Anyone can have their own theory of things, but what separates Trump and the "crazies" from the rest of us (including many of those who suspected the lab leak theory was true) is that one group accepted the possibility and investigated that, while the others were running around calling for "china to pay" and beating up random Asian people in the streets at a time when the evidence we had for the the lab leak theory was weaker than the evidence we had for other theories.
Even today, while the evidence is inconclusive, what changed was that we have additional evidence that has raised the level of credibility of the lab leak theory.
"Crazies" went all in regardless of evidence or reason, and for that the pejorative is well earned.
Because they had evidence that made the wet market theory the one most likely to be true, and a lack of stronger evidence for the lab leak theory. Investigating and supporting the theory that is best supported by the evidence you have isn't crazy, it's science.
When you look at all the facts you have, and then ignore that because it doesn't support what you want to be true, and then you act on what you wish was true instead, that's crazy. That's exactly what Trump and many of his supporters were doing.
We have new evidence now that suggests the lab leak theory is more likely than the wet market one, so once it is released non-crazy people will support the lab leak theory when they could not (and should not) have before.
sorry but what was evidence supporting wet market theory when this article was published
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/health/coronavirus-animal...
> The new virus seems to have leapt from wildlife to humans in a seafood and meat market in Wuhan, China, where live animals were slaughtered and sold as food.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/science/pangolin-coronavi...
None of these qualify as evidence that you say the claim was based on.
There was a lot of evidence supporting the wet market theory at the time and supporting that it wasn't made in a lab (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9) including exposure to the market by early patients (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...) and the fact that wet markets have been guilty of spreading similar diseases in the past (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14738798/)
You do realise that when people say it was a lab leak, they don't necessarily mean it was made in a lab. They are merely saying that the origin of the pandemic was a virus escaping the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology via one of the workers/researchers there.
The idea that someone in the lab down the street was accidentally infected with something from the lab and then went to lunch is far more plausible than creatures from thousands of miles away introduced a disease down the street street from a lab working on viruses that are known to be almost identical to the one of interest.
There’s no issue with pursuing all leads, but obviously some are much more plausible than others.
We know that because…?
"Raccoon dogs, marmots, civets, mink, Siberian badgers and many other furry mammals that could have served as intermediate hosts for the SARS-CoV-2 virus were openly, illegally and profitably sold in the market. The wild and farmed animals were documented to be in poor health, and crowded together in their cages."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2021.2...
"Live animals that are susceptible to COVID-19 were in the market in December 2019"
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/28/1160162...
pangolin werent sold at wet markets though ?
> is that one group accepted the possibility and investigated that
I'm not sure what group you mean here, but that was certainly not mainstream media, "The Experts (TM)" and the medical-political establishment. Those spent 100% of the effort on suppressing any possibility of the lab leak theory being seriously considered and investigated and declaring anybody who disagreed "crazies", and 0% of the effort investigating anything. To the honor of the actual scientific community, they managed to fight back and re-legitimize the leak theory, but it took significant time and effort, and significant struggle. And the PR damage (and career damage, etc.) to the people who dared to dissent was already done.
> and beating up random Asian people in the streets
I think mentioning people who considered lab leak theory a viable possibility together with people who beat up Asian people on the street, or even suggesting that there's a connection between the two, they have a common cause, and the former bear any responsibility on the latter - is an extremely dishonest move and you should apologize for making such connection.
> "Crazies" went all in regardless of evidence or reason, and for that the pejorative is well earned.
The "bat soup" propagandists went all in much further than the "crazies" - while the crazies only talked about the possibility of the lab leak (or bioweapon lab, ok) - the non-crazies banned, fired, ruined careers, declared opponents racist, and all that with even less evidence - at least for the lab leak theory there's a lab to leak from. By the time the "bat soup" theory was declared the only truth possible there was nothing to support it evidentially, let alone on the level of the only viable possibility. So "the crazies" earned their name, then "bat soup" propagandists must be named "super crazies on crazy juice while taking crazy pills and bathing in the crazy ocean". Or we can go back to actually discussing the evidence, if anybody is interested in that, of course.
I never said they were the same thing. They are different, but they were both BS conspiracy theories because they were pushed without sufficient evidence to support them and while ignoring stronger evidence for other theories.
