The only group that stands to benefit are those who benefit by making those groups look bad, who will also unfortunately exaggerate their claims for greater effect.
[1]https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656
[2]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[3]https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-...
>The only group that stands to benefit are those who benefit by making those groups look bad
I mean, collectively as humans we stand to benefit from knowing what happened so we can make more informed cost benefit decisions in the future about conducting risky research (if that's what happened).
There's going to be quite a bit more externalizing risk while "privatizing" (even if it's nation states) gains in the future with bio-engineering, so these conversations should be had.
You're not wrong, but I think what you're missing is that the risky research was funded (in part) by the us federal government, and no one voted for that in the first place. So even if we were all enlightened, what could we change? So many people still don't even know that there was a lab studying coronaviruses in wuhan.
The notable exception is Donald Trump, whose superpower is that shame causes him to double down. He's the kryptonite for a representative democracy. Just because of that, I'll never understand why people voted him in.
I really don't think so. Knowing what actually happened makes no difference. What is important is knowing what problems exist and what can possibly happen as a consequence of them.
Doing a root cause analysis is useful, because it provides you with information about certain modes of failure and their causes. Ignoring past failures, and using a 'tabula rasa' approach will deprive decision-makers of valuable information, and lead to repeating past errors.
It's not looking great.
You can’t “engineer away” a virus.
The airplane analogy only makes sense of you say the result of investigation is to apply international sanctions against countries who continue to manufacture unsafe aircraft and fly them domestically…
…but, you have a) arguably no business telling them what to do in their own country and b) how are you even going to know, since those aircraft never visit your country?
Ie. yeah, great concept, but it’s so disparate from what we’re actually talking about it’s meaningless in this context.
It won’t fix things, or make things better knowing where it came from.
The only wins will be ideological.
If the virus is caused by risky research, you can stop doing risky research.
>arguably no business telling them what to do in their own country
Aren't there international standards for dealing with viruses? Also, some of the research in the Wuhan lab was funded by the US. So the US did have business telling them what to do in some cases regardless of international standards.
They have become heavily biased towards self-preservation over function.
Does this also hold for Root Cause Analysis?
How to fix that problem is difficult, as gain of function research is complicated and obscure enough to be off the radar of most people until something goes wrong, so questioning scientific orthodoxy is somewhat impossible for the average person. I'm not sure what can be done about it, other than those with respectable credentials advocating for transparency and and regular people maintaining a healthy sense of curiosity.
If one or more parties are "responsible" then public sentiment (amplified by social media) will bring the pitchforks.
That translates to political support and basically guarantees the election or increased support for certain types of politicians and response, which in turn will impact diplomacy.
It would take some supreme social engineering to get society at large to accept the idea of a blameless post mortem. It's really not part of the broader cultural lexicon. Even companies struggle and they are much smaller and simpler systems.
Responsibility and liability are intrinsically linked in the public mind.
Reparations are OK for some things, but not for causing worldwide pandemics?
This is a common understanding in industries dealing with safety. If you want to _punish_, focus on blame. If you want to focus on _helping ensure the problem doesn't happen again_, remove the threat of blame.
Also, mentioning reparations brings up ideas of ...current US political discussion... and is likely to polarise this discussion. Please try and keep this productive.
This a problem of global proportions. We've had protracted wars over much smaller things in the past.
If general GOF research caused this pandemic, then maybe there should be a backlash against it. Lot's of science doesn't happen because it's too dangerous to human lives, even if the theoretical benefits outweigh the costs.
If for example there was a leak, and it was purely the fault of one country, I would imagine there would be vigorous finger pointing.
I imagine by the same account, if a person is murdered, it was purely the fault of one murderer, that there would be vigorous finger pointing.
However, if they don't come forward and citizens, media, and prosecutors have to determine who killed someone; not only should they be required to pay significantly more if they have assets, but the punishment should be harsher because they deliberately withheld the truth causing their victims families more suffering.
1) "The lab leak theory" is actually a collection of theories, from the fairly reasonable possibility of an accidental release as part of a lab accident down to a engineered Chinese bioweapon. What any individual means by "lab leak" tends to be whatever is serving their political purposes as the time, and they borrow evidence from each other in a way that's really flawed, etc.
