I’m not convinced by the new lab leak debunking
slowboring.com
slowboring.com
This, I think, is the crux of our problem. Almost anyone who knows enough about the field to have an informed opinion, is involved enough to have an incentive to convince the world that it was not their profession, that unleashed this. Scientists are human, not demons but also not angels. It would be hard to convince yourself, that your profession was responsible for this. We should listen to what they have to say, but not expect them to be dispassionate and unbiased investigators of the question.
A weaponized strain would be designed deliberately to be indistinguishable from a natural origin, so there will be no proving that without documents or a confession. An incidental genesis would be an intentional chimera, produced just for research, that got loose. An accidental genesis would be very like a natural origin, but just in lab animals based on strains handled in the lab, maybe even mixed with a natural strain brought in by accident, even incubated unbeknownst in a lab employee.
Personally, I doubt we will ever know more than we do now. All four are possible, all four should be guarded against in the future. But guarding against weaponized viruses is arbitrarily hard. Russia probably still has casks of weaponized smallpox stored underground somewhere. US and China, too, possibly.
To me, the "strength" of the covid-19 is evidence of successful lab experiments, not a fluke contagion. As the pandemic variants showed, natural evolution of viruses tend toward being less lethal. So why did Sars-Cov-2 start overpowered and get weaker?
As viruses can make the jump from one species to another, then it should not be hard to imagine how easy it would be to engineer that same outcome; that is all "gain of function" experiments do: try to emulate a pipeline for viral mutation.
That virulence (contagiousness) is also evidence though. Yes, an airborne respiratory viruses needs to be more contagious than other types, and a more contagious virus needs to be less deadly, or natural selection is going to do its thing (people die before spreading it). Sars-COV-2 was LESS contagious and more deadly than a typical respiratory virus. That is called evidence.
Smallpox was overwhelmingly more deadly, and its spread was not limited, even without airborne transmission. Measles was also overwhelmingly more deadly, did rely on airborne transmission, and afflicted us century in and century out.
Research into viral function, absent military intent, has no reason to experiment with making the infection more deadly. The primary research goal is to discover what may affect virulence, and try to anticipate and understand what may occur naturally, and then discover ways to block those.
As plane crashes have gotten rarer, the ability of the government (in the US, anyway) to maintain in-house expertise sufficient for the job, has declined, I think not coincidentally. Not sure what the solution is for airlines, but in any case for virus outbreaks we have (fortunately) too few cases to maintain an independent profession of investigators (I hope I am not naive in saying this).
Can they all claim, and prove, to be free of foreign influences and allegiance?
One aspect mentioned was that all the virology labs doing dangerous research would be moved outside of big cities. Then they concluded that such an act would be a terrible thing to do, since no virologist would want to work and live in the middle of nowhere.
So the science doesn't trust The Science?
So pathologists and virologists see reality as a default high risk of pandemic, with an optional managed risk of high-BSL research labs near population centers. And that total risk is dominated by the former.
But the general public doesn't react well when you run around screaming "Nature is constantly dreaming up better ways to kill us! And the latest creation might hitch a ride out of the forest any day now!" Which leads to some odd pro/con weighing in the public debate.
Experimenting with deadly viruses in a major population center is like testing in production if your an AWS or Azure engineer. You might not care too much if it doesn't work, but your screwing over everyone else for your convenience if something does go wrong.
Covid was a warning. But scientists are going to ignore that and the science? And we're going to make excuses for that?
What could go wrong?
In which case, all of that is predicating on this actually being a lab leak.
But there is no "bury head in sand" option. Eventually something as transmissible and much more lethal is going to spread. At that point, it's too late. The reason SARS-CoV-2 had a vaccine a year later is because of previous work in exactly these sorts of facilities.
BSL labs are the safest places on the planet to work on dangerous pathogens. They aren't perfect. We should continually work to make them more perfect, and fund them to be so. But they're already multiple orders of magnitude more secure biologically than the alternates.
Any country on the planet can work with any dangerous pathogens they can get ahold of. In any way they want. You can only set standards, contribute foreign aid to fund improvement, and try to improve the safety level of the global community.
The "lab leak possibility means we shouldn't do lab research" argument feels like the suggestion that after Nagasaki the world should have abandoned nuclear weapons and ceased research.
In which case, we'd be living under the flag of whichever country ignored that and pursued it anyway.
They get to choose.
So you end up with the CDC in Atlanta or Ft. Detrick 50 miles away from Washington, DC. If you said "We're only going to do BSL-4 work at Enewetak," then a lot of work simply wouldn't get done, either because of logistical challenges or because no one wants to relocate there.
And on a personal note, as someone who's lived < 5 miles away from a BSL-4 lab, I slept like a baby. I knew that if the worst happened, from the environment outside the lab or the lab itself, the nearest ICU and associated institutions were staffed by some of the best infectious disease experts on the planet.
Meanwhile we have coal power plants in the cities spewing out harmful particulates, gases and even radiation and people percieving them as safe because they live next to them.
> After 16 years of irregular service, the plant was closed permanently in 1992 by its operator, Portland General Electric (PGE),[3] after cracks were discovered in the steam-generator tubing. Decommissioning and demolition of the plant began the following year and was largely completed in 2006
> The Trojan steam generators were designed to last the life of the plant, but it was only four years before premature cracking of the steam tubes was observed.[citation needed] In October 1979, the plant was shut down through the end of the year for repairs.[14][15][16] The plant had an extended shutdown in 1984, with difficulty restarting.
> In December 1992, documents were leaked from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission showing that staff scientists believed that Trojan might be unsafe to operate.[26] In early January 1993, PGE chief executive Ken Harrison announced the company would not try to restart Trojan
> In 2005, the reactor vessel and other radioactive equipment were removed from the Trojan plant, encased in concrete foam, shrink-wrapped, and transported intact by barge along the Columbia River to Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, where it was buried in a pit and covered with 45 feet (14 m) of gravel, which made it the first commercial reactor to be moved and buried whole.[31] It was awaiting transport to the Yucca Mountain Repository until that project was canceled in 2009.
Emphasis on small. Not a true secret; fully regulated and licensed. But they didn't talk about it!
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/kodak-reve...
"...it came pre-loaded with nearly 1.5kg of uranium enriched up to a level of 93.4 per cent, which is just about right for an atomic warhead."
I think it is about 10-15km from center of Moscow.
https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...
or at least, more recent than Chernobyl?
> the death toll of history’s two nuclear disasters we have added the death rate that Markandya and Wilkinson (2007) estimated for occupational deaths, most from milling and mining. Their published rate is 0.022 deaths per TWh.
> The sum of these three data points gives us a death rate of 0.07 deaths per TWh. We might consider this an upper estimate.
