Thanks for the book, alina. As a former molecular biologist (who worked on non-pathogenic enzyme gain-of-function projects) when the details of the virus came out I looked at it and immediately thought, "huh, that's exactly what I would have done", caveat I wasn't a virologist, of course, but I felt like I was being gaslit for being told that there was "no way" it could have been a lab leak. I know that I am not the only molecular biologist who felt this way. In no small part due to your work I think it's being taken more seriously, and maybe this is selfish in the context of the crazy situation going on worldwide but I feel 'less crazy'.
> I felt like I was being gaslit for being told that there was "no way" it could have been a lab leak
Can I say, as someone also looking at this somewhat dispassionately, how upsetting it is that the discourse on this issue has shifted from "It was a lab leak!" (to which strong replies absolutely were "There's no evidence"), to "It might have been a lab leak", now to "People were unfairly treated on the internet for saying it was a lab leak".
I mean, it's been two years now, and there's still no evidence beyond the kind of circumstantial stuff detailed by Chan and Ridley (I have the book but haven't read it yet, though I've seen most of Chan's public posts on the subject so I'm pretty sure I know the arc of what's in it).
And it seems like everyone has basically conceded that. But instead of just admitting we'll never know with certainty (and that natural evolution remains the most probable origin), everyone wants to talk about meta stuff instead?
It’s important to have a meta conversation because the media and social media were actively hindering discussion (censoring) that examined the lab leak hypothesis.
One can’t have an honest investigation if one major avenue is shut down.
But... we're literally discussing a book written on the subject. It wasn't censored. Neither were discussions here on this site, where lab leak arguments were very popular.
Are you really sure you aren't confusing controversy (the fact that an opinion can be a minority one with which most experts disagree) with suppression?
Just because suppression wasn't successful doesn't mean it wasn't attempted. And the attempt itself, by leading Western scientists who attempted to forestall any discussion and gaslight dissenters with accusations of anti-Chinese bigotry and scientific ignorance, is to me an even bigger story than covid's actual origins.
The government continued to investigate the lab leak hypothesis from the very beginning. The fact that some scientists tried to paint it as anti-Chinese bigotry (and some of the accusations clearly were) did not stop this. There's very little there there.
Social media actively censored such discussion and Google also manipulated autocomplete, etc. The WHO and CDC dismissed the theory at the time. The CCP actively scrubbed data which would affect the effectiveness of any subsequent investigation.
2. Facebook ham-fistedly censored conspiracy theory posts that the virus was man-made and later realized that they were also censoring actual lab leak discussion and fixed their policy.
3. Google turned off autocomplete because most of the autocompletions were crazy conspiracy theories. People could still search for whatever they wanted.
None of this stopped actual investigation of the lab leak hypothesis, which you claim could not have happened due to Facebook's actions.
I mean, the reality also is that there were in fact serious attempts to unleash bigotry instead of focusing on response. That is reality of what happened too. Huge reason why people painted it as anti-Chinese bigotry is that such a thing played a huge role in Trump response. Renaming Covid-19 to Chinese virus while downplaying need for tests and such was exactly that.
There was no suppression, quite tyje opposite: the lab leak hypothesis has been pusjed again and again, often with 'convenient' timing.
Now for scientists there is no point discussing this without any concrete element. Sure, a lab leak or even an artificial origin of the virus are potential hypotheses but then people need to find evidence, and the more far-fetched the hypothesis the stronger the evidence needed before keeping mentioning it (or writing books...)
Currently I don't think there are any material element so the reasonable and scientific thing to do is to work on finding the origin of the virus and only then to discuss facts.
Lancet CORRESPONDENCE| VOLUME 398, ISSUE 10309, P1402-1404, OCTOBER 16, 2021
The authors associated any alternative view with conspiracy theories by stating: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin”. The statement has imparted a silencing effect on the wider scientific debate, including among science journalists.
Edit: to add context: the authors of that letter didn’t disclose their conflicts of interest and mischaracterized the cited genomic research which hadn’t and still hasn’t found a wild match.
Daszak’s story began falling apart last November when the non-profit group US Right to Know published emails gathered through a freedom of information request that showed he had orchestrated the Lancet statement without disclosing that he was funding Shi Zhengli through grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Daszak’s credibility took a further hit this June when Sachs published an essay that called for an independent investigation of the pandemic’s origin and charged that both China and the NIH should be transparent about virus research, including “gain-of-function” studies that make viruses more transmissible and virulent.
"not a natural origin" is not simply a lab leak, it's claiming that the virus is artificial and engineered.
I don't believe that there are any elements to support this claim at the present time. To keep bringing this claim up to 'discuss' it is therefore not scientific and might be considered FUD or conspiracy theory indeed.
Open research and science does not mean giving all claims equally. As said, the more extraordinary the claim the more solid the evidence. A claim backed by nothing has no place in publications. This is not "suppression". In fact, what you've quoted shows the opposite: the claim is pushed by dubious means.
It’s like saying, after Snowden released his trove of documents, what government secret data collection? look, here’s what Snowden showed us, it’s not secret!
We need open discussion at all times not only after we “get permission”.
When we had the ricin incident in the 2000s people openly discussed the possibility of a lab insider being the source any it wasn’t censored by the media.
When the establishment media and big tech puts forth extreme concerted effort in using whatever underhanded techniques it can to attempt to slander and undermine you and your ideas, calling you every name in the book, associating you with "undesirable" groups of people, putting "debunked" labels next to the things you say, de-platforms, cancels, the whole nine yards... and its followers lap up that behavior, and engage in it themselves on discussion websites and social media, and even in real life, but you can still technically talk about it on the far corners of the web or if you're in a group of people you're sure think like you think, sorry but that is absolutely 100% still a form of censorship.
The lab leak theory was never treated by the establishment as "a minority opinion with which most experts disagree", it was ridiculed and attacked, thereby effectively changing much of the public psyche against it. The damage was done. The government doesn't have to force a website to delete a post mentioning the lab leak theory in order for something to be considered censorship. Otherwise you're playing the semantics game - and losing at it.
> It’s important to have a meta conversation because the media and social media were actively hindering discussion (censoring) that examined the lab leak hypothesis.
> One can’t have an honest investigation if one major avenue is shut down.
The problem is that to my understanding the lab-leak discussion was (and still somewhat is) dominated by raving mad conspiracy lunatics[1] or instances trying to inflict racism. I fully admit that someone should seriously research that hypothesis (I fully assume there are some serious folks doing just that), but it is also difficult to blame media trying to keep the raving mad in check, even if some sensible arguments are thrown with the bathwater. (Besides, I am not sure if public discussion has anything substantial to add before there is some conclusion on the matter)
[1] As this is somewhat heated discussion, I think I need to emphasize that I definitely do not imply that all who doubt lab-leak are raving mad. If you think I do, please breathe and read again.
The really odd part of the meta conversation is that the “pro lab leak” folks are complaining they were stripped of nuance, but claim they were told it’s impossible or it’s crazy to think it could’ve been a lab leak. That might have been their subjective experience of people apparently not taking them seriously, but I have never actually seen this position held by an authority. What are we supposed to do, send military-escorted scientists into Wuhan to swab every inch? And what if that came up inconclusive, as it certainly would?
The “anti lab leak” position has always been 1) we don’t know, 2) it’s not the most important question right now, and 3) we probably will never know.
The people complaining about lack of nuance are proving their own inability/unwillingness to grapple with nuance.
