with such vitriol, and with such unanimity before any real investigation had been done.
I’ve got no dog in this fight, but the way this hypothesis was treated gets my libertarian hackles up.
Don't be silly. Obviously the bans were not perfectly enforced and you could still find hushed conversations in the corners. This was true on all platforms. What, exactly, is your argument? Or your point? Are you really going to try to claim that the lab leak hypothesis was not widely censored in social media? "We have always been at war with Eastasia"...
> As more info comes to light it's being given more credence, simple as that.
The thing is, no new info supporting the lab-leak theory has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been. All the evidence still points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology not having had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic, and all the new evidence is consistent with the default prior - that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals, just like every other novel virus in history.
No new evidence for natural origin has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been, and you are making an isolated demand for rigor.
If you read the Nicholas Wade article, the PLOS blog, or even this article, you will know the evidence is not pointing in any one direction at the moment, but there is solid evidence of a cover-up and blame shifting by the Chinese government and the virology / national defense establishment.
> No new evidence for natural origin has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been, and you are making an isolated demand for rigor.
This is an absurd equivalence. Viruses spill over from nature all the time. There are millions of people coming into contact every day with animal populations that harbor myriad SARS-related coronaviruses. Every known novel virus that has entered the human population has done so through spillover. This is the default hypothesis, which must be overwhelmingly favored at the outset of any discussion. Everything we know so far is perfectly consistent with this default assumption, and there is precisely zero evidence of a lab leak.
> If you read the Nicholas Wade article
I've read it, and it is appalling that an article by someone who does not understand the subject they are writing about is getting so much circulation.
> there is solid evidence of a cover-up
There is no evidence at all of a cover-up of a lab leak. Everything we know so far points to the lab not even having had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic. It appears to be a completely novel virus, not closely related to anything else known before, which is precisely what you'd expect for a novel virus that spilled over from an unknown animal population. If there were a major outbreak of a virus that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had (such as WIV-1), that would be a different matter, but there isn't.
Right. And so too do viruses not uncommonly spill over from labs into the public. SARS1 escaped the lab four times. Pandemic flu is thought to have escaped once.
> it is appalling that an article by someone who does not understand the subject they are writing about
In that case, a point by point rebuttal should be written by people who do know what they are writing about. The ad hominem isn't really persuasive.
> There is no evidence at all of a cover-up of a lab leak.
I did not refer to a cover-up of a lab leak. I referred to a cover-up of something, which may be a lab leak. There is certainly no denying that there is a cover-up:
1. WIV removed their virus database from the web on Sept 19, 2019, and their staff/student bios from the web in late Jan 2020.
2. China has mandated that all papers concerning Covid-19 be approved by the government before publication since Feb 2020.
3. Access of investigators to the WIV has been blocked. Free staff interviews with foreign investogators have not been permitted.
4. Statements made by the Shi lab are mutually inconsistent in their details.
5. The US gain of function establishment has pre-emptively sought to associate any talk of lab leaks with social stigma and conspiracy theories.
All these are detailed in the Vanity Fair article which started this comment chain. Thanks for revealing that you didn't read it.
> Right. And so too do viruses not uncommonly spill over from labs into the public. SARS1 escaped the lab four times. Pandemic flu is thought to have escaped once.
No novel virus has ever spilled over from a lab. Every novel virus in history has been a zoonosis.
The only lab escapes were of existing, highly infectious viruses that were being intensively studied, cultured in large quantities, etc. Such escapes are rare, and there are very good systems in place to detect them. The Wuhan Institute of Virology regularly tests its workers for antibodies against various viruses (including coronaviruses), and the workers are negative for SARS-CoV-2. The pandemic flu you're talking about was likely the result of a large-scale vaccine study, not a lab leak.
There is no sign that anyone knew of SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak, much less that any lab was working with it. There is, on the contrary, good evidence that it was not known about. The WIV never published the genome of SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak, in contrast to other related coronaviruses (for example RaTG13 was published in 2016, and the WIV has never even isolated it - it exists purely as RNA fragments and data on a hard drive). The set of coronaviruses that the WIV works with are publicly known, and SARS-CoV-2 is not among those worked with pre-2020.
> The ad hominem isn't really persuasive.
If a person who clearly does not know anything about programming writes a long screed about programming, filled with basic errors that illustrate that the person does not understand basic programming concepts, it's not ad hominem to point out that the person doesn't know anything about programming. The question is why the media is hyping an article by someone who doesn't understand basic virology.
> WIV removed their virus database from the web on Sept 19, 2019
This part of the conspiracy theory requires the WIV to have known about a lab leak in September 2019. That really is stretching any sort of plausibility. This database was only online for a few months in the first place, and they say that they took it down because it was insecure. The alternative explanation that the conspiracy theorists are pushing - that the WIV knew about a lab leak months before anyone in China showed any sign whatsoever of reacting to the outbreak - is just not plausible.
> their staff/student bios from the web in late Jan 2020.
I don't know what bios you're talking about. However, there was a conspiracy theory about a postdoc who left the lab in 2015, whose picture was "missing" from the website. Based on this, internet conspiracy theorists jumped to the conclusion that she was patient zero, that she had been secretly cremated, and all sorts of other nonsense. The obvious explanation is that she left the lab years ago, and that for whatever reason, nobody has bothered to put her picture up on the website.
> Access of investigators to the WIV has been blocked. Free staff interviews with foreign investogators have not been permitted.
This is false. The WHO team was given full access to the lab, and interviewed many of the staff. They got detailed information about all the coronavirus research at the lab.
> The US gain of function establishment has pre-emptively sought to associate any talk of lab leaks with social stigma and conspiracy theories.
I don't know what the "gain of function establishment" is. Virologists generally view the lab leak as extremely unlikely and completely unsupported by evidence. Some virologists do what might be characterized as "gain-of-function" research. Does that make them the "gain of function establishment"? There isn't some big conspiracy to shut down truth-tellers. There are experts who are annoyed that an extremely unlikely theory that is unsupported by any evidence is being hyped by non-experts who don't know what they're talking about.
It’s crazy to me how many people on even this forum, a place purportedly of science, continue to dismiss a lab leak origin out of hand citing it as some sort of crackpot theory. The serious questions raised in this article have been around since last April but it’s only now it’s even allowed to talk about them on digital forums.
The way I remember it was that people conflated the lab leak theory with it being engineered in a lab. Those are very different things but easy to mix up in a headline.
It being engineered as a bioweapon is in the realm of a crackpot theory, but it being just a poorly contained natural research project was fairly reasonable. Some prominent people mixed the two up on purpose and eventually the whole thing - both ideas - got labeled a crackpot theory by people who just saw some headlines.
> The way I remember it was that people conflated the lab leak theory with it being engineered in a lab. Those are very different things but easy to mix up in a headline.
This is kind of how I remember things too I think, I feel like I'm being gaslit by the internet lately reading how certain some people are.
I've seen this so many times, yet 9 times out of ten, even in this thread, when people are claiming it originated in a lab, they also include claims that it was created in a lab.
To be fair it does not sound like many people doubt that they were conducting gain of function experiments at the Wuhan lab, which makes it not unlikely that a lab leak as successful as covid was one of those engineered strains. If it was a lab leak at all.
Certain right wing China hawks were pushing the bioweapon theory to stoke fears, and since the loudest and most outrageous talking points are what spreads on the internet, that became the default idea for a lot of people when they heard "lab origins".
Kevin Drum had a good summary of this a couple of weeks ago, much shorter. His take? There's no more evidence for the lab leak theory now than there was a year ago, BUT what has changed is that the cross-over theory implied that we would find certain evidence for the vectors, and that evidence has not shown up. KD's take was that it's not so much that the lab leak theory has become more likely, it's the that biological origin theory has become less likely.
We’ve been trying to find the zoonotic origin of Ebola for decades without any success. We don’t have anywhere near a complete catalog of animal diseases, and of those only a fraction have been sequenced.
I think the release that three scientists fell ill in November 2019, who were working on gain of function research at the Wuhan lab with Covid-like symptoms, may have made the lab leak theory more probable, at least in my opinion, since a year ago. Note that doesn't say they definitely had Covid or that anything conclusive about the theory was settled.
Haha. No. It’s because of politics and TDS. People were taught that this was a Trump theory. That’s all the media needs to say to ensure that nobody will take it seriously and nobody will tolerate anyone else who takes it seriously.
It's so bizarre to me to view him in this way. "Trump thinks something; therefore I must be against it".
I understand not taking his word for anything. But it's such an important issue. To just dismiss it and not try to investigate it, even at the highest levels of our government and public health bureaucracies, strikes me as negligent at best.
> To just dismiss it and not try to investigate it, even at the highest levels of our government and public health bureaucracies, strikes me as negligent at best.
No, it is not. Judge ideas on their own merits please.
These same people ridicule the Space Force, for example, despite it being a reorganization of US Space Command that had bipartisan approval years before Trump even ran for office.
Here I have a little bit of experience. When a person has shown themselves to be a pathological liar, you can't judge their ideas on their own merits because the cost of judging far outweighs the cost of producing garbage ideas. That is why attention is so valuable, there are plenty of people out there who do not make it their trade to espouse nonsense.
This is a good point in general but I don’t think it actually applies here. I don’t know why people keep acting like taking this seriously required believing a word of anything out of Trumps mouth. That isn’t how it went.
Some folks who never supported Trump had their own reasons to examine this. They talked about it, and everyone assumed they got the idea from Trump, and therefore not only did they deserve no attention, but they also deserve no respect, and outright career sabotage by folks like Peter Daszak and to a lesser extent, Anthony Fauci. Many had to work on this in secret because the hyper partisans wouldn’t listen to them, and instead tried to attack them just for talking about it. Take a look at Yuri Deigin and Alina Chan on twitter and go back in their timelines to see how long they have been digging into this.
My hope is not that anyone acknowledges that Trump was correct, although I would view it as a sign of integrity if they did. But whether he was or wasn’t, and whether he got lucky or actually knew something, I don’t care. The real issue comes not from Trump, but their own prejudice, which many are still trying to make excuses for, made them so blind to what, in hindsight, is actually extremely obvious as the most likely explanation. Then they took it further and let their blind hate for Trump also caused them to hate half of their fellow citizens, and they extended that hate to anyone who they even perceived as having thoughts tangentially related to something Trump said.
I could easily come up with probably 5 more examples of something very similar that happened in his orbit that people who only follow left leaning mainstream news have no idea about, or that were spun into complete anti-trump lies by the media and are still believed by people today.
The media are absolutely full of shit. All of them. Real journalism died, hyper partisan “woke” activists have been graduating and taking writing jobs, groupthink and cult-like behavior has amplified, and the executives loved the sky high ratings and revenue they got for being anti-trump. Cancel culture further reinforced this culty groupthink and forced moderate voices out. Hell, people actually try to say Glenn Greenwald went right-wing crazy. Glenn Greenwald! They don’t even realize that it wasn’t him who changed, it was them.
It’s pervasive in tech. People are actually pro-censorship now. And they have convinced themselves that they are the good guys. It’s hard to believe how far we have fallen from rationality in such a short time.
That doesn't mean it cannot be true. It does mean that after 3 years and several thousand fully documented outright lies, the presumption of truth was no longer being granted.
Except he was proven right yet again that social media and old media orgs will censor others and lie to the public when it fits their political agenda.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's against the HN guidelines because it destroys the intended purpose of the site—and for that reason, we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which politics/ideology they're battling for.
Crossing into personal attack is also egregious and not allowed here.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Your "politics" are antagonism and scapegoating of The Other. If you were actually conservative, you should be appalled and distancing yourself as much as possible from the MAGA cult.
Antagonism and scapegoating of The Other was, and is, currently the playbook of the democrats at the moment. They don’t have a monopoly on it, but they’re way more guilty of this. It just doesn’t seem like it, because you haven’t heard the other side of the story, and haven’t realized how much has been a total lie from the left. Everyone believes it all, uncritically, for the same reason they dismissed the lab leak.
Folks reflecting on this and saying, what else did we have completely wrong are asking the right question. Folks who think this was a one off, well, it absolutely wasn’t.
I doubt there is even a single “MAGA” person on HN, but you folks like to throw that epithet around to shut down dialog. It’s shameful.
And nobody needs to distance themselves from anyone. If you make a false association, that’s your fault, not theirs. Judge them on what they actually do and say, not on what you (incorrectly) assume they might think.
> Antagonism and scapegoating of The Other was, and is, currently the playbook of the democrats at the moment. They don’t have a monopoly on it, but they’re way more guilty of this. It just doesn’t seem like it, because you haven’t heard the other side of the story, and haven’t realized how much has been a total lie from the left.
I go out of my way to try to understand what conservative punditry has to say on a given subject.
You might be conflating the terminally online left with the much larger and more diverse Democrat party as a whole. Contrast with the GOP, whom with very few exceptions has fully signed on with Trumpism & embraced the sort of ignorant, economically illiterate and frankly insane beliefs that entails. Maybe it's survivorship bias, because anyone with a principled conservative bone in their body has already distanced themselves from the GOP over the last 4 years.
There are absolutely "MAGA" people on HN, in this case salivating over the opportunity to claim Trump was right about something, anything at all(as though it vindicates them or proves something in general, let alone in this case).
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's against the HN guidelines because it destroys the intended purpose of the site—and for that reason, we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which politics/ideology they're battling for. We already asked you not to do this once, and as far as I can tell you've done nothing but flamewar ever since. Not cool.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's against the HN guidelines because it destroys the intended purpose of the site—and for that reason, we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which politics/ideology they're battling for. We've asked you not to do this many times and you've ignored our requests. Not cool.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Right - instead of trying to debate the veracity of the argument, it was immediately cast as a political battle, and being on the same side as Trump in most urban and most media circles was asking to be ostracized. It’s absolutely poisonous.
