Yes, but we can assume - Trump and his people have openly communicated, planned, and followed through on it - that the actions of executive branch agencies are politicized.
Here we are told that the "C.I.A.’s new director, John Ratcliffe, ... wants the agency to get “off the sidelines” in the debate."; that he's long favored the lab-leak theory (which is a politicized issue); and of all the things a brand new new CIA director must do, we see that this was Ratcliffe's first priority. We know that the CIA did not choose to release the report before the Trump administration.
I think the overwhelming evidence is that it's a politicized action. Would Trump or his team lie or mislead? Of course. We can't give them the benefit of the trust until proven false; they have embraced deceit.
Unfortunately, even though they weren't always credible before, I think that means that these things are now meaningless, other than as clues to Trump's and others' intents: Why prioritize this messaging? Whose idea was it? And always, cui bono - who benefits?
Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, released the following statement about the CIA’s findings on the origins of the Coronavirus:
“I’ve said from the beginning that Covid likely originated in the Wuhan labs. Communist China covered it up and the liberal media covered for them. I’m pleased the CIA concluded in the final days of the Biden administration that the lab-leak theory is the most plausible explanation of Covid’s origins and I commend Director Ratcliffe for fulfilling his promise to release this conclusion. Now, the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world.”
Having no other information, the fact he went out of his way to associate it with Biden makes it seem actually politically driven by Trump/Republicans.
He wants to give it a "it's a bipartisan conclusion, so it's sane!".
Considering it's "with low confidence", someone else could've published the findings focusing on the low confidence rather than the fact that their needle is pointing more towards "lab leak".
"Now, the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world.”
Is that really true? Even supposing it was a leak from a lab, is punishing China really our top priority? What does it accomplish? What does it look like?
That sounds like the goal isn't to find the actual cause, but to seek excuses to justify whatever it is he wishes to inflict on China.
It was started under Biden, but the decision to publicize it is the new director's decision.
Worth noting is that this is a low-confidence report. I'm not accusing the director of divulging a low-confidence report under the belief that the public will accept it as categorically true because they have no sense of how CIA confidence levels work, but they're willing to believe the director wouldn't publicize it if it wasn't true.
... you should have low confidence in the truth of my last statement.
Specifically, we now have internal emails dating to 2020 from the CDC (NIH? Who remembers, it's been literally two years since this came out) about how it was probably a lab leak and then about the importance to bury the lab leak theory.
Wasn't this one of those "forbidden" conspiracy theories, censored from most social media, while most people (here too) cheered for "fighting misinformation" with censorship?
There is now a broad consensus across the national security establishment and the leadership of both major political parties that China must be treated as an adversary. Attempts at constructive engagement failed so now we have to pivot to containment in Cold War 2. This is a strategic issue that transcends money.
Concern about China is not partisan anymore, pretty much everyone is on board now.
Also from the article:
"Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time."
But we know Trump lies, and that people around him change their story and lie for him, and we know he gets rid of personnel who don't 'kiss the ring'... and this comes at the exact instant that he says he's going to start his import tariffs for Chinese goods and needs media support to convince USA-ians that making all goods coming from China now expensive is a good idea...
I mean you're going to need extraordinary evidence to show this is true; but CIA say there's no new evidence and it's a low confidence conclusion.
Probability that it's just Trump continuing to be deceitful and manipulative approaches certainty.
Trump (and Elon) are actually fairly pro-China. Or at least, Trump and Xi have a good relationship (and Trump was quoted last month as believing the US and China can solve many problems together), and Elon loves China.
They’re pro-themselves. China could bankrupt Musk at the stroke of a pen by kicking Tesla out, so he’s effectively their foreign agent. Trump wants bribes, and he has leverage via his unchecked power over tariffs. He even opened a convenient collection box via his cryptocurrency.
Censoring views that it came from a lab leak with zero evidence isn't any better. In fact I remember being lied to by major news outlets at the time saying that the evidence points to a non lab origin.
I'm confused, do you mean the animal origin had no evidence either, but was favoured? But not having evidence for 5 years suddenly makes the other theory favoured instead?
So basically neither had real evidence, but one was favoured?
Animal origin does not contradict a lab leak however. Especially if you have a biolab studying coronaviruses in bats in the city identified as ground zero.
It does favor an accidental lab leak over a targeted weaponization and release, but it doesn't contradict a lab origin.
There was a nucleotide sequence in the covid strain that did not show up in any of the proposed hosts or progenitor viral sequences, which is where leaked documents showed NIH (Fauci included I believe) discussing the non-natural origin of the nucleotide sequence. It's possible to search for articles about the Fauci NIH emails, and whether they mean anything scandalous.
Here's a technical article at NIH discussing the theory of no known natural origin for a nucleotide subsequence
This is an open access journal by two people whose publication history you can look up if you want to draw your own conclusions. Read the disclaimer at the top of the link. Don’t bootstrap its credibility by linking it to being at NIH (which does mean something) anymore than saying something found on Google is from the company itself.
Don’t imagine any bootstrapping of credibility is stated. It’s a citation to one article of many with no assertion otherwise. That’s how science discussions work.
That is not true at all. Some scientists at the time suspected a lab leak, talk of which was deliberately shut down.
"Dr Robert Redfield, who led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Trump administration, told Vanity Fair that he received death threats from fellow scientists when he backed the Wuhan lab leak theory last spring.
"I was threatened and ostracised because I proposed another hypothesis," Dr Redfield said. "I expected it from politicians. I didn't expect it from science."[1]"
The US State Department were told to not to explore claims of Gains of Function research:
"According to an investigation in Vanity Fair magazine published on Thursday, Department of State officials discussed the origins of coronavirus at a meeting on 9 December 2020.
They were told not to explore claims about gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan lab to avoid attracting unwelcome attention to US government funding of such research, reports Vanity Fair.[2]"
We may never know the truth, but its clear that there was politics being played since the beginning of the pandemic to obscure the truth, and not just by China.
Wasn't it? Most of the earliest cases had a link to the market, many of whom were vendors including the very first known case. The early cases which had no known link lived/stayed clustered around the market. The market sold live wild animals which were known reservoirs for the previous coronavirus break (SARS).
There was also no evidence against it. If there is neither solid evidence for nor against something I find it perfectly reasonable to apply the balance of probabilities. At least as long as you qualify your statement with a "probably".
And with the main competing theory (covid spreading from a wet market in a city that contains a biolab) also being consistent with the hypothesis that it was an accidental lab leak, to me the balance of probabilities always seemed to favor the lab leak hypothesis.
Yet saying that Covid probably originated from a lab leak was once branded as dangerous misinformation, with seemingly no evidence to support that claim
At the time, there was essentially a 50/50 chance it was a lab leak or from a wet market. The issue with saying it was a lab leak at that time is that you are essentially gambling the US's relationship with China should it come out that it was a from a wet market. Also, a lot of the discussion regarding the lab leak theory early on seemed to me like it wouldn't be sated even if the US presented sufficient evidence that it was from a wet market.
There were very good arguments that Covid (probably) leaked from a lab as early as April 2020 at the latest (and in January if you were a virologist included in top-level NIAID emails). HN largely went along with the shunning of debate, which helped give everyone the impression there was "zero evidence" of a lab leak compared to solid evidence of zoonotic origin, which was simply never true.
In short a few prominent people claimed it was racist to suggest that China's research or wet market contributed to the origins of COVID. They were mistaken but with the highly politicized environment, it helped distort opinions at a critical time. The claims of racism have since been demonstrated to be at least partly false (that is, there is a legitimate case to be made that China's researchers or wet market did contribute to the origin of COVID, and that China's leadership hid most of the evidence that would be used to make a case).
Conflation of very different factors. Animal origin was always going to be the most likely explanation, so wet market tracks. Lab leak after secret gain of function research is much more of a speculatory accusation than the existence of wet markets.
It's not racist to blame China, but it is racist to accuse/harass/disparage Asian people and that was what was happening in America. Pushing back on the lab leak theory was at least in part to stop the dumbest among us from blaming their Asian neighbor. That and the lack of evidence.
> while most people (here too) cheered for "fighting misinformation" with censorship?
Exactly right. Remember any comment daring to question the authorities was shouted down to oblivion. Anyone daring to question lockdowns or other draconian measures were met with fire and brimstone. I lost a lot of respect for HN during Covid.
I feel it’s important to not forget the level of adherence to authoritarian rule that infected the population during Covid. Even places like HN were not immune. “Just following orders” was SOP even here.
It was forbidden since users were banned for talking about it. That is what is meant by forbidden. When an authority exercises their power over you to stop you.
So there’s a new president and the main intelligence agency changes its position radically in alignment with the new government. Why should we be confident in any other claim they made in the past?
Yes that's what I thought but it does say it was an analysis project started by Biden. The timing is suspicious, true.
But yeah this topic is extremely politicised (not just by the US mind you, but also by China). So it's hard to say what's the truth. I doubt we'll ever find it.
The lab leak theory does make sense though IMO. I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. But yeah, I take this at face value. And to be honest I'm just really happy that this is all behind us.
Or, in a parallel universe, there's an old president who preemptively pardoned the person who might have been involved in GOF research leading to a lab leak.
It is an interesting angle, because now he could potentially be subpoenaed by Congress or anyone else, and it seems unlikely that he would perjure himself over anything after 2014.
Unless there's another crime outside the scope of the pardon. For example, crimes within the statute of limitations prior to the pardon, new crimes after the pardon, or state level crimes during the period of the pardon.
Considering what is known about that agency's activities under Reagan, I think everyone lost confidence about any claims they made before I was even born.
I'm missing the part where there has been institutional reform since then. Otherwise, the mandate and policies that fostered those affairs are still in place, no?
Even if the lab leak theory is true, why Trump was so confident about it? Does he have sources that CIA does not? I would be so confident in it only in the case if I myself caused that virus leak...
Only one lab in the world doing GoF experiments on this specific furin cleavage site AND a random natural mutation happens within a few KM of this lab on this specific furin cleavage site. What are the odds of this happening? Very close to zero.
Trump wasn't confident in the theory. He is not confident in anything. He does not care about the truth or falsity of anything he says. He only cares about it serving his interests.
Don’t you people tire of this? Do you really not realize why he just won every contest we have?
He was the president at the time - yes - he had better info than you. The people saying it wasn’t a lab leak had motivation to do so - and the head of that group just took a president pardon for their efforts.
Normally I would disregard their findings. However, the FBI, former head of the CDC, and Congressional panel all came to the same conclusion: Covid was made in a lab.
Doesn't feel like a radical change in position to me. They said they weren't sure either way previously. In this statement they're explicitly calling it "low-confidence."
The FBI & Energy Department have both said that they think it's a lab leak.
Changes its position radically? The FBI came out saying it had moderate confidence in the lab leak theory in 2023, right in the middle of the Biden administration [0]. The DOE came out with their own assessment a few days earlier [1]. The CIA's position was hiterto "we're not yet sure", and now it's "we still aren't sure but we're leaning towards lab leak". That's not a radical shift, it's a very slight shift in the direction that other three-letter agencies have been leaning for years.
There were almost certainly some politics involved in the decision to release the report now, but it's not like the CIA were staunch advocates for zoonotic origins up until now, and again: Biden's FBI and DOE were already leaning this way!
> The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.
From "we don't know if it was a lab leak or spread from the market" to "we think it maybe is". Sure, they started this investigation with Biden, but just released it a couple of days ago AND they have even low confidence on it. So, why release it if the confidence is low? Why now? The answer is: new government, new conclusions.
They went from uncertain to low certainty. It's hard to imagine a smaller shift in position than that, and thus the dog-pile. You're trying to drag me into some other debate entirely.
> The agency made its new assessment with “low confidence,” which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete.
I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain.
---
One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as saying:
> “Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Mr. Cotton said.
So... I'm not certain this is a development worth trusting. Maybe it really did originate from a lab! But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.
That’s certainly motivation for releasing it, but he’s been in office for five days so the analysis being released was done under the prior administration.
As the article observes, “the new analysis … began under the Biden administration.”
The new administration has been in office a week. There is a political incentive to release it now, but they couldn’t have meaningfully created the analysis for political reasons in five days.
> they couldn’t have meaningfully created the analysis for political reasons in five days
CIA has been in the hot seat for long enough to be politically sensitive. Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce multiple reports for every conclusion. It's not implausible that this happened here. In any case, we're talking about a partian topic with low- and moderate-confidence reports with a President who has zero chance of holding China accountable on it. Parlour talk.
They say that there is no new data. That they are just altering their choice for what assumption is more likely.
Supposedly because they've had more time to think about the conditions of the lab before Covid was released...
But really, nothing has changed except their biases. Nothing has changed on the solid evidence side.
Separately, if there were actual safety issues and stuff was leaking... Then we're incredibly lucky that it was something as tame as Covid, and not one of the more serious kinds of horrors that gain of function research has successfully produced.
> I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain.
That's fine. The really problem is all debate on such matters was shut down during pandemic. To the benefit of no one (except for maybe Biden trying to cajole to Chinese into something, or other. Or to protect USG's role in this affair by financing Chinese gain of function research).
The real problem is, trying to cover that, they said masks were useless and other elucubrations for which they didn’t have proof, like “Stay inside”. “But they didn’t know it was false” Well, if so, don’t speak.
> I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain.
There's never going to be any conclusive evidence of the source of covid, and anyone claiming they have certainty (who wasn't a witness to a lab leak) is simply lying to you. What they're doing is going along with everyone else worth listening to, who find the coincidence that we were funding banned research on coronaviruses in a lab a few feet away from the origin of the outbreak unlikely. They also find tales of non-lab origin both speculative and vague, while stories of lab origin are only speculative.
It's so strange to demand so much more proof of lab origin than one does of non-lab origin. The obvious reasons for that demand are that millions died, and that everybody involved with that lab can easily be named. Also weird that this observation is covid-skeptic coded, when in reality the worse you think covid is, the greater the crime that a lab leak entails.
I assumed it was a non-lab origin at first because that's how all previous pandemics have started as far as I am aware. A lab origin (and what precisely that means has never been particularly clear to me), but I have to say that I'd say your last observation cuts both ways - if one thinks this is such a great crime, then perhaps one would have encouraged masking, shutdowns/distancing, and vaccines, but those seem anti-correlated. Perhaps we'll do better next time around?
We won’t, because the judgment of many of our cognitive elites has been impaired.
This is a bit of a digression, but I’m reading a tweet thread by a $2,300/hour attorney who is an MSNBC contributor that is making just basic logical errors in discussing the birthright citizenship EO. Not even on the merits, literally in just summarizing the implications of the argument being made on a page of a filing he screenshotted in his tweet. I’m persuaded that if you had these folks take the LSAT with questions that had a political coding, they’d score a 160.
We need to get back to prioritizing the institutional and values of the different professions above all else. The public should view our scientific and professional organizations as neutral actors staffed by people who put the institutions above their personal beliefs. They shouldn’t be wondering whether medical organizations would be saying the same things about the “Lab Leak” theory if it had involved Russia instead of China.
> a tweet thread by […] an MSNBC contributor that is making just basic logical errors in discussing the birthright citizenship EO
No surprise there. Some people are not, contrary to your apparent assumption, actually trying to analyze something logically and arrive at some form of truth. I very much doubt that this has anything at all to do with COVID.
African green monkeys later found to be carrying the virus were shipped to several labs in Germany and Yugoslavia; the virus hopped from the monkeys to lab workers and then from the lab workers to a small number of others.
If we are looking what we could do better next time, then we should look to the studies that showed what worked and what was most effective. The most effective initial method against the virus was neither masking, shutdowns/distancing (vaccines are not applicable since they didn't exist initially). It was to close down mass transportation. Shared recycled air is a highly suitable transportation mechanism for this kind of virus, with airplanes, trains and busses being mobile centers for outbreaks. We should try to look towards this kind of research next time something like this hit and be more focused on what actually work, rather than what either the governing party or opposing party want to promote. Airborne diseases travel by air and if you want to prevent that you need to make sure that people who are non-infected do not share the same air as people who are. If that is impossible, shutdowns/distancing helps to reduce the risks until a vaccine is developed.
And there's been mutations in the virus since the initial exposure. How could that happen? How can a virus change its genetic code without a lab to do it?!?!!/s
Regardless of the source, it was dangerous but could have been better mitigated if it was taken seriously as a threat (not just a "common cold").
Okay, but your objection was requiring more evidence for the less likely assertion constituted an "arbitrary bar", you cannot argue that and quote _an arbitrary estimate by another commenter_
The 1977 flu is uncontroversially accepted to have arisen from a research accident, probably either an inadequately attenuated vaccine or a challenge trial in human subjects. The death toll is typically reported as 700,000, though I don't think that's a very good number and I can't find the methodology. Many fewer people died in the 1977-78 season; but the virus has continued to spread, so the cumulative toll is much higher (and continues to increase).
So how many people have to die before this is no longer an extraordinary claim? Bhopal managed to change chemical manufacturing standards with "only" thousands or tens of thousands of deaths; but the 1977 flu is somehow completely forgotten.
Perhaps the death toll is so high that people simply can't believe it? YouTube's fact-checkers recently removed an unambiguously factual description of the 1977 pandemic, ignoring appeals well-referenced into the peer-reviewed literature with no stated justification.
The argument is not "research accidents categorically do not happen" it was "are they the more common event and therefore the more probable explanation, absent anything else"
Depending how we count, there have been a dozen or so pandemics comparably novel or deadly to the 1977 flu in the last fifty years. Of those, at least one was research-origin.
So are you really saying p ~ 1/12 is an "extraordinary claim"? Is a 6'1" American man "extraordinarily tall"? There's unfortunately no standard map between English phrases and numerical probabilities, but I think most people would understand a much lower probability. If you really want to define it that way, then "extraordinary evidence" is likewise diluted to the point that the circumstantial case (emergence in Wuhan, DEFUSE) brings research origin easily into contention.
> Depending how we count, there have been a dozen or so pandemics comparably novel or deadly to the 1977 flu in the last fifty years. Of those, at least one was research-origin. So are you really saying p ~ 1/12 is an "extraordinary claim"?
Yes, I think it is extraordinary to extrapolate one event in 1977 to a "once every fifty years" rate
Can you quantify what you believe is a correct prior then, and explain how you got that number?
I hope you're not going to count every natural spillover since prehistory in the denominator. The technology to culture and freeze an influenza virus didn't exist before ~1930, and the technology to genetically enhance a sarbecovirus didn't exist before ~2010. The absence of pandemics with such origin before that means nothing. No one had ever suffered a cancer induced by an X-ray tube before 1904; but that doesn't mean the risk wasn't there, and Edison's assistant still died horribly.
I said fifty years because that roughly covers the period during which an accident similar to the 1977 flu was possible. Perhaps I should have said longer, since influenza was first cultured in 1931; but we also need some time in the freezer for the circulating virus to diverge. I don't think much changes if we say a hundred years instead.
Can you explain why 2010 would be a reasonable start cutoff? That doesn't make any sense to me, since it excludes most of the time that a research-origin flu pandemic was possible. We obviously haven't had a research-origin novel sarbecovirus pandemic before maybe SARS-CoV-2; but when new technological developments occur, the most similar old technologies are our best model. Nobody had ever died in a plane crash before the Wright brothers, but anyone familiar with unpowered gliders could predict the risk.
Both the FBI and DOE, which have their own foreign intelligence gathering capabilities, had previously assessed that COVID was caused by a lab leak with moderate confidence. So while I agree with you that the truth will likely remain shrouded in some mystery, most of us that believed it originated from zoonosis at first (and I would include myself in that camp) should update our priors both based on the CIA assessment and previous assessments
Are the FBI or DOE assessments public? What I last read in the peer-reviewed public literature seemed to point strongly to animal origin and not from a lab.
You are being downvoted, but you are right. Evidence suggest that patient zero was someone in the Wuhan market, around november 2019, and the SARS-CoV-2 genetic "signatures" where all found in wild animals for sale in that market.
Even if it leaked from the lab, the first affected people (mainly sellers) were from the market, which is weird. Occam's razor points to what you said.
> Evidence suggest that patient zero was someone in the Wuhan market, around november 2019, and the SARS-CoV-2 genetic "signatures" where all found in wild animals for sale in that market.
You're just repeating the conclusions of papers that made ridiculous leaps of logic based on circumstantial evidence. For example [1], which is the likely source of the argument you're (mis-)remembering, bases this conclusion on:
1) case histories from reported, hospitalized cases, which were probably incorrect (i.e. they just assume that the cases they know about are, in fact, the first cases), being "geographically centered" on the market in December (not November) of 2019 [2].
2) positive environmental samples near animal stalls in the market, of which they found two strains.
Neither of which is dispositive of anything, and more an indictment of the motivated reasoning of the academic literature at the time than anything else. If you bother to read any of the subsequent analyses, you'll find that there are a bunch of different lines of evidence (genetic and case reports, at the least), pushing the date of the first infections well before December.
In short, the first/WHO case reports were probably wrong, the virus likely broke out earlier and was circulating in Wuhan before these samples were taken. If that's true, it wouldn't be surprising, at all, to find positive environmental samples in a food market, and the tortured logic of this paper would fall apart.
[2] Seriously. Not joking. Here's the "methods" they used for this oh-so-rigorous analysis:
> The 2021 WHO mission report identified 174 COVID-19 cases in Hubei Province in December 2019 after careful examination of reported case histories (7). Although geographical coordinates of the residential locations of the 164 cases who lived within Wuhan were unavailable, we were able to reliably extract the latitude and longitude coordinates of 155 cases from maps in the report
They then take this data and blend it through a kernel analysis, wave their hands, and voilá! This this The Science (tm) upon which your confidence is based.
...oh, and by the way: the market in question just happens to be right next to the Wuhan CDC, and a major city hospital [3]. Weird, right? I'm sure it's just a coincidence. Certainly nothing worth including in a putative "probability analysis" of geographic distribution.
The disease might have already been global at that point, it doesn't exactly have conspicuous symptoms. Wuhan was a place where somebody thought of looking for anything unusual.
Doctors in Wuhan first identified the pandemic due to the unusually high volume of sick and dying patients, not by any sophisticated means. There's no public evidence that the WIV was involved in the initial discovery of the novel virus. Zhang Yong-Zhen was the first to publish a genome, in Shanghai.
If the disease had already been global, then retrospective testing of wastewater samples, nasal swabs obtained for other purposes like the Seattle Flu Study, banked blood, and other stored samples would have revealed that. There were some scattered claims that it did, but none that held up very well under scrutiny.
Your guessing of my sources are wrong, thus your message is a strawman fallacy from beginning to end.
There are studies pre SARS-CoV-2 about coronavirus in natural environments (like bat caves), and they found motifs that we found also in SARS-CoV-2. Zoonotic infections are very common and specially for coronavirus, so it should be our first guess unless overwhelming evidence shows that the virus was originated in a lab (leaked or engineered).
Maybe it was a lab leak, but there is not stronger evidence for that, than for the zoonotic event.
Here is your bad science:
- H0: The origin is the lab.
- H1: The origin is a naturally ocurring zoonosis.
As evidence for H1 cannot convince you, you accept H0 without any proof. Great science! Problem is your H0 is wrong. H0 should be the most easy explanation, which is a zoonosis that has happened before thousands of times, and for which we have also evidence (you call it circumstancial, as this was a trial) like similar sequences found in bats nearby. You must get better evidence to prove the unusual lab leak hypothesis. Your H0 and H1 are reversed.
You provided no references, and you've made your claims in generally nonstandard terms. Given that, I don't think it's reasonable to criticize other users for guessing incorrectly what you meant to say.
> There are studies pre SARS-CoV-2 about coronavirus in natural environments (like bat caves), and they found motifs that we found also in SARS-CoV-2.
You're doing it again here, but I think you're probably referring to Andersen's Proximal Origin:
But nobody disputes that SARS-CoV-2 evolved mostly in bats; the question is whether its path from bats to humans included a trip through the lab. No genomic evidence can distinguish between a novel natural virus and a chimera of two novel natural viruses. As Davis Relman wrote:
> Some [that's Andersen] have argued that a deliberate engineering scenario is unlikely because one would not have had the insight a priori to design the current pandemic virus. This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory
Well, I cited a canonical paper making the argument you're advancing, so if it's not that, then...
As for the rest of your comment -- oy, talk about a straw man fallacy. There's absolutely nothing I said that requires the false dichotomy you've presented between H0 and H1 (i.e. there are other plausible hypotheses that aren't as extreme as the ones you've presented). Also, I don't "accept" H0. I just can't rule it out.
> H0 should be the most easy explanation, which is a zoonosis that has happened before thousands of times, and for which we have also evidence
Neither hypothesis is easy (i.e. likely). Natural, human-optimized zoonosis is incredibly rare in viruses. Making humanized viruses in a lab, starting from natural viruses, is actually straightforward. But when one of the world centers for doing that kind of work, on very similar coronaviruses, was right there in Wuhan...
It found that viral RNA and DNA from potential zoonotic hosts (palm civets, raccoon dogs) occurred together in some samples from the Huanan Seafood Market. But there's no question that infected humans were present there, and nothing in their study can distinguish an infected palm civet from a healthy palm civet near an infected human.
A different study by Jesse Bloom found that of all the animals present, viral RNA correlated most strongly with DNA from "catfish and largemouth bass":
So were those the proximal hosts? Obviously not, since SARS-CoV-2 can't infect fish--the point is that this is all just noise. Live, unquestionably infected proximal hosts were found for both SARS-1 and MERS, within about a year of the first human cases. For SARS-CoV-2, we still have nothing beyond those tortured metagenomics.
How is occams razor pointing you to a fish market where they didn’t find it in any animals that could transmit it, next to a research center working on similar viruses, where people commuted from there via the market, where documents exist pointing out poor security practices, and where the Chinese government restricted access?
Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market also sold the following seafood items: raccoon dogs, hedgehogs, weasels, badgers, hares, squirrels, civets, rats, porcupines, coypus, marmots, foxes, minks, wild boars, etc.
Civets at the very least are known to be the host for SARS-CoV virus that jumped to humans. The first affected people all had in common the market, and not the lab. Samples from the market in early 2020 found a lot of SARS-CoV-2 everywhere, specially at stalls that were selling poultry and racoons. The market was stuffed with animals. As poor as the security was in the lab, the market was orders of magnitude worse.
It always happens. Local authorities are more interested in not killing business and tourism than they are in preventing low-probability epidemics. Thus a cover-up by the locals is to be expected.
And of course the Chinese government restricts access--there's no way to prove a negative, thus no way to exonerate them. No matter what investigators are allowed to see there will always be the allegation that they aren't being allowed to see the important stuff.
I have pretty much given up on trying to discuss this rationally on any Internet forum. The only people who seem to engage have very strong priors that are impervious to new data. But it's been a year so I guess I needed a reminder to myself in the futility of the endeavor
The peer reviewed literature is written and reviewed by the people who were funding/doing that kind of GoF research, so it isn't a reliable way to decide what's true.
You are wrong, something that you could have easily checked yourself. There are many sophisticated epidemiology groups throughout defense and intelligence. It is a longstanding critical part of their mission, for a variety of end purposes.
My prior includes neither agency can provide genetic analysis which would be the easiest way to convince a professor of virology that this theory has any merit.
My priors include all the agencies (the Intelligence Community, arguably the deep state) having ulterior political and personal motives. Does noone remember the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction hoax that the CIA cooked up for GWB?
I would not trust any of these agencies to provide objective findings or conclusions, there is a lot of power on the table that's at stake.
> I feel that that could've been an honest mistake too.
There were a lot of indications that it was wrong even at the time, like the inspectors’ reports. We knew about the unreliability of the dodgy dossier and how baseless Khidir Hamza was. The satellite evidence was sketchy and the rest was contradictory. Al-Qaeda was also not there and we also knew that. Let’s not rewrite history: there is no certainty in intelligence, but anyone not in the CIA’s pocket knew it was most likely wrong, a far cry from what you need to legitimately attack a country.
The CIA did not cook up the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction hoax. Paul Wolfowitz had to create an entirely new intelligence agency with hand-picked analysts to get that result, because the existing agencies refused to make that claim.
According to Iraq general, WMD were moved to Syria about 6 month prior to invasion, then Syrian government used them against rebels.
HANNITY: So he had them.
SADA: Yes.
HANNITY: Where were they? And were they moved and where?
SADA: Well, up to the year 2002, 2002, in summer, they were in Iraq. And after that, when Saddam realized that the inspectors are coming on the first of November and the Americans are coming, so he took the advantage of a natural disaster happened in Syria, a dam was broken. So he — he announced to the world that he is going to make an air bridge...
HANNITY: You know for a fact he moved these weapons to Syria?
SADA: Yes.
HANNITY: How do you know that?
SADA: I know it because I have got the captains of the Iraqi airway that were my friends, and they told me these weapons of mass destruction had been moved to Syria.
BECKEL: How did he move them, general? How were they moved?
SADA: They were moved by air and by ground, 56 sorties by jumbo, 747, and 27 were moved, after they were converted to cargo aircraft, they were moved to Syria.
“Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” George W Bush.
We went into Iraq because the White House latched on to insufficient and contested intel of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq (the yellowcake and the aluminum tubes). It wasn’t about some rusted old artillery rounds with chemical weapons in them.
Seriously, I remember the Bush admin going after the wife of a CIA operative by leaking her identity after he spoke out about the war intel being bullshit. As someone who was following the Iraq war from the left side and pretty disgusted by it it definitely seemed like it was being pushed hardest by the GOP with anti-war information coming out of the CIA or even military. Granted leakers don't represent the opinions of an agency but this narrative that the CIA was the real villain (not that they aren't) that hoodwinked the poor GOP strikes me revisionist whitewashing.
While I am very skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis as an infectious disease epidemiologist, the DoE has a fair amount of expertise via the national labs.
A few reasons, though as I note in another comment, I'm not an expert in spillover events, my area of interest kicks in about a week later. So there's a few:
1) People I trust are skeptical, including people who are opposed to gain of function research. I've found Angela Rasmussen to be one of the better voices in terms of discussing the evidence for a natural origin, but she's far from the only one.
2) We have had two naturally occurring coronavirus epidemics during my career. A third is all but inevitable -- I wrote a grant in October 2019 suggesting a novel coronavirus as an example case for a modeling exercise, for example (sadly, said grant didn't get funded). So for me, there's a very strong prior on coronaviruses emerging as significant public health threats.