That is absolutely not true. Don't you dare try to rewrite history. The anti-lab-leak position has included claims like "it's racist to say that china lab leaked the virus". At best, the "official" anti lab leak position has been framed by the lancet article. Go read that and tell us if that position is as neutral as you claim.
Yeah this is another view I see commonly expressed and have found no evidence ever coming from an authority. The Lancet letter (effectively an op-ed), for example, mentions race exactly zero times. It does somewhat recklessly affiliate these theories with conspiracy theories, but it’s worth remembering that they were responding to actual conspiracy theories like the virus being a bioweapon purposely released. This is an actual theory of conspiracy for which there continues to be no evidence. Scientists were getting death threats on this basis.
And again, the Lancet letter itself points to the then-current body of evidence, which people can contribute to or refute via their own publications (this is how science works).
They weren't responding to any body of evidence. There was zero at that time, on either side. They were trying to get out in front and head off what they thought was something reasonable people would include in their consideration of origins.
They had no evidence either way but knew that they had a lot to lose, and fired everything they had.
The letter didn’t blame racism, the letter cited several genomic analyses that actually had already been conducted by that point, and to my knowledge that letter didn’t disrupt any research into the virus’s origins. Open to seeing evidence otherwise though.
You're twisting my words and deflecting from my point. To clarify: The letter did not call it racism, other people did. This is verifiable in many places.
And we’re to take some commentators (Twitter users? TV personalities maybe?) calling it racist as evidence of what would certainly be the largest scientific suppression campaign ever conducted?
The Lancet article was opinionated. It may have been wrong. I still don't see how that constitutes suppression or cancellation or censorship (and certainly not an accusation of racism). There were people within the scientific community who disagreed (Chan is one). There just weren't many of them.
Holding an opinion contrary to an expert consensus isn't a state of persecution.
The Lancet letter came about to imply there was an expert consensus, when there was not yet one. It was driven by the exact people who would know best that a lab origin was plausible, saying loudly that it was not.
That's not suppression, though. It's just disagreement. I understand that you personally believe that the Lancet authors were acting in bad faith. But you surely agree they had the right to author that letter, right? You just... disagree.
That's the way things are supposed to work. Maybe science is wrong sometimes, and people argue. And eventually we come to consensus.
I have to say: it sounds like you're the one on the pro-suppression side here (arguing that the Lancet shouldn't have published that letter). Am I wrong?
I don't blame the Lancet for publishing it. They had no way of knowing it was not what it seemed. They should have maybe looked for the conflicts of interest a bit harder, and it is to their credit that they encouraged Daszak to write a correction later.
Everyone should be heard. Unfortunately the intent of that original letter was to pre-bias against opposing viewpoints, before they got to be heard.
> the intent of that original letter was to pre-bias against opposing viewpoints
Isn't that the same thing as saying the intent was "persuade" the reader? How is it different except in the sense that they managed to persuade people to believe something with which you disagreed?
You're right. It's highly suspicious, but it's just that and the problem is that the lab leak theory has many ramifications that are net negative for everyone: was it intentional, was it preventable, was it modified to test bioweapons, was it financed by France (yes, in France, we're not so hot about discussing our own little responsibility in building that lab).
I think if it was a clear-cut case of manipulation screwup, and that some people in China know today for sure that it was, we'll know eventually when we care less. If nobody, even close to the lab in China, knows for sure, then we probably won't investigate more just in case we'd discover with horror we killed all these people.
Btw I don't think the French should feel so bad, by my understanding they did the right thing, or as best as they could: once they reviewed the construction of the building they refused to sign off on the bsl certification and no french researchers were sent to the institute (or maybe it was just one). I suppose they could have raised a bit more of a stink about it, but it was a different era, one when diplomacy with china was still a net win-win for everyone.
I'm looking forward to reading your book. As a former microbiologist / biochemist with a fair amount of knowledge about what is possible in terms of gain-of-function research, and with a fair amount of experience reading technical research papers and a long-standing interest in both environmental and infectious microbiology and virology, the discussion of origins of the virus in the literature really seemed shady during the first six months of the pandemic.
In particular, the early flood of 'data' about potential links to pangolins and a supposed bat-pangolin cross-breeding event, which was discredited pretty quickly, indicated that someone was trying to muddy the waters. Past natural outbreaks involving these kinds of cross-species jumps (MERS and camels for example) had a a long-term natural history, they didn't just appear wholly formed out of the blue, and the natural reservoirs were quickly identified[1, 2]
The failure to identify any such natural source of the virus within six months despite intensive searches really put the Wuhan lab leak theory back on the front burner, and the fact that the Lancet and Nature op-eds proclaiming a 'natural source' were organized by those linked to providing U.S. funding to the Wuhan lab was another huge red flag. When it became clear that the funds sent to Wuhan were intended to continue a branch of research (gain-of-function with respiratory viral pathogens) that the U.S. government had severely restricted in 2014[3], well...
Clearly both some elements of the US government's academic funding wing and of the Chinese government have a deeply vested interest in not allowing an open and independent inquiry into the actual source of the pandemic. This only encourages future similar outbreaks - as it really seems that there may be literally hundreds of wild-type animal viruses that can be turned into human pathogens by selective modification of their cell-surface-protein binding capabilities via techniques such as CRISPR etc. International bans on this kind of research (including an inspection regime as with nuclear non-proliferation treaties) really make sense.
"The failure to identify any such natural source of the virus within six months despite intensive searches really put the Wuhan lab leak theory back on the front burner"
We have had to look for the reservoir animal for Ebola for decades before having a viable candidate. On that scale six months is a very short time.
The failure to identify a natural reservoir does throw a lot of doubt onto the 'wet market-origin' theory, since some close variants should have existed in some of the animals there and none were found. If on the other hand the virus was one collected from a remote location and transported to the lab for further study and possible modification, as part of a well-intentioned research effort, and then accidentally escaped (by infection of lab techs, visitors, etc. most likely), that would be an understandable situation.
It doesn't, really. All it takes is a single individual animal to carry a virus. The assumption that all of the individuals of a species harbor the virus is faulty, it could well be a small fraction of a rare animal, in fact the difficulty of locating the reservoir is strong evidence for that.
Sticking to Ebola for the moment: even though there were major suspicions that a species of bat was responsible for Ebola it took a very long time to identify which species and how Ebola managed to transit the continent and to pop up in different places.
Reservoir animals can be very hard to determine with certainty. Note also that the reservoir animal itself need not have been present in the wet market for this to have worked, it is enough that a pig or some other suitable amplifier host got infected which then passed it to humans. In that case too, you'd see a small number of animals, possibly even a single individual, carry live virus. And given the nature of the wet markets you can be pretty sure that any such evidence was erased before COVID even had a name.
Until there is hard evidence for a lab leak I will chalk it up to a possibility, but a remote one. And if and when the reservoir animal is found I'm sure that too will be discounted by the proponents of the lab leak theory, who seem to have their bullet-proof fix already in the works: in that case the claim is that the virus was first sampled from an individual of the reservoir animal species and moved to the lab from where it leaked.
So we likely will never see the end of that, but that doesn't mean that any of it is true. Which is a problem with many conspiracy theories, they tend to be inherently un-falsifiable which allows them to stick around forever. The way in which one of the authors of the book effortlessly integrated new knowledge that invalidated the premise of the book into an altered version of the same - instead of admitting they got it wrong - is a very nice example of that.