> For example, included in this database were deaths related to an incident where from a water tank ruptured during a construction test at a solar factory. It’s not clear whether these supply chain deaths should or shouldn’t be attributed as a death from solar technologies.
Deaths: Nuclear 0.07 vs Solar 0.02.
Greenhouse gasses: Nuclear 3 tonnes vs Solar 5 tonnes
Here's one from 2012[1] where they breakdown nuclear deaths to include Chernobyl and Fukushima and remove those (i.e. electricity). Nuclear wins by a lot.
Or a 2014 study[2] showing nuclear beating solar rooftop (note, concentrated solar is a lot safer than rooftop. Concentrated is actually safer than nuclear but the death rates are so small I'm not sure why we're arguing over them).
There's plenty of sources showing nuclear's death rates are roughly the same as solar, wind, and hydro. All of which are 2 orders of magnitude below biomass and natural gas and 3 below coal and oil. Similarly also 2-3 orders of magnitude less than coal, natural gas, and oil (1 magnitude less than hydro).
These discussions are absurd. We just end up sitting here quibbling over a small tradeoff between emissions and deaths (a very difficult thing to measure) while we just keep producing gas, oil, and coal. Pick your battles. When we have a clean grid we can quibble over these numbers because at that point they will be significant. But at this time they aren't even close. If you want to complain about the cost of nuclear, sure, that's a fair and honest discussion we can have. But there is no evidence to suggest that nuclear isn't safe and green. This is very concerning when it represents 50% of the zero carbon emission energy in the US.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/rates-for-each-energy-so...
I've picked my battle and I've picked a winner. solar has been giving me more power than I know what to do with for years. More than 10% of my suburb has rooftop, there are 3 small grid arrays within 100k, and a 10gw plant being built down the highway that will produce enough untapped energy to kickstart new manufacturing.
> More than 10% of my suburb has rooftop, there are 3 small grid arrays within 100k
Great! I'm not anti-solar. Nor is anyone I know that is pro-nuclear. We tend to also be pro-renewables. It is just that nuclear shouldn't be taken off the table when we're facing a crisis.
I mean, this is a solved problem in many fields. In medicine, for example, the way you convince good doctors and nurses to work in rural hospitals is to pay them a lot more.
It doesn’t have to be a negative thing but I do understand that getting pushed out of all urban areas in a hostile NIMBY culture we’ve developed could very well limit the field in many ways.
Or 90% do and 10% want to shut down the thing depressing their property values. The problem is that 10% votes and shows up to city council meetings.
>> http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/7/richland-wash...
The idea that postdoc researchers are on the whole a bunch of hipster urbanites is laughable.
Many people got lost many year of life but don’t even know it.
The fact that it affect heart muscle that have almost no regenerative capacity is chilling.
You will never, ever keep people safe from something by plugging your ears and pretending it doesn't exist.
The fact that viruses can cause so much damage is exactly why we need even more research into dangerous viruses, not less.
Isn't this line of thinking going to create a dangerous feedback loop?
Scientists experiment to create the deadliest virus yet, this virus leaks (because part of being very dangerous is being very contagious), killing many, shutting down our life as we know it for years.
And what did we learn from it? We need more research, we need to experiment and create even more dangerous viruses, because it can cause so much damage?
Then repeat?
That's not going to end well (but I'm afraid that will happen).
^-- found the bugAll nukes should be decommissioned, and all countries should be open to independent inspectors. (I will never happen, but it _should_). This week, of all weeks, this should be clear.
Not staying ahead of the curve just means someone else will.
It doesn't help that any nuclear plant can make a "dirty bomb" btw, which is one more reason to be anti-nuclear. No nukes, no nuke weapons. Not a bad tradeoff all by itself. (And yes, such bans can be enforced, look no further than Iran's difficulty getting nuclear power going).
The Non-Proliferation Treaty is still a thing, and the US still plays ball with it.
Arms limitation treaties were an important thing until the US scrapped the ABM Treaty in 2002, followed almost immediately by Russia dumping START II, which is the closest real thing I can think of to what you said, differing in the kind of treaty involved and the decade the wheels came off.
It is perfectly accurate to say that they did so (and that it was a direct response to the US withdrawing from the ABM Treaty.)
> NATO's "nuclear sharing" makes a mockery of NPT
NATO’s nuclear sharing agreements predate the NPT, and no new ones have been entered since the NPT, and the continuation of the existing ones is consistent with the NPT.
Now it's too late for this crisis (and possibly humanity) but we must demand NPTs if/when this crisis is resolved.
yes please.
yes of course all nuclear WMD states (not just the biggest) need to abandon this losing game.
The good news is the rest of us have called time: https://banmonitor.org/tpnw-status
so far.
Current events point to a possible future that remembers covid as a footnote to the events this year.
That is what it looks like whem you run of straws to grasp in order to maintain your favorite theory...
And they don't have to cover up a lab leak, nearly all of them are not involved in any lab leak to cover up, most may just be unwilling to believe that it could've been a leak for personal convenience.
I imagine that might be helpful in making it more likely that an outbreak could be contained, but I wonder by how much. If I understand correctly the Pirbright Institute in England has a history of leaks, and is believed to have caused the 2007 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. The lab is situated far from cities, but that didn't stop the outbreak. [0]
(Of course, as foot-and-mouth disease affects livestock, rather than people, I imagine that putting the lab in a city might actually have been better in that particular case.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...
This seems... like a naive read of the "political context." It seems like there is far more interest in finding a useful target for blame than any real discussion of how to keep research like that safe, which will likely happen in approximately the same scale whether this WAS a lab leak or not, if only because the specter of it being one has done quite a lot to scare people.
There would also be notoriety for the person that would blow the lid off a lab leak. There are plenty of other industries that have eaten there own.
2007: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-foodmarket-idUSHKG2...
2012: https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2012/12/wet-markets-in-china-...
2013: https://qz.com/141596/chinese-bats-carry-viruses-primed-to-c...
2017: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/china-ground-z...
I was more aware of this danger and I guess the lab leak theory sounds more like a sci-fi plot to me before the pandemic.
I have reflected upon it, and decided I don't care. Anyway, animals would be the last on the list of things to help if I decided to act truly ethically. It feels nice to pretend you're ethically superior though, posting photos of vegan food with an iPhone, so I won't blame anyone for it.
Meat as a staple food is literally not genocide, because an actual animal genocide would literally lead to famine. Making silly comparisons like this doesn't make your position sound reasonable.
Maybe you want to call meat eating a moral crime, and you can make that argument, but you keep pulling in these tangential human-centric concepts like "war" and "genocide" in an attempt to make the normalized meat diet seem as morally perverse as possible, but I think the hyperbole is doing the opposite. If your position is the rational one, you shouldn't come across as irrational.