> I'm not sure what group you mean here, but that was certainly not mainstream media,
the mainstream media acknowledged that the science was still primarily, and that there were a lot of questions, but they mostly reported on our best understanding of the facts that we have and not on conspiracy theories that ignored our best understanding of the facts that we had.
> "The Experts (TM)" and the medical-political establishment. Those spent 100% of the effort on suppressing any possibility of the lab leak theory being seriously considered and investigated and declaring anybody who disagreed "crazies", and 0% of the effort investigating anything.
Who exactly is the ""The Experts (TM)" and the medical-political establishment"? As you yourself acknowledge scientists and governments continued to investigate the origins of the virus including the possibility of a lab leak to find evidence.
> I think mentioning people who considered lab leak theory a viable possibility together with people who beat up Asian people on the street, or even suggesting that there's a connection between the two, they have a common cause, and the former bear any responsibility on the latter - is an extremely dishonest move and you should apologize for making such connection.
I clearly made a distinction between the people who believed a BS conspiracy theory and acted on it (in some cases by beating asian people) and those who accepted it was possible, and investigated that, but followed the available evidence and supported the theory that best fit the facts that we had.
> By the time the "bat soup" theory was declared the only truth possible
Declared by who? When? There was constant questioning of the origin and acknowledgement that there were multiple conflicting theories in mainstream media. I don't know where you were getting your information from, but it sounds like you weren't paying much attention to what mainstream media was actually saying.
Yet many people insisted that this was the origin.
Of course it had evidence (see https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-origin-bats.html and https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55998157) but there were always questions (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/who-report-says-covid-orig...)
For more exploration of the "no evidence" question, I suggest you read https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...
Except those weren't conspiracy theories but alternative explanations of the known facts supported by at least as much evidence (not much, not conclusive, but neither had the alternative) as their explanation. Which the press tried to de-emphasize in every way possible, and paint it as if there's absolutely no possible legitimacy behind the alternatives. After 3 years of screaming abuse and calling people "conspiracy theorists" we finally arrived at the point where we find their assertions of there being an only valid explanation are not true.
I have no problem with people believing for a while in a theory that later proven to be false or unsupported. I did it myself - believed in experiments and conclusions that failed to reproduce or have been disproven. It happens to much better people than me. I do have a problem with the same people making claims that people who believed in alternative explanations are crazy, racists, idiots, extremists, terrorists, etc. - and not even apologizing afterwards, just saying "well, we believed in the best theory NYT/WaPo described to us, what do you want?" I think they earned at least some epistemic humility.
> Who exactly is the ""The Experts (TM)" and the medical-political establishment"?
Pretty much everybody you regularly seen on TV and in the newspapers discussing those things and making decisions on those things.
> Declared by who? When?
By the media, the politicians and, for a period, by publications such as Lancet. And in much further degree, by the "I fucking love science" crowd which took delight in mobbing the dissenters and calling them all kinds of names. And continues to do so on other questions, btw.
> There was constant questioning of the origin and acknowledgement that there were multiple conflicting theories in mainstream media.
Nope, there wasn't for a long while, until scientists prominent enough that there was no way to silence them started to raise objections. The most prominent event was probably in September 2021, when Lancet published a rebuttal to their February 2020 article flatly declaring any non-nautural-origin theories to be "conspiracy theories". That's when the idea started to regain legitimacy. Until then, it was The Science (TM) that only natural origin is scientific and all the rest is crazy. And if you don't believe me (which you are right to do, I'm just some jerk on the internet), think about it - why would a team of 16 health experts write an article to Lancet demanding "objective, open, and transparent scientific debate about the origin of SARS-CoV-2" and arguing that scientists "need to evaluate all hypotheses on a rational basis, and to weigh their likelihood based on facts and evidence, devoid of speculation concerning possible political impacts" - if by then such debate was already happening for all this while and the political impacts did not influence it at all? Were they just bored and were Lancet editors dumb for publishing a letter calling for something that is already being done and stating the obvious? Or maybe it wasn't obvious by then and it wasn't done - and this is what not me, a random internet jerk, but experts serious enough to be taken seriously by the Lancet, were worried about enough to write a collective letter?
> I don't know where you were getting your information from, but it sounds like you weren't paying much attention to what mainstream media was actually saying.