They did detect virus on the ground in the market. It seems there were wild animals in the market illegally that were all removed before the scientists got there. There was also a lot of wild animal farming in the Wuhan area which would be quite a likely candidate and which wasn't tested at all probably for political reasons. It had been encouraged by Xi and so would have been embarrassing if they found that to be the cause.
These conversations all miss the single most important underlying detail.
Even if covid didn't come from a lab, we clearly possess the technology.
The cherry on top is that we're still actively working on said technology.
We have collectively and silently learned that we have the technology to end the world, and no one is really shocked by it.
This is far worse than nukes because M.A.D. doesn't apply, and it's not resource constrained. Viruses can come from anywhere and be enhanced with the right equipment and knowledge, which probably isn't all that expensive.
Why the hell aren't we shutting these labs down, or at the very least this type of research?
This does seem to be the case. Pathogenic (or even nonpathogenic 'silent riders' with minimal effects) respiratory viruses exist in a wide variety of animal species, and it seems the main barrier to cross-species transmission is that the natural host's cell-surface receptor proteins are different enough from human cell-surface receptor proteins that transmission is blocked.
With all the modern biotech tools, it's now possible to swap out the cell-surface binding domain from any virus with one that matches a human cell-surface receptor protein, which is how the viral particle gains access to the cell's interior. Cellular interiors seem more highly conserved across species, i.e. it appears that once you breach the outer defenses, the rest of the viral package can replicate within the cell without being constrained so much by inter-species differences. The ribosomal machinery will build just about anything in other words.
Hence the 'gain-of-function' game, which proponents justify as 'finding the potentially dangerous mutations before they arise naturally' is just creating novel pathogenic viruses with a high chance of escape from the labs where they're being created. This kind of research was temporarily banned in 2014 in the USA, but then that ban was lifted in 2017, all with little public discussion.
A permanent international ban on this kind of research, including an inspection and monitoring regime, is likely the only long-term solution that will work.
Because we have natural pathogens that could be released to do the same as a bioengineered one. For example the Spainish Flu, smallpox, plague. All of these could be introduced into our cities and kill millions. In addition there is and has been for quite a while the potential for buoengineered viruses as well.
So, what should we do if the local chapter of the Aryan Nation or whatever bad actor we choose to discuss were to go on a bioterrorism campaign? What could we do if we had not capability to test, evaluate and develop counters for these agents? These labs are where the folks that understand these agents come from.
I understand that's the value proposition of the research, but the difference between theory and practice is.. we just had a plague and it's not clear the research helped in any tangible way. In fact it may very well have been the catalyst.
There is bioweapon potential in these combination of technologies beyond simply engineering a virus, I won't go into detail here, since maybe (however unlikely) no-one else has come up with this particular scheme. However recent work by Baric and others leads me to believe that this kind of scheme is precisely their endgame.
I don't think it is the best strategy to build a dangerous pathogen, because we do not have the capability to contain it reliably. We just do not, as has been demonstrated many times. Humans are involved, and mistakes will happen.
To imagine you are "preparing" for a possible outcome, by realizing that exact outcome (as this pandemic may demonstrate), is like training the fire department by burning down Chicago.
We have supplies of smallpox vaccine ready to go in the event of an attack.
I don’t think we actually have the Spanish flu in a lab somewhere in reproducible form. Supposedly H1N1/swine flu is descended from it, but most people have protection against severe disease now from vaccination or a previous H1N1 infection.
If someone releases a new SARS-CoV-3 that’s been engineered to be as good a killer as MERS or SARS1 while retaining the transmission characteristics of covid-19 we could be in trouble, same if someone did it with a different virus family we don’t have some immunity to already.
Bird flu could be a good example here. It is an excellent human-killer but luckily doesn’t transmit well.
Lab leak doesn't necessarily mean it was man made.
They were storing coronavirus samples from all over the world here, it could have been a contamination accident, yet still a "lab leak"
We've always known humans do dangerous things, the takeaway is that you need safety procedures to mitigate risk.
The scandal that needs to be addressed is the dangerous experiments being done in BSL2 conditions and every country deciding their own tolerance for safety.
These are internationally supported and funded projects. There is no excuse for the stakeholders not to be on the same page about safety procedures.
I guess my underlying question is whether or not some areas of research should just be absolutely off-limits.
MKUltra, for example. Other human experimentation.
What if a physicist discovered the math to create black holes and wanted to test it; could any theoretical benefit be worth the known risk? Maybe it can be justified if the experiment is done in deep space, far from earth. Perhaps the same is true of gain of function, it should be studied on a moon facility instead of in or near a densely populated city?
On the other hand, the highest form of safety is not doing it in the first place, which happens to be cheap compared to a moon base.
The meme answer to which is "Then let's continue to spread the democracy :D".
Except that that also might be the most reasonable serious answer... What else do you do when a country continues to develop an extremely dangerous weapon?
Right, there's an arms race nature to it and you can't put the genie back in the bottle. But banning and sanctions still seem like the only real option.
Effort and diligence can work, even if it's at odds with our nature.
because you are clueless and/or misinformed as to what separates this virus from other coronaviruses and HOW different it is from other coronaviruses. the technology absolutely does not exist.
Attacking another user like this is not allowed on HN. Since you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly in other places too, I've banned this account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Agree, it's not possible to create something like sars-cov2 completely de-novo. I assume this is what you mean? Claims of impossibility here need to be quite specific to be meaningful, I think.
On the other hand if you have not read the DEFUSE proposal you are in for a real treat. It is absolutely plausible that sars-cov2 could be an output of this line of research.
We also don't really know what backbones they had.
At the other end of the scale, it is absolutely certain that if humans started with a virus more similar to SARS-COV-2 than any publicly disclosed virus and made some possibly very minor modifications they could end up with COVID-19, whether the virus leaked was more or less harmful than its all-natural ancestors.
But if we're looking at specific claims about applied research apparently featured in the book: that it was [most] plausible details like the spike binding to ACE2 receptors were the product of human ingenuity applied to RATG13, the likelihood of this seems to have been undermined by the subsequent discovery of other naturally occurring viruses more similar to SARS-COV-2 already featuring a spike capable of binding to human ACE2 receptors.
Ultimately I guess the question is whether the intermediate viruses between SARS-COV-2 and other variants are more likely to exist in secret in the labs or outside the scope of human knowledge, I guess. I do believe it is possible for virologists to cover up things in their lab especially in this context, but outside the scope of human knowledge is a bigger search space.
I know plenty about the differences, and even if I didn't what would that have to do with our technological abilities?
Here's what's patently true:
1. We are actively funding many "gain of function" research grants.
2. We have gene editing technology, CRISPR has been around for over a decade now.
3. We have literally synthesized DNA, RNA, bacteria, and viruses in the lab. The covid vaccines alone are enough to validate this, but here's further evidence we've been doing this for at least 2 decades. [0]
The point is you don't need to control them to wreak havoc. Yes you would harm your own community/country, but this is already in many ways the case with conventional weapons.
I’m a flaming liberal but I still thought we should at least pursue the lab leak hypothesis for one simple reason. I was a scientist and I’ve seen the lax way people treat biohazardous samples and just how fallible humans are.
After going down a long rabbit hole I lean towards non lab leak, but if we can’t ask questions because of politicization of ideas we are done.
It is infinitely disturbing that political sides are a factor in determining whether to pursue justice and truth, in this case, the Covid-19 lab leak question.
