The lab-leak origin claim for Covid-19 is in the news, but it’s still fact-free
latimes.com
latimes.com
1. It was definitely zoonotic, and suggestions otherwise are racist conspiracy theories.
2. While it's impossible to rule out a lab leak, I believe it's zoonotic unless confronted with hard evidence.
3. While I admit the possibility of a lab leak, I secretly am pretty sure it was spillover.
4. Both lab leak and spillover are plausible, and the best priors are past experience (dozens or more spillovers, probably one or two lab leaks).
5. Lab leak and spillover seem equally likely, and a lot of the behavior of the CCP, WHO, EcoHealth Alliance are suspicious.
6. It was almost certainly a lab leak, the CCP is covering it up.
7. Definitely at least a lab leak, probably an engineered bioweapon.
8. Kill Fauci, he was in on it.
This article is 3. The recent Vanity Fair article is 5. Most virologists I follow on Twitter are 2 or 3. As I say, you can save time in responding by just posting the number of where you are on this scale. Explaining why you think so won't add too much more information, it's a function of what sources you pay attention to and that can be pretty reliably inferred from the position on the scale.
If you throw away the two most extreme options and focus on 2 - 4, notice there is no reasonable counterpart to those expressed on the other side.
In other words, 2 - 4 are worded to look reasonable, while 6 - 7 are not, when they easily could have been worded differently to be more reasonable.
Number 5 is worded to have the appearance of looking neutral, while it's really expressing the fallacy of "there are two sides so let's assign them 50/50 likelihood even though the data weighs clearly on one side."
So that one is also on the side of 2 - 4, while appearing on the surface to be reasonable.
Then 6 immediately leaps to an extreme and untenable position, saying "almost certainly" and making that side look non-credible, as if they jump to conclusions and near certainty when the evidence is still coming in.
And 7 goes even farther to the extreme.
So again I would suggest this scale is a bit weighted against one side here.
I assume this was not your intent. If my assumption is correct, perhaps you could edit it to address this issue.
But the view that is really not expressed at all on this scale is:
We do not know for certain at this time. But we should continue to follow the evidence where it leads, and we should not solely rely on people who have a conflict of interest, especially people who have tried to hide their conflicts of interest, such as Peter Daszak reportedly did in the Lancet.
Point 5 could be the "when you don't know, all probabilities are roughly 50%" fallacy, but I think it can also charitably interpreted as belief that a careful weighting of the evidence is roughly equal.
But your points are well taken. I'm not going to edit it here, as I don't think that would be fair to the people who have responded.
Your final paragraph is of course the only reasonable position for the truly open-minded (and actually represents my own position quite well), but I didn't bother to put it on the scale as it seems hardly represented at all, at least in Twitter discussions and HN threads.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
Let's generalise that a touch to defang it, incidents in scientific laboratories are common.
#1: I worked in a university science lab for four years. One of my colleagues blew up a fume cupboard* and, since he was deafened and had minor wounds from flying glass shards, I - personally - called the emergency services.
* don't apply a heat gun to stuff that looks like ice but might not be....
I met the fire service and ambulance at the front door to the department, as requested, and led them up to our laboratory, accompanied by bemused looks from other students and staff.
The lead guy from the fire service asked me (I'm not kidding) "is there anything dangerous in your lab?" ... I tried hard not to giggle (the adrenaline had taken over by that point), I told him it was a Chemistry lab and asked if he had anything specific in mind? We stored dangerous stuff alphabetically, and as I recall, the fume cupboard that blew up was the second one along, so had everything dangerous from (approximately) F to L.
#2: After they'd carted my colleague off to hospital, a professor turned up and asked who had called the emergency services. I fessed up. He gave me a dressing down and told me "the press will hear about this!". I was dumbfounded. My colleague was in the back of an ambulance on the way to hospital covered in glass shards and the prof was worried about us getting in the papers?
