Book Review: “Viral” by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley
scottaaronson.blog
scottaaronson.blog
This is Alina Chan, one of the authors of the book.
Thank you very much for your thorough review of our book :)
On the Laos connection, I made a thread on Twitter to lay out the latest findings about virus samples being sent directly from Laos to Wuhan over several years: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1476231824267485190?s=20
I hope this is a good update on that point.
Happy new year!
Can I say, as someone also looking at this somewhat dispassionately, how upsetting it is that the discourse on this issue has shifted from "It was a lab leak!" (to which strong replies absolutely were "There's no evidence"), to "It might have been a lab leak", now to "People were unfairly treated on the internet for saying it was a lab leak".
I mean, it's been two years now, and there's still no evidence beyond the kind of circumstantial stuff detailed by Chan and Ridley (I have the book but haven't read it yet, though I've seen most of Chan's public posts on the subject so I'm pretty sure I know the arc of what's in it).
And it seems like everyone has basically conceded that. But instead of just admitting we'll never know with certainty (and that natural evolution remains the most probable origin), everyone wants to talk about meta stuff instead?
The “anti lab leak” position has always been 1) we don’t know, 2) it’s not the most important question right now, and 3) we probably will never know.
The people complaining about lack of nuance are proving their own inability/unwillingness to grapple with nuance.
That is absolutely not true. Don't you dare try to rewrite history. The anti-lab-leak position has included claims like "it's racist to say that china lab leaked the virus". At best, the "official" anti lab leak position has been framed by the lancet article. Go read that and tell us if that position is as neutral as you claim.
And again, the Lancet letter itself points to the then-current body of evidence, which people can contribute to or refute via their own publications (this is how science works).
They had no evidence either way but knew that they had a lot to lose, and fired everything they had.
People are discussing this hypothesis nonstop.
Holding an opinion contrary to an expert consensus isn't a state of persecution.
That's the way things are supposed to work. Maybe science is wrong sometimes, and people argue. And eventually we come to consensus.
I have to say: it sounds like you're the one on the pro-suppression side here (arguing that the Lancet shouldn't have published that letter). Am I wrong?
Everyone should be heard. Unfortunately the intent of that original letter was to pre-bias against opposing viewpoints, before they got to be heard.
Isn't that the same thing as saying the intent was "persuade" the reader? How is it different except in the sense that they managed to persuade people to believe something with which you disagreed?
One can’t have an honest investigation if one major avenue is shut down.
Are you really sure you aren't confusing controversy (the fact that an opinion can be a minority one with which most experts disagree) with suppression?
It’s like saying, after Snowden released his trove of documents, what government secret data collection? look, here’s what Snowden showed us, it’s not secret!
We need open discussion at all times not only after we “get permission”.
When we had the ricin incident in the 2000s people openly discussed the possibility of a lab insider being the source any it wasn’t censored by the media.
2. Facebook ham-fistedly censored conspiracy theory posts that the virus was man-made and later realized that they were also censoring actual lab leak discussion and fixed their policy.
3. Google turned off autocomplete because most of the autocompletions were crazy conspiracy theories. People could still search for whatever they wanted.
None of this stopped actual investigation of the lab leak hypothesis, which you claim could not have happened due to Facebook's actions.
Now for scientists there is no point discussing this without any concrete element. Sure, a lab leak or even an artificial origin of the virus are potential hypotheses but then people need to find evidence, and the more far-fetched the hypothesis the stronger the evidence needed before keeping mentioning it (or writing books...)
Currently I don't think there are any material element so the reasonable and scientific thing to do is to work on finding the origin of the virus and only then to discuss facts.
Lancet CORRESPONDENCE| VOLUME 395, ISSUE 10226, E42-E43, MARCH 07, 2020
We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Lancet CORRESPONDENCE| VOLUME 398, ISSUE 10309, P1402-1404, OCTOBER 16, 2021
The authors associated any alternative view with conspiracy theories by stating: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin”. The statement has imparted a silencing effect on the wider scientific debate, including among science journalists.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Edit: to add context: the authors of that letter didn’t disclose their conflicts of interest and mischaracterized the cited genomic research which hadn’t and still hasn’t found a wild match.