Accusations should be ignored when asking valid scientific questions.
Imagine a scientist not being curious about HIV in its early days because of homophobia (it was definitely a thing but the right people ignored it). Maybe the analogy isn't perfect ... I didn't want to open a can of worms but hopefully you get my point :)
Not just that, but the long history of lab leaks (with e.g. smallpox and SARS) that indicates lab leaks are not an unusual occurrence.
I too think the evidence in this particular virus comes down on the side of a natural origin, but the a priori denial of the possibility (and need for investigation) of a lab leak early in the pandemic was really unjustified. In fairness, the right wing demands to sanction (or even attack) China certainly didn't help things.
I don't think there's much direct evidence to support natural spillover event other than that much of the initial spread could be localized to a wet market, which may have had vendors selling meat from animals known to carry these types of viruses. That seems like pretty weak evidence, though. Other than that, IMO we should have very high prior weight assigned to the natural origin hypothesis in the Bayesian sense, so even without new direct evidence it's still reasonable to believe that hypothesis to be more likely.
About 60% of all diseases is the result of spillover, and that's only the part that we can trace. The null hypothesis is that this was a spillover, anything else requires hard evidence, not the other way around. There are numerous recent cases of documented spillover, but there isn't a single documented case of a lab leak leading to a major outbreak.
The people that keep pushing that angle are usually not in this for the science but to stoke the fire.
Why does either option not require hard evidence? I don’t understand your distinction. Something that happens 60% of the time is almost a hard guarantee that’s that what happened now? Really?
You also ignore all circumstantial human behaviour around this, like China being completely unwilling to cooperate in any way in the investigation. Why? Surely if it was definitely a spillover they would cooperate because it’s not exactly their fault?
That is a gross misreading of what I wrote. 60% is the pathogens for which we can even after a very long time trace their origin to a spillover, but the numbers are far higher than that, we just don't have the proof.
Hard evidence is required for exceptional cases, especially when culpability is involved. Whereas the 'natural' way may simply not have left enough evidence at all to be able to trace it.
Are you meaning it is or is not a frequent occurrence? Because the way you've phrased it here it seems that you agree with the OP but I suspect you meant the opposite.
Does “flaming liberal” === excusing the CCP’s behavior? At least in the US, the CCP is condemned by most politicians from across the classic liberal-conservative spectrum.
I don’t understand why the question needed to be asked in the first place.
There’s no reason to assume such support based on the “flaming liberal” designation, so asking the question can only be interpreted as some form of accusation or implication that such a relationship does exist.
While the lab leak hypothesis has been politicized, yes, I still see no connection between liberalism and support of the CCP.
And again I ask: how does being a liberal and supporting the investigation of the lab leak hypothesis have any connection to supporting CCP behavior?
The only possible conclusion I can draw is that you’re implying those liberals who don’t think lab leak should be discussed are somehow implicitly supporting the CCP, but this does not logically follow either.
"Liberal" in the US policy-wise is extremely conservative in most Western European countries, for example Merkel's party CDU is a "right of center conservative" party in Germany but would be far left in the US. Maybe it's not comparable, coming to think of it, because morals and values are so extremely different in Europe and the US.
I don't know why people keep saying this, but there's no way in hell the CDU is far left. The CDU is a historically conservative center to slightly right party, and if they didn't need the votes, the current politicians in charge would go further to the right. A couple of years ago, the CDU lost many voters to the AFD, which is a far right extremist party, and many CDU politicians still sympathize with them, while no other party in Germany collaborates with the AFD. Getting pro gay, trans, and abortion laws through was hell with the CDU in power.
Nope. It is not a given that liberals "reflexively" do the opposite of Trump. There's a huge shared overlap about a distrust of China. I know that I rejected the lab leak theory because of WHO's press release and articles on foreignpolicy.com, but at that time I didn't know about the conflict of interest.
It is very obvious that "gain of function" research described here is basally manufacturing biological weapons, but supposedly this is done "the good of all humans" what is just another communist party slogan.
Where are the vaccines or medicine invented by this facility?
I can understand storing and analyzing the viruses. Yet gain of function is basically bioweapon research. How is this even allowed when it breaks bioweapon conventions?
Also isnt the famous wet market in Wuhan like 300 yards from the Chinese center for disease and control building? (Not to be confused with other buildings in same town).
International effort or not, still a biological weapon.
It looks that China was collecting viruses (what makes a lot of sense) + also cooking some biological weapons on the side. They didnt call it "biological weapon production", they called it "gain of function research", but it is still the same thing.
USA paid some money to be able to access this data (makes sense, the more data you have, the better) + probably they wanted to spy on the Chinese to see what is happening. Unfortunately they send people such as Daszak, who in my opinion looks like a Chinese double-agent, or someone bribed by China to be their mouth-piece.
Still we are moving away from the discussion: this "research" is basically against Biological Research Convention ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention ). And yes, I know that Russia signed the convention but does not abide it - they manufacture lots of biological weapons. But it is another problem.
China had to slaughter and dispose of millions of pigs up to november 2019. There were stories of drones being used to infect pig farms through the summer to drive up pork prices. Odds are that this was covered up so much that when it hit the breaking point, people blamed the lab, even though wuhan is down stream from farm lands.
Realistically they were over taxed and they missed the SARs outbreak. Probably why they are using draconian methods still and welding people into their homes, to make up for their lax action.
The movie "Don't Look Up" but the asteroid scientists funded by NASA create an artificial black hole to pull asteroids towards Earth with sophisticated "gain of destruction" methodology - how better to study the potential civilization-ending power of asteroids?
When an asteroid appears from out of nowhere right near the Wuhan Black Hole and on course to kill us all, head scientist DiCaprio dedicates himself to leading the effort to label anyone questioning the natural origins of the asteroid's planet-killing trajectory a conspiracy theorist, and almost everyone goes along and gets those people banned from the internet. The end.
Carl Sagan expressed essentially the same idea in 1994 -- that the development of asteroid-deflecting *nuclear weapons* would be more likely to destroy the world than to save it. That the baseline risk of major asteroid impacts is low enough, that the threat of asteroid-deflecting technology being turned into a weapon -- a loose analogy to "gain-of-function" research, I guess -- is more probable than the natural threat it defends against.
>"In our view, development of this asteroid-deflection technology would be premature. Given twentieth-century history and present global politics, it is hard to imagine guarantees against eventual misuse of an asteroid deflection system commensurate with the dangers such a system poses. Those who argue that it would be prudent to prevent catastrophic impacts with annual probabilities of 10^-5 would surely recognize the prudence of preventing more probable catastrophes of comparable magnitude from misuse of potentially apocalyptic technology."
> Carl Sagan expressed essentially the same idea in 1994 -- that the development of asteroid-deflecting nuclear weapons would be more likely to destroy the world than to save it.
He also talked about this in his book Pale Blue Dot around the same time. He found it darkly ironic, I think. Technologies like spaceflight and nuclear power and advanced biology are necessary for the long-term survival of the human species. Yet presently, it seems they are more likely to be misapplied and destroy us.
It could have saved us (unlikely though) from layers of lies upon lies on handling the pandemic, if we hadn’t started politicizing from the very start.