3) At the same time, I've come to distrust many of the voices who push the lab leak hypothesis, either because they're obviously doing so for geopolitical reasons, or because they've become addicted to being "the lone voice in the wilderness", despite it not being a risky position to take.
4) The lab leak hypothesis, in terms of evidence, relies on WIV, the Chinese Government, the WHO, etc. being broadly incompetent except when it comes to the characterization of the initial cases when SARS-CoV-2 emerged, which is arguably the hardest part of any outbreak.
Basically, things like "It started in Wuhan near the WIV" implies that we actually have found the first case, etc., when this is notoriously difficult to do, especially with a disease that can have mild or asymptomatic presentation.
Indeed, so it could be some unidentified third place. There are few labs and many other possibilities for people to come into contact with animals, so that third place was probably not a lab.
If you followed events at the time and the suppressed rumours from doctors in China end of 2019, the new illness began exactly around that area actually (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang etc).
There were no similar reports in another place on this planet. (Since 99% of other places do not have full control of media and many have better healthcare so if it happened it would be less likely to go unnoticed)
Brazil recorded its first COVID death April 15, 2019. Initially taken as a data entry error by some, data for 2019 is still published nearly six years after the fact.
November Brazil could happen because December is when rumours already circulated in China and October is when it was out in Wuhan already per your link.
April Brazil I don't know what to tell you, no sources support the wild claim that it was NOT a data error.
> 2 months before it came out of wuhan
Source? I bet it came out earlier.
It was circulating in Wuhan before the pandemic according to WHO. Just people in China who are more likely to get infected are less likely to travel abroad (social class/sanitary conditions/etc) but maybe one person brought it out.
There was similar report about sudden increase of cases of atypical pneumonia at Oct 16, 2019 in Krasnoyark Krai, Siberia, Russia: about 700 cases per week, which is similar to Covid-19 levels.
> A joint study published by China and the World Health Organization at the end of March acknowledged there could have been sporadic human infections before the Wuhan outbreak.
> Researchers from Britain's University of Kent used methods from conservation science to estimate that SARS-CoV-2 first appeared from early October to mid-November 2019, according to a paper published in the PLOS Pathogens journal.
I agree with that statement. Even with prior warning, and knowing the virus could be introduced only at an airport or seaport, Western public health authorities managed to trace approximately zero cases to their introduction. So it's hard to believe the same tools would succeed at the much more difficult task of tracing the very first cases in China.
That makes it odd that you're promoting an author who has claimed such evidence shows conclusively that spillover into humans--and not just a super-spreader event--occurred in the Huanan Seafood Market. I suspect that if you looked personally at the methodology behind the conflicted (Rasmussen's doctorate was under Vincent Racaniello, a longtime proponent of high-risk virological research) authors' claims, then you'd find them much less worthy of repetition.
I think her arguments are solid, I'm just not certain they're definitive. But I do find her presentation of those arguments to be both detailed and accessible.
The claim that the location of spillover can be definitively localized within hundreds of meters from epidemiological data is core to the predominant theory of natural zoonotic origin, from an overlapping set of authors including Rasmussen.
Theories of a research accident almost never assume such localization is possible, not least because the earliest known cases weren't particularly close to the WIV. (If anyone's claiming otherwise, they've probably confused the WIV and Wuhan CDC.) So it's odd that you'd correctly note the near-impossibility of that localization, but then cite that as evidence against unnatural origin.
This makes me think you haven't looked much in the details yourself, and two of your four points above are explicitly arguments from authority. If you did look yourself, then I think your assessment might change.
I believe these agencies may have other kinds of intelligence data such as satellite photos of the (empty?) Wuhan Institute of Virology carpark, spikes in mobile phone activity in the area etc.
So assessments are made on more than just biological principles.
I would argue you are sowing disinfo and I honestly dont know what point you are trying to make.
Spikes and/or significant reductions in activity as indicated by external data sources, and particular the timing thereof, will obviously be very useful for determining the sequence of events.
> or because they've become addicted to being "the lone voice in the wilderness", despite it not being a risky position to take.
This frankly makes me distrust you; in 2020-2022 this was absolutely a risky position to take for most public figures, let alone those on academia, let alone those connected to epidemiology. This remains the only time and topic I've seen
blanket banned from discussing across all major US social platforms. Try looking up what the vibe was like in 2020-2021 especially.
Let's be honest, if their is a global conspiracy to spread disease I think it's to kill off the masses due to AI replacing jobs and lowering the amount of green houses gasses people produce.
I got death threats for suggesting that mandatory vaccination for school kids wasn't well justified not from the people who wanted vaccination, but from the people who decided I wasn't sufficiently opposed to it.
That's obviously bad. Vaccination and COVID origins are different topics, though.
Opinions do correlate in the general public, and I guess that's why you've made that link. I don't think that trend holds among scientists, though--Deigin, Chan, Ebright, Bloom, etc. all have quite ordinary views on vaccine risk and efficacy.
Yet you propose no thoughts of your own. You only base it on your belief in people around you and your disbelief of people you assume are political. This sounds not scientific at all. Are you really an epidemiologist?
I was honestly hoping for more given that you’re supposedly an epidemiologist.
I base it on my evaluation of the arguments of those people as an epidemiologist. And their expertise - as I've said, my expertise focuses on a different aspect of outbreaks, with its own theories and methods, and I know enough to recognize that addressing this requires a good deal of specialized knowledge.
Well, that sounds more reasonable, but the prior comment seems to be relying mostly on reputation and political viewpoints rather than the arguments themselves.
Is Rasmussen really in favour of a GoF ban and destroying the academic value of the background of the majority of her professional friends in the field? Cause I can't really find her calling for a ban, quite the opposite really.
This is the problem with virology, it IS GoF. Expecting virologists to be objective in this is expecting the impossible, like expecting the WHO to apologize for sending Daszak as head of the fact finding mission. They were either THAT incompetent or THAT self interested in maintaing GoF/virology, damn the truth.
I suspect virologists still see themselves as guards on the wall and that we can't handle the truth. Which we already know from the early emails is how they thought early on, why should I assume their propensity for dishonesty has changed?
Lab leak and zoonotic origin are not mutually exclusive.
The lab leak hypothesis means "accelerated evolution" through either caged animals or "in vitro cells" infecting the lab personnel. Gene splicing and such are not necessary to make the argument.
The observed fact pointing to this is the number of generations required to produce the divergence between the first SCoV2 variant and the closest wild ancestor. It corresponds to something like 20 years (?) of evolution.
Although it's not specified in common dictionary definitions...
"...zoonosis (a disease communicable from animals to man under natural conditions)."
—Laurie Garrett, _The Coming Plague_ (Ch 14, section IV)
Which is naturally how the word is used virtually all the time.
Transmission from lab animals kept for study in a biolab, you could argue either way. Transmission from humanized lab animals purposely subjected to serial passage is not really zoonosis in any reasonable sense.
...and the most likely scenario is that it was leaked due to a mistake. Sloppy lab procedures. If anything, this should point to MORE regulation around GLP principles with more transparency and oversight, not less. And while I see some merit in determining potential risk, it should be only done with computation and computer modeling now, not an actual virus.
Closest *identified* wild variant. The thing is it's made the jump before, making the jump again isn't astounding.
What's notable about the SCov2 variant is how well it spreads between humans. It probably has made the jump many times, it's just this time it figured out how to spread.
I have family that have worked on developing NBC equipment for the military. The first thing they said when covid was spreading was that it was most likely from a lab. That was before anyone in the news was saying that. So an independent first-look assessment by someone with experience, followed by later finding out that there was in fact a lab there, has me heavily leaning towards it being true. But it doesn't really change anything unless there's hard proof. Even with hard proof, do you think China would pay for anything? I don't think so.
You should realize experience in a tangentially related field and there being a lab somewhere in the area is not the same as insight and evidence. That’s like saying that if a new flu came out of Atlanta, the fact the CDC is there proves it came from a lab, and must be true because someone’s janitor cousin who worked there one summer said it was true.
“Low confidence” means that there is a lack of evidence and the statement is ambiguous; that it could be completely true, or completely false. The only lower confidence would be direct evidence that it is outright false. Given, as you said, how nearly impossible it would be to prove true, wouldn’t you think it equally nearly impossible to prove false?
Believe what you want, but even the CIA doesn’t lean on the side of you being right.
If something very like smallpox, thought eradicated, suddenly showed up in some random town, it might be surmised that maybe some animal reservoir for it somehow slipped through the gaps. But if that random town happened to be Atlanta, home of the CDC, known to have some of the few samples of smallpox to still exist, then the relative chance of a lab leak must be thought higher. That's basic Bayesian reasoning. It doesn't prove anything but pretending the proximity to a relevant lab doesn't shift the odds at all is absurd.
Smallpox, yes. But another SARS variant (even a somewhat more aggressive one)...
Obviously, it's not impossible.
But, there were even RNA samples from Covid found in other countries, months before Covid really spread in China.
I imagine the main problem with the superspreader event there was more that enough people ended up in the same hospital, and thus it was easier to identify that Covid was a distinct virus.
If it was crawling around in a less dense population, its spread would've been meh, and the hospitals might not even notice the spike much.
> That’s like saying that if a new flu came out of Atlanta, the fact the CDC is there proves it came from a lab, and must be true because someone’s janitor cousin who worked there one summer said it was true.
Well in this case it’s more like if if a new flu burst onto the scene with the following all being true:
- the epicenter of the outbreak being within a few miles of the CDC
- the CDC working specifically on gain of function for new strains of the flu
- the CDC being cited in whistleblower reports to the outbreak for poor safety and security protocols in the years prior to the outbreak
- inability to find the natural reservoir the virus crossed over from, despite years of searching in the biggest virus hunt in human history
- the closest naturally occurring relative of the virus being found in bats that are only native in areas hundreds of miles away (in this analogy, something like the upper Midwest), that also happen to be among the species of bats being studied by the lab at the CDC
- several CDC employees being among the earliest discovered cases, so early that they occurred before the disease was even picked up in the radar and were only discovered when searching for the earliest cases
- the US government preventing any none government health officials in or out of the area of the infection for several weeks after the outbreak
- the sole other identified potential outbreak location, the wet market nearby, was completely sterilized by the US government within the first two weeks of the outbreak, over the protests of international investigators who hadn’t yet been given access to it, thereby preventing them from ever being able to confirm or deny if it was the actual ground zero of the outbreak.
“Low confidence” doesn’t mean there is a lack of evidence, it means there is a lack of direct evidence. Problem is there is a lack of direct evidence for any alternative theory as well. There is, however, and overwhelming about of circumstantial evidence supporting the lab leak. The CIA isn’t going to issue accusations like this without a smoking bullet, which they will never have.
The reality is that had this occurred under any other administration, the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t be so taboo. But Trump is a serial conspiracy theorist and pugilistic nationalist, so the second he floated it everyone on the left, which includes much in academia, immediately disputed it in a knee jerk reaction, despite not having much evidence either way. Since then what evidence exists has increasingly supported the lab leak theory, but many are walking back from entrenched positions. If this had happened when Obama was president I don’t think anyone would be pushing back on this with the evidence that exists.
Coordinating medical information is notoriously hard, particularly when the government doesn't want to acknowledge something. Let's take Florida as an example.
There was a point at the beginning of the covid pandemic where the governor was declaring that the state only hand a few cases, and there was not great need for concern. The pneumonia death rates for the previous months showed a different story. For the previous two months the death rates were 10x higher that normal. Nobody seemed to have noticed that at the state level.
Most outbreaks follow a pattern where the disease shows up in small pockets for many years before it becomes an epidemic. HIV is an example. The first HIV death in the USA happened in 1969. The oldest confirmed case in Africa is in '59. The oldest suspected death in the US is '52.
Crossover tends to happen multiple times, and there is no reason to expect otherwise with covid-19. The problem with finding these cases is that it happened in an area governed by an authoritarian ruler. Authoritarians don't want to admit that there are things out of their control, and by inclination they conceal bad news, or news that makes them look like they're less than omnipotent. They shift blame rather than dealing with problem.
The love of the lab theory in the US seems to be driven by the same desire to push the blame on someone else. It takes the focus away from the incompetent response.
The pandemic was discovered by ordinary doctors in Wuhan who noticed the unusually high volume of sick and dying patients. Only then were specialists engaged to identify the cause, and the viral genome was first published by Zhang Yong-Zhen in Shanghai. The WIV isn't known to have played any role in this.
Perhaps the WIV secretly discovered the new virus by more sophisticated means before those doctors did. There's no evidence for this, but maybe. There is no possibility that a Wuhan-level outbreak occurred in a different city first, though. China keeps tight control of their mass media, but mortality on that level is impossible to conceal. Do you not remember 2020? The coffin shortages? So your implication that the WIV's presence somehow caused the first cases in a natural pandemic to get ascertained in Wuhan just doesn't make sense.
This topic is unfortunately politicized, and you're not helping. I think it would be helpful to spend more timing studying the scientific evidence, and less time speculating over the motivations of one's perceived ideological opponents.
There's a paper from 2014 that tried to estimate the annual chance of a pandemic from a lab leak. They estimated it at 2%.
I assumed they overestimated a bit for effect and put it at around 1%.
Pandemics have historically happened somewhere around ever 100 years. What's that annual probability? 1%.
So if you knew NOTHING else, from a bayesian standpoint, if you have to differentiate a once in a 100 year spillover or a lab leak, you would put it at 50/50.
Now add in the fact that the outbreak occurred right next to a BSL lab. Now add in the fact that this lab specialized in the exact type of virus that caused the pandemic. Now add in the fact that lab workers at that lab got hospitalized with respiratory symtpoms in November. Now add in the fact that China responded with tons of secrecy, pulled down their genomic database of known viruses in their Wuhan lab, Xi issued a proclamation in February that they were revamping safety at BSL labs to prevent leaks, and that the virus in question is remarkably similar to one they found in 2013 thousands of miles away, and add the fact that there was a proposal to modify cornaviruses to have a furan cleavage site to perform gain of function research and that the COVID virus has just such a furan cleavage site, and this virus emerged remarkably well adapted to humans very very quickly. Now how about the fact that China pushed the wet market theory even after they'd figured out that probably wasn't the case? Now add in the fact that China let SARS escape from the lab TWICE in the previous decade.
How does that affect your truth value? All the facts above push the probalistic truth value toward a lab leak. There are a few facts that push it back a little the other way, but there aren't very many that I've found.
To me it barely moves the needle, specifically because as you have said we have found other remarkably similar viruses in the past.
We have known about coronaviruses for almost 100 years, and we have been studying them due to their dangers for atleast 60 years, and it has likely existed since before humans could be called human. And it has been shown to be a highly virulent numerous times in many different forms. No matter how low the chances of winning the lottery, when literally billions of people are playing it daily, it is only of matter of when, not if, it turns into something more dangerous.
Now none of that comes anywhere near proving anything, but the fact that we have had multiple coronavirus infections in the past, many of which have come dangerously close to pandemic level infections, makes a natural occurrence seem the most likely source.
On top of all that, even if it did come from a lab, why does that matter? A handful of extra lottery tickets were sold and someone won from that pool. This isn't some bioweapon modified virus purposefully bred from a farm of human subjects, you would never be able to get away with such a program in a large publicly known virology lab and we aren't knowledgeable enough in viral genetics to make something like that without testing it on farms of people. There are no markers indicating engineering it in any way that we are actually capable of. And worst case it is something a mere handful of unguided generations away from a sample that was pulled from the public already and the lab got "lucky" with a random mutation on a petri dish they were studying.
You're not saying it, but you're obviously starting with a very different bayseian prior than my 50/50.
As someone that makes forecasts for a living, I'd like to see what you're assumptions are about the base rates there.
As for how the facts produce modifications to the base rate, personally I think that a virus identified in a cave over a thousand miles away popping up in a very urban area right next to a BSL facility that specializes in researching that type of virus moves the needle toward it being more likely a lab escape. You seem to feel otherwise and I don't really agree. In particular, if you take the converse: suppose the virus wasn't known at all to man, you'd probably argue it also pushes you toward the conclusion that it was a natural spillover. (In which case, I'd be in agreement.) So I don't think that argument is really a logical one.
Your objection in the last paragraph, describing this as a "bioweapon modified virus" is really a classic strawman, and since it isn't the argument I was making I see no reason to indulge it. It is indeed a relatively ridiculous notion.
Also, just for precision, my own assessment of the truth value there is about 70% in favor of a lab-leak.
Its origin is at a huge meat market full of both hunted and farmed produce and animals both live and dead from all over the country and attended by thousands of people daily. I find that far more convincing than the fact that there was a virology center in an urban area, there are virology centers in tons of large cities and all of them hold samples of many corona viruses because they are incredibly common. The fact that the one that potentially escaped just happens to be incredibly dangerous would seem like an astronomical coincidence if it wasn't released on purpose, and there are many problems with that idea. But the fact that a market full of both live and fresh slaughtered animal products ends up being the origination point of a dangerous virus does not seem coincidental at all, just a mere matter of time.
A Bayesian prior of 50/50 seems high to me. It assumes that 50% of new disease variants come from lab leaks.
In the last few decades there have been 1-2 confirmed lab leaks per year. And they're often thing like "we found a vial of smallpox we didn't know we had" not new diseases.
Nature very capably produced colds, flus, a bunch of nasty diarrhoeal diseases, the many and varied sexually transmitted diseases, the hemorrhagic fevers, and so on. For "some new disease variant that I don't know anything about", my prior would be more like 1/99 lab leak to natural origin.
Not that it will fit a western centric ideology but there is zero mystery with people going into hospitals in Nov. It would be surprising if it weren’t so.
It’s flu season and Chinese don’t go zoom their Dr, they go and check into the hospital.
In other countries, it would be considered sociopathy to go to work with a flu, but we’re all Real Americans so anything different means… conspiracy.
I'm actually aware of the cultural differences there.
Going to the hospital is not usually the same thing as being "hospitalized" though, and it would be relevant for us to make that distinction to determine how much that tidbit pushes us one way or the other. I had originally read "hospitalized" some time ago, but i just checked the intelligence briefing and it definitely does not indicate actual hospitalization.
So that intel doesn't push us one way or the other very much. Although perhaps the absence of known lab-worker hospitalizations is an argument against the lab-leak though.
If one were either the director or a senior leader of a more-or-less covert biolab doing research that is definitely supposed not to be discovered, would you have done your job if you had not established a procedure for medical treatment of sick or infected employees using local and probably covert resources? - And likely including local isolation of infected or potentially infected people? Whether or not people from this supposed type of biolab turns up at public hospitals does not seem to indicate much.
> Now add in the fact that the outbreak occurred right next to a BSL lab.
The outbreak was likely to happen in a large population center near where the bats were. The actual probability that it went north and happened in Wuhan was probably 1-in-12 or so. And the first time there was a coronavirus spillover and pandemic, it happened in Guangzhou. So we rolled 1d12 once and didn't get a 1 and then rolled it again and did. Not that mind-blowingly improbable.
Also, not surprising that the lab was in a major city somewhat central and closer to the bats than e.g. Beijing. Because that is what it was set up to study.
> Now add in the fact that lab workers at that lab got hospitalized with respiratory symtpoms in November.
This has been asserted by a story in the NYT, but never proven and denied by WIV. There's literally no evidence of this.
> and that the virus in question is remarkably similar to one they found in 2013 thousands of miles away,
Still roughly a thousand base pairs and a few decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2. You can't get from RaTG-13 to SARS-CoV-2 in a lab, and there's no evidence they ever had live virus RaTG-13 in the lab.
> and that the COVID virus has just such a furan cleavage site
It had a novel PRRAR furin cleavage site which had never been seen before. Not one that humans would have ever guessed. That is actually strong evidence AGAINST it being lab-made.
> Also, not surprising that the lab was in a major city somewhat central and closer to the bats than e.g. Beijing. Because that is what it was set up to study.
As we've discussed, the greatest abundance of related viruses occurred around Yunnan and Southeast Asia. Dr. Shi herself didn't expect spillover in Wuhan:
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
Wuhan was "closer to the bats" only in the sense that New York City is "closer to the alligators" than Boston. There's little reason to choose that phrasing except to deliberately mislead.
I've warned repeatedly that the failure of competent scientists to engage with the real possibility that their research caused this pandemic will result in a blunt and damaging backlash. We're watching that damage now in real time.
> As we've discussed, the greatest abundance of related viruses occurred around Yunnan and Southeast Asia. Dr. Shi herself didn't expect spillover in Wuhan:
And SARS-CoV-1 occurred in Guangzhou. The closest known relative virus (WIV16) is 96% homologous to SARS-CoV-1 and was found in Yunnan as well, which is over 1,000 km away from Guangzhou. Either the range of the bats carrying these coronaviruses is much larger than anyone in the world (including Dr Shi) knows about, or else the "blast radius" of the animal trade in China is considerably larger than anyone knows about.
I think the usual theory for SARS-1 is spillover from bats to other non-human animals outside Guangzhou. The virus was then brought to Guangzhou by wildlife traffickers, like in the live infected civet cats found in markets there. A similar conduit is possible for SARS-CoV-2, but we still haven't found that proximal host.
I don't think spillover of SARS-1 from bats in Guangzhou is commonly proposed. If you've seen it (and didn't just include that option for completeness), then I'd appreciate the reference.
I agree that unexpected things sometimes happen. Nobody expected spillover in Wuhan pre-pandemic though, and the WIV absolutely wasn't situated based on any such expectation.
You're not clarify anything I said or telling me anything I don't already know.
The SARS-CoV-1 virus moved over 1000km from Yunnan to Guangzhou.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus moved over 1000km from Yunnan to Wuhan.
This is the same fucking problem. One way or another we know it has a solution that doesn't involve WIV due to the SARS-CoV-1 spillover.
If we can explain SARS-CoV-1 without WIV then we can explain SARS-CoV-2 without WIV.
> I don't think spillover of SARS-1 from bats in Guangzhou is commonly proposed.
I never suggested that was definitely what happened, and I kind of doubt it, I think the wildlife trade is more likely. At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if the range of the viruses in bats is larger than we know right now.
> Nobody expected spillover in Wuhan pre-pandemic though
Which doesn't mean it didn't happen.
> and the WIV absolutely wasn't situated based on any such expectation.
The central location made Yunnan a lot more accessible than if WIV was in Beijing, and puts it around about the same distance from Yunnan as Guangzhou is.
I'm aware that you already know everything I've written here. I agree that spillover from bats in Wuhan is not impossible (nature is big and mysterious), but your implication that proximity to such bats affected Dr. Shi's choice of working location just isn't correct. She can be wrong about a lot of things, but she can't be wrong about her own intentions.
I guess we're just endlessly arguing the same uncertain technicalities now. I miss the days when actual new information was becoming available, and appreciated the chance to discuss with someone informed with opposing views. It would be nice to confidently learn the truth someday. Perhaps the new administration will release something, but I think it's much more likely they'll just poison the topic politically even more.
there's a 19 bp sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade).
now an exact match of that length isn't impossible, but which is more likely? that this managed to be exactly correct on accident? or some grad student was told to just copypasta every furin cleavage site in the database into a GOF library and surprise surprise the most virulent form that became a pandemic came from the sequence that is engineered to be efficient.
any scientist that has any molecular biology wet experience will tell you this is exactly what they would have done (though us researchers would probably not have pulled from the patented BLAST sequences, since that selector is turned off by default by the NCBI)
The sequence (reverse complemented) matches positions 2751-2733 of sequence ID 11652 attached to the patent: https://seqdata.uspto.gov/seqdetail?docId=US09587003B2&publi... - as the other person said, it's located in the S1/S2 furin cleavage site, and produces no BLAST hits outside the SARS-CoV-2 lineage.
It's not entirely clear to me when the sequence was incorporated into the patent - it doesn't look like it was in the first revision. But it looks like it was added before 2020.
The whole theory still has gaps (even if we assume someone was searching specifically within that patent, what would a screen look like to single out that sequence? It would have to be very high throughput and use very sophisticated modeling), but it's interesting.
no screen necessary. you create a bunch of dnas by robot building from scratch every FCS known to man. the "screen" is "this is the guy that hapoened jump out of the test tube and cause a pandemic". more of a selection than a screen i guess
If I said I had cousins that were bankers, I am not sure that it would make me more credible to talk about finance. I mean - to the people who care about expertise.
If SARS-Cov-2 was from a lab, what about the original SARS?
Generally though, China is somewhat better suited to producing pandemics, because they have a larger and more dense population within which a disease can spread.
SARS-1 was found in wild animals, had a long period in which it adapted to human hosts instead of being immediately well adapted, didn't have any weird artificial looking RNA sequences, and didn't emerge right next to a lab experimenting on coronaviruses.
Interestingly it was also clearly airborne and able to spread long distances in aerosols moved by air currents. Investigators traced those air flows in some cases to explain movements of the virus. Yet despite being literally called SARS-2 the WHO and other self-declared sources of expertise all denied that this was possible, and attacked people who pointed out that it was. The desire for lockdowns and masks to be perceived as credible outweighed prior experience with similar viruses, turning those who tried to learn from history into pariahs.
I had a Chinese colleague in January of '20 saying it was obviously a leak. I hadn't even heard of Wuhan before, and he told me there is a bio lab there.
And what does that tell you? I could probably find 10 people in every country on earth that claim COVID-19 originated in a lab there. I don’t think being Chinese is a good qualification for determining where COVID-19 came from.
This gentleman works in a US national lab, graduated top of his class in a top Chinese school and has friends that, at the time, worked in the Wuhan lab.
He, while very proud of being Chinese, was very critical of what he perceived his countrymen's lax safety standards. Myself, I can't judge that as I am not Chinese or an experimentalist so I deferred to his expertise and experience.
This is an event that saw a lot of the world effectively under house arrest for two years. I think that trying to finding out the underlying reason behind that is a reasonable goal.
Looking for reparations is secondary to that, but maybe not entirely unreasonable either; not that it'll ever happen.
And also that drug dealers and cartels are terrorists who should be executed, except the kingpin of the largest online drug market and likely hitman client, who should be pardoned
Many of the pardoned individuals have video evidence of assaulting police with weapons and claim to be part of organizations diametrically opposed to BLM, Antifa, and the FBI. Are they:
1. Lying, masquerading as Trump supporters in deep cover for many years (secretly a part of the organizations you're blaming, despite playing part in an attempted coup that would have opposed those organizations and despite no evidence of such multi-year subterfuge)
2. Framed (mind you, AI is wishy-washy for video even now, and it wasn't good enough then)
3. Innocent for some other reason despite their violent actions
There aren't a lot of options that make tasing and trampling cops while heavily armed and overrunning the White House look good. Even republican congressmen, whose careers partially depend on not pissing off Trump, are happy to publicly decry those pardons, no matter how they feel about the rest of the executive orders. Every Trump supporter I've talked to so far (except, perhaps, you) has agreed that was a step too far (though they're all still optimistic about the presidency overall).
What, exactly, about those pardons was appropriate? If I stormed your house with guns and trampled the police blocking my way, would that make me an American hero for defending the right to free speech?
> - Democrat aligned mobs routinely invade the Capitol building without facing similar charges
It’s the internet, can you link to some concrete instances where they did this? Were Congress people forced to retreat when they did it (assuming your claim is that they were roughly similar in extremity?)?
They attacked the White House and forced the president to flee to a bunker on 5/29 — as referenced in my original comment. Note how that’s called a “protest” and not “insurrection”. (I’d say riot, but protest is closer to the truth than insurrection.)
For their large scale violence, Democrat mobs prefer to target civilians — eg, their live-streamed murder of Antonio Mays Jr, by a militia that first fought police and then seized a city park. As part of a coordinated attack on dozens of cities resulting in over seventy murders.
I know it’s weird, but when you just protest outside of the white house and don’t actually do anything illegal, they can’t really arrest you and throw the book at you.
Also, disrupting a public hearing open to the public, definitely rude but not actually illegal.
The Gaza protesters were arrested for refusing to leave the capitol, but didn’t force their way into congressional offices nor did they threaten any congress people. Still wrong which is why they got arrested, I guess, but not the same as an insurrection.
I lived in Seattle during CHOP (well, I still live in Ballard), but I never got over to Capitol Hill to experience it (we go downtown a lot, but never Capitol Hill unless it’s hospital related). I don’t think they were any position to overthrow the government though.
Thanks for linking though, and I didn’t downvote you. It’s always nice to know what the right is referring to when they say “the left does it also!” We can compare the behavior of the two sides head on at least.
> I don’t think they were any position to overthrow the government though.
One group used weapons to seize an area for multiple days, including acts of murder to defend their ill-gotten territory; one didn’t.
Neither made an attempt to “overthrow the government”.
> when you just protest outside of the white house and don’t actually do anything illegal
They rioted and attacked the gate imposing enough threat the president had to flee to a bunker. They also assaulted the security there.
From the article you clearly didn’t read:
> The decision to physically move the President came as protesters confronted Secret Service officers outside the White House for hours on Friday – shouting, throwing water bottles and other objects at the line of officers, and attempting to break through the metal barriers.
I find it interesting that you minimize when people aligned with your policies attempt the same crimes — assaulting police, attempting to break into a secured government building, and forcing politicians to flee.
As for the pardons, many were just commutations. They did 3 years or whatever in prison by now. And many full pardons were just misdemeanors for trespassing or whatever anyway. It make more sense to focus on specific people who were violent and got away with nothing.
Placing rhetoric in context like you did has a way of cutting through the bs and really getting to the core of what current politicians want covid to be. A minor cold when it was running rampant, and now suddenly a plague. Why could that be? Could it be because during the pandemic it was in their best interest to downplay it while hundreds of thousands died, and now that we've passed it and the USA is facing the rise of a successful nation with a different political system, we need to paint them as the enemy? For what it's worth, the current administration is showing signs of cozying up to nations with weak or non-existent democracies. Just look at the proposed tariffs - they are NOT targeting China but rather Mexico and Canada. Why could that be?
Ultimately the question should be, how can we improve our systems to better respond to future pandemics. Does it matter if it was a lab leak? What will that do for those who died? Will revenge prevent a future pandemic from happening? Viruses and bacteria do not care about their nation of origin, once its out its out.
> But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.
Yes, the annoying thing is that "the truth about covid" literally only matters to culture war grievances, it has no relevance whatsoever to the actual world. If it was a lab leak, then China needs to improve their BSL-4 safety... but they need to do that anyway[0]. If it was zoonotic, then they need to clean up the wet markets... but they need to do that anyway. The true origin of covid makes no difference at all, and I wish these people would just come out and admit this is all domestic political peacocking.