The argument that there are groups of food animals that constitute peoples in the sense used in the definition of genocide and that destroying them as a people is a necessary instrumental method to meat production is...not obvious.
So with the exception of gain-of-function research, it's not that it's worse exactly, but it's finally put "do we really need to be taking so many risks?" under the spotlight.
If the lab leak hypothesis proves to be true US research funded by NIH may be the cause.
There was a virus, they knew there was a virus. They held a massive party with the virus, it got out to the world. Then they locked down.
https://www.thestar.com.my/news/regional/2020/02/06/wuhan-ne...
This is the (well documented and well known) event that should be the focus of ire towards the authorities in China.
For civil or criminal convictions, the "innocent unless proven guilty" (for various standards of guilty) applies. For safety regulations making, in general "better safe than sorry" is the standard that needs to apply.
Whenever any group feels threatened with regulations that will cause them inconvenience or cost (eg. In this case Move research centers out of urban areas, stricter interpretation of which BSL standards apply to what research - virologists have said on record they were doing a lot of Coronavirus research in levels 2 or 3), there will be push back and an attempt to conflate the standards of civil/criminal conviction (ie. You can't prove X caused Y) with standards of policy making due to self-interest. You see the same sorts of issues with self regulation in the Finance industry, in the aircraft manufacture industry which predictably also led to crises.
Those have to be over-ridden at a soceital level which happened to various degrees after the 2008 crises in Finance and the 737 Max crises in Boeing/FAA.
In other words, in this particular case, whether we can find out what actually happened (very unlikely given so many intersecting conflicts of interest) really doesn't change the key points of what needs to happen going forward.
I think this badly misses the point. Nobody who uncritically promotes lab leak theories is saying 'scientific hubris must be tempered by civic responsibility!' or the like. They'are using it to argue that China launched a bioweapon upon the world, or unscrupulous deep state bureaucrats/freemasons/illuminati did it to cover up the nefarious goings on of this or that politicians etc. etc.
For those people, it's not a medical/scientific ethics & society debate centered around a spirited but civil disagreement between various nerds about the risk calculus. It's a political football thrown about with the goal of breaking as many windows as possible. To ignore this is to consign oneself to the role of a pawn.
We seem to be sorely lacking in elder statesmen/graybeard type figures who are willing to step into a muddied discourse and create a reasoned discussion from the insanity. There’s obviously a huge demand for such figures (see: the early days of Fauci) but we’re only getting grifters, blatantly political operatives, and those with huge conflicts of interest.
No, it reflects badly on your profession if you don't do your job properly. And I bet most scientists and virologosts understand this.
But since the author will never actually be held to account for being wrong, and certainly isn't putting any money where his mouth is, here we are.
They do gain of function research, breeding deadlier viruses, and then what? Do they use this to pre-develop vaccines?
For example, we already knew that the spike protein was critical in reproduction of the covid-19 virus, whereas we might not have known as much about that if we had no virology labs (I'm not an expert in the field, I might be wrong here).
But, for any particular line of research, your question is still a valid one. Is this particular research likely to have a payoff worth the (inevitably non-zero) risk? The issue is how (and who) to make that decision.
Is that the case?
‘…SIGNIFICANT factual error in my newsletter.’
‘…we knew specifically that RaTG13 samples had been brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and studied there.
That is not the case for this Laos virus.
To me that discovery really does meaningfully detract from the plausibility of the lab leak story and I apologize — I simply missed this when it came out and failed to update my views.‘
https://mobile.twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1499467534202...
I chalk this up to that; he’s seeing how interested people are, he wants to talk about it, but his most interesting take is marginally conspiratorial.
My reaction to this is, “Oh, Matt…” and moving on. I hope this doesn’t become his norm, and I really think he’s too grounded generally.
Source (Nov 2021, not sure if my info is out of date): https://twitter.com/mattwridley/status/1462659372421718019
Which would mean that the article's argument stands, stronger.
- @mattyglesias posts this article on slowboring
- @angie_rasmussen posts some pretty thoughtful responses [1].
- @MichaelWorobey posts some more responses specifically with regard to the fact that there are A/B lineages [2].
- @mattyglesias publicly apologies [3] and says, and I quote:
To me that discovery really does meaningfully detract from the plausibility
of the lab leak story and I apologize — I simply missed this when it came
out and failed to update my views.
So you know, you can take what you want from this, but it's pretty clear to me that this is click-bait.
A good actor would update the article with the new information... but he hasn't done that, so we can only presume he's acting in completely bad faith with his apology, and is bluntly, just peddling conspiracy theories for page views.
[1] - https://mobile.twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1499406198...
[2] - https://mobile.twitter.com/MichaelWorobey/status/14999693883...
[3] - https://mobile.twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1499465032547...
That point has been carefully argued by other people.
What I’m saying is that when you’re wrong (and he was) and you apologise (and he did) then don’t leave your (wrong) article up there encouraging other people to take up the same (wrong) views that you previously had.
That’s acting in bad faith.
I don’t care what you believe; believe whatever you think is appropriate.
…but he said that he thinks that his own article is wrong.
If you think that the article is right under those circumstances, perhaps consider:
You’re being suckered by a lazy click bait article.
(Not convinced? Actually go and read those Twitter threads I posted. It’s pretty damning. Wtf, “the NYT made this diagram that shows…” <— nope, that was from the paper, he was just being lazy and didn’t read it before writing an article about it. It’s just click bait to rile people up and get page views with random plausible but unsubstantiated crap)
> They said they found no support for an alternate theory that the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.
No support? Really? Not just "weak" support, but not a single shred of support whatsoever? So it's just a hoax?
There's a long article going into what would be otherwise some very strange and implausible coincidences [1] surrounding the issue for those curious. Surely unbiased research into the topic would deem these to be worthy of at least some cursory mentions (and ideally, some debunking)?
Moreover, this might be an interesting read:
In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet. [...] During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory. [2]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
- 4 refused to say what they believed likely, because they couldn’t decide between a lab leak and natural origins;
- 4 weakly assessed a natural origin, but didn’t rule out a lab leak;
- 1 moderately assessed a lab leak, but didn’t rule out natural origin.
This report was before a number of studies that led to more support for the lab leak — eg, the patented gene being the only genetic difference between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13.
You don’t have to believe it, but surely you can’t say that there’s zero evidence supporting a lab leak.
If China is so positive that they are not the origin they would have opened up for an investigation in 2020. But it’s 2022 and it hasn’t happened and it’s too late.
I doubt it. I think it's just a standard Chinese reaction to refuse international oversight and they would do this regardless of the truth. So there's not much of a conclusion to be taken from this.
by itself there is nothing to debunk, it is a fact, the statement existed before, now it is down. That clearly warrants an explanation.
i feel like the word coincidence is abused like the way the word conspiracy is abused, to shut down the conversation. The circumstances of these two events together absolutely are relevant to any lab leak investigation.
