"But we should keep in mind that the virologists publishing papers downplaying the possibility of a lab leak are not disinterested parties in this. The political context is a debate about regulating virus labs, and it’s hardly shocking that a large segment of the virus lab community doesn’t like that idea."
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.
On the TWiV (This Week in Virology) podcast at one point they discussed what would be some of the consequences if the lab leak theory were to be proven.
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.
The genesis of JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) was rocket researchers doing it on the Caltech campus and the community fearing explosions. So JPL was created out of town, and named "Jet" instead of "Rocket" because it sounded less dangerous.
I could imagine a university town or the Russian style nuclear cities developing. You go there for a certain industry and a mini culture develops, people understand the trade offs.
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.
World is interconnected a lot right now by planes. For example, Novosibirsk is low populated area in the middle if nowhere, but it just 2 hours by plane to heavily populated China. BSL4 Lab Vector was created in relatively safe area, but now it is not safe anymore. The blast in Vector lab on Sep 16 2019 took immediate attention of scientific world, because blast is able to put virus particles into air from hidden surfaces, which cannot be cleaned properly. Scintists recommended to put Novosibirsk into carantine for 2 weeks at least, but Russians ignored that.
Covid has killed an order of magnitude more people than atomic weapons. We got to learn the hard way how destructive viruses can be. People clutching pearls over the potential to mislead are missing the point. There should be a frank and critical discussion about the risks of viral research, especially near populated areas. But entertaining the possibility of a catastrophic accident is now considered conspiratorial thinking
> 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).
Yes, it might create a feedback loop. But the fact is, no matter what the good guys do, the bad guys are going to keep at it. The only alternative is to try and stay ahead of the bad guys.
How is knowing more about Nukes keeping us safe from Nukes?
All 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.
Non-proliferation treaties were a thing until the US decided not to play ball in the 90s. It is entirely feasible to conceive of nuclear containment via treaties, and indeed the world was headed in this direction after the cold war.
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).
> Non-proliferation treaties were a thing until the US decided not to play ball in the 90s.
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's oversimplifying a lot to say Russia "dumped START II" given the dishonesty surrounding US nukes in Europe at the time. NATO's "nuclear sharing" makes a mockery of NPT. There's the USs historic support of Israel not joining NPT. And so on ... the US is not serious about non-proliferation, to say the very least.
> It's oversimplifying a lot to say Russia "dumped START II"
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.
Non-proliferation is possible if democracies like the US weren't determined to sabotage them. I say democracies because in theory they do what their population wants, and NPTs faced no opposition in the 90s (except from defense contractors of course).
Now it's too late for this crisis (and possibly humanity) but we must demand NPTs if/when this crisis is resolved.
Viral research is useful I'm sure it just annoys me when the media is framing the lab leak theory as some absurd and incredibly unlikely possibility. My point is that like a nuclear exchange a low probability times a lot of damage is high risk
Nuclear weapons are reasonably well controlled. I’d love to know that they were better controlled than they are though. The same applies to virus research.
Surely you don't think that would be a good idea? That leaves Russia with the most powerful weapons on earth. Something makes me think that wouldn't end well for the rest of the world.
If it is „just“ one order of magnitude then I would argue that the loss in quality adjusted lifetime is much lower given the demographics of severe covid cases
As terrible as that may sound I wonder if they thought about the idea to move nuclear reactors back into big cities for the convenience of the people working in them. Sound as if they neither see a problem with that.
Actually moving reactors (back?) into the cities would be a great move because that would make people understand how incredibly safe those thing are.
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.
A lot (most?) of them are. Trojan, in Portland Oregon, wasn't. It left a bitter taste in the mouths of many Oregonians, especially the main population center of the state in Portland, to the point the basically banned it. Also a lot of Washingtonians were not happy that the leftover nuclear waste was buried up in their state as well as increased radioactive levels in the Columbia River detected since then, and higher than average deformation of fish. It was on the ballot year after year to get it closed down and finally leaked docs from the US NRC sealed the deal. I got to watch them blow it up! :)
> 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.
Random factoid: Kodak had a small nuclear reactor in the basement of its Rochester, NY headquarters for thirty years (until the plant and HQ was closed).
Emphasis on small. Not a true secret; fully regulated and licensed. But they didn't talk about it!
If it meant not having fossil fuel plants nearby instead, I 100% would want a nuclear pant near my backyard. Perhaps you don't realize how many people die per year due to air pollution. Comparing the safety records of fossil fuels and nuclear is frankly laughable.
Comparing the safety records of fossil fuels and nuclear,
while ignoring the safety of solar,
is dishonest.
>150% of my power requirements is produced by panels on my roof.