Daszak’s story began falling apart last November when the non-profit group US Right to Know published emails gathered through a freedom of information request that showed he had orchestrated the Lancet statement without disclosing that he was funding Shi Zhengli through grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Daszak’s credibility took a further hit this June when Sachs published an essay that called for an independent investigation of the pandemic’s origin and charged that both China and the NIH should be transparent about virus research, including “gain-of-function” studies that make viruses more transmissible and virulent.
I don't believe that there are any elements to support this claim at the present time. To keep bringing this claim up to 'discuss' it is therefore not scientific and might be considered FUD or conspiracy theory indeed.
Open research and science does not mean giving all claims equally. As said, the more extraordinary the claim the more solid the evidence. A claim backed by nothing has no place in publications. This is not "suppression". In fact, what you've quoted shows the opposite: the claim is pushed by dubious means.
When the establishment media and big tech puts forth extreme concerted effort in using whatever underhanded techniques it can to attempt to slander and undermine you and your ideas, calling you every name in the book, associating you with "undesirable" groups of people, putting "debunked" labels next to the things you say, de-platforms, cancels, the whole nine yards... and its followers lap up that behavior, and engage in it themselves on discussion websites and social media, and even in real life, but you can still technically talk about it on the far corners of the web or if you're in a group of people you're sure think like you think, sorry but that is absolutely 100% still a form of censorship.
The lab leak theory was never treated by the establishment as "a minority opinion with which most experts disagree", it was ridiculed and attacked, thereby effectively changing much of the public psyche against it. The damage was done. The government doesn't have to force a website to delete a post mentioning the lab leak theory in order for something to be considered censorship. Otherwise you're playing the semantics game - and losing at it.
> One can’t have an honest investigation if one major avenue is shut down.
The problem is that to my understanding the lab-leak discussion was (and still somewhat is) dominated by raving mad conspiracy lunatics[1] or instances trying to inflict racism. I fully admit that someone should seriously research that hypothesis (I fully assume there are some serious folks doing just that), but it is also difficult to blame media trying to keep the raving mad in check, even if some sensible arguments are thrown with the bathwater. (Besides, I am not sure if public discussion has anything substantial to add before there is some conclusion on the matter)
[1] As this is somewhat heated discussion, I think I need to emphasize that I definitely do not imply that all who doubt lab-leak are raving mad. If you think I do, please breathe and read again.
I don’t see where the media deserves a pass.
I think if it was a clear-cut case of manipulation screwup, and that some people in China know today for sure that it was, we'll know eventually when we care less. If nobody, even close to the lab in China, knows for sure, then we probably won't investigate more just in case we'd discover with horror we killed all these people.
Hey Alina! Welcome to HN!
I hope you will stick around and spend some time here with us. This is hands down the best online community I've ever seen in my life.
In particular, the early flood of 'data' about potential links to pangolins and a supposed bat-pangolin cross-breeding event, which was discredited pretty quickly, indicated that someone was trying to muddy the waters. Past natural outbreaks involving these kinds of cross-species jumps (MERS and camels for example) had a a long-term natural history, they didn't just appear wholly formed out of the blue, and the natural reservoirs were quickly identified[1, 2]
[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/middle-east...
[2] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/20/8/14-0596_article
The failure to identify any such natural source of the virus within six months despite intensive searches really put the Wuhan lab leak theory back on the front burner, and the fact that the Lancet and Nature op-eds proclaiming a 'natural source' were organized by those linked to providing U.S. funding to the Wuhan lab was another huge red flag. When it became clear that the funds sent to Wuhan were intended to continue a branch of research (gain-of-function with respiratory viral pathogens) that the U.S. government had severely restricted in 2014[3], well...
[3] https://www.science.org/content/article/us-halts-funding-new...
Clearly both some elements of the US government's academic funding wing and of the Chinese government have a deeply vested interest in not allowing an open and independent inquiry into the actual source of the pandemic. This only encourages future similar outbreaks - as it really seems that there may be literally hundreds of wild-type animal viruses that can be turned into human pathogens by selective modification of their cell-surface-protein binding capabilities via techniques such as CRISPR etc. International bans on this kind of research (including an inspection regime as with nuclear non-proliferation treaties) really make sense.
We have had to look for the reservoir animal for Ebola for decades before having a viable candidate. On that scale six months is a very short time.
