A "sightly-less-shitty-than-other-theories" theory is still a shitty theory. Low-confidence means exactly what it sounds like.
This whole saga is a damning indictment of: science journalism, government agencies’ public engagement, scientists’ public engagement, and the critical reasoning skills of middlebrow audiences.
In big enterprises usually solving the problem is secondary to finding who the culprit is so that all future problems can be blamed on that department.
China and the US are both like big enterprises. None of them is actually focused on making sure all the problems that happened will not happen again. People are just focused on blaming their domestic shit on the other.
China releases a strategy paper on US hegemony, US brings the lab leak theory back into the spotlight. It doesn't really matter if there was valid research on that theory. The fact that the major newspapers come out with it 1 day after China releases their stuff, shows you it's political.
It may be right, it may be wrong, an unintended leak has always been a very likely on the list for me. It's not like lack of security in labs hasn't been an issue in the US, in China and in a bunch of labs in Europe for that matter. Probably other countries are way worse.
The point isn't whether it's right or wrong, the point is that the goal isn't to solve the problem, but exclusively to assert blame.
At a practical level I don’t think there’s much difference between the lab link being a 7% chance vs a 70% chance. What’s more concerning is the potential of future leaks and what responses they might result in. The possibility that local officials get in CYA mode over a possible lab leak of a more dangerous virus is seriously concerning.
None that I've seen.
And the possibility of a future leak is probably unrelated to the possibility of this one having been a leak.
Which has little to do with the existence of said evidence. I’ve never seen direct evidence for the year Columbus sailed.
Anyway, many things that would make future leaks less likely also make past leaks less likely. The types of experiments being conducted and the types of labs those experiments are conducted in. Oversight, funding, and systems for reporting safety issues etc etc.
But that is a lie. From the article:
“The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory.”
DoE does a lot of civilian stuff now (electrical grid, cybersecurity, etc.) but it's kind of an add-on. The first couple of national labs - places like Los Alamos and Oak Ridge - are historically related to the nuke mission.
The considerations were:
— there were random attacks on Asians
- public health officials and scientists were worried about an anti science backlash
- virologists were really worried about a backlash against virology
— relations with China had not yet deteriorated to their current levels and government leaders didn’t want to antagonize them
So there was a semi-coordinated effort by government officials and the scientific establishment to put the lab leak theory beyond the pale. The middlebrow media either wittingly or unwittingly went along for the ride. Their readership ate it up.
But my sense was that the agenda behind the lab leak family of theories was to lay blame at some human or humans for the events of the pandemic, which to me seems like a fairly futile endeavor. One of my questions for these people has always been this: say their darkest theories are correct; what am I supposed to do about that? It seems that the best course of action was to wear masks, socially isolate as much as possible, and get vaccinated and keep getting vaccinations as new strains appear.
Lab leak was always a better theory. There were what hundreds? thousands? of wet markets across China and two bsl-4 labs. Given that the virus arose in a city with a wet market and a bsl-4 lab, the prior should be that it had to do with the lab and not the wet market. That could be overcome with evidence, of course, but it is not some out there idea.
What are you supposed to do about it? Maybe nothing. But if you are an establishment figure, certainly don’t lie about it and further destroy our society’s trust in experts.
Specifically, the talking point put out to the media that lab leak is highly unlikely is wrong and was unreasonable based on what they knew at the time.
I think that shading of the truth was arrogant and pernicious.
From the memory of this conspiracy-minded non-scientist:
- The signers declared no conflict of interest, but their lives would be made substantially more complicated and less lucrative by any increase in/scrutiny of biohazard control. One signer worked at or with the lab in question.
- The letter dismissed (VERY early and without any evidence to speak of) out of hand the possibility of a lab leak.
- The letter was picked up by the media and influenced public discussion and scientists’ opinions significantly.