2) There's a lot of personal attacks built into the evidence - whether or not Ralph Baric is a likable guy, for example, fed into a lot of whether or not his lab was "involved".
3) A lot of the advocates for the lab leak hypothesis don't come from epidemiology/public health/virology, but from the intelligence community, the tech world, etc. who tended to reach for "Oh, it's obviously this..." and who reacted poorly to the idea that it might not be that simple and straightforward. Both sides of that exchange burned a lot of good will with each other early on enough that the engagement has, I think, spiraled somewhere not particularly productive.
4) It got coopted by crackpots and conspiracy theorists, as well as those interested in abdicating their own role in the pandemic.
5) The biggest reason, in my mind, is that it is a "fast" solution that gets a lot of press, and for which the alternative explanation - the one that has been true for the last two coronavirus outbreaks - is something that will take the better part of decades to resolve, if it ever does. It's also by and large not relevant for the current state of the pandemic. That creates the sense that there's a whole mountain of evidence behind it, when in reality it's a theory that is going to be rather difficult and expensive to falsify, one way or the other.
I don't believe it would affect "the Chinese" at all, other than spending time to ladle out a new dose of conditioning for their own public.
It has nothing to do with taking an anti China stance, as this has happened elsewhere.
It would also be advisable to investigate the early stages of the pandemic as clearly many parties were deliberately hiding information. This led to avoidable casualties and, ultimately, the whole pandemic might have been possible to contain.
This is a classic collective action problem, not some nationalistic thing (though some will believe or pretend it is). Each specific lab wants relatively lax rules and no consequences for failures, but everyone else needs higher standards.
Might be a better match in some ways as it was a previously unknown pathogen, from a previously unknown family of viruses, isolated only after several lab workers got sick.
“ The World Health Organization has confirmed that breaches of safety procedures on at least two occasions at one of Beijing's top virology laboratories were the probable cause of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) there last month, which infected nine people, one of whom died.”
It even happened with a coronavirus in China before!
>and there is not a lot of solid evidence in this case to argue in good faith beyond "theoretically possible."
Also, bad faith arguments tend to be posited on the fact that they are incorrect. Otherwise they would just be arguments.
I think the society would be far better off if we completely cut out politics and make it super boring. Relentless push to put behind this tribal warfare and serve the truth, however uncomfortable it may be.
Lex Fridman's interview with the NIH director was eye-opening. They're acting like children. Of course, you can't see how unpopular it was because Youtube has hidden the dislikes. The cocktail of Big Tech + ruling party is equally as scary to me as Trumpism.
You guys should see the propaganda du jour- the Chinese government claims covid comes from deer in North America.
If the goal is to make racists look good, that's a great plan.
Personally I rate the plausibility of a lab leak at over 90%. Quick back of the envelope: there is one such lab in China, where there are about 100 cities with over 1 million inhabitants. The probability that a pandemic randomly appeared in any one of them is therefore 1%, or put another way, there is a 99% probability that it appeared in Wuhan because of a link to the lab. There has been no new information in the past two years to change that assessment.
It looks bad
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2
The NIAID claimed that it didn't fund research into BANAL-52 and similar. "the closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 . . . were not studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant"
https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/coronavirus-ba...
However, that was recently revealed to be extremely unlikely, since bat coronavirus samples were in fact collected from Laos, where BANAL-52 was located. Even more suspiciously, the Laos genetic samples disappeared from the WIV database in late 2019.
https://wap.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/wu...
1) I've seen people call for a ban on research at all on BSL-3+ pathogens.
2) If you "accept that it was a lab leak" you are implicitly accepting that it was not a natural event - which is going to cause you to focus more on long-tailed, low-probability events like lab leaks, and less on zoonotic transmission events.
Which if you're wrong would be a serious problem.
But even with a "natural origin," there are things that could be done. I've heard it said that the real Chinese cover-up in that scenario is the widespread trading of wild animals (with one wild animal vendor even travelling from Wuhan to other markets which China had insisted only sold frozen food and kitchenware).
https://news.yahoo.com/virologist-suggests-coronavirus-origi...