> Searching my inbox, I found an email from April 16, 2020 where I told someone who’d me asked that the lab-leak hypothesis seemed entirely plausible to me, that in fact I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t being investigated more, but that I was hesitant to blog about these matters. As I wrote seven months ago, I now see my lack of courage as having been a personal failing. Obviously, I’m just a quantum computing theorist, not a biologist, so I don’t have to have any opinion at all about the origin of COVID-19 … but I did, and I didn’t share it only because of the likelihood that I’d be called an idiot on social media. Having now read Chan and Ridley, though, I think I’d take being called an idiot for this book review more as a positive signal about my courage than as a negative signal about my reasoning skills!
The groupthink around the lab leak hypothesis, and especially that letter signed by scientists in the early days of the pandemic, has done a lot of damage. The problem is that is isn't just this topic. About a dozen other topics have become minefields of politics and mind control masquerading as science. We only see the idiocy of this approach in the case of the lab leak because the consensus has crumbled.
Hopefully, this won't be the last wall to fall under its own weight.
"that letter signed by scientists" does not do justice to the fact that the organizer of that letter had a severe conflict of interest that he failed to disclose. Like why the hell would a scientist not disclose that??! Having been a scientist myself it boggles the mind.
I think it's "Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19" in the Lancet from Feb 19 2020:
The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin....We declare no competing interests.
They later published an "Addendum: competing interests and the origins of SARS-CoV-2" in June 2021:
Peter Daszak has expanded on his disclosure statements for three pieces relating to COVID-19 that he co-authored or contributed to in The Lancet—the February, 2020, Correspondence, as well as a Commission Statement and a Comment for the Lancet COVID-19 Commission.
And there's as yet no academic/systemic consequence for them not declaring this blatant conflict of interest. That sends a big bold message to future scientists considering whether or not to declare them honestly.
reading the description of the conflict and paraphrasing Upton Sinclair I would say it is hard for someone to admit a conflict, if their continuing access to funding is dependent on keeping it hidden.
I reread aaronsons blogpost more carefully and I take back my "??!". Daszak is very possibly avoiding the trauma of having had the experience of trying to save lives and ending up resulting in -15m lives saved. That's a unique experience in human existence that goes even beyond the Sinclair quote. I can't honestly say I wouldn't do the same thing, and I've historically done the right thing -- issued corrections two of the n < 10 papers I have to my name.
Daszak is already getting lynched, at least mediatically. Do a search in his name on ddg, see what the top result is. I'd say it's a crackpot website but in fact it seems it was all written by a covid19 victim. I'd probably move to an Antarctic research station until people forget, as opposed to confortably living in a country where every crackpot and their neighbour has access to firearms.
I got into a slightly heated argument with my mother when she claimed that "China had manufactured the virus in a lab" - I didn't even consider the possibility of virus manufacture for study and a possible leak happening, I just assumed she was being fed propaganda that this was the beginning of some kind of bio-war being started by China. So that is my failing, and after reading more about the lab-leak hypothesis I learned to hold my tongue and be curious about such left-field claims instead of judgemental
One of my favorite fallacies is the fallacy fallacy. Just because one used fallacious reasoning, doesn't mean they're wrong. e.g. I can give a bad reason for why 16/64 = 1/4, just cross out the 6's, but just because the reason is bad doesn't mean the result is wrong.
Yes, this case has generated an amount of "Hitler was a vegetarian" cases.
More "shockingly", some perceived in certain circles that an amount of "odd actors" acted to throw gasoline on every spark, enticing savage gut reactions. Another blow to civilization, opinion benders encouraging towards the dismissal of clean evaluation, mining the pillar that after "He said we walk using feet!!!" the response should be "Actually, ", not "Boo!".
Jeff McKissack, a mail carrier in Houston, Texas, transformed a small suburban lot near his wood frame house into The Orange Show in honor of his favorite fruit.
I super appreciate your willingness to share a small moment of intellectual humility - they are too rare and I hope that it will inspire at least one other person to approach at least one other issue with a similar spirit.
I know that my thinking and behavior has benefited from the small subset of people who have been willing to do so publicly in the past.
Indeed. one of my favorite learnings in life is the power of admitting when I'm wrong (which is often enough). Quite an empowering decision and also relationahip building.
However there are times when people find it so unusual that they see it as weakness and instead of admitting their own wrong, try to capitalise on an opprtunity (perceived weakness).
One exception though is playing chess online, where my ego is yet to be mastered.
I use self-deprecating humor a lot. And some people, usually the ones who don't pick up on the irony, also use it as an opportunity to attack. It's quite sad when you think about it :)
The problem with this is that it could very well be the case that she was being fed propaganda or just repeating something written on facebook by a randomer before more details were known. The fact that it could turn out to be true makes it very difficult to know how to take future similar statements because they probably have a higher likelihood of being wrong if they come from similar sources.
The intertwined nature of country, financial and personnel relationships is not easy for people to understand.
I was just at a gathering the other day where a woman couldn't comprehend that the lab in Wuhan is a joint venture with US public resources, US private sector resources, Chinese resources, and personnel from both countries and others, which includes Dr. Fauci.
She had, until that point, mostly been enamored by Dr. Fauci and mostly been quite angry at Wuhan as a general disavowal of the CCP.
There is nothing to conclude from any of that observation alone, aside from noticing gaps in US federal oversight. Many people will just spiral into some other rabbit hole since nuance isn't their strongsuit. We still have to react to the pandemic whether that bolsters a lab leak hypothesis, or leads to a smoking gun, or not.
If only the American president at the time had been more responsible and less inflammatory it would have resulted in a lot less reflexive aggression - asian people beaten in the street included.
The CCP is not very responsible if they know and hide it or if they don't and refuse to look, but to their defense, it's also because it will be used and reused to their detriment (possibly deserved) if proven. Having a sound diplomatic strategy would have maybe helped convince them otherwise, but it was apparently more interesting to ALSO play down the virus in the U.S. for whatever reason and make absolutely clear that China would pay a dear price for it. So hard to blame China :s
Also yes, there will be both good and bad consequences to every action, or inaction.
But ffs give the dust time to settle before doing the after action analysis.
--
I mostly blame the popular medias for boosting and accelerating the human tendency for fear, outrage, blame. Knowing this about ourselves, that crap has to be toned down.
Writing this now, I guess I'm just repeating the "thinking, fast and slow" critique.
> I don’t have to have any opinion at all about the origin of COVID-19 … but I did, and I didn’t share it only because of the likelihood that I’d be called an idiot on social media.
This is a great justification for anon accounts -- both "primary anon-only" users and also fully- or semi- anon alts for people who have thoughts like this (which, in my opinion, ought to be every smart intellectual who doesn't make the Culture War their primary stomping ground).
Blaming a lack of courage is all well and good after the tides have turned, but courage is slim comfort when the eye of sauron turns on you. You will not feel much better for martyring yourself in service of the beliefs you hold with about-as-much-confidence as Scott expresses here -- and you'd be wise not to do so.
If you must put something down in writing that you know has the potential to cause political heat to fall on your shoulders, and it's not something core to your life's work, it's perfectly fine to either a) use a semi-anon alt or b) write in a circumspect manner. Preferably both.
Anonymity is a thin shield to hide behind, so I say "semi-anon" in support of the idea that, though the anonymity may be imperfect and the identity may be tied to your own, it can clearly be shown as a vehicle to express thoughts you are less sure of, or that you wish to distance yourself from somewhat.
I say all this will the empathy & sympathy of a fellow online writer, though with only a tiny fraction of Scott's reach...