How as anybody going to "debate the veracity of the argument"? What information was anybody going to use?
Even so, in the intervening period, even when Trump was still president, several US agency reports concluded that the virus likely did not originate from a lab, and one assumes that they had more information than anybody else.
Do you believe in anything else considered a "conspiracy theory" by the scientific or academic community? This is roughly the level of reasoning people use when arguing that 9/11 was an inside job.
Not really. I believe Armstrong walked on the moon, Oswald shot Kennedy and 911 was a bunch of mostly Saudis flying planes into buildings. I question the attribution of hacks to Russia that often happens, not because I trust Russia or anything but because I'm capable of pulling off some of those attacks myself and I can do so without leaving evidence of what nation I'm in. I assume a team of elite Russian hackers would be more capable than me and could do the same.
Why did you say “anything else”? This isn’t a conspiracy theory. They only detail that is even in question is whether or not one of their samples leaked. Nothing else about what that lab is, or what that lab does, is even in question. They go 1000 miles away to get bats and bat poop and bring it to the WIV to study bat coronaviruses and they modify them to be more transmissible. This is basic virology in 2021 and they have been proudly telling the world that they do this for years. None of that is speculation.
The question of whether one of their viruses leaked out again (yes, again!) that was a bat coronavirus found right by the bat coronavirus lab, or whether it was a remarkable cascade of coincidences that still has no viable complete hypothesis (the “modified” virus doesn’t infect bats anymore), is not one of “conspiracy”.
> Except he was proven right yet again that social media and old media orgs will censor others and lie to the public when it fits their political agenda.
And this differs from "new media" how? You don't like what certain social media and "old media orgs" did? Fine, no problem. There's no media on the planet that doesn't do this to some extent, least of all contemporary conservative US media outlets.
Whether you consider what was done to Trump and others regarding their posts/speeches about COVID and cures for it as censorship depends a lot on how you see the world. Your mileage may vary (because mine certainly does).
I keep seeing this and it just doesn’t make sense. What is more likely, a global conspiracy theory amongst all the tech giants who normally try to outcompete each other into the ground as quickly and with as much humiliation as possible and the Federal government, which they try to evade and subvert at every opportunity?
Or the idea that when COVID first hit it was the conspiracy theorists screaming the loudest about the lab leak origin and given the sudden interest of the US in xenophobia and specifically the anti-Chinese sentiment(hint: it’s not that sudden), it would have potentially resulted in violence against Asian people. And at the same time the crossover theory was pretty much as likely if not more based on what we knew then. Now that more info has been gathered everyone is doing an about-face on covering this issue since it’s become a serious conversation and not a crackpot fringe theory shared with the intent to spread hate.
Maybe what had happened was that initially we knew little and everyone was a bit panicked. Then the crackpots started spreading FUD via the most convenient COVID origin theory to their message. The old media mostly ignored this, dismissing it swiftly without giving it more airtime. Social media was too busy with conspiracy theorist and right wing activists spreading the lab leak theory so they viewed it as false (if 99% of the time what a person says is a lie, why would this particular thing be true?). Then articles like these revived that theory with new information. Most people took in the information as just “hey new data” and left it at that. A few people who were spreading the conspiracy theory version of this story felt vindicated while simultaneously upset because their low quality memes were not really allowed while new the WSJ, the NYT, and Vanity Faire is getting front page treatment because of course excellent writing is more compelling than some guy on YouTube angrily vaping in his mother’s basement.
Nothing was revived with any new information. The Venn diagram that includes the circle of people who were following and investigating this, and the circle of conspiracy theorist Trump supporters, did not ever overlap.
One of these circles was about some bill gates funded bioweapon to implant 5G or some nonsense which they suspected was being done in WIV.
The other was scientists who have known about the work at WIV for years, not based on suspicion, but based on the papers they kept releasing, media interviews, sequencing the genome, and doing science.
But you all TDS’d so hard that you wrote the latter off as the former, and the media went along with it.
It isn’t even a conspiracy theory. It had nothing to do with collusion by tech giants. Their hyper partisan employees just fell into the same TDS trap and decided “lab = conspiracy misinformation, no ifs ands or buts” and started purging people talking about it.
The Vanity Fair article is actually quite poorly researched and written, and misattributes much of the source and timeline, but at least people are snapping out of their partisan blindness on this issue now.
No. It was not a Trump theory. It was commonly believed among Chinese political dissidents. Any Chinese people who don't believe the CCP have speculated this long before Trump even had any thought on this. Please stop relating everything to Trump.
I mean, fair enough right? Figuring out if it started in a lab has zero effect on the mortality rate while Trump making up new lies every day for months about how it's just about to just go away anyway led people to their deaths, plenty of whom probably weren't his followers.
Here's what I remember from that time period. My recollection is that the wet market hypothesis fell out of favor rather quickly, but nothing else really emerged in its place. The lab leak theory was circulating, but amongst people such as rank-and-file scientists, the attitude was: We aren't going to get a straight answer about this, but we've got to defeat this virus.
I don't remember dismissing the lab leak theory per se, but rather, taking it in as one of a massive spew of crackpot theories all coming from more or less one source. I'm reminded of the children's story, "The boy who cried wolf."
Looking back in hindsight, I wonder how we could have picked out the lab leak theory as being worthy of consideration, given the context. And whether a more scientifically minded public and government would have faced that dilemma.
Could be. I confess that I don't follow social media, but I participate in a handful of web forums that probably count as lightweight social media. On those forums, there are taboo topics, and my impression is that those are topics where any hope of civil discussion has long since evaporated. So, I wouldn't have high hopes for progress towards investigating this issue via a social medium if its curators have already concluded that the topic should be banned.
FYI for the past year or so you could get a lifetime ban from YouTube (and Facebook and Twitter?) for discussing the lab-leak hypothesis. It was an outrageous overreaction.
The article literally cites a statement put out by a respected medical journal on Feb. 29, 2020, and signed by 27 scientists, "roundly rejecting the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism."
Whatever your recollection of "rank-and-file scientists" attitudes is, the narrative on record is to the contrary.
Rank-and-file scientists tend to stay out of that kind of political statement-making IME, just as when you see a statement from the student union of XZY university condemning whatever that tells you very little about what rank-and-file students of that university are thinking. So I don't see a contradiction here.
> Looking back in hindsight, I wonder how we could have picked out the lab leak theory as being worthy of consideration, given the context. And whether a more scientifically minded public and government would have faced that dilemma.
By actually considering the idea based on the information available, rather than judging solely on the messenger. Things we've known for most of the past year now:
* The wet-market was likely not the origin of the outbreak. Earliest identified positive cases predate the market outbreak and have no connection with it.
* The lab in question was very near to the wet market where the largest outbreak occurred.
* The lab in question specifically researched coronaviruses in bats.
* The closest match to the SARS-COV-2 virus we've found in bats in nature are bats that live over a 1000 kilometers away from Wuhan. However, these bats are among those being researched at the virology lab there.
* The lab in question was the subject of concern among international inspectors years before the outbreak, who stated that they believed the lab didn't meet necessary safety and containment protocols, and didn't have the staff to do so.
* US intelligence agencies have been signalling that the Chinese government has been covering up the origins of the lab.
* The CCP themselves have demonstrated that they are actively working against the discovery of the origins of the disease. Soon after the wet-market outbreak, they closed the wet-market, prevented any international scientists and experts from examining it, and over their objections, purged all animals there and sanitized the entire place, making it impossible to determine what might have led to an outbreak at the market. They also cracked down internally on whistleblowers who said the situation in Wuhan early in the pandemic was much worse than being broadcasted. Finally, they have simultaneously insisted on the natural origin of the virus, while also pushing theories that it originated from non-Chinese sources, such as China, South Asian pangolin black market traders, and the US Army.
* The CCP prevented WHO investigators from actually entering the country to look for origins of the virus for nearly a year, didn't give them full access when they arrived, and the resulting report was declared largely useless by the international community immediately upon its release.
* All people claiming that the lab-leak theory had been "debunked" were actually referring to the theory that it was genetically engineered, which is not the same thing at all.
None of this proves a lab leak, but its strong enough circumstantial evidence that it is at least as plausible as any other origin. Virtually the only new information to have come out is that some of the workers in the lab got sick with Covid-like symptoms in November.
If you swapped China with the US and this lab with the CDC, people would have taken it far more seriously. Imagine a worldwide pandemic started down the street from the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, AND no one could find the origin of the virus but the closest match was in an animal native to Northern Ohio, AND that animal also happened to be at the CDC for studying the type of virus in question, AND whistleblowers had mentioned concerns about procedures there previously, AND the US government did everything in their power to prevent people from investigating. People would have zeroed in on the theory from day 1.
There was always plenty of reason to see it as worthy of consideration, and for those who weren't judging solely based on "Does Trump think this is true or not", they did. The biggest reason it wasn't was solely due to the fact that our media/social media can't function outside the scope of our current political/cultural wars. Information is being judged less and less on its own merits, and more and more on who is providing it.
I too am disappointed at how politicized this is. That includes the Vanity Fair article, which was mostly about press coverage, funding, memos, and circumstantial evidence.
Here's some good science sources:
- Comprehensive reddit post [0] from a virologist (table of contents, also linked as a 34 page pdf), referencing over 150 sources, with several sections going into the details of the genetic evidence, also interesting to read the comments.
- Here's an article [1] talking about different origin theories and the related genetic evidence, having a section I was interested in about the cleavage site and o-linked glycan, something apparently that has to develop in an animal with an immune system (this is something I haven't seen any lab-made proponents speak to yet).
- Lastly, here is an article [2], much more scientific than the Vanify Fair article, in favor of a lab connection (unfortunately, for me, this article doesn't mention the o-linked glycan, nor the genetic evidence that covid-19 may have originated hundreds of miles from Wuhan [3])
That's as far as I've gotten so far following the science. I'm hoping there will be more virologist commentary as more data comes out, perhaps something based on the full WHO report/data that I heard was released last week. I'd like to think that science will give us more definite answers eventually. It could take years.
I'm not so much interested in conjecture from politicians and journalists. I'm really taken back by all the inaccuracies, half-truth's, innuendo, and conspiracy theories floating around. Are we all led so easily by the headlines they feed us?
I am going through all the documents you referenced but let me tell you about the reason why I believe that you can’t trust the scientists directly involved in the research: the Reddit posting PhD uses this statement to tell why the lab couldn’t have just leaked a sample they collected (so not engineered just being absolutely sloppy):
“The WIV, and Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi’s lab group, are extremely well-respected in the virology community. As well respected as many US scientists.”
In fact this person does jackshit to methodologically prove that this lab was not run sloppily, just throws pedigree and “trust us we know she’s legit” crap. Let me tell you the majority of scientists anywhere should not be trusted in their ability maintain sterile techniques or keeping their lab secure. You can look at the vials that floated out of Galveston utmb in a flood, or the cdc shipping precontaminated Covid test kits because their techs didn’t use filter tips.
This is not just this PhD, it’s basically 97% of all scientists. Any statement that undermines the image that they don’t know what they are doing is taken personally with great prejudice.
The Reddit resource is great to suggest that no one deliberately engineered or even grew this virus. But it does nothing to disprove that they just leaked a sample they excavated in a cave and brought to the lab. And by combining both and collectively arguing against any malice or stupidity from these researchers they are not doing anyone a favor in trusting them. Also a real scientist would never categorically disregard a hypothesis without incontrovertible proof, which this and every other kiss-ass scientist does defending this wuhan cabal.
I agree, that's why I pay the most attention to the genetic evidence. Other sections of his post, and the references he pulled together, go into great detail on that.
Whether or not I agree with everything you wrote and sourced here, let me offer some enthusiastic praise for such a comprehensive and well-informed writeup. We should all aspire to be able to post something as substantive as this.
That’s because “lab leak” origin isn’t consistently defined. Is it that it was engineered? Was it just being studied? Were the first cases just workers at the lab workers who were doing collections?
I’ve always said, focusing on the origins of “who was responsible” rather than dealing with containment first is counterproductive.
If anything good can come of this, I hope some of the folks who trusted the science begins to realize that people are behind science and people often act in their own best interest. Not that it will change much but we can at least stop yelling down and shaming skeptics.
You trust Science, not The Science, not the Scientists. You trust the Scientific Method, and nothing else.
It took mankind a lot of centuries to get free from the shackle of the gods, let us not replace the pantheon with our science man.
Treat Science like a religion, you even used the word faith. It may often be more accurate, but at the end of the day, it's just another way of explaining things.
And if you ever think of science as perfect, just look at the history of science. There was a time where most scientists knew for a 'fact' that certain races were objectively inferior to others. Science is always being refined, new things are being discovered, and the people doing it change. Invariably, there is some scientific knowledge that will be discredited and changed in the future.
You don't "trust" often or very much. You look for a society where conflicting ideas are encouraged and are based in reason not whacky extremist ideology. You trust good disagreements and debates, you look for argument and parties which try to convince with facts and solid arguments.
We can't just live in a world where my side is right and your side is evil.
The strength of the US system of government and any democracy comes from diversity of thought and opinion which is good enough and respectful enough to actually be interested in arriving at the truth.
Instead we have political process which is somewhere between a reality show, a sporting event, and a religion.
Social media is in a very confuzed middle ground between publisher and public square. I don't want them to be the arbiters of truth nor do I want them to be megaphones for misinformation nor powerful tools for easy population manipulation... but here we are. The solutions aren't just in content moderation, but whatever it is, it is difficult.
"Megaphone" is a bad analogy. You hear a megaphone whether you want to or not, and it interferes with other discussion.
Social media was blocking posts that people wanted to read and even blocked private messages. That's privatized censorship; there's no other word for it.
I am honestly dumbfounded that people are excusing it.