You still have the same problem in the end: a "lack of transparency" (if not downright dishonesty) from the Chinese government. And also, an obvious avenue for reforming the dangers that helped spread the 2020 pandemic -- which is not being explored because of difficulties in even establishing the facts of the initial outbreak.
I honestly don't know why this idea -- this possibility, this scenario -- isn't getting equal consideration.
The fact that the first(?) major outbreak was in a city with a major virus research lab that researches coronaviruses is pretty strong circumstantial evidence. China's "nothing to see here" handling of it was also suspicious.
We could have easily been able to have an open conversation about the lab leak possibility if we had proper leadership at the time.
The first thing Bush did after 9/11 was go on TV and essentially say to everyone: “hey, don’t be racist towards Muslim Americans because of this attack; they are fellow Americans and have nothing to do with this” and it was largely effective.
(Not that I'm praising Bush as a president, but this specific act was an instance of good leadership)
They know their cushy careers and research grants are gone if they normalize the lab leak.
These sorts of comments on HN are always fascinating to me.
Scientific researchers make $20K/yr for 6 years of their 20s, often working 60 hour - 80 hour weeks. If they are successful, around the age of 30 they will then make between $40K and $60K in a temporary, term-limited position (post-doc). This might repeat several times -- each more stressful than the last -- until they land a permanent job. Still working like dogs the whole time, btw. That final permanent job, which very few will ever actually get, probably pays between $60K and $100K. A very lucky few among the lucky few might make up to $200K by the time they turn 40, but most will never surpass $150K in their lives.
My undergrad mentees all make $160K+ as 22 year olds, often get to $300K pretty quickly, and will max out in the >$500K range some time in their 30s.
Software folks accusing life scientists of getting fat off of research grant money is really something else.
LOL. I was being generous to you be doing otherwise.
Faculty running successful large wet labs at R1s could jump to the private sector and make millions/yr minimum. Those people are the equivalent of a Director in the tech world. (Or, at the very very least, a Staff/Principal. But really more like Director/VP).
Look at what faculty who run large DARPA-funded labs in CS make when they jump to industry. They usually enter as either Principal/Staff or more commonly as Director. Those are very high six / low 7 figure positions. It's comparable in biotech.
To be perhaps excessively blunt, you have no fucking clue who you're talking about.
> should be compared to the median American, who earns $36K
WTF? Why are we comparing STEM PhDs to the median American?
The average virologist has a STEM undergraduate degree, a PhD, significant additional training, knows their way around complicated lab equipment, has experience designing/debugging complicated experiments, and is usually not such a half-bad programmer either.
(And, again, those are the losers. The average successful PI has all of that plus is leading a group of 10-20 employees in complicated R&D. Possibly also has an MD.)
Even the losers could easily find jobs that leverage those skills or mildly retool to get a high-class software job. In either case, they would earn much more than $36K in any number of industries. Because they have significant experience and training. Unlike the median American.
> not the extreme outliers you mentor.
My mentees are not extreme outliers. They come from a no-name university with an unexceptional CS program. $160K is not an outlier total comp in tech. It's pretty darn normal. National statistics say that the average Software Eng salary is $110K. Salary. Not Comp. Salary. Throw in typical stock/bonus and you get to $160K pretty easily.
But even that $110K number is a shitload more than the $20K virology phd candidates are paid (often for 60-80 hours of lab work each week).
My undergrad mentees are a much better group to compare STEM PhDs against than this "median American" thing you're suggesting:
1. In some cases it's a direct comparison. Many non-CS STEM PhDs are at least as qualified for entry-level software jobs as CS undergrads from unexceptional places. Or can be in very short order. Lots of lab work these days involves significant programming. All lab work involves building a the skills and mindset that make for excellent debugging. And soft engs with domain expertise are valuable.
2. Software isn't the only industry that pays well; the biotech industry also pays quite well. The sorts of people working in virology weblabs are almost certainly able to get WAAY better paying jobs at Biogen or Amgen or whatever.