Now calculate the probability that a virus would happen to naturally mutate in a wet market next to a virology research facility.
A lab leak has the highest probability of being true. It takes a mountain of evidence to overcome that very simple probability calculation.
"Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."
Ex: Supposing they recover the old database from the WIV and they found the SARS-CoV-2 sequence in there, and notes that described it as the result of an ongoing project. It's still possible that the exact same sequence occurred naturally and leaked to humans that way. It could be a coincidence that the sequence is exactly the same.
It seems that the difference between this and the other coincidences is merely a question of orders of magnitude of likelihood. Otherwise it's the same sort of thing. Therefore, the coincidences so far stated are tantamount to weak evidence.
Yes? No?
Something I think is plausible is that they've figures out a technique for controlling the narrative in the internet age where they take the range of opinions in a group with positions they don't like, identify a really wild one, debunk it, then tar the whole group with that opinion. I'm not thinking any particular group, although I'm guessing it is deployed against literally all political protests. The technique really needs a well known name.
I doubt that is happening for lab-leak stuff since nobody is making money off it (and if the Chinese government cares they can just restrict access to info). But it is really interesting to note how difficult it was to restart the conversation once the lab leak theory was "debunked", so I'm sure the technical people who want to control the narrative took note. It was a nice clear example of how the dynamics come together.
The weak-man fallacy: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...
There exist for everyone a hypothetical black man on a spectrum from Ice Cube in "Are We There Yet" to Ice Cube in "Straight outta Compton". If you see this hypothetical person coming towards you, you will feel uncomfortable because your reptile brain wants you keep you alive.
Everyone's lived experience is different. Everyone is entitled to a version of Ice Cube that scares them and the freedom to not associate with the people who they don't trust. Everyone is entitled to think a self-diagnosed mental disorder is disgusting and steals light from the actually afflicted.
Most opinions are not based on "lived experiences", but journalism and movies. They will select the pattern for you.
We still need to remind the lemming that pattern recognition isn't the boogieman that pop culture makes it out to be.
Modern journalists are used to observing social media to determine and reinforce trends. When something won't trend on twitter or propagate on FB because those platforms have added it to their hardcoded lists of 'topics that will never trend even if literally half the userbase tweets the hashtag' it's almost impossible to get the media to pay attention to it.
exactly. "5G causes covid" "5G transmits signals to nano-carbon transmitters delivered through vaccines to mind-control the vaccinated" et al. were this to any far more reasonable criticism of 5G technology—now any such criticism is lumped in with these wacky, now-"debunked" claims.
Think peaceful protestors refusing to condemn violence in their protests.
The Roenxi Fallacy :)
Even Moderna's CEO Stephane Bancel does not discount it and say's "it's possible" after researchers found a genetic sequence in SARS-CoV-2 virus which was patented by Moderna three years prior to pandemic. [6]
[1] https://prometheusshrugged.substack.com/
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353547700_SARS-CoV-...
[3] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRASTIC
Two of them at least have research profiles, but their fields of expertise are in microbiology and nitrogen fixation, which have very little to do with virology or pathology. Their primary mode of publication also seems to be ArXiV and ResearchGate, which doesn't go through peer review, so there is no good way to verify their findings.
Calling these people researchers would be equivalent to calling your average software developer a physicist.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=LLlFfdUAAAAJ...
[2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=YWuJkRsAAAAJ...
I see this as a sign that they're more trustworthy. This is a poor situation to be in and not really something we can productively argue about.
Trust should be the most important priority for any scientist (or any person really, but that's another issue).
I've got a much higher relative trust in underwater basketweaving PHD's than virologist PHD's commenting on the lab leak.
This assumption, if accepted, creates a sort of a ethical-logical problem where a class of experts cannot be criticized by those outside of the field, leading to an inherent conflict of interest in issues where the nature of the problem are the practices of those in the field. If everyone in the field is doing problematic thing A, but the only people who can evaluate whether A is problematic, there's no way to change the field.
It's basically like not only letting criminals be police and judges of their crimes, but forbidding anyone who isn't a criminal be police or judge.
I'm not saying virologists are criminals, or even that the lab leak theory is correct, but it's the same ethical dilemma, which is what people are pointing to here. It's also not unique to COVID; it shows up in other issues, especially those surrounding medical practice.
In society we have to prioritize the substance of argument or criticism above credentials; otherwise it leads to lack of transparency. There always has to be an outside overseer.
Some things are too complex for non-experts. It would be like a front-end web developer writing articles about how cryptography is flawed. Who are you going to believe if all the cryptographers disagree?
Tangential questions:
- Does the natural presence of a patented genetic sequence nullify the patent?
- If not, can a company that doesn't hold or pay for the patent 'copy' the naturally occurring genetic sequence and not be liable for patent infringement?
- Whether or not it occurred naturally, does the fact that it's "out there" in such a large way, not nullify the patent so much, but nullify the chances of being liable for patent infringement?
The patents protect the usage of gene sequences in particular ways, usually in genetic engineering ways. You can’t patent a gene from a cow and say nobody can breed cows any more, of course that’s silly.
Take a cell line (e. coli, a yeast, some animal cell line), combine together the target gene, a few boilerplate add-ons specific to the host cell, and send it off to get manufactured. A first prototype can be engineered in an afternoon. Then somebody patents it, the same thing from every species they can think of, and nobody gets to do that same thing for decades.
The process being so low effort and obvious these days is the core of the problem with patentability. "I put X gene into Y, and it worked" can be done for so many X and Y and anybody with, say, a graduate degree in the appropriate field can do it quite quickly.
Take a biologic developed for cancer treatment for example. A tremendous amount of work goes into determining what gene does useful work, and Much more work goes into showing that it is safe and effective for treating disease.
I generally agree that simply reproducing a gene found in nature should not be patentable. However, most genetic patents are more specific and take a different form. Instead of "put X gene into Y", they are use "X gene, to make Y protein, to treat Z".
Figuring out what protein can treat Z, is an invention, takes hard work, and should be rewarded.
Legally speaking, just putting X gene into Y, isn't patentable because it fails the non-obviousness test. Doing something new with known methods to yield predictable results is not valid.
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1499465032547061767?...
It does not change anything - because no one knows what viri were in the lab. And "China" refuses to share any data about it e. g. the missing virus database.
“The evidence really does show pretty clearly that there were one or more superspreader events at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. I just don’t think that’s really what the lab leak debate is about; it’s about why there was a superspreader event at the market. Did an infected animal pass it to people there or did a person who got infected at the lab pass it to people there?”
I like Matt Yglesias, I think his Very Serious work is usually at least interesting, and I find some of his trollish witticisms very appealing. But I think you've hit the nail on the head; he creates a sort of Poe's Law situation around his own work because of them.