According to the search I just did, Peter Daszak has recently been booted from investigations of this matter by the US government. He stands to gain and lose enormously depending on the future of virology research. This includes (iirc) the ‘ban’ on gain of function research, and the current loophole that taking an animal virus and changing it to be infectious to humans does not count as gain of function. There is much more to this story but that’s all I can remember with confidence.
Additionally, I would like to note that I’ve seen some solid-looking science tracing the outbreak to the wet market, but nobody seems to ever mention that lab workers have been (iirc) caught selling lab animals to wet markets in China in the past.
(Note again: I am not a scientist and I am conspiratorially-minded)
Whose nuts are you picking? And, for God's sake, why?!
Bubonic plague and polio both predate the existence of writing, and may well predate even agriculture.
- Originally evolved in the wild to at least some extent
- Was being studied in a lab and escaped
- Found its way into a wet market near said lab
For what it's worth, your scenario seems to me the most probably by far. I don't think we'll ever know for sure, since China has done it's best to destroy all evidence (we should be careful not to take that fact as evidence for one theory or another though).
Suppose a lab worker went to a cave hundreds of miles away and collected a bunch of bats. Those bats were returned to the lab. At some point a different lab worker exposed himself to one of the bat carcasses and caught proto-Covid-19. Three days later he stopped at the wet market on the way home from work to pick up dinner and infected patients 1-5.
In what way is the lab in this scenario superfluous? If it had better and enforced protocols for handling potentially infected specimens there would have been no pandemic.
The ground zero wet market in Wuhan is several miles away from the virology lab, and across the river.
The simplest explanation is that one of the 11 million Wuhan residents who do not work at that particular lab brought it to the wet market. It was right before spring festival, lots of people traveling.
Inserting "possible" events that loop in the virology lab while all of the initial infections were nowhere close to it, with no evidence, is just trying to keep "lab leak" alive. Sure, it's possible! We could assume it was lab workers somewhere in the chain, or assume the CIA, we can assume whatever we want.
Why the need to throw everything against the wall to see what sticks?
I can't prove a negative, you believe what you want.
Second, COVID-19's furin cleavage site is unique from all other coronaviruses and that is what allows it to bind so well in humans. A new preprint (not full reviewed, Oct 2022) is interesting from a genomics perspective on this being a potential bioengineering marker[1].
I think just because Orange man called it out early on, it immediately became a non-starter for most people. A coronavirus lab just mere miles from a wet market where it supposedly bloomed, and contrary to finding other zootonic sources of other viruses relatively soon, none has been found at all in the past two-plus years. The wiping of databases by China; the involvement of US/Europpean/Russian agencies in the Wuhan lab; the whole NIH/Fauci mess with funded research there in gain of function or whatever you want to call it research, and it is unlikely?
Common sense has left the room during the political divisiveness these past years. I do believe over the years more evidence will come out proving a lab leak given the advances in genomics, intentionally slow drip feed of documents, and the sheer number of factors pointing towards this. I do believe it was an accident, and not a bioweapons thing, and originated from the Wuhan lab. Lab leaks are more common than people think, and having worked in China for over 7 years, I can imagine this was not your movie rendition of a BSL-4 lab, but one with a lot of warts. I say this about other countries too. I did some work for an aerospace robotics lab and I was dreaming of the BSL-4 suits and all, and what I found was a normal shop with out of tolerance machinery. This was in the U.S.
[1] https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/preprint-covid-19-shows-f...
It's absolutely possible that the epicenter wet market was on a particular lab worker's way home and that's how the spread started. Also possible that someone who lived in the countryside, contracted it from an animal, and went to Wuhan to visit family for spring festival.
That biomarker stuff is interesting and I'll have to take the biologists' word for it. If it looks and quacks like a bio weapon, that is evidence. "Some people generally study viruses across town" is a lot weaker.. it's like automatically blaming Columbia University for an infection in Brooklyn because they have bio labs.
Yes there are a lot of places to buy food, but wet markets are a special type of place to buy food. The wet market in question is right across the river from the WIV, which coincidentally(?) studies coronaviruses and was conducting studies prior to the outbreak.