3. Lots of virologists are MD/PhDs. I don't have to tell you that MDs make more than $35K/yr, right?
> $60K to $100K for high-status intellectual work is something most people would cling onto.
Sure. But -- and this is the point -- it's NOT a good monetary or social status outcome for the people who actually fucking QUALIFY for those jobs. Which, again, isn't the "median American".
Literally no one working on NIH grants is maximizing their earning potential. If you can't concede this point, then you're choosing willful ignorance and there's not much point in having a conversation.
In the lab where I did my postdoc, the folks who went on to work for Amazon, Rackspace and Facebook are doing way better than those of us who went to work for universities, the CDC, etc. monetarily.
I have, what is for an academic a great job, and it pales in comparison to what I could make if I retooled for industry.
I'm 10 years closer to retirement as well, able to own a house in the bay area, etc etc. However, I'm quite aware few who go into industry were given the level of research freedom I was.
And I can guarantee you Daszak and a bunch of other hangers on make a lot more than "20K". In fact 20K might not be enough to get him out of bed in the morning.
...And? What's your point?
As a Chief Medical Officer at a pharma company, which he more than qualifies for, he's be making 10+ million/year. E.g., darryl sleep, the CMO of Amgen, made $20 million last year. You make this point yourself.
So Fauci is greedy because he.... didn't sell out? This take is so astoundingly ignorant that it's hard to believe it's made in good faith.
If you think they have your interests in mind, I suggest you reconsider. At best, your interests might sometimes align with those of their true masters. But if they don't, who gives a shit - Pfizer has legal immunity now.
> Pay them twice as much, but then say "you can't take money from the companies you're charged with regulating, directly or otherwise, for 5 years or you go to jail"... Happens to every single one of these figureheads, without any exceptions.
You know how I can tell you're an unserious? You're criticizing Fauci for doing exactly what you want -- staying a well-but-not-unfairly-paid civil servant for his entire career. If Fauci was going to cash out, he could have done so decades ago. He's been at the top for a long time.
Which, BTW, is FAR more common than not. The people you're describing are not the median or normal outcome.
I don't think you have thought seriously about your criticism here, and I don't think you're commenting on this issue in good faith.
Have a good Thanksgiving.
It's a voluntary trade-off for lower pay to work in the field you want.
There is a difference between churning out code you really hate for 500k/yr, and doing what you are interested in for 80/10/150k. The vast majority people in software aren't aching to reinvent the wheel, but in a new js framework every year, they just do it for the money.
Research grant money is still money, even if the academics decide to take a trade-off others don't.
How would you like to NEVER receive grant money again? Gonna bite the hand that feeds you?
LOL, no.
Industry is way better than academia on the qualitative stuff.
First, STEM PhDs who qualify for R1 faculty positions but who instead go into industry are not doing shit with javascript frameworks. What kind of insane company would waste such specific and highly developed skills on that kind of nonsense?
Second, people running wet labs aren't "doing what they want". They're doing contract work for funding agencies. In terms of both freedom and enjoyment, it's much closer to a mid-level manager body-shop position at Accenture than a "life of mind". FAANG IC life is luxurious by comparison.
My friends in academia are constantly tweaking/justifying what they work on. I do what I want, make 5x-10x more, and have way better resources/staff.
And that's all before giving a 2 hour lecture to 500 kids while wearing an N-95, then going home and giving the same lecture to another 200 kinds on zoom.
Some FAANGs even have a policy of hiring talent just to deny it to competition. Figure out what they'll do after you hire them, no real planning on that part.
However, the larger point remains: people in science labs for some reason stay in the lab. Why? Maybe they just like complaining or suffering? Maybe so, but if they want to - they can quit any time, but they for some reason remain.
I had a friend from Fermilab who left to do quant finance on wallst, only to return to physics because he found finance boring, even though very well paid. Much better paid than FAANG.
You just happen to like what you are working on at FAANG. Not everyone does, and plenty burn out and leave the field entirely.
That isn't what this article is about.