> If you must put something down in writing that you know has the potential to cause political heat to fall on your shoulders, and it's not something core to your life's work, it's perfectly fine to either a) use a semi-anon alt or b) write in a circumspect manner. Preferably both.
I would say today, it's dangerous to speak uncomfortable truths. Assange is still in prison for speaking out about the NSA and looks like he will die there.
Does humanity deserve people like that to walk amongst us, or do we deserve to just get a society where we have no freedom even over our bodies?
After covid i think humanity sucks. We have easily been put into two camps, arguing with eachother. The divide and conquer strategy always works it seems. Like idiots we are not seeing the bigger picture of who profits and benefits from the change society now is transforming into.
Unfortunately the problem is that anonymous information is untrustworthy. It's fine for speaking unpopular opinions, but reporting something anonymously discredits it. This will only get worse with deep fakes. Pretty soon we will be flooded with fake video evidence of things like the Qanon claims.
Provenance (chain of custody) is very important for any evidence. Look at the problem of fakes in archaeology and how in some cases they have skewed the entire historical narrative.
If someone is not even willing to put their name on something, there is no way to even attempt to trace it.
> it's perfectly fine to either a) use a semi-anon alt or b) write in a circumspect manner. Preferably both.
This is the reason I use an anon account but there are still problems on HN. I apologize if I cause some trouble here on HN, but the flagging aspects of HN beyond rude/spam comments (which is what I suspect it is designed for) does a disservice to the community. My comments about inflation were flagged in March 2021 despite of being cordial and respectful. I trusted the scientists and the intellectual community, but I similarly saw some Lab Leak theory comments being flagged on HN. Vouching is a great feature, but not many people know it since it requires a couple of prerequisites - enough karma + settings to show flagged comments.
I hope we restrain ourselves to flagging behavior on HN. It also enrages people for trying to be reasonable, but contrarian, and seeing their comments disappear. Now, they're resolute and firmly dug into their contrarian views even if they were false.
So, if HN has these issues, the outside world is even worse. Try the same on Twitter and hard echo chambers form (blocking/etc). I am not engaged on Twitter or Reddit, but I occassionally observe this.
I hope we restrain ourselves to flagging behavior on HN.
Like many informal groups, it's difficult to judge the composition of the whole when you might be seeing just the actions of the very active few. You'll notice certain topics tend to provoke flagging and downvoting wildly out of proportion with the nature of the comments, and I believe this is because those have particular user interest groups with very ahem strong opinions. You may have also noticed how your comments tend to do quite well when they're new, but somehow pick up a basket of downvotes hours after the post has fallen off the front page. I believe these to be due to a population of generic haters crawling over every post downvoting large numbers of comments.
A service that a journalism outfit could provide. Someone like Quillette, perhaps. The author and the outlet mutually agree to what extent personal info is disclosed before publishing the controversial article.
No, it really isn't. Flags are used to mark comments that are breaking the guidelines, enough flags will kill a comment, but fewer will result in a moderator having a look at the comment, time permitting.
Haha, in theory that's true. But in practice comments are frequently flagged that the majority demographic of HN disagrees with, even breaking no guidelines. It's exactly what the OP to my comment was saying.
Social media has basically turned the world into a sort of bizarre mob rule situation when it comes to unpopular opinion.
I think that we have a responsibility to speak out on matters we believe in and ignore negative pushback.
The alternative is that anyone can shut down a viewpoint by simply flooding the opposite side. You don't know whether a poster is a troll, a real person that's simply misguided, or a real person that posts in good faith.
You don't even end up with what's merely emotionally satisfying - that would be bad enough - but with the set of events or opinion that wins out purely based on competition.
> I think that we have a responsibility to speak out on matters we believe in and ignore negative pushback.
You can try, but new "fact checking" norms will ensure unpopular (especially politically unpopular) opinions get censored on social media before anyone sees them
This is a complicated issue and requires a careful approach. I don't think any serious fact checkers simply declare non-mainstream views as false, rather they would highlight only issues where a clear scientific consensus exist. So you flag an article about masks being ineffective and quote a clear analysis, or you flag an article about the Chinese (or US) government purposefully spreading covid, but you don't flag an article discussing the evidence for and against origin theories. See e.g. also the EU imitative on Russian disinformation:
>I think that we have a responsibility to speak out on matters we believe in and ignore negative pushback.
I would prefer to read you thoughts in areas you have experience in rather your random believes, as a non political example I don't care about your option on Linux init systems if you are not a system administrator, distro maintainer or somehow that is more then a random Linux distro user, same with programming languages opinion, I don't care about your anti-X pro-Y opinion if you have zero experience on X and Y but your opinion is just because your hero blogger/developer/youtuber hates X and likes Y.
For sure there are topics where you have experience with and you can share that and there are topics where everyone has same level of experience and we can all give our opinion.
Sure, your take is a bit overly harsh though. I don't think, with the exception of the odd mentally ill crackpot, most people do do this. Like, you don't see QAnon theories about systemd because well, it doesn't affect them at all, most people don't even know it exists.
By contrast, to give a recent and poignant example, the idea that e.g. _only_ a Harvard epidemiologist or equivalent should speak out on coronavirus restrictions is absurd.
They might have more precise data about specific models, but in the general case they don't know more about the impacts restrictions will have on anything else, they don't have a representative opinion on what an acceptable risk reward balance is, and it's also likely that they have personal bias due to their family and friends (as we all do).
The sad thing, even as you identify into this (true) dynamic, is that it’s happening in this community in favour of this supposedly heterodox viewpoint.
The slightest counterpoint to this supposedly suppressed lab leak theory is downvoted, flagged, and the community congratulates itself on its paradoxical unity-in-contrarianness. Before our very eyes!
Just asking questions — and saying what people really think — has long been a profitable grift. It’s sobering to see how different audiences succumb to it so acutely.
The problem is that what you have said is literally the exact same thing that people say to promote their not just crazy but nonsensical conspiracy theories. I mean, the QAnon folks literally go on and on about "what the media doesn't want you to see" as they wait for JFK's return in Dallas.
It's really not hard to identify stuff that makes no sense at all, and having to manually filter through that stuff is worth it if it means being able to form a model of the world that's actually correct as opposed to simply being what the most powerful entities want.
Brain damaged space lizard believers aren't doing scientific research, as an obvious example.
In addition, I also recommend watching 4.5 hours of Jamie Metzl, who is on a first name basis with WHO's director Tedros Adhanom and even talks about how he called Tedros on his cell phone a time when it was urgent to relay the message, describe the insanity of what happened in 2020 with regards to Lab Leak theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K78jqx9fx2I
The conclusion "we don’t yet live in a post-truth world" is hard to swallow, considering two years after the facts there is no truth about the origin of the pandemic. The reasons for this lack of scientific proof are the subject of the article and the 300 pages reviewed book. The author is once again lacking courage not to admit we do leave in a post-truth world.
Expanding a bit on my comment: truth has not been established, that's one thing. The other thing is that there is no significant hope that truth is ever established. It is said that all the archive of Wuhan's P4 have been destroyed. That would not be surprising at all. A large part of the world is under very stringent information control, far more stringent than in the USSR at any period of time. It combines social control, total control over electronic communications, and a huge PR influence thanks to a wide spread diaspora. In this context truth has become relative.
At the start of the pandemic I thought the leak of a modified virus from a lab was very unlikely and that a naturally occurring virus being brought to Wuhan by lab activities or a natural origin were both far more likely. At this point I think that's the second most significant thing I was wrong about, coming in after my early doubts about aerosol spread.