And for that matter, the rest of CambridgeWG has also had a consistent record of calling for investigation into lab-leak incidents at WIV for several years, including from the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Hats off to all of them.
The one thing saving the conspiracists so far is the Journal story of two weeks ago that western intelligence agencies were aware of an outbreak of something among lab staff at more or less exactly the right moment to explain a covid origin. That's the one thing that's hard to explain as a coincidence.
And even then... meh. I give it even odds at best. Again, if this was really happening you don't think some enterprising PhD would have tried to leverage a tenure position at Stanford or something in exchange for testimony? The incentives to tell the world about this are huge.
What's disconcerting is how the lab leak was treated as a conspiracy theory that needed to be censored for the past year.
> And many scientists acting as if it were anathema to suggest a lab origin while conveniently keeping quiet on their own conflicts of interest.
Do you people not hear yourselves? You're alleging a conspiracy to suppress the discussion of the conspiracy discussion that has clearly not been suppressed. You guys have been screaming about it endlessly for going on a year now. We've heard you loud and clear, we just don't believe you.
It hasn't been covered by media sources, because it has little to no evidence. That's not "suppression", it's journalism.
(Full disclosure: have science PhD, wife has science PhD, sister has science PhD): with no snark intended: have you met (m)any scientists?
An i agree with GP: while they sometime talk about some junky theory (the one i spoke with the most is a retired geneticist agronomist - J.Mallard, who try to convince me that drosophila are somehow born either righty or lefty, and that their choices are caused by genetics), they utter the words "Maybe, i don't know, possibly, i do believe so, but don't take my words for it..." more than the average population. Disagree?
Since March of 2020 all criticism and skepticism has been shouted down with "are you 'An Expert'"? The entire pandemic has been nothing but a thinly guised appeal to authority. And a very narrow set of authority at that--the only authority we were allowed to listen to are the ones who sold this as the worst thing ever. Hope or optimism or just asking basic questions was never allowed.
The second best piece of evidence IMO is the lack of an alternative explanation, but these things do take time to piece together.
I don’t have a number right now. I do have some suspicions regarding the consistent attempts to squash the lab leak theory. It has been rather aggressive at times.
Oftentimes people are mad at the media too quickly dismissing the possibility last year rather than actively suggesting it was a lab leak.
Rarely our media and politicians show their true colors in this fashion
Note that my wording was specific there. It's effective because it has a bunch of people talking about it. It supports racist rhetoric because it creates an environment in which people are comfortable making statements blaming China, and there are a lot of people who are sloppy about distinguishing between the government of China and Chinese people.
Whether the theory "is" racist or not is the wrong question. The right question is whether discussion of it helps to normalize racist positions. That seems like a much easier matter to study - no need to divine anyone's private beliefs. And it's completely independent of any question of how the new coronavirus got into human spread.
I think it's very important to separate these two topics, so that the far more important question of how much damage this is doing to Asian communities doesn't get buried in some completely unactionable nonsense about the virus's means of introduction to the human population.
This is incredibly problematic and anti-scientific sentiment. Science is about expanding knowledge. Whether covid came from China or Spain or Madagascar doesn't matter; we should determine where it came from and then see where that takes us. Racism and racist uses of fact and fiction are a separate, societal issue; tackle that separately.
Should there be people tracking the origin of the disease, how it got into the general population, and how to reduce similar incidents in the future? Yes, absolutely. That's doing science.
But what, exactly, is scientific about spreading your hypothesis across popular media for public discussion when the entirety of your evidence is "there's no concrete evidence to the contrary"? This isn't how science is done. It's how propaganda is done.
I am disturbed by the number of people here who fall for such propaganda so easily. Being a testable hypothesis does not make something intrinsically science. Actually doing science does. And science is not done by media talking heads selling you fear in order to increase their advertising income.
Truth is truth, regardless of whether it supports a viewpoint you decry.
I presume you'd be on BART's side in this story. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/09/bart-withholdin...