From a 7 June 2021 paper [1]:
Here we document 47,381 individuals from 38 species, including 31 protected species sold between May 2017 and November 2019 in Wuhan’s markets. We note that no pangolins (or bats) were traded, supporting reformed opinion that pangolins were not likely the spillover host at the source of the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
The other human coronaviruses came from bats mainly. The WIV had bats from a location known to have coronaviruses. Scientists now wear masks when bat hunting in caves, but before COVID-19 they typically did not (I'll dig up the reference later). No bats were sold at the Wuhan wet market. The US/NIH/Fauci and other world players have a stake in the WIV of some sort. They were doing research on coronaviruses, and they were manipulating the virus. Documents before 2019 asking for approval to conduct such research are in the public record.
Almost everyone thinks this is true. Even the most fringy people don’t seem to be claiming that a virus was synthesized from scratch.
Found its way into a wet market near said lab
Ditto for this one. It’s pretty clear that there was a cluster of people early on that were infected in or near the market.
—-
The distinction between the lab leak and non-lab leak theory is whether the lab had anything at all to do with the chain of transmission.
If patient zero caught the virus in the lab or from a vector that was once in the lab, that’s lab leak. It’s apologists for the lab that want to conflate lab leak and bioweapon in order to dismiss the former as a nutty conspiracy theory.
And if a lab worker had become infected while field sampling captive farmed "wild" animals for the lab and brought the infection to Wuhan?
And if a lab worker had become infected while buying captive farmed "wild" animals for the lab and brought the infection to Wuhan?
And if a lab worker had become infected while buying captive farmed "wild" animals for dinner and brought the infection to Wuhan?
Aint this the dang truth.
Ah, the ol' litigating my personal grievances with society at large, with a particular individual that has nothing to do with it at all...
I was surprised to find, at CNN, of all places, something that actually sounds credible: "https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan..."
"A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion."
That's a far cry from "shitty theory".
A "shitty" theory is one which completely lacks evidence supporting it and/or has far more evidence that contradicts it. The covid lab leak theory is not "shitty" by either metric.
It's just a theory. Totally crackpot.
I mean come on they totally found the animal that came from to support the zoonotic origin theory.
Oh wait, they have yet to identify a spillover animal.
Anyone with common sense notice the lab leak is the most likely scenario here. But sure go ahead and continue to defend the honor of the CCP, an organization that is shortly going to be sending lethal weaponry including suicide drones to Vladimir Putin so he can murder Ukrainian civilians with impunity.
"Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 on mink farms between humans and mink and back to humans"
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe5901
Not what you meant?
How long did it take to definitively identify a natural reservoir for the 2002 SARS outbreak?
"Bats as Animal Reservoirs for the SARS Coronavirus: Hypothesis Proved After 10 Years of Virus Hunting"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258204548_Bats_as_a...
No intermediate host was ever identified as the source of infection in Wuhan. The article you posted regarding minks has absolutely nothing to do with an original source of spillover. It's simply documenting the common pandemic phenomenon of humans infecting mammals with covid, and, wow, the minks infecting humans with the same virus that is already evolved to infect human ACE2 receptors.
You started with an absurd, inverse hypothesis. The lab that studies bat-borne coronaviruses had absolutely nothing to do with the bat-borne coronavirus that broke out a kilometer away, despite:
Location is 1000km away from the known horseshoe bat populations in Yunnan that are SARS reservoirs. Emergence was during late autumn/early winter when local bats are already hibernating. Emergence was in the middle of a cosmopolitan metropolis where the locals don't eat bats. Chinese Communist Party immediately blocked any investigations and never even pretended to want to restore records that were deleted, despite the prospect of being vindicated by a zoonotic origin being found. CCP currently, rather than attempt to continue to claim a non-existent zoonotic origin, has now claimed a US-based lab leak is at fault. Multiple NIH grants specifically mention humanized mouse models with human ACE2 receptors lining air passages, and conducting serial passage of wild-type bat-borne SARS in research being conducted by grant recipient in Wuhan lab. (There was an intermediate host, it was a genetically modified mouse model, and long since disposed of.)