Can you show me an article in NYT or WaPo in the period between February 2020 and September 2021 that describes natural origin and lab leak theories as equal possibilities, each of them could yet be proven true and each of them being legitimate alternatives and areas of scientific enquiry? I admit I do not read every article in these publications (mainly because I consider them mostly be utter garbage and in cases where they raise above that level I usually get a referral from one of the places I trust more) but I am willing to accept evidence if presented to me.
This just isn't true. There wasn't anywhere near as much evidence for the lab leak theory as their was for a natural origin which is why the lab leak theory was determined to be unlikely compared to other theories. Even the people who were pushing the conspiracy theory admitted to the lack of evidence.
Tom Cotton, one of the first in politics to push the theory, said himself: "Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says" (https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/18/politics/coronavirus-cotton-f...)
For example there is an early article from a 'low credibility' right biased news website (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-mail/) The Daily Mail, and even they had a microbiologist explain: "at this point there's no reason to harbour suspicions' that the facility had anything to do with the outbreak, besides being responsible for the crucial genome sequencing that lets doctors diagnose it" (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7922379/Chinas-la...)
Same story with this article which was pushing the bio-weapon theory. (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus...). It also stated that evidence was incredibly weak without dismissing it entirely: "In principle, outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility. This could have been the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but so far there isn’t evidence or indication for such incident."
Meanwhile, other theories being talked about at the time were supported by actual science such as genome analysis (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9) and note that here too they weren't totally dismissing any other theories either, only presenting the best evidence we had saying:
"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here...More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another."
> The most prominent event was probably in September 2021, when Lancet published a rebuttal to their February 2020 article flatly declaring any non-nautural-origin theories to be "conspiracy theories".
The opinion piece February did not flatly declare every non-natural origin theory to be a conspiracy. What it said was "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin." which is very different from saying that all theories of a non-natural origin are by definition conspiracy theories. Those same authors made that explicit in a followup article (July 21) saying: "Careful and transparent collection of scientific information is essential to understand how the virus has spread and to develop strategies to mitigate the ongoing impact of COVID-19, whether it occurred wholly within nature or might somehow have reached the community via an alternative route, and prevent future pandemics." They did not dismiss that other options were possible. They were just saying "We want evidence, not conjecture"
> Can you show me an article in NYT or WaPo in the period between February 2020 and September 2021 that describes natural origin and lab leak theories as equal possibilities, each of them could yet be proven true and each of them being legitimate alternatives and areas of scientific enquiry?
They weren't equally supported by the evidence, but there are certainly cases where articles on those (left-biased) sites made it clear that a lab leak was possible and that the origin of the virus was not certain.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/health/wuhan-coronavirus-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/science/covid-lab-leak-fa...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/27/medias-de...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/30/scientist...
I feel a lot of mental gymnastics here. "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" does exactly this - declares that non-natural-origin theories are conspiracy theories. And it has been widely seen and used as such.
Out of your links: 1. only reports some scientists call for investigating the possibility of lab leak theory, hurrying to emphasize it's "unlikely" and there's no "new evidence". But at least the possibility of research is discussed - so maybe September 2021 is not the turning point, but May 14, 2021 letter to Science was? I think that would be more correct timeframe. 2. talks about "engineering" hypothesis proponent (and his rejection of it ) and is pretty dismissive of lab leak theory, though admits the possibility (month after May 2021) 3. opinion piece which pretty much confirms what I said about "the media has scorned the idea of an accidental lab release as a far-flung conspiracy theory, declaring it “debunked,” “dangerous” or “doubtful.”" and argues for lab leak hypothesis - also 27 May 2021 (weird coincidence, not sure what to think about it, especially given it's 1 day after Biden's order to research the origins of covid) and 4. is basically reporting lab leak theory is now legit, but also says it only happened "in recent weeks" (on May 30, that'd be about two weeks since May 14). I wonder what changed in those "recent weeks" - it doesn't mention any new evidence - so either it still has absolutely no evidence as before, but somehow now it's important to research if though it hasn't been for more than a year - or there's still some evidence which existed all that time but wasn't explored? Also, if that all only happened in "recent weeks" - what happened in many weeks before? You claim both theories were duly and equally investigated - then what exactly happened in "recent weeks" and what all these scientists are calling for if it has been already happening for a year anyway? Why the "leading scientist" needs to "call" for investigating the lab leak theory, if, as you claim, it already was being properly investigated?