[0]: and so does everyone else, for that matter. The US has also had several close calls with BSL-4 leaks; if covid did originate from a lab leak, the fact that it wasn't from an American lab is just sheer dumb luck.
If it were a lab leak then the people especially fearful and distrustful of gain of function research would feel vindicated and try to use that to shut down existing research programs. I don't think that group of people is meaningfully divided along partisan lines, and outside the professional class probably includes everybody.
Conversely, if it were a natural outbreak then that bolsters the case for continuing gain of function research as before. Such research is precisely why we were able to identify the threat and within weeks assemble a vaccine, at least on paper. (Granted, the arc began long before 2019 with a through-line of research going back to the 2002 SARS outbreak.) And it's why we've many other advancements. Creation of CRISPR and related technology emerged in part out of gain of function research with viruses. Gain of function is a critical tool in testing hypotheses about how foundational molecular machinery works, and viruses are a convenient research model for exploring and testing ideas in that space.
But I'm not sure the origin should matter to that debate. And I'm even more sure it probably won't matter, even if we agreed on a definitive answer.
Whenever you have an institutional failure, you need to do a root cause analysis to fix the problem. That includes Chinese labs. That also includes health organizations who may have put aside their objectivity and tried to discredit a theory merely because they disagreed with the politics of those supporting it.
Wow do we live in the same "actual world?" If we knew for certain that covid began in the Wuhan lab, it would be World War 3.
I get your perspective: an outbreak is an unfortunate byproduct of the risks necessary for scientific progress. No one couldve known how bad it would be. The damage is done, learn from your mistakes and move on. Very enlightened.
In the real world, people will lose their absolute shit. There would be near global demand for sanctions and reparations, and there's enough anti china sentiment that its a real possibility.
Backed into a corner, the world against them, they would have no other choice. It would be a matter of survival.
"Why" because of all the latent anger and frustration from the mass death and pain of the pandemic. Its naive to underestimate it. How it unfolds, think WWI reparations from Germany.
"Cover it up anyway" pretty much. There's precedent for this, we never got the full truth about 9/11 either. To this day the 100 page dossier is off limits to the public, probably for similar reasoning. The USA wants to play the board opportunistically without regard for justice or public outrage. And then people wonder why the public feels abandoned by their government.
> "Why" because of all the latent anger and frustration from the mass death and pain of the pandemic. Its naive to underestimate it. How it unfolds, think WWI reparations from Germany.
Why is a lab outbreak worse than a wet market outbreak?
The wet markets were a super spreader event... Doesn't really tell you much about where it started (even if it has animal origin).
People just assumed that the wet markets were the cause of the problem, because they found them digusting (and wanted an excuse to blame it on the Chinese being evil).
In a less dense population, without many people going to the same hospital... You would just not have noticed Covid much.
>> One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as saying:
> “Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Mr. Cotton said.
That could backfire in a couple ways.
1. China could say that they'll consider paying for COVID escaping their borders if the US pays for the damage the things that have escaped its borders have caused, such as greenhouse gases.
Yes, I know that China currently is emitting more greenhouse gases than the US, but since CO2 emissions stay in the atmosphere for several hundred or even thousands of years the US is responsible for more of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere than China is.
It's 26% US, 16% China, 7% Russia, 6% Germany, 5% UK, 4% Japan, 4% India, 2% France, 2% Canada, 2% Ukraine, 2% Poland, rounded to the nearest 1%. All the rest of the countries round to 1% or 0%.
That's a can of worms I don't think the US wants to open.
2. China could say they they'll consider paying, but only up to the amount of damages that would have been reasonably incurred if the US had handled COVID competently.
There were several distinct patterns in COVID deaths in the US. First, there were states like Washington that had a fairly linear growth in the cumulative number of deaths per capita from the start through April 2022, and then after that continued with a linear growth but not as steep.
Then there were states like New York, which got hit very hard in the first two months, because of a combination of nobody really knowing yet how to treat it and dense populations of especially vulnerable people. New York reached in two months a deaths per capita number that Washington took 22 months to reach.
But after those first two months, New York's deaths grew at about the same rate as Washington's, except during the Delta surge and to a lesser extent the Omicron surge. Washington's rate picked up during those surges, but not very much.
There were states like Florida. Its curve was like Washington's first 3 months, the switched to growing about twice as fast. By the end of 2021 it had almost caught up to New York. From then it and New York both continued at about the same rate was Washington, with Florida slightly higher so it passed New York in August 2022.
Other states tended to be a mix of those three patterns. California was close to Washington up until Delta, which brought it to near Florida, but then after Delta was was similar to Washington. A little better actually. Right after Delta it had about 70 more deaths per 100k than Washington, but by March 2023 was down to 56 more deaths per 100k.
Texas was like Florida until Omicron, which it handled better, and after that it was similar to Washington, or even a little better. It had 140 more deaths per 100k than Washington right after Omicron, but only 115 more by March 2023.
By March 2023, which is when the data I'm using ends, Washington stood at 206 deaths per 100k population, California at 256, Texas at 322, New York at 396, and Florida at 404.
Tom Cotton's state, Arkansas, was basically the same pattern as Florida, except with a higher rate. It ended up at 431 deaths per 100k by March 2023.
A good case can probably be made that somewhere from 25% to 50% of the Florida deaths were due to Florida's lax handling of the pandemic.
That too is probably a can of worms many politicians would not want to open, especially if their state is one of the ones that China would be arguing should get greatly reduced damages.
> if the US pays for the damage the things that have escaped its borders have caused,
Or just covid. I remember after PRC lockdown when regional countries were publishing their inbound repatriation flight test data and basically they only got very low digit covid positives, i.e. it was epidemiologically containable. At same time you have all the news of western travellers spreading covid to different countrries because they kept borders open.
The reason borders were kept open was that it was considered xenophobic to close down the borders and globally public health guidance was saying that the virus was affecting only old, very young and people with weak immune systems. Only in the middle of March 2020 did countries start restricting travel and by then it was way too late.
Whatever the reason (many reasonable at the time), this was after PRC did a full lock down, with outbound flights limited to repatriation, i.e. they weren't trying to spread the disease, other countries wanted their citizens back while PRC did one of the harshest locked downs in modern history. Can't blame others for thinking CCP was over reacting, but ultimately, PRC locked down during period where covid spread in PRC was minimal and signifant first incidents in many countries were from western travellers, who thought things were going to be fine.
I have previously shared this little known, but factual, event on Hacker News. It is simply a Wikipedia article--the 1977 Russian Flu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu). This is not my statement, note this well dang, and read or argue with the editors of Wikipedia if you want (not me), but the following statement stands firm:
"Genetic analysis and several unusual characteristics of the 1977 Russian flu have prompted many researchers to say that the virus was released to the public through a laboratory accident, or resulted from a live-vaccine trial escape"
Tangentially, risks like that are why I'm really frustrated-with/exasperated-by certain mRNA-vaccine scaremongers: Ones who act as if older techniques were already fine and sufficient.
It can both be the case that old methods have risks and new methods have greater risks, eg, underestimating mRNA distribution in the body, leading to mRNA replication in heart tissue, and higher than expect dangerous side-effects.
In general, people prefer understood risks to new risks because the system is better adapted to them — both biologically and politically.
> Reanalysis of the H1N1 sequences excluding isolates with unrealistic sampling dates indicates that the 1977 re-emergent lineage was circulating for approximately one year before detection, making it difficult to determine the geographic source of reintroduction. We suggest that a new method is needed to account for viral isolates with unrealistic sampling dates.
Read carefully, "...have prompted many researchers..." To change the text, one would need to change the minds of all of the many researchers, and have them administer retractions. Argue over what happened in that year, I guess, but the fact remains that the genetic clock of viral mutation does not stop unless a virus is kept in storage. Also, was the year of mutational change accrued from 1976 to 1977 or from 1918 to 1919? Either way, no question, the virus that caused the 1977 Russian flu spent time in a lab.
Exactly. The paper linked in the grandparent is questioning the exact date of reintroduction, not whether reintroduction occurred. The usual guess seems to be
> the result of vaccine trials in the Far East involving the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus (C.M. Chu, personal communication)
That part is genuinely uncertain though, and probably unanswerable. Historical surveillance was weak, and those who do have information may not wish to implicitly confess to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
No one is seriously questioning that it spent ~20 years in a lab freezer. There was some speculation about virus frozen in the Arctic or such; but since that's never been observed to happen any other time, and multiple labs were known to be working with frozen and thawed virus, I think that's pretty abandoned.
This is a strange take to me. Of course the search for truth is to some degree a search for accountability. It's not a gotcha to say "They just want to hold China accountable". Of course they do if it seems likely it came from poor procedure, it makes it their responsibility.
> It's not a gotcha to say "They just want to hold China accountable".
Sure, it’s not a gotcha if we divorce such a statement from all of its surrounding context.
But context in communication is incredibly important, and it’s unwise to analyze these kinds of statements in a context-free manner. I find it occurs on this site fairly often; it seems endemic to engineers. I try hard to avoid it myself, but frequently fail.
The relevant context here, of course, is the rabid anti-China sentiment expressed by folks like Sen. Cotton for years, dating back to well before the COVID pandemic. I take no position on whether or not his views are accurate or fair - but a context-informed analysis of the situation suggests that Sen. Cotton (and others) are not simply seeking truth and accountability: rather, they seek pretext to justify their views.
I remember watching the movie War Games (1983 film) and even as a kid when they announced nuclear missiles had been launched and "confidence is high" I thought "That's a really good way to indicate that there are indications that something might be happening, AND indicate how much you believe it when you talk about things that you can't confirm."
1) Multiple departments of the executive branch were saying this under Biden too.
2) The US gov’t funded the biological weapons research lab at Wuhan. Mr Cotton has been a senator for 10 years, and therefore was around when the funding was approved. So if he wants to find someone to punish, maybe he should look in a mirror.
What’s most disturbing and highly irresponsible about comments like that and all of the reporting on this development is that there’s almost zero acknowledgement that the lab in question was being funded by the US government and much of the Gain of Function research was being directed by a US nonprofit with ties to the US government.
There are plenty of experiments done secretly by Americans. You think everything is published in some nice little NIH budget explainer? Ever heard of Fort Detrick?
It's been widely known for years. Search for EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszack if you want to learn more.
Briefly, under Obama gain of function research was banned for a while. During this time Fauci signed off on illegal grants to fund GoF research, funnelled through a British NGO in order to evade detection and the ban. The NGO didn't do the research themselves, they then sent the money to Wuhan to fund experiments done there. Thus Fauci was using US money to do banned research, which he then lied about under oath to Congress. It's for this sort of reason that he's now been pardoned by Biden, as otherwise he would likely have been prosecuted. Whether you can actually retroactively pardon someone for any/all crimes without actually specifying what for and without that person actually having been found guilty is a bit unclear, though.
I think people are missing one very sympathizable effect of this joint research, that it prevents either country from gaining an offensive edge from dual-use research that could be used for bio-weapons. You could argue that this has the benefit of preventing a bio-weapons arms race.
Vertiginous to think about the layers of unknowns.
Right. "Low confidence". Read [1] People who deal with intel data need to work with possibly wrong info. Most spy novels don't get this. Real military planning works more like: "Intel says the enemy is at A or B, most likely at A. How much resources should we devote to A vs B, or hold in reserve until we find out by encountering the enemy? What's our plan if we guess wrong?" Planning has to assume that intel might be wrong.
Go watch "A Bridge Too Far" (WWII). Read the story of the Son Tay raid (Vietnam). The many overestimates of Soviet capability during the Cold War. The underestimates of North Korean missile capability. Sometimes uncertain intel really works, as with the attack on the bin Laden compound in Pakistan.
Retrospective intel questions may never be answered. It's known that the US atomic bomb program had another Russian spy who is mentioned by code name in VENONA transcripts, but that spy was never identified. There are still arguments over whether the explosion of the Maine in Havana harbor in 1889 was an accident or a hostile act. It's still not clear why Turret 2 of the USS Iowa blew up in 1989. Huge amounts of effort were expended on all three of those questions, all of which were important at the time, and yet they remain unsettled.
It’s also important to weight dramatic changes in the White House this week, too, right? There’s the intel itself, but then there’s also the guy trying to control the news cycle.
There's not an equivalence between post-Cold War Democratic and Republican administrations manipulating intelligence. My evidence is the Iraq War and Valerie Plame.
Man, you're a smart guy. Just once I want you to like, do the reading and argue in good faith. I'm sure a lot of people on HN respect you, including me!
Let's say that any donation to any Democratic campaign makes you a Democrat (ignoring for a moment that being against Trump isn't the same as being for Democrats). By that logic maybe half of the signatories on that letter are Democrats--and also a few are Republicans. Also many "Democratic" signatories signed a letter against Obama when he revoked Brennan's security clearance, so how in the tank can they really be? Also the main way the Hunter Biden emails were "authenticated" was via DKIM, which would allow you to mix fake emails in with real emails (we recently learned you could do this with $8 of server time). Too farfetched? The Russians did it to Macron in 2017. Also let's not equate creating a false basis for a full on war with 51 intelligence professionals raising doubts.
I’m arguing in good faith. The Iraq War was the biggest mistake in recent American history. Which is why the realignment of pro-Iraq War republicans to democrats—and democrats’ acceptance of them—is so shocking. Liz Cheney should be politically radioactive. Instead Biden gave her a medal. Harris campaigned with her.
I think you may have the causation reversed. I voted for Biden in 2020. But the intelligence community has no credibility and are just trying to get us into war with Russia. That letter never should’ve been taken seriously by real democrats.
You've been a proud Republican since you were a student, and openly so here. That's fine, of course, but it's odd to see you talking about "real" Democrats. Democrats broadly opposed the Republican party; whether or not the Republicans responsible for the Iraq War fled the party post-Trump, they do not characterize the Democratic party today.
I really don't give a shit about how credible the US IC is; no part of my identity is invested in how well they do their job. But the attempt to generalize this out to the parties themselves rankles, and is trollish.
The Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, this year, used Cheney on the campaign trail. When Trump called her ‘war hawk’, rather than trying to defend that very legitimate condemnation, they attacked it as anti-woman.
I think where I disagree with rayiner is that I believe she _was_ toxic. Her endorsement is certainly one of my grievances with the party, as a Democratic voter, and we saw the big tent collapse because of, in part, the current hawkishness of that part of the leadership.
"She is a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face."
Trump has a (literal) record of advocating for and perpetrating violence against women and minorities. I don't know of any elected Dems who called it anti-woman (there's a trend of taking any Dem on X as representative, which isn't a good survey), but if they did that's the nicest thing you could say about it.
---
FWIW I agree the Cheney thing was boneheaded, and the defense of "she offered to campaign" is... prrrrrrretty wimpy. Some people argued you needed to shake people in the middle free, but no one in the middle likes Liz Cheney; she's mega conservative.
> perpetrating violence against women and minorities
Trump’s comment is a common way democrats have criticized hawks since the Vietnam war: asking if they’d be singing a different tune if they were the ones in the trenches getting shot at.
The fact that you’d invoke the “women and minorities” card to defend Liz effing Cheney is proof that the CIA has learned how to use wokeness as a psyop to eviscerate the antiwar left.
No. That’s not the full quote. The full quote was minutes long and rambling. But you removed this for instance that was near that quote “You know they're all war hawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, 'Oh, gee, let's send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy”.
Cheney comes from a family of chicken hawks and lots of people have had similar quotes about them.
I don't think this was as boneheaded as you both do. I think the Cheney political legacy overall is odious, but none of Liz Cheney's recent supporters are there for her foreign policy; it's because she sacrificed her political career to stand up to Donald Trump, which is admirable, and because Trump took the bait and cast her as an enemy of the party, which raised her profile. The idea was that there was some material faction of the GOP that was persuadable by dint of Liz Cheney's mistreatment by GOP nominee.
The Cheney thing reminds me of people's attitudes towards John McCain. His history in the GOP: also not great. But in the end, he did have some principles; it's not unreasonable to celebrate them.
None of this is really germane to the thread, I just get irritable when directly partisan Democrat vs. Republican politics end up here.
I'll mea culpa: I try pretty hard to not backseat campaign manage. My defense is I was posting after midnight and wine and I'm trying to find a balance between not suffering right wing talking points and offering olive branches. I do agree we should celebrate the kind of courage Cheney showed, especially given the kinds of threats she's experienced since.
I mean, you can't expect me to paste multiple paragraphs as a quote here. If you think Trump's clumsy ersatz nod to "Fortunate Son" contextualizes putting Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad, OK then. If you can find elected officials threatening to execute other electeds who were pro-Iraq War (so, so many people), go ahead and post it.
I think reasonable people can disagree about this. Trump is pretty good with the "flimsy excuse", like "look I said 'stand back' as well as 'stand by'" or "hey I said 'peacefully and patriotically'". Probably whether you're willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on these kinds of things is some kind of political ink blot test, but to me, he definitely has the instinct and pattern of "say it without saying it".
Most leaders are aware that people might cue off of what they're saying and do something very bad, so they stay far away from rhetoric like this. Trump (deliberately IMO) does the opposite for political gain. So even if I agree this is about combat, what's the difference? He's once again engaging in his pattern of dehumanizing his opponents and advocating violence against them, which has led to actual violence.
Elsewhere you pointed out this is pretty similar to Vietnam War protests. I think generally that's right (again "Fortunate Son"), but there are some differences. First is there isn't a draft; we have an all volunteer force (though there's a big discussion to be had about economic exploitation and multi-generational military families). Second, she wasn't even in Congress during Bush 2 and AFAIK had no policy making power where she was at State.
Do I love Liz Cheney? Hell no; her policy positions are one disaster after the next. I believe she should be vigorously opposed in every election she runs in. But do I think she should be subject to wink wink "sure would be a shame if something happened to Liz Cheney" rhetoric from maybe the most powerful person on Earth? Absolutely not; no one deserves that.
Like many Trump quotes, this isn’t an “ink blot” test:
> I don’t blame (Dick Cheney) for sticking with his daughter, but his daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb. She is a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.
She has a rifle, and there are nine other guns pointed at her. When are people facing a firing squad given their own weapon? The quote is literally a textbook “what if the war hawk’s shoe were on the other foot” trope.
I know I skipped my usual edit sweep and my post above was pretty wordy as a result, but TL;DR I think giving her a rifle fits with Trump's pattern of "say it without saying it". If you don't agree, I'm fine conceding this is about combat. Trump is still dehumanizing and advocating for violence against his political enemies. The reason other politicians avoid this kind of rhetoric is they don't want to take the political gain at the risk of causing violence. Despite his rhetoric having led to violence multiple times, Trump continues to take the risk. Draw whatever conclusion you want from that.
I think the “pattern” is that Trump speaks plainly instead of using corporate HR speak and people read whatever they want into that. But regardless, we shouldn’t be more upset about how Trump is criticizing the war monger than we are about the war mongering.
There's a difference between talking like you're an LLM trained by focus groups and endangering your political rivals with your rhetoric. A lot of Democratic senators are/were good at that. Don't make yet another false equivalence here.
I would clarify that there’s a disconnect between what the party leadership thinks (Schumer with his “we’ll pick up two moderate republicans for every working class white we lose”) and the base. My dad is a straight ticket Dem voter and he stayed home this year, and Cheney and Blinken were part of the reason. But I also think the base is a little in denial about how many Romney 2012 folks are now in their coalition. Obama-Trump voters were 13% of Trump’s coalition in 2016. They were obviously replaced by a bunch of Romney-Clinton voters because the race was close overall.
I understand democrats have kicked all the social conservatives out of the party but I didn’t think it was retroactive! I was a registered Democrat until 2017. I went to Wingdings in Iowa in 2019 as a Tulsi Gabbard supporter.
Hawks are by no means the majority of democrats, but Romney 2012 types are the margin democrat voter. And while the majority of democrats aren’t hawks, the party’s dominant principle as of late seems to be trusting credentialed experts, which makes them suckers for the intelligence community.
The Harris 2024 coalition is a lot closer to the Romney 2012 coalition than democrats want to admit: https://x.com/patrickjfl/status/1854645395856482568. There’s been a huge swing of college educated whites, who Romney won decisively, to Democrats.
Also, Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney suggests that her campaign thought that Romney 2012 voters were their marginal vote.
A truly intelligent person is independent and not attached to a political part. By doing so, this latches to the "Yes men" mentally where those in power are always right even when wrong and probable through the most simplistic means. [0] Polarization leads to stupidity and ignorance to real world statistics and out comes, even in medical treatment.
Self identifying with a political party erodes critical thinking skills. Unless you can criticize the stupidity of all, including those you vote for, you are limited by your own stupidity.
Self identity ignorance is prominent in religious cultures where the church must be protected. The congregation will protect a priest or pastor that is sexual predator and pretend their actions didn't take place to protect their community. They loose their identity when their church is harmed, same with latching to political parties.
Majoritarian democratic systems require group coordination to achieve desires outcomes. Political parties are just a vehicle for doing that. If you care about outcomes, you should have some party identity, because that facilitates compromising less important goals for more important ones to achieve a coalition that can carry a majority.
I agree parties shouldn’t be so ideologically rigid, and for the most part they aren’t. Jamie Dimon and AOC are both in the same party, as are Marco Rubio and Tulsi Gabbard. People who refuse to work within a party unless the party agrees on every issue are simply not interested in outcomes. That’s fine too!
I wanna try and weight my reply right. I like a lot of your posts and learn from you not infrequently. I also respect the way you think. Sometimes though, you toss out a very Fox News talking point, which confuses me! Before Trump's reelection I was fine letting this kind of thing stand, I mean who has the energy. But it's clearly gone too far. Here's another great example: "the intelligence community [is] just trying to get us into war with Russia." I mean, what a fuckin bonkers claim with no evidence. What are you doing?
> Here's another great example: "the intelligence community [is] just trying to get us into war with Russia."
I mean this respectfully: how old are you? Because that isn’t a “Fox News” comment at all! Until five minutes ago, Democrats were the ones who criticized Bush-era republicans for their fixation on Russia and efforts to keep fighting the Cold War: https://youtu.be/T1409sXBleg?si=Pz2Yd_vY4ZARbcvs
And yes, the intelligence community has been trying to get us into a war with Russia or its proxies since the 1950s. The whole idea that Americans have “allies” or “interests” in Eastern Europe is a Reagan-era CIA psyop.
Haha well, I think we're in the same cohort? I was a senior in HS when 9/11 happened. I've worked in Democratic politics in some capacity for over a decade, although I recently took a break to have kids. I know Russia's our enemy because I was working on the Hillary Clinton campaign when Trump asked them to hack into Hillary's emails and watched them actively trying to hack us; and they've since compromised a bunch of (dumb, like crunchyroll) accounts of mine.
I don't want to parse through everything here, and you definitely won't find me defending the intelligence establishment. All I'm saying is what tptacek said up there: stretching the Hunter Biden laptop letter signatories into "Democrats" stretches too far, and if that's the evidence you're bringing against the Iraq War and Valerie Plame you're coming up short. You have a big platform here; I think if you were a little more judicious about the claims you make you could do a lot of good, and I think we need that right now.
We must be the exact same age. You saw what I saw. How could you trust Clinton on foreign policy after that? I don’t think she even regrets the Iraq War, and wishes we were still in Afghanistan. She sounded like the Weekly Standard the way she went after Tulsi Gabbard for trying to keep us out of a war in Syria.
I don’t know what’s in the inner minds of other democrats. But out of the two parties, they’re cuddling up to all the ones who have been wrong for the last 50 years about foreign policy.
See I knew there was something I liked about you haha.
Hopefully this doesn't come across as deflecting or whatever (HRC has a lot of takes I disagree with, I think she would have been a very good president, but I'm more of a Warren or Booker guy). I think being an effective leader in the US at the level HRC was for decades is a lot harder than people really know. I'm not talking about the mechanics (though those are also hard), rather I'm talking about the effect it has on you as a human. I think the act of building a mental model of public opinion is fundamentally corrupting, but if you don't do it, you'll almost certainly lose power to someone who does (or you could be in a super safe seat, but that's not an option for everyone). You probably also think a big part of your job is representing your constituents, so there's a huge amount of balancing divining and representing their positions vs. leading them to where they might not necessarily be. The stakes are also bananas: you're talking about the lives of tons and tons of people. This is all very hard; I can't really overstate how mindfucking it can be.
So to come back around to your point, let's take an incredibly cynical view and say HRC authorized the Iraq War because that was the obvious power politics move. It's not wrong to consider, "I'm pursuing values I think are important, I'm effective at it, the odds of someone doing better or being more principled than I am are very low--after all this game is by itself deeply corrupting to even the best of us, taking a stand here has almost no upside, I do want to be president one day, OK I vote yea". This all really reasonable, then you throw on the pile her changing her vote would've made absolutely no difference, and she's the junior Senator from New York where 9/11 happened, and at least I start having a lot of sympathy for her vote. I don't mean to diminish the full on tragedies Iraq and Afghanistan were, but these are the kinds of stakes and incentives we're working with here.
So I try to be pretty kind to electeds, even on both sides, because the incentives are truly nutso. Maybe you're Trey Gowdy and you don't love having 5,000 Benghazi hearings, but you've got this plum committee assignment you don't want to lose, so here we go. Maybe you're John Boehner and you don't love being asked vaguely racist questions about Obama's birth certificate constantly, but you're finally Speaker and this is the zeitgeist. Anyway, I earnestly think we urgently need some kind of deep governance reform or whatever. It's almost impossible for the system to produce good outcomes. I'm not saying get the torches; I am saying start putting it in party platforms and get candidates on record about it.
Finally, you ask how I could trust her after her Iraq war vote, but Democrats are pretty used to not having our policy preferences represented in office. Again while I think HRC would have been a very good president, there are other people I'd have preferred. But that's what primaries and party politics are for, and that process is... imperfect. I voted for Obama in the '08 Iowa caucus largely because of her Iraq War vote and--hilariously--I liked Obama saying you wouldn't need an individual health insurance mandate (oh to be young). But, to resume a partisan stance, I think the Republican party--and Trump in particular--is dangerous enough to merit fierce and vigorous opposition in a general election. It's hard for me to imagine a Democratic candidate that was so bad I'd stay home on eday.
> I don’t know what’s in the inner minds of other democrats. But out of the two parties, they’re cuddling up to all the ones who have been wrong for the last 50 years about foreign policy.
I'm bad at foreign policy and mostly stay out of it. But my uninformed opinion is that while Democrats haven't don...
So I guess it depends on why you think the Iraq War was bad. To me, the Iraq War was bad because, even if the intel had been correct, the notion that you could create a democracy in Iraq was fundamentally foolish, along with the idea that it was America’s job to do it.
To me, the Iraq War was a predictable disaster rooted not in bad intel, but the mistaken concept of liberal universalism (emphasis on universalism, not liberal). Clinton is a smart, probably well meaning person. But what she shares with George W. Bush is liberal universalism, and that’s a bad and dangerous idea. It’s been a bad and dangerous idea that’s gotten us involved in countless non-defensive wars over the last 50 years.
In that respect, the Democratic Party today is a lot closer to the bad old GOP than it was 20 years ago. Between Ukraine, helping overthrow Assad, what Blinken allegedly did in Pakistan, rabble-rousing about “human rights” in Bangladesh—the Democratic Party today is full of liberal universalists. They’re not literally the same people who got us into the Iraq War, but the ideology isn’t any less dumb today, and will result in similar disasters.
What Trump understands that democrats don’t is that non-Americans aren’t Americans. The conceit underlying the Iraq war is that Iraqis were Americans. If you overthrew the dictator keeping them down, they’d build a democracy. And it was a monumental error. And the same is true for Syria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, etc. This is a conceit that liberal universalists cannot let go of.
This is the only comment you made so far that made sense, with clear assertions and references. Everything else was unfounded or inflammatory without any concrete assertion, which is why it vibed like "Fox News talking points."
While I do think what you describe under the label of "liberal universalism" mostly makes sense, I do challenge it's consistency. By all measures, some countries are trending towards becoming liberal democracies. Why shouldn't we help them?
Ukraine being a viable liberal democracy, a useful geopolitical ally, and in opposition to a destabilizing and dehumanizing autocracy, makes for a perfect candidate for support beyond naive global liberalism. It is in our interests in many practical terms, separate from ideology.
Ukraine I think is a pretty good example of where we've learned our lesson. We're working with allies, we aren't involving US or NATO troops, we're broadening our coalition and isolating our adversaries, etc. I think we could do better (Russia is super winning the propaganda war inside the US), but it's a positive trend from Iraq/Afghanistan.
I 90% agree on the foreign policy stuff. I'd even go further and say advocates for invasion never considered Iraq was actually pretty good for a country in that region. Not only were they a key counterbalancing force to Iran, they were relatively religiously and culturally moderate (I'm sure there's a lot of nuance here; again I'm pretty ignorant). Advocates full on ignored or misrepresented intelligence about Iraq's WMD program though (I'm pretty sure even HRC ignored it or at least weighed it way too lightly).
I agree the Iraq War was premised on deeply faulty assumptions and complete naïveté about other cultures. Governments grow out of culture (a popular saying is "people tend to get the governments they deserve", which is maybe a little insensitive re: stuff like minority rights but not otherwise totally wrong); you can't really just poof a democracy into being; you can't just assume people will adopt your values. I do think we're way more circumspect on this now than you do though, I mean we haven't done another Iraq/Afghanistan. I'll also say that even though Republicans snicker at it, Jake Sullivan's foreign policy for the middle class is a pretty big departure for the establishment. That's a substantial positive change.
I also agree you can't 100% import "Americans". But, my worry with Trump's rhetoric here is that he ignores you can 99% import Americans, the children of the remaining 1% are fully assimilated, and that this has always been the case. There's so many ways we could make our immigration and asylum systems more humane and sustainable, but the GOP has ratfucked our immigration and asylum systems for decades to win elections (this is their move: break a part of government and then be like "look government is broken"... well yeah) so things will be trash for the foreseeable future.
“Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” George W Bush.
The Iraq war was not about bringing democracy to Iraq. It was bad intel about a nuclear weapons program in Iraq. The intel for a nuclear weapons program was weak and flimsy and the disagreement within the intel community was strong, but the White House pushed hard to support the pro-nuclear program viewpoint.