You can’t trust anybody, not structurally anyway. Western civilization has spent literally hundreds of years developing various ideas, such as free speech and democracy, to deal with that fact of life.
it's the reality of living in large, complex societies, where our intuitive trust-building relational proclivities get short-circuited by power structures. that doesn't mean we never trust organizations, but trust should be commensurate with our relational distance. that's actually the foundational principle of the federalist separation of powers (in the US).
also, terms like "anti-vaccers" don't help. just stop trying to bucket others as being stupid or outrageous. there are small but real, legitimate risks to every vaccine. that some folks can be overly self-assured and blow out those dangers for their own self-importance has no bearing on that fact. employ your rational brain to keep your emotional brain in check so you can see risks as they are, not as others want to use against you.
The article claims "the Lancet statement rejected the lab-leak hypothesis", which is a bit misleading considering what the Lancet statement actually did was reject a human origin of the virus, based on genome sampling and other evidence.
The two are not equal, the virus could be of natural origin but leaked from a lab, that scenario is still very much possible even in the context of the Lancet statement.
Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist, then is cited as saying there is no evidence in the statement, when actually there are around 12 relevant citations in there. I guess a dozen is just not enough data for a data scientist?
The actual context of that statement also gets quite a bit embezzled with an off-hand remark about "xenophobia and climate denialism": Since the first case in the US, there had been a concentrated and very nasty effort to politicize the virus.
It was US senators and US new pundits who at first floated the claim of it being a bio weapon [0], that's what triggered said Lancet statement in the very first place. It didn't just come out of nowhere for no reason, as some people like to claim, to imply the statement itself is already evidence for a cover-up.
>the virus could be of natural origin but leaked from a lab, that scenario is still very much possible even in the context of the Lancet statement.
That's absolutely true, but one of the main corollary claims is also that SARS-CoV-2 may have resulted in part from gain of function research. People making that claim have said that the virus seems to be particularly effective against humans despite no intermediate forms discovered yet and that a natural virus leaking from a lab would be less likely to spread so widely. They've also cited the fact that the lab does do gain of function research on coronaviruses.
If it were true, that definitely wouldn't imply it's a bio-weapon (such research happens everywhere all the time, etc.), but it would be important to know.
We weren't talking about gain functions 1.5 years ago. That term has just recently appeared in the media. And now that phrase is the new "scape-phrase".
"Gain function" now means there's now a great way to confuse man-made and natural. I find it both a more concise scientific term, but anathema to politics.
> People making that claim have said that the virus seems to be particularly effective against humans despite no intermediate forms discovered yet
But such forms were already discovered back in 2015 as a result of the research that's now labeled as "GoF research", even tho it didn't actually fall under the GoF moratorium back then [0].
Imho the whole thing has a very "shooting the messenger" vibe to it; The evidence we had for this being a very real possibility of happening is now turned into the alleged cause of it actually happening.
>But such forms were already discovered back in 2015 as a result of the research that's now labeled as "GoF research", even tho it didn't actually fall under the GoF moratorium back then [0].
I think I'm having difficulty understanding what you mean. Your link is referring to an engineered SARS hybrid virus. If SARS-CoV-2 is indeed also an engineered virus or a descendant of one, then this 2015 virus wouldn't be an intermediate form; just another example of the same sort of thing.
>Imho the whole thing has a very "shooting the messenger" vibe to it; The evidence we had for this being a very real possibility of happening is now turned into the alleged cause of it actually happening.
Do you mean "gain of function-like research is what warned us this could happen"? If so, if SARS-CoV-2 is a result of that sort of research, wouldn't gain of function research be both the messenger and the source, here?
Isn't that the whole crux of the debate and dilemma in the first place? That such research can help us discover, study, and mitigate risks, and can also potentially create new risks.
> Isn't that the whole crux of the debate and dilemma in the first place?
It's not like researchers are "engineering a virus to do exactly what they want it to do", what they do is observe the evolution of cultures of viruses, in an environment that's conductive to it, to see where that ultimately leads.
All of that also constantly happens in nature, but in a controlled lab environment we can accelerate and observe this process, like in a simulation, to see what viruses might be capable of evolving to be dangerous to us in the long term.
Sure, an argument can be made how that's one way of how we could end up creating and releasing such a virus ourselves, but even then: Wouldn't it be preferable for that to happen in a controlled research environment, instead of it just emerging in some remote obscure place? At least then are in a way better position to understand why and how it happens, giving us an edge in fighting it.
>It's not like researchers are "engineering a virus to do exactly what they want it to do", what they do is observe the evolution of cultures of viruses, in an environment that's conductive to it, to see where that ultimately leads.
No, I think some researchers are trying to do that. From the article you linked:
>In an article published in Nature Medicine1 on 9 November, scientists investigated a virus called SHC014, which is found in horseshoe bats in China. The researchers created a chimaeric virus, made up of a surface protein of SHC014 and the backbone of a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and to mimic human disease. The chimaera infected human airway cells — proving that the surface protein of SHC014 has the necessary structure to bind to a key receptor on the cells and to infect them.
This isn't merely observing viruses in a lab environment. It's combining parts of different viruses to create a new, more effective virus. This is gain of function research, and there's an allegation that SARS-CoV-2 may have been created in a similar way.
>Sure, an argument can be made how that's one way of how we could end up creating and releasing such a virus ourselves, but even then: Wouldn't it be preferable for that to happen in a controlled research environment, instead of it just emerging in some remote obscure place? At least then are in a way better position to understand why and how it happens, giving us an edge in fighting it.
Let's hypothetically assume SARS-CoV-2 was created through either this lab-monitoring method and/or gain of function methods. (Not saying it was or even that it's likely; just for the sake of argument.)
One thing that's baffling to me is that I've not seen any discussion from scientists who actually know what they are talking about. All we get are articles who talk about the political side, and try to prove things by how certain actors behaved.
Most of the actual science that all the articles cite are pop-sci simplifications at best. People talk about how parts from multiple viruses would be joined together etc, how base pairs are 97% identical, etc. These are all very high level summaries that don't really allow for detailed conclusions.
Now I'm not a subject matter expert myself, but from what I've learned about evolutionary genetics is that some scenarios would be pretty obvious when looking at the genome. For example, you could look at where in the genome the mutations occur.
I'd love to read an article that goes in depth on the actual scientific arguments, rather than just rehashes of rehashes like this.
Human stories about conflicts of interest, ideological takes focused on confluency with grander theories, politically factionalization and such make the better story. Hard positions make better stories than skeptical ambiguity.
That can't be helped. Most people are going to read the compelling story, so that will be what major publications print. We do need some sort of journalism that doesn't do this. Someone needs to research and investigate this without populist considerations playing a role. Not instead of what we have, in addition to.
That's exactly the kind of unsubstantiated statements I see all the time (both from proponents of the lab leak theory and from opponents). I'd love to read the actual reasoning why virologists think that it's nonsense. I'm a bit sad that hacker is so full of political and over-simplified arguments for this topic, and the actual science is missing.
From my point of view, the lab-leak hypothesis is presented in a political way and not a scientific way, so it's hard to challenge scientifically.
This is my genuine scientific take, having worked in a genome lab:
If the virus was artificially engineered, then you might expect to see points of artificial cleavage in the genome (which I assume you don't, because that would have been identified by now and would be presented as strong scientific evidence for lab origin).
If the virus were stored and allowed to mutate naturally but in a lab, then it might look very much like any naturally-occurring virus, but in lab conditions it seems likely (probabilistically 'almost certain') to evolve in the direction of reduced infectiousness. So, this also seems unlikely.
Deliberately engineering a human-infectious virus to appear natural is theoretically possible, but it seems to me that it would have to be deliberate - and is far beyond our current public understanding of science. So, I'd expect the cost to be astronomical. One lab or one group of scientists privately working on this doesn't seem to be enough.
The fact that this coronavirus transfers so easily to and between other species (and mink in particular) suggests that it has cross-species potential, and therefore cross-species origin. It suggests that this virus doesn't have any particular connection to humans.
Like any scientist, I'm prepared to accept that it's not impossible. Indeed, I have laid out three routes in this comment. But, the arguments for a lab-leak it are not scientifically convincing, to me, and it seems vanishingly unlikely. I haven't seen any hint of evidence that would make me sit up and pay attention.
> From my point of view, the lab-leak hypothesis is presented in a political way and not a scientific way, so it's hard to challenge scientifically.
I think my problem is that I'm looking for a detailed analysis of a possible scenario, but the more I read it seems the lab leak theory is not a single theory, but rather a large number of possible scenarios without supporting evidence for any of them.
So asking for a detailed scientific analysis is kind of hard, because you'd have to look at dozens of possible scenarios, and evaluate each of them separately.
The main reasons why virologists think the idea of a lab leak is nonsense:
* Nothing in the genome of SARS-CoV-2 is particularly surprising. All the elements of the virus (including the furin cleavage site) are commonly found in other coronaviruses.
* Every novel virus in history has been the result of spillover from animals. Just in the last 20 years alone, two novel coronaviruses have spilled over into humans: SARS and MERS. SARS-related coronaviruses are circulating in bat and other animal populations throughout China and Southeast Asia, and millions of people come into regular contact with these animal populations. These millions of people are not trained researchers wearing protective gear and undergoing regular testing for infection. Literally millions of people are constantly exposed at much higher levels than researchers.
* There is not a single shred of evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic. None. On the other hand, there's good evidence that they didn't have it. They publish the genomes of viruses they find (such as the now-famous RaTG13, which they published in 2016), and SARS-CoV-2 is not among them.
* The Wuhan Institute of Virology has only ever isolated three SARS-related coronaviruses, and it has published extensively on them. All three of them are only distantly related to SARS-CoV-2. All the gain-of-function conspiracy theories require SARS-CoV-2 to have been secretly isolated in a lab, which is a very difficult and time-consuming task, without anyone being informed, without anything being published, and without any of the many people who would know about this (very likely including foreign scientists) spilling the beans.
* The Wuhan Institute of Virology, just like all other well-run high-security labs, regularly tests its workers for signs of infection. If lab workers had been infected, they would be seropositive. The lab-leak conspiracy theory requires the lab to be lying about its testing results.
If the lab even did secretly have SARS-CoV-2, they must have acquired that sample somewhere. Which means it was out in the wild spreading and ready to spillover. Even buying into the conspiracy theory a bit the lab leak still doesn't seem like the most probable outcome. It's strange that everyone pushing the lab leak ignores this.
Anybody who has ever worked in a wet lab, or a lab of any sort, knows that accidents happen. All the time. Things catch fire, things are dropped, labeling issues happen, anything you can think of.
I worked for many years in a lab, the accidental leak hypothesis was and still is what I consider the most probable. Calculate the joint probability of everything we know about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 happening and it should be obvious that the "lab leak" should be _thoroughly_ investigated before dismissing it.
With SARS-Cov1 and MERS they were able to identify the cross-over host and find transitional stages that are somewhat adapted to human hosts but more successful in other host animals. It is not too late to find that of course, but it is becoming conspicuous in its absence. Also, the lab in Wuhan was basically trying to create SARS-Cov-2 and that isn't speculation its what their grant proposal says they were doing.
It also differs from every betacoronavirus backbone that had been used for genetic modification (and there’s no clear reason somebody would want to come up with a new one), which is basically the same problem but in reverse.
We’ve never, despite years and years of trying, been able to identify an origin for Ebola. The basic reality is we don’t know anywhere near all the diseases that animals have.
I’d guess several small teams have received single digit million dollar grants to look for the origin of Ebola. Maybe one or two got double digit millions.
China put sanctions on Australia that will and have cost their economy billions for implying that the lab leak hypothesis is plausible. Reasonable or not the Chinese government believes suppressing this theory to be a major policy goal. So I expect they’ve either spent orders of magnitude more effort than we ever spent on looking for Ebola’s origins, or they have some reason to believe they wouldn’t find anything.
This isn’t a smoking gun, but it is a dog that didn’t bark.
by guess, do you mean estimate, or just a real guess? Is there somewhere I can read more about the teams that have looked for the ebola origin and how they're funded?
p(Epidemic started in Wuhan) * p(origin in market right next to lab) * p(lab is one of 3 in the world to conduct gain-of-function research on conronaviruses) * p(lab scientists were notably sick prior to outbreak) * p(no accident ever happening in a lab) * p(et cetera) = very small number.
That's not evidence per se, but it does show you how probable a human error is.
I can’t help but feel you’re taking all the “for” factors and none of the “against”, then bending the “for” factors even further.
Calling the market “right next to the lab” is a bit of a stretch - it’s a three and a half hour walk.
The scientists getting sick early doesn’t actually seem to be confirmed - there’s still debate in the US intelligence community whether it’s true. And going to the hospital because you’re sick means something a bit different in China where primary care is rare.
And as for “against”... no mention of the virus not matching any backbones in use for genetic experimentation, or the suboptimal binding to humans, both of which would suggest against engineering.
Let me make this clear: I don't know for certain what happened. But after updating my priors, I believe it's highly probable that the outbreak came from human error.
Also, I never once mentioned engineering. There's a lab 280m away from the market that has one of the largest bat virus samples in the world.
I would have no problem revising my priors, but for the moment I still consider the lab leak human error hypothesis still the most reasonable explanation.
Every published backbone used for genetic experimentation was at some point unpublished. The WIV had the biggest program in the world to sample novel SARS-like coronaviruses from nature, plus the ability to engineer them in the lab. In the words of David Relman:
> This argument [that SARS-CoV-2 must be natural since it doesn't use a known backbone] fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory.
Note also that the WIV's public database of viral genomes went offline in Sept 2019, and hasn't come back.
As to the binding, Andersen looked at the binding of SARS-CoV-2's RBD to human ACE2 in silico, and found that it was suboptimal. But that proves only that the RBD wasn't designed in silico using his software workflow. Among unnatural origins, it's far more likely that the RBD either evolved naturally (as Relman proposed above) in a different virus, or evolved quasi-naturally in the lab during culture in human cells or in humanized mice. Andersen's argument doesn't address these more likely possibilities.