> 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.
you know what's really absurd?
you started off with a 50yo source claiming solar has >100 times the deaths of nuclear,
then fell back to claims that they're 'roughly the same' and 'just a small tradeoff'
but go on to say there is no evidence nuclear isn't safe.
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.
>> 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.
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.
This is far from a solved problem in medicine. Higher salaries aren't enough to attract the number of doctors are needed, and there are also other issues that actively drive away doctors. (For example, fewer doctors to split the call pool in rural areas means that doctors may need to work more nights and weekends than they would in urban areas.)
That would require 1) budgeting more money for science or 2) hiring fewer scientists. Recent U.S. history has very much shown us unwilling to do 1), which means that we're going to get 2). I'm pretty sure that's not really an outcome scientists want either, and arguably it'd be bad for the nation's long-term competitiveness.
> all the virology labs doing dangerous research would be moved outside of big cities
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.)
Inevitably what happens is “middle of nowhere” eventually becomes “middle of the city.” Look to the BSL4 primate lab in San Antonio to observe this phenomenon.
So what would be the difference? Through the lab-leak discussion we have identified labs as a _potential_ threat that need tighter security measures. Even if this virus did not originate in a lab we are just waiting for one that actually does.
As far as media and general public are concerned, maybe. Everyone that watched one of the pandemic films of the 90s, or spend more then 5 minutes thinking about this stuff, figured that out long ago.
I'm not sure the outside big cities would make much difference given how these things spread. Lab worker gets it, goes home, partner flies to a conference etc.
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.
There's a constant, non-zero possibility of a (international-implied-by-the-term) pandemic. And even if this one was a lab leak, chances are extremely high the next will be zoonotic spillover.
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.
Just because the chance of a new pandemic is non-zero doesn't mean we should invite and encourage dangerous behavior that could trigger or quickly spread a strain to the point it turns into a pandemic.
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.
Your response is a bit confusing, so I'm assuming what you mean is that you believe physically isolating high BSL labs in remote areas is a clear and obvious way to mitigate that risk? And that COVID was a warning that we should do more of that? And that scientists are ignoring that warning?
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.
It isn't a ceteris paribus comparison, because we don't live in a society where you can force people of expertise to work where you would like them to.
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.
Not all pandemics are equal though. Whatever nature might throw at us, might not be as bad as a virus that has been purposefully designed to be deadly and highly contagious, through gain of function research.
One of the important things to keep in mind is that the standards of evidence for safety policy decisions are not the same as those of civil or criminal convictions.
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 would think, the US or practically any other country would have a huge incentive to be able to blame China for this entire mess. And those incentives would far outweigh having to move a few labs. Plus, "It's China's bad practices that put the world at risk, not the great wonderful lab practices that happen in the US." That would be the line.
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.
I hear this a lot, but I don't understand how people think it's worse. How is a lab leak worse than the virus emerging from a wet market? At least if it's a lab leak it was while doing potentially life-saving medical research.
Right, this is what I was thinking. Like with a quick Google for "wet markets" prior to 2019 I see tons of articles warning about the dangers and calling for China to close them:
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.
Not at all. What's the war? Do animals even have a concept of war? Don't two parties need to know they're at war for it to qualify as war? Humans aren't killing other animals because animals are a threat to their way of life or their values.
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.
No, humans are enslaving and torturing multiple species because they taste good. And I'm the irrational one? Because I value not causing suffering over personal pleasure? If that's irrational, then fuck whatever is considered rational. It IS morally reprehensible. Just because they aren't human doesn't mean they don't suffer. If there were a group of humans that were perpetually imprisoned, tortured, and eventually murdered, we would call it what it is: genocide. It fits the definitions laid out by the UN.
Everyone in the first world causes vast amounts of suffering to humans across the globe just to maintain our standard of living. Just by being on the internet, we've all decided we're okay with this, and won't voluntarily stop causing suffering for our pleasure.
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.
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.
> The political context is a debate about regulating virus labs
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.
> have an incentive to convince the world that it was not their profession, that unleashed this
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.
Unfortunately, the only folks willing to stick out their necks publicly on this issue are the ones who’re already running around headless. Not sure what fixes this. I can’t imagine anyone reputable with a platform wanting to be the first one to jump into the side of the pool currently filled with schizo posting about how Russia is actually saving the world by blowing up US backed biological weapons labs in Ukraine.
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 of course not. That's why I emphasized uncritically. I'm saying that ignoring the fact of it being such a political football is a fatal mistake, because everything anyone says in public is going to be twisted by people who don't actually GAF about safety policy.
We should also keep in mind the author is not a disinterested party: the author is a blogger. Not a scientist, not a virologist. They profit from clicks, and you don't get clicks for suggesting that the best available evidence is - surprise - the best available evidence, and will probably turn out to be right.