I can see how you'd read it that way, but remember that at that time, there were several conspiracy theories going around. Some were saying it came from the lab, some said it was designed in America, or that it was a bio-weapon and and released intentionally etc. "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" is not the same as "strongly condemn every theory suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" - and again, the same authors did clarify that in the follow up.
It might help if you build a time line of events.
conspiracy theories were going around pretty much immediately, but I mostly saw them spreading in January and and February of 2020. At the time, there wasn't any evidence for it besides "A lab exists" and "We don't like China", while evidence that it jumped to humans from animals was growing.
By March 2020 however it was discovered that China had hidden the first cases of the virus, meaning the outbreak had started ~20 days before they reported it to the WHO and they'd been pressuring doctors to stay quiet. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/coronavirus-wu...) Still, this was not evidence of a lab leak, but it sure caused people to lose trust in China and fueled the theory.
A year later, the lab leak theory was starting to be taken much more seriously because there had been new evidence (although mainly circumstantial). March was when a lot of it happened:
- A new report that some scientists at the Wuhan lab had gotten sick, but China said they tested negative for the virus. (https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/who-team-scientis...).
- The WHO released their report (https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-...) but people were already skeptical (https://www.state.gov/joint-statement-on-the-who-convened-co...) and the world was yelling at china for being secretive (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/who-wuhan-tedros-lab/20...)
Then in May 2021 it was discovered that three researchers from the lab had been sick and sent to hospital before the virus was reported to the WHO (https://nypost.com/2021/05/23/three-wuhan-lab-workers-were-h...). It looked pretty suspicious, but we still couldn't say that they had covid and naturally China said it was all lies (https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202105/1224284.shtml) but they'd basically lost all credibility by then. There was also this article (https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...) which got walked back a bit later (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-06-08/nobel-laur...)
The lab leak theory started out as nothing but a wild conspiracy theory without evidence, some of it was very clearly fueled by anti-Chinese sentiment and some of it was straight up crazy talk (like it being a US manufactured bio-weapon) and all of that never really let up. It fueled attacks on innocent Asian Americans and tainted the theory from the start. It made sense for most of the research to follow the evidence that we had, and for people to be wary about the wild and harmful claims people had been making.
I wasn't the idea of a lab leak that bothered people (outside of china anyway), it was how aggressively the theory was pushed without evidence, and all while ignoring what our best evidence suggested that concerned people. We can see that's true because once evidence (even weak evidence) started to emerge suggesting a lab leak more and more people started to ask for further investigation and this time with good cause!
Gradually over the years, the official story (stories really) coming out of china fell apart and new evidence (although not hard evidence) started to come forward. Again, nothing solid, but China wasn't exactly being helpful.
Research continued as best as it could though with reporters and scientists looking wherever the evidence took them and both the trump and biden administrations investigating to the best of their ability.
Natural-origin theories came and went, with varying degrees of confidence, but we never got a conclusive answer on the natural-origin side of things either. It did not appear to be engineered or lab-grown as some people had claimed, that was investigated, but there was never really a smoking gun.
Now, the government says we have new intelligence that is still not conclusive but makes the possibility of a lab leak the more likely scenario. I haven't seen that evidence, but I'm inclined to believe it until I see otherwise. I hope whatever new data we have gets out so that it can be researched. In any case, people who was spouting off lab leak theories, even the more sensible theories, in the early months of the pandemic shouldn't feel vindicated. Their suspicions were not based on evidence or reached through investigation of the facts. I don't think it hurt the investigation too much though, since the information we need is in China's hands, but it did hurt a lot of people.
No, they're not. The people who pushed the lab leak hoax originally (and as evidenced by several redcap troll accounts in this thread) all believed that covid-19 was engineered in a lab and released by the chinese government to harm them personally.
Even if it ends up being a case where a natural virus was studied in a lab and accidentally released, it does not validate their views.
As I said, that environment makes it hard to separate the legit, well-informed, grounded people who also advance real evidence of a lab leak.
My point was that they very loud, very nutty lab leak enthusiasts discredit legit discussion of the real possibility. I think you may have illustrated my point.
Evaluating an empirical claim based on the aggregate character of those who are supporting it rather than actual steelmanned arguments is poor epistemic hygiene. It's a commonly-used justification for tribal epistemic closure - "the red tribe has lower IQ than average, therefore they are wrong in every disagreement with the blue tribe."
There's an equally-negative opposite of a "conspiracy nut" here - something like "sheeple".