But more importantly, truth doesn't absolve you of your personal responsibility. You are responsible for your actions. This means paying attention to their results and changing your behaviors if you don't like what happens in response. Your intentions and beliefs are less important than your actions and their results. If the way you are expressing something has results you don't like, you should change the way you're expressing it. I'll stand by that assertion whether the thing you're saying is true or not.
And let's be very clear here: 1) The lab leak hypothesis has no evidence. The best it has is a lack of concrete evidence to the contrary. 2) Resolving the question either direction will not change any actions you take in the future. 3) Media discussion of the hypothesis does not resolve it nor provide you with any reason to change your actions.
What is the actual value in discussing the hypothesis as if it's a matter of public import? What public need is being addressed by a media circus? Are you happy with the results of the way the question is being treated in public?
I'm not. So I'm advocating we change the discussion to reduce harm.
Examining the question to determine this wasn't allowed in the media during the past year, until very very recently.
>And let's be very clear here: 1) The lab leak hypothesis has no evidence. The best it has is a lack of concrete evidence to the contrary.
I don't disagree. I would argue, however, that there is more circumstantial evidence[1] for an origin for COVID19 from a Wuhan biolab than for purely natural animal-to-human transmission.
>2) Resolving the question either direction will not change any actions you take in the future.
Nonsense. Determining that, say, an accdiental leak from a Wuhan biolab caused the pandemic would affect
* how and whether future gain-of-function research is done around the world
* what punitive actions the world would demand from China
* the credibility and legitimacy of the Chinese government within and outside its borders
>3) Media discussion of the hypothesis does not resolve it nor provide you with any reason to change your actions.
Why do you get to declare that this story, but not others, should not be discussed in public?
You didn't answer my question regarding the 2017 news story I linked to. Did BART do the right thing by suppressing camera footage of crimes, and in how the transit agency justified doing so?
[1] Circumstantial evidence is, contrary to what Hollywood has taught us, quite permissible in the court of law. Many cases, criminal and civil, are resolved entirely or largely based on circumstantial evidence.
And I'm not even saying don't report on it. I'm saying to take responsibility. If your goal isn't to support racism, stop reporting in a way that does.
As for the BART thing... Eh, I think a lot of what they said is nonsense, like attempting to justify their choice based on minor privacy laws. But I think they made one key point that's enough to justify their choice: releasing those videos to the media doesn't increase public safety. It increases public fear. Scared people are actively harmful for public safety. A terrified person pulling out a gun the next time several black teenagers get onto the same train car is only an escalation of violence.
You seem to be forgetting there's a middle ground between suppressing and sensationalizing. Did the lack of video footage prevent reporting on the BART incidents? Was the news suppressed? Was anyone injured by the lack of video? I can find no evidence of this happening. Everything I can see suggests that things ended up in a reasonable spot there. People who wanted to know about crime could find out about it.
So what's the middle ground on the lab leak hypothesis? Stop dredging it up like it's important to every media consumer. Every action you listed is a public policy decision, not a personal action. Report on it when it's important for determining public policy, not when you're scaring people for ratings.
And yeah, I'm aware that circumstantial evidence is fine in court. But when I see the circumstantial evidence, I don't see anything to outweigh the fact that zoonotic transmission has been the source of thousands of outbreaks in the past. That's one hell of a circumstantial hurdle any other argument has to clear. Any argument of the form "this time it's different" has a very high bar to clear.
I recommend this one: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
And this one: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
"I don't like those facts, I like these facts."
I would strongly disagree that the consequences should involve us biasing our own map of the world. I'm sure we can find some solution that doesn't involve spreading probable falsehoods.
And instead of transparency, investigation, apologies and reforms what we will get after another cup of nationalistic lies is Taiwan war.
There was enough money on the table to keep everyone quiet.
It's one of the biggest tip-offs I had that my gut was onto something. Thank god we got vaccines as soon as we did because honestly the route society was taking was complete madness.
Facts are hard to come by. It’s weight of evidence in context.