> no mention of the virus not matching any backbones in use for genetic experimentation, or the suboptimal binding to humans
Are you going to cite sources? And then are you going to cite the other sources which have addressed both of these weak counter arguments? Some of us have done a lot of homework on this one, so you need to bring your A game.
There is a vast amount of unpublished research, not because of malicious intentions, but because it's either still ongoing, or abandoned, or postponed, or waiting for other results, or for review, or qualified specialists to help, whatever.
The VF article specifically mentions that the closest known virus was 96% similar (vs 90% for SARS-CoV-1), and had actually been renamed by the scientists studying it and that fact hadn't been put forward to the community.
It can still be shown that this has a completely natural (i.e. no human error involved) origin, but the burden of proof gets higher every day. It's much more probable that human error is involved, which is something that happens every day.
Another pretty good article, certainly higher quality than you'd consider given the source[0].
What switch flipped to make all these come out right now?
There were a bunch of things in the past month or so that flipped the pandemic narratives in general, I'm thinking that made people start to question the rest. Here's some others:
* Texas and Florida eliminated not just lockdowns but also all mask usage and the predicted spike in cases didn't happen.
* Fauci was caught lying to Congress about funding gain-of-function research.
* And probably the most direct trigger for this topic, Buzzfeed got and released Fauci's emails through a FoIA request just a couple days ago, which among other things revealed that he was warned about it possibly being a lab leak right at the beginning of the pandemic.
At the end of April Biden gave a prime-time address to the joint sessions of Congress announcing that the USA is "in competition with China” to “win the 21st century". Critiquing China became allowed and stimulated by that status quo press, instead of a partisan issue promoted by Trump who the media disliked.
Comments like this bring up so many questions in my mind -- do you prefer conservative news media? If so, are you struggling to find news media to consume?
Are you aware of the top cable news network, the newer smaller ones, the media holding companies that dominate local news affiliates and dictate conservative talking points through their hosts, the massively popular hard-right conservative influencers, Facebook, etc?
All one has to do is look at the top reaching posts on facebook each week - it's mostly right-wing pundits like Ben Shapiro or Dan Bongino. Occasionally Bernie Sanders or AOC breaks into the list, but usually overwhelmingly right-wing pundits.
It’s not that the media wanted to avoid helping Trump or hurting Biden, even going so far as to withhold reporting the truth of the pandemic’s origin. But rather that the media had a higher threshold of evidence for publishing accusations of malfeasance against another nationstate than Trump did, and hadn’t met that threshold till recently.
Trump was notoriously flippant, with low or no standard for truth, or even merely diplomatic tact. His MO is not truth-finding but rather saying anything distressing to his political adversaries. He is an archetypal Internet troll with the soapbox of the US presidency.
He spent four years doing that, essentially crying wolf over and over. By the time the pandemic hit, the media was universally resistant to serving as a megaphone to amplify his trolling.
Thus they held back on this story until they could piece together and verify enough of it to meet their higher threshold of evidence. That simply took until now to do.
Media and threshold of evidence? You need suspension of belief if you even want to consider it for a moment. The case of 5g causing corona being covered recently, without instant ban like lableak theory, is a case in point.
We have an actively status-quo favoring media, not an activist one. The former president was a pathological liar (thousands of documented clear lies during his office), and there were (and are) extremely good reasons to ignore more or less anything he said.
There are reasons to ignore what Trump says - not reasons to believe the opposite of what he says. In other words, if Trump says "Covid was made in a Chinese lab" that shouldn't convince anyone either way. I'm afraid it may have convinced our media though that "Covid was definitely not made in a Chinese lab" and that is basically the same mistake as believing everything Trump says.
To paraphrase one of my favorite comedies, Super Troopers:
“But Trump’s lies are cheeky and fun!
Yeah, and the establishment’s lies are cruel and tragic.”
Of course this is an overstatement; Trump’s lies were not pretty but the point is that obvious lies are significantly less damaging than well-hidden lies. It’s the skillful liars that one needs to be wary of.
> What switch flipped to make all these come out right now?
Vaccination rates are nearing immunity across the major US population centers. I can imagine "they" wanted to ensure orderly vaccinations and return to the normal economic activity before any possible disruption of the political order.
Far-fetched, I know. But if you had to have a theory, here is one.
Strange that this article tries to paint anyone right-wing who postulated this theory way before the mainstream finally accepted it as being racist or crazy, as if nobody had talked about this evidence back then. The journal articles published by the lab were public information, as was their prior lab leaks in 2019, poor safety practice anecdotes, etc.
Thousands of social media accounts got banned on all the major platforms during months of suppression all because this theory didn't fit Big Tech's political agenda. Will they get unbanned? Will anyone of them apologise? No, it's business as usual for our corporate overlords. If you're on the wrong side of their agenda then you'll be cancelled even with paper thin reasoning.
USA's medias are a bit late to discuss this theory seriously. I know that they usually don't read newspapers that are not written in English, but they perhaps should do because it's not the first time they arrive months later. For example the theory was discussed a lot in major French medias months ago after the CNRS, a major research institute, published about it : https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/articles/la-question-de-lorigine-d...
Independent of whether the virus was lab-leaked or natural in origin, the conduct of Peter Daszac was completely inappropriate, and he should face consequences.
Spearheading and cosigning the statement: "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.", when you have specific career and financial interest in that statement being true, is a conflict of interest, is not scientific, and should be addressed publicly. But then privately saying “you, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.” Daszak added, “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.” displays clear intent to manipulate public opinion. Unbelievable.
Your comment makes it seem like they somehow shifted their opinion from one side to the other. That's not what either articles are about.
The one you link is about "Wuhan-Lab Coronavirus Origin Theory Is Highly Unlikely", that the science is "dubious" but doesn't seem to make any strong claims either way (but I only skimmed the article).
The one in the submission is about how conversations and debates about the "Wuhan-Lab Coronavirus Origin Theory" was silenced because many thought it was so obvious.
While the articles are about the same subject, they touch on the subject in two very different ways and are in no way contradictory.
What you are doing here is trying to add more gasoline on some fire, but that's not super helpful.
More like they weren't actually doing science, not that science was wrong or turns out to be a bad concept. I should most sincerely hope that the love of proper science will not be reduced due to articles and comments like these. What kind of dark ages would that land us in if the general public started doubting that if you do an experiment that shows X, and you can repeat that and it still shows X, that X is likely true?
Account of the Informed Consent Action Network
@ICANdecide reportedly locked out by Twitter after they announced to publish more emails from Dr. Fauci obtained via FOIA request, citing #COVID19 misinformation policy.
For anyone who’s listened to Bret Weinstein’s podcast from early on in the pandemic, “gain of function research” will be a familiar term. Great to see this hypothesis getting traction in mainstream media. What’s still crazy to me is how quickly things were explained away and how strongly the directly related scientific community said the hypothesis was “fringe”.
Came here to see if anyone mention the fact that Bret had ALREADY identified this exact scenario on his podcast months ago! He even pointed out the Drazak conflict of interest.
But no one listened.
Its bewildering how blind people can be. I hope they start paying attentions and giving him credit because he is saying things today that no one in the mainstream is paying attention to... but I feel will have the exact same gravity of scandal later on.
A sideshow is what’s happening on Wikipedia. There’s a cabal of editors that shut off any mention of a lab leak, using mis-applied content guidelines designed to protect against quack medical advice. Talk pages are constantly purged, which is a sign that someone desperately doesn’t want a consensus to form. Anti-pile-on policies are used as a way to ignore criticism.
Are these Chinese government agents? Overzealous students studying in North America? Gain-of-function grad students protecting their turf?
There were a smaller number of suspicious accounts that overzealously pushed the lab leak, possibly agents of Taiwan, but these were banned swiftly.
With the anti leak thought-policing editors, normal editors are intimidated into silence. Despite all the talk of dealing with organized manipulation around the 2020 election, the foundation hasn’t bothered intervening. Normal amateur editors don’t have the resources to push back against zealous state-actors.
This issue could pose a devastating blow to Wikipedia.
To the Editor — Since the first reports of novel pneumonia (COVID-19) in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, there has been considerable discussion on the origin of the causative virus, SARS-CoV-2 (also referred to as HCoV-19). Infections with SARS-CoV-2 are now widespread, and as of 11 March 2020, 121,564 cases have been confirmed in more than 110 countries, with 4,373 deaths.
SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans; SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 can cause severe disease, whereas HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E are associated with mild symptoms. Here we review what can be deduced about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 from comparative analysis of genomic data. We offer a perspective on the notable features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which they could have arisen. Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
"In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it."
In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (or "Who will guard the guards?")
Assuming a lab leak, but not judging, it's surreal to think what it would be like to be someone involved with the initial handling of Covid-19.
I can't imagine being in those shoes while this unprecedented, global event unfolded with political and economic consequences on such an insane scale ...
1) If covid _did_ come out of lab - I'm emphatically not saying that I believe that it did - I have pretty high confidence in the ability of the any government to cover it up.
2) There is some class of people who will accept whatever 'evidence' of a lab leak as completely convincing for a variety of reasons (conspiracy minded thinking, anti-chinese sentiments, etc)
3) It seems impossible to strongly prove that the virus emerged naturally (we can't observe the case zero event again), _especially_ to the crowd mentioned in 2).
Given these 3 statements, it's really hard for me to see _any_ value in investigating this any further. It just seems like it'd just feed fuel to group 2), which is not something that I think would be particularly good for anyone in the long run.
Covering up the deaths of 10+ Million people that potentially occurred due to risky research because it might encourage conspiracy theorists and racists?
I’m trying to be civil, but that’s the most conformist thing I’ve ever heard.
Not investigating would provide fuel to group 2a, the people who will defend China at any cost and against all evidence, and their Western enablers who engage in performative anti-racism.
This is nothing new. The independent media wrote about this a year ago and mainstream media organized an anti-fake news campaign against it. Now the mainstream presents itself as the saint - BS! 1 year ago mainstream did not check the facts or at least compare natural versus lab origin. No - they steam rolled independent media for publishing "fake" news, got them kicked off of social media and destroyed their income stream. Now it's factual news and they present themselves as saints, without apologizing for their wrong doing. I do not trust these mainstream media outlets anymore. I spend my money on independent news.
I'm normally one to be quick to criticize the media for its many faults, but in this case I blame the scientists--namely those at the Lancet--more than the media. Journalists aren't virologists or biologists, and I have a hard time blaming them for taking the statements of scientists at the most respected medical journal at face value.
This is massively discrediting to the Lancet. Similar to the review of Linux patches from U of Minnesota, it would be prudent to review past publications by the scientists who published the Lancet statement.
Wall Street Journal's article on US Intelligence having information on the three potential sick WIV researchers was written by a reporter named Michael R. Gordon[1].
This is the same Michael R. Gordon who in 2002 wrote the famous NYTimes article saying US Intelligence had credible information that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (Thousands of aluminium tubes) [2] and led to the Iraq War.
To be clear - this guy's article didn't lead to the Iraq war. He was writing about the information that the US intelligence offices were putting out, which at this point we know was dubious. That really has nothing to do with his credibility.
Saying it "has nothing to do with his credibility" sounds extremely naive.
It is totally within possibility that he is "writing about the information that the US intelligence offices were putting out" this time too, to make certain narrative that the US government wants.
It’s a widely accepted fact that Iraq had a chemical weapons program before the Persian Gulf War. Iraq and the UN cooperated to dismantle that program in the early 90’s. There was disagreement about whether that effort was exhaustive. The Bush administration’s claim to justify invasion was that there was an active ongoing chemical/biological/nuclear weapons program. Some old caches of chemical weapons materials discovered after the invasion doesn’t show that Iraq had an active chemical weapons program circa 2003.
Dislike of the messenger and conflicts of interest clouded and intimidated the search for truth. We need an objective press and a de-politicized science free, or fully disclosed of, conflicts of interest. Intimidation by the political wind of the day has substantial consequences.
I don't trust "prestigious" science magazines, since they publish substandard research on cannabis for political purpose. I am an expert in that topic. If they do this with cannabis, what else they publish with an agenda?
In early December of 2019 with absolutely no indication that a new virus was being spread, the Chinese figured out that they had a) a new virus and b) they were able to identify the virus.
In this case the Chinese knew, in early December, they had a problem when they only had a handful of cases. HOW????
COVID presents like the flu, so there isn't a novel symptom to help them identify that something new is in play.
There wasn't a significant rise in cases or deaths. There couldn't be a significant rise in deaths because there weren't that many cases. A small cluster of flu cases escalating into pneumonia, and then death won't raise a red flag because it happens all the time. I've had multiple Chief Medial Officers tell me this.
With COVID presenting like the flu, and with so few cases the ONLY way they could know that a new virus was spreading was if they had prior knowledge. The only way they could get prior knowledge was because someone working at the lab got sick, and then people they came in contact with got sick.
If this really happened organically then it should have been spreading pretty damn fast, and because it presents like the flu it wouldn't have raised any eyebrows until either the case rates spiked or the death rates spiked. In the U.S. flu cases per year range from a low of 9.3M to a high of 45M and deaths of 12,000 up to 61,000.
I suspect that China sees the same fluctuations in yearly flu cases so localized spikes wouldn't have raised any eyebrows it wouldn't have gotten anyone's attention until hospitals started to get overwhelmed. But in early December they didn't have that many cases.
> More recently, Shi and her colleagues at the WIV have performed high-profile experiments that made pathogens more infectious. Such research, known as “gain-of-function,” has generated heated controversy among virologists.
Yeah, I don't see this ending well. A lab leak seems... inevitable, no?
The most shocking thing about this is actually the comment thread on Hackernews and the level of conspiracy that exists here under guise of uncovering facts.