I thought the article actually did a real public service by moving the discussion beyond whether Covid did or didn't emerge from the Wuhan market. Because either way, it's much much more important to say, "how could we, in the future, prevent the scenario of a lab leak from happening."
It keeps the discussion focused on what's important.
The lab leak theor(y/ies) (is a/ are) "the hoofprints may have come from zebras" sort of situation - possible but not the most likely in absense of other evidence.
If those same people would have said things like "obviously, it's _possible_ it was leaked from a lab, we're going to work on finding that out and let you know what we find as we do. In the mean time, here's what we're going to do about the immediate problems we're facing..." and ended it there, there wouldn't have been any backlash. That's what going on now, and that's why this post (good or bad, I can't say, I can't access it) wasn't flagged into oblivion the second it hit the front page.
Does "polarized platforms" include the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Lancet?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-media-cal...
In this case, the malice explanation demands stupidity because it was released in their own city. Not sure what Hanlon would say about that.
> In this case, the malice explanation demands stupidity because it was released in their own city.
Lenin said that "if for the sake of Communism it is necessary for us to destroy 9/10ths of the people, we must not hesitate". Tito killed 1% of his country's population. Stalin killed or starved 20 million. Mao killed or starved 60 million. Pol Pot killed or starved 25% of his country's population.
When everyone thinks the other guy is responsible for something and no one really is, when promotion is mainly determined by office politics, when departments that should work together compete with each other, you get levels of stupidity that is difficult to achieve by an individual.
Government entities tend to be even worse. At least companies have a clear goal they can always refer to: profit. Governments follow the whims of the political ideas of the moment.
Now, the crux, whatever legislation you come up with, how does that apply to a foreign country?
-----------
> Now, the crux, whatever legislation you come up with, how does that apply to a foreign country?
Conceivably couldn't we do some kind of trade agreement/embargo on countries that don't follow a minimum level of disclosure/safety protocol? E.g. if country A is shown to have covered up a massive lab leak, we impose some kind of tariff on them for N days.
Obviously there are no easy solutions to problems like this, but I think that would be the place I start, because obviously US law doesn't really apply to places outside of the US; the only thing we could do (at least the only thing that I could think of) that's even close to punitive enforcement would be to apply leverage.
[1] "Opinions are like assholes; everyone's got one and most of them stink"
Imagine, if you will, a scenario where one country is manufacturing such a large percentage of products so that an embargo would cause massive disruptions to pretty much everyone everywhere. Now imagine that country being the suspect in a situation where the punishment is that very embargo. What do you do?
Either the lab leak was true and this was a self-inflicted wound, or it was highly suspicious and uselessly dangerous research, as it didn't help us stop the pandemic.
That's a ridiculous line of reasoning: legislation helps mitigate accidents all the time.
Pilots don't want their bird to fall out of the sky, and yet legislation around pilot training, practices and certification limited the number of accidents.
It sounds like you're claiming that removing the requirement for drivers licenses would not change the percentage of accidents per driver. Are you?
Probably so, but just like hollywood and guns.
they had to do new science to fingerprint strains based on the quantities of different populations in the samples vs. the bottles - an investigation the culprit himself was involved in. as they uncovered the flask responsible and the very limited number of people who could get their hands on it, the attacker killed himself.
The 'lab leak' is actually a bit of a misnomer. What they really mean is that it was created/modified/bred intentionally, versus just being discovered in some bat cave or whatever.
It's not the leaking per se that is what worries people--it's the idea that this has a human-created origin. It's an experiment or weapon which was accidentally leaked to the world.
I was originally dismissive of the "lab leak hypothesis", in no small part because of how quickly it got caught up in politics. I'm less so now, but I do think it's important to remember that when we ask "how likely is it that a novel coronavirus epidemic would start in a city that also has a laboratory working with novel coronaviruses and it just be a coincidence," the answer may be "not very" if the city with the laboratory is the size of, say, Frederick, Maryland (78,000), but "maybe more than you think" if it's the size of New York City (8.8M).
The lab leak idea bears further investigation, but "authorities have been too dismissive of that" shouldn't lead us to assume "well, it was obviously a lab leak."