In this case I think he's overreaching a little.
But then I also think the lab leak theory was discredited and avoided partly from well-meaning applications of the wrong reasons, because even if you make a serious review of it as a professional accident, the Wrong People will definitely like and share your work for their own awful/vile/violent reasons. And nobody wants to be part of that.
How the hell is that unique either in "MSM" or online media? He basically just described Gawker, BoingBoing, DailyKos, and a slew of other "hot take" sites. In terms of traditional media, every city has the garbage tabloid-level paper.
Is Running the New Smoking?
I wouldn't blindly adopt a Slow Boring headline as my own opinion because Matt Said It, but I wouldn't do that for any other opinion-haver either.
I'd rather have a well-argued contrarian take that the author doesn't really believe, than a badly-argued one that the author genuinely believes.
I don't have a strong opinion about him as a journalist in general because I'm not intimately familiar with most of his work, but I found this particular article kind of underwhelming. It reads as a direct extension of the title, Breaking News: Local Man Feels Unconvinced About COVID Origins... like, okay? It comes across a bit navel-gazing to frame a "News" piece as an update on one's personal opinion, especially considering doing so provides the author cover to say "Well I was just riffing!" later if he happens to be conclusively disproved.
> These papers fill in some interesting details about the early outbreak at the market in Wuhan where the epidemic was first identified, but they don’t identify an intermediate host species that caught the virus from bats and then spread it to humans. Nor do they identify a precursor virus in a population of wild bats that lives near Wuhan or near farms supplying the Wuhan market. They show that the virus was introduced to the market at some point, but that could have been by humans who got the bug at a lab.
> And so we’re left with the exact same dueling origin theories: it would be an odd coincidence for a lab-leaked virus to have its first big super-spreading event at a live animal market, but it would also be an odd coincidence for a devastating zoonotic coronavirus plague to occur in a city that happened to host a lab doing research on coronaviruses. It’s a genuinely weird situation.
> And that is the Covid-19 origin puzzle in a nutshell: how did a bat virus from a cave in Yunnan end up hundreds of miles away in Wuhan?
...
> It’s thanks to the hard work and diligent efforts of those WIV researchers that we know about Bat RaTG13. But this work also offers an explanation for how a bat virus could have traveled 700 miles from rural Yunnan to Wuhan: it was transported years ago by virus researchers.
> So did the virus travel from Yunnan to Hubei a second time in an unrelated voyage, this time bound for the seafood market rather than the virus lab? Or did it travel from the lab to the market?
> [...] the evidence is all consistent with the theory that a human got the virus at the lab, brought it to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and triggered a super-spreading event at the market (potentially infecting raccoon dogs along with humans).
And not just are they still stonewalling https://theintercept.com/2022/02/20/nih-coronavirus-research... but the person in charge of the ecohealth alliance project in question is the leading source for any "debunking" of the lab leak hypothesis. Peter Daszak. Who also lead the WHO mission into figuring out the origins in China.
This is a conflict of interests. Something Daszak has experience with, when he didnt disclose his in the first lancet paper painting lab leak as racist conspiracies. A paper he orchestrated and a conflict of interest the Lancet later acknowledged.
There is an unwillingness to have a rational conversation about the likelihood of the furin cleavage site mutation occurring naturally with no trace in nature vs it escaping from a lab where we know such modifications were made to coronaviruses. Simply because Daszak said a lab leak was impossible and Fauci (Whos NiH funded the project) denied that Daszaks work was even gain of function research. And that has been enough for 2 years.
edit: They have had the possibility for two years to actually debunk this by simply releasing what sequence project was working on. Its a publicly funded project btw. They havent and they apparently wont.
Back in the beginning of the pandemic, no animals at the wet market had tested positive and we were told that it was just in the humans at the market. They were seeing COVID on surfaces at the market at that time, but had opposite conclusions.
> A number of early cases of the outbreak in Wuhan were tied to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. *Later*, researchers took environmental samples that suggested the virus had landed on surfaces in the market. But in the period since, tissue samples from the market's animals have revealed no trace of the virus. For the virus to jump from animals to humans, the animals have to actually be carrying it.
>"None of the animals tested positive. So since January, this has not actually been particularly conclusive. But this has developed into a narrative," he said. Carlson said his colleagues in China have been careful and precise in their work, publishing data according to international regulations that any scientist anywhere in the world can examine, and that strongly supports the conclusion that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market wasn't the source of the virus.
https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-did-not-start-at-wuhan-...
So I just believe what makes sense to me. I'm probably wrong as often as right, but that would be true if I tried to make sense out of today's news too.
We ran into trouble at some point with critical thinking. I believe prosperity and comfort for three generations in the West may have led to this type of thing by default, unfortunately. To flip it around...you can also make an argument that PR and propaganda itself has led to prosperity and comfort. Or at least it was something to do that filled time and created some cool apps and fashions. Which is awesome until you realize you're not safe from war.
How does any amount of critical thinking get around this, assuming it is true? If you hear the same bit of news a dozen different ways from many outlets, it must be true? If all media is propaganda, you can't trust anything that you have not experienced personally.
I'll use the Postman questions, because they apply to every piece of media, which is always at its base a technology:
1. “What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?”
2. “Whose problem is it?”
3. “Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?”
4. “What new problems might be created because we have solved this problem?”
5. “What sort of people and institutions might acquire special economic and political power because of technological change?”
6. “What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies, and what is being gained and lost by such changes?”
You can ask these questions about every Wall Street Journal or New York Times article or opinion piece - or Vox or The Verge, wherever. It's not always a clean answer to each question, but the consideration itself is important. What is this person's argument, and how may this person or institution sponsoring this argument benefit from presenting this information this way? And it's not a "wing" thing - these questions need to be asked about your favorite writers and thinkers as well.
I’m more worried about democracy than I am about a seeming decline in critical thinking skills. The latter is more than likely just a flawed perception created by the internet giving the masses a voice they’ve never had before. As for the former: the very fact we perceive “our critical thinking skills” to be in decline based on the musings of the masses is evidence of the perils of democracy.
i believe what makes sense to me. thank you for writing this out. we have built a system that incentivizes all the wrong things. or leaves people engaging in those with no clear consequences for their actions, which reinforces their behavior.
i am not too optimistic about online discourse at this point.
In March 2020, it was natural for people to leap to conclusions, because the only thing anyone knew about the coronavirus was that it "came from" a Wuhan market with weird animals.
Weird is socially relative. You eat pigs and pat dogs. Billions of people think that's weird and a bit gross. Fair enough, seeing how many diseases people have caught from them. Animals can carry germs that are dangerous to people. Wash your hands after you touch them.