I've read lots of comments on how major media organizations are hiding information or not covering stories to push a narrative. That the US media landscape is like China State TV. That Fauci must have been involved at a conspiratorial level. It's legit bananas and deeply concerning.
I always assume HN commentters broadly havev a scientific mindset (anything is possible - though many are unlikely, fact based, empirical evidence, probabilities) as I equated programming/computer engineering similar to scientific thinking.
However I realize through experience that many people here like to think they have a scientific thought process and in fact don't and truly harbor intense conspiracies.
There is a chance that the commenters are actually not that representative of the broader population and this story brings out the biases of people who have a conspiratorial Fauci angle.
People have been discussing a possible lab leak for well over a year. For the most part commenters here on hackernews have been close-minded, arrogant, dismissive and probably wrong. disgusting.
I don't actually care much about the lab leak hypothesis. So I don't have a dog in that particular fight. I think contagion itself is a myth. See the work of Dr. Tom Cowan if you are interested. I just don't like the arrogant attitude I see on display here all the time, on so many topics. People wielding beliefs, opinions, and "scientific consensus" as if they were facts, and there is nothing left to discover about biology or wider sciences.
Guess what people, human understanding of the natural world is moved forward by those who DO NOT AGREE with scientific consensus of the day. The heretics are the interesting ones to follow, not the rest of you lot.
I'm quite frankly glad to see a bunch of you eating crow right now. You should.
The American government might much more cooperation in their lab-link investigation if they can guarantee the Chinese that there will be ZERO consequences (financial, legal, oversight, etc.) for them if its found to be true.
The very first paragraph starting with a hackneyed image of an "Asperger’s Syndrome" scientist who is good in "finding patterns" is quite a serious signal of bullshit. Let's read further...
You guys really think people would do that? Lie about a crisis to consolidate power? Those WMDs were real, they HAVE to be! People with power over me wouldn't lie because that's wrong!
Does anybody know if the current lab leak theories say if it was a natural virus that was released by accident, or was it something engineered in the course of research that was released by accident?
I think the real point that no public figure is willing to say, is that if this virus did leak out of a CCP lab after being modified the entire world will to some degree or another demand consequences for the CCP.
While doubtful the consequences would lead to nuclear war that’s not outside the scope of possible outcomes. What’s more likely is the vast consumer public rejecting the relationship with the CCP, leading to a quicker downward spiral of relations leading to risky military situations and a lot of rich people with a stake in China trade becoming slightly less rich.
I knew something was off from the very beginning once big tech started banning scientists with dissenting voices. The fact that Fauci and Zuckerberg were literally conspiring to induce greater panic in the masses is icing on the cake.
Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying's DarkHorse podcast have been very critical of Fauci's involvement but they would have been banned just 6 months ago.
What's interesting is that the way the Chinese govt responded and is responding is consistent with the fact that they believe it escaped one of their labs.
There is much to be said in not cooperating in an investigation against yourself, but active measures to prevent the investigation is a step further.
Ultimately the problem will be cracked, artificial selection and natural selection can be discerned given enough time and effort.
> Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the CDC, said he received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN he thought the virus likely escaped from a lab. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science,” he said.
Holyshit. We have created an atmosphere of censorship and suppression to the point where noble, well meaning people have been turned into monsters.
The emphasis is that reasonable, educated and rational, self-introspective and self-critical people like Scientists can issue death threats from their wokeness just shows how bad politics have gotten on both sides.
Obviously this article isn’t making a comprehensive argument for gain-of-function research, but it’s interesting how the arguments made in favour of it seem to have been demonstrated so poorly during this pandemic.
The argument that it’d help detect risk doesn’t seem very good, we know these researchers published work on similar viruses and it doesn’t seem to have caused anything to change and increase safety.
The argument that it could contribute to vaccine research doesn’t seem to have held up either, AFAIK there’s no link between such research and the Covid-19 vaccines we now have.
I’m sure there are other arguments for the research, and I’m sure it won’t stop regardless of what people want given how the article says Obama’s moratorium was treated and the obvious military applications. But it seems that the experience of Covid-19 does drastically alter the risk/benefit calculation of that research given it seems to have had no benefit in practice.
A good article although it spends too much time blaming Trump for other peoples failures.
How hilarious will it be if Trump was more accurate on this issue than Fauci?
This article is painfully political. The author takes far too much time demonizing Trump and anointing Biden to keep me interested in learning what she has to say.
Now that media has to tell the truth they have to get the negative Trump spin in to justify the vitriol of the last 5 years otherwise the narrative wouldn't make sense.
TLDR: Demaneuf soon discovered that there had been four incidents of SARS-related lab breaches since 2004, two occuring at a top laboratory in Beijing. Due to overcrowding there, a live SARS virus that had been improperly deactivated, had been moved to a refrigerator in a corridor. A graduate student then examined it in the electron microscope room and sparked an outbreak.
>> When Trump himself floated the lab-leak hypothesis last April, his divisiveness and lack of credibility made things more, not less, challenging for those seeking the truth.
Bullshit. It was the media which rejected this theory. How is this also Trump's fault for suggesting it? Are they also going to rewrite this part of the record?
What i feel is that as much as science has distinguished itself over the pandemic e.g. identifying the virus developing a vaccine etc, it has disgraced itself. First of the criminal and disgraceful actions of the WHO helping China cover up the virus in the initial stages. Then afterwards, despite obviously and understandably being totally ignorant of almost all basic data on how the virus spreads, works etc. (data that the Chinese withheld) they felt confident enough to offer clear guidelines. So much so, that when Trump closed the US to China, he was slammed as xenophobic. The scientific community have a lot to explain, but shockingly they don't seem to be hanging their heads in shame. Rather they are soldiering apparently oblivious to that fact.
4chan flocks to doom and gloom predictions, because that's the most "fun." When they always predict a global disaster, we shouldn't be surprised when they predicted something that actually was a global disaster. Broken clocks are right twice a day.
More like, '4chan predicted 10 of the last 1 disasters'. Still worth checking in, just in case this is the one that pans out. Definitely better than ridiculing all 10.
Nearly made the same comment myself. It feels vindicating to watch all this unfold. How many times now has 4chan been right about the virus, and the media wrong?
- 4chan saw the pandemic coming in January 2020, and predicted it would be big
- 4chan knew it wasn't 'just another flu' in March 2020, when the media was downplaying it
- 4chan figured out the virus is transmitted via areosol, not just particulate
- 4chan worked out that Vitamin D can help (even Fauci admitted he takes it)
- Wuhan Lab hypothesis
That's just off the top of my head. Sure, 4chan got a lot wrong: but better to get all the (possible) facts, and sift through them. That's science. What are you going to do otherwise? Trust Fauci?
Not to tout my own horn, but it really doesn't take a genius to put two and two together in these instances.
I never read 4chan or many opinions in genral, but I knew all of those points (minus the vitamin D) on my own.
The quote of 'knew a picosecond after he heard' resonated with me, because my intuition - as a laymen - was exactly the same. The moment I heard of the wuhan institute, I basically was pretty sure what had happened.
All that followed was disbelief and mild shock about my surroundings not coming to the same conclusions, or lets say suspicions and not hearing the sound of alarm bells.
I lost a lot of faith in the common sense of people through the pandemic.
I'm with you. What are the odds it naturally occurred literally right next to the lab studying coronaviruses? I'm not saying it didn't naturally occur, but that can't be the first suspect. This is like ignoring the husband in the investigation into his wife's murder.
4chan can be unsettlingly resourceful sometimes. Remember when they identified the location of a terrorist training camp from some photos and quite literally called in an air strike?
The media showed enormous deference to the Trump administration that insisted it was not going to be big, that is was just another flu, that it wasn't transmitted via aerosol, and that it would be gone soon.
4chan isn't know for enormous deference to anyone, so the fact that "they" (collectivizing 4chan always irriates me, but whatever) got things right given the head-in-sand public attitude (*) of the administration isn't really surprising.
(*) Trump of course privately told Woodward that it was really bad.
That report is completely deferential to the administration. It reports on their decision, cites administration officials exclusively, contains no counterpoints whatsoever.
Retrospectively, most analyses that I've read have said that travel bans had essentially no effect, something most epidemiologists at the time were saying too. Was that covered? No. The administration said that a ban on travel from China was a good idea (it likely wasn't a bad one), and that was the end of the story, more or less.
Months after that announcement, Trump was proclaiming that the virus was no worse than the flu.
March 24th, 2020:
"We lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu. We don't turn the country off," Trump said from the Rose Garden. "And actually, this year we're having a bad flu season. But we lose thousands of people a year to the flu. We never turn the country off. We lose much more than that to automobile accidents… I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter."
You chose the link, not me. There's nothing there that is not deferential.
Hoping to have the country roaring back by easter 2020 didn't and doesn't strike me as evidence of someone taking COVID19 seriously.
Was it incorrect that part of Trump's motivation for the travel ban was racism (his own, or institutional)? I don't think we can really answer that question definitively at the moment, and we may never be able to. But again, this is another example of "the boy who cried wolf" syndrome. Maybe this time, his nationalistic, xenophobic language was rooted in a sincere, scientifically rooted belief about how best to protect the country. But when you've used the same kind of language throughout your administration to belittle, insult and denigrate, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that people interpret the same sort of behavior as more of the same.
The US media is almost always deferential. They lob softball questions at politicans, allow them to lie to the cameras without challenge, give outsize credibility to administration statements, and so much more. I grew up in the UK in the 60s, 70s and 80s. No US politician would survive the media climate in the UK back then.
Probably you're thinking of media actually calling Trump out on his lies, and yes, when they eventually got around to that, that was a little different. But then, he was a different sort of president, so hardly surprising.
My sources of information on the pandemic did not include Trump. Who cares what he said? The world does not revolve around the public statements of a single man. Dude, just move on.
One thing I've noticed a lot in articles like this one is how they kind of "both sides" the issue. This article says "With disreputable wing nuts on one side of them and scornful experts on the other" - to make it seem like both the right wing cranks and the experts were wrong here. Right wing cranks way-overstepped by calling it a "bioweapon" without evidence and experts understepped by assuming it was natural without good evidence.
I looked up the person (Li-Meng Yan)[1], the paper[2], and the Fox News Interview[3] where Tucker Carlson "gleefully flogged" the bioweapon theory that this article references as being part of Steve Bannon's faction of right wing cranks.
In the paper Yan describes "an unrestricted bioweapon" like so -
Although it is not easy for the public to accept SARS-CoV-2 as a bioweapon due to its relatively low lethality, this virus indeed meets the criteria of a bioweapon as described by Dr. Ruifu Yang. Aside from his appointment in the AMMS, Dr. Yang is also a key member of China’s National and Military Bioterrorism Response Consultant Group and had participated in the investigation of the Iraqi bioweapon
program as a member of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1998. In 2005, Dr. Yang
specified the criteria for a pathogen to qualify as a bioweapon:
1. It is significantly virulent and can cause large scale casualty.
2. It is highly contagious and transmits easily, often through respiratory routesin the form of aerosols. The most dangerous scenario would be that it allows human-to-human transmission.
3. It is relatively resistant to environmental changes, can sustain transportation, and is capable of
supporting targeted release.
-------
I don't know that's the exact definition I'd give for "bioweapon" but it seems plausible, from a somewhat authoritative source, and fits covid. In other parts of the paper Yan addresses what she calls the "cover-up" of the lab origins of covid-19 and she points to elements of the cover-up that predate the outbreak and concludes "the unleashing of the virus must be a planned execution rather than accident."
On the Tucker Carlson interview the host listens to Yan's points and invites an expert on. The expert seems to basically ignore Yan's more exotic claims (i.e. that it was an intentional attack) and summarizes the situation at 3:39 as "We don't know" and gives two possible explanations as "Zoonotic transfer" or "Accidental lab release" and leans towards the latter. That seems exactly right to me.
I don't follow the "cover-up" part of Yan's argument (though I will read more about it) so I can't comment on her conclusion that it was an intentional attack. That's certainly not what other people I've read seem to think. The "bioweapon" definition seems a bit like an exaggeration or a technicality, if only because "bioweapon" conjures the idea of much more severe and lethal and viruses.
My point is that the right wing cranks actually come out looking pretty good on this topic - as far as I can tell. They immediately questioned the natural origins and advanced credible arguments for lab leak which are gaining support and evidence. I think it's wrong for this article and others to start out, and dedicate space in the opening of their argument, to try and balance things by saying, essentially, "Yes, maybe the experts were wrong here, but so were the crazy right-wing people." The people who are really and clearly wrong here are the mainstream media outlets who blindly trusted the authorities that told them this couldn't be a lab leak. Tucker Carlson talked to Yan, who may not really be a virus-expert (her degree seems to be in Ophthalmology) and may be over-zealous in her anti-China stance (e.g. concluding it was an intentional attack on what might not be very good evidence) but Tucker Carlson and his show explicitly call out the two main theories as what I believe they still are - i.e. zoonotic transfer and lab leak.
I assume the author, and others referenced in the article, don't want to admit the other "side" was correct. Nor do they want to admit their "side" was wrong.
Yeah, it is wrong to claim it was certainly a lab leak when there is little evidence. However, it is also wrong to claim it certainly wasn't a leak for that same reason. Let's just hope the truth is found, and we learn from it.
It's hard to do, but simply being able to say "I was wrong" or "I messed up" would make the world a better place. This is actually something I've been working on.
My take is that this is something where most mainstream media outlets need to be saying "We got it wrong." Either they asserted covid was definitely not a lab leak without evidence, or they ignored major media outlets doing that without comment. The problem here is that this article spends a lot of time and text talking about how right wing cranks were kind of responsible and kind of wrong too, when, in this case, the right wing cranks actually seem pretty accurate.