Sticking to Ebola for the moment: even though there were major suspicions that a species of bat was responsible for Ebola it took a very long time to identify which species and how Ebola managed to transit the continent and to pop up in different places.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71226-0
Reservoir animals can be very hard to determine with certainty. Note also that the reservoir animal itself need not have been present in the wet market for this to have worked, it is enough that a pig or some other suitable amplifier host got infected which then passed it to humans. In that case too, you'd see a small number of animals, possibly even a single individual, carry live virus. And given the nature of the wet markets you can be pretty sure that any such evidence was erased before COVID even had a name.
Until there is hard evidence for a lab leak I will chalk it up to a possibility, but a remote one. And if and when the reservoir animal is found I'm sure that too will be discounted by the proponents of the lab leak theory, who seem to have their bullet-proof fix already in the works: in that case the claim is that the virus was first sampled from an individual of the reservoir animal species and moved to the lab from where it leaked.
So we likely will never see the end of that, but that doesn't mean that any of it is true. Which is a problem with many conspiracy theories, they tend to be inherently un-falsifiable which allows them to stick around forever. The way in which one of the authors of the book effortlessly integrated new knowledge that invalidated the premise of the book into an altered version of the same - instead of admitting they got it wrong - is a very nice example of that.
Even if covid didn't come from a lab, we clearly possess the technology.
The cherry on top is that we're still actively working on said technology.
We have collectively and silently learned that we have the technology to end the world, and no one is really shocked by it.
This is far worse than nukes because M.A.D. doesn't apply, and it's not resource constrained. Viruses can come from anywhere and be enhanced with the right equipment and knowledge, which probably isn't all that expensive.
Why the hell aren't we shutting these labs down, or at the very least this type of research?
So, what should we do if the local chapter of the Aryan Nation or whatever bad actor we choose to discuss were to go on a bioterrorism campaign? What could we do if we had not capability to test, evaluate and develop counters for these agents? These labs are where the folks that understand these agents come from.
We have supplies of smallpox vaccine ready to go in the event of an attack.
I don’t think we actually have the Spanish flu in a lab somewhere in reproducible form. Supposedly H1N1/swine flu is descended from it, but most people have protection against severe disease now from vaccination or a previous H1N1 infection.
If someone releases a new SARS-CoV-3 that’s been engineered to be as good a killer as MERS or SARS1 while retaining the transmission characteristics of covid-19 we could be in trouble, same if someone did it with a different virus family we don’t have some immunity to already.
Bird flu could be a good example here. It is an excellent human-killer but luckily doesn’t transmit well.
To imagine you are "preparing" for a possible outcome, by realizing that exact outcome (as this pandemic may demonstrate), is like training the fire department by burning down Chicago.
Except that that also might be the most reasonable serious answer... What else do you do when a country continues to develop an extremely dangerous weapon?
Effort and diligence can work, even if it's at odds with our nature.
With all the modern biotech tools, it's now possible to swap out the cell-surface binding domain from any virus with one that matches a human cell-surface receptor protein, which is how the viral particle gains access to the cell's interior. Cellular interiors seem more highly conserved across species, i.e. it appears that once you breach the outer defenses, the rest of the viral package can replicate within the cell without being constrained so much by inter-species differences. The ribosomal machinery will build just about anything in other words.
Hence the 'gain-of-function' game, which proponents justify as 'finding the potentially dangerous mutations before they arise naturally' is just creating novel pathogenic viruses with a high chance of escape from the labs where they're being created. This kind of research was temporarily banned in 2014 in the USA, but then that ban was lifted in 2017, all with little public discussion.
A permanent international ban on this kind of research, including an inspection and monitoring regime, is likely the only long-term solution that will work.
They were storing coronavirus samples from all over the world here, it could have been a contamination accident, yet still a "lab leak"
We've always known humans do dangerous things, the takeaway is that you need safety procedures to mitigate risk.
The scandal that needs to be addressed is the dangerous experiments being done in BSL2 conditions and every country deciding their own tolerance for safety.
These are internationally supported and funded projects. There is no excuse for the stakeholders not to be on the same page about safety procedures.
MKUltra, for example. Other human experimentation.