While I agree we should not have gone into Iraq, I disagree that it was an inevitable disaster. Iraq was a disaster because there was zero post invasion plan in place. The government was purged of “regime loyalists” which was basically everyone. This did two major things that shaped the country. First, it put thousands of police and soldiers out of work, giving the later insurgency a large employment pool of trained personnel that needed money and resented the US for destroying their lives. Second, it created a security vacuum directly after the invasion, creating crime waves throughout the country when it needed stability. Iraq was a primarily urban society used to central governance (unlike rural/tribal Afghanistan, for instance) and it is likely it could have transitioned to a new government.
While it is dangerous to think everyone can be like Americans, it is just as dangerous to think Iraq and Afghanistan are basically the same, or that all interventions and goals are the same (nation building in Afghanistan vs minimizing genocidal civil war in Syria).
Maybe, but I think we're all subject to the temptation to make bad arguments to get one over on people we disagree with. I can respect some things about someone and not respect other things. I guess this comes from being low-key terrified I've been as bamboozled as conservatives have, and I hope if I started parroting various propaganda someone here would have respect enough to tell me respectfully. But, also I get the internet makes cynics of us all.
Baldly accusing someone of bad faith is serious business, and I believe against the rules of this forum. It is way worse than calling out what you believe are bad arguments, as it's a slur against someone's integrity and character. Rayiner doesn't deserve that.
I might be misusing bad faith, but honestly I don't think so. I felt like trying to equate the Hunter Biden Laptop letter with the Iraq War was way too polemic to be good faith, designed solely for gotcha purposes rather than to continue or deepen a discussion. I think a good faith discussion would have had some standard by which they were categorizing Hunter Biden laptop letter signatories and wouldn't have equated the letter with all the intelligence fraud behind the Iraq War. I think it's not unreasonable to expect someone with Rayiner's platform on this site (and intelligence) to know that stuff. Maybe (probably?) you clearly take good/bad faith more seriously than I do; I think it's really easy to prioritize winning the argument or mindshare vs. participating in a discussion that benefits us all, and I think that comment had all the hallmarks of it. I don't think Rayiner's a bad person, just that he--like all of us--sometimes could do better (I'm also guilty of this, probably even recently who knows). I'm fine not agreeing on this, but I try pretty hard to criticize behavior and not people, and I think I've held to that standard here.
EDIT: I reread and I definitely gave the impression that Rayiner posts in bad faith a lot. I don't think that, and I apologize.
> Real military planning works more like: "Intel says the enemy is at A or B, most likely at A. How much resources should we devote to A vs B, or hold in reserve until we find out by encountering the enemy? What's our plan if we guess wrong?"
Not quite, and you can't possibly capture all of that paper in that sentiment. For instance, there's this excerpt:
> People’s judgments and willingness to accept analytic findings are framed by multiple factors, including backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs. Every decisionmaker has cognitive biases, including theories that guide them (e.g., the liberal international order), beliefs about how the world works (e.g., the arc of history bends in a particular direction), or sacred beliefs (e.g., all things happen for a reason). Thus it is essential for the analyst to understand as much as possible about the decisionmakers and the environment in which they operate.
Military intelligence will happily give you high confidence leads that are entirely wrong because, by all appearances, the information came from a source in the right place with the seemingly right motivations when in reality they can be playing 4D chess better than the analyst.
The confidence level can only be expressed in finite ways but it can be analyzed in almost infinite, one of them being that the information needed to develop "high confidence" has disappeared and the window of opportunity to gain insight has long passed. Personally speaking, I do not think we will ever find out the origins because a whole gaggle of people with various interests had a vested interest in a particular answer at the time. This is the byproduct of a democracy and bureaucratic system which has not been functioning nominally for quite some time - doubly so now.
I would go so far as to describe the events at the time as parallel construction.
Any new theory needs to match evidence for SARS-COV-2 being present in European wastewater during December 2019 [0] [1].
Maybe it leaked from the lab; maybe it was released? As far as I understand (but tbh, I have not kept up as much with immunology news) the alternative theory of the virus hopping from another species hadn't been confirmed, as no reservoir had been found. Does anyone know if that had been the case?
> So... I'm not certain this is a development worth trusting. Maybe it really did originate from a lab! But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.
0. COVID-19 was mostly harmless. Even more so than Douglas Adam's books.
1. China reacted asif they'd accidentally released a bioweapon.
2. China did what it does best, shut the F up on the world stage.
3. Everyone saw China's reaction because this isn't the 1950s and the internet exists.
4. The developed nations freaked out until there was data, hence the first set of lockdowns in Europe very quickly.
5. 2-3 years later after media pantomime, sectarian politics, holier than though preaching from everyone, the WHO declared the "emergency" over.
Some countries achieved 80%+ vaccination rates, didn't see 20% die. Some only achieved 50% and didn't see 50% death rates.
We now have a serious economic tab to be paid because of the BS pushed by developed countries in a panic that might have been less dramatic had there been information available from day 1.
China _has_ hidden and or destroyed a lot of "evidence" making certain discussions mute. (Again they are good at this let's not pretend otherwise).
Western countries, who, _like china_, jumped on a "who can punch themselves hardest with policy?" approach to this unknown now want someone else to blame.
Aka because we can pin a small significance and serious fault on China being a bad neighbour. (Snooze to the sensible this isn't news, china is very private about internal policy and now even more so) We are choosing to blame them for everything to get motivation up to get them to pay the bill...
This unfortunately was clear winter of 2020 and is clear now, it's just taken 4-5yr for politics to go through it's "he said she said" cycle. And I'm not referring to the US or UK political cycles this is the slow bi-partizan we all need someone to blame rather than be introspective and realise __"We should have handled this better"__.
> 0. COVID-19 was mostly harmless. Even more so than Douglas Adam's books.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I found out that my father and his partner had COVID. He lived, at the time, about 12 hours drive from me. Where he lived, his support network was thin (to say the least) - the little family he had nearby needed to keep away because they were responsible for caring for my cousin with a severely weakened immune system. His friends, sadly, also contracted COVID around the same time.
I called him twice a day, and each call he was worse than the last. I decided to rent an AirBnB nearby. My partner and I packed up the dog and everything we needed and drove overnight to get there.
We masked up, and got supplies at Walmart. We brought them to my Dad’s house and left them on the patio - retreated a safe distance - and my Dad came to retrieve them. He was in an awful condition, and his partner was worse.
For the next week I came to their porch every few hours, and called my dad, and we spoke with what little breath he had. He dictated his last will and testament to me. I delivered pedialyte, meal replacement shakes, pulse oximeters, anything to help them make it through. I forced them to get up and move around a little from time to time, and took notes on their condition. They wouldn’t let me in the house.
One day, before I arrived with supplies, my Dad told me they had called an ambulance for his partner. They took his partner to the local hospital… and the hospital turned him away because they had no beds. They essentially sent my Dad’s partner home to die.
By some miraculous turn of events, they survived. They have issues walking and breathing to this day, but they survived.
It’s one of the more agonizing, awful things I’ve ever had to watch. COVID-19 wasn’t harmless; it killed millions. I saw it up close. Especially early on, it was virulent and deadly, and very nearly took my parents from me. It did end up taking a lot of people in my extended social network. They died agonizing deaths.
Yes I am sorry for your loss. Now let's get to the point.
Because I understand statistics and am making sweeping statements I can and will make them from an objective viewpoint. Please do NOT sensor proven facts. I don't care for bible thumping tora humping nonsense that does not match reality. I'll take 2k years of religion and raise you 50 years of tech, oled TVs and microprocessors.
I know someone who ended up hospitalised and several years later does from complications due to a winter flu, doesn't mean we shut down society _every year_.
CV19 was a novel virus introduced into an existing population without any pre-existing immunity. This meant we will see complications, deaths at every age group and people's lives ruined by something that most 4yo, 25yo and 68yo will simply shake off.
Again the statement of millions dead _DOES NOT_ match the real world where several developed nations with populations sub 1B did not have dead numbers into the 10M+ of healthy individuals.
People died yes. This is expected. It is an illness. People die of staph infections. Life is unfair.
That _DOES NOT_ mean that this is equivalent to small pox. It's not a bioweapon it just meant the subpopulations who we identified really early (2020) should have isolated or accepted their risk.
The rest of society should not bend for the risk (again high survivability even in at risk groups). If it did we wouldn't sell guns, scissors or cross the road.
> Yes I am sorry for your loss. Now let's get to the point
I hope that people do not treat you with the callousness with which you treat others.
> Because I understand statistics and am making sweeping statements I can and will make them from an objective viewpoint. Please do NOT sensor proven facts. I don't care for bible thumping tora humping nonsense that does not match reality. I'll take 2k years of religion and raise you 50 years of tech, oled TVs and microprocessors.
My friend, you are speaking gibberish. I literally have no idea what you are trying to say. Maybe check your house for a gas leak, or something. I don’t mean it in a dismissive way - I quite literally cannot make heads or tails of what you’re saying here.
> Again the statement of millions dead _DOES NOT_ match the real world
The dead are dead whether you like it or not. Sounds like the pandemic didn’t affect you personally. Be grateful for that, and be kinder to others.
You effectively told me to shut up because of the way you feel when talking about facts. This is the ultimate in anti-intellectual, dishonest and selfish statements.
Check yourself before engaging in conversations about FACTS.
> You effectively told me to shut up because of the way you feel when talking about facts.
You waltzed into a thread about the CIA suddenly changing their tune about where COVID came from; and started making assertions that it wasn’t that bad.
I shared a deeply personal story about exactly how bad it was, from my vantage point. I expressed outrage at your dismissal of the suffering and many deaths that occurred. “How dare you” isn’t the same as “shut up.” But it is a strong suggestion that you’re being uncharitable.
> Check yourself before engaging in conversations about FACTS.
I scrolled through your comment history and based on some recent arguments with the mods, it sounds like you’ve have a bone to pick with people on this site.
Touching grass is honestly not a problem for me. But I like that you think I'm trapped behind a keyboard. Must have hit a nerve if we're getting close to name calling. Please refrain from this.
I'm telling you facts because for 4+ years nobody listens.
I've been correct in calling every detail about CV19 because I was involved and shut out of the early criticisms of the modelling based on the data. I'm correct and I'm just shouting into the void so that I can go away and rest easy that "I told you so", I tried ignoring it but frankly shouting until blue in the face helps my conscience easier.
You didn't just share a story you took offence to my position and tried to shut it down. Again, not approaching discourse honestly and openly. Please learn to be wrong. I know I can be. But again not when I'm stating hammer and nail facts. The earth is round, sky blue and water wet. Not the Orwellian everyone has a story type "facts". Words have meanings, please don't let that get lost for the sake of future generations.
Again mostly harmless is met with, the worst story I personally have is discomfort and complications. This unfortunately is not deaths by the millions of healthy people. But it is obviously real, it's just a different thing.
My friend, this is not productive or rational discourse. It’s certainly not empathetic. There is no place for it on this site. Perhaps you would feel more comfortable in a different community, one more amenable to listening to the “facts” that you’ve shared.
I think it is as your engaging which means you'll be more likely to listen to statistics next time they're presented to you with a "non immediately obvious" outcome.
If it were fruitless you wouldn't have engaged from an aggressive stance and I wouldn't be telling you why your wrong. Cognitive dissodence does hurt when it breaks but it's all for the better :)
You haven’t made any compelling case about anything, changed my mind, or altered my behavior. But if it helps you sleep at night to believe that, then go ahead.
For what it’s worth: I continued to engage because I used to be like you - argumentative, hyper assured of my own intelligence, and certain I was correct about everything. I wish someone had pointed out earlier that I was being a massive asshole.
Hence, trying to politely engage with you a bit. I feel like it’s the kind thing to do.
You are choosing to engage which either causes you to double down or reject change.
I'm going to engage in good faith still again and see if we can get past the point of it being uncomfortable for you.
I made a statement aligned with the indisputable reality that COVID did not lead to huge amounts of deaths among the healthy working age population.
Ironically the USA gives us a very good example of this. Their jab rates are close to 50% across multiple age brackets. If COVID was really really bad we would expect to see many more Americans dead than say in the UK where the jab rate hit >80% in most age groups.
This is not a statement about treatment efficacy or safety. This is a statement that we should be expecting to see many more dead without treatment if the treatment were essential comparing 2 relatively comparable subs populations.
This result given the population sizes can also be deemed to be ignorant of the health care model adopted.
This is also not a statement that COVID didn't kill. This is also not a statement that COVID didn't mame. This isn't a statement that water isn't wet or that the vaccine caused autism.
You told me about the worst experience of your relative. It's is unfortunate for them. I did not wish them ill. I did not deny that this happened. You demanded that I change my statement because of their and your experience.
I'm sorry that they may have suffered in the real world not being fair. But let's be clear NO, I will not change a statement of fact.
Again, I'm not wishing them ill, but there is a world of difference between suffering and an uncomfortable hospital visit and death. This fact does not mean I am wishing ill will upon anyone.
I'm not being argumentative, I'm being corrective. Yes I was insulted by being shut down for feelings, but that is a philosophical line I will never cross based on the last 4 years.
Feelings too are important, I'm not saying they're not, but they don't solely define reality.
I think we've been able to reach this point without name calling again so in good faith I'll wish you a good day, week, year and life and too to those you love and care for.
Given the original reason for lockdown in the UK was 20% all cause mortality.
100% expected fatalities above about 70 and hospitals struggling for oxygen supplies. Yes it was not that bad.
No that’s not an exaggeration, that’s why lockdown 1 happened.
After that is just memeing from both sides about microchips and death walkers without masks on.
The it wasn’t that bad is honestly true. Again it was a novel virus introduced into a population with no immunity, but frankly keeping the economy going would have been better than paying people to stay at home and worry.
The cost is starting to come home to roost if we’re not careful and the socioeconomic results of a global depression could genuinely kill more, displace more and lead to political turmoil and violence.
That is not worth just telling gran I’m sorry, the rest of us can go outside but we recommend you don’t.
Again practicing lecturer in applied stats talking so I understand the gritty details of the models and projections.
I had a pretty long post about this here before, due to the politicization of the issue it is highly unlikely any of us will ever know “the truth” without a surprise smoking gun. There are good reasons to believe the natural or the lab leak hypotheses.
I think you have to accept it is now unlikely we normies will ever know the truth.
There's a certain sort of fanatic who believes that everyone has the same opinions as them under the covers, but are disagreeing purely for performance purposes.
Participants here are afraid of losing "points" and care about "winning" points.
So you end up increasing the bias towards what gets you points rather than frank conversations based on a bigger array of facts than just the convenient facts.
Corona made this painfully visible. With facebook and others only admitting 4 years later that they completely muffed the other side of the conversations with downvotings, shadowbanning, suspending accounts when those voices had a perfectly valid reason to argue and question the official narrative.
The funny thing is that 99% of the users here will look with disdain to the burnings on public squares, but they behave exactly that way in a digital format today.
We won't change that system since it is human nature, but at least it will be recorded in history that some humans we're trying to revert that situation.
Actually, you've made my point quite clearly. The fact that you think you know the answer without a doubt, and that I am refusing to acknowledge it due to political reasons, is exactly why we won't know the truth.
If you were to step back and evaluate the possibilities rationally, acknowledge the evidence you do and do not have, and ask how well your heuristics are calibrated to this domain, you would see that not only do you not have any real answers to this question, but that you are as fundamentally incapable of adding meaningful value to the conversation as a biologist is to a deep cybersecurity investigation.
I feel this is a great summary, and really calls out the issues that we are certain of — namely the politicization and the resulting uncertainty. IMO, everything else is difficult to know with high confidence, because of those two issues.
Thanks for the dose of epistemic humility. I'm willing to go one step further: It's plausible that no one knows the truth. Keeping secrets is hard. If someone knew they might've died in the early stages of the outbreak.
There’s an asymmetry of potential evidence for each of the theories as well.
• If it was a lab leak, then even if the people responsible are dead, there was likely data that could trace it back. It is unlikely that data still exists or is findable, for obvious reasons.
• If it was not a lab leak, it may be impossible to find evidence to prove that is the case.
People always talk about early covid like it was some hyper-lethal virus. Remember, if you were a mostly healthy, non-elderly adult the death rate was like 1 in a thousand. I've read a few of people's amateur investigations about the early days of the virus and there are many cases where people point to potential witnesses whose testimony and evidence is lost because they apparently died from the virus. Did the virus greatly moderate in it's lethality in the first weeks? Was the Chinese government initially freaking out and euthanizing the infected?
My hypothesis is that it did not become less deadly, it is that a combo of demographics and response (both positive and negative) played more of a role than we are ready to admit, mostly because we still seem to feel like everyone did a bad job when the response was probably closer to “fine.”
The response in China, once things got out of control, included locking sick people in their homes. This form of quarantine is probably good to reduce spread, but it is also probably bad for the health of the patient. If there are multiple people in the home, it is probably worse for all of them. China also has a lot of multigenerational households (grandparents, adults, children) which means the vulnerable are together with people who are lower mortality risk, but higher risk for traveling and getting infected. I don’t know what percent of households in Wuhan were like this, but it probably played some sort of role.
We also forget that it wasn’t only China that got wrecked - Italy also had substantial challenges.
On the other hand, if your healthcare system isn’t overwhelmed, people are wearing masks so initial exposure is low, and you are caring for/separating the sick from the healthy, the outcomes are probably exponentially better.
It certainly seems that later strains were less dangerous though.
It would be trivial for the Chinese to determine if covid 19 matches with what they were investigating in the lab, and if the people in the lab were among the first infected.
I like how the CIA has "low confidence," but that you are positive. You should share your evidence with them so that they can upgrade to "high confidence" and we can settle it.
I have substantially more confidence in their assessment than I do in you and your "circle." A circle which, based on your other posts in this thread so far, provides you a convenient safe-space to avoid the need to provide evidence, defend your assertions with sound argument, and enables you to feel superior by way of intellectual dishonesty.
I can only aspire to be so woke, to see reality so clearly and with such confidence!
If you don't have extra evidence, and the you don't trust the CIA, then what base do you have for your assumption?
Wanting human like causes for problems is how humanity invented gods. So that they could feel more under control by trying to appease the now humanized force.
Of course, if the problem went away after you prayed, that would really just have been luck. Even though it strengthened your belief.
> There are good reasons to believe the natural or the lab leak hypotheses.
Given the ridiculous response from everyone involved, I'm just going to assume it was an accidental biosecurity breach of a natural specimen. It happens frequently enough and enough puzzle pieces seem to fit. Not that I care or think anything should come of it, other than hopefully learning better biosecurity procedures.
No sorry necessary. I just think it is interesting how hard it is to not have an opinion about something beyond "I don't know." We all seem to feel more comfortable making an assumption and picking an answer, even when it won't change our behavior and not picking has no cost.
> I just think it is interesting how hard it is to not have an opinion about something beyond "I don't know."
I hadn't thought of this before. I wonder if we naturally formulate an opinion or hypothesis when we're curious about something. Which I did again just now.. huh.
The lab leak is more likely than zoonosis. Uncertainty still dominates.
The take away is not that we'll never know. The take away is that governments conspired to obscure the truth, control public opinion, and censor dissent.
The CIA is not a neutral party in this. Discrediting China may well be their goal here.
A lab leak is not impossible, but there are good reasons to suspect a natural spillover event. There have been a number of studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests that the Wuhan wet market was the origin.
> There have been a number of studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests the Wuhan wet market was the origin.
Those are not mutually exclusive theories.
It could have been a lab leak that was then superspread by the visit of an affected lab worker (or someone they came into contact with) at the wet market.
That is possible, but the evidence doesn't suggest that. E.g. if I am reading the paper correctly, they say that there is evidence of two distinct spillover lineages, which wouldn't be consistent with a simple visit from a lab worker.
The current evidence points to at least two different spillover events (of slightly different variants) at the market, followed by spread of the virus in the communities surrounding the market, eventually radiating out to the rest of Wuhan. There is solid evidence now for each of those statements.
If you try to reconcile that with the lab leak theory, you end up with an ever more implausible theory: two different scientists got infected in the lab with different variants (of a virus we have good evidence never existed at the lab in the first place), then both of them went to the market (where the same types of wild animals that caused the original SARS outbreak in 2002 just happened to be sold) and infected people, but somehow they didn't infect anyone else at the lab. It's just one implausibility stacked on top of the next, all with the goal of avoiding what the data is obviously saying: the outbreak began at the market.
Carful when assuming how a lab leak must have unfolded, there’s many possibilities.
A single worker gets infected/accidentally releases multiple variants, sloppy worker messing up twice doesn’t seem that crazy. A lab leak is also consistent with an infection person visiting a location that experienced a separate variant.
And that’s just a few options there’s also things like an intentional leak followed by another intentional leak etc.
I’ve read that the lab was intentionally set near that wet market, so there being overlap like this doesn’t seem extraordinary.
This is how conspiracy theories become unfalsifiable.
You're now positing that a lab worker got infected with multiple variants (which wouldn't exist in the lab, by the way, since they would work with cloned virus), then traveled across town and spread the virus at the market.
The evidence all points towards a spillover (two, actually) at the market, but you can always make the lab leak theory ever more convoluted to keep it alive.
Why do you believe that lab workers only work with cloned viruses? Do you know the exact nature of the research that was going on there?
Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely. There's a good chance that the lack of safety was in the culture and not just one careless person. In November and December, several Wuhan Institute personnel were reporting unknown illnesses and took standard precautions (weeks of isolation) over it. It sounds like they weren't equipped to deal with a class of pathogens that they were working with.
> Do you know the exact nature of the research that was going on there?
We actually have a very good idea of what research was going on there. The groups in question publish their research, give talks at international conferences, upload the viruses they discover to US databases, talk with colleagues abroad, etc. We have a very good picture of what they were working on, and every indication is that they didn't have any virus closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
> Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely.
If that were the case, you'd see the outbreak centered on the lab. It wasn't. It was centered on the market, on the other side of town. So you have to start making implausible - and obviously motivated - assertions that two different lab workers went and infected people at the market, without infecting any of their colleagues or anyone else along the way.
> If that were the case, you'd see the outbreak centered on the lab. It wasn't. It was centered on the market, on the other side of town. So you have to start making implausible - and obviously motivated - assertions that two different lab workers went and infected people at the market, without infecting any of their colleagues or anyone else along the way.
There literally was an outbreak among lab workers in November to December of 2019. Many of them got sick with something that looks vaguely like COVID and quarantined over it - this is a standard precaution when you work around weird pathogens. Social media from these workers was suppressed when they talked about getting sick. Chinese whistleblowers discussed this at the time.
I'm frankly surprised you haven't seen any of this evidence given your interest in the subject.
And we only know about the research they published, not what goes unpublished. That includes various kinds of failed research, research that someone did for fun and wouldn't make it past ethics boards (a not-infrequent problem for this type of virus research), and research that was done under the table to nefarious ends.
> There literally was an outbreak among lab workers in November to December of 2019.
No, there wasn't.
The 1st Trump administration leaked a rumor to the press that three workers got a respiratory virus sometime in the winter in 2019. Even if true, that's completely uninteresting. A large percentage of Earth's population gets any number of respiratory viruses every winter.
I have no idea where you're getting the rest of the details that you're claiming ("looks vaguely like COVID," "quarantined over it," etc.). They're not even in the Trump administration's leaks, and I suspect you're getting them from the online rumor mill.
> And we only know about the research they published, not what goes unpublished.
We actually know much more than what gets published. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology regularly go and give talks at international conferences. There are visiting scientists at the WIV from other countries, including the United States. WIV scientists upload RNA sequences that they gather in the field to US-based gene-sequence databases. This wasn't secret research. It was out in the open. They would have had no reason at all to conceal the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 if they had had it. Yet there's no indication whatsoever that they had it. Everything we know indicates that they were just as clueless about the virus when the outbreak began as everyone else.
These labs were putting coronavirus samples into a forcing environment that drove evolutionary development towards the goal they wanted to study. Creating new lineages of the virus that differed from the original was the entire point!
Given that, it’s plausible that sloppy lab handling procedures led to someone being infected with multiple different viruses that were present in the same part of the lab.
None of this proves the lab leak hypothesis of course, but a lab worker being infected with multiple variants simultaneously (or separately) is a perfectly plausible outcome.
Multiple zoonosis events is actually exactly what you expect from natural spillover.
If the virus is spreading in farmed animals, it will have many chances to spill over into humans. In fact, this is exactly what happened with the original SARS in 2002.
It's striking how similar the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak is to the original SARS outbreak. Almost every detail of the spillover is identical: unknown coronavirus emerges at market in major Chinese city selling wild animals.
But SARS outbreak was from a single strain, wasn't it? It's not the “two zoonosis” that I find to be low-probability, it's the “two zoonosis of two different strains at the same place & time”.
The two Covid strains were closely related with only a few mutations difference between them. As you’d expect if eg two different raccoon dogs were infected with the same virus and one of the lineages was preferred.
You would expect, as was the case with SARS, that we would then find the population of infected animals. That did not happen with COVID, and in fact when we went looking, the closest virus in a wild population was a bat coronavirus located 1000 miles away.
> You would expect, as was the case with SARS, that we would then find the population of infected animals.
In the case of SARS, the animals were not culled for months. The entire SARS response was slow - the virus kept spreading in farmed animal populations and kept spilling over into humans.
With SARS-CoV-2, the Chinese government immediately ordered all the suspect animals to be culled. No test results for those animals have ever been released, if they were ever even conducted.
> the closest virus in a wild population was a bat coronavirus located 1000 miles away.
Guangzhou, where the original SARS emerged, is just as far away from the bat populations and Wuhan is.
And relatedly - several of the animals sold in Wuhan with proper paperwork were from farms far closer to the closest Covid ancestors including many in the same province - not to mention wherever else the off-the-books animals were being brought in from.
> In the case of SARS, the animals were not culled for months. The entire SARS response was slow - the virus kept spreading in farmed animal populations and kept spilling over into humans.
It's been 4 years. When are we culling the COVID animals? The answer is that there's no culling because there's no animal population with a virus that is close enough that it could have been the basis for COVID.
The closest known wild-type virus - the one in those bats from over 1000 miles away - is still missing several key features (eg furin cleavage sites) that would be exceedingly unlikely to have all evolved multiple times in the few animals that made it to the wet market.
Almost every animal population that has resulted in a pandemic in the past has been pinned down in a matter of months and "dealt with." Obvious examples are SARS, MERS, and the recent influenza pandemics. That hasn't even gotten close to happening with COVID. This is a core competency of public health agencies, much more so than you might have realized.
In 2020, the lab leak sounded like a conspiracy theory to me and I thought it was a matter of time until the animals were found. Now, with it clear that there is no population of animal hosts with a similar virus in a similar area (given huge databases of bat coronaviruses that were developed post-SARS), it's looking increasingly like a virus that has been through a lab IMO.
> It's been 4 years. When are we culling the COVID animals? The answer is that there's no culling because there's no animal population with a virus that is close enough that it could have been the basis for COVID.
The animals were culled right at the beginning of the pandemic. The Chinese government immediately ordered all of the farms that raise the types of animals that caused the original SARS to cull their stock. We have never seen a sequence from any of those culled animals, either because no sequences were taken, or because the government doesn't want them to be published. In any case, culling the potential host population would have been a very effective measure for preventing the virus from spilling over again.
> The closest known wild-type virus - the one in those bats from over 1000 miles away - is still missing several key features (eg furin cleavage sites) that would be exceedingly unlikely to have all evolved multiple times in the few animals that made it to the wet market.
First off, the fact that the closest known virus is in bats 1000 miles away is not at all surprising. With the original SARS virus, the closest known virus in bats was also from a site about 1000 miles away from where the human outbreak started. Second, other coronaviruses have furin cleavage sites, so this is something that has evolved multiple times. Third, we're not just talking about a few infected animals. We're talking about a population of infected animals, maybe on different farms. The few that were brought to the Huanan market in Wuhan seeded the outbreak in humans, but they were part of a larger infected population.
> Almost every animal population that has resulted in a pandemic in the past has been pinned down in a matter of months and "dealt with."
This is not true. It took literally decades to locate the origins of AIDS. We still don't know the origins of Ebola (not a pandemic, but it has caused a series of large regional outbreaks and is the subject of intense study). There is a vast diversity of coronaviruses in bats, and the more scientists look, the more they find.
> it's looking increasingly like a virus that has been through a lab IMO.
Literally every piece of evidence has pointed towards the market, from epidemiology (which has firmly established that the outbreak radiated outwards from the market) to genetic evidence (multiple lineages of SARS-CoV-2 present in the very stalls where wild animals were being sold at the market).
Just wanted to say I appreciate that a few people here have actually been paying attention to the evidence re: lab leak and are willing to bash their head against the wall 'educating' the rest of the community. It's a repetitive, thankless task but I'm heartened that the comments aren't all just the same low-brow "is anyone surprised, it was obviously a lab leak from day-1" nonsense that shows up in almost every discussion of this.
The SARS outbreak was from many zoonosis events of slightly different strains, over the course of months.
The standard zoonosis theory here predicts that multiple spillover events are likely, because there's a population of infected animals that is in close contact with humans.
Multiple zoonosis events from close strains over a couple months from a local animal population strikes high on the probability scale.
Virtually simultaneous, in time and space, zoonosis events from different strains at the same place is still possible, but reaches much lower on the scale.
If it were coming from a farm population, I would have expected the said farm to have been found pretty easily by the Chinese investigation – and they would have had no incentive to hide it, as it would have pinned covid on basically a bad luck case once and for all.
They identified the at-risk farms right away and ordered them to immediately cull their stocks.
The Chinese government has been very sensitive about the idea that the virus came from a farm.
> it would have pinned covid on basically a bad luck case once and for all.
The US would still have tried to make maximum propaganda use of that. If you recall the early "wet market" discussion, it was highly accusatory, and often blatantly racist.
Yes, the “at-risk”, not the “incubator”, and notice the plural form to “farms”. China has never pretended having found a farm that would have been the source of the virus.
> The US would still have tried to make maximum propaganda use of that
The US (the state & government) was very far from having tried to make maximum propaganda use of anything regarding covid.
> it was highly accusatory
Well yes, it was highly accusatory of the typically awful hygienic condition of these markets. That's not racist so, that's just a fact.
> Yes, the “at-risk”, not the “incubator”, and notice the plural form to “farms”. China has never pretended having found a farm that would have been the source of the virus.