When I'm wrong, I try to have the grace and maturity to say "I got this wrong. I got this wrong for reasons X, Y, and Z. Here is what I can do to prevent or mitigate X, Y, and Z in the future." I think an answer of that form builds credibility. People who see my mea culpa may gain confidence that I've learned my lesson and will do better in the future. If, instead, I were to say "A lot of people got this wrong. These people I hate were wrong too - kind of, I think they were wrong, they are pretty dumb. Anyway - a lot of people were wrong on this..." then that probably wouldn't inspire much confidence that I had learned my lesson. I read this article as more like the latter rather than the former.
Vanity Fair.. publishes a ton of articles that pander to various audiences. I'm not sure how else to put it but their stuff pops up all the time on r/politics (somewhere I spend too much time TBH). That community is easily pandered to.. I like to just keep that in mind when reading articles like these from sources like these.
> My point is that the right wing cranks actually come out looking pretty good on this topic - as far as I can tell. I think it's wrong for this article and others to start out, and dedicate space in the opening of their argument, to try and balance things by saying, essentially, "Yes, maybe the experts were wrong here, but so were the crazy right-wing people."
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Worse is that said broken clock embraced thoroughly xenophobic language that almost certainly led to a rise in anti-asian violence. It unfortunately made it easier for the public to discount these arguments because it was impossible to tell whether they were being made in good faith, not to mention that these arguments were often made out of a (justified) distrust of the Chinese government rather than an objective understanding of the known facts.
Did the zoonotic origin story have a favored political party in the US? Who even introduced it?
I wish Trump had never commented on this stuff at all. I feel like what that did is take advantage of people's rage over Trump to sell them facts that they would have never otherwise bought.
Not everything is political, contrary to that foolish saying. I think politics ruins everything it touches, like Midas, except it turns everything to trash.
I'd like to point out that the lab-leak theory is still being dismissed by portions of the mainstream media. (I'm not taking a side here -- just pointing out that this hasn't been settled yet.)
Today the Los Angeles Times published an article headlined "The lab-leak origin claim for COVID-19 is in the news, but it's still fact-free."
What's missing from all this reexamination and soul-searching is a fundamental fact: There is no evidence — not a smidgen — for the claim that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory in China or anywhere else, or that the China lab ever had the virus in its inventory... No one disputes that a lab leak is possible. Viruses have escaped from laboratories in the past, on occasion leading to human infection. But "zoonotic" transfers — that is, from animals to humans — are a much more common and well-documented pathway. That's why the virological community believes that it's vastly more likely that COVID-19 spilled over from an animal host to humans...
"We cannot prove that SARS-CoV-2 [the COVID-19 virus] has a natural origin and we cannot prove that its emergence was not the result of a lab leak," the lead author of the Nature paper, Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, told me by email. "However, while both scenarios are possible, they are not equally likely," Andersen said. "Precedence, data, and other evidence strongly favor natural emergence as a highly likely scientific theory for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, while the lab leak remains a speculative incomplete hypothesis with no credible evidence." Co-author Robert F. Garry of Tulane Medical School told several colleagues during a recent webcast: "Our conclusion that it didn't leak from the lab is even stronger today than it was when we wrote the paper." As the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski sums up the contest between the lab-leak and zoonotic theories, "the likelihood of the two hypotheses is nowhere near close to equal."
And Wired also ran a piece last week with a similar skeptical headline. "The Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory Is a Tale of Weaponized Uncertainty." Its subheading? "Scientists almost never say they’re sure, and it could take years to pin down the pandemic's origins. Until then: People are trying to scare you."
What if that's because there's less to the theory than you think? Your own quotations, not to mention other comments in this very thread, show that there is still a non-trivial amount of doubt on this one. I seriously think a lot of people leaving comments along these lines WANT this hypothesis to be true because they think it proves they were "always right".
I know that most people won't; but if this article is some kind of major a revelation to you, I hope that you take some time to re-evaluate your information sources. You really should think more carefully about how you detect bullshit.
There were those who were sounding the alarm about this lab leak hypothesis well over a year ago. The overwhelming media narrative to look away from that hypothesis and smear those who talked about it was always artificially manufactured in a way that should have been obvious to most people.
But this kind of misinformation is really par for the course with the mainstream media. If you're only paying attention to ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, NYT, WaPo, etc. (and downstream from those sources) for your day-to-day news - you're in the worst manufactured media bubble in existence. Those big media companies are a locus of power that is manipulated to an incredible degree.
I'm not telling you to drink the koolaid and only watch Fox News while reading Breitbart. I'm definitely not telling you to waste your time on Alex Jones or someone like that. I'm saying to balance what you look at with other information sources with a variety of political slants. This WIV narrative is just one of many that the MSM has been pushing over the last few years. It scares me how gullible people have been on so many topics.
I'll push back here... if you actually want the data on this, it's not a clean MSM<>Fox and co split, via "analyzing over fifty-five thousand online media stories, five million tweets, and seventy-five thousand posts on public Facebook pages garnering millions of engagements."
There's this general situation where yes, there is that ecosystem 1 and downstream sources OP mentioned, and there is the ecosystem 2 (Fox and downstream sources).
However, former POTUS and ecosystem 1 cycled between themselves a fair bit, ecosystem 2 and former POTUS cycle, so by proxy eco1 and eco2 are cross-linking to each other in a sense, and so on.
I'm not telling you that there is no good way to parse info sources out there, but I am telling you the "MSM vs. other" delineation that OP is calling for awareness of doesn't really exist if you study the actual information flow... which this team did.
If you want my advice, read primary sources on events that matter to you. Studies, court documents, and so on. It's what that whole confusing ecosystem uses as well, and you can get the raw data without the analysis.
Yeah, that feeling of belonging to a team is all that matters to a lot of people.
I know several people whose happiness is based upon whether or not the Atlanta Falcons or Braves are having a good season. It's bizarre to me, but there it is.
Im still curious what you think this article really reveals. It makes a lot of unsupported claims. Fox News Is mainstream news. It literally is the most watched network, well beyond all those you listed as being “mainstream news”. Yet they serve the same biased, lack of balanced coverage as the sites you listed. In fact, the article even points out how White House advisors (on Fox, OAN) put out the WIV origin story over and over again using bad research and sources.
And again, I still don’t even know why this is more important than the task of dealing with the pandemic first. Pointing fingers directly led to a simpleton policy of blocking flights from China, which was the extent of public health measures for weeks. Cases were pouring in from italy without anyone doing quarantine follow up or contact tracing. It took months to get PPE and adequate testing in place.
Even today, as variants occur (hey, but nobody seems to care that those have origins too right?), there are literally Republicans fighting measures against public safety and calling into question the efficacy of vaccination.
Fox News Is mainstream news. It literally is the most watched network
If you view Fox News as one of many competing news outlets, sure, it's got a big voice. But I'd urge you to view it in terms of collective narrative. The left-leaning narrative bubble is far larger than Fox News by more than an order of magnitude. When CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, the AP, NYT, WaPo, ESPN, late-night comedy hosts, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are all driving the same narrative that it's conspiracy theory to consider the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a possible source of COVID... Fox News' mild protestations to the contrary are insignificant in terms of bandwidth into the American psyche.
I noticed you left out AM radio and a host of newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch. A bunch of those other sources bend over backwards to carry a both sides narrative to nobody’s benefit.
Facebooks top groups are all conservative. I realize that they end up getting a lot of attention for the spread of misinformation and getting moderated into oblivion for it, but Facebook is a huge hub of conservative influence as the past two elections cycles pretty much demonstrated.
This is why I don’t hold conversations online. I had other points that weren’t worth addressing apparently and this isn’t really going to lead anywhere so good luck to you.
I find that narrative on the Fox News news shows to be much more in line with what people generally consider "MSM" anyway. Wallace, Shep, and etc were constantly pushing back on a lot of the same BS that other outlets were.
Big difference between the Fox News and Fox News news.
1. Calling it "the china virus", as the former president was wont to do, was labelled racist/bigoted/nationalistic by those who did not simply agree with anything he said.
2. The claim that it originated in the Wuhan lab was viewed as unlikely, and there was (is) an alternative biological origin story which at the time seemed credible and more likely.
> Calling it "the china virus", as the former president was wont to do, was labelled racist/bigoted/nationalistic
While the racist violence that happened was deplorable, it is entirely amusing to me that we are fine with calling it UK/Brazil/South African/Indian variant but not call it the China virus/flu.
The same publications like Guardian which did not use the term China virus/flu because it was considered racist had no problem in using Brazil/Indian variant as the names of the variant. They are still doing it even after WHO came up with different non country based names for each variants.
> The claim that it originated in the Wuhan lab was viewed as unlikely, and there was (is) an alternative biological origin story which at the time seemed credible and more likely
Wuhan lab leak being shot down so easily was the thing I found non convincing and the fact that so many journalists didn't cover it was surprising. While we might be able to ascertain that the virus is natural or man made easily, but a natural virus leaking out would seem high on the probability list to me as there is conveniently a lab at the same place where the outbreak first happened; and it was doing research on the same thing.
> While the racist violence that happened was deplorable, it is entirely amusing to me that we are fine with calling it UK/Brazil/South African/Indian variant but not call it the China virus/flu.
Why is this amusing? In N.A. there is currently (and pre-dating Covid-19) substantive differences in xenophobic response to China/Russia vs. the other countries mentioned. The former are the go to political boogiemen whereas the latter are either allies or patronizingly viewed.
The article content mentions the new name Delta, unlike the headline so I am guessing the copy editor is aware. Anyway, I guess my view is not as charitable as you as it is coloured by their coverage of events in the past.
Trump's use of the term "the China virus" was clearly, absolutely, unambiguously to blame China for the virus/pandemic.
By the time the variants started to emerge, the virus' biological structure and mechanism was sufficiently well understood that seeking to blame any particular locale for the emergence of a variant was seen to be pointless.
About pointless as blaming China for the virus itself appeared to be at the time, even if that may no longer be the case.
I agree that Trump's use was to definitely please his supporter base and blame China. But except for some racist bigots, I really doubt calling it the China virus/flu means that someone is trying to blame Chinese people for it, just like you are arguing for variants.
My point was, the same concerns people had for not using the country name on virus were applicable for variants too. If we chose one standard for the virus, we should have kept the same for variants too, after all there are some variants which are considered more dangerous than the others.
"the virus that killed at least 3.5M people worldwide came from <COUNTRY>"
and
"as the pandemic spread globally, and as expected for almost any virus and for coronaviruses in particular, variants of the virus emerged in <COUNTRY A>, <COUNTRY B> and <COUNTRY C>"
Well, both the statements are worded way differently. The same variant thing can be worded as
"Covid-19 variant wreaking havoc and causing severe hospitalisations and has killed 3.5M people came from #{COUNTRY_A}"
The same carefully worded statement like yours for the variant one can also be used for the first outbreak country's name. It is the usage that is the issue not the term itself. My point still is, if someone saw downfalls of using the country name in one situation, they should have seen it in the other as well. At least WHO did, that's why they came up with the new names.
the history of any viral pandemic is going to inevitably see variants showing up. their emergence says nothing at all about the places where that happens.
the origin of the pandemic was made a central point of contention by trump. it appeared very important to him, based on his own language, that we identify china as the place where the virus first infected people, and for a while, as the place where authorities had failed to control its spread.
while i see downfalls in terms like "the india variant", they seem small because they generally do not have connotations of blame. by contrast "the chinus virus" term was entirely about blame (and also about deflection from the failure to manage the pandemic effectively).
That's like saying "The child was murdered by a Black man," vs "The child was murdered by a man wearing a hoodie and a scar on his left cheek." Both sentences use details that could be true accurate descriptions, but choosing which descriptors to use allow you to control the opinions of the reader and the associations to the bad thing (murder) with some traits. It gives the writer a powerful propagandistic tool. The question is what descriptors are important enough to be associated with the bad thing? Could any man, or even person, have murdered a child? Could the virus have come from anywhere? If so, then shaping opinions by associating with the trait of "Black man" or "China" is counterproductive.
Better descriptors could be: "Covid-19 ... wreaking havoc... came from laboratory with poor hygiene practices and safety measures."
"Child was murdered by insane person."
These titles stick to the point rather than trying to bias public opinion, and associate the bad thing with what the actual underlying cause was.
That wasn't meant to be an example of a more on-point variant. It was meant as an example of a different set of potentially arbitrary details to focus on that changes the perceptions and associations. It works to associate hoodies, scars, and left cheeks with murderers.
It's the WAY Trump et al said it + their political motivations & bias. Context is very important.
"ChiNe A", almost the verbal version of slanting your eyes with your fingers.
And the more obvious 'kung flu.'
For what it's worth I've read that there has been attempts to reframe virus names from using state names as to not cast blame (though 'blame' is muddled in this case if it was leaked or worse GOF->leak).
"Spanish Flu" for instance likely didn't even originate in Spain
Fair point on the media, since variants do have actual scientific names. But I don't think the context there is the same. But they should be using consistent scientific names imho we knew H1N1 we can do that again.
Except it never seemed more credible. People were assigned their opinion that it was more credible, and accepted it uncritically. It was frankly ridiculous if you had the information about the WIV that was being discussed wherever Peter Daszak wasn’t trying to cover his own ass and ruin others careers.
It's been practice for centuries to initially name it after where it was first originated. Spanish flu ring a bell? But yeah Trump's racist for saying China flu.
The first observations of illness and mortality of the Spanish Flu were actually in the US. The origin of the name of the Spanish Flu is due to it being reported in the news most freely and widely in Spain as many other nations were limiting reporting due to being embroiled in WWI.
> It's been practice for centuries to initially name it after where it was first originated.
It was practice. Past tense. The WHO changed that practice in 2015 [1]. In fact they explicitly list Spanish Flu as an example of why that practice was flawed.
"Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations (e.g. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish Flu, Rift Valley fever), people’s names (e.g. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Chagas disease), species of animal or food (e.g. swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox), cultural, population, industry or occupational references (e.g. legionnaires), and terms that incite undue fear (e.g. unknown, fatal, epidemic)."