What if a physicist discovered the math to create black holes and wanted to test it; could any theoretical benefit be worth the known risk? Maybe it can be justified if the experiment is done in deep space, far from earth. Perhaps the same is true of gain of function, it should be studied on a moon facility instead of in or near a densely populated city?
On the other hand, the highest form of safety is not doing it in the first place, which happens to be cheap compared to a moon base.
After going down a long rabbit hole I lean towards non lab leak, but if we can’t ask questions because of politicization of ideas we are done.
There’s no reason to assume such support based on the “flaming liberal” designation, so asking the question can only be interpreted as some form of accusation or implication that such a relationship does exist.
I was questioning the relationship between the two parts of that sentence, that’s all.
And again I ask: how does being a liberal and supporting the investigation of the lab leak hypothesis have any connection to supporting CCP behavior?
The only possible conclusion I can draw is that you’re implying those liberals who don’t think lab leak should be discussed are somehow implicitly supporting the CCP, but this does not logically follow either.
Where are the vaccines or medicine invented by this facility?
I can understand storing and analyzing the viruses. Yet gain of function is basically bioweapon research. How is this even allowed when it breaks bioweapon conventions?
Also isnt the famous wet market in Wuhan like 300 yards from the Chinese center for disease and control building? (Not to be confused with other buildings in same town).
Keep in mind research done there was an international effort. Some things being strongly funded and supported mostly be other countries.
It looks that China was collecting viruses (what makes a lot of sense) + also cooking some biological weapons on the side. They didnt call it "biological weapon production", they called it "gain of function research", but it is still the same thing.
USA paid some money to be able to access this data (makes sense, the more data you have, the better) + probably they wanted to spy on the Chinese to see what is happening. Unfortunately they send people such as Daszak, who in my opinion looks like a Chinese double-agent, or someone bribed by China to be their mouth-piece.
Still we are moving away from the discussion: this "research" is basically against Biological Research Convention ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention ). And yes, I know that Russia signed the convention but does not abide it - they manufacture lots of biological weapons. But it is another problem.
Are you an authority on the subject or are you making an unfalsifiable claim?
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/D961/production/...
I too think the evidence in this particular virus comes down on the side of a natural origin, but the a priori denial of the possibility (and need for investigation) of a lab leak early in the pandemic was really unjustified. In fairness, the right wing demands to sanction (or even attack) China certainly didn't help things.
The people that keep pushing that angle are usually not in this for the science but to stoke the fire.
You also ignore all circumstantial human behaviour around this, like China being completely unwilling to cooperate in any way in the investigation. Why? Surely if it was definitely a spillover they would cooperate because it’s not exactly their fault?
Hard evidence is required for exceptional cases, especially when culpability is involved. Whereas the 'natural' way may simply not have left enough evidence at all to be able to trace it.
Imagine a scientist not being curious about HIV in its early days because of homophobia (it was definitely a thing but the right people ignored it). Maybe the analogy isn't perfect ... I didn't want to open a can of worms but hopefully you get my point :)
When an asteroid appears from out of nowhere right near the Wuhan Black Hole and on course to kill us all, head scientist DiCaprio dedicates himself to leading the effort to label anyone questioning the natural origins of the asteroid's planet-killing trajectory a conspiracy theorist, and almost everyone goes along and gets those people banned from the internet. The end.
>"In our view, development of this asteroid-deflection technology would be premature. Given twentieth-century history and present global politics, it is hard to imagine guarantees against eventual misuse of an asteroid deflection system commensurate with the dangers such a system poses. Those who argue that it would be prudent to prevent catastrophic impacts with annual probabilities of 10^-5 would surely recognize the prudence of preventing more probable catastrophes of comparable magnitude from misuse of potentially apocalyptic technology."
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1038/368501a0 ("Dangers of Asteroid Deflection", Carl Sagan & Steven Ostro)
He also talked about this in his book Pale Blue Dot around the same time. He found it darkly ironic, I think. Technologies like spaceflight and nuclear power and advanced biology are necessary for the long-term survival of the human species. Yet presently, it seems they are more likely to be misapplied and destroy us.
The groupthink around the lab leak hypothesis, and especially that letter signed by scientists in the early days of the pandemic, has done a lot of damage. The problem is that is isn't just this topic. About a dozen other topics have become minefields of politics and mind control masquerading as science. We only see the idiocy of this approach in the case of the lab leak because the consensus has crumbled.
