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.

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 around 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 via the furan cleavage site to perform gain og function research, 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?

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.

Maybe bio weapons could be tested on organ-on-a-chip/body-on-a-chip systems?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Actually, it's more difficult to prove a wild origin than a lab origin, because labs have papertrails and witnesses.

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.

>because labs have papertrails and witnesses

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.

Chinese lab paper trails are as trustworthy as Trump’s toilet paper roll trails if we are being honest.

> 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.

Actually, my first though would be that there were other outbreaks, but we only documented the one in Atlanta because the CDC happened to be there.

We should expect that the first outbreaks documented are those that happen to be close to facilities capable of identifying and documenting them.

wiv was not documenting them. Hospitals were documenting flu like cases increasing at exponential rages. And there are hospitals everywhere

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.

In fact, if a new flu came out from Atlanta I would immediately suspect an Emory grad student working in the CDC labs.

(Not to knock Emory students, I love them, but Emory has a relationship with the CDC and grad students can be cavalier)

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)

> there's a 19 bp sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent

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?

No. The patent in question: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9587003B2/en

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.

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.

> If SARS-Cov-2 was from a lab, what about the original SARS?

And MERS. It’s not like coronaviruses causing epidemics were very surprising at the time.

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.

You're right of course.

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.

>That was before anyone in the news was saying that.

May be in the west? It was certainly well publicised in other regions.

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

My priors include none of the agencies having expertise in epidemiology.

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.

Why would you think that?

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.

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.

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.

In the run-up to the second Iraq war there were a steady trickle of articles documenting the corruption of the intelligence process.

>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.

That is very literally the opposite of what actually happened.

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.

Here’s an actual account from someone in the room that lays out the entire situation. https://youtu.be/5iNrGhmr5p0

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans

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.

The CIA was very skeptical about the WMD story and there were lots of leaks that made that clear.

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.

Can you please share the reasons why you are skeptical?

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.

Can you elaborate on point 4? Your comment is interesting but I don't entirely follow.

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.

Doesn't the same difficulty of finding the first case also apply to the wet market theory?

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.

Yep.

My prior is that it is a zoonotic spillover event. Not necessarily that one, though there is some good evidence for it.

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)

>no similar reports

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...

Spain paper was not peer-reviewed.

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.

The main database of samples and viral sequences of the Wuhan Institute of Virology went offline on Sep 12th 2019.

That's a smoking gun. And next month it was likely already circulating in Wuhan (https://www.reuters.com/world/china/first-covid-19-case-coul...), coincidence.

> 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.

No, it doesn't. Quote from the article:

> 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.

Satellite images of Wuhan may suggest coronavirus was spreading as early as August 2019:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52975934.amp

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/08/health/satellite-pics-cor...

Would it mean it was active earlier but a critical mass was needed to cause a pandemic? Or it evolved in humans while circulating Wuhan?

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.

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.

You might not be certain they're definitive, but she is:

> 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.

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.

The hospital was full.

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.

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.

The hospital, sure.

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.

The virus evolved in an AIDS patient.

> 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.

Lol people were getting called racist for suggesting it was anything less than the spawn of a bat and an asian water racoon.

It still isn't even acceptable to acknowledge the (blatant) possibility that Omnicron was intentionally leaked because of low vaccine effectiveness.

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.

“as an infectious disease epidemiologist”

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?

Everyone is a Bayesian these days; it's become so fashionable to throw "priors" around like it means anything.

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.

> Are the FBI or DOE assessments public?

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...

I think you are confusing “lab leak” with “lab made.”

No, the academic papers that were published strongly pointed to the origin being the market and from wild animals, not lab animals.

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.

I guess everyone loves a good conspirancy.

I think you're referring to this paper (or other similar analyses):

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.

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.

They sold lots of animals, but they found no viruses in the animals themselves right? Sampling found it in the environment, but not in the animals?

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

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.

> 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.

[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...

The disease might have already been global at that point, it doesn't exactly have conspicious symptoms. Wuhan was a plce 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:

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.

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...

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

Actually, we probably can never prove that. Could the animals have come to the market via the lab?

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.

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.

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.

Most accurately, lab leak and spillover event are not mutually exclusive theories.