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.
And he confirmed, in one the forst paragraphs, that he started writting about the lab theory after one of the blogs articles about the press coverage turned into the most read article. I stopped reading when he included a google maps (?) screen shot to show distances as proff of something.
The crux of the problem should be the grave injustice IF it was indeed lab generated and leaked. That is why I refer to it as a Lab Genesis, not a leak. The mere downplaying of the possibility is criminally insane.
When it is hard enough to engage people on a lab-leak possibility, engaging on lab genesis is way beyond. If a lab leak can be established, then it will be time to consider the actual origin process: lab-propagated natural, or lab-produced. Even then, for lab-produced there are three reasonable alternatives: weaponized, incidental, or wholly accidental.
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.
Accidental release or not, if they were attempting gain-of-function, which is bio-engineering, and they succeeded, that deserves inquiry. Especially if U.S. leadership, WHO, or NGOs were involved.
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.
Virulence is not the only parameter. Damage caused by the disease is obviously more important. And in that case Sars-Cov-2 is way overpowered compared to previous coronaviruses.
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.
A more-deadly virus ruins its chances only if it kills before it spreads. In this case, where it appears that COVID-19 is contagious for a week before substantial symptoms appear, and a large fraction of those who catch it are not debilitated, ultimate mortality has little effect.
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.
Totally agree -- a similar situation has occurred where some airplane crashes and the people that know the most about it either work for the industry or consult for the industry and there is essentially nobody else that knows anything useful. So one way that this type of thing can be approached is to have a commission -- the equivalent of an information "firing squad" -- nobody really knows who said what, but it allows information to be presented from experts. But requires a ton of trust among the people in the commission to not out each other for who said what.
I think we can all bet that behind closed doors the people that are involved in this type of research are definitely treating the possibility of a lab-leak as highly probable and are thinking about ways to prevent it in the future since we now know that apparently tons of people would rather get disease X than be told what to do.. so we have a bigger future problem on our hands than we thought if something really nasty escapes..
The airplane industry precedent is a good one, but in this case you do have a professional cadre who work on investigating plane crashes, not making planes. This is because there are (or at least were) enough plane crashes to persuade governments to pay for this.
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).
This seems like bs to me. Imagine the investigators of the space shuttle failure or any aeroplane crash behaving like this. After all it reflects badly on the aeronautical engineering profession!
No, it reflects badly on your profession if you don't do your job properly. And I bet most scientists and virologosts understand this.
The "china" leak has always been a red herring and hopefully people have noticed that the emphasis was always supposed to be gain of function research anyone can do anywhere. The finger pointing aspect is distracting when the real concern is the rapidly evolving underlying technology. The scientists disposition really doesn't matter.. it's not like physicists are responsible for all of the nuclear devices that have been detonated, thousands. Those (and these) scientist's owners will be deciding what their developments will ultimately be used for but in this I don't see that there are any entities capable of leveraging this next wave of "progress" that will be capable of amazing and horrific potentialities.
But "more regulation" is in not an intrinsic virtue even though the media/politicians always think they have good ideas on that front. Also the policy question about regulation doesn't mean everyone in the industry will avoid empirical conclusions. Like much of the internet industry is based on ads but that doesn't mean you can't find a programmer to analyze how a particular cookie is set
The other side of the problem is that humans do not want to admit that they are afraid of death and change. Blaming lab leak for the pandemic gives them the feeling of control and safety. They would rather have the belief that this was human caused rather than natural as they cant control a natural disaster.
Ya, it's the same thing behind a lot of conspiracy theories. 911 was an inside job because people don't want to accept that a small contingent of lightly funded terrorists could pull off something so devastating. Or that mass shootings are staged because people don't want to believe that someone could be so murderous.
Well there isn't currently any plausible threat of restricting the ability of a small group of developers to make their own software, without government oversight. If we had a piece of malware that killed a bunch of people and brought the economy to a screeching halt worldwide, there probably would be calls to restrict individual developers from making whatever software they want, and the situation would feel quite different.
One use is to have understanding of how viruses work, so that you can accurately predict spread. If we assume that SARS and MERS (both coronaviruses that seem nearly certain _not_ to have been made in labs) required a knowledge of how coronaviruses work, then a lab doing the general kind of work that was done in Wuhan is real.
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.
Why is this being discussed now? Matt Yglesias has publicly admitted that this piece is flawed. This is critically important context that is being missed by everyone in this discussion:
‘…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.‘
- @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.
...but, doesn't bother to update his article to say that, because that would you know, affect page views and stuff.
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.
The only thing that needed to be corrected was that there was another version of the virus in laos instead of hubei. The main points of the article still stand.