Objectively, a wet market is just a slaughterhouse. Here's what, in 2022, you should deduce from the fact that the first large coronavirus outbreak occurred in a slaughterhouse: coronavirus outbreaks occur in slaughterhouses. Obviously some animal carried the virus to the Wuhan market. It's very likely that animal was human, because of all the species there, only humans are known to catch the virus. Even if you found an infected pangolin, you'd have to suspect it caught the virus from its handlers.
1. Pigs and dogs frequently transmit diseases to humans.
2. SARS-CoV-2 was "very likely" carried to the Wuhan market by humans, since only humans are "known" to catch the virus among species present at the market.
I don't understand why you are so confident in #2 given #1? If animals frequently transmit diseases to humans, why would we assume this did not happen in the Wuhan market case? Have all species present at the market been exhaustively tested and proven not to contract or transmit the virus? That would be news to me. All I know is it's been reported that many species traded at the market are known to harbor coronaviruses.
And what exactly is your theory of the origin? Surely the virus came from somewhere, and didn't just suddenly appear in humans without a source?
Well people with little connection to Asia got corona, heck almost everyone across the world got corona and Asia, particularly wuhan's wet market has the first documented cases. So someone not connected to Asia making a big fuss is ok
This would ignore the fact that testers would over-sample points of interest. If you got some positive tests in some location, you concentrate your probing there. You would need to also display the probing density.
Unfortunately I cannot see all of the article, it's not ideal that pay-to-read articles are posted here.
> A specific infected animal at the South China Seafood Market
Won't ever happen now because they sterilized the market as a containment action almost immediately. With SARS-CoV-1 the virus wasn't as virulent and researchers were able to study it at the market where the pandemic originated. By acting fast to try to contain it, they erased any evidence of it.
> An intermediate reservoir population in Hubei who were infected with a close relative of SARS-CoV-2 (pangolins were initially suspected but never confirmed)
Any animal now observed to have SARS-CoV-2 in mainland China will have a high probability that humans gave the virus to it. That makes it difficult to track down which species was the intermediate animal without a time machine.
> And that is the Covid-19 origin puzzle in a nutshell: how did a bat virus from a cave in Yunnan end up hundreds of miles away in Wuhan?
Same problem with SARS-CoV-1 where the closest related bat virus is WIV1 which was isolated in 2013 (ten years after that outbreak) from bats in Hubei but which wound up causing an outbreak in wet markets about 700 miles away in Guangdong.
RaTG13 is also separated by several decades of evolution from SARS-Cov-2, you can't close that gap with any experiment in a lab without a massive serial passage experiment through many millions of animals.
And the really problematic issue for the lab leak theory is that it looks like Lineage A and B were separate spillover events of different variants.
> But you could also draw a map focused on the human cases that would have shown a cluster in the other corner. And certainly the evidence is all consistent with the theory that a human got the virus at the lab, brought it to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and triggered a super-spreading event at the market (potentially infecting raccoon dogs along with humans).
> ...the boring truth is that we don’t know where Covid-19 came from, we probably aren’t going to find out, and very little of consequence actually hinges on the answer. [emphasis mine]
> Of course, politically it’s a big deal. The case for stricter supervision of virus-related lab ...
Pandemics caused by new infectious diseases were a ~regular thing long before humans had labs studying viruses. Experts familiar with coronaviruses had been sounding alarm bells since the SARS outbreak of 2002-2003. It's d*mn obvious that local government officials in China completely botched the initial response, then a huge number of other government officials botched their own responses, all over the world.
The endless arguments about "who's at fault" for COVID-19...my biggest take-away from them is that the world is really disfunctional, and there's minimal interest in making the future any better.
Happily for me, I'm rather old, and probably won't be around for most of really bad years that the average HN'er will have to live through.
A good explanation for this that "used" (and thus infected) lab animals were sold at the market. Anyone who has ever been to China would not be surprised by this happening.
Not really if the market is literally next door. The infected lab worker goes over to do their after work shopping for a few days in a row and you've got your outbreak.
Its worth reading about the Smallpox outbreak in the UK, where it was being studied in a university building with poor security. These things aren't secure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbreak_in_the_...
One short rebuttal I found particularly understandable to a layperson comes from a prominent economist (not a virologist), pointing out a few considerations that Matt’s piece appears to give insufficient credence to:
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/case-closed-2/
There’s also the twitter thread by one of the original research article coauthors, but I actually found that harder to evaluate as a layperson.
In particular: 1. Matts piece may overweight how much of a coincidence the virus emerging in Wuhan was if it were zoonotic 2. Matt’s piece may underweight the coincidence of emerging at a live animal market if it were a lab leak 3. Matt’s piece underweights the finding that the market hosted both the original A and B variants
1. Study immune boosting drugs in bats.
2. Take bat corona virus and 'predict' how it can become infectious to humans by incubating it in humanized tissues until it thrives in them, and if that is insufficient directly modifying it to insert a human-specific furin cleavage into the viruses genetic code for the spike protein (as this is an already known barrier to human infectiousness).
3. Inoculate wild bats against human infectious corona viruses by administering drugs to boost their immune system and exposing them to the viruses developed in the prior phase.
Sars-cov-2's primary functional difference from its nearest known wild ancestor is exactly the cleavage proposed in defuse. However, defuse proposed studying a different wild virus than the ancestor of sars-cov-2. The nearest known wild ancestor of sars-cov-2 is the virus the same researchers were working with immediately before the project proposal for defuse.
DARPA had declined to fund the project, with the view that it violated the US government moratorium on funding gain-of-function research ( https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/301... ). NIH has taken the view that this project was not gain-of-function research because the particular virus they were experimenting on could already infect humans (just not particularly well) and because they were directed to pause research and report if they found a ten fold increase in infectivity (the researchers seemingly failed to do so, but did eventually report when they hit a 10,000 fold increase in apparent viral load).
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop...
The two new preprint papers (“The Huanan market was the epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 emergence” and “SARS-CoV-2 emergence very likely resulted from at least two zoonotic events”), only trace back to December 2019. Why no go back further? Considering the "unknown" virus stated even in November and possibly October.
There was a real covid lab leak in Taiwan by the way https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/taiwan-investigates-covid-lab... No one actually caught it off the researcher that time.
I still dont know why every report are pin-pointing at the December Date. I thought it is rather misleading.
[1] https://www.hongkongpost.hk/en/about_us/whats_new/notices/in...
>doctors in Wuhan said that unless pneumonia cases were linked to the Huanan market, they did not meet Wuhan Municipal Health Commission standards and were often not reported or counted.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/149956665134336000...
I've always considered that a reasonable and boring explanation for the source, and I've seen no reason to update that point of view.
Just because someone lies all the time, doesn't mean you don't INVESTIGATE them when something happens and they are implicated in the deaths of millions of people. Their failure to cooperate in investigation is a black mark against them regardless of how many other black marks they have. Is that so hard to grok?
