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.