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)
EcoHealth straight up denies that any samples were sent, and the tweet you link only shows that WIV folks were listed as authors of a very generic-sounding paper. I don't see that this shows anything at all. Getting an author listing on a paper doesn't require that you have gotten anywhere near a sample.
That doesnt change any of the most salient points of this saga: Virology research community is coming across shady and untrustworthy. And thats a bigger problem.
I just couldn't take the "research" seriously when I read this:
> 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]
You don’t need to be a scientist to recognize when a group of people are circling the wagons. I don’t know whether on not the virus leaked, but I don’t give much credence to claims by the wagon circle-rs.
Enough coincidences absolutely do need to be debunked. I'm not sure that's the case here, but talking in the abstract - if you start to see tens or hundreds of well documented coincidences, there comes a point at which you can no longer reasonably dismiss them.
- 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.
The US military was in Wuhan for the military games right at the beginning of the outbreak and they were some of the first to get sick. They also flew through Seattle to get there, which was the site of the first outbreak in the US. Combine that with the history of leaks from Ft. Detrick. I haven't seen any of this be debunked. Why won't they allow inspectors into Ft. Detrick?
The lab leak theory originated in China in January 2020. It wasn’t until much later that China started pushing propaganda about Ft. Detrick to distract everyone. It serves no purpose than to get everyone to stop talking about the origin being china and instead shift the blame to everyone else.
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.
> If China is so positive that they are not the origin they would have opened up for an investigation in 2020.
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.
If you want to dismiss the connection between pieces of evidence, you need an argument. Not just calling them a coincidence and dismissing the connection out of hand.
This is something I'm trying to sort out. Is there a qualitative difference between a coincidence and evidence?
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.
No, not really. There's evidence of lots of events that are extremely unlikely to occur by chance, and it gets labelled as a "coincidence" by people who don't like where it points and are trying to stop people drawing obvious conclusions. The term "coincidence" only really makes sense when the probability of accidental coexistence is very high but that's not the case here.
Do you live in the US? This would be part of circumstantial evidence in conjunction with a response of why the statement was removed.
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.
On the contrary, put enough coincidences together and you have what is called evidence. They're not proof, but you certainly need to address them if you want to be taken seriously.
"Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."
So something that has entered the discourse of HN [0] is that there is a large PR industry that powers the corporate press. That is where a lot of the money comes from which decides what & how things get covered.
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.
>But it is really interesting to note how difficult it was to restart the conversation once the lab leak theory was "debunked"
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.
This is really a bad argument. There is plenty of non-profit media and they have not produced anything directly contravening the mainstream for-profit media on this topic. Even in any respectable for-profit news outlet, they wouldn't let a PR firm dictate coverage and convince them to run something untrue for money. They can and frequently do alert them to something newsworthy in the interests of their clients. Think about something apolitical like movie reviews. PR can definitely influence the volume of coverage, but it can't generate positive reviews.
Does this non-profit media also believe in a technological society? Perhaps with an allergy to challenging the concept of this type of science in the first place?
The non-profit media is made up of the same human beings as every other endeavor on the planet. Just without an explicit profit motive. One of my favorite shows, On The Media, has done a few segments breaking down coverage on controversial topics like lab leak or ivermectin. How they became controversial and how some coverage was overly zealous in dismissing evidence too quickly.
> 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.
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.
This fallacy might be useful in a debate, but it's useless in real life. It tells us to ignore basic pattern recognition in favor of treating everyone as an individual, despite our brain's hardware being incapable of effectively doing so.
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.
Sadly, yes. A lot of people consume and regurgitate manufactured opinions. Manufactured consent wouldn't work if it weren't the case. We've struggled with this problem since Plato and will likely continue to for the foreseeable future.
We still need to remind the lemming that pattern recognition isn't the boogieman that pop culture makes it out to be.
If anyone wants to go down the "lab leak" rabbit hole, check out Charles Rixey's Substack [1]. He's assembled a massive database of articles and a complete timeline of events [2] that lead to COVID-19 pandemic. He's one of the members of DRASTIC which is a loose group of researchers looking into the "lab leak" hypothesis. [3][4][5]
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]
I find it suspicious that very few of these "researchers" seem to even have any expertise in virology. Furthermore, very few of them seem to even have a PhD in their respective fields, nor any significant institutional affiliations.
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.
This is tangential, but I've noticed a trend with this argument and other debates in biomedicine where there's a particular form of appeal to authority that takes the form of immunity by authority. That is, "anyone who is not credentialed in X cannot criticize the practices of those in X."
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.
I think there are enough virologists in the world to trust that they don't all believe the same things or have the same bad/good practices.
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?