But I can see how legitimate research can be made to look like weapons research and vice versa, so I have no idea how one would go about with either proving or disproving it.
Uh, no it's not a coincidence at all. It was doing coronavirus research because SARS-1 was known to have jumped from bats to humans in China and Wuhan had a lot of bats near human population. China (and everybody else) had spent decades on high alert for another bat-born coronavirus variant and it was considered a very likely source of the next pandemic. So, they dedicated a ton of resources to studying exactly that. It would be like expressing shock at the coincidence of war breaking out in the exact spot where two opposing armies have been pointing guns at each other for 20 years.
You can't have a war without two opposing armies. So places where war breaks out are limited to only locations with two opposing armies in position. You might have, say, 5 such places in the world, but a war starts in only one of them. The probability of war is O(0.2) across that set of locations. The probability is O(0) in all other locations. If war breaks out you wouldn't marvel at the coincidence because having two armies was a prerequisite.
Now, you can have a virus pandemic originate anywhere there are large numbers of humans (too sparse a population and it doesn't spread far). You don't need a virus lab in order to begin a pandemic. There is a theory that you could start a pandemic with a virus lab. In order to have a lab-originated pandemic you do need a lab at your location or origin.
Therefore it's a coincidence that a non-lab-originated pandemic began in a city with a lab. It's not a coincidence that a lab-originated pandemic began in a city with a lab.
So if you had a lab-originated pandemic you would not be surprised that there is a lab at the location of origin.
You can not however conclude that if a pandemic originated in a city that has a lab then it must have been a lab-originated pandemic. There's no probabilistic link between those two known facts. Causation only goes one way.
1. How you would prove this? 2. That it matters until you can prove it happened
Lab safety does matter though.
Signed -> Me a lab scientist.
If I go into the kitchen and the cookie jar is empty, and there's a trail of crumbs leading to my kids bed, and the kid has stolen the CCTV tape from the kitchen that night and won't let me see it, do I then still have to prove that the kid ate the cookies?
2. Yes, it fucking matters. Millions of people died, and there were warnings about the safety of that lab the year before the outbreak. There are still people doing GOF research in ultra-densely populated cities, and we've had no discussion of accountability or oversight of such labs. That's insanity on an ultra-dense level.
Signed -> IDGAF who you are.
2. We should probably improve on the two most likely sources - lab or wet market.
I dont understand how anyone can have anything other than utter contempt for the media and associated "experts".
Neither do I, but I suspect the answer comes down to the exploitation of human flaws such as tribalism, fear, overwhelm, and the systematic fucking of the education system.
This issue illustrates that public pronouncements and published material can be misinformation and opposite to the obvious truth. Great ways to identify liars for yourself.
Covid-19 will be viewed historically as the Hiroshima of biowarfare. And actually biowarfare will be viewed in the future as a slightly less uncivilized alternative to nuclear warfare. Although they will be both be in the same category of horrible weapons to be avoided in general, nuclear will be seen as somewhat less evolved and more horrific.
Especially, it is likely that Chinese will view biowarfare as a regrettable but necessary tactic, and again less destructive than nuclear warfare.
The efficient production and distribution of vaccines or treatment is now a national security issue. The extreme political polarization is also now a security issue because it is blocking the efficient distribution of vaccines.
For the American-led western coalition to maintain its dominance, there is an urgent need to either completely change the paradigm from one where overt force is generally accepted, or develop new effective weapons, such as space-based. Biowarfare is pretty much a non-starter for the west.
What I keep hoping, probably quite unrealistically, is that we will have a new international citizen-led paradigm that supercedes nation-states and their brutal strategic operations.
In my mind, global security boils down to merging the different information streams that various political factions tend to push to one extreme or another and even deliberately disconnect from each other.
It is an error of reasoning to consider the lab leak and seafood market hypotheses to be competing and mutually exclusive.
I find it extremely plausible that in the event of a lab leak, there would be some kind of cover up.
And that there has been a cover up of something is obvious.
https://dispatchito.substack.com/p/the-strongest-evidence-of...
The best "evidence" for Newtonian physics (as opposed to General Relativity) is common sense. Common sense is not evidence.
A hypothesis is not a theory. Being loose with language and concepts is dangerous.
Also, evidence is not fact. Evidence is anything. Evidence was O.J. Simpson's hand didn't fit the glove. That was weak evidence, but that turned into "proof", via not-guilty verdict. Even proof is not fact (there are no facts lol). Evidence is anything you can find to solve the crime. After you collect evidence, you go through it at piece together the story. Read a book yo.
Famously, when asked what his response would be if a certain piece of evidence turned out to be against relativity, Einstein replied that he'd feel sorry for who obtained the evidence, because Relativity was certainly right. And much later it transpired that the evidence matched the theory merely by coincidence; that the experiment was flawed. So Einstein nearly had to face that fight. Anyone following the position laid out in your comment would have been on the wrong side of that debate.
This demonstrates perfectly that rationality can be superior to empiricism because it is not subject to the same flaws and contingencies as the gathering of empirical evidence.
The amount of precession in Mercury's orbit couldn't be accounted for with known theories of the time.
> he did not carefully study existing evidence and realize it supported General Relativity.
Considering it took nearly 10 years to develop GR, I'm not sure he could have even considered whether evidence supported it or not; it was clear that there was a gap in understanding at the time, as experiments started to show it. Einstein suspected rightly[1] that unifying gravitation and acceleration with special relativity would give a complete theory of everything.
[1] He was only half right; it doesn't explain quantum mechanics. He was a strong opponent of (some parts of QM) for a long time.
> rationality can be superior to empiricism
But it clearly isn't, as we haven't come up with a complete model that explains everything we can observe yet.
That objection is utter nonsense and an affront to reasonable discussion. Empiricism hasn't come up with a Grand Unified Theory of Everything yet either, so rationality's failure to do so doesn't constitute evidence either way regarding their relative value.
Let's please not turn the anger dial all the way up on every discussion. I would have been happy to continue discussing this in a dispassionate way, but I won't now.
Simple test: Ask some old Maritime provinces fishermen about how the weather, sun, moon, coastal shape, currents, and dredged shipping channels interact to determine high tide levels along the coast. Then ask a bunch of folks whose experience doesn't include anything "ocean", "sea", or even "great lake" to give your their "common sense" on that subject.
Manslaughter need not have intent or motive. The actions or consequences that precipitate from powerful leaders of state who bio-engineer weapons (against the law) do not need murder-intent either.
Also "lab leak hypothesis" in no way necessitates "making it in a lab" or gain-of-function. It could be that the virus was being researched in a lab and it leaked.