Just days after the virus was discovered, the Chinese government would have had no idea which farm the virus came from. They ordered a broad cull. They might have destroyed our ability to trace the origins of the outbreak by doing that, though from an immediate epidemic-control perspective, it was the correct decision. Maybe they did do testing at those farms, but maybe they didn't. In the case of the market, we know that China CDC only came in and did testing after the local authorities shut down and sterilized the place. Officials were probably much more worried about the immediate spread of the virus than scientifically tracing the origins of the outbreak.
> The US (the state & government) was very far from having tried to make maximum propaganda use of anything regarding covid.
The Trump administration went to great lengths to use the pandemic for propaganda purposes. At first, Trump was "nice" to the Chinese and even praised their response. However, after the virus took off in the US and it became clear that the Trump administration had completely mismanaged it, Trump pivoted to yelling, "China! China! China!"
> Well yes, it was highly accusatory of the typically awful hygienic condition of these markets. That's not racist so, that's just a fact.
There was a huge amount of racist "bat soup" discussion in the United States early on in the pandemic, followed soon by racist phrases like "Kung flu." I remember a viral post that showed a random Asian person eating a bat (it turned out the photo wasn't even from China). That's what the atmosphere was like.
This wasn't an informed discussion about the viral spillover dangers of wet markets (which are ubiquitous in much of Asia, not just China, and are often the primary way people buy groceries). It was mostly people who have no idea what they're talking about (and who have never visited a wet market) talking about dirty foreigners.
I doubt they are actually related but it’s something I read presumably because:
“Wuhan Branch of the CAS.[4] Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it was founded in 1956 and opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory[5] in 2018.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology
There was also a separate BSL-2 facility that moved right before the outbreak which also got news coverage due to the timing. But I think that was more confusion as they shouldn’t be working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility.
They in fact were working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility, which is another thing that helps make the lab leak hypothesis more plausible. E.g. from Vanity Fair:
Baric testified that he had specifically warned Shi Zhengli that the WIV’s critical coronavirus research was being conducted in labs with insufficient biosafety protections. When he urged her to move the work to a more secure biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) lab, he testified that she did not heed his recommendation. Because the WIV continued to perform coronavirus research at what he considers an inappropriately low biosafety level, Baric said of a laboratory accident, “You can’t rule that out…. You just can’t.”
In 2004, nine people were infected with Sars and one person died after two researchers were separately exposed to the virus while working at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing. In November 2019, just a month before the first confirmed case of Covid-19, more than 6,000 people in north-west China were infected with brucellosis, a bacterial disease with flu-like symptoms, after a leak at a vaccine plant. [1]
The Chinese facility hosts one of no more than six BSL-4 labs in the world that had been conducting contentious “gain of function” research on bat-related pathogens before the pandemic, according to Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University [1]
Just given the above, the statistical likelihood of coincidence is so absurdly low it alone means there needs to be overwhelming evidence to the opposite to overcome it. At no point has this been the case.
Read the paper. It claims that this is consistent with 2 spillover events, but it's also consistent with 1 spillover and an early mutation. The mutation between the 2 lineages could happen on either side of the spillover.
But a 2 spillover event suggests there was a pool of infected animals with multiple lineages that were all already capable of zoonosis. So why only a single secondary event? This suggests the pool was small, contact was limited, and that the pool wasn't sustained for long. OK, then it's comparably likely that a mutation would happen on either side of the spillover.
We don't know how many spillover events there were. Just just know that it's at least two. Most spillover events probably do not lead to a sustained outbreak.
The problem with positing that the mutations happened after spillover is that the timeline is way too short. Multiple variants were present at the market just weeks after the initial human cases. That points to differentiation before spillover, probably on the farms where the animals were being kept.
A hypothetical lab worker which only spread it to the market and nowhere else seems implausible.
I suppose that could happen if what they were carrying wasn't capable of human transmission yet, but was capable of infecting some species of the live animals at the market, but that's a big if.
There's till the problem of the second lineage which would indicate multiple zoonotic crossover events.
> I suppose that could happen if what they were carrying wasn't capable of human transmission yet, but was capable of infecting some species of the live animals at the market
Or if infected carrions from the labs were sold at the market – I suppose it only takes a low-ranking employee wanting to make a few bucks.
You are 100% right. Not sure why you are being downvoted.
All of the evidence people argue over can fit together.
Original virus was brought from the south of china, was studied in the lab. Unclear if it was engineered. Somehow in the lab an animal was exposed. Either purposefully for study or accidentally. Animal dies or will die soon so a rouge employee takes it to the market to sell the meat for some pocket money. First cases show up in lab employees they are smart enough to quarantine. Full outbreak starts at market from animal source.
US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no conclusive evidence of what exactly happened. The burden of proof is on China. But let's be honest if it was a lab leak of this scale and consequences in US, US wouldn't admit it as would probably no country.
>State media has been reporting intensively on coronavirus discovered on packaging of frozen food imports, not considered a significant vector of infection elsewhere, and research into possible cases of the disease found outside China’s borders before December 2019.
The official People’s Daily newspaper claimed in a Facebook post last week that “all available evidence suggests that the coronavirus did not start in central China’s Wuhan”.
“Wuhan was where the coronavirus was first detected but it was not where it originated,” it quoted Zeng Guang, formerly a chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.[0]
> US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no conclusive evidence of what exactly happened.
Right, but in 2020 and 2021, the US was doing everything it could to discredit those who were trying to possibly discredit China. And the WHO was doing whatever China wanted. No scrutiny was to be tolerated. That in and of itself is very fishy.
> US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no conclusive evidence of what exactly happened.
The US funded the lab and the specific fields of research. I have no idea how people can still be banging on about lab-leak origin being a racist plot against the Chinese. Covid probably leaked from US lab experiments in China. The rest of the world should be raging against the US and China both.
There will be no major discrediting of China since the bat coronavirus research at Wuhan labs was funded by the National Institute of Health. This was firmly and unequivocally established by the hearing held by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Refer to “Overseeing the Overseers: A Hearing with NIH Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak”.
Dr. Tabak testified in this hearing that the NIH was funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China through a grant to EcoHealth.
Of-course this was in "direct contradiction" of the earlier testimony given by Dr Fauci under sworn oath. But hey - he has already been pardoned for it.
The only thing that can be laid at China's feet is ignorance of what was going on in their labs and the useless attempt at media suppression once the virus got out. However, anyone who has studied the facts in detail would easily form the judgement that a subsection of the U.S. government had the majority share of culpability.
The NIH partially funded GoF research in contravention of policy. The funding for the worst of the GoF proposals was denied, but there is evidence that the WIV performed the research anyway.
Yeah, the NIH isn't blameless if the lab leak hypothesis is true.
The US funded the Wuhan lab through the EcoHealth Alliance, which was used as a vehicle to steer US government funding into areas of research that Obama had banned the US government from funding.
The idea that this assessment needs a goal is strange, because it is the most reasonable assessment, but the idea that it discredits China more than it discredits the US is bizarre. Maybe it does for the Chinese people, who can see that their government is willing to put Chinese people in danger in partnership with a US that was nominally refusing to put American people in danger. Turns out viruses don't need visas so it didn't matter, but maybe it's the thought that counts.
US intelligence likely has more evidence than they will publicly discuss. It is a matter of public record that parts of US intelligence (not CIA) had been tracking COVID in China since at least November of 2019. That they coincidentally happened to be johnny-on-the-spot when the initial infection(s) happened, long before anyone was paying attention or trying to create a narrative, suggests that they probably have more context around the conditions of the initial infections than they will ever disclose. How they managed to be "right place, right time" to observe the initial stages raises all kinds of interesting questions that aren't going to be answered.
However, what the (classified) evidence indicates is somewhat separate from whatever public posture the CIA finds useful to take.
> It is a matter of public record that parts of US intelligence (not CIA) had been tracking COVID in China since at least November of 2019.
What's public record is that ABC News reported[1] that two anonymous officials claimed there was an internal intelligence report in late November discussing an outbreak in China, and that it was briefed up the chain. All other news outlets then picked it up, with attribution (ABC News says someone else says...) buried deep in the text per usual. The report was immediately denied publicly by various officials and in over 4 years has never been corroborated, not even with other anonymous sources.
Plus, even if it were true, what's the relevance? It originally made headlines because it implied the Trump administration was slow to react; in particular, that they possibly had as many as 4 additional weeks in which to begin preparations. But it doesn't speak to origin. Most advocates for both the natural and lab-leak arguments all agree that the COVID-19 outbreak began sometime in Fall 2019. It's not a point of contention except possibly when comparing one overspecified theory against another overspecified, straw man theory. There are so many degrees of freedom to either theory (or rather, group of theories) that an early or late start doesn't significantly weigh in favor of one or the other.
Topic aside, it is often strategically useful in these types of contexts to convey lower confidence than you actually have. Saying you have high confidence without the ability to provide the reason encourages other parties to wonder whence that confidence comes, which may induce them to search for an answer you don’t want them to search for. There are many audiences for these public statements and you have to thread the needle of desired effect without unintended side-effect. Ambiguity is an advantage.
There are also many cases where adversaries both know the true story, and know the other knows the true story, but neither side finds it in their strategic interest to publish the truth e.g. the optics are terrible for both for different reasons.
That said, this particular case of the CIA publishing a report seems performative for domestic politics rather than strategic, which also happens all the time. There was nothing new or novel. The internal view of the intelligence community has been pretty consistent for years.
What are you talking about? The NIH funded the research through Ecohealth alliance. It was funded from the US and created in the Wuhan lab. We've known the virus was created in a lab and not natural since early 2020.
If only there was an inter-national body that everyone contributes to and that does these things /s. Both parties here are at blame: China didn't fully cooperate with the WHO and the US recently kicked it out.
It's not obvious that international bodies are the answer. Health agencies the world over lied through their teeth to manipulate the public to take specific actions.
So if you believe that your lauded international bodies are immune to politics and the abuse of authority, then maybe it will work. The rest of us prefer international bodies to be forums and coordination points for the real authorities.
Eh, sure, the CIA isn't behind honest. China isn't being honest. There's too many parties with ulterior motives to trust anything being said. China has done a great job of looking like they're covering something up.
I read "Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley" and it convinced me the lab leak theory was at least fairly likely. The proximity of the outbreak to WIV -- which was doing gain-of-function research of bat coronaviruses -- is convincing. Occam's razor and all.
Pretty safe to say this is a politicized nothingburger:
The announcement of the shift came shortly after Mr. Ratcliffe told Breitbart News he no longer wanted the agency “on the sidelines” of the debate over the origins of the Covid pandemic. Mr. Ratcliffe has long said he believes that the virus most likely emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology....
Another senior U.S. official said it was Mr. Ratcliffe’s decision to declassify and release the new analysis. There is no new intelligence behind the agency’s shift. Rather it is based on the same evidence it has been chewing over for months.....
To boost the natural origins theory, intelligence officers would like to find the animal that passed it to a human or find a bat carrying what was the likely ancestor of the coronavirus that causes Covid.
Similarly, to seal the lab leak, the intelligence community would like to find evidence that one of the labs in Wuhan was working on a progenitor virus that directly led to the epidemic.
Neither piece of evidence has been found.
The thing is that unlike political science, virology is an actual science. Scientists have found little evidence of coronavirus at the labs and there is record of them failing even to culture the virus which would be required for any research including gain of function research. In dramatic contrast samples from the wet market were easily cultured into multiple related strains which strongly points to the wet market as the source.
+1, the question of origin in general is politicized. I don’t think individual theories are taboo, it’s just very difficult to truly evaluate the evidence at this point, unless perhaps you are an expert and can do all the fact checking yourself.
Heliocentrism was politicized. The Galileo affair had a lot more to do with Church authority during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation than about cosmology. Galileo went out of his way to antagonize certain key players, and his punishment was primarily a political matter, not a scientific or even theological one.
We can conclude nothing, except that humans do stupid stuff and usually conspiracy theories are incorrect. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Do we actually know if NIH was doing gain of function research (on Corona viruses) in the Wuhan lab? It sounds like another right wing conspiracy theory but if people have high quality sources for this being true I’ll happily change my mind.
The demonization of the Ecohealth Alliance is one of the more depressing aspects of the response to the pandemic.
EHA has been warning for decades that a coronavirus pandemic is likely, and that governments should be taking steps to prepare for it and to make it less likely. Then, they're proved right, but instead of society thanking them, they're subject to a politically motivated witch hunt, with the aim of distracting from the US government's disastrous pandemic response.
It's begging the question to claim they were proven right. Sure, they were proven right in some respect, but if the research itself caused it (and let's be real, it did) then they were proven right in a manner that doesn't really speak well of their record. And yes, they were influential in arguing for continued grant money to study coronaviruses. They were also influential in arguing against the Obama administrations restrictions on gain of function research and seem to have sought ways around the restrictions (we know from comments on the DEFUSE paper). They didn't publicly disclose the DEFUSE paper, a whistleblower in the DoD had to leak it. It is relevant because it suggested adding a FCS to natural coronaviruses to make it more virulent to humans. It seems like as soon as a virus with FCS appeared on the scene, their first reaction should have been "oh no, did someone do that research we proposed somewhere? We have to tell someone!" -- but, alas, no. Let's keep crying that they're being demonized, though.
The scientific evidence that the outbreak began at the market is overwhelming at this point, and there's never been a shred of evidence for the lab leak.
If you think otherwise, then you have not been following the scientific publications on the subject for the last 5 years.
So yes, EHA has been proven right, and you're hounding the very people who dedicated themselves to warning the world about the threat of a pandemic.
This is a fascinating exhibit. To effectively summarize favorite take on Covid, “the peasants will go to their graves before they admit they were fools”.
I think the conspiracy theorist label is associated with common patterns (believing in a cover up in cases where there's no incentive / the cover up would be more expensive than the crime / the evidence would be impossible to cover up, etc) but in this case these patterns don't apply.
The lab leak theory was extremely plausible even assuming no secret conspiracy at all. Lab leaks do happen, that lab did do gain of function research, the State did shut down investigations, etc.
You might be surprised how many things labeled conspiracy theories have strong evidence, incentives, etc. but get scoffed at as kooky impossibilities nonetheless - like the lab leak theory.
99% of the time there isn't a good reason to censor things, that doesn't stop it from happening constantly though. Especially in China where censorship of anything with bad publicity for the country or government or people is the default stance.
The major reason for that is that many were doing this in language that was generally considered racist and/or mixed in some other weird stuff like how COVID lockdowns were like the Jewish persecution, rants about masking, or that type of stuff. I'm not saying everyone did that, but there was a huge overlap.
There was a huge overlap because within a month it became completely taboo for anyone who cared about not being seen as an alt-right activist to say anything about it. Even freaking Jon Stewart got caught in the instant-cancellation blast [0].
A major problem with our world today is that anything that the alt right supports instantly becomes taboo for the rest of us. People are more concerned with distancing themselves from the alt right than they are with finding and supporting the truth—and that goes for just about anything, not just COVID.
The fact that there's a biolab doing gain-of-function research a few blocks away from ground zero is much stronger bayesian evidence than "but maybe it's true".
(And then the fact that ground zero is a wet market is strong evidence against. It's so weird that we have two plausible origins for this virus and they're almost right next to each other.)
"but maybe this could have happened"* is the exact evidence being input into your bayesian model. The fact that this particular thing could have happened is a bit surprising, so it does count as some evidence, but it's not strong enough to then go run around saying on the internet it definitely did happen. Especially in the context where, as you point out, there's also other evidence of the form "but maybe <this other thing> could have happened and that's also surprising".
Which to address a different subthread, is exactly what some people did (go around on the internet confidently stating it did happen). Which is why, I think, other people then labelled the people seriously discussing the theory as conspiracy theorists. Which is a step too far, it's only the people confidently asserting from weak evidence that it definitely did happen who should be labelled as conspiracy theorists. Which is all to say since when does the internet do any of this nuance at all well on any side.
* GP's phrasing, which is arguably different from your phrasing of "but maybe it's true"
JFC, finally someone that understands specific evidence changes probabilities.
It's unlikely we'll ever know the truth. If it's a cover up, then it's possible that someone will come forward in 30 years. For example, Luis Salas spilled the beans on Lyndon B Johnson's 1948 election fraud. But it's unlikely, because the PRC doesn't have a statute of limitations on STFU. If it's natural zoonosis, then maybe we'll manage to find and prove the origin.
I simply cannot use this as signal to update my priors on the theory given how politically charged this issue is and the new administration.
We cannot ignore the timing or the fact that the release appears to be the direct consequence of the previous director not believing the information he had passed the evidential bar and the new directory believing it does.
It's new signal on the question, which is always nice-to-have, but I'll be digesting it with a huge grain of salt given its pedigree.
Society is like a meta-brain. One neuron may believe something to a different degree than the others - i.e. different priora. Highly-reported channels like this are the society brain updating its priors at large.
Fauci has been preemptively pardoned for gain of function research (lying or funding), so the bureaucrats can now pander to Trump. Anyway, we have always been at war with Oceania and China is now our enemy! Next week the NYT will use the term "Wuhan Virus".
This is the first US presidential change of power I'm following consciously. Have there always been such abrupt 180° turns and pledges of loyalty as now? I feel like I'm watching The Godfather.
FWIW, the pardon doesn't mention gain of function research. (https://www.justice.gov/pardon/media/1385746/dl). This pardon applies every bit as much to him parallel parking while attending a Chief Medical Advisor meeting as it does to gain of function research.
> This is the first US presidential change of power I'm following consciously. Have there always been such abrupt 180° turns and pledges of loyalty as now?
No; this is 100% new. This is in no way a normal Presidential transition of power.
I found this recent interview with Christian Drosten [1] very interesting, he explains very good scientifically why it is much more probable that the origin is not from a laboratory.
(1) The area where the Nyctereutes spec. (german: Marderhund, I have no idea how it is called in english) where kept, there where a lot of DNA of Nyctereutes and a lot of nucleinacid of SARS II.
(2) From the beginning there a two lines of the corona viruses laboratory-confirmed. From the evolutionary speed of virus mutation it is nearly certain that the separation had to be taken place months before. About 8 times a corona-variation had been aquired by man. From this infection chains 2 virus-types had survived to be confirmed in Wuhan. A person who works in the laboratory would have been working with a clonal virus that is not mutated in that way.
(3) The market is the center of all infections even if you take out everybody that is known to be at the market, not the laboratory.
(4) For the animals at the market a analysis showed that they had been ill/infected (not specifically corona)
These are all separate published aspects that points to the same thing.
The part starts at 2 hours 23 minutes 30 seconds - you have to use auto-translated subtitles which are unfortunately not very good (german language)
there's a 23? bp sequence that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade).
now an exact match of that length isn't impossible, but which is more likely? that this managed to be exactly correct on accident? or some grad student was told to just copypasta every furin cleavage site in the database into a GOF library and surprise surprise the most virulent form that became a pandemic came from the sequence that is engineered to be efficient.
any scientist that has any molecular biology wet experience will tell you this is exactly what they would have done (though us researchers would probably not have pulled from the patented BLAST sequences, since that selector is turned off by default by the NCBI)
rough estimate worse than 1 in 3^7 (based on # of wobble codons) but its even lower likelihood if you also allow AA variation in the universe of all furin cleavage sites
> there's a 23? bp sequence that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade).
could you cite this? not because i'm questioning the statement's credibility, but because i'm curious (and you could save me a lot of time from even knowing where to begin to look for credible information for myself—full disclosure, lol).
I wanted to learn more about where this claim comes from and found this article [0].
The linked commentary [1] raises several interesting points.
"Unfortunately, the authors did not provide details of their BLAST research. The patent database that they used contained 24,712 sequences. Yet, by querying BLAST, we obtained a database of 46,121,617 patent sequences with an average length of 560 nucleotides. The authors should give more details and justification for their query, especially if they queried the full database but a posteriori restricted their computation. Of note, with such a large database, and despite the fact that the average sequence length decreased, the probability of finding at least one sequence containing one of the 16 patterns previously mentioned may rise to 68% under assumption 2."
The absence of CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG from any mammalian or viral genome in the BLAST database makes recombination in an intermediate host an unlikely explanation for its presence in SARS-CoV-2. You can verify for yourself that there are no other sequences with an exact match.
The subsequent comment about statistics of blast searching is irrelevant.
So the conclusion of the comment-article cited in the parent of your comment is false?
"According to the current phylogeny, FCS appeared independently six times in the Betacoronavirus lineages, demonstrating that FCS insertion is compatible with natural evolution (2, 7, 8).
[...]
7. Wu Y, Zhao S. Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses. Stem Cell Res (2021) 50:102115. doi: 10.1016/j.scr.2020.102115"
"Unfortunately, the authors did not provide details of their BLAST research. The patent database that they used contained 24,712 sequences. Yet, by querying BLAST, we obtained a database of 46,121,617 patent sequences with an average length of 560 nucleotides."
just do the BLAST yourself and see. it's a publically available database. you will find zero other exact matches. note that today in 2025 there are a shit tonne of sequences that are resequencing of covid variants so you'll have to filter those out
It very much does. China is a political opponent, and casting blame on China allows the US more freedom to act against them.
American involvement is barely an inconvenience. For those most eager to blame it on China, it was the fault of one American. They would like to punish him, too, but he has received a preemptive pardon. (Either to avoid political persecution of an innocent man, or to cover up the dastardly deeds of their domestic political opponents; take your pick.)
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 457 ms ] threadHere we are told that the "C.I.A.’s new director, John Ratcliffe, ... wants the agency to get “off the sidelines” in the debate."; that he's long favored the lab-leak theory (which is a politicized issue); and of all the things a brand new new CIA director must do, we see that this was Ratcliffe's first priority. We know that the CIA did not choose to release the report before the Trump administration.
I think the overwhelming evidence is that it's a politicized action. Would Trump or his team lie or mislead? Of course. We can't give them the benefit of the trust until proven false; they have embraced deceit.
Unfortunately, even though they weren't always credible before, I think that means that these things are now meaningless, other than as clues to Trump's and others' intents: Why prioritize this messaging? Whose idea was it? And always, cui bono - who benefits?
And right below the headline on the Wall Street Journal they even stressed that the CIA says it had 'low confidence' in its finding...
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/cia-now-favor...
“I’ve said from the beginning that Covid likely originated in the Wuhan labs. Communist China covered it up and the liberal media covered for them. I’m pleased the CIA concluded in the final days of the Biden administration that the lab-leak theory is the most plausible explanation of Covid’s origins and I commend Director Ratcliffe for fulfilling his promise to release this conclusion. Now, the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world.”
Considering it's "with low confidence", someone else could've published the findings focusing on the low confidence rather than the fact that their needle is pointing more towards "lab leak".
Is that really true? Even supposing it was a leak from a lab, is punishing China really our top priority? What does it accomplish? What does it look like?
That sounds like the goal isn't to find the actual cause, but to seek excuses to justify whatever it is he wishes to inflict on China.
Worth noting is that this is a low-confidence report. I'm not accusing the director of divulging a low-confidence report under the belief that the public will accept it as categorically true because they have no sense of how CIA confidence levels work, but they're willing to believe the director wouldn't publicize it if it wasn't true.
... you should have low confidence in the truth of my last statement.
The intel community never dismissed the lab leak theory. The discrediting of it was 100% a psyop
Also from the article: "Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time."
I mean you're going to need extraordinary evidence to show this is true; but CIA say there's no new evidence and it's a low confidence conclusion.
Probability that it's just Trump continuing to be deceitful and manipulative approaches certainty.
Once a CIA director gets confirmed, they can influence hiring decisions at the CIA, but that takes time.
This was investigated for a long while before Trump was even president. This was started under Biden.
Trump doesn't have that many people left to convince that China is problematic.
The CIA isn't the first to conclude this, but also the FBI and the DoE. Both of their reports came out under the Biden administration.
This doesn't appear to be a new trend or a dramatic shift in conclusion as a result of Trump becoming president.
They’re well-oiled grift machines.
So basically neither had real evidence, but one was favoured?
Animal origin still seems more likely to me, but less than 5 years ago, since we have a missing link one would expect to see.
It does favor an accidental lab leak over a targeted weaponization and release, but it doesn't contradict a lab origin.
There was no evidence for a zoonotic origin other than it was possible.
There was little evidence for a lab leak other than it was possible, but at least there was some.
Here's a technical article at NIH discussing the theory of no known natural origin for a nucleotide subsequence
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8209872/
"Dr Robert Redfield, who led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Trump administration, told Vanity Fair that he received death threats from fellow scientists when he backed the Wuhan lab leak theory last spring. "I was threatened and ostracised because I proposed another hypothesis," Dr Redfield said. "I expected it from politicians. I didn't expect it from science."[1]"
The US State Department were told to not to explore claims of Gains of Function research:
"According to an investigation in Vanity Fair magazine published on Thursday, Department of State officials discussed the origins of coronavirus at a meeting on 9 December 2020. They were told not to explore claims about gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan lab to avoid attracting unwelcome attention to US government funding of such research, reports Vanity Fair.[2]"
We may never know the truth, but its clear that there was politics being played since the beginning of the pandemic to obscure the truth, and not just by China.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57352992
[2] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
How can following a trail possibly be no better?
And with the main competing theory (covid spreading from a wet market in a city that contains a biolab) also being consistent with the hypothesis that it was an accidental lab leak, to me the balance of probabilities always seemed to favor the lab leak hypothesis.
Yet saying that Covid probably originated from a lab leak was once branded as dangerous misinformation, with seemingly no evidence to support that claim
https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
Because of a lack of access and free speech it's hard to get verifiable evidence to it's origin being from a lab leak or a market in either direction.
Unfortunately, because of that lack of access mistrust and conspiracy theories spread like wild fires.
It's important with science to understand that there is what happened or what is observed and to separate that away from wishful thinking or feelings.
In short a few prominent people claimed it was racist to suggest that China's research or wet market contributed to the origins of COVID. They were mistaken but with the highly politicized environment, it helped distort opinions at a critical time. The claims of racism have since been demonstrated to be at least partly false (that is, there is a legitimate case to be made that China's researchers or wet market did contribute to the origin of COVID, and that China's leadership hid most of the evidence that would be used to make a case).
People who merely "suggested" the lab could have leaked, and asked to investigate more, were being called racist.
But not racism to declare that the virus must have come from a wet market where the savages eat uncooked bats and pangolin.
Now the goal posts have shifted to “lack of evidence” knowing full well china would nuke the city before admitting they caused covid by negligence.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-...
Exactly right. Remember any comment daring to question the authorities was shouted down to oblivion. Anyone daring to question lockdowns or other draconian measures were met with fire and brimstone. I lost a lot of respect for HN during Covid.
I feel it’s important to not forget the level of adherence to authoritarian rule that infected the population during Covid. Even places like HN were not immune. “Just following orders” was SOP even here.
But yeah this topic is extremely politicised (not just by the US mind you, but also by China). So it's hard to say what's the truth. I doubt we'll ever find it.
The lab leak theory does make sense though IMO. I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. But yeah, I take this at face value. And to be honest I'm just really happy that this is all behind us.
> The agency made its new assessment with “low confidence,” which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_garment
That's not reason to trust it. But "a bad thing happened in the 80s and that's all I need to know" isn't a compelling argument either.
Like I said, that's not the same as knowing that they're following the rules now. But it isn't the same organization by any stretch.
He was the president at the time - yes - he had better info than you. The people saying it wasn’t a lab leak had motivation to do so - and the head of that group just took a president pardon for their efforts.
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
Yep. Just checking to make sure I’m following along correctly.
When did the CIA come out against lab leak? Everyone's been spitballing low- and moderate-confidence guesses.
The FBI & Energy Department have both said that they think it's a lab leak.
There were almost certainly some politics involved in the decision to release the report now, but it's not like the CIA were staunch advocates for zoonotic origins up until now, and again: Biden's FBI and DOE were already leaning this way!
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-origi...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan...
From "we don't know if it was a lab leak or spread from the market" to "we think it maybe is". Sure, they started this investigation with Biden, but just released it a couple of days ago AND they have even low confidence on it. So, why release it if the confidence is low? Why now? The answer is: new government, new conclusions.
I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain.
---
One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as saying:
> “Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Mr. Cotton said.
So... I'm not certain this is a development worth trusting. Maybe it really did originate from a lab! But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.
The new administration has been in office a week. There is a political incentive to release it now, but they couldn’t have meaningfully created the analysis for political reasons in five days.
CIA has been in the hot seat for long enough to be politically sensitive. Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce multiple reports for every conclusion. It's not implausible that this happened here. In any case, we're talking about a partian topic with low- and moderate-confidence reports with a President who has zero chance of holding China accountable on it. Parlour talk.
Multiple conclusions, not multiple investigations.
Supposedly because they've had more time to think about the conditions of the lab before Covid was released...
But really, nothing has changed except their biases. Nothing has changed on the solid evidence side.
Separately, if there were actual safety issues and stuff was leaking... Then we're incredibly lucky that it was something as tame as Covid, and not one of the more serious kinds of horrors that gain of function research has successfully produced.
That's fine. The really problem is all debate on such matters was shut down during pandemic. To the benefit of no one (except for maybe Biden trying to cajole to Chinese into something, or other. Or to protect USG's role in this affair by financing Chinese gain of function research).
There's never going to be any conclusive evidence of the source of covid, and anyone claiming they have certainty (who wasn't a witness to a lab leak) is simply lying to you. What they're doing is going along with everyone else worth listening to, who find the coincidence that we were funding banned research on coronaviruses in a lab a few feet away from the origin of the outbreak unlikely. They also find tales of non-lab origin both speculative and vague, while stories of lab origin are only speculative.
It's so strange to demand so much more proof of lab origin than one does of non-lab origin. The obvious reasons for that demand are that millions died, and that everybody involved with that lab can easily be named. Also weird that this observation is covid-skeptic coded, when in reality the worse you think covid is, the greater the crime that a lab leak entails.
We won’t, because the judgment of many of our cognitive elites has been impaired.
This is a bit of a digression, but I’m reading a tweet thread by a $2,300/hour attorney who is an MSNBC contributor that is making just basic logical errors in discussing the birthright citizenship EO. Not even on the merits, literally in just summarizing the implications of the argument being made on a page of a filing he screenshotted in his tweet. I’m persuaded that if you had these folks take the LSAT with questions that had a political coding, they’d score a 160.