It would be more like an amateur cryptographer finding a flaw with a published algorithm or certain companies security practices. Which can and does happen.
Arguments should survive on their own merits though, not an appeal to authority. Sometimes a whole field can be flawed (or be afraid of having their funding cut since it comes from only a few sources), and an outsider may be needed to point it out.
You seem to be making a really broad claim with a hidden assumption. When you claim that "Trust should be the most important priority for any scientist," whose trust should be prioritized?
Those complexities seem to be central to how you view graduate degree holders as less trustworthy. From what I understand, you're stating that these institutions are not trustworthy for some reason, which seems to be that they are trying to hide something that is true. Could you elaborate on that?
More or less comes down to trust in institutions and whether or not you think trust should be earned not given. I've seen (personally and in the news) way too many occurrences of trust being abused by institutions. My default is the more political an issue is, the more likely I am to have 0 trust.
I've got a much higher relative trust in underwater basketweaving PHD's than virologist PHD's commenting on the lab leak.
> researchers found a genetic sequence in SARS-CoV-2 virus which was patented by Moderna three years prior to pandemic
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?
Genetics patents very much do exist based on genes found in living organisms.
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.
The problem is how trivial most of the things are to create.
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.
I agree that there is room for productive discussion around what should be patentable, but you are greatly over simplifying the process.
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.
No one has declared it impossible even now. They are saying there is now a very strong preponderance of evidence favors natural origin, while no new evidence of lab leak has appeared.
Worth bearing in mind that the author has himself admitted to and apologized for factual errors in his article that could change some of his conclusions.
"Factual error" is a strong word for a minor issue.
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.
Please god, someone just give me a single piece of evidence of a lab leak so I can run with it and decry the corruption of mainstream media. Nevermind any evidence to the contrary; it's plausible that there could be a conflict of interest, therefore I can throw all of that evidence in the trash. Something something Occam's razor.
The article (by Matt Yglesias) is more nuanced than the title may suggest. Here’s a quote that gets at the gist of the piece:
“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?”
Thank you for including the "by Matt Yglesias". Yglesias periodically admits to trolling, but as near as I can tell, also wants to be taken Very Seriously sometimes. I personally think he comes too close to "trolling" a lot of the time he wants to be taken Very Seriously, so I have to be careful when reading his takes. I would advise other people to also read Matt Yglesias carefully to decide if he's trolling in any given article.
While I am an Yglesias fan, I don’t think your take is unfair. Matt often describes himself as a professional take-haver, and admits to trying to put out somewhat contrarian takes on topics. One of my favorite recent columns of his was a love letter to the “Slatepitches” that Slate.com used to be known for, as an example of unique voice and differentiation in mainstream media that may be going by the wayside in the age of social media:
“ Slate had a whole editorial style that was based around provocative — some would say trolly — articles and up-is-down theses. At its best, Slate championed unpopular causes and provoked fantastic debates. At its worst, Slate seemed to be deliberately stretching to come up with indefensible ideas.”
> Slate.com used to be known for, as an example of unique voice and differentiation in mainstream media that may be going by the wayside in the age of social media: “ Slate had a whole editorial style that was based around provocative — some would say trolly — articles and up-is-down theses.
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.
Nobody claimed it was unique. Slate was just particularly egregious, to the point that virtually every article was like "Was Chattel Slavery Entirely Bad?" The article text would largely dodge the take in order to make some mild pointless observation, but I'm pretty sure articles were accepted based on the ability to write that kind of headline for them, and rejected if they couldn't come up with one.
I know we're not supposed to ask why people are downvoted but I'd be fascinated to know why you were downvoted.
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.
I don't think you have to read the tea leaves of "trolling intent" to evaluate a Yglesias take. Whatever his intent, he lays out his reasoning transparently, and you can decide for yourself if it holds water.
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.
Why would those be mutually exclusive? Ie it could have originated in the lab, somehow got out into the local environment, and then started spreading in the market through an infected animal.
I think your comment is in keeping with Matt’s point, that virus spread among humans or animals at the Wuhan seafood market doesn’t on its own contradict the possibility of a lab leak.
> 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).
I genuinely thought Matt Yglesias was a satirist until recently. It's entirely possible that I'm not the first one to infer that from his "professional take haver" persona (which I thought was a caricature.)
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.
The really depressing part is that the research project in question (where they introduced a furin cleave site into a coronavirus) has been known since early 2020. Newsweek had the link to the research project on the NiH website in March.
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.
As far as I know there is no peer-reviewed research, or research done by virologists or epidemiologists that supports the lab leak theory. It's being pushed on social media by an internet activist group called DRASTIC. They are laying the cloak and dagger act thick, denying that there are good-faith investigations into the theory. Contrary to what they say however most of the world isn't interested in covering up the alleged conspiracy, it's just that the investigations are not at all conclusive. As a data scientist you can nudge things around until you find the pattern you are looking for, but virologists and epidemiologists must take their jobs much more seriously.