And it's not only a question of intent. It's also about proximity. There are thousands and thousands of intermediate steps between carelessness leading to a lab leak and a global pandemic. My concern is that by calling it murder, you have no way to explain how driving a car isn't murder due to global deaths from pollution.
Yes, "lab leak" is exactly the phrasing the media uses to diminish the importance, to preclude the asking of more serious questions in light of other evidence. The term is too simple, it does not imply the worse, possibly criminal, involvement. But then, why was it a lab, and not hospital leak? Seems odd place to start for a virus that some guy caught at the fish market.
It's a pointless discussion which has spilled enough ink and consumed enough brain cycles.
In 2019 a pandemic broke out a mouse-journey from its door.
Millions of people died, and the lab has escaped independent investigation for over two years.
It's weird that you don't see how that's relevant. For all the ink and brain-cycles, there's STILL gain of function research happening in metropolis areas, and if another pandemic broke out beside one there'd STILL be no process for investigating them. That's fucking BATTY.
https://twitter.com/RealGeorgeWebb1
The world is a corrupt place.
https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/14994061482517544...
Rasmussen asserts things she could not possibly know (e.g. the Wuhan lab did not have "the fucking virus" -- we don't know what they had or did not have, because the Chinese government is not exactly being forthright on the matter), and focuses on a corner of the article (a side debate about RaTG13 and the physical proximity of it to Wuhan), while completely brushing off the core argument of the piece: the authors of these papers have not demonstrated that the early infections at the market came from animals.
That's the whole ballgame. Rasmussen spends a lot of words setting up and knocking down straw men, but there's nothing else here. To make it worse, she is rude, dismissive, profane and needlessly aggressive. As a former researcher, if a high-profile reporter published a piece questioning my research in a polite and civil manner, I'd like to think I'd be mature enough to engage with that person constructively in a public forum.
He's talking about the lab's lead coronavirus researcher, Shi Zhengli:
Could this new virus, she wondered, have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records and found no exact matches. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink for days.”
If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab.
It's reminiscent of the idea that the CIA were so jumpy about the JFK and RFK assassinations not because they know they did them, but that their fingers were in so many pies with so many undesirables that they didn't know they weren't involved.
I don't think we'll ever know for sure, and I think it's a vanishingly unlikely idea that there was any malice. But an accidental escape? There are viruses named after accidental escapes. They happen.
[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
But on the flip side, the logic used by Baker is more than a little silly. I don't need Shi's quote to make me wonder if an outbreak of a mysterious viral pathogen might just be related to the viral pathogen research center down the street. I don't have a problem with the piece, but Baker was really reaching here.
There's so much sloppy reasoning around all of this stuff, on both sides. It's exhausting to wade into it, but seeing Rasmussen behave the way she did on that twitter thread is just...unprofessional.
It carries a fair bit of information, when you consider that Shi is not really free to say what she wants. She has to say what they want her to say. That is a carefully crafted state-sponsored message, with all that entails. It's the Chinese state making a denial with the smallest surface area they can make, which is kind of unusual.
But at any rate, Baker's point in context is not that Shi is engaging in a coverup. Nor is his point that until she said that nobody thought to look, or that it gives permission to do so.
His point is not about Chinese science at all, so much as about Western science journalism. He's saying to other journalists, look, you can't just breezily let the world's science contributors dismiss this as fantasy along with the bioweapons nonsense, or let anyone shut it down as taboo. (When this article was written, this was dismissed by really most of the science-journalism complex as wild speculation.) He means, if Shi is saying that, it's a legitimate inquiry and it specifically invites that inquiry.
First, you quote her as stating: "the Wuhan lab did not have "the fucking virus" -- we don't know what they had or did not have, because the Chinese government is not exactly being forthright on the matter." But her actual tweet notes "To have the virus originate at the lab under any circumstances, the lab has to have the fucking virus!" That seems to be a logical conclusion, which your framing dismisses.
Rasmussen continues by stating "Not only did they not have intact, infectious, replication competent RaTG13–which, again, is not SARS-CoV-2–at WIV, there’s no evidence they had any ancestral proto-SC2 virus." The first point was explained by the tweets above that one, and the second point is clear. There is no evidence that they had the virus, so any argument that there was a lab leak requires them to have the virus in the first place, going back to her first axiom at the beginning of the tweet.
But the bigger issue here seems to be one of framing. Yglesias frames the preprint in the context of the press response to it, and not so much the actual contents. The abstract clearly states: "Together, these analyses provide dispositive evidence for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the live wildlife trade and identify the Huanan market as the unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic." Note the lack of any mention of a lab leak here, or anywhere else in the preprint. Rasmussen's rebuttal is done in the frame of the conclusions of her research, which Yglesias misinterprets as a paper trying to disprove the lab leak theory.
Considering that he cites those figures as from the New York Times instead of from the appendix of the preprint, it seems pretty clear that Yglesias is responding to the New York Times article and probably didn't even read the actual preprint.
No, it doesn't. The point I was making is that she can't know what she's claiming to know (and also that she was being incredibly rude).
> Rasmussen continues by stating "Not only did they not have intact, infectious, replication competent RaTG13–which, again, is not SARS-CoV-2–at WIV, there’s no evidence they had any ancestral proto-SC2 virus." The first point was explained by the tweets above that one
The tweets prior to this one in no way support that assertion. In those tweets, she makes a hand-wavy claim that RaTG "is not ancestral" to SARS-CoV2 (this is Not Even Wrong -- it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of phylogeny), and further, that it could not become SARS-CoV2 "even through engineering", which is a truly bizarre, bold claim. Then she advances that the Laos viruses are somehow better in this respect, even though they are also separated from SARS-CoV2 by many mutations, and have the same basic problems.
What Rasmussen is doing here is trying to assert that because "there's no evidence that they had RaTG13", it means that they didn't have it, and Yglesias must be wrong. But that's the whole question. It's a truism.
Did they have it? We don't know. The Chinese aren't saying, and as far as I know, Angie Rasmussen didn't work at the Wuhan lab, so she can't pretend to know either.
> The abstract clearly states: "Together, these analyses provide dispositive evidence for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the live wildlife trade and identify the Huanan market as the unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic."
Yeah, abstracts say lots of things that are unsupported by the data below them. They don't prove those claims, and the use of the words "dispositive evidence" is the sort of phrasing that should make any scientist skeptical, unless said evidence involves a warm body and a smoking gun.
First off, this topic attracts the Wrong People as well. By the Wrong People I mean terrifying crazy people who will never leave you alone, not merely people with wrong opinions.
Second: she's a woman in science on Twitter. The appalling sexist hate she will absolutely trigger by simply speaking up warrants at least throwing the switch so it can't be seen. This is why so many women writing for newspapers now ask for the comments to be switched off on their articles, too. Because it is endless and soul-damaging.