Hopefully, this won't be the last wall to fall under its own weight.
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. ... We declare no competing interests.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
They later published an "Addendum: competing interests and the origins of SARS-CoV-2" in June 2021:
Peter Daszak has expanded on his disclosure statements for three pieces relating to COVID-19 that he co-authored or contributed to in The Lancet—the February, 2020, Correspondence, as well as a Commission Statement and a Comment for the Lancet COVID-19 Commission.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Because they are trying to avoid getting lynched?
However there are times when people find it so unusual that they see it as weakness and instead of admitting their own wrong, try to capitalise on an opprtunity (perceived weakness).
One exception though is playing chess online, where my ego is yet to be mastered.
Admitting this fallacy would be too much to expect from political partisans. The guy is not a very stable genius, but he's not always 100% wrong either.
Carrot Top?
More "shockingly", some perceived in certain circles that an amount of "odd actors" acted to throw gasoline on every spark, enticing savage gut reactions. Another blow to civilization, opinion benders encouraging towards the dismissal of clean evaluation, mining the pillar that after "He said we walk using feet!!!" the response should be "Actually, ", not "Boo!".
I know that my thinking and behavior has benefited from the small subset of people who have been willing to do so publicly in the past.
I was just at a gathering the other day where a woman couldn't comprehend that the lab in Wuhan is a joint venture with US public resources, US private sector resources, Chinese resources, and personnel from both countries and others, which includes Dr. Fauci.
She had, until that point, mostly been enamored by Dr. Fauci and mostly been quite angry at Wuhan as a general disavowal of the CCP.
There is nothing to conclude from any of that observation alone, aside from noticing gaps in US federal oversight. Many people will just spiral into some other rabbit hole since nuance isn't their strongsuit. We still have to react to the pandemic whether that bolsters a lab leak hypothesis, or leads to a smoking gun, or not.
The CCP is not very responsible if they know and hide it or if they don't and refuse to look, but to their defense, it's also because it will be used and reused to their detriment (possibly deserved) if proven. Having a sound diplomatic strategy would have maybe helped convince them otherwise, but it was apparently more interesting to ALSO play down the virus in the U.S. for whatever reason and make absolutely clear that China would pay a dear price for it. So hard to blame China :s
I'm done with "hot takes".
Yes, we need rapid responses during a crisis.
Also yes, there will be both good and bad consequences to every action, or inaction.
But ffs give the dust time to settle before doing the after action analysis.
--
I mostly blame the popular medias for boosting and accelerating the human tendency for fear, outrage, blame. Knowing this about ourselves, that crap has to be toned down.
Writing this now, I guess I'm just repeating the "thinking, fast and slow" critique.
This is a great justification for anon accounts -- both "primary anon-only" users and also fully- or semi- anon alts for people who have thoughts like this (which, in my opinion, ought to be every smart intellectual who doesn't make the Culture War their primary stomping ground).
Blaming a lack of courage is all well and good after the tides have turned, but courage is slim comfort when the eye of sauron turns on you. You will not feel much better for martyring yourself in service of the beliefs you hold with about-as-much-confidence as Scott expresses here -- and you'd be wise not to do so.
If you must put something down in writing that you know has the potential to cause political heat to fall on your shoulders, and it's not something core to your life's work, it's perfectly fine to either a) use a semi-anon alt or b) write in a circumspect manner. Preferably both.
Anonymity is a thin shield to hide behind, so I say "semi-anon" in support of the idea that, though the anonymity may be imperfect and the identity may be tied to your own, it can clearly be shown as a vehicle to express thoughts you are less sure of, or that you wish to distance yourself from somewhat.
I say all this will the empathy & sympathy of a fellow online writer, though with only a tiny fraction of Scott's reach...
This is the reason I use an anon account but there are still problems on HN. I apologize if I cause some trouble here on HN, but the flagging aspects of HN beyond rude/spam comments (which is what I suspect it is designed for) does a disservice to the community. My comments about inflation were flagged in March 2021 despite of being cordial and respectful. I trusted the scientists and the intellectual community, but I similarly saw some Lab Leak theory comments being flagged on HN. Vouching is a great feature, but not many people know it since it requires a couple of prerequisites - enough karma + settings to show flagged comments.
