> This remains the only scientifically supported theory for how the virus emerged.
I am not so sure about this assertion. And definitely, the lab leak hypothesis should not have been so forcefully suppressed as a conspiracy theory.
I am not so sure about this assertion. And definitely, the lab leak hypothesis should not have been so forcefully suppressed as a conspiracy theory.
The WIV lab was built by the French with money from many different countries and the research was being done by EcoHealth Alliance with US funding so blaming it on the Chinese is probably not the whole picture.
EcoHealth alliance made a grant application to DARPA and DARPA turned them down because it was too risky but it seems pretty obvious that they got the money somewhere else.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
And it gets worse, even though EcoHealth Alliance lied in their books they recently received another grant to keep doing similar research. It was discussed here at the time. What could go wrong?
It's a rabbit hole but you might be surprised how corrupt it looks. Don't get fooled by those trying to shift your focus to China.
The government of any place gets to take the blame for things happening in that place, even in more extreme cases where deeds were fully funded by a hostile government who sent in secret agents. ("The buck stops here").
So, if you want to blame $meme_de_jour as well, then go for it — but even if guilty, regardless of whether that's malice or incompetence or bad luck or a novel failure that nobody could have foreseen, that doesn't exonerate anyone else who dropped a ball, which China absolutely did more than once regardless of the origin, as they also tried to downplay the initial infections.
This is major gaslighting by saying that.
Of course it matters. It affects the priorities and the costs. If there was indeed a lab leak that caused the pandemic, you can justify having far more oversight, and more safety precautions even at great expense, because you have evidence that failing to do so killed millions of people.
Also, this would call for greater scrutiny and regulation of organizations such as the Ecohealth Alliance that are providing funding for such labs.
In addition, saying it doesn't matter rewards a coverup.
If someone breaks your leg, saying you should eat more calcium and be careful walking down the steps, and it doesn't matter if someone actually hit your let with a tire iron, isn't that helpful.
If it's even reasonably plausible, and this is as good a chance as any to take a close look and find out, then you should spend this money to prevent such an outbreak even if COVID didn't happen this way.
Likewise in reverse, that wet markets were already seen as likely to cause the emergence of a new zoonotic disease, they should be changed or closed anyway because that risk is exactly the same now as in 2018 regardless of whether or not it was the origin of COVID.
> In addition, saying it doesn't matter rewards a coverup.
Only for people whose attention span misses that I also wrote "both cases, it's a good idea to review and possibly improve biolab safety protocols".
(I suspect this is quite a large percentage; people anchors on single points very easily, no matter how hard you try to make it clear "two things: what about both?")
> If someone breaks your leg, saying you should eat more calcium and be careful walking down the steps, and it doesn't matter if someone actually hit your let with a tire iron, isn't that helpful
In this case it's more like:
Doctors and lawyers trying to work out if your broken leg was caused by the cage fights you do every weekend, or by your recent slip down a very long and excessively polished staircase in a building that might or might not have be up to code at the time.
And the options are:
"Stop fighting in cage matches", and/or "see if that building was up to code and if it was campaign for better building codes".
The reason why you may think it has been suppressed as a conspiracy theory is probably because the people pushing the more for it actually use conspiracy theory patterns. In reaction, report about these loud yeller providing out-of-context, with often ridicule arguments, are dismissed as conspiracy theories.
There is nonetheless some objective reports a lab leak hypotheses and how improving lab security is important to prevent this kind of things either way.
Social media platforms were removing content discussing lab leak theories, and there's enough evidence of government officials colluding with those platforms generally to suspect they could have played a role in that.
That's apart from the scientific community itself, which is what this hearing is ostensibly about.
Personally I have been from the start saying that a lab leak was possible, on the basis that lab leaks have happened before, and should be investigated. That makes me a lab leak theory supporter as a possibility from day one. I've never got silenced, banned, insulted or de-platformed for saying so. I have no common cause or sympathy for people knowingly spreading lies and contrived 'evidence' to push the lab leak hypothesis though.
There was gain of function research going on in the same city as the origin of SarsCov2, with the exact same class of virus, and a hand-wavy paper appears claiming only natural origin is reasonable? And the recipients and/or funders of the gain of function research put their names on the paper without declaring conflicts?
Maybe it's because Fauci himself called it a conspiracy theory and tried to suppress the idea from further discussion. I think many would consider that "official", even if not technically.
It always amazes me when people attempt to rewrite history that people lived through just 2 years ago
Lab Leak was absolutely suppressed on all major tech platforms, and calls a xenophobic conspiracy theory by all major news outlets in 2019 and 2020, 2021 it started to shift to "hey maybe that is possible" and now in 2023 is "extremely unlikely" to "likely with low confidence".
1. that the lab "created" the virus via genetic engineering or something. 2. the virus was natural but the lab was studying it and it escaped.
The paper is explicitly about case one, saying the virus seems completely natural, they explicitly say case two is not off the table.
science is the thing you do.
Science is the thing you trust.
Similarly there’s theories around collections of events such as the timing of the ice ages which are collectively significant.
I don't agree because there are plethora of possible details depending on level of conspiracy. Was the virus synthesized at least partly? Was the virus selected from a number of not so harmful viruses? Was the virus went from naively non-infected bat when the fact is that it was infected? Was the lab-leak done intentionally, kind of something able to pause WW3? And so on and on.
At this point I feel like the argument is over some broader meta-argument that the lab leak hypothesis was dismissed too aggressively and the consensus formed too quickly over the wet market.
Because almost no-one has covered this news, you may have missed that the data pointing at the wet-market (from Worobey et al) has been thoroughly debunked using solid scientific data.
A thought experiment:
A murder during a fancy dinner party. Victim was shot in the head with a 9mm round. Guest A is very evasive and was in the vicinity where the body was found. Guest A is known to have a 9mm handgun. Guest A quickly destroys his handgun and forensics cannot recover any information from it. Guest A writes a letter explaining that the shot came from outside the house, without any mention of his potential role in the murder, and his friends at the local newspaper not only run the letter, citing him as a expert, but run hit pieces that anyone claiming otherwise is a racist.
Reason allows us to know Guest A was involved. In the absence of evidence sometimes reason is all you have. This is one of those cases, no science is required just a little life experience.
"Guest A quickly destroys his handgun" is, thus far, not supported by evidence in the lab leak hypothesis, which posits but has never proven the existence of samples of SARS-CoV-2 in the lab.
western people will believe in the wuhan virus leak and some others will believe in Fort detrick virus leak theories. You also had Russians finding a lot of virus labs in ukraine etc.
The world will split into multiple realities and histories.
Not really. We can build vinegar and baking soda volcanoes in our kitchens, but we can't build particle accelerators.
You will never personally prove where COVID-19 originated, so if you don't want to rely on trusting other accounts, you'll need to permanently abstain from holding an opinion either way.
- science is the methodology,
- Science is the institution that requires trust to be believed?
Folks might interpret your comment to mean we should trust the institution, when of course we all know it's a grave error to trust institutions. Institutions get captured, usually by low-iq lifers
Richard Feynman: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts... science - a.k.a. research - is in the making, belongs to the (unknown, yet to be discovered) future, while expertise is based on the past, with in-built obsolescence"