> "The pandemic is conventionally marked as having begun on 4 March 1918 with the recording of the case of Albert Gitchell, an army cook at Camp Funston in Kansas, United States"
The Spanish flu didn't originate in Spain -- its origins are disputed, but it was first observed in the US.
I'm surprised you didn't get this memo by now, but Spain gained that ignominy only by being the sole country to not apply censorship regarding the topic at the time ("Land of the Free" included).
It's utter nonsensical bullshit like this that made us collectively move away from naming diseases after countries.
It's easy to ignore the liar themselves, but it's impossible to ignore repetitions of the liar's message. The only possibility is to ignore any message matching the liar's, regardless of provenance. This completely screws up rational discourse.
And yes, such manipulation and corruption of debate is the general problem with liars being awarded leadership positions.
Depends how you point. Look I'm French, we built the lab.
In France, all the people involved in the lab construction "quit" any official functions they had before the virus. That's the legend, the doubt is quite strong.
People are just now refusing it could NOT be the lab. And are mounting into conspiracy theory etc just because not everyone rolls over the floor with their conviction.
No: the lab source is likely (suspicious communist behaviour, french handlers all disappeared, geographical proximity, thematical proximity - as in they studied these kind of virii), but not sure yet.
And I'm taking flak in my family for not jumping to the most "obvious" conclusion - probably because they live in France and I live in China hehe. I think the communists are equally able to be stupid enough to refuse any investigation, to have put military command of the lab to actually be ready to study a natural virus under military command, that they were not quite competent enough to raise the virus to that particular gain of function, and that the french handlers left their ministerial position out of precaution.
I wonder what other factual reporting might have been suppressed by political orthodoxy dismissing it as a baseless conspiracy theory over the past few years.
Media, governments, and scientists should take a stronger stand now, or they will not protect amateurs against the full wrath of more unsavory elements of hostile state actors.
Working backwards from February 2020. About 3 weeks after Peter Daszak started his wild PR campaign. Pretty impressive for a group of amateurs to still beat the pros to the finish line. Because here we are. Finally discussing it. This site can be linked, and exposed to ridicule and critique. And it keeps standing (Peter Daszak can not use his Facebook admin powers to block it!). Lovely!
People say "do your own research" but really more than most people are incapable of finding and evaluating information on their own. "Read a bunch of blogs and facebook posts until something fits your pre-judged intuition" doesn't count as research and that is the extent of the abilities of people.
There is something distinctly missing from education even through undergraduate degrees: gathering, evaluating, and criticizing conflicting high quality research.
I took a philosophy class in the spring and one of the most striking things about it wasn't the material but the other students (most of whom a decade or more my junior) reactions to the material. A few of them were openly upset at the disagreement and inconsistency of philosophical opinion on every topic discussed; I didn't really understand it at first but then... What seems to have happened is basically for their entire education up to their senior years in undergrad, these people had only really ever been taught the Truth as though everything presented to them were solid facts and as a corollary, in general things should just be known and true or not.
There is a really big gap there. Sure, there are plenty of things which are quite certain, but people need to be driven to realize the truth doesn't just pop out one day, it is arrived at through a long process of disagreement and development and there are few ideas out there which weren't in their time quite controversial, and there is plenty still which is being presented as True which really has quite a bit of room for doubt.
The more important takeaway is don't shout down those who are skeptical if you haven't actually investigated the authorities' credibility yourself. Get comfortable with not knowing, with being agnostic on a lot of issues, because it's often the only reasonable position.
(The most important takeaway is to ignore Twitter - not "social media", but specifically Twitter).
So I give every quack the same attention, legitimacy, as say, an expert I trust? That's almost as bad advice as trust no one and do my own research for everything.
No, you make your own judgements, but you don't publish them. Otherwise initially legitimate credibility gets amplified to unreasonable levels because everyone ends up circularly reasoning that the more credible people are more credible.
All fair points. But again I question the part where you said "if you haven't actually investigated the authorities' credibility yourself". How would I, a person with no training in virology, do that?
At some point, you have to trust someone or some institution or organization or system.
> But again I question the part where you said "if you haven't actually investigated the authorities' credibility yourself". How would I, a person with no training in virology, do that?
My point is that maybe you shouldn't stick your oar in in that case. The polarisation was exacerbated by a lot of non-experts who not just trusted the WHO (reasonable in itself) but felt the need to pile on anyone who was questioning them.
Nah what happens is then people start trusting people who say "don't trust the experts, here's my theory though" and says whatever it takes to get clicks to their YouTube channel.
It's as straightforward a statement as it can get. I don't watch YouTube much, but when I read threads on this kind of stuff, that's the mantra: here's what I found, here's what I think, go do your own research.
It's not that you discover the One True Truth; it's that you know all the things that might be true. If you listen to the experts, all you hear is one possibility - hope they got it right.
The "experts" rarely have a unanimous consensus on anything. If you actually listen to all of the experts, you'll hear all of the possibilities. But that still won't tell you who's right and who isn't.
On a question like "lab leak or meat market?" the answer isn't of importance to me, or any other average person. It's important for the experts to know the truth, in order to be able to prevent it next time. But other than that, finding someone (or several someones) to pin it on isn't going to give everyone the past 15 months of their lives back.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting you learn about virology and fly to wuhan and start looking around. Maintaining multiple explanations as possibilities until one is proven, while resisting political tribalism shrouding your view of the truth, is I suppose hard for many people to pull off. But that is what we’re suggesting you try to do, maybe next time we have a global pandemic…
You've broken the site guidelines badly and repeatedly in this thread. Crossing into personal attack is seriously not cool, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. And you broke other guidelines too.
I'm not going to ban you because it doesn't seem like this happened before, but we ban accounts that do this kind of thing, so please don't do it again.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. There's far too much content here for us to read it all, or even see it all. People can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
In beginning and middle of pandemic energy is better spent on solving the crisis first. Truth is for mortals like a set of possibilities. Here media presented both possibilities and reported usual facts and opinions.
As we all know, media often gets thing wrong, as nobody are arbiters of Truth. So one reads it like that.
When president turned traitor, that was more damaging than this virus itself.
Yes trust the experts if you cant run your own experts. You know the people who can be easily influenced by funding sources, political pressure and their own need for validation and success. If there is anything we have learnt is that 'Authority is Truth' and no one in positions of Authority or 'experts' has ever deceived the public.
> Perhaps begin by entertaining ideas as possible until proven otherwise
You're assuming I didn't already do that. I'm just objecting to the exhortation to "do your own research". I'm not going to do that, because we live in a modern society with labor specialization.
> No scientists ever provided conclusive proof the virus didn’t originate in a lab.
Where the virus originated from is nice to know for later. But I really care about getting my life back right now. The scientists and experts can debate all the evidence, consider all the options, and report back their findings. "Doing my research" isn't going to help anyone.
> suggesting that lazy people investigate and seek out the truth instead of clinging to dogma that validates their biases
What's more common with the "do your own research" types is seeking out sources of information that validates their biases. And calling everything else "dogma" or "MSM" or whatever.
I know my own field (software) and I'll readily call out BS when I see it. In this field, I can trust my own judgment after doing my own research. I don't care for my doctor's opinion on encryption or network protocols. It's likely to be seriously misinformed or lacking in perspective.
By the same coin, I recognize that I don't have the expertise or a sufficiently strong knowledge base to form a serious opinion on other things just on the basis of "research" i.e. typing some terms into a search engine. That's intellectual humility, not laziness.
When Trump himself floated the lab-leak hypothesis last April, his divisiveness and lack of credibility made things more, not less, challenging for those seeking the truth.
Right, it's Trump's fault that the media and political opposition acted like children in opposing every word that came out of his mouth.
Apply that logic to your favorite left-leaning politician:
"The fact that Obama was always a natural born citizen would have been accepted by some Conservatives who thought he was born in Kenya, but the fact that Obama denied the claims that he was foreign-born made things worse."
When you're wrong, you're wrong. Try to own up to it without blaming the people who were actually right.
There was a need to rely on the boy who cried wolf at first, since he was the only one out in the fields.
There was never a need to rely on Trump. This was a pandemic. Basic journalistic curiosity and integrity should have meant that our "free" press should have been all over figuring out how COVID-19 came to be. Instead, they played politics with information that they could have easily looked into.
What you did in this thread (posting dozens of copies of the same comment) was vandalism. I've banned the account.
You needn't have wondered why your comment was flagged if you had read the site guidelines before posting it. The users who flagged it were obviously correct to do so. What you did after that was beyond the pale.
I already checked. The flaggers were well established, responsible HN users who understood exactly which site guidelines you were violating. This "communist agent" stuff is childish. Please stop now.
This is silly. The lab leak hypothesis was never off limits, it was ridiculed because it had little evidence and was based on political things are different this time thinking. Finding viral origins is never a fight, it is hard work requiring detailed research. Both SARS and MERS are good comparisons and took around three years to fully understand.
The lab leak theory is popular because of politics and ignoring the down sides of potential error. The lab leak theory posits that natural disasters such as have happened throughout history no longer happen because all events are shaped by the hands of man. The lab leak theory is based on the idea that establishing guilt brings justice. The lab leak theory is based on a generalized loathing of China. The lab leak theory ignores the history of ongoing transfers of animal viruses to man in favor of the view that it is different this time. Garbage in results in garbage out and the lab leak theory assumes that an incorrect idea will result in correct political action.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy here is that people are appealing to ideas about justice by saying this was a forbidden struggle that is a big fight, yet ignoring the most important realities of justice. If you really want justice then you need a coherent statement of the offense, there should be a fair hearing with representatives of all sides, there should be impartial review whether that be trained judges or a selected jury of peers or whatever else, and so on. We know what justice looks like and any serious introspection will show that this shrill advocacy of the lab leak theory is just more social media garbage like q anon and the rest. If you want justice then you will have to submit to the kind of impartiality that brings justice, but that isn't what we are talking about here.
> The lab leak hypothesis was never off limits, it was ridiculed because it had little evidence and was based on political things are different this time thinking.
It was ridiculed because a Republican Senator popularized it, not because of evidence.
The way you know it had nothing to do with the evidence or lack thereof is that people who respond based on evidence don't usually respond with ridicule, and people who respond based on tribal affiliation usually do.
There were definitely some people saying "this is possible, but on balance unlikely given what we know today", but for the most part words like "crackpot" and "incompetent" and even "racist" were used instead. That's not what arguing from a place of facts sounds like.
The dominance of those forums is the problem. Note how many posters on this thread are calling out how "shocking" articles and evidence are? This is how social media works by pushing hot buttons. Actual science is based on evidence and is often an extreme bore. What we are seeing is people getting excited over made up stories while ignoring the real hard work which has time and again pointed to viruses hopping from animals to humans.
I'm sorry, but you are ignoring the chain of low probability coincidences that were evident from the very beginning. Also, the Lancet letter denouncing the theory, written by scientists who claimed no conflict of interest, falsely.
This is laid out clearly in Wade's article below, and saying it's political is not based on data or science.
>never off limits, it was ridiculed because it had little evidence and was based on political things
re limits - I got banned from the covid19 reddit for mentioning it and was unable to write about in on Wikipedia, this in Feb 2020, pre Trump
re evidence - there were no bats anywhere near Wuhan and Daszak's gain of function funding and interview were public before the breakout but unmentionable
How is the above that the nearest viruses to the breakout were in a lab politics?
And while people like me being unable to write on Wikipedia etc may seem silly bear in mind 10m people died from this thing and several of those million may not have done if the data was not censored.
> If you really want justice then you need a coherent statement of the offense, there should be a fair hearing with representatives of all sides, there should be impartial review whether that be trained judges or a selected jury of peers or whatever else, and so on.
Cool. Since China is the source of this virus, can they take the lead here? I'll wait.
There is no lead. Since America is the prime location for infection and death we should probably try to be serious about the issue instead of getting distracted.
And what exactly is China expected to do in any case? Apologize? Pay in the way fining Germany for WWI led to WWII?
You are full of moral rage, yet still have essentially zero scientific support. Are you sure that is okay?
> And what exactly is China expected to do in any case?
China, and every other country, should move such labs away from major population centers.
From the article:
> Then, in February, a research paper coauthored by two Chinese scientists, based at separate Wuhan universities, appeared online as a preprint. It tackled a fundamental question: How did a novel bat coronavirus get to a major metropolis of 11 million people in central China, in the dead of winter when most bats were hibernating, and turn a market where bats weren’t sold into the epicenter of an outbreak?
> The paper offered an answer: “We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus.” The first was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which sat just 280 meters from the Huanan market and had been known to collect hundreds of bat samples. The second, the researchers wrote, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
> The paper came to a staggeringly blunt conclusion about COVID-19: “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.... Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.”
Key part: "Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places" Isn't this common sense? I feel that those claiming there is nothing that could be done with information pointing to a lab leak, as you seem to be doing, are being incredibly disingenuous. If the virus escaped from a lab, strengthening lab regulations is the obvious response that you seem to be pretending doesn't exist.
I'd add that, while China is ready to help and take part in the global fight against the covid, a finger-pointing shaming war against them would probably (as it already did several times) trigger the very Asian reaction of counter-fighting to not lose face, and stopping any constructive cooperation.
Once the situation was out they did everything properly to fix it at home, and then even contributed to the science work on the virus (just not on the lab origin hypothesis, but all other work on the virus structure, illness mechanisms, potential vaccines or medications, yes).
All the geopolitical tensions around China, both Koreas, and Japan, are just about losing or not losing face. Most of the time they would largely benefit just negociating and accepting to lose some useless islands and so on, but no because "they don't bow to the foe".
Also I work in Asia and I meet this "keeping the face" behavior everywhere and all the time.
So to understand relations with China you'd better factor in these characteritics into your analysis rather than sweeping them under the carpet.