We need to get back to prioritizing the institutional and values of the different professions above all else. The public should view our scientific and professional organizations as neutral actors staffed by people who put the institutions above their personal beliefs. They shouldn’t be wondering whether medical organizations would be saying the same things about the “Lab Leak” theory if it had involved Russia instead of China.
No surprise there. Some people are not, contrary to your apparent assumption, actually trying to analyze something logically and arrive at some form of truth. I very much doubt that this has anything at all to do with COVID.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/
African green monkeys later found to be carrying the virus were shipped to several labs in Germany and Yugoslavia; the virus hopped from the monkeys to lab workers and then from the lab workers to a small number of others.
It's not, zoonotic transmission has happened many times, lab leak is the extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence
Regardless of the source, it was dangerous but could have been better mitigated if it was taken seriously as a threat (not just a "common cold").
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/936217
So how many people have to die before this is no longer an extraordinary claim? Bhopal managed to change chemical manufacturing standards with "only" thousands or tens of thousands of deaths; but the 1977 flu is somehow completely forgotten.
Perhaps the death toll is so high that people simply can't believe it? YouTube's fact-checkers recently removed an unambiguously factual description of the 1977 pandemic, ignoring appeals well-referenced into the peer-reviewed literature with no stated justification.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-i-fell-foul-of-youtu...
So are you really saying p ~ 1/12 is an "extraordinary claim"? Is a 6'1" American man "extraordinarily tall"? There's unfortunately no standard map between English phrases and numerical probabilities, but I think most people would understand a much lower probability. If you really want to define it that way, then "extraordinary evidence" is likewise diluted to the point that the circumstantial case (emergence in Wuhan, DEFUSE) brings research origin easily into contention.
Yes, I think it is extraordinary to extrapolate one event in 1977 to a "once every fifty years" rate
I hope you're not going to count every natural spillover since prehistory in the denominator. The technology to culture and freeze an influenza virus didn't exist before ~1930, and the technology to genetically enhance a sarbecovirus didn't exist before ~2010. The absence of pandemics with such origin before that means nothing. No one had ever suffered a cancer induced by an X-ray tube before 1904; but that doesn't mean the risk wasn't there, and Edison's assistant still died horribly.
Can you explain why 2010 would be a reasonable start cutoff? That doesn't make any sense to me, since it excludes most of the time that a research-origin flu pandemic was possible. We obviously haven't had a research-origin novel sarbecovirus pandemic before maybe SARS-CoV-2; but when new technological developments occur, the most similar old technologies are our best model. Nobody had ever died in a plane crash before the Wright brothers, but anyone familiar with unpowered gliders could predict the risk.
Yes (DNI) [1] and no (State) [2].
[1] https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declass...
[2] https://oversight.house.gov/release/classified-state-departm...
Even if it leaked from the lab, the first affected people (mainly sellers) were from the market, which is weird. Occam's razor points to what you said.
I guess everyone loves a good conspirancy.
You're just repeating the conclusions of papers that made ridiculous leaps of logic based on circumstantial evidence. For example [1], which is the likely source of the argument you're (mis-)remembering, bases this conclusion on:
1) case histories from reported, hospitalized cases, which were probably incorrect (i.e. they just assume that the cases they know about are, in fact, the first cases), being "geographically centered" on the market in December (not November) of 2019 [2].
2) positive environmental samples near animal stalls in the market, of which they found two strains.
Neither of which is dispositive of anything, and more an indictment of the motivated reasoning of the academic literature at the time than anything else. If you bother to read any of the subsequent analyses, you'll find that there are a bunch of different lines of evidence (genetic and case reports, at the least), pushing the date of the first infections well before December.
In short, the first/WHO case reports were probably wrong, the virus likely broke out earlier and was circulating in Wuhan before these samples were taken. If that's true, it wouldn't be surprising, at all, to find positive environmental samples in a food market, and the tortured logic of this paper would fall apart.
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
[2] Seriously. Not joking. Here's the "methods" they used for this oh-so-rigorous analysis:
> The 2021 WHO mission report identified 174 COVID-19 cases in Hubei Province in December 2019 after careful examination of reported case histories (7). Although geographical coordinates of the residential locations of the 164 cases who lived within Wuhan were unavailable, we were able to reliably extract the latitude and longitude coordinates of 155 cases from maps in the report
They then take this data and blend it through a kernel analysis, wave their hands, and voilá! This this The Science (tm) upon which your confidence is based.
...oh, and by the way: the market in question just happens to be right next to the Wuhan CDC, and a major city hospital [3]. Weird, right? I'm sure it's just a coincidence. Certainly nothing worth including in a putative "probability analysis" of geographic distribution.
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-Huanan-Seafood-Ma...
If the disease had already been global, then retrospective testing of wastewater samples, nasal swabs obtained for other purposes like the Seattle Flu Study, banked blood, and other stored samples would have revealed that. There were some scattered claims that it did, but none that held up very well under scrutiny.
There are studies pre SARS-CoV-2 about coronavirus in natural environments (like bat caves), and they found motifs that we found also in SARS-CoV-2. Zoonotic infections are very common and specially for coronavirus, so it should be our first guess unless overwhelming evidence shows that the virus was originated in a lab (leaked or engineered).
Maybe it was a lab leak, but there is not stronger evidence for that, than for the zoonotic event.
Here is your bad science:
- H0: The origin is the lab.
- H1: The origin is a naturally ocurring zoonosis.
As evidence for H1 cannot convince you, you accept H0 without any proof. Great science! Problem is your H0 is wrong. H0 should be the most easy explanation, which is a zoonosis that has happened before thousands of times, and for which we have also evidence (you call it circumstancial, as this was a trial) like similar sequences found in bats nearby. You must get better evidence to prove the unusual lab leak hypothesis. Your H0 and H1 are reversed.
> There are studies pre SARS-CoV-2 about coronavirus in natural environments (like bat caves), and they found motifs that we found also in SARS-CoV-2.
You're doing it again here, but I think you're probably referring to Andersen's Proximal Origin:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
But nobody disputes that SARS-CoV-2 evolved mostly in bats; the question is whether its path from bats to humans included a trip through the lab. No genomic evidence can distinguish between a novel natural virus and a chimera of two novel natural viruses. As Davis Relman wrote:
> Some [that's Andersen] have argued that a deliberate engineering scenario is unlikely because one would not have had the insight a priori to design the current pandemic virus. This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory
https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2021133117
The WIV had the biggest collection of novel sarbecoviruses in the world.
As for the rest of your comment -- oy, talk about a straw man fallacy. There's absolutely nothing I said that requires the false dichotomy you've presented between H0 and H1 (i.e. there are other plausible hypotheses that aren't as extreme as the ones you've presented). Also, I don't "accept" H0. I just can't rule it out.
> H0 should be the most easy explanation, which is a zoonosis that has happened before thousands of times, and for which we have also evidence
Neither hypothesis is easy (i.e. likely). Natural, human-optimized zoonosis is incredibly rare in viruses. Making humanized viruses in a lab, starting from natural viruses, is actually straightforward. But when one of the world centers for doing that kind of work, on very similar coronaviruses, was right there in Wuhan...
https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(24)00901-2.pdf
It found that viral RNA and DNA from potential zoonotic hosts (palm civets, raccoon dogs) occurred together in some samples from the Huanan Seafood Market. But there's no question that infected humans were present there, and nothing in their study can distinguish an infected palm civet from a healthy palm civet near an infected human.
A different study by Jesse Bloom found that of all the animals present, viral RNA correlated most strongly with DNA from "catfish and largemouth bass":
https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/9/2/vead050/7249794
So were those the proximal hosts? Obviously not, since SARS-CoV-2 can't infect fish--the point is that this is all just noise. Live, unquestionably infected proximal hosts were found for both SARS-1 and MERS, within about a year of the first human cases. For SARS-CoV-2, we still have nothing beyond those tortured metagenomics.
Civets at the very least are known to be the host for SARS-CoV virus that jumped to humans. The first affected people all had in common the market, and not the lab. Samples from the market in early 2020 found a lot of SARS-CoV-2 everywhere, specially at stalls that were selling poultry and racoons. The market was stuffed with animals. As poor as the security was in the lab, the market was orders of magnitude worse.
I might be wrong but I swear I read they never found cov 2 in an animal that could transmit to humans
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06043-2
And of course the Chinese government restricts access--there's no way to prove a negative, thus no way to exonerate them. No matter what investigators are allowed to see there will always be the allegation that they aren't being allowed to see the important stuff.
But I see no reason to suspect a leak from the hot part of the lab. While it's not impossible I see no non-political reason to think it did happen.
It's obviously false if you just think about it, but you can also do some searching if you need some authority to tell you.
I would not trust any of these agencies to provide objective findings or conclusions, there is a lot of power on the table that's at stake.
The intelligence networks there were weak, and if people were talking about it, they may have assumed wrongly that there was something there.
Politicians hunting for excuses to do what they already want to do though, is definitely a thing.
Just to be clear: The people in charge are the CIA, not GWB. GWB was simply the right useful idiot at the right time in the right place.
I don’t know where you are getting your information from but it’s absolutely incorrect.
It was Cheney specifically who was relying on Chalabi whom the CIA had repeatedly dismissed as a fabricator which is what was used as evidence.
There were a lot of indications that it was wrong even at the time, like the inspectors’ reports. We knew about the unreliability of the dodgy dossier and how baseless Khidir Hamza was. The satellite evidence was sketchy and the rest was contradictory. Al-Qaeda was also not there and we also knew that. Let’s not rewrite history: there is no certainty in intelligence, but anyone not in the CIA’s pocket knew it was most likely wrong, a far cry from what you need to legitimately attack a country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans
HANNITY: So he had them.
SADA: Yes.
HANNITY: Where were they? And were they moved and where?
SADA: Well, up to the year 2002, 2002, in summer, they were in Iraq. And after that, when Saddam realized that the inspectors are coming on the first of November and the Americans are coming, so he took the advantage of a natural disaster happened in Syria, a dam was broken. So he — he announced to the world that he is going to make an air bridge...
HANNITY: You know for a fact he moved these weapons to Syria?
SADA: Yes.
HANNITY: How do you know that?
SADA: I know it because I have got the captains of the Iraqi airway that were my friends, and they told me these weapons of mass destruction had been moved to Syria.
BECKEL: How did he move them, general? How were they moved?
SADA: They were moved by air and by ground, 56 sorties by jumbo, 747, and 27 were moved, after they were converted to cargo aircraft, they were moved to Syria.
We went into Iraq because the White House latched on to insufficient and contested intel of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq (the yellowcake and the aluminum tubes). It wasn’t about some rusted old artillery rounds with chemical weapons in them.
1) People I trust are skeptical, including people who are opposed to gain of function research. I've found Angela Rasmussen to be one of the better voices in terms of discussing the evidence for a natural origin, but she's far from the only one.
2) We have had two naturally occurring coronavirus epidemics during my career. A third is all but inevitable -- I wrote a grant in October 2019 suggesting a novel coronavirus as an example case for a modeling exercise, for example (sadly, said grant didn't get funded). So for me, there's a very strong prior on coronaviruses emerging as significant public health threats.
3) At the same time, I've come to distrust many of the voices who push the lab leak hypothesis, either because they're obviously doing so for geopolitical reasons, or because they've become addicted to being "the lone voice in the wilderness", despite it not being a risky position to take.
4) The lab leak hypothesis, in terms of evidence, relies on WIV, the Chinese Government, the WHO, etc. being broadly incompetent except when it comes to the characterization of the initial cases when SARS-CoV-2 emerged, which is arguably the hardest part of any outbreak.
My prior is that it is a zoonotic spillover event. Not necessarily that one, though there is some good evidence for it.
There were no similar reports in another place on this planet. (Since 99% of other places do not have full control of media and many have better healthcare so if it happened it would be less likely to go unnoticed)
Covid detected in wastewater samples
December 2019 in Italy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7428442/
>November 2019 in Brazil: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.26.20140731v...
They found covid in samples of the sewage system in SC state Brazil in November. 2 months before it came out of wuhan
https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/saude/novo-coronavirus-ja-estav...
>March 2019 in Spain: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...
Brazil recorded its first COVID death April 15, 2019. Initially taken as a data entry error by some, data for 2019 is still published nearly six years after the fact.
https://transparencia.registrocivil.org.br/dados-covid-downl...
November Brazil could happen because December is when rumours already circulated in China and October is when it was out in Wuhan already per your link.
April Brazil I don't know what to tell you, no sources support the wild claim that it was NOT a data error.
> 2 months before it came out of wuhan
Source? I bet it came out earlier. It was circulating in Wuhan before the pandemic according to WHO. Just people in China who are more likely to get infected are less likely to travel abroad (social class/sanitary conditions/etc) but maybe one person brought it out.
> A joint study published by China and the World Health Organization at the end of March acknowledged there could have been sporadic human infections before the Wuhan outbreak.
> Researchers from Britain's University of Kent used methods from conservation science to estimate that SARS-CoV-2 first appeared from early October to mid-November 2019, according to a paper published in the PLOS Pathogens journal.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52975934.amp
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/08/health/satellite-pics-cor...
That makes it odd that you're promoting an author who has claimed such evidence shows conclusively that spillover into humans--and not just a super-spreader event--occurred in the Huanan Seafood Market. I suspect that if you looked personally at the methodology behind the conflicted (Rasmussen's doctorate was under Vincent Racaniello, a longtime proponent of high-risk virological research) authors' claims, then you'd find them much less worthy of repetition.
> There’s really no explanation other than that the virus started spreading in the human population at that market
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/13/angela-rasmuss...
The claim that the location of spillover can be definitively localized within hundreds of meters from epidemiological data is core to the predominant theory of natural zoonotic origin, from an overlapping set of authors including Rasmussen.
Theories of a research accident almost never assume such localization is possible, not least because the earliest known cases weren't particularly close to the WIV. (If anyone's claiming otherwise, they've probably confused the WIV and Wuhan CDC.) So it's odd that you'd correctly note the near-impossibility of that localization, but then cite that as evidence against unnatural origin.
This makes me think you haven't looked much in the details yourself, and two of your four points above are explicitly arguments from authority. If you did look yourself, then I think your assessment might change.
The institute would never be full.
There is no "bring your child to work day" in China.
Weird conflation, unlikely... uunless you mean to muddy the waters and sow dis-information.
Why would Wuhan center being empty represent anything?
People don't rush to a random (unrelated) building when they get sick at the "market".
Coincidence, surely?
What are the chances of having a specialized infectious disease center next to where that type of disease spontaneously emerged?
More or less likely than a bat having sex with a panda possum?
No one, not even the cowardly academics, believed it.
This frankly makes me distrust you; in 2020-2022 this was absolutely a risky position to take for most public figures, let alone those on academia, let alone those connected to epidemiology. This remains the only time and topic I've seen blanket banned from discussing across all major US social platforms. Try looking up what the vibe was like in 2020-2021 especially.
It still isn't even acceptable to acknowledge the (blatant) possibility that Omnicron was intentionally leaked because of low vaccine effectiveness.
Opinions do correlate in the general public, and I guess that's why you've made that link. I don't think that trend holds among scientists, though--Deigin, Chan, Ebright, Bloom, etc. all have quite ordinary views on vaccine risk and efficacy.
Yet you propose no thoughts of your own. You only base it on your belief in people around you and your disbelief of people you assume are political. This sounds not scientific at all. Are you really an epidemiologist?
I was honestly hoping for more given that you’re supposedly an epidemiologist.
This is the problem with virology, it IS GoF. Expecting virologists to be objective in this is expecting the impossible, like expecting the WHO to apologize for sending Daszak as head of the fact finding mission. They were either THAT incompetent or THAT self interested in maintaing GoF/virology, damn the truth.
I suspect virologists still see themselves as guards on the wall and that we can't handle the truth. Which we already know from the early emails is how they thought early on, why should I assume their propensity for dishonesty has changed?
The lab leak hypothesis means "accelerated evolution" through either caged animals or "in vitro cells" infecting the lab personnel. Gene splicing and such are not necessary to make the argument.
The observed fact pointing to this is the number of generations required to produce the divergence between the first SCoV2 variant and the closest wild ancestor. It corresponds to something like 20 years (?) of evolution.
"...zoonosis (a disease communicable from animals to man under natural conditions)." —Laurie Garrett, _The Coming Plague_ (Ch 14, section IV)
Which is naturally how the word is used virtually all the time.
Transmission from lab animals kept for study in a biolab, you could argue either way. Transmission from humanized lab animals purposely subjected to serial passage is not really zoonosis in any reasonable sense.
What's notable about the SCov2 variant is how well it spreads between humans. It probably has made the jump many times, it's just this time it figured out how to spread.
“Low confidence” means that there is a lack of evidence and the statement is ambiguous; that it could be completely true, or completely false. The only lower confidence would be direct evidence that it is outright false. Given, as you said, how nearly impossible it would be to prove true, wouldn’t you think it equally nearly impossible to prove false?
Believe what you want, but even the CIA doesn’t lean on the side of you being right.
Obviously, it's not impossible.
But, there were even RNA samples from Covid found in other countries, months before Covid really spread in China.
I imagine the main problem with the superspreader event there was more that enough people ended up in the same hospital, and thus it was easier to identify that Covid was a distinct virus.
If it was crawling around in a less dense population, its spread would've been meh, and the hospitals might not even notice the spike much.
Well in this case it’s more like if if a new flu burst onto the scene with the following all being true:
- the epicenter of the outbreak being within a few miles of the CDC
- the CDC working specifically on gain of function for new strains of the flu
- the CDC being cited in whistleblower reports to the outbreak for poor safety and security protocols in the years prior to the outbreak
- inability to find the natural reservoir the virus crossed over from, despite years of searching in the biggest virus hunt in human history
- the closest naturally occurring relative of the virus being found in bats that are only native in areas hundreds of miles away (in this analogy, something like the upper Midwest), that also happen to be among the species of bats being studied by the lab at the CDC
- several CDC employees being among the earliest discovered cases, so early that they occurred before the disease was even picked up in the radar and were only discovered when searching for the earliest cases
- the US government preventing any none government health officials in or out of the area of the infection for several weeks after the outbreak
- the sole other identified potential outbreak location, the wet market nearby, was completely sterilized by the US government within the first two weeks of the outbreak, over the protests of international investigators who hadn’t yet been given access to it, thereby preventing them from ever being able to confirm or deny if it was the actual ground zero of the outbreak.
“Low confidence” doesn’t mean there is a lack of evidence, it means there is a lack of direct evidence. Problem is there is a lack of direct evidence for any alternative theory as well. There is, however, and overwhelming about of circumstantial evidence supporting the lab leak. The CIA isn’t going to issue accusations like this without a smoking bullet, which they will never have.
The reality is that had this occurred under any other administration, the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t be so taboo. But Trump is a serial conspiracy theorist and pugilistic nationalist, so the second he floated it everyone on the left, which includes much in academia, immediately disputed it in a knee jerk reaction, despite not having much evidence either way. Since then what evidence exists has increasingly supported the lab leak theory, but many are walking back from entrenched positions. If this had happened when Obama was president I don’t think anyone would be pushing back on this with the evidence that exists.
We should expect that the first outbreaks documented are those that happen to be close to facilities capable of identifying and documenting them.
There was a point at the beginning of the covid pandemic where the governor was declaring that the state only hand a few cases, and there was not great need for concern. The pneumonia death rates for the previous months showed a different story. For the previous two months the death rates were 10x higher that normal. Nobody seemed to have noticed that at the state level.
Most outbreaks follow a pattern where the disease shows up in small pockets for many years before it becomes an epidemic. HIV is an example. The first HIV death in the USA happened in 1969. The oldest confirmed case in Africa is in '59. The oldest suspected death in the US is '52.
Crossover tends to happen multiple times, and there is no reason to expect otherwise with covid-19. The problem with finding these cases is that it happened in an area governed by an authoritarian ruler. Authoritarians don't want to admit that there are things out of their control, and by inclination they conceal bad news, or news that makes them look like they're less than omnipotent. They shift blame rather than dealing with problem.
The love of the lab theory in the US seems to be driven by the same desire to push the blame on someone else. It takes the focus away from the incompetent response.
Perhaps the WIV secretly discovered the new virus by more sophisticated means before those doctors did. There's no evidence for this, but maybe. There is no possibility that a Wuhan-level outbreak occurred in a different city first, though. China keeps tight control of their mass media, but mortality on that level is impossible to conceal. Do you not remember 2020? The coffin shortages? So your implication that the WIV's presence somehow caused the first cases in a natural pandemic to get ascertained in Wuhan just doesn't make sense.
This topic is unfortunately politicized, and you're not helping. I think it would be helpful to spend more timing studying the scientific evidence, and less time speculating over the motivations of one's perceived ideological opponents.
I never said I was right. I said it makes a lot of sense and I believe it's probably true.
This is the sort of thing that neither of us can prove to the other at this point. You seem awfully aggressive to prove something though.
If you have access to the labs. Second hand information and extremely delayed visits to labs in a one party state are a whole other matter.
I assumed they overestimated a bit for effect and put it at around 1%.
Pandemics have historically happened somewhere around ever 100 years. What's that annual probability? 1%.
So if you knew NOTHING else, from a bayesian standpoint, if you have to differentiate a once in a 100 year spillover or a lab leak, you would put it at 50/50.
Now add in the fact that the outbreak occurred right next to a BSL lab. Now add in the fact that this lab specialized in the exact type of virus that caused the pandemic. Now add in the fact that lab workers at that lab got hospitalized with respiratory symtpoms in November. Now add in the fact that China responded with tons of secrecy, pulled down their genomic database of known viruses in their Wuhan lab, Xi issued a proclamation in February that they were revamping safety at BSL labs to prevent leaks, and that the virus in question is remarkably similar to one they found in 2013 thousands of miles away, and add the fact that there was a proposal to modify cornaviruses to have a furan cleavage site to perform gain of function research and that the COVID virus has just such a furan cleavage site, and this virus emerged remarkably well adapted to humans very very quickly. Now how about the fact that China pushed the wet market theory even after they'd figured out that probably wasn't the case? Now add in the fact that China let SARS escape from the lab TWICE in the previous decade.
How does that affect your truth value? All the facts above push the probalistic truth value toward a lab leak. There are a few facts that push it back a little the other way, but there aren't very many that I've found.
We have known about coronaviruses for almost 100 years, and we have been studying them due to their dangers for atleast 60 years, and it has likely existed since before humans could be called human. And it has been shown to be a highly virulent numerous times in many different forms. No matter how low the chances of winning the lottery, when literally billions of people are playing it daily, it is only of matter of when, not if, it turns into something more dangerous.
Now none of that comes anywhere near proving anything, but the fact that we have had multiple coronavirus infections in the past, many of which have come dangerously close to pandemic level infections, makes a natural occurrence seem the most likely source.
On top of all that, even if it did come from a lab, why does that matter? A handful of extra lottery tickets were sold and someone won from that pool. This isn't some bioweapon modified virus purposefully bred from a farm of human subjects, you would never be able to get away with such a program in a large publicly known virology lab and we aren't knowledgeable enough in viral genetics to make something like that without testing it on farms of people. There are no markers indicating engineering it in any way that we are actually capable of. And worst case it is something a mere handful of unguided generations away from a sample that was pulled from the public already and the lab got "lucky" with a random mutation on a petri dish they were studying.
As someone that makes forecasts for a living, I'd like to see what you're assumptions are about the base rates there.
As for how the facts produce modifications to the base rate, personally I think that a virus identified in a cave over a thousand miles away popping up in a very urban area right next to a BSL facility that specializes in researching that type of virus moves the needle toward it being more likely a lab escape. You seem to feel otherwise and I don't really agree. In particular, if you take the converse: suppose the virus wasn't known at all to man, you'd probably argue it also pushes you toward the conclusion that it was a natural spillover. (In which case, I'd be in agreement.) So I don't think that argument is really a logical one.
Your objection in the last paragraph, describing this as a "bioweapon modified virus" is really a classic strawman, and since it isn't the argument I was making I see no reason to indulge it. It is indeed a relatively ridiculous notion.
Also, just for precision, my own assessment of the truth value there is about 70% in favor of a lab-leak.
In the last few decades there have been 1-2 confirmed lab leaks per year. And they're often thing like "we found a vial of smallpox we didn't know we had" not new diseases.
Nature very capably produced colds, flus, a bunch of nasty diarrhoeal diseases, the many and varied sexually transmitted diseases, the hemorrhagic fevers, and so on. For "some new disease variant that I don't know anything about", my prior would be more like 1/99 lab leak to natural origin.
It’s flu season and Chinese don’t go zoom their Dr, they go and check into the hospital.
In other countries, it would be considered sociopathy to go to work with a flu, but we’re all Real Americans so anything different means… conspiracy.
So that intel doesn't push us one way or the other very much. Although perhaps the absence of known lab-worker hospitalizations is an argument against the lab-leak though.
The outbreak was likely to happen in a large population center near where the bats were. The actual probability that it went north and happened in Wuhan was probably 1-in-12 or so. And the first time there was a coronavirus spillover and pandemic, it happened in Guangzhou. So we rolled 1d12 once and didn't get a 1 and then rolled it again and did. Not that mind-blowingly improbable.
Also, not surprising that the lab was in a major city somewhat central and closer to the bats than e.g. Beijing. Because that is what it was set up to study.
> Now add in the fact that lab workers at that lab got hospitalized with respiratory symtpoms in November.
This has been asserted by a story in the NYT, but never proven and denied by WIV. There's literally no evidence of this.
> and that the virus in question is remarkably similar to one they found in 2013 thousands of miles away,
Still roughly a thousand base pairs and a few decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2. You can't get from RaTG-13 to SARS-CoV-2 in a lab, and there's no evidence they ever had live virus RaTG-13 in the lab.
> and that the COVID virus has just such a furan cleavage site
It had a novel PRRAR furin cleavage site which had never been seen before. Not one that humans would have ever guessed. That is actually strong evidence AGAINST it being lab-made.
As we've discussed, the greatest abundance of related viruses occurred around Yunnan and Southeast Asia. Dr. Shi herself didn't expect spillover in Wuhan:
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210727042832/https://www.scien...
Wuhan was "closer to the bats" only in the sense that New York City is "closer to the alligators" than Boston. There's little reason to choose that phrasing except to deliberately mislead.
I've warned repeatedly that the failure of competent scientists to engage with the real possibility that their research caused this pandemic will result in a blunt and damaging backlash. We're watching that damage now in real time.
And SARS-CoV-1 occurred in Guangzhou. The closest known relative virus (WIV16) is 96% homologous to SARS-CoV-1 and was found in Yunnan as well, which is over 1,000 km away from Guangzhou. Either the range of the bats carrying these coronaviruses is much larger than anyone in the world (including Dr Shi) knows about, or else the "blast radius" of the animal trade in China is considerably larger than anyone knows about.
I don't think spillover of SARS-1 from bats in Guangzhou is commonly proposed. If you've seen it (and didn't just include that option for completeness), then I'd appreciate the reference.
I agree that unexpected things sometimes happen. Nobody expected spillover in Wuhan pre-pandemic though, and the WIV absolutely wasn't situated based on any such expectation.
The SARS-CoV-1 virus moved over 1000km from Yunnan to Guangzhou.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus moved over 1000km from Yunnan to Wuhan.
This is the same fucking problem. One way or another we know it has a solution that doesn't involve WIV due to the SARS-CoV-1 spillover.
If we can explain SARS-CoV-1 without WIV then we can explain SARS-CoV-2 without WIV.
> I don't think spillover of SARS-1 from bats in Guangzhou is commonly proposed.
I never suggested that was definitely what happened, and I kind of doubt it, I think the wildlife trade is more likely. At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if the range of the viruses in bats is larger than we know right now.
> Nobody expected spillover in Wuhan pre-pandemic though
Which doesn't mean it didn't happen.
> and the WIV absolutely wasn't situated based on any such expectation.
The central location made Yunnan a lot more accessible than if WIV was in Beijing, and puts it around about the same distance from Yunnan as Guangzhou is.
I guess we're just endlessly arguing the same uncertain technicalities now. I miss the days when actual new information was becoming available, and appreciated the chance to discuss with someone informed with opposing views. It would be nice to confidently learn the truth someday. Perhaps the new administration will release something, but I think it's much more likely they'll just poison the topic politically even more.
(Not to knock Emory students, I love them, but Emory has a relationship with the CDC and grad students can be cavalier)
any scientist that has any molecular biology wet experience will tell you this is exactly what they would have done (though us researchers would probably not have pulled from the patented BLAST sequences, since that selector is turned off by default by the NCBI)
Sigh. Here's the first line from the patent: "The present invention provides a cDNA of a severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus".
You don't think that two coronaviruses just might have similar structural proteins?
The article: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.33...
The sequence (reverse complemented) matches positions 2751-2733 of sequence ID 11652 attached to the patent: https://seqdata.uspto.gov/seqdetail?docId=US09587003B2&publi... - as the other person said, it's located in the S1/S2 furin cleavage site, and produces no BLAST hits outside the SARS-CoV-2 lineage.
It's not entirely clear to me when the sequence was incorporated into the patent - it doesn't look like it was in the first revision. But it looks like it was added before 2020.
The whole theory still has gaps (even if we assume someone was searching specifically within that patent, what would a screen look like to single out that sequence? It would have to be very high throughput and use very sophisticated modeling), but it's interesting.
Generally though, China is somewhat better suited to producing pandemics, because they have a larger and more dense population within which a disease can spread.
And MERS. It’s not like coronaviruses causing epidemics were very surprising at the time.
Interestingly it was also clearly airborne and able to spread long distances in aerosols moved by air currents. Investigators traced those air flows in some cases to explain movements of the virus. Yet despite being literally called SARS-2 the WHO and other self-declared sources of expertise all denied that this was possible, and attacked people who pointed out that it was. The desire for lockdowns and masks to be perceived as credible outweighed prior experience with similar viruses, turning those who tried to learn from history into pariahs.
This gentleman works in a US national lab, graduated top of his class in a top Chinese school and has friends that, at the time, worked in the Wuhan lab.
He, while very proud of being Chinese, was very critical of what he perceived his countrymen's lax safety standards. Myself, I can't judge that as I am not Chinese or an experimentalist so I deferred to his expertise and experience.
May be in the west? It was certainly well publicised in other regions.
Looking for reparations is secondary to that, but maybe not entirely unreasonable either; not that it'll ever happen.