I don’t know the answer, but it could well be that a significant fraction of the population of China (or the USA) lives in a city with such a lab, making it not too unlikely that the first patient will be found in such a city.
The answer is around 30 active sites that deal with threats as serious as the Wuhan facility. Of those, less than half work on viruses, and even fewer do GOF work.
So not that many.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#Biosafety_leve...
EDIT: and to address your implication, China has 2 such facilities, Wuhan and Harbin (a metro area of 10mn)
"Where the epidemic was first detected" and "Where the epidemic started" are not the same thing.
Especially given the relative prevalence of mild disease in COVID-19 cases.
That in itself is kind of scary though. It means a lab leak could happen silently and we may never correctly attribute it.
It tickles the part of human psychology that looks for threat agents, rather than just threats.
Lots of us here on the more analytical side might have trouble understanding that fully, especially if we relate to Fauci's early 2020 statements which more or less amount to "it doesn't really matter which plausible origin turns out to be the case, either way the task in front of us is to figure out how to mitigate the damage and address the virus."
It could have been a lab leak. It could have been (and now looks more likely to have been [0][1]) natural spillover from increasing contact with zoonotic reservoirs. What's the difference?
The answer to that question on a practical level is re-thinking safety protocols for related research (and perhaps a conversation about the risks of conducting viral research vs the risks of viral ignorance).
On a less practical level, though, the answer is that it prompts inhabiting a narrative where they key issue is human threat agents.
The irony is that many of the people who choose that as the most important thing to pay attention seem slower to consider how human threat agents might use that narrative.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/11/18/coronavirus... [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/why-many-scientists-...
No it's not! Reasonably minded persons consider this entirely plausible.
The way the conversation is being actively steered away from this topic is concerning.
> It could have been a lab leak. It could have been (and now looks more likely to have been [0][1]) natural spillover from increasing contact with zoonotic reservoirs. What's the difference?
There's a huge difference. Each scenario has different lessons to learn, culpability, etc.
I didn't say it was implausible. In fact, I have at least one sentence in my comment that acknowledges it is plausible to entertain. It doesn't appear to be plausible as a conclusion (see the two articles I linked, which do include sources who initially wanted to explore the lab leak theory), but it was plausible enough as a hypothesis.
What I said is that even if it is the truth, it evokes conspiracy-oriented thinking in a specific way, and elaborated on the dynamic.
> Each scenario has different lessons to learn, culpability, etc.
"Culpability" -- thank you for reinforcing my point about human threat agents. And also regarding "lessons to learn", or as I put it, managing risks in viral research vs the risks of not doing viral research... which of course is a conversation that goes on anyway.
Perspective matters. Yes, learning to not have it happen again is an ideal thing. However, from Fauci's point of view at the time and his role, the how/why absolutely didn't matter as he stated.
Not investigating, and hiding the truth is what gives room for conspiracies to grow.
Also how can we better understand and prevent pandemics whithout understanding where they come from. Wasn't the coronavirus research lab founded on that premise?
As such, one can either focus on generally being more prepared against volcano explosions, or focus on trying to find a person among volcano researchers and tourists who may have done something to tickle the volcano to explode.
I mean, it's sure also not a perfect analogy; but how I see it, focusing on preparedness and handling of a situation that does happen naturally from time to time for sure, sounds to me like a sensible choice to focus effort into. With that said, totally, if there's some possibility it might have been human-induced, it makes sense to try and track and prevent it in the future; thing is, me personally, and I would risk theorizing that also many other people, am strongly afraid of such approach too quickly and too easily turning into a witch-hunt, anti-XYZ propaganda, and stirring hate by unscrupulous people - with scapegoating seemingly socially much easier to turn towards, than tiresome and "boring" epidemologic preparedness and discipline.
It's remarkable how quickly they settled on bats and everything but this was misinformation that would get you banned from various american tech companies.
It's also remarkable how quickly they moved to shutdown many discussions. The lab leak only months earlier from Canada where a chinese national shipped viruses to wuhan. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/chinese-researcher-e...