I find this to be a shallow "just-so" take on geopolitics. Many of the disputed islands have strategic economic & military value in their territory. There's a lot of googlable analysis on how these islands are valued but it honestly seems a little laughable to suggest that China or the other Asian countries will just accept losing some "useless islands". Given the secretive nature of CCP behavior I don't think I can prove that their dispute isn't driven by "keeping the face" playground psychology, but more practical & sensible motivations are apparent and I can meta-comment that it seems very unlikely that this dispute would confound experienced diplomats for this long if it was as simple as keeping face.
If you look for critical analysis of many high-stakes geopolitical disputes you can usually find a very practical and utilitarian motivation behind it. An explanation that relies on popular stereotypes is basically the opposite of that.
I mean, just compare the advantage of (I'm taking the point of vue of Japan here):
- being friend with all your neighbors and having a couple less islands, to which you could go in vacations just fine anyway, or
- having your islands but being enemy with everybody, spoiling your gross product on arms race and exercises, creating an atmosphere of hate for your resident foreigners, hindering international commerce, voting laws to reinforce government coertion...
They could negociate to buy the rare earth or any other useful resources around these islands, if they belonged to a foreign but friendly neighbor.
Your perspective on the pros and cons in this dispute are very personal and don't involve a lot of geopolitical factors. The ability to go to a few islands for holiday is not a significant geopolitical benefit. Creating an atmosphere of hate for your resident foreigners is not a serious geopolitical disadvantage (citizens of both China and USA are hated in many places yet they both remain powerful and wealthy countries). Countries don't threaten expensive and risky military action because they are worried about a lack of friendly holiday destinations.
The discovery of important resources like natural gas and fish near eg. the Senkaku Islands seems more on the mark but is also more serious than "you can just buy these useful resources". Obviously a substantial amount of resources will cost a lot of resources to buy if you don't own it, but also resource ownership fuels domestic economic growth that supports the happiness of your citizens and strengthens your ability to defend and sponsor your interests in future conflicts.
Either way, settling this conflict by surrendering these islands will not on their own establish friendly relations between China and its neighbors. China is in deeper economic competition with countries like Japan beyond these islands. More conflict will need to be resolved before you can claim that settling the island dispute will result in a foreign but friendly neighbor.
I was not clear, I am not advocating for any of these countries to change the status quo, I'm just advocating for them to accept the status quo.
That's why my arguments look like shallow, it's because indeed it really is a shallow problem.
Japan would gain everything to accept that these Russian-controlled islands are Russian after all, China would better accept that Senkakus are not Chinese, and so on.
They do not loose anything, and they -- as I said -- gain the privilege to be able to spend their vacations there, buy resources extracted there, and many new friends as well as a largely more peaceful atmosphere towards their resident foreigners.
The only reason they don't do that is an irrational one. As I said, again, it's just to not loose face. Lol.
Yes they do. Although the Senkaku Islands' "status quo" is controlled by Japan, China loses potential wealth if they cede control of the islands. Not gaining potential resources is practically indistinguishable from losing resources.
Obviously you can't count everything as "potential wealth", but China evidently thinks it has a realistic shot at claiming the wealth of these islands and is rationally reluctant to lose such a practical opportunity.
This is an interesting conversation, thank you. You are considering what I say and replying to it rationally, that's refreshing, as it's rarer and rarer on HN for this kind of hot subjects.
My point of view is that a change of the status quo is an outlandish impossibility.
It would mean a really nasty, bloody conflict, and it is not even sure that anything good would result for the winner in total.
This is based on this assumption that I only considered either 1/ they keep disputing the status quo (but not changing it) or 2/ they accept it and build on it.
Maybe it is not very clear for the Senkakus example, as Japan is only "loosely" controlling it.
But it's much more obvious for the Northern Territories, the islands North of Japan that are controlled by Russia: Russia has bases, even cities on it, and is plentifully in control.
I'm not sure what your point is here. That the Wuhan lab shouldn't be called out for likely causing a global pandemic? It's being done in a very fair and non-aggressive manner. I don't really see what other approach could be said to take into account this stereotype more.
To keep it simple: are there benefits of calling them out?
Are you really just in search of scientific truth, and is this science useful in this context of present and maybe future crisis?
My point is that actually it (the calling out) is done aggressively, and it was especially when Trump was president.
And maybe China is afraid to be shamed and discredited on the international scene, which would delight geopolitical enemies like US, or having to repay colossal sums of money to the world. And thus they would be refusing even the possibility of a lab leak.
If China was given a more relaxed treatment (but is it even possible? isn't the world out to find scapegoats and make them feel shame or get them to pay?), maybe they would have more willingly investigated the origins of the virus, even probably as a simple consequence of their other ongoing scientific investigations on covid.
I may seem unduly focused on the concept of shame in this comment, but this is precisely why it is an Asian problem. It is not obvious for Westerners that shame or discredit would be that much important.
The money problem only adds to it.
But what's even more important here to figure out a solution, is that the investigations about the virus origin will likely not help at all to solve the crisis.
Solutions are more in studying the variants, preventing the spread, and developping vaccines and antivirals.
Developing effective preventive solutions require that you understand the problem. If the problem is a lab leak, then policies that address insufficient lab safety standards are warranted. Frankly, the Chinese government should feel ashamed and discredited if it was a lab leak under its responsibility. Any US involvement in the lab leak should be investigated and uncovered as well. China would have no qualms pointing fingers at the US if the roles were reversed, and they'd be right to do so. Being sensitive to shame has never been a reasonable excuse for covering up the truth. Coddling China is not only unjust, it damages our ability to prevent this from happening again.
This is also one thing that I dispute: knowing the origin will not make the world better, because a lab leak is theoretically impossible anyway, given the lab safety standards.
So I doubt that knowing the leak would change the outcome in the future or prevent the mistakes.
It is also highly plausible that China has already taken steps, internally. Like, the Wuhan lab is closed now.
So, in the light of this fact, too, calling out China will not make them do more than they already did to address the issue.
If the problem is the lack of enforcement of security (maybe because of deeper lingering problems, like the fact that local authorities are too much autonomous, behave like little tyrants themselves, etc), then adding even more security policy will not do anything.
If the answer is to change the whole way China is administered, this will just not happen (unfortunately).
> because a lab leak is theoretically impossible anyway, given the lab safety standards
It's obviously not impossible because we're seeing evidence that it is possibly a lab leak, that's the whole point of the Vanity Fair article. This reasoning works backwards from a theory where a lab leak is "theoretically impossible" but obviously if a fair and impartial investigation revealed that it was a lab leak, then logically that theory is wrong. If theories about lab safety are wrong, that's very important information.
> It is also highly plausible that China has already taken steps, internally. Like, the Wuhan lab is closed now.
That doesn't help other labs overseas. Other countries also perform bio-research in labs and any safety discoveries can prevent similarly bad outcomes internationally as well. If a fair and impartial investigation reveals that foreign labs are susceptible to the same lab leak that caused this pandemic, that's really valuable and essential information in preventing the next pandemic. Whether or not the origin is a direct consequence of Chinese government carelessness or whether it's an accident that could happen to other labs or whether it's not a lab leak at all, we need to know the truth.
> If the answer is to change the whole way China is administered, this will just not happen (unfortunately).
Not with that attitude. If your only response to bullies and bad actors is absolutely nothing, of course they won't change, they have no reason to change. The international community should impose punishments for China's bad behavior and non-cooperation.
You would be correct if there was something that could be done internationally, but nobody was able to do anything for the repression of Hong-Kong protests (and in this case it was a very voluntary thing, not a lab mistake).
China has bazillions of elite scientists (heck, they even consider that Harvard is low-ball compared to the entrance level of their top-notch national universities), so if anything, I would advocate to get them to cooperate in the global fight against the virus (medications, vaccines, mechanisms of illness, variants, etc).
Everybody knows how that story ended, but as a reminder:
"This tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his flock. When a wolf actually does appear, the villagers do not believe the boy's cries for help, and the flock is destroyed. The moral of the story is that liars will not be rewarded; even if they tell the truth, no one believes them. "
There's a cost to lying. Sometimes it's your own flock. Sometime's its everybody's flock. Maybe Trump was right, maybe he wasn't. The boy was right about the wolf, eventually, too. The moral remains the same.
Ok, but somehow he turned journalists' brains into mush such that they could no longer do investigative journalism and moreover turned them into bots which flagged Tweets which questioned the received theory and turned the CDC virologist into a Saint?
Investigative journalism? Do you know how long it takes to do that sort of thing under normal conditions?
How long was it between the writing of the Pentagon papers and their release? How long did the Catholic sex abuse situation take to be fully reported?
It's been a bit more than a year since the virus turned into a global pandemic. I'm willing to grant journalists a bit more leeway in the timeline for serious investigative journalism, particularly when the central locate is a somewhat secretive Chinese lab in an area that was completely locked down for months as the pandemic started.
You write this as though this somehow new behavior by the media, unique to some combination of Trump and/or COVID19.
This is in fact how the media has always behaved. It did this about more or less every major event in US history. Only when the tide has turned sufficiently within the culture as a whole does the media as a whole manage to embrace non-status-quo positions. There are always outliers, visible/audible from the start, who tell contrary stories, just as there have been for COVID19.
> "After the interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”"
As has been pointed out, repeatedly, Trump was not the only one pointing out the lab leak hypothesis. "Trump made me not take the lab leak hypothesis seriously" is not the excuse that journalists seem to think it is.
Trump seems to occupy a super position in the brains of media types in this country. He is a idiotic buffoon who no one should take seriously and yet he somehow magically and constantly influences behavior that is directly related to their job.
As I know the story, claims about wolf were made by just the boy, not by scores of people and subsequently dismissed because the boy was also one who claimed it. I'm starting to question if you argue in good faith.
I think you've missed the moral. It's not about being annoyed. It's about making a choice on whether to dismiss someone's claims because of their past lies.
Sure, you can make the case for always ignoring past lies, and always evaluating every claim based on current evidence. The reason the story exists is to try to illustrate how most humans actually behave, despite there being a preferable response.
In addition, the evidence for the lab leak theory wasn't strong back when Trump became the mouthpiece for it. There wasn't much of a reason, even if you evaluated the current evidence for what could be another one of his thousands of documented lies, to take it particularly seriously.
That situation might be changing now, and we are seeing that in the media and culture right now, as we respond to new evidence, or more specifically, lack of other expected evidence.
This is a weak and frankly shameful rationalization. Just take the L. People who dismissed this fucked up. People who were jerks about it fucked up even more. Trump Derangement Syndrome is your fault, not Trumps. None of the people who were looking into this or following it were getting their information from Trump. Most of the detractors just assumed they were.
I mean the only person in my life expressing an interest in this was my mom and she got it from the radio program coast to coast. Which is almost entirely crackpot conspiracy UFO bullshit. Still. I didn't tell her it couldn't have come from the lab. I said there isn't really enough evidence to conclude that. I think that was the mainstream opinion. Not that it couldn't have come from the lab, but that there wasn't enough evidence to support that conclusion. It's normal that something like this can take years to sort out especially when the authoritarian government controlling the area would prefer not to have that particular conclusion.
Shutting them up doesn't appear to have been particularly successful. The lab leak theory has continued to be discussed in all kinds of media and many parts of the culture over the last year.
Several media organizations (washington post, buzzfeed) submitted FOIA requests for the emails, and as per federal law, they were released. No leak, normal federal government policy process, driven by mainstream-y media outlets AFAICT.
Twitter has not banned discussion of the theory. Here's a thread from May 27th (Nate Silver) discussing it in some detail:
They did have policies related to the lab leak theory, but it seems like a mischaracterization to say that the banned discussion of it.
The only person I can find who has lost their account over related matters is a NY Times reporter who closed her own account after making some fairly dumb remarks about the theory.
>Shutting them up doesn't appear to have been particularly successful.
The goal posts will move on this, I guarantee it. Suddenly institutional media will claim they've been working on this story the entire time, and all of their pronouncements cajoling people into not thinking about this explanation will be completely memory-holed. I'm not being hostile to you, I'm expressing frustration here because this really does call into question nearly all of the reporting on the broader Pandemic response when we're just fully admitting here that they did this "because Trump". What other stories did they fuck up on "because Trump"?
Go back and look at the reporting on every American war of the last 70 years. You will see the same pattern, and yet Trump had nothing do with any of them.
Go back and look at the reporting on every major environmental disaster of the last 70 years, from DDT to oil tanker spills to lead in gasoline to anthropogenic climate change: same pattern. Trump had nothing do with any of them either.
Hint: the media is pro-status quo. On every story, there are a few outliers who provide contrarian accounts, while the majority take a don't rock the boat (much) approach. Eventually, evidence accumulates, the culture shifts, the media changes direction.
Up thread you are literally arguing[1] that Trump is the "boy who cried wolf" and that his "lies" cost us proper reporting on this. I have no idea what past reporting on wars and environmental disasters have to do with the media making an explicitly political choice about how to cover the possible origins of the pandemic.
to suggest that gain of function research is not in service to bio weapon development is tantamount to suggesting the United States went to the moon purely for scientific purposes
Why is the lab leak theory so taboo? I dont understand why this would want to be glossed over? If a mistake was made why are we not learning from it? Why would China care? its not like anything would change if they admitted a mea culpa here. I just feel like so many factors point to this not being a 'wild' virus it just didnt make sense to not investigate if this was a lab leak. Lets learn here and do better.
One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity."
Plus there's all the stuff about the miners shoveling bat poop for weeks and then dying of coronaviruses, and the Wuhan institute collecting and doing gain of function research on these similar-to-SARS samples. And then several of the lab's gain of function researchers became ill in late 2019. And there's the weird renaming of samples to hide the unmatched closeness of the mine samples and covid. This is just the absolute surface of the article. There's too much to list here
Edit: here's another amazement for the list: "Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories." And the article says "BSL-2 [is] roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office."