I hope we restrain ourselves to flagging behavior on HN. It also enrages people for trying to be reasonable, but contrarian, and seeing their comments disappear. Now, they're resolute and firmly dug into their contrarian views even if they were false.
So, if HN has these issues, the outside world is even worse. Try the same on Twitter and hard echo chambers form (blocking/etc). I am not engaged on Twitter or Reddit, but I occassionally observe this.
My 2 cents.
The best solution I've seen are Reddit AMAs where mods verify a semi-anon's credentials (e.g. "Mod has confirmed that ___ is an employee at the NIH.")
Like many informal groups, it's difficult to judge the composition of the whole when you might be seeing just the actions of the very active few. You'll notice certain topics tend to provoke flagging and downvoting wildly out of proportion with the nature of the comments, and I believe this is because those have particular user interest groups with very ahem strong opinions. You may have also noticed how your comments tend to do quite well when they're new, but somehow pick up a basket of downvotes hours after the post has fallen off the front page. I believe these to be due to a population of generic haters crawling over every post downvoting large numbers of comments.
Huh. This has me thinking about https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1241551327743770624 and https://www.kalzumeus.com/2020/04/21/japan-coronavirus/ and wondering how things went with that experiment.
Does humanity deserve people like that to walk amongst us, or do we deserve to just get a society where we have no freedom even over our bodies?
After covid i think humanity sucks. We have easily been put into two camps, arguing with eachother. The divide and conquer strategy always works it seems. Like idiots we are not seeing the bigger picture of who profits and benefits from the change society now is transforming into.
Is any information trustworthy? Shouldn’t it all be verified or interrogated or seen as a particular observation at a particular point in time?
If someone is not even willing to put their name on something, there is no way to even attempt to trace it.
I think that we have a responsibility to speak out on matters we believe in and ignore negative pushback.
The alternative is that anyone can shut down a viewpoint by simply flooding the opposite side. You don't know whether a poster is a troll, a real person that's simply misguided, or a real person that posts in good faith.
You don't even end up with what's merely emotionally satisfying - that would be bad enough - but with the set of events or opinion that wins out purely based on competition.
You can try, but new "fact checking" norms will ensure unpopular (especially politically unpopular) opinions get censored on social media before anyone sees them
I find it amusing that people use "getting news from Facebook" as a slur. It's stupid, but for entirely the opposite reason that they think it is.
I remember seeing a cool SEM micrograph of a violin at the ~10um scale at one meme site, but I'm having trouble finding it now...
It's really not hard to identify stuff that makes no sense at all, and having to manually filter through that stuff is worth it if it means being able to form a model of the world that's actually correct as opposed to simply being what the most powerful entities want.
Brain damaged space lizard believers aren't doing scientific research, as an obvious example.
I would prefer to read you thoughts in areas you have experience in rather your random believes, as a non political example I don't care about your option on Linux init systems if you are not a system administrator, distro maintainer or somehow that is more then a random Linux distro user, same with programming languages opinion, I don't care about your anti-X pro-Y opinion if you have zero experience on X and Y but your opinion is just because your hero blogger/developer/youtuber hates X and likes Y.
For sure there are topics where you have experience with and you can share that and there are topics where everyone has same level of experience and we can all give our opinion.
By contrast, to give a recent and poignant example, the idea that e.g. _only_ a Harvard epidemiologist or equivalent should speak out on coronavirus restrictions is absurd.
They might have more precise data about specific models, but in the general case they don't know more about the impacts restrictions will have on anything else, they don't have a representative opinion on what an acceptable risk reward balance is, and it's also likely that they have personal bias due to their family and friends (as we all do).
The slightest counterpoint to this supposedly suppressed lab leak theory is downvoted, flagged, and the community congratulates itself on its paradoxical unity-in-contrarianness. Before our very eyes!
Just asking questions — and saying what people really think — has long been a profitable grift. It’s sobering to see how different audiences succumb to it so acutely.
It’s now acceptable to discuss it, but such was not the case early on. Hence the claims of censorship.
While certainly more plausible than 9/11 conspiracy theories, the lab-leak proponents have the same tendency to put forth several mutually incompatible theories, while believing each has a strong amount of evidence for it.