...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.

> Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world

Does COVID being a “plague” jibe with the talking point that COVID is “no worse than a cold”

We just recently learned that even the violent subset of insurrectionists were actually heroes protecting free speech. When such fundamental assumptions can be shaken, I'm prepared to believe that a plague can be no worse than a cold. /s

And don’t forget that TikTok should be banned and now it should be saved.

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

And China should be investigated for phone hacks but now that should stop.

And we should should subpoena Cassidy Hutchinson but actual no cause some of us sent unsolicited sexual threats/messages.

“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

Actually, the violent ones were BLM, Antifa, and FBI (according to the same set of people).

Truth is whatever you want it to be!

Clarifying:

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?

>while heavily armed and overrunning the White House

You are not a serious person.

I think that was sarcasm?

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.

Well, the only people who attempted to overrun the White House were BLM aligned rioters on 5/29. But assuming you meant the Capitol building and got your facts confused:

- most of the pardoned people did no such thing

- there’s irregularities in the prosecution, including not providing evidence, for which the normal remedy is acquittal (as in the Baldwin shooting case)

- time held without prosecution is excessive for many of the alleged crimes, such as trespassing

- the primary charge utilized (interfering in a process) was ruled by the Supreme Court to be total nonsense by the prosecutors clearly misinterpreting the law

- the FBI concluded there was no insurrection or planned attack

- one of the people we have on video urging people to go into the Capitol, including at the perimeter fence as crowd overran it, was mysteriously removed from the FBI wanted list and never prosecuted

- Democrat aligned mobs routinely invade the Capitol building without facing similar charges

- not directly related, but the Congressional panel investigating the matter deleted their records and accepted pardons for their actions, which according to the Supreme Court is an admission of guilt

All of that together points to a prosecution more akin to a modern Reichstag Fire than justice. When considering in the broader context of the year, where billions in arson attacks and dozens of murders by Democrat aligned street gangs weren’t prosecuted, the harsh prosecutions of people who merely attended the event and walked around without causing harm gives a strong indication this was politically motivated.

> - 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.)

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.

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 actually 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.

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

They were also agents provocateur sent by the FBI

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.

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.

Sure they could, they seem to be using chatgpt for executive orders so why not this.

> 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.

Could be that too. But that’s not a flattering comparison!

Investigation of multiple hypothesis simultaneously is the norm, not an exception.

> Investigation of multiple hypothesis simultaneously is the norm, not an exception

Multiple conclusions, not multiple investigations.

This assumes operatives haven’t been working on this plan long before the regime took office.

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.

What change in “biases?” You think a government agency put together a new assessment in four days?

What is clear is that Ratcliff wants the lab leak theory to be true

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.

And, as per the article, the Biden admin did order reinvestigations.

Because they didn’t get the answer they wanted. lol.

or maybe this is one of a thousand studies they performed, and they threw it out because it wasn’t found to be credible

Could be.

> 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.

> If we knew for certain that covid began in the Wuhan lab, it would be World War 3.

1. why?

2. that attitude strongly disincentives the discovery of the truth. If that were true I would support a cover up!

"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 same reason arson is worse than a wild fire.

Arson implies intent, leak does not

Intent is a good word, and the right question. What's the intent of a bio security lab? What's the intent of gain of function research?

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.

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 of 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.

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.

> 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.

> It's so strange to demand so much more proof of lab origin than one does of non-lab origin.

It's not, zoonotic transmission has happened many times, lab leak is the extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence

You just set an arbitrary bar that that is higher for the lab leak based on an “everybody knows” argument. That’s not science, it’s faith.

Prior probability estimates are not part of science?

Prior probability estimates of p = 0.083 are not extraordinary. As the sibling says one out of twelve past pandemics was a known lab leak.

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_

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").

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).

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...

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.

Apply the same reasoning with the start cutoff at 2010 then

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.

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?

> 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.

Not that it was the start of a pandemic, but the original SARS leaked from labs in China twice.[1]

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/

As an example of a lab escape of a novel virus (fortunately not leading to a pandemic) see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Marburg_virus_disease_out...

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.

> 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.