Humanized mouse models can be purchased from any reputable bio supplier: https://www.criver.com/products-services/research-models-ser...
Where did I say that?
I'll take your word for it. (A long "few years" — "The virus originally came from horseshoe bats, though that wasn’t conclusively determined until 2017".)
"No intermediate host was ever identified as the source of infection in Wuhan" likely because —
"Unlike with SARS, however, there were no opportunities to sample the markets to look for animals infected with SARS-CoV-2. Chinese authorities closed and cleared out the markets soon after the epidemic started, citing public-health concerns, and banned all wildlife trade on 26 January 2020. Eating and trading wild animals were permanently banned in February 2020. Samples at the market to test for SARS-CoV-2 were not taken until months later. The virus was found in the drains of the market, but there were no live animals to test."
"The tick study that documented the sale of illegal animals in the Huanan market observed, however, that the sellers were not too concerned about law enforcement, and that plainly illegal animals were openly sold. It is unclear whether any of the animal traders engaged in illegal wildlife commerce have been since found, fined or punished. The swift clear-out of the market may have been intended to protect them as well as the law-enforcement officers and local politicians who had looked the other way."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2021.2...
Commonplace criminality or sinister super secret science scandal?
Reductio ad absurdum won't work here. There are ways to test a "low confidence" theory, and re-evaluate its confidence level. This is called science.
Science isn't a magic wand, its a process, and honestly assuming we do get access an investigation like this most likely wouldn't even involve the scientific method at all. If science was enough to determine the origin given current available knowledge it probably would've been solved already.
But while this helps the CCP party save face, it doesn't help to move on with the investigation. It's not even about the blame. We investigate air crashes in such detail so we can prevent them from happening again. Of course with an even bigger event like this we should do the same.
The pandemic has happened and no kind of blame or money can revert it. But we can try to learn everything about it that we can to stop the next one. I'm sure it was an accident but we need to know what happened.
For this reason I really think China should cooperate with the investigators.
Finding and fixing a problem is exactly what needs to happen here too.
I’m sure air crash investigations would resolve many safety issues completely unrelated to the actual cause of a crash.
But the US could perhaps push for openness considering they contributed financially. Though I suspect they already have and failed.
All of the theories had the properties of being convenient darlings of some pre-existing political faction.
The most responsible thing is to claim ignorance on the origin story unless you have genuine, credentialed, expertise and analytical training for it and even then, those people choose their audiences and presentation carefully because of the unintended consequences.
Those who refuse to fuel speculation on topics they are unqualified to comment on is by definition, absent and invisible.
It's also a distraction. The real problem is the chain of decisions and coordinating made by hundreds of groups around the planet between say November and April that catalyzed this from a problem to a global catastrophe. That's really the focus here because an H5N1 mutation is potentially around the corner and that could be much much worse.
It's dramatically affected egg supplies as you've probably seen at your local supermarket. A human uncontrolled outbreak would be a disaster. It's far more dangerous than covid.
For instance, that's today's date: https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...
The first part (origin) has already happened, the second part about the management, that's the actual important stuff.
Finally, what do we do with the info? Is it just a, 'oh well, that's interesting'?
There's a specific American racist connection with blaming Chinese immigrants for disease that goes back to the era of the Chinese exclusion act of the 1880s. There were riots attacking chinatowns and doing ethnic cleansing with lynchings and mass destruction in Denver, Tacoma, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Eureka, Seattle and others throughout the 1880s.
Eugenicist texts of the early 1900s claimed Asians were disease carriers as well.
The general public's relationship with this stuff has only really been ugly and I can't stand here in 2023 pontificating absolute free speech and pretend like these types of narratives won't become tools of violence and racism in the hands of scammers and hatemongers.