But there is a popular quote from Upton Sinclair that goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it," which basically means I can ignore what any professional says and claim they just have a conflict of interest. It works great.
yea it's frustrating how many people I've engaged with who lead with the "well who funded the study?" question before even looking at anything. It screams confirmation bias to me (the question is almost never applied equally to all information)
Any details on how the researchers completed this detailed stall by stall mapping of the wet market and why it took this many years to be released?
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.
Online "news" has gotten to the same point with me as TV "news": I basically don't believe anything anymore ... it's all just noise. One thing might make more sense to me personally, but if the power-that-be have decided that's not the "right" thing, then I'm labeled a conspiracy theorist.
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.
Media is and has always been propaganda. All of it. You have to start from there to make sense of the world.
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.
> Media is and has always been propaganda. All of it. You have to start from there to make sense of the world.
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.
Propaganda isn't all false, it's all advocacy. You interpret it based on that fact; you don't ignore that fact to make the world feel stable and secure.
Just because it is propaganda doesn't mean it won't have actionable information within it. It just means that you cannot shut off your brain and consume any of it - ever. Every last creator has an angle, even your good guys.
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.
> We ran into trouble at some point with critical thinking
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.
If some event doesn't have a direct personal effect on you, it's probably nothing you need to know about or be concerned with. If it does have a direct personal effect on you, you'll find out about it without being told.
I just don't see how you can trust "what makes sense to me". Personally I don't pretend to think I have a deep understanding in most topics to be able to tell true from made up. It's too easy to get fooled by your own confirmation bias.
when you're being told to not think critically about anything and just believe what you're being told at face value, and you're capable of thinking critically enough to notice this, then this is the result.
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.
I mean, that's a really bad position to take. You can't evaluate news based on the medium. Evaluate based on the credibility of the source. MSM reporting on COVID has been very consistent and very accurate. Almost all of the mis and disinformation is coming from political sources or unqualified opinionators. If you just follow the most obvious sources like the NY Times, BBC, NPR and the like, you'd be right over 95% of the time.
I'm a bit disappointed that people with little connection to Asia are still making a big fuss about wet markets and exotic animals.
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?
>>> I'm a bit disappointed that people with little connection to Asia are still making a big fuss about wet markets and exotic animals.
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
> The Times made a heat map that ignores the human cases and just plots the stall samples (I’m not totally sure why would you do that?), and then the finger points really squarely at a specific stall that sold live animals.
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.
> Over time, three basic issues emerged with this theory. No one has been able to identify:
> 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.
Is that the complete article? Or does it continue (for subscribers) after this paragraph?
> 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.
" it would be an odd coincidence for a lab-leaked virus to have its first big super-spreading event at a live animal market,"
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.
> it would be an odd coincidence for a lab-leaked virus to have its first big super-spreading event at a live animal market,
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.
I'm pretty sure if there were a bunch of dead bats/mice/monkeys coming out of the lab it wouldn't be unexpected for some to turn up in the local market.
As the person who originally posted this to HN, after reading some of the refutations of Matt Y’s piece (the OP), I’ve come to believe the evidence for zoonotic origin is stronger than Matt Y gives credit for.
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:
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
This is like the Kennedy assassination. there is the official narrative, and at the same time other alternative narratives that the govt. will never entertain but are still also possible. You're never going to see a NYTs or WSJ headlines that says "lab leak confirmed by Whitehouse". It will always be something in the air.
How does this not mention project defuse, the NIAID funded EcoHealth Alliance research program taking place in wuhan which sought to:
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).
My simple question would be, if it was really a lab leak, wouldn't you expect the people working in lab to be infected first? Or is this assumption flawed? If so why?
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.
Ah. Thank You. Because if it started in November, very likely October, and possibly in September. I thought it would have started with those working in the Lab first.
I still dont know why every report are pin-pointing at the December Date. I thought it is rather misleading.
They stopped all flight to Wuhan by 10th of November [1] ( even if the notice said 15 ). That was when they knew it was serious enough. Chatter of unknown "Lung Diseases" was already spreading by end of October on WeChat.
One recent find that makes me doubt the debunking:
>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.
In January 2020 there was discussion on Chinese Social Media about lab conditions at the plant, and that it came from there. There were multiple quality sources about it. There ended up being a crackdown on discussion about this from China with several people being taken away.
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.
... That doesn't exonerate them. Like, at all. It's weird that so many make this point as if it matters.
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?