I can't understand why you would complain about censorship when discussing this book on a public forum. Can you explain to me so I can get my head round this?
We weren't allowed to discuss lab leak on social media until the information overlords decided it was ok to do so. And it took them over a year before they gave us permission to discuss it.
a conspiracy is just a big word used by the media to describe something that happens all the time: people behind closed doors getting along with a plan to exploit the masses for profit or power.
There's also the commonly overlooked fact that sometimes people don't even need to get together, they already have aligned interests and go with the flow.
when it's aligned interests without a formal discussion/agreement between different parties, I don't think it's fair to call it a conspiracy, rather purely selfish incentives at play.
While certainly more plausible than 9/11 conspiracy theories, the lab-leak proponents have the same tendency to put forth several mutually incompatible theories, while believing each has a strong amount of evidence for it.
What a garbage response. The author starts by discrediting both the authors. Next, the smoking gun which it cites repeatedly (The study on Laos bats) is not even peer-reviewed! This is from the articled linked from this article:
“The results, which are not peer reviewed, have been posted on the preprint server Research Square.”
While I don't personally find Matt Ridley's (or Alina Chan's) views on genetics or climate change to be damaging to their credibility, I think it's just as valid to mention them as it is to discuss Peter Daszak's conflict of interest.
I don't see how it's "just as valid" to mention those extraneous things. Daszak's conflict of interest is directly relevant to the issue being discussed, and the Lancet piece which was distorted by it was a critical moment in the history of the issue.
I think it's important to understand the writer's past history on an analogous subject, as it points to his motivations. I think letting you know he also previously argued about the benefits of global warming "nourishing the oceans", https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/now-heres-the-good-news-o... , points to the type of arguments this person likes to make.
I agree the stuff about his failed bank is irrelevant.
"The type of arguments this person likes to make" seems ad hominem to me. Being wrong about global warming doesn't make him wrong about this unrelated topic.
Also, his coauthor on the current book has impeccable credentials as perhaps the leading honest broker in the field, so these comments feel a bit like looking for a weak flank to attack.
The article you link is a very well written boon review which summarizes the arguments of the book. Ridley's review concludes that the theory that aids was transferred to humans through large-scale experimental vaccinations with vaccines made out of chimp liver is a theory worth further investigation.
This is GOOD SCIENCE. You analyze data and put forward theory. I can't speak to the merits of the theory or the book being reviewed, but why would it discredit Ridley if he reads and reviews critical books and is open to exploring alternative theories?
We live in a world where, at least in some respect, when you are evaluating detailed technical analysis for which you are not an expert, it should be normal and expected to at least attempt to determine the level of expertise and trustworthiness of the source.
For example, I think it is extremely relevant and valid to point out Daszek's clear conflict of interest when he put out his original letter.
In this case, the fact that the writer has promoted other theories (importantly, theories analogous to the one under discussion) I consider completely crackpot certainly makes me look at the data here with a more skeptical eye.
More importantly, there are plenty of other researchers who I consider much more credible who have raised loud alarms about the chance of a lab leak (e.g. Zeynep Tufekci's excellent analysis here, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.h... ). The fact that I can look at one piece of writing with a more critical eye based on the author's history of insincerity does not mean I discount more credible researchers making similar arguments.
This is what the article authors mean by lab-leak arguments being unfalsifiable. No matter what evidence comes out, it can still be shoe-horned into a lab-leak theory.
- Opening the records about which viruses the WIV was storing. It's not a mystery — labs track that kind of thing! But China refused to release any data about which viruses the WIV stored or modified.
- Finding a clear chain of infection between a natural source and the outbreak in Wuhan
- Finding clear evidence that there was a small outbreak which later spread to Wuhan
No, the Laos bats are strong evidence for the lab leak hypothesis because it makes a prediction which could have turned out false: that if a close relative of COVID-19 is found somewhere, predict that researchers took samples from that area to Wuhan prior to the start of the pandemic.
Others below point out that it is indeed falsifiable but more importantly, why would it discredit the theory if you can't disprove it? You can certainly disprove some versions of it and as far as I can seen there has been a lot of outrage and occlusion by the Chinese government but very little effort to actually disprove anything.
Let me get this straight, the fact that there are multiple plausible lab-leak scenarios makes the entire question less credible than if there was only one plausible lab-leak scenario?
I would invite you to think about that a little longer.
1. It is, in principle, good thinking to keep multiple competing hypotheses in mind, and allow each new piece of information you get to adjust your level of credence in each one, rather than picking one to Believe and Disbelieving all the others.
2. It is, in practice, a common sort of bad thinking to treat a bundle of mutually incompatible theories as a single thing, and to handwavily treat any bit of information that supports any of them as supporting the whole bundle, even when what the information actually does is to support some bits and undermine others.
And also
3. It is also a common sort of bad thinking to adjust one's beliefs not on the basis of looking concretely at how likely a new piece of information is if each of your multiple competing hypotheses is true, but on the basis of vague notions of what feels as if it supports what.
I take the New Republic review to be mostly accusing Chan & Ridley of doing 2 and 3 in the guise of 1. I haven't read their book and can't tell how fair that accusation is.
Similarly, the following are both true.
1'. It is, in principle, good thinking to adjust the hypotheses you're considering in the light of new evidence, which may promote new hypotheses or new variants of old hypotheses to consideration.
2'. It is, in practice, a common sort of bad thinking to respond to criticism of your beliefs by moving the goalposts: you say A1, someone says "but P!", you adjust to A2 which is compatible with P, someone says "but Q!", you adjust to A3 which is compatible with Q, and at that point you don't check whether it's also compatible with P, so you confuse "at each step I had a version of my beliefs that was nicely compatible with the evidence presented to me" with "there is a version of my beliefs that is simultaneously compatible with all the evidence".
And also
3'. Adjusting your hypotheses in the light of new evidence can lead to problems akin to overfitting in machine learning, where you find something that fits very nicely with the specific bits of evidence you looked at but not with the other evidence that's out there, because you optimized it to fit as well as possible with those specific bits of evidence.
I take the New Republic review to be accusing Chan & Ridley of doing 2' and 3' in the guise of 1'. Again, since I haven't read their book it's not clear how fair the accusation is.
What I would like to see is something that lays out a few specific hypotheses (SARS-CoV-2 deliberately engineered with malicious purposes; SARS-CoV-2 deliberately engineered for study with the goal of understanding/preventing/mitigating future pandemics; SARS-CoV-2 found naturally in bats or something but brought into contact with humans via the WIV; SARS-CoV-2 found naturally in bats or something and brought into contact with humans via the Wuhan wet market; maybe a couple more) and then goes through the available evidence trying to assess what each piece of evidence does to each hypothesis, noting where better versions of the hypotheses are suggested by the evidence and then either assessing those better versions against other evidence or just presenting them as "suggested by the available evidence but now in need of further verification or refutation as new evidence comes in".
It doesn't seem to me, from either the Aaronson review or the NR review, as if the Chan & Ridley book does anything much like that. (To a good approximation, no one ever does anything much like that, and it's a pity.)
Considering the current political climate between US and china, supporting a non-lab origin is slowly becoming the contrarian idea.