There's no evidence of coronavirus being involved at all with the canadian lady, but they sure did call it conspiracy theory and shutdown talks quick.
Throw this in context of a pissing match with China and Canada. https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/26/china/meng-wanzhou-china-arri... and China in return arresting and putting Canada diplomats on death row.
I think lots of answers came along from fauci's emails. All of these are not coincidences and China is probably not the source of covid. Hence why there was such a quick reaction to blame china.
Blame Canada!
No where in the linked article does it say that Dr. Xiangguo Qiu shipped viruses to Wuhan.
NMLs lips have been sealed and there was never a reason given why they were dismissed. Going as far as saying that they were shipping viruses to wuhan is baseless speculation.
A more recent article from CBC had more up to date details than the article you linked: https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6090188
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/canadian-scientist-s...
>All of this has led to conspiracy theories linking the novel coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, Canada's microbiology lab, and the lab in Wuhan.
There's no evidence that coronavirus was involved with this lady.
>NMLs lips have been sealed and there was never a reason given why they were dismissed. Going as far as saying that they were shipping viruses to wuhan is baseless speculation.
Like, Wuhan is certainly involved. It's possible coronavirus was already at wuhan and they used these canadian viruses for the 'gain of function' stuff. Oh it's much better than that. Those government officials have outright defied orders requiring them to disclose this information. Even better, we all know how strong unions and such are. They came out originally fighting for this lady and then suddenly they stopped altogether. No fight at all.
And where did this lady go? She has been missing...
Even better? Early on in covid Indian universities looked at the covid make up and found that it wasn't a natural virus. A natural virus would have been spitting out many new variants early on. They made some predictions about where those gain of function points would have been from. But then the censors came along and shut them down.
Plausibility is a starting point, not an answer.
(1) Trump initially blamed COVID on China and the ethos of the left is that Trump isn't ever allowed to be right, and "resist" means unconditionally doing the opposite. So once Trump said it, half the country unplugged their brains.
(2) It's no fun to blame a lab in Wuhan when the left could instead blame DeSantis/Republicans/Unvaxxed.
(3) The US is kinda wimpy about a real fight over this, regardless of who is in office. Xi would tell Biden (or whoever) to pound sand if the US ever really tried investigating this and seeking some sort of retribution. Again, the path of least resistance is to stick one's head in the sand and find a convenient scapegoat like Joe Rogan or whatever.
(4) Too many people have already definitively declared it impossible so they're pot committed to their position even if it's wrong, no different than mask efficacy (zero). There have been a couple issues where one side went all-in so there's no reversal or even slight walking back because the repetitional risk is too high.
I'm not totally sure about 3, my guess is that we have collected far more useful intelligence that our agencies have released, but nothing sufficient to make a geopolitical claim about China, and the cost of being wrong with such an accusation is huge.
I always love when someone posts like one single "study" that almost always doesn't even qualify as amateur hour (eg data mining) and thinks it's some sort of mic drop, as if there aren't 25 disconfirming studies or data points for every one thing saying masks have even a faint amount of efficacy.
It's important to remember what some of the lab leak theories have said:
- that it is a engineered bioweapon
- that it is genetically altered to contain parts of HIV
- that it was intentionally released during the 2019 military games
Once in a camp it is difficult to accept nuance.
Trumpian tempests should remain in a teapot of their own, and lab leak theory should be discussed on its own merit. Xenophobia innuendos and "but Trump" dog whistles are unhelpful in sussing out the truth.
OTOH, I will tell you that I definitely look at what my daughter says with a far more critical eye than I do what my son says, because my daughter has a track record of lying and my son does not.
So whether you believe it or not depends entirely on you're prejudices. I'm prejudiced not to but others may feed differently.
And it makes absolutely no difference at all. You still need a vaccine, you still need lockdowns and quarantines and to manage your healthcare. And we should all be taking action on China whether it's incompetence (around food hygiene) or incompetence (around bio hazard management).
This is why I hate the whole Lab Leak thing. It's people "straining out a knat and swallowing a camel". It's a distraction and it unnecessarily complicates messaging and discussion that can be pretty vital.