“The results, which are not peer reviewed, have been posted on the preprint server Research Square.”
Sounds like very lazy “journalism” to me.
How would a disease from a bat from Laos make it to Wuhan? It still could be from the WIV!
- Opening the records about which viruses the WIV was storing. It's not a mystery — labs track that kind of thing! But China refused to release any data about which viruses the WIV stored or modified.
- Finding a clear chain of infection between a natural source and the outbreak in Wuhan
- Finding clear evidence that there was a small outbreak which later spread to Wuhan
Nobody has managed any of those.
And the study on Laos bats is clearly undergoing peer-review: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-871965/v1
https://www.bmartin.cc/dissent/documents/AIDS/River/Prospect...
I think it's important to understand the writer's past history on an analogous subject, as it points to his motivations. I think letting you know he also previously argued about the benefits of global warming "nourishing the oceans", https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/now-heres-the-good-news-o... , points to the type of arguments this person likes to make.
I agree the stuff about his failed bank is irrelevant.
The article you link is a very well written boon review which summarizes the arguments of the book. Ridley's review concludes that the theory that aids was transferred to humans through large-scale experimental vaccinations with vaccines made out of chimp liver is a theory worth further investigation.
This is GOOD SCIENCE. You analyze data and put forward theory. I can't speak to the merits of the theory or the book being reviewed, but why would it discredit Ridley if he reads and reviews critical books and is open to exploring alternative theories?
For example, I think it is extremely relevant and valid to point out Daszek's clear conflict of interest when he put out his original letter.
In this case, the fact that the writer has promoted other theories (importantly, theories analogous to the one under discussion) I consider completely crackpot certainly makes me look at the data here with a more skeptical eye.
More importantly, there are plenty of other researchers who I consider much more credible who have raised loud alarms about the chance of a lab leak (e.g. Zeynep Tufekci's excellent analysis here, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.h... ). The fact that I can look at one piece of writing with a more critical eye based on the author's history of insincerity does not mean I discount more credible researchers making similar arguments.
Also, his coauthor on the current book has impeccable credentials as perhaps the leading honest broker in the field, so these comments feel a bit like looking for a weak flank to attack.
I would invite you to think about that a little longer.
1. It is, in principle, good thinking to keep multiple competing hypotheses in mind, and allow each new piece of information you get to adjust your level of credence in each one, rather than picking one to Believe and Disbelieving all the others.
2. It is, in practice, a common sort of bad thinking to treat a bundle of mutually incompatible theories as a single thing, and to handwavily treat any bit of information that supports any of them as supporting the whole bundle, even when what the information actually does is to support some bits and undermine others.
And also
3. It is also a common sort of bad thinking to adjust one's beliefs not on the basis of looking concretely at how likely a new piece of information is if each of your multiple competing hypotheses is true, but on the basis of vague notions of what feels as if it supports what.
I take the New Republic review to be mostly accusing Chan & Ridley of doing 2 and 3 in the guise of 1. I haven't read their book and can't tell how fair that accusation is.
Similarly, the following are both true.
1'. It is, in principle, good thinking to adjust the hypotheses you're considering in the light of new evidence, which may promote new hypotheses or new variants of old hypotheses to consideration.
2'. It is, in practice, a common sort of bad thinking to respond to criticism of your beliefs by moving the goalposts: you say A1, someone says "but P!", you adjust to A2 which is compatible with P, someone says "but Q!", you adjust to A3 which is compatible with Q, and at that point you don't check whether it's also compatible with P, so you confuse "at each step I had a version of my beliefs that was nicely compatible with the evidence presented to me" with "there is a version of my beliefs that is simultaneously compatible with all the evidence".
And also
3'. Adjusting your hypotheses in the light of new evidence can lead to problems akin to overfitting in machine learning, where you find something that fits very nicely with the specific bits of evidence you looked at but not with the other evidence that's out there, because you optimized it to fit as well as possible with those specific bits of evidence.
I take the New Republic review to be accusing Chan & Ridley of doing 2' and 3' in the guise of 1'. Again, since I haven't read their book it's not clear how fair the accusation is.