I wonder if the authors discuss the evolution of the virus since it was first leaked/mutated. For example , eventhough it is believed, as the authors say, furin cleavage is a key to the virus' transmissibility, a computational study of the Omicron variant suggests the furin cleavage site has evolved for less efficient replication of the virus[1] (but still more transmissible due to immunity escape).
beyond the flashy politics, the lab leak hypothesis is terrifying as it means that someone can create a worldwide crisis by doing relatively well understood modifications to existing viruses, and the world is clearly not prepared for such biodefense attacks. We should be talking about the day-after covid and what measures we need to prevent such rapid worldwide spread of pathogens.
> beyond the flashy politics, the lab leak hypothesis is terrifying as it means that someone can create a worldwide crisis by doing relatively well understood modifications to existing viruses, and the world is clearly not prepared for such biodefense attacks. We should be talking about the day-after covid and what measures we need to prevent such rapid worldwide spread of pathogens.
Scientists have been able to create viruses in a lab for some time now, e.g. it's pretty well-known how to create smallpox from scratch. None of this is new. The point is, as the pandemic has shown, it makes a really lousy bioweapon when the whole world gets infected. Even if you're a psycho and your goal is total world destruction, a pandemic still sucks for your goals because a comparatively teeny percentage of people actually die.
We really need to start working to de-politicize as many things as we can. Maybe this one can be a start because the politicization of COVID has a literal body count. Next could be climate change, which should be reframed as an engineering problem not a moral problem or a guilt trip.
Politicization of very consequential things is inevitable and desirable. If you say "don't politicize trade", and attempt to make it a technocratic matter about trade treaties and comparative advantage and such, you'd be rightly laughed out of the room. Why should a response to a pandemic be different?
To put another way: "de-politicize" simply means "don't discuss in the public realm".
Hardly. Humans are not first and foremost political creatures. The notion that "everything is political" didn't get as extreme as it is now until recent years. It's made society far more combative because it's made life revolve around the accumulation of power.
There's still room for curiosity. We don't have to focus exclusively on who gains or loses power in every interaction.
I used to look at politics as some “side effect” of humans working together when in fact it’s just a necessary component.
Politics is simply leadership, persuasion, communication, debate all wrapped up together. It’s neither good nor bad, but just a necessary component to large groups of humans working together.
Climate change is already politicized, because it costs money to take it seriously. Some people will loose money on taking it seriously, so they have to politicize it.
> The politicization of the pandemic will in the future perhaps be looked upon as our civilization's greatest mistake.
I don't believe this is a civilisational-wide mistake -- more so an issue with a handful of relatively small (by population) countries trying to leverage this event.
Civilisation obviously extends way beyond those, say the 5% of the planet's population that live in the USA for example, but certainly there's some lessons to be learned here.
> And one point Viral makes abundantly clear is that, if our goal is to prevent the next pandemic, then resolving the mystery of COVID-19 actually matters less than one might think. This is because, whichever possibility—zoonotic spillover or lab leak—turns out to be the truth of this case, the other possibility would remain absolutely terrifying and would demand urgent action as well. Read the book and see for yourself.
This logic does not convince me. If it did come from lab leak, there are lots of things the scientific community need to do to themselves to prevent the next lab leak from happening. It's defenitely not the same as a zoonotic spillover. Scientists are not wild animals, they can regulate themselves.
If the virus did leak from one of the two Wuhan labs, at least these actions need to be taken:
* All the Chinese labs doing this kind of research need to be seriously examined by the international community
* All the bio research funding from the western countries to China labs need to be stopped and only can be restarted with serious conditions met
I think their point is that the leak has a plausible route - and whatever protections we would institute were that to have been true - we still should implement - precisely because they could have been true.
In many safety contexts, the strong possibility of an accident is often considered as the failure - not just the accident itself.
> a global pandemic far worse than any in living memory
I beleive author means that 1918 Spanish flu, with death toll of 25m to 50m according to different sources, is something no on living today has a memory of.
But smallpox death toll in XX century was about 300m, and there are a lot of people alive with memories of it.
It's really over time that they subpoenaed Daszak and acquired and published all records from EcoHealth. I realize that would be annoying for them but really with millions dead the right to know what went on should take priority.
I'm just happy that critical discussion around SARS-nCoV-2 and related politics isn't instantly being flagged on Hacker News anymore ;)
There is a lot of brainpower and a surprising variety of experience on this list.
You could disprove it by finding the non lab animal it came from. For instance with SARS 1, pretty much as soon as they looked they found it had come from palm civets at the local market so no one was hypothesising lab leaks on that one. However this time 80k + animals tested, nothing like that found.
For another perspective on this I recommend Peter Daszak etc. in the This Week in Virology podcast explaining their efforts to trace the origin of COVID19:
I linked to the full thing for people with a genuine interest in the subject. Going into tit for tat would not really be helpful nor convince anyone as this is already deeply buried in politics.
The people who did the phase 1 report were amongst the best in their fields and did a good faith effort. Unfortunately people did not like their boring conclusion and prefer politics and speculation instead.
> And one point Viral makes abundantly clear is that, if our goal is to prevent the next pandemic, then resolving the mystery of COVID-19 matters less than one might think. This is because, whichever possibility—zoonotic spillover or lab leak—turns out to be the truth of this case, the other possibility would remain absolutely terrifying. Read the book and see for yourself.
Apparently the book does not only focus on lab leaks.
This is buried, but I do think people would care if they could see it because it delegitimizes the very valid reasons to investigate the lab leak hypothesis. Nobody cares if you have a personal vendetta against a country, and it will end up distracting from the fact that, whether this came from a lab or a marketplace, the fact that we can't answer which was the source means the rational response is to take the precautions that would be warranted as if it came from BOTH.
Only if they are both equally likely, which they really aren't. It's more like 99.5% natural, 0.5% lab leak. Or even less. The lab leak is mostly a very popular hypothesis in circles that don't really do science. You can spend all the effort to write a book about it but in reality the biology of zooonosis is well understood and has been established many times in very recent history, including for coronaviruses very much like this one. To hypothesize a lab leak would require some evidence other than the circumstantial, and this book presents none.
Scott is primarily interested because it allows him to crow 'I told you so', but in fact the substance that he sees simply isn't there. The superlatives with which he describes the book do not come across as unbiased reviewing but as searching for confirmation.
We already have a good definition of exotic animal trading so we don't need to strawman any larger scope here.
I 100% support the shutdown of exotic animal trading. From the Wuhan wet markets carrying animals from the corners of the globe for supposed medicinal benefits to the idiots in the west with pet tigers.
What do "Wuhan wet markets" have to do with anything?
From the article:
The seafood market was almost certainly “just” an early superspreader site, rather than the site of the original spillover event. No bats or pangolins at all, and relatively few mammals of any kind, appear to have been sold at that market, and no sign of SARS-CoV2 was ever found in any of the animals despite searching.
It was received knowledge well before 11/21, I remember well from that morning on NPR [0]. I read that article and the academic paper [1] behind it. There is nothing there other than thin correlation. No evidence to say a single zoonotic exposure occurred, much less many over several months, over that human to human transmission occurred there. Correlation is great for starting an investigation such as Snow’s [2]. After the map Snow established causation and a mechanism, Worobey does nothing.
This is Alina Chan, one of the authors of the book.
Thank you very much for your thorough review of our book :)
On the Laos connection, I made a thread on Twitter to lay out the latest findings about virus samples being sent directly from Laos to Wuhan over several years: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1476231824267485190?s=20
I hope this is a good update on that point.
Happy new year!