In 2017 a University of Zurich report on media in Switzerland analyzed "six of the most-discussed 'alternative media'", including SPR, that "resort to conspiracy theories." Daniel Vogler concluded that SPR appears to be a "a pseudoscientific media research project."
The fact that the SPR people are anonymous is something people should be aware of when deciding how much stock to put in them.
[1]: https://twitter.com/wokeglobaltimes/status/13991870957642793...
1. The virus that WIV identified as closest to ours is identically the virus that the miners caught in 2013. It was renamed for what were described as administrative reasons, but the 2013 events were not mentioned in connection with it.
2. Several (3?) WIV employees were sick with Covid19-like symptoms in November 2019. WIV tried to cover this up.
If there are coverups by Chinese and US officials, they seem to be trying to cover up different things.
Neither fact bears much on whether the jump occurred in or out of a lab, without more information than we have. Useful information would include details of the infection(s) in Nov 2019.
How is the zoonotic hypothesis (“virus originated in Chinese wet market” / “due to Chinese dietary practices”) any less racist?
By contrast, knowing the origins of Covid doesn't, in fact, have a lot of relevance to preparedness against the next pandemic. Both spillover and biosecurity incidents happen regularly enough that we really need to protect against both. If the CCP is lying about lab leak and covering it up, that has political implications but not really public health.
It's also, I think, digging deeper into this to explore trustworthiness of news sources. Mainstream sources haven't done a good job, mostly parroting conventional wisdom (as they will do). Social media has been worse, often a source of plain misinformation (in either direction). Real science journalists have done a good job, but people don't pay much attention to them, and in many cases what they write has been distorted and misrepresented (see [1] for a recent and relevant example).
[1]: https://twitter.com/amymaxmen/status/1400648773169156097
- "Came from bats": "People in China ate bats" vs "Bats poop on things livestock/humans eat"
- "Came from the wetmarket": "Chinese wetmarkets are uniquely disgusting" vs "most wetmarkets are scaled up farmer's markets"
There is a useful scientific question of interest to a small nu,ebr of people: if the virus transferred from Petri dish to humans, what can we learn about bio safety practices for future research.
There is an unuseful question which is what most people are asking: “how can I find someone to blame after the fact for what is essentially a natural phenomenon?”
Not impressed by humanity on this one.
If it's a lab screwup that's relatively good news because we can fix lab screwups - it is not an indictment of our globalized, urbanized way of life.
However, if it is a natural event then it, along with SARS and MERS are starting to create a trendline that suggests our globalized and urbanized way of life has crossed a threshold and we should expect this regularly.
That's a much tougher problem to solve ...
And the reply (to which you reply) expanded the scope a bit, which was interesting.
A powered up virus escaping from a lab is almost definitionally not a natural event
And if that is the case the lesson should be never to do this kind of research ever again, upon the worst possible punishment we can come up with.
And there was unambiguously a coverup in either case
I don't think learning how the virus appeared will help. It will only allow countries to put responsibility on china, which is only a geopolitical concern.
I don't want to get into the weeds with all of this, but here's just one scientific paper among many investigating the actual structure:
The genetic structure of SARS-CoV-2 does not rule out a laboratory origin [PDF]
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bies.2020002...
This is the exact sort of stuff you would see with "gain of function" research.
If it came from an animal in the lab where did that animal come from?
If it was synthetic, how was it synthesized?
>Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes (“reverse genetics” and “infectious clone technology”), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures (“in vitro”) and humanized mice (“in vivo”)... It cannot yet be stated that Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed, but it seems she was certainly on the right track to have done so.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
Its not a conspiracy, its just that accident can happen
A fact: all SARS-CoV-2 sequences fit into a phylogeny with a common ancestor in Wuhan in October/November 2019.
Another fact: we have not found the intermediate host or natural viral reservoir from which this virus arose.
These are pretty intense facts. We would need a lot of other facts to make the zoonotic origin claim hold water.