What I would like to see is something that lays out a few specific hypotheses (SARS-CoV-2 deliberately engineered with malicious purposes; SARS-CoV-2 deliberately engineered for study with the goal of understanding/preventing/mitigating future pandemics; SARS-CoV-2 found naturally in bats or something but brought into contact with humans via the WIV; SARS-CoV-2 found naturally in bats or something and brought into contact with humans via the Wuhan wet market; maybe a couple more) and then goes through the available evidence trying to assess what each piece of evidence does to each hypothesis, noting where better versions of the hypotheses are suggested by the evidence and then either assessing those better versions against other evidence or just presenting them as "suggested by the available evidence but now in need of further verification or refutation as new evidence comes in".
It doesn't seem to me, from either the Aaronson review or the NR review, as if the Chan & Ridley book does anything much like that. (To a good approximation, no one ever does anything much like that, and it's a pity.)
I wonder if the authors discuss the evolution of the virus since it was first leaked/mutated. For example , eventhough it is believed, as the authors say, furin cleavage is a key to the virus' transmissibility, a computational study of the Omicron variant suggests the furin cleavage site has evolved for less efficient replication of the virus[1] (but still more transmissible due to immunity escape).
beyond the flashy politics, the lab leak hypothesis is terrifying as it means that someone can create a worldwide crisis by doing relatively well understood modifications to existing viruses, and the world is clearly not prepared for such biodefense attacks. We should be talking about the day-after covid and what measures we need to prevent such rapid worldwide spread of pathogens.
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.472704v1....
Scientists have been able to create viruses in a lab for some time now, e.g. it's pretty well-known how to create smallpox from scratch. None of this is new. The point is, as the pandemic has shown, it makes a really lousy bioweapon when the whole world gets infected. Even if you're a psycho and your goal is total world destruction, a pandemic still sucks for your goals because a comparatively teeny percentage of people actually die.
I used to look at politics as some “side effect” of humans working together when in fact it’s just a necessary component.
Politics is simply leadership, persuasion, communication, debate all wrapped up together. It’s neither good nor bad, but just a necessary component to large groups of humans working together.
There's still room for curiosity. We don't have to focus exclusively on who gains or loses power in every interaction.
To put another way: "de-politicize" simply means "don't discuss in the public realm".
The response to it have to be political too.
The enemies of science have agency too.
I fail to see how being more reasonable is a winning strategy when the opponents are determined to be unreasonable.
Simply "try harder" hasn't worked. Better messaging, better framing, active listening, empathy, patience, yadda, yadda.
I'm totally on board with any and all ideas for mooting the efforts of those who actively politicize these things.
I don't believe this is a civilisational-wide mistake -- more so an issue with a handful of relatively small (by population) countries trying to leverage this event.
Civilisation obviously extends way beyond those, say the 5% of the planet's population that live in the USA for example, but certainly there's some lessons to be learned here.
This logic does not convince me. If it did come from lab leak, there are lots of things the scientific community need to do to themselves to prevent the next lab leak from happening. It's defenitely not the same as a zoonotic spillover. Scientists are not wild animals, they can regulate themselves.
If the virus did leak from one of the two Wuhan labs, at least these actions need to be taken:
* All the Chinese labs doing this kind of research need to be seriously examined by the international community
* All the bio research funding from the western countries to China labs need to be stopped and only can be restarted with serious conditions met
In many safety contexts, the strong possibility of an accident is often considered as the failure - not just the accident itself.
I beleive author means that 1918 Spanish flu, with death toll of 25m to 50m according to different sources, is something no on living today has a memory of.
But smallpox death toll in XX century was about 300m, and there are a lot of people alive with memories of it.
Could have be been classified as an endemic disease in many areas and not a pandemic.
It's really over time that they subpoenaed Daszak and acquired and published all records from EcoHealth. I realize that would be annoying for them but really with millions dead the right to know what went on should take priority.
>HJS Virtual Event: "Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19" Streamed live on Dec 13, 2021
To call this book 'one of the most important books so far of the twenty-first century' is preposterous.
https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-760/
A memorable quote is this: When you mix science with politics, you get politics.
The people who did the phase 1 report were amongst the best in their fields and did a good faith effort. Unfortunately people did not like their boring conclusion and prefer politics and speculation instead.
True and Daszak has been more guilty of that than most.