The number of early cases connected to the market could be partly confirmation bias -- you detect an early case at the market, and then start to investigate everyone connected to the market, and surprise! almost all of the cases you find are connected to the market.
The lab is only 27 km from the wet market along two main arteries. How about the idea a compromised lab worker went to the wet market on the way home, or for a prepared lunch and it spread to the general population that way?
I’m not convinced by the bioweapon debunking either for that matter.
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.
"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"
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. - You'd investigate the god damn lab, immediately. Failing to do this is equivalent to admitting it came from the lab.
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.
1. There are various possible ways. Maybe a whistleblower. Maybe it's in the lab database they still won't show. Maybe the research is detailed in EcoHealths emails they still won't show. etc.
2. We should probably improve on the two most likely sources - lab or wet market.
This is a great example of what would be obvious to a 10 year old (natural virus leaking from a lab) yet we've seen endless lies and distortions from the media and intelligentsia trying to obsfucate the idea.
I dont understand how anyone can have anything other than utter contempt for the media and associated "experts".
> 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.
On this issue I suggest figuring it out for yourself. Look into the technology a bit and decide.
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.
People are living in a fairy tale. Whether intentional or accidental lab leak, or accidental market incident, the effect has been the same.
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.
There are sources that claim that 300 yards from the we market there was a chinese virology inatitute building. Why this was never followed up baffles me.
The lab leak hypothesis and the seafood market hypotheses are not necessarily in conflict. If a lab made a boo boo with a virus sample, they could cover up the institution's own infections, and purposely get some people sick at the market to make it look like it started there.
I'm only pointing out (one possible) way in which two hypotheses are not conflicting. If any such a way exists, then the hypotheses cannot be regarded as mutually exclusive.
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.
Downplaying the lab leak is dangerous, because it is the difference between an accident and mass murder. I think the best evidence for a lab leak is common sense.
Einstein developed General Relativity despite all the available evidence being against it; he did not carefully study existing evidence and realize it supported General Relativity. I.e., it was developed purely by using "common sense", which is just a derogatory term for rationalism.
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.
> Einstein developed General Relativity despite all the available evidence being against it
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.
> 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.
Evidence is facts and information, not vague feelings, no matter how "common sense" it seems. You couldn't convict someone in a court of law with common sense, nor support a scientific theory with common sense. You need this external thing in the world that exists outside your mind. We have the word evidence to mean that external thing that exists outside your mind.
Is there somehow more evidence of natural origin than lab leak? By common sense, this is what I mean: the strain of coronavirus that caused covid-19 was very strong, much stronger than any previous strain, and we have seen many. Common sense says we have seen all the strains Nature could throw at us already, and none have been that deadly. So common sense leads to looking for evidence i new light, in new places.
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.
"Common sense" does not apply - or is worse than useless - in areas where one has no actual deep experience. Which in this case would mean certain virologists, epidemiologists, etc.
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.
You have deep experience with viruses, via your biology. Science knows very little about virology, if you learned nothing but that from the pandemic. Your intuition is actually quite strong, as your whole body is a fractal complex of nature itself.
The first illegal thing would be the act of making it in the lab, not the release, accidental or not.
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.
I'm not sure that "making it in a lab" is illegal. Haven't many countries engaged in gain-of-function research? Is that illegal? Under what law?
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.
Okay, well accidentally killng people as a result of bioengineering is war crime, if not a crime Alameda County.
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.
I just don't understand why people feel so strongly about this issue, nor why so many people are so confident in their belief. Both theories are plausible. We will never know which one is correct. And it doesn't matter either way. Nothing would change given certainty one way or another.
It's a pointless discussion which has spilled enough ink and consumed enough brain cycles.
The WIV was studying novel coronaviruses. American scientists called it unsafe in 2018.
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.
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.
Not sure if you read it, but in the New York Magazine article by Nicholson Baker [0], that the rest of the press really hammered them for publishing, there is one bit that I still find really persistently interesting.
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.
I find quotes like this uninteresting, because it's also exactly the sort of thing you would say if you were trying to cover up such a mistake. It carries no information.
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.
> I find quotes like this uninteresting, because it's also exactly the sort of thing you would say if you were trying to cover up such a mistake. It carries no information.
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.
I can't tell if you simply skipped over words while reading her response or if you simply brought personal bias into your reading.
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.
> 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.
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.
> but I can't help but feel if you can't deal with the attention appearing/posting things publicly gets you
Deal with it by not being female, maybe?
I mean, I think your idea makes sense in principle. But the nature of the attention is not irrelevant: there is good data that shows that women encounter both the lion's share of online abuse, and also much worse abuse on every level than men, even on non-gender-related topics.