Does COVID being a “plague” jibe with the talking point that COVID is “no worse than a cold”
Many of the pardoned individuals have video evidence of assaulting police with weapons and claim to be part of organizations diametrically opposed to BLM, Antifa, and the FBI. Are they:
1. Lying, masquerading as Trump supporters in deep cover for many years (secretly a part of the organizations you're blaming, despite playing part in an attempted coup that would have opposed those organizations and despite no evidence of such multi-year subterfuge)
2. Framed (mind you, AI is wishy-washy for video even now, and it wasn't good enough then)
3. Innocent for some other reason despite their violent actions
There aren't a lot of options that make tasing and trampling cops while heavily armed and overrunning the White House look good. Even republican congressmen, whose careers partially depend on not pissing off Trump, are happy to publicly decry those pardons, no matter how they feel about the rest of the executive orders. Every Trump supporter I've talked to so far (except, perhaps, you) has agreed that was a step too far (though they're all still optimistic about the presidency overall).
What, exactly, about those pardons was appropriate? If I stormed your house with guns and trampled the police blocking my way, would that make me an American hero for defending the right to free speech?
It’s the internet, can you link to some concrete instances where they did this? Were Congress people forced to retreat when they did it (assuming your claim is that they were roughly similar in extremity?)?
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/31/politics/trump-undergroun...
They interrupted a proceeding two weeks ago.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5087021-protesters-trump...
They fought with police a few months ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIbMhuo1F78
They occupied part of the building until arrested last year.
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/24/nx-s1-5050443/capitol-buildin...
For their large scale violence, Democrat mobs prefer to target civilians — eg, their live-streamed murder of Antonio Mays Jr, by a militia that first fought police and then seized a city park. As part of a coordinated attack on dozens of cities resulting in over seventy murders.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/everybody-down-wha...
None of that resulted in anywhere near the charges of a protest by Republicans that turned riot when police tear gassed a peaceful crowd.
Also, disrupting a public hearing open to the public, definitely rude but not actually illegal.
The Gaza protesters were arrested for refusing to leave the capitol, but didn’t force their way into congressional offices nor did they threaten any congress people. Still wrong which is why they got arrested, I guess, but not the same as an insurrection.
I lived in Seattle during CHOP (well, I still live in Ballard), but I never got over to Capitol Hill to experience it (we go downtown a lot, but never Capitol Hill unless it’s hospital related). I don’t think they were any position to overthrow the government though.
Thanks for linking though, and I didn’t downvote you. It’s always nice to know what the right is referring to when they say “the left does it also!” We can compare the behavior of the two sides head on at least.
One group used weapons to seize an area for multiple days, including acts of murder to defend their ill-gotten territory; one didn’t.
Neither made an attempt to “overthrow the government”.
> when you just protest outside of the white house and don’t actually do anything illegal
They rioted and attacked the gate imposing enough threat the president had to flee to a bunker. They also assaulted the security there.
From the article you clearly didn’t read:
> The decision to physically move the President came as protesters confronted Secret Service officers outside the White House for hours on Friday – shouting, throwing water bottles and other objects at the line of officers, and attempting to break through the metal barriers.
I find it interesting that you minimize when people aligned with your policies attempt the same crimes — assaulting police, attempting to break into a secured government building, and forcing politicians to flee.
As for the pardons, many were just commutations. They did 3 years or whatever in prison by now. And many full pardons were just misdemeanors for trespassing or whatever anyway. It make more sense to focus on specific people who were violent and got away with nothing.
Ultimately the question should be, how can we improve our systems to better respond to future pandemics. Does it matter if it was a lab leak? What will that do for those who died? Will revenge prevent a future pandemic from happening? Viruses and bacteria do not care about their nation of origin, once its out its out.
Yes, the annoying thing is that "the truth about covid" literally only matters to culture war grievances, it has no relevance whatsoever to the actual world. If it was a lab leak, then China needs to improve their BSL-4 safety... but they need to do that anyway[0]. If it was zoonotic, then they need to clean up the wet markets... but they need to do that anyway. The true origin of covid makes no difference at all, and I wish these people would just come out and admit this is all domestic political peacocking.
[0]: and so does everyone else, for that matter. The US has also had several close calls with BSL-4 leaks; if covid did originate from a lab leak, the fact that it wasn't from an American lab is just sheer dumb luck.
Conversely, if it were a natural outbreak then that bolsters the case for continuing gain of function research as before. Such research is precisely why we were able to identify the threat and within weeks assemble a vaccine, at least on paper. (Granted, the arc began long before 2019 with a through-line of research going back to the 2002 SARS outbreak.) And it's why we've many other advancements. Creation of CRISPR and related technology emerged in part out of gain of function research with viruses. Gain of function is a critical tool in testing hypotheses about how foundational molecular machinery works, and viruses are a convenient research model for exploring and testing ideas in that space.
But I'm not sure the origin should matter to that debate. And I'm even more sure it probably won't matter, even if we agreed on a definitive answer.
I get your perspective: an outbreak is an unfortunate byproduct of the risks necessary for scientific progress. No one couldve known how bad it would be. The damage is done, learn from your mistakes and move on. Very enlightened.
In the real world, people will lose their absolute shit. There would be near global demand for sanctions and reparations, and there's enough anti china sentiment that its a real possibility.
Backed into a corner, the world against them, they would have no other choice. It would be a matter of survival.
1. why?
2. that attitude strongly disincentives the discovery of the truth. If that were true I would support a cover up!
"Cover it up anyway" pretty much. There's precedent for this, we never got the full truth about 9/11 either. To this day the 100 page dossier is off limits to the public, probably for similar reasoning. The USA wants to play the board opportunistically without regard for justice or public outrage. And then people wonder why the public feels abandoned by their government.
Why is a lab outbreak worse than a wet market outbreak?
Some say the intent of a firearm is self defense, as the intent of a nuclear bomb is a deterrent.
Finally, what role does intent play in the poker world championship?
And for record of the court, arson by negligence is a criminal offense.
People just assumed that the wet markets were the cause of the problem, because they found them digusting (and wanted an excuse to blame it on the Chinese being evil).
In a less dense population, without many people going to the same hospital... You would just not have noticed Covid much.
> “Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Mr. Cotton said.
That could backfire in a couple ways.
1. China could say that they'll consider paying for COVID escaping their borders if the US pays for the damage the things that have escaped its borders have caused, such as greenhouse gases.
Yes, I know that China currently is emitting more greenhouse gases than the US, but since CO2 emissions stay in the atmosphere for several hundred or even thousands of years the US is responsible for more of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere than China is.
It's 26% US, 16% China, 7% Russia, 6% Germany, 5% UK, 4% Japan, 4% India, 2% France, 2% Canada, 2% Ukraine, 2% Poland, rounded to the nearest 1%. All the rest of the countries round to 1% or 0%.
That's a can of worms I don't think the US wants to open.
2. China could say they they'll consider paying, but only up to the amount of damages that would have been reasonably incurred if the US had handled COVID competently.
There were several distinct patterns in COVID deaths in the US. First, there were states like Washington that had a fairly linear growth in the cumulative number of deaths per capita from the start through April 2022, and then after that continued with a linear growth but not as steep.
Then there were states like New York, which got hit very hard in the first two months, because of a combination of nobody really knowing yet how to treat it and dense populations of especially vulnerable people. New York reached in two months a deaths per capita number that Washington took 22 months to reach.
But after those first two months, New York's deaths grew at about the same rate as Washington's, except during the Delta surge and to a lesser extent the Omicron surge. Washington's rate picked up during those surges, but not very much.
There were states like Florida. Its curve was like Washington's first 3 months, the switched to growing about twice as fast. By the end of 2021 it had almost caught up to New York. From then it and New York both continued at about the same rate was Washington, with Florida slightly higher so it passed New York in August 2022.
Other states tended to be a mix of those three patterns. California was close to Washington up until Delta, which brought it to near Florida, but then after Delta was was similar to Washington. A little better actually. Right after Delta it had about 70 more deaths per 100k than Washington, but by March 2023 was down to 56 more deaths per 100k.
Texas was like Florida until Omicron, which it handled better, and after that it was similar to Washington, or even a little better. It had 140 more deaths per 100k than Washington right after Omicron, but only 115 more by March 2023.
By March 2023, which is when the data I'm using ends, Washington stood at 206 deaths per 100k population, California at 256, Texas at 322, New York at 396, and Florida at 404.
Tom Cotton's state, Arkansas, was basically the same pattern as Florida, except with a higher rate. It ended up at 431 deaths per 100k by March 2023.
A good case can probably be made that somewhere from 25% to 50% of the Florida deaths were due to Florida's lax handling of the pandemic.
That too is probably a can of worms many politicians would not want to open, especially if their state is one of the ones that China would be arguing should get greatly reduced damages.
Or just covid. I remember after PRC lockdown when regional countries were publishing their inbound repatriation flight test data and basically they only got very low digit covid positives, i.e. it was epidemiologically containable. At same time you have all the news of western travellers spreading covid to different countrries because they kept borders open.
"Genetic analysis and several unusual characteristics of the 1977 Russian flu have prompted many researchers to say that the virus was released to the public through a laboratory accident, or resulted from a live-vaccine trial escape"
Ex: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/vaccine-derived-p...
In general, people prefer understood risks to new risks because the system is better adapted to them — both biologically and politically.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2887442/
I will have to have a discussion with the editors of that page.
> the result of vaccine trials in the Far East involving the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus (C.M. Chu, personal communication)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm1141
That part is genuinely uncertain though, and probably unanswerable. Historical surveillance was weak, and those who do have information may not wish to implicitly confess to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
No one is seriously questioning that it spent ~20 years in a lab freezer. There was some speculation about virus frozen in the Arctic or such; but since that's never been observed to happen any other time, and multiple labs were known to be working with frozen and thawed virus, I think that's pretty abandoned.
Sure, it’s not a gotcha if we divorce such a statement from all of its surrounding context.
But context in communication is incredibly important, and it’s unwise to analyze these kinds of statements in a context-free manner. I find it occurs on this site fairly often; it seems endemic to engineers. I try hard to avoid it myself, but frequently fail.
The relevant context here, of course, is the rabid anti-China sentiment expressed by folks like Sen. Cotton for years, dating back to well before the COVID pandemic. I take no position on whether or not his views are accurate or fair - but a context-informed analysis of the situation suggests that Sen. Cotton (and others) are not simply seeking truth and accountability: rather, they seek pretext to justify their views.
1) Multiple departments of the executive branch were saying this under Biden too.
2) The US gov’t funded the biological weapons research lab at Wuhan. Mr Cotton has been a senator for 10 years, and therefore was around when the funding was approved. So if he wants to find someone to punish, maybe he should look in a mirror.
Briefly, under Obama gain of function research was banned for a while. During this time Fauci signed off on illegal grants to fund GoF research, funnelled through a British NGO in order to evade detection and the ban. The NGO didn't do the research themselves, they then sent the money to Wuhan to fund experiments done there. Thus Fauci was using US money to do banned research, which he then lied about under oath to Congress. It's for this sort of reason that he's now been pardoned by Biden, as otherwise he would likely have been prosecuted. Whether you can actually retroactively pardon someone for any/all crimes without actually specifying what for and without that person actually having been found guilty is a bit unclear, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology
This lab was an international cooperation, from back in the days where there were such things.
Vertiginous to think about the layers of unknowns.
Go watch "A Bridge Too Far" (WWII). Read the story of the Son Tay raid (Vietnam). The many overestimates of Soviet capability during the Cold War. The underestimates of North Korean missile capability. Sometimes uncertain intel really works, as with the attack on the bin Laden compound in Pakistan.
Retrospective intel questions may never be answered. It's known that the US atomic bomb program had another Russian spy who is mentioned by code name in VENONA transcripts, but that spy was never identified. There are still arguments over whether the explosion of the Maine in Havana harbor in 1889 was an accident or a hostile act. It's still not clear why Turret 2 of the USS Iowa blew up in 1989. Huge amounts of effort were expended on all three of those questions, all of which were important at the time, and yet they remain unsettled.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Article-Principles-...
Let's say that any donation to any Democratic campaign makes you a Democrat (ignoring for a moment that being against Trump isn't the same as being for Democrats). By that logic maybe half of the signatories on that letter are Democrats--and also a few are Republicans. Also many "Democratic" signatories signed a letter against Obama when he revoked Brennan's security clearance, so how in the tank can they really be? Also the main way the Hunter Biden emails were "authenticated" was via DKIM, which would allow you to mix fake emails in with real emails (we recently learned you could do this with $8 of server time). Too farfetched? The Russians did it to Macron in 2017. Also let's not equate creating a false basis for a full on war with 51 intelligence professionals raising doubts.
I think you may have the causation reversed. I voted for Biden in 2020. But the intelligence community has no credibility and are just trying to get us into war with Russia. That letter never should’ve been taken seriously by real democrats.
I really don't give a shit about how credible the US IC is; no part of my identity is invested in how well they do their job. But the attempt to generalize this out to the parties themselves rankles, and is trollish.
I think where I disagree with rayiner is that I believe she _was_ toxic. Her endorsement is certainly one of my grievances with the party, as a Democratic voter, and we saw the big tent collapse because of, in part, the current hawkishness of that part of the leadership.
"She is a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face."
Trump has a (literal) record of advocating for and perpetrating violence against women and minorities. I don't know of any elected Dems who called it anti-woman (there's a trend of taking any Dem on X as representative, which isn't a good survey), but if they did that's the nicest thing you could say about it.
---
FWIW I agree the Cheney thing was boneheaded, and the defense of "she offered to campaign" is... prrrrrrretty wimpy. Some people argued you needed to shake people in the middle free, but no one in the middle likes Liz Cheney; she's mega conservative.
Trump’s comment is a common way democrats have criticized hawks since the Vietnam war: asking if they’d be singing a different tune if they were the ones in the trenches getting shot at.
The fact that you’d invoke the “women and minorities” card to defend Liz effing Cheney is proof that the CIA has learned how to use wokeness as a psyop to eviscerate the antiwar left.
Cheney comes from a family of chicken hawks and lots of people have had similar quotes about them.
The Cheney thing reminds me of people's attitudes towards John McCain. His history in the GOP: also not great. But in the end, he did have some principles; it's not unreasonable to celebrate them.
None of this is really germane to the thread, I just get irritable when directly partisan Democrat vs. Republican politics end up here.
Most leaders are aware that people might cue off of what they're saying and do something very bad, so they stay far away from rhetoric like this. Trump (deliberately IMO) does the opposite for political gain. So even if I agree this is about combat, what's the difference? He's once again engaging in his pattern of dehumanizing his opponents and advocating violence against them, which has led to actual violence.
Elsewhere you pointed out this is pretty similar to Vietnam War protests. I think generally that's right (again "Fortunate Son"), but there are some differences. First is there isn't a draft; we have an all volunteer force (though there's a big discussion to be had about economic exploitation and multi-generational military families). Second, she wasn't even in Congress during Bush 2 and AFAIK had no policy making power where she was at State.
Do I love Liz Cheney? Hell no; her policy positions are one disaster after the next. I believe she should be vigorously opposed in every election she runs in. But do I think she should be subject to wink wink "sure would be a shame if something happened to Liz Cheney" rhetoric from maybe the most powerful person on Earth? Absolutely not; no one deserves that.
> I don’t blame (Dick Cheney) for sticking with his daughter, but his daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb. She is a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.
She has a rifle, and there are nine other guns pointed at her. When are people facing a firing squad given their own weapon? The quote is literally a textbook “what if the war hawk’s shoe were on the other foot” trope.
There's a difference between talking like you're an LLM trained by focus groups and endangering your political rivals with your rhetoric. A lot of Democratic senators are/were good at that. Don't make yet another false equivalence here.
Hawks are by no means the majority of democrats, but Romney 2012 types are the margin democrat voter. And while the majority of democrats aren’t hawks, the party’s dominant principle as of late seems to be trusting credentialed experts, which makes them suckers for the intelligence community.
Also, Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney suggests that her campaign thought that Romney 2012 voters were their marginal vote.
Self identifying with a political party erodes critical thinking skills. Unless you can criticize the stupidity of all, including those you vote for, you are limited by your own stupidity.
Self identity ignorance is prominent in religious cultures where the church must be protected. The congregation will protect a priest or pastor that is sexual predator and pretend their actions didn't take place to protect their community. They loose their identity when their church is harmed, same with latching to political parties.
[0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2216179120
I agree parties shouldn’t be so ideologically rigid, and for the most part they aren’t. Jamie Dimon and AOC are both in the same party, as are Marco Rubio and Tulsi Gabbard. People who refuse to work within a party unless the party agrees on every issue are simply not interested in outcomes. That’s fine too!
I mean this respectfully: how old are you? Because that isn’t a “Fox News” comment at all! Until five minutes ago, Democrats were the ones who criticized Bush-era republicans for their fixation on Russia and efforts to keep fighting the Cold War: https://youtu.be/T1409sXBleg?si=Pz2Yd_vY4ZARbcvs
And yes, the intelligence community has been trying to get us into a war with Russia or its proxies since the 1950s. The whole idea that Americans have “allies” or “interests” in Eastern Europe is a Reagan-era CIA psyop.
I don't want to parse through everything here, and you definitely won't find me defending the intelligence establishment. All I'm saying is what tptacek said up there: stretching the Hunter Biden laptop letter signatories into "Democrats" stretches too far, and if that's the evidence you're bringing against the Iraq War and Valerie Plame you're coming up short. You have a big platform here; I think if you were a little more judicious about the claims you make you could do a lot of good, and I think we need that right now.
I don’t know what’s in the inner minds of other democrats. But out of the two parties, they’re cuddling up to all the ones who have been wrong for the last 50 years about foreign policy.
See I knew there was something I liked about you haha.
Hopefully this doesn't come across as deflecting or whatever (HRC has a lot of takes I disagree with, I think she would have been a very good president, but I'm more of a Warren or Booker guy). I think being an effective leader in the US at the level HRC was for decades is a lot harder than people really know. I'm not talking about the mechanics (though those are also hard), rather I'm talking about the effect it has on you as a human. I think the act of building a mental model of public opinion is fundamentally corrupting, but if you don't do it, you'll almost certainly lose power to someone who does (or you could be in a super safe seat, but that's not an option for everyone). You probably also think a big part of your job is representing your constituents, so there's a huge amount of balancing divining and representing their positions vs. leading them to where they might not necessarily be. The stakes are also bananas: you're talking about the lives of tons and tons of people. This is all very hard; I can't really overstate how mindfucking it can be.
So to come back around to your point, let's take an incredibly cynical view and say HRC authorized the Iraq War because that was the obvious power politics move. It's not wrong to consider, "I'm pursuing values I think are important, I'm effective at it, the odds of someone doing better or being more principled than I am are very low--after all this game is by itself deeply corrupting to even the best of us, taking a stand here has almost no upside, I do want to be president one day, OK I vote yea". This all really reasonable, then you throw on the pile her changing her vote would've made absolutely no difference, and she's the junior Senator from New York where 9/11 happened, and at least I start having a lot of sympathy for her vote. I don't mean to diminish the full on tragedies Iraq and Afghanistan were, but these are the kinds of stakes and incentives we're working with here.
So I try to be pretty kind to electeds, even on both sides, because the incentives are truly nutso. Maybe you're Trey Gowdy and you don't love having 5,000 Benghazi hearings, but you've got this plum committee assignment you don't want to lose, so here we go. Maybe you're John Boehner and you don't love being asked vaguely racist questions about Obama's birth certificate constantly, but you're finally Speaker and this is the zeitgeist. Anyway, I earnestly think we urgently need some kind of deep governance reform or whatever. It's almost impossible for the system to produce good outcomes. I'm not saying get the torches; I am saying start putting it in party platforms and get candidates on record about it.
Finally, you ask how I could trust her after her Iraq war vote, but Democrats are pretty used to not having our policy preferences represented in office. Again while I think HRC would have been a very good president, there are other people I'd have preferred. But that's what primaries and party politics are for, and that process is... imperfect. I voted for Obama in the '08 Iowa caucus largely because of her Iraq War vote and--hilariously--I liked Obama saying you wouldn't need an individual health insurance mandate (oh to be young). But, to resume a partisan stance, I think the Republican party--and Trump in particular--is dangerous enough to merit fierce and vigorous opposition in a general election. It's hard for me to imagine a Democratic candidate that was so bad I'd stay home on eday.
> I don’t know what’s in the inner minds of other democrats. But out of the two parties, they’re cuddling up to all the ones who have been wrong for the last 50 years about foreign policy.
I'm bad at foreign policy and mostly stay out of it. But my uninformed opinion is that while Democrats haven't don...
To me, the Iraq War was a predictable disaster rooted not in bad intel, but the mistaken concept of liberal universalism (emphasis on universalism, not liberal). Clinton is a smart, probably well meaning person. But what she shares with George W. Bush is liberal universalism, and that’s a bad and dangerous idea. It’s been a bad and dangerous idea that’s gotten us involved in countless non-defensive wars over the last 50 years.
In that respect, the Democratic Party today is a lot closer to the bad old GOP than it was 20 years ago. Between Ukraine, helping overthrow Assad, what Blinken allegedly did in Pakistan, rabble-rousing about “human rights” in Bangladesh—the Democratic Party today is full of liberal universalists. They’re not literally the same people who got us into the Iraq War, but the ideology isn’t any less dumb today, and will result in similar disasters.
What Trump understands that democrats don’t is that non-Americans aren’t Americans. The conceit underlying the Iraq war is that Iraqis were Americans. If you overthrew the dictator keeping them down, they’d build a democracy. And it was a monumental error. And the same is true for Syria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, etc. This is a conceit that liberal universalists cannot let go of.
While I do think what you describe under the label of "liberal universalism" mostly makes sense, I do challenge it's consistency. By all measures, some countries are trending towards becoming liberal democracies. Why shouldn't we help them?
Ukraine being a viable liberal democracy, a useful geopolitical ally, and in opposition to a destabilizing and dehumanizing autocracy, makes for a perfect candidate for support beyond naive global liberalism. It is in our interests in many practical terms, separate from ideology.
I agree the Iraq War was premised on deeply faulty assumptions and complete naïveté about other cultures. Governments grow out of culture (a popular saying is "people tend to get the governments they deserve", which is maybe a little insensitive re: stuff like minority rights but not otherwise totally wrong); you can't really just poof a democracy into being; you can't just assume people will adopt your values. I do think we're way more circumspect on this now than you do though, I mean we haven't done another Iraq/Afghanistan. I'll also say that even though Republicans snicker at it, Jake Sullivan's foreign policy for the middle class is a pretty big departure for the establishment. That's a substantial positive change.
I also agree you can't 100% import "Americans". But, my worry with Trump's rhetoric here is that he ignores you can 99% import Americans, the children of the remaining 1% are fully assimilated, and that this has always been the case. There's so many ways we could make our immigration and asylum systems more humane and sustainable, but the GOP has ratfucked our immigration and asylum systems for decades to win elections (this is their move: break a part of government and then be like "look government is broken"... well yeah) so things will be trash for the foreseeable future.
The Iraq war was not about bringing democracy to Iraq. It was bad intel about a nuclear weapons program in Iraq. The intel for a nuclear weapons program was weak and flimsy and the disagreement within the intel community was strong, but the White House pushed hard to support the pro-nuclear program viewpoint.
While I agree we should not have gone into Iraq, I disagree that it was an inevitable disaster. Iraq was a disaster because there was zero post invasion plan in place. The government was purged of “regime loyalists” which was basically everyone. This did two major things that shaped the country. First, it put thousands of police and soldiers out of work, giving the later insurgency a large employment pool of trained personnel that needed money and resented the US for destroying their lives. Second, it created a security vacuum directly after the invasion, creating crime waves throughout the country when it needed stability. Iraq was a primarily urban society used to central governance (unlike rural/tribal Afghanistan, for instance) and it is likely it could have transitioned to a new government.
While it is dangerous to think everyone can be like Americans, it is just as dangerous to think Iraq and Afghanistan are basically the same, or that all interventions and goals are the same (nation building in Afghanistan vs minimizing genocidal civil war in Syria).
EDIT: I reread and I definitely gave the impression that Rayiner posts in bad faith a lot. I don't think that, and I apologize.
Not quite, and you can't possibly capture all of that paper in that sentiment. For instance, there's this excerpt:
> People’s judgments and willingness to accept analytic findings are framed by multiple factors, including backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs. Every decisionmaker has cognitive biases, including theories that guide them (e.g., the liberal international order), beliefs about how the world works (e.g., the arc of history bends in a particular direction), or sacred beliefs (e.g., all things happen for a reason). Thus it is essential for the analyst to understand as much as possible about the decisionmakers and the environment in which they operate.
Military intelligence will happily give you high confidence leads that are entirely wrong because, by all appearances, the information came from a source in the right place with the seemingly right motivations when in reality they can be playing 4D chess better than the analyst.
The confidence level can only be expressed in finite ways but it can be analyzed in almost infinite, one of them being that the information needed to develop "high confidence" has disappeared and the window of opportunity to gain insight has long passed. Personally speaking, I do not think we will ever find out the origins because a whole gaggle of people with various interests had a vested interest in a particular answer at the time. This is the byproduct of a democracy and bureaucratic system which has not been functioning nominally for quite some time - doubly so now.
I would go so far as to describe the events at the time as parallel construction.
Maybe it leaked from the lab; maybe it was released? As far as I understand (but tbh, I have not kept up as much with immunology news) the alternative theory of the virus hopping from another species hadn't been confirmed, as no reservoir had been found. Does anyone know if that had been the case?
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53106444
[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7428442/
> So... I'm not certain this is a development worth trusting. Maybe it really did originate from a lab! But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.
0. COVID-19 was mostly harmless. Even more so than Douglas Adam's books. 1. China reacted asif they'd accidentally released a bioweapon. 2. China did what it does best, shut the F up on the world stage. 3. Everyone saw China's reaction because this isn't the 1950s and the internet exists. 4. The developed nations freaked out until there was data, hence the first set of lockdowns in Europe very quickly. 5. 2-3 years later after media pantomime, sectarian politics, holier than though preaching from everyone, the WHO declared the "emergency" over.
Some countries achieved 80%+ vaccination rates, didn't see 20% die. Some only achieved 50% and didn't see 50% death rates.
We now have a serious economic tab to be paid because of the BS pushed by developed countries in a panic that might have been less dramatic had there been information available from day 1.
China _has_ hidden and or destroyed a lot of "evidence" making certain discussions mute. (Again they are good at this let's not pretend otherwise).
Western countries, who, _like china_, jumped on a "who can punch themselves hardest with policy?" approach to this unknown now want someone else to blame.
Aka because we can pin a small significance and serious fault on China being a bad neighbour. (Snooze to the sensible this isn't news, china is very private about internal policy and now even more so) We are choosing to blame them for everything to get motivation up to get them to pay the bill...
This unfortunately was clear winter of 2020 and is clear now, it's just taken 4-5yr for politics to go through it's "he said she said" cycle. And I'm not referring to the US or UK political cycles this is the slow bi-partizan we all need someone to blame rather than be introspective and realise __"We should have handled this better"__.
> 0. COVID-19 was mostly harmless. Even more so than Douglas Adam's books.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I found out that my father and his partner had COVID. He lived, at the time, about 12 hours drive from me. Where he lived, his support network was thin (to say the least) - the little family he had nearby needed to keep away because they were responsible for caring for my cousin with a severely weakened immune system. His friends, sadly, also contracted COVID around the same time.
I called him twice a day, and each call he was worse than the last. I decided to rent an AirBnB nearby. My partner and I packed up the dog and everything we needed and drove overnight to get there.
We masked up, and got supplies at Walmart. We brought them to my Dad’s house and left them on the patio - retreated a safe distance - and my Dad came to retrieve them. He was in an awful condition, and his partner was worse.
For the next week I came to their porch every few hours, and called my dad, and we spoke with what little breath he had. He dictated his last will and testament to me. I delivered pedialyte, meal replacement shakes, pulse oximeters, anything to help them make it through. I forced them to get up and move around a little from time to time, and took notes on their condition. They wouldn’t let me in the house.
One day, before I arrived with supplies, my Dad told me they had called an ambulance for his partner. They took his partner to the local hospital… and the hospital turned him away because they had no beds. They essentially sent my Dad’s partner home to die.
By some miraculous turn of events, they survived. They have issues walking and breathing to this day, but they survived.
It’s one of the more agonizing, awful things I’ve ever had to watch. COVID-19 wasn’t harmless; it killed millions. I saw it up close. Especially early on, it was virulent and deadly, and very nearly took my parents from me. It did end up taking a lot of people in my extended social network. They died agonizing deaths.
How dare you paint it as “mostly harmless.”
Yes I am sorry for your loss. Now let's get to the point.
Because I understand statistics and am making sweeping statements I can and will make them from an objective viewpoint. Please do NOT sensor proven facts. I don't care for bible thumping tora humping nonsense that does not match reality. I'll take 2k years of religion and raise you 50 years of tech, oled TVs and microprocessors.
I know someone who ended up hospitalised and several years later does from complications due to a winter flu, doesn't mean we shut down society _every year_.
CV19 was a novel virus introduced into an existing population without any pre-existing immunity. This meant we will see complications, deaths at every age group and people's lives ruined by something that most 4yo, 25yo and 68yo will simply shake off.
Again the statement of millions dead _DOES NOT_ match the real world where several developed nations with populations sub 1B did not have dead numbers into the 10M+ of healthy individuals.
People died yes. This is expected. It is an illness. People die of staph infections. Life is unfair.
That _DOES NOT_ mean that this is equivalent to small pox. It's not a bioweapon it just meant the subpopulations who we identified really early (2020) should have isolated or accepted their risk.
The rest of society should not bend for the risk (again high survivability even in at risk groups). If it did we wouldn't sell guns, scissors or cross the road.
I hope that people do not treat you with the callousness with which you treat others.
> Because I understand statistics and am making sweeping statements I can and will make them from an objective viewpoint. Please do NOT sensor proven facts. I don't care for bible thumping tora humping nonsense that does not match reality. I'll take 2k years of religion and raise you 50 years of tech, oled TVs and microprocessors.
My friend, you are speaking gibberish. I literally have no idea what you are trying to say. Maybe check your house for a gas leak, or something. I don’t mean it in a dismissive way - I quite literally cannot make heads or tails of what you’re saying here.