Additionally it seems like you are advocating removing free speech? Friend you are sitting here actively campaigning for a 1984 style society. Not sure I have ever seen this one before; well done.
no.
> Really?
no.
> You would rather the government conceal information about a virus that killed millions of people because it might make some people upset with Asians?
no.
> Additionally it seems like you are advocating removing free speech?
no.
The personal responsibility for the liberty of speech includes reasonable consideration for the reaction of people. That's the whole point of Oliver Wendell Holmes "fire in a crowded theater" when he concretized the modern notion of free speech with Learned Hand.
Conduct has consequences
You said no to all my questions and then with your last paragraph again seemed to advocate for what I said.
Like, are you seriously going to pretend that you mean the same thing by the "reasonable consideration for the reaction of people" when that's exactly what you've been debating with dozens of people in this thread. Give me a break. It's bad faith, highschool kid that just read ayn rand style posting.
Considering possible eisegesis is one of the primary ways responsible experts with an audience police their speech.
It's probably impossible to both effectively communicate complex ideas and defend against all potential eisegesis. I wouldn't be surprised if enlightenment era philosophers talked about this. I'll readily admit their literature are beyond my patience so forgive me for my ignorance
Which is exactly what I said op was saying in the first place and you and he reacted like I physically attacked you. From my perspective you are being needlessly obtuse not understanding what I am saying. The thought of not telling the truth and willingly advocate for the government to just ignore or not share the root cause of a pandemic that killed millions is anathema to me. I literally cannot wrap my head around it. How can you take the position that it's best not to know because some rogue elements could take it badly?
> It seems like both op and you are saying the truth is not important because it could lead to "excessively racialized and polarized reactions".
The truth... you act like there's a wholesale ban on truth. I think you are again mischaracterizing what is actually the media trying to not whip people up into a frenzy. People get whipped up into frenzies, you should probably check out some history. Maybe something on WWII. I'd recommend, Century of The Self, a great documentary that shows what kind of frenzies people get whipped up into when you have politicians using demagoguery to advance their agendas. You don't see how the entire past 3 years isn't completely different if every news paper is running with the headline "CHINESE VIRUS LEAK"? You are going to pretend, the same populace which was incapable of handling any actual discourse on the pandemic response, vaccination, etc, is going to just have a rational response? Regardless of where the virus came from, of which there is plenty literature available for the curious and literate, your perspective here seems childish at best.
>Which is exactly what I said op was saying in the first place and you and he reacted like I physically attacked you. From my perspective you are being needlessly obtuse not understanding what I am saying. The thought of not telling the truth and willingly advocate for the government to just ignore or not share the root cause of a pandemic that killed millions is anathema to me. I literally cannot wrap my head around it. How can you take the position that it's best not to know because some rogue elements could take it badly?
This is childishly naive. It's not rogue elements. The US president at the time was an actual demagogue.
Your entire approach to this is arrogant. You have decided that based on your superiority and judgement that your mental inferiors are too simple to handle the truth and thus it should not be revealed. While I dislike him, Trump was a democratically elected president.
"your perspective here seems childish at best" This appears to be your approach to your fellow citizens, you are right and every one else is a child. You come off just as narcissist as Trump. Grow up friend, realize there is nothing special about you, you are just as intelligent and naive as your fellow man.
I didn't make any decisions and you are incredibly foolish for even pretending that's the case. More of your false narrative creation that justifies your bullshit grievance-complex self-victimization. I don't edit any newspapers, I don't work in any government's health complex. I'm an IP attorney. Get a grip.
> This appears to be your approach to your fellow citizens, you are right and every one else is a child.
No, not sure why you are equivocating like that. As I pointed out, anyone who is interested is free to access all the literature on this. I did, you did.
>Grow up friend, realize there is nothing special about you, you are just as intelligent and naive as your fellow man.
Maybe read my post first and then get back to me.
You're welcome!
:)
I think I've proven my point. I'll call the game now. All the best:)