Can someone help me understand why a lab leak looks worse for China than zoonotic spillover? Why would Senator Cotton need it to be a lab leak to give him more leverage?

From what I understand, one theory is that China has for decades tolerated unsanitary wet markets that allowed dangerous diseases to evolve, get stronger, and eventually transmit to human hosts. They'd been warned about this over and over again and had failed to implement the required policies, leading to a preventable pandemic.

The alternative theory has China accidentally letting a disease leak from a lab.

From my perspective, if anything the lab leak theory is the one that makes China look better: at least it emphasizes that it resulted from China's scientific pursuits and not their lack of health codes!

Why would the China hawks need a lab leak in order to China hawk?

Because a lab leak could imply that China had a direct, active role in cultivating or engineering the virus, as opposed to the “mere” disastrous negligence entailed by the wet market theory.

That this is someone's fault and they can be punished is, I think, the reason people want it to be true. Rather than the world is a terrifying place that sometimes kills millions.

Occam's razor in this situation is the people people claiming the lab leak theory is most likely are interested in the truth and feel that a lab leak is the most probable cause. It never made sense either way to see how the virus came into existence to be a political question.

Whether or not someone gets punished is largely irrelevant. It isn't like 1 billion people in China would have sat down and decided to violate lab safety protocols; there'd be some supervisor somewhere who made mistakes. What happens to such a hypothetical person is irrelevant in the scheme of the damage the virus caused.

It sure seemed like a lot of people wanted the other theory to be true also though didn't it? I think the biggest driver for the lab leak arguments is backlash.

Both theories would presumably have people that are culpable due to violating safety rules designed to prevent exactly what happened. But I suppose a lab screwing up is more embarrassing to China than a hick selling wild animals or whatever illegally.

Theoretically, a lab leak should be considered less embarrassing than a hick selling wild animals perfectly legally - wet markets that sell even wild animal meat are legal in China (and other places in the world) in spite of the known dangers of this practice. And people making a mistake while intentionally working with dangerous substances/organisms is also seen as more explicitly culpable than the more distributed blame of people allowing a known dangerous traditional practice to continue, wherein the participants are not aware that they are performing dangerous experiments.

But of course, there is considerable bias to view traditional practices like wet markets more favorably than modern practices like virology labs. So, in reality, the virus leaking from a virology lab would be found far more condemnable than the virus being contracted randomly at a wet market.

Failing to enforce basic health codes is not a random act of God, it's a failure to perform the minimum functions of a state. It's not a single individual's fault, true, but these wet markets are not some obscure corner shop that managed to dodge regulation, their existence would not be tolerated in any developed country.

The zoonotic theory has no evidence to support it whatsoever. It's the viral equivalent of the 'Magic Bullet.'

- No samples were ever found, nor were any sick animals, in the market where it supposedly started. Period. Nothing.

- No evidence of genetic mutations and variants leading up to crossover, no intermediary host ever found.

- It just happened to start infecting people in the city of a lab which had been doing extremely similar experiments AND had issues with releases before.

- WHO rushed the investigation, involved Chinese scientists in the investigation, and the Chinese government did not cooperate in any way, shape, or form - no samples, no lab data, nothing. It was just "trust us." And everyone dusted off their hands and said "well, no evidence. Done then!"

The world's governments pushed the "zoological crossover" theory because the only alternative would be...what? Accusing the world's largest source of manufactured goods of killing 8 million people? And what would we do, exactly?

Level economic sanctions against a country producing most of the world's stuff? That is by and large quite self sufficient, far more so than most nations?

The initial outbreak cases were clustered around the wet market, not around WIV, and the cases weren't linked to WIV. There was a documented lab leak with SARS-CoV-1 and it killed the affected researcher's mother. That'd the kind of thing you expect to see in a lab leak. Instead you see a cluster of cases that look exactly like it spilled over from the wet market.

And there's zero evidence to support the lab leak. All the research they were doing on live virus was based on SARS-CoV-1. You can't get SARS-CoV-2 out of that. And while they sequenced RaTG-13, there is no evidence they ever had live virus, and RaTG-13 is still around a thousand mutations and a few decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2.

The research on “clustering” in the market is extremely flimsy. It relies on government data sources and very small sample sizes.