> Again the statement of millions dead _DOES NOT_ match the real world
The dead are dead whether you like it or not. Sounds like the pandemic didn’t affect you personally. Be grateful for that, and be kinder to others.
You effectively told me to shut up because of the way you feel when talking about facts. This is the ultimate in anti-intellectual, dishonest and selfish statements.
Check yourself before engaging in conversations about FACTS.
You waltzed into a thread about the CIA suddenly changing their tune about where COVID came from; and started making assertions that it wasn’t that bad.
I shared a deeply personal story about exactly how bad it was, from my vantage point. I expressed outrage at your dismissal of the suffering and many deaths that occurred. “How dare you” isn’t the same as “shut up.” But it is a strong suggestion that you’re being uncharitable.
> Check yourself before engaging in conversations about FACTS.
I scrolled through your comment history and based on some recent arguments with the mods, it sounds like you’ve have a bone to pick with people on this site.
Log off and touch grass, man.
I'm telling you facts because for 4+ years nobody listens.
I've been correct in calling every detail about CV19 because I was involved and shut out of the early criticisms of the modelling based on the data. I'm correct and I'm just shouting into the void so that I can go away and rest easy that "I told you so", I tried ignoring it but frankly shouting until blue in the face helps my conscience easier.
You didn't just share a story you took offence to my position and tried to shut it down. Again, not approaching discourse honestly and openly. Please learn to be wrong. I know I can be. But again not when I'm stating hammer and nail facts. The earth is round, sky blue and water wet. Not the Orwellian everyone has a story type "facts". Words have meanings, please don't let that get lost for the sake of future generations.
Again mostly harmless is met with, the worst story I personally have is discomfort and complications. This unfortunately is not deaths by the millions of healthy people. But it is obviously real, it's just a different thing.
If it were fruitless you wouldn't have engaged from an aggressive stance and I wouldn't be telling you why your wrong. Cognitive dissodence does hurt when it breaks but it's all for the better :)
For what it’s worth: I continued to engage because I used to be like you - argumentative, hyper assured of my own intelligence, and certain I was correct about everything. I wish someone had pointed out earlier that I was being a massive asshole.
Hence, trying to politely engage with you a bit. I feel like it’s the kind thing to do.
I'm going to engage in good faith still again and see if we can get past the point of it being uncomfortable for you.
I made a statement aligned with the indisputable reality that COVID did not lead to huge amounts of deaths among the healthy working age population.
Ironically the USA gives us a very good example of this. Their jab rates are close to 50% across multiple age brackets. If COVID was really really bad we would expect to see many more Americans dead than say in the UK where the jab rate hit >80% in most age groups.
This is not a statement about treatment efficacy or safety. This is a statement that we should be expecting to see many more dead without treatment if the treatment were essential comparing 2 relatively comparable subs populations.
This result given the population sizes can also be deemed to be ignorant of the health care model adopted.
This is also not a statement that COVID didn't kill. This is also not a statement that COVID didn't mame. This isn't a statement that water isn't wet or that the vaccine caused autism.
You told me about the worst experience of your relative. It's is unfortunate for them. I did not wish them ill. I did not deny that this happened. You demanded that I change my statement because of their and your experience.
I'm sorry that they may have suffered in the real world not being fair. But let's be clear NO, I will not change a statement of fact.
Again, I'm not wishing them ill, but there is a world of difference between suffering and an uncomfortable hospital visit and death. This fact does not mean I am wishing ill will upon anyone.
I'm not being argumentative, I'm being corrective. Yes I was insulted by being shut down for feelings, but that is a philosophical line I will never cross based on the last 4 years. Feelings too are important, I'm not saying they're not, but they don't solely define reality.
I think we've been able to reach this point without name calling again so in good faith I'll wish you a good day, week, year and life and too to those you love and care for.
100% expected fatalities above about 70 and hospitals struggling for oxygen supplies. Yes it was not that bad.
No that’s not an exaggeration, that’s why lockdown 1 happened.
After that is just memeing from both sides about microchips and death walkers without masks on.
The it wasn’t that bad is honestly true. Again it was a novel virus introduced into a population with no immunity, but frankly keeping the economy going would have been better than paying people to stay at home and worry.
The cost is starting to come home to roost if we’re not careful and the socioeconomic results of a global depression could genuinely kill more, displace more and lead to political turmoil and violence.
That is not worth just telling gran I’m sorry, the rest of us can go outside but we recommend you don’t.
Again practicing lecturer in applied stats talking so I understand the gritty details of the models and projections.
I think you have to accept it is now unlikely we normies will ever know the truth.
The post, and its comments, are worth reading still IMO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26750452#26751943
That this even exists is a fundamental part of the problem.
So you end up increasing the bias towards what gets you points rather than frank conversations based on a bigger array of facts than just the convenient facts.
Corona made this painfully visible. With facebook and others only admitting 4 years later that they completely muffed the other side of the conversations with downvotings, shadowbanning, suspending accounts when those voices had a perfectly valid reason to argue and question the official narrative.
The funny thing is that 99% of the users here will look with disdain to the burnings on public squares, but they behave exactly that way in a digital format today.
We won't change that system since it is human nature, but at least it will be recorded in history that some humans we're trying to revert that situation.
If you were to step back and evaluate the possibilities rationally, acknowledge the evidence you do and do not have, and ask how well your heuristics are calibrated to this domain, you would see that not only do you not have any real answers to this question, but that you are as fundamentally incapable of adding meaningful value to the conversation as a biologist is to a deep cybersecurity investigation.
Dewokenization is coming to town.
Thanks for the dose of epistemic humility. I'm willing to go one step further: It's plausible that no one knows the truth. Keeping secrets is hard. If someone knew they might've died in the early stages of the outbreak.
• If it was a lab leak, then even if the people responsible are dead, there was likely data that could trace it back. It is unlikely that data still exists or is findable, for obvious reasons.
• If it was not a lab leak, it may be impossible to find evidence to prove that is the case.
The response in China, once things got out of control, included locking sick people in their homes. This form of quarantine is probably good to reduce spread, but it is also probably bad for the health of the patient. If there are multiple people in the home, it is probably worse for all of them. China also has a lot of multigenerational households (grandparents, adults, children) which means the vulnerable are together with people who are lower mortality risk, but higher risk for traveling and getting infected. I don’t know what percent of households in Wuhan were like this, but it probably played some sort of role.
We also forget that it wasn’t only China that got wrecked - Italy also had substantial challenges.
On the other hand, if your healthcare system isn’t overwhelmed, people are wearing masks so initial exposure is low, and you are caring for/separating the sick from the healthy, the outcomes are probably exponentially better.
It certainly seems that later strains were less dangerous though.
Edit: my original comment was not intended to be a reply to you, but to the parent.
* A worker could've been infected while hunting for viruses in a cave.
* Someone could've been infected prior to the sample being ascenioned.
I can only aspire to be so woke, to see reality so clearly and with such confidence!
Wanting human like causes for problems is how humanity invented gods. So that they could feel more under control by trying to appease the now humanized force.
Of course, if the problem went away after you prayed, that would really just have been luck. Even though it strengthened your belief.
Given the ridiculous response from everyone involved, I'm just going to assume it was an accidental biosecurity breach of a natural specimen. It happens frequently enough and enough puzzle pieces seem to fit. Not that I care or think anything should come of it, other than hopefully learning better biosecurity procedures.
Why bother assuming? Why isn’t “I don’t know” good enough?
No sorry necessary. I just think it is interesting how hard it is to not have an opinion about something beyond "I don't know." We all seem to feel more comfortable making an assumption and picking an answer, even when it won't change our behavior and not picking has no cost.
I hadn't thought of this before. I wonder if we naturally formulate an opinion or hypothesis when we're curious about something. Which I did again just now.. huh.
The take away is not that we'll never know. The take away is that governments conspired to obscure the truth, control public opinion, and censor dissent.
A lab leak is not impossible, but there are good reasons to suspect a natural spillover event. There have been a number of studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests that the Wuhan wet market was the origin.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2
Those are not mutually exclusive theories.
It could have been a lab leak that was then superspread by the visit of an affected lab worker (or someone they came into contact with) at the wet market.
The current evidence points to at least two different spillover events (of slightly different variants) at the market, followed by spread of the virus in the communities surrounding the market, eventually radiating out to the rest of Wuhan. There is solid evidence now for each of those statements.
If you try to reconcile that with the lab leak theory, you end up with an ever more implausible theory: two different scientists got infected in the lab with different variants (of a virus we have good evidence never existed at the lab in the first place), then both of them went to the market (where the same types of wild animals that caused the original SARS outbreak in 2002 just happened to be sold) and infected people, but somehow they didn't infect anyone else at the lab. It's just one implausibility stacked on top of the next, all with the goal of avoiding what the data is obviously saying: the outbreak began at the market.
A single worker gets infected/accidentally releases multiple variants, sloppy worker messing up twice doesn’t seem that crazy. A lab leak is also consistent with an infection person visiting a location that experienced a separate variant.
And that’s just a few options there’s also things like an intentional leak followed by another intentional leak etc.
I’ve read that the lab was intentionally set near that wet market, so there being overlap like this doesn’t seem extraordinary.
You're now positing that a lab worker got infected with multiple variants (which wouldn't exist in the lab, by the way, since they would work with cloned virus), then traveled across town and spread the virus at the market.
The evidence all points towards a spillover (two, actually) at the market, but you can always make the lab leak theory ever more convoluted to keep it alive.
Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely. There's a good chance that the lack of safety was in the culture and not just one careless person. In November and December, several Wuhan Institute personnel were reporting unknown illnesses and took standard precautions (weeks of isolation) over it. It sounds like they weren't equipped to deal with a class of pathogens that they were working with.
We actually have a very good idea of what research was going on there. The groups in question publish their research, give talks at international conferences, upload the viruses they discover to US databases, talk with colleagues abroad, etc. We have a very good picture of what they were working on, and every indication is that they didn't have any virus closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
> Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely.
If that were the case, you'd see the outbreak centered on the lab. It wasn't. It was centered on the market, on the other side of town. So you have to start making implausible - and obviously motivated - assertions that two different lab workers went and infected people at the market, without infecting any of their colleagues or anyone else along the way.
There literally was an outbreak among lab workers in November to December of 2019. Many of them got sick with something that looks vaguely like COVID and quarantined over it - this is a standard precaution when you work around weird pathogens. Social media from these workers was suppressed when they talked about getting sick. Chinese whistleblowers discussed this at the time.
I'm frankly surprised you haven't seen any of this evidence given your interest in the subject.
And we only know about the research they published, not what goes unpublished. That includes various kinds of failed research, research that someone did for fun and wouldn't make it past ethics boards (a not-infrequent problem for this type of virus research), and research that was done under the table to nefarious ends.
No, there wasn't.
The 1st Trump administration leaked a rumor to the press that three workers got a respiratory virus sometime in the winter in 2019. Even if true, that's completely uninteresting. A large percentage of Earth's population gets any number of respiratory viruses every winter.
I have no idea where you're getting the rest of the details that you're claiming ("looks vaguely like COVID," "quarantined over it," etc.). They're not even in the Trump administration's leaks, and I suspect you're getting them from the online rumor mill.
> And we only know about the research they published, not what goes unpublished.
We actually know much more than what gets published. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology regularly go and give talks at international conferences. There are visiting scientists at the WIV from other countries, including the United States. WIV scientists upload RNA sequences that they gather in the field to US-based gene-sequence databases. This wasn't secret research. It was out in the open. They would have had no reason at all to conceal the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 if they had had it. Yet there's no indication whatsoever that they had it. Everything we know indicates that they were just as clueless about the virus when the outbreak began as everyone else.
Given that, it’s plausible that sloppy lab handling procedures led to someone being infected with multiple different viruses that were present in the same part of the lab.
None of this proves the lab leak hypothesis of course, but a lab worker being infected with multiple variants simultaneously (or separately) is a perfectly plausible outcome.
If the virus is spreading in farmed animals, it will have many chances to spill over into humans. In fact, this is exactly what happened with the original SARS in 2002.
It's striking how similar the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak is to the original SARS outbreak. Almost every detail of the spillover is identical: unknown coronavirus emerges at market in major Chinese city selling wild animals.
In the case of SARS, the animals were not culled for months. The entire SARS response was slow - the virus kept spreading in farmed animal populations and kept spilling over into humans.
With SARS-CoV-2, the Chinese government immediately ordered all the suspect animals to be culled. No test results for those animals have ever been released, if they were ever even conducted.
> the closest virus in a wild population was a bat coronavirus located 1000 miles away.
Guangzhou, where the original SARS emerged, is just as far away from the bat populations and Wuhan is.
It's been 4 years. When are we culling the COVID animals? The answer is that there's no culling because there's no animal population with a virus that is close enough that it could have been the basis for COVID.
The closest known wild-type virus - the one in those bats from over 1000 miles away - is still missing several key features (eg furin cleavage sites) that would be exceedingly unlikely to have all evolved multiple times in the few animals that made it to the wet market.
Almost every animal population that has resulted in a pandemic in the past has been pinned down in a matter of months and "dealt with." Obvious examples are SARS, MERS, and the recent influenza pandemics. That hasn't even gotten close to happening with COVID. This is a core competency of public health agencies, much more so than you might have realized.
In 2020, the lab leak sounded like a conspiracy theory to me and I thought it was a matter of time until the animals were found. Now, with it clear that there is no population of animal hosts with a similar virus in a similar area (given huge databases of bat coronaviruses that were developed post-SARS), it's looking increasingly like a virus that has been through a lab IMO.
The animals were culled right at the beginning of the pandemic. The Chinese government immediately ordered all of the farms that raise the types of animals that caused the original SARS to cull their stock. We have never seen a sequence from any of those culled animals, either because no sequences were taken, or because the government doesn't want them to be published. In any case, culling the potential host population would have been a very effective measure for preventing the virus from spilling over again.
> The closest known wild-type virus - the one in those bats from over 1000 miles away - is still missing several key features (eg furin cleavage sites) that would be exceedingly unlikely to have all evolved multiple times in the few animals that made it to the wet market.
First off, the fact that the closest known virus is in bats 1000 miles away is not at all surprising. With the original SARS virus, the closest known virus in bats was also from a site about 1000 miles away from where the human outbreak started. Second, other coronaviruses have furin cleavage sites, so this is something that has evolved multiple times. Third, we're not just talking about a few infected animals. We're talking about a population of infected animals, maybe on different farms. The few that were brought to the Huanan market in Wuhan seeded the outbreak in humans, but they were part of a larger infected population.
> Almost every animal population that has resulted in a pandemic in the past has been pinned down in a matter of months and "dealt with."
This is not true. It took literally decades to locate the origins of AIDS. We still don't know the origins of Ebola (not a pandemic, but it has caused a series of large regional outbreaks and is the subject of intense study). There is a vast diversity of coronaviruses in bats, and the more scientists look, the more they find.
> it's looking increasingly like a virus that has been through a lab IMO.
Literally every piece of evidence has pointed towards the market, from epidemiology (which has firmly established that the outbreak radiated outwards from the market) to genetic evidence (multiple lineages of SARS-CoV-2 present in the very stalls where wild animals were being sold at the market).
The standard zoonosis theory here predicts that multiple spillover events are likely, because there's a population of infected animals that is in close contact with humans.
Virtually simultaneous, in time and space, zoonosis events from different strains at the same place is still possible, but reaches much lower on the scale.
The Chinese government has been very sensitive about the idea that the virus came from a farm.
> it would have pinned covid on basically a bad luck case once and for all.
The US would still have tried to make maximum propaganda use of that. If you recall the early "wet market" discussion, it was highly accusatory, and often blatantly racist.
Yes, the “at-risk”, not the “incubator”, and notice the plural form to “farms”. China has never pretended having found a farm that would have been the source of the virus.
> The US would still have tried to make maximum propaganda use of that
The US (the state & government) was very far from having tried to make maximum propaganda use of anything regarding covid.
> it was highly accusatory
Well yes, it was highly accusatory of the typically awful hygienic condition of these markets. That's not racist so, that's just a fact.
Just days after the virus was discovered, the Chinese government would have had no idea which farm the virus came from. They ordered a broad cull. They might have destroyed our ability to trace the origins of the outbreak by doing that, though from an immediate epidemic-control perspective, it was the correct decision. Maybe they did do testing at those farms, but maybe they didn't. In the case of the market, we know that China CDC only came in and did testing after the local authorities shut down and sterilized the place. Officials were probably much more worried about the immediate spread of the virus than scientifically tracing the origins of the outbreak.
> The US (the state & government) was very far from having tried to make maximum propaganda use of anything regarding covid.
The Trump administration went to great lengths to use the pandemic for propaganda purposes. At first, Trump was "nice" to the Chinese and even praised their response. However, after the virus took off in the US and it became clear that the Trump administration had completely mismanaged it, Trump pivoted to yelling, "China! China! China!"
> Well yes, it was highly accusatory of the typically awful hygienic condition of these markets. That's not racist so, that's just a fact.
There was a huge amount of racist "bat soup" discussion in the United States early on in the pandemic, followed soon by racist phrases like "Kung flu." I remember a viral post that showed a random Asian person eating a bat (it turned out the photo wasn't even from China). That's what the atmosphere was like.
This wasn't an informed discussion about the viral spillover dangers of wet markets (which are ubiquitous in much of Asia, not just China, and are often the primary way people buy groceries). It was mostly people who have no idea what they're talking about (and who have never visited a wet market) talking about dirty foreigners.
That seems unlikely, given that - per Wikipedia - the WIV opened in 1956 and the wet market opened in 2002.
“Wuhan Branch of the CAS.[4] Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it was founded in 1956 and opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory[5] in 2018.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology
There was also a separate BSL-2 facility that moved right before the outbreak which also got news coverage due to the timing. But I think that was more confusion as they shouldn’t be working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-...
Baric testified that he had specifically warned Shi Zhengli that the WIV’s critical coronavirus research was being conducted in labs with insufficient biosafety protections. When he urged her to move the work to a more secure biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) lab, he testified that she did not heed his recommendation. Because the WIV continued to perform coronavirus research at what he considers an inappropriately low biosafety level, Baric said of a laboratory accident, “You can’t rule that out…. You just can’t.”
In 2004, nine people were infected with Sars and one person died after two researchers were separately exposed to the virus while working at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing. In November 2019, just a month before the first confirmed case of Covid-19, more than 6,000 people in north-west China were infected with brucellosis, a bacterial disease with flu-like symptoms, after a leak at a vaccine plant. [1]
The Chinese facility hosts one of no more than six BSL-4 labs in the world that had been conducting contentious “gain of function” research on bat-related pathogens before the pandemic, according to Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University [1]
Just given the above, the statistical likelihood of coincidence is so absurdly low it alone means there needs to be overwhelming evidence to the opposite to overcome it. At no point has this been the case.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/a0badd5d-4d88-4a3b-b019-61c6d8275...
But a 2 spillover event suggests there was a pool of infected animals with multiple lineages that were all already capable of zoonosis. So why only a single secondary event? This suggests the pool was small, contact was limited, and that the pool wasn't sustained for long. OK, then it's comparably likely that a mutation would happen on either side of the spillover.
The problem with positing that the mutations happened after spillover is that the timeline is way too short. Multiple variants were present at the market just weeks after the initial human cases. That points to differentiation before spillover, probably on the farms where the animals were being kept.
I suppose that could happen if what they were carrying wasn't capable of human transmission yet, but was capable of infecting some species of the live animals at the market, but that's a big if.
There's till the problem of the second lineage which would indicate multiple zoonotic crossover events.
Or if infected carrions from the labs were sold at the market – I suppose it only takes a low-ranking employee wanting to make a few bucks.
All of the evidence people argue over can fit together.
Original virus was brought from the south of china, was studied in the lab. Unclear if it was engineered. Somehow in the lab an animal was exposed. Either purposefully for study or accidentally. Animal dies or will die soon so a rouge employee takes it to the market to sell the meat for some pocket money. First cases show up in lab employees they are smart enough to quarantine. Full outbreak starts at market from animal source.
The official People’s Daily newspaper claimed in a Facebook post last week that “all available evidence suggests that the coronavirus did not start in central China’s Wuhan”.
“Wuhan was where the coronavirus was first detected but it was not where it originated,” it quoted Zeng Guang, formerly a chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/29/a-year-after-w...
They kept changing the story....they claim or claimed that it originated outside China. Give me evidence. The burden of proof is on them.
Right, but in 2020 and 2021, the US was doing everything it could to discredit those who were trying to possibly discredit China. And the WHO was doing whatever China wanted. No scrutiny was to be tolerated. That in and of itself is very fishy.
The US funded the lab and the specific fields of research. I have no idea how people can still be banging on about lab-leak origin being a racist plot against the Chinese. Covid probably leaked from US lab experiments in China. The rest of the world should be raging against the US and China both.
$250k is nothing for something this size.
Dr. Tabak testified in this hearing that the NIH was funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China through a grant to EcoHealth.
Of-course this was in "direct contradiction" of the earlier testimony given by Dr Fauci under sworn oath. But hey - he has already been pardoned for it.
The only thing that can be laid at China's feet is ignorance of what was going on in their labs and the useless attempt at media suppression once the virus got out. However, anyone who has studied the facts in detail would easily form the judgement that a subsection of the U.S. government had the majority share of culpability.
Yeah, the NIH isn't blameless if the lab leak hypothesis is true.
The idea that this assessment needs a goal is strange, because it is the most reasonable assessment, but the idea that it discredits China more than it discredits the US is bizarre. Maybe it does for the Chinese people, who can see that their government is willing to put Chinese people in danger in partnership with a US that was nominally refusing to put American people in danger. Turns out viruses don't need visas so it didn't matter, but maybe it's the thought that counts.
What evidence do you have for this claim?
However, what the (classified) evidence indicates is somewhat separate from whatever public posture the CIA finds useful to take.
What's public record is that ABC News reported[1] that two anonymous officials claimed there was an internal intelligence report in late November discussing an outbreak in China, and that it was briefed up the chain. All other news outlets then picked it up, with attribution (ABC News says someone else says...) buried deep in the text per usual. The report was immediately denied publicly by various officials and in over 4 years has never been corroborated, not even with other anonymous sources.
Plus, even if it were true, what's the relevance? It originally made headlines because it implied the Trump administration was slow to react; in particular, that they possibly had as many as 4 additional weeks in which to begin preparations. But it doesn't speak to origin. Most advocates for both the natural and lab-leak arguments all agree that the COVID-19 outbreak began sometime in Fall 2019. It's not a point of contention except possibly when comparing one overspecified theory against another overspecified, straw man theory. There are so many degrees of freedom to either theory (or rather, group of theories) that an early or late start doesn't significantly weigh in favor of one or the other.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-c...
But they are saying that they have low confidence, and that there is no new evidence that changes anything.
They're just changing the way they're biased, because they think that the lab's conditions weren't particularly safe.
But then, we might as well expect that dozens of dangerous viruses should've gotten out.
There are also many cases where adversaries both know the true story, and know the other knows the true story, but neither side finds it in their strategic interest to publish the truth e.g. the optics are terrible for both for different reasons.
That said, this particular case of the CIA publishing a report seems performative for domestic politics rather than strategic, which also happens all the time. There was nothing new or novel. The internal view of the intelligence community has been pretty consistent for years.
https://peakprosperity.com/more-evidence-covid-19-may-not-be...
So if you believe that your lauded international bodies are immune to politics and the abuse of authority, then maybe it will work. The rest of us prefer international bodies to be forums and coordination points for the real authorities.
I read "Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley" and it convinced me the lab leak theory was at least fairly likely. The proximity of the outbreak to WIV -- which was doing gain-of-function research of bat coronaviruses -- is convincing. Occam's razor and all.
I suppose flat earthers make heliocentrism and the laws of physics politicized theories too, then.
Do we actually know if NIH was doing gain of function research (on Corona viruses) in the Wuhan lab? It sounds like another right wing conspiracy theory but if people have high quality sources for this being true I’ll happily change my mind.
https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/2024/06/ecohealth-alliance...
EHA has been warning for decades that a coronavirus pandemic is likely, and that governments should be taking steps to prepare for it and to make it less likely. Then, they're proved right, but instead of society thanking them, they're subject to a politically motivated witch hunt, with the aim of distracting from the US government's disastrous pandemic response.
The scientific evidence that the outbreak began at the market is overwhelming at this point, and there's never been a shred of evidence for the lab leak.
If you think otherwise, then you have not been following the scientific publications on the subject for the last 5 years.
So yes, EHA has been proven right, and you're hounding the very people who dedicated themselves to warning the world about the threat of a pandemic.
https://x.com/thackerpd/status/1880465349373751438?t=oBbkfRZ...
Of course the immediate jump to conclusion in the first few months by some who found it politically expedient was no better either.
People need to be more comfortable saying I don’t know but we are looking into it.
The lab leak theory was extremely plausible even assuming no secret conspiracy at all. Lab leaks do happen, that lab did do gain of function research, the State did shut down investigations, etc.
1.) Do they have an incentive to conspire?
2.) Do they have the ability to conspire?
Where both are true I think conspiracies exist every where, often to such an extent it just gets labelled as corruption rather than conspiracy.
Btw, I wouldn't remind people of "horse dewormer" debacle I were you - you come off as anti-science.
There was a huge overlap because within a month it became completely taboo for anyone who cared about not being seen as an alt-right activist to say anything about it. Even freaking Jon Stewart got caught in the instant-cancellation blast [0].
A major problem with our world today is that anything that the alt right supports instantly becomes taboo for the rest of us. People are more concerned with distancing themselves from the alt right than they are with finding and supporting the truth—and that goes for just about anything, not just COVID.
[0] https://nypost.com/2023/02/28/jon-stewart-recalls-outrage-af...
(And then the fact that ground zero is a wet market is strong evidence against. It's so weird that we have two plausible origins for this virus and they're almost right next to each other.)
Which to address a different subthread, is exactly what some people did (go around on the internet confidently stating it did happen). Which is why, I think, other people then labelled the people seriously discussing the theory as conspiracy theorists. Which is a step too far, it's only the people confidently asserting from weak evidence that it definitely did happen who should be labelled as conspiracy theorists. Which is all to say since when does the internet do any of this nuance at all well on any side.
* GP's phrasing, which is arguably different from your phrasing of "but maybe it's true"
It's unlikely we'll ever know the truth. If it's a cover up, then it's possible that someone will come forward in 30 years. For example, Luis Salas spilled the beans on Lyndon B Johnson's 1948 election fraud. But it's unlikely, because the PRC doesn't have a statute of limitations on STFU. If it's natural zoonosis, then maybe we'll manage to find and prove the origin.
The French CNRS, well know to be a right-wing US actor wanting to spread hate
https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/articles/la-question-de-lorigine-d...
All other theories sound as made up bs.
We cannot ignore the timing or the fact that the release appears to be the direct consequence of the previous director not believing the information he had passed the evidential bar and the new directory believing it does.
It's new signal on the question, which is always nice-to-have, but I'll be digesting it with a huge grain of salt given its pedigree.
This is the first US presidential change of power I'm following consciously. Have there always been such abrupt 180° turns and pledges of loyalty as now? I feel like I'm watching The Godfather.
> This is the first US presidential change of power I'm following consciously. Have there always been such abrupt 180° turns and pledges of loyalty as now?
No; this is 100% new. This is in no way a normal Presidential transition of power.
A quick summary of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av2Hax3Bg1U
(1) The area where the Nyctereutes spec. (german: Marderhund, I have no idea how it is called in english) where kept, there where a lot of DNA of Nyctereutes and a lot of nucleinacid of SARS II.
(2) From the beginning there a two lines of the corona viruses laboratory-confirmed. From the evolutionary speed of virus mutation it is nearly certain that the separation had to be taken place months before. About 8 times a corona-variation had been aquired by man. From this infection chains 2 virus-types had survived to be confirmed in Wuhan. A person who works in the laboratory would have been working with a clonal virus that is not mutated in that way.
(3) The market is the center of all infections even if you take out everybody that is known to be at the market, not the laboratory.
(4) For the animals at the market a analysis showed that they had been ill/infected (not specifically corona)
These are all separate published aspects that points to the same thing.
The part starts at 2 hours 23 minutes 30 seconds - you have to use auto-translated subtitles which are unfortunately not very good (german language)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Drosten
edit: grammar
now an exact match of that length isn't impossible, but which is more likely? that this managed to be exactly correct on accident? or some grad student was told to just copypasta every furin cleavage site in the database into a GOF library and surprise surprise the most virulent form that became a pandemic came from the sequence that is engineered to be efficient.
any scientist that has any molecular biology wet experience will tell you this is exactly what they would have done (though us researchers would probably not have pulled from the patented BLAST sequences, since that selector is turned off by default by the NCBI)
could you cite this? not because i'm questioning the statement's credibility, but because i'm curious (and you could save me a lot of time from even knowing where to begin to look for credible information for myself—full disclosure, lol).
Here. you can do it yourself. databases are public.
CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG
The linked commentary [1] raises several interesting points.
"Unfortunately, the authors did not provide details of their BLAST research. The patent database that they used contained 24,712 sequences. Yet, by querying BLAST, we obtained a database of 46,121,617 patent sequences with an average length of 560 nucleotides. The authors should give more details and justification for their query, especially if they queried the full database but a posteriori restricted their computation. Of note, with such a large database, and despite the fact that the average sequence length decreased, the probability of finding at least one sequence containing one of the 16 patterns previously mentioned may rise to 68% under assumption 2."
0: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.33...
1: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.33...
The absence of CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG from any mammalian or viral genome in the BLAST database makes recombination in an intermediate host an unlikely explanation for its presence in SARS-CoV-2. You can verify for yourself that there are no other sequences with an exact match.
The subsequent comment about statistics of blast searching is irrelevant.
"According to the current phylogeny, FCS appeared independently six times in the Betacoronavirus lineages, demonstrating that FCS insertion is compatible with natural evolution (2, 7, 8). [...] 7. Wu Y, Zhao S. Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses. Stem Cell Res (2021) 50:102115. doi: 10.1016/j.scr.2020.102115"
is that not relevant?
https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi
The US has absolutely no interest in prooving that the virus leaked from there.
American involvement is barely an inconvenience. For those most eager to blame it on China, it was the fault of one American. They would like to punish him, too, but he has received a preemptive pardon. (Either to avoid political persecution of an innocent man, or to cover up the dastardly deeds of their domestic political opponents; take your pick.)