So if it's lab leak, the problem isn't the US or Russia or Butan doing lab work. It's China doing lab work insecurely.
And if it's a food hygiene thing, it's not a world food hygiene thing, it's a Chinese food hygiene thing.
So the action here is to sanction the fuck out of China. And that is true whether it's lab leaked or zoonotic or any other unimaginable source.
What a weird assertion.
It would be perfectly testable in any democratic country. Set up an independent commission, give access to the lab's complete files, perform a lot of tests on samples held there. That's exactly what would happen. Opposition parties would be demonstrating non stop demanding answers.
Instead this is China, a communist dictatorship with, on top of that, a strong culture of never losing face. It's only untestable because of that, not for epistemological reasons.
Sounds untestable to me...
It's also kind of insane that Dasczak was a lead signatory to the "this is not a lab leak" opinion piece without disclosing a MAJOR conflict of interest. He should have stayed out of it.
1. Trump mismanaged the pandemic, this resulted in cognitive dissonance amongst his supporters. (they like him but their brain doesn't like the feeling that it was wrong)
2. A 'convenient' explanation to avoid this dissonance is COVID is a Chinese bio-weapon. They (big bad China) released COVID to make Trump look bad and to kill Americans.
3. Liberals, seeing through this, push back on this generally unsubstantiated claim (at the time and potentially even now) that COVID is a bio-weapon. In the eyes of most, Liberals have taken the side of 'COVID is a natural random mutation, not a lab leak'.
4. Now whether or not it's a lab leak or natural is a political game, where your team wins depending on where the facts finally lie (or if you can manufacture enough support for your 'side').
5. See: Rand Paul v Fauci in various senate hearings about gain-of-function research and funding for a Wuhan lab & generally liberals trying not to talk about it because it would be another example of them 'lying' in the eyes of conservatives (think 'masks don't help' but alllll over again).
Lately, I've been getting more comfortable with just saying "I don't know" for the latest controversial topic. It's not great for making small talk though.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/28/us/disease-outbreaks-coronavi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
I believe what you're describing is rather "the coordinated malevolent animal transmission theory".
Cover-up is the default mode of handling failure in an aspiring Communist state. When a major accident happens that can be covered up, it will be covered up.
The above mentioned Sverdlovsk outbreak was presented as natural as well: the official culprit was cough a wet market nearby cough. Took 13 years and the dissolution of USSR to admit the cover-up.
You mean the literal proposal to put furin cleavage sites on coronavirus collected in the wild, filed for a grant in 2018, which was rejected for being too dangerous. Also, SARS-Cov-2 is the only beta coronavirus with a furin cleavage site. And if you have ever been anywhere near academic grant process, you'll know that you use a previous grant to do the next grant work, as preliminary results.
So tell me it is just a coincidence that just after writing this grant proposal in 2018 to take coronavirus in the wild and putting furin cleavage sites on them, the first beta coronavirus with a furin cleavage site turns up in the same place right next to the lab, right after they moved their sister BSL-2 lab.
https://virological.org/t/tackling-rumors-of-a-suspicious-or...
Same thing happens with that ultrasound attack against US diplomates in Cuba, Hacker news users claim it was just grasshopers while more and more evidence mounts it was a Russian attack.
Perhaps you mean "less and less evidence"?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/11/18/coronavirus...
https://www.science.org/content/article/why-many-scientists-...
1) They include observation from figures who started open to the idea that the lab leak hypothesis was plausible enough to explore, but have concluded that it's unlikely (and explain why)
2) They are more recent
1) They do not explain way, Worobey just assumes that first patient was different person, with connection to wet market, while it is known that both WHO and China identified earlier patient without connection to the wet market. If you read long enough you will find that he is being criticized exactly for that assumptions without any proof.
2) Does not matter.
Because wildlife->human is a lot more plausible than that. Consider for instance a novel mutation that arises from [0], transmitted to humans and is coincidentally discovered near a lab that was researching this disease. Would that also be considered a 'lab leak'?
https://www.wbur.org/npr/1054224204/how-sars-cov-2-in-americ...