The raw truth of the world is that women in any sphere of influence but perhaps particularly in science and politics get so much more abuse of so much more vile a nature, that we should probably be forgiving of their wish to ultimately just be able to speak without having it shoved in their faces.
That would imply that women are inherently more socially inept than men.
>there is good data that shows that women encounter both the lion's share of online abuse, and also much worse abuse on every level than men, even on non-gender-related topics.
Is there? Such as? I'm not being glib, I'm honestly asking. I doubt it, but I'm willing to be proven wrong.
>perhaps particularly in science and politics get so much more abuse of so much more vile a nature
I think you're exaggerating and losing perspective of just how terrible the world is.
>we should probably be forgiving of their wish to ultimately just be able to speak without having it shoved in their faces.
If you want to, feel free. When someone shuts off others' ability to respond, what it says to me is either that they're not confident enough in their words to defend them (so why did they bother?), or that I should listen to them, but they are important enough not to have to reciprocate that courtesy. Why should I listen in either case?
Link 1: The article is light on methodology, and in any case it seems to be categorizing as "abuse" conversations between person A and person B about person C, who is not participating in the discussion. I.e. me telling you "I think emperor Hirohito was kind of a wimp" would be abuse, apparently.
Link 2: Even worse. It's only counting uses of specific words without regard for context. Just uttering the word "slut" is misogynistic? So my previous sentence is misogynistic?
Link 3: I have no tears to shed for any negative attention any politician gets. That's part of the job description. If they can't deal with it they really should have picked a different profession.
Link 4: As a statistical data point it's interesting, but one should be careful about what conclusions to draw from it. They only counted blocked comments. We don't really know what those comments contained (although we're invited to assume they were misogynistic and abusive towards the writer). We don't know what the specific topics the articles in question were about. For example, could it be that women tend to write more often about controversial topics, for whatever reason? We don't know if all articles are subjected to the same amount of moderation. If articles A and B have the same number of comments, but B has twice as many blocked comments, and twice as many people moderating it, they might not be so lopsided as it appears.
To be clear, I'm not denying that women probably do get more negative attention online. There's probably a fair bit of overlap between being loud and annoying and hating women. I just think these stats are garbage, except for link 4.
I think there are two reasonable positions that aren’t contradictory:
1) public figures should anticipate public attention;
2) women and other minorities receive order of magnitude more harassment online when they become public figures
In this perception it seems reasonable to be a woman in public, anticipate more harassment, and operate in public appropriately. After all, she’s not legally obligated to open her replies (and people can qrt or screenshot if they want to engage).
Obviously not. I'm not talking about what's legal or illegal, I'm talking about being courteous by engaging with other's responses to you. Yes, some people will not be courteous back, but by disabling the ability to reply you're shutting everyone out.
People can quote retweet or screenshot if they want to engage. This isn’t a locked account or one that has most of Twitter blocked or something, so they’re clearly not shutting everyone out.
Do they actually? Has this been proven? I know that I'm just supposed to take any anecdotes about race and gender as unquestionable truth, but I just don't.
You know thanks to your inquiry I did some cursory googling and while it seems women claim to receive about similar amounts of harassment, the nature of the harassment is generally much more focused and experienced as much more distressing than men (for example, women experience more sexual harassment and rape threats online, while men receive more generically offensive or insulting language). I guess in this case the adjustment can be that women can anticipate more rape threats and sexual harassment and act appropriately. Thanks for pushing me to do some more research about it.
If you really care, there are plenty of ways to research now that everyone has the internet. Next time you have this argument, you'll be armed with information.
Are you accusing me of hypocrisy? The way to avoid negative attention is by being anonymous. People who specifically avoid being anonymous want to have a reputation. When they turn around and moan about being insulted they're trying to have their cake and eat it too: they want only the positive attention attached to their identity and none of the negative attention. That's just not how the world works.
Why would anyone have "no idea" about this? We're literally surrounded by women - moms, sisters, friends, wives - our entire lives. This is not some secret knowledge that men cannot grasp. Men know the score here, and have even intervened for our sisters or nieces when needed. I see stuff like this all the time online, it's absurd. Who do you think I spend most of my time with? Women. I came from a woman.
I'm well aware. One chooses how to present oneself. Do you know if I'm a woman? Do you think you don't know by accident? If I want my ideas to be heard they should be the focus of my communication, not any part of my identity.
That's not a thing that you can do on twitter where your gender is already public. It's not her that would be intentionally entangling her gender with the ideas that she's expressing, it's her that wouldn't be able to escape her gender being entangled with the ideas that she's expressing.
I'd venture to say that most racial/ethnic minorities try to stay within the pseudoanonymous assumption that everybody on the internet is a white man as long as possible. If you're posting on the internet as a public person, that's not an option.
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.