> There was a documented lab leak with SARS-CoV-1 and it killed the affected researcher's mother. That'd the kind of thing you expect to see in a lab leak.

SARS-1 had a CFR of 11% over all ages, 55% for >65. That's about 10x as deadly as SARS-CoV-2. The situations are thus not comparable--with SARS-CoV-2, we'd expect much more cryptic spread before someone gets sick enough to seek medical attention, and illness much more easily misdiagnosed as flu.

There's also zero question that the WIV had unpublished viruses during the pandemic, since they just published 56 new sequences collected "between 2004 and 2021". So do you really think it's impossible that they actually had 57?

Sequences aren't live virus and don't require live virus.

The article I read indicated a number of researchers did become ill and die in the right timeframe, with the wet market they routinely visited following that.

The article that was written in the NYT by the same author that wrote the "yellow cake uranium in Niger" article that was the basis for the Iraq War.

I don't give that a lot of credit.

Pretty sure I read it on Vox, but it might have been a republishing of the same AP or Reuters source. It was a kind of retrospective of how problematic it is when someone so wrong about so many things is right about something.

You might want to check out the rootclaim debates or the preprint by Cilibrasi and Vitányi (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.22.216242v1....) with code - https://github.com/rudi-cilibrasi/ncd-covid

Right. It fits well with the Anglosphere’s concept of compensible negligence.

China had a duty to run the lab safely, it breached that duty, and so China is responsible for the harms and losses caused by its negligence.

Missouri actually filed suit against China, and it is set to go to trial next week. It will be interesting to watch. If Missouri were to get a judgement for all the costs created by the virus, it could theoretically collect Chinese-owned assets in the US.

And, the news has been full of stories about one particular Chinese asset the US would like to have held in the US: TikTok.

What I don't really get is why that concept doesn't apply to both the wet market and the lab leak scenarios.

Think about it this way: if a French tourist gets a severe toxinfection while eating in a seedy restaurant in some corner of the USA, would the French state, or even the family of the person, sue the US government for failing to enforce health codes / not having good enough health codes? Would you seriously imagine that trial happening and being successful?

Conversely, say the same person got equally badly sick while visiting a friend who works in a US government lab that researches and deals with live viruses. Wouldn't you feel the US government has a higher chance of losing a suit on this?

Most people grasp the reasonableness standard for running a disease lab: you were negligent if the diseases break containment, because lab standards should be in place to prevent that obvious risk.

Under the wet market scenario, it's not instinctively clear to me what was unreasonable about the practices of the vendors at the market. Does selling bats more likely than not result in spreading disease? Or selling bats in proximity to pangolins? It seems like the vendors were doing the same thing vendors have done for millennia, not doing something unusually or obviously substandard.

If it could be blamed on "China", it could as well be blamed on "the US" for having also funded that lab, and likely having been responsible for what security measures it would have.

And more realistically, if it was a lab leak, it was likely some lab technician being careless, or some thing breaking and whoever was responsible, not fixing it quickly enough.

Except for the part they left out which is that the lab was being funded by the US government and its GoF research directed by a US nonprofit entity with strong ties to the NIH.

Or less nefarious: that they mishandled an extracted virus /someone got bitten by a bat in the lab and was allowed to leave without quarantine.

No it wouldn't imply that at all. The same animals ending up in wet markets could have ended up in labs. Nothing to imply it was engineered, which is a whole other level of culpability. Sucks that so many people are itching to make this leap.

> lab leak could imply that China had a direct, active role in cultivating or engineering the virus, as opposed to the “mere” disastrous negligence entailed by the wet market theory

This was literally outsourced US DoD research...

The lab in question is BSL-2* while viruses like this are supposed to be researched in BSL-3*. If it was a lab leak, they were using insufficient safety protocols to keep the virus contained. It also implies they're probably still doing the same for much worse viruses.

*I think these were the levels, I'm going from memory.

There are two campuses in Wuhan. One has BSL-3 facilities, the other BSL-4. Not all work is done at the highest BSL available for cost and practicality reasons though. American rules were that research on agents in the same classification as COVID is BSL-3, but routine diagnostic work is only BSL-2. Chinese researchers classified both at BSL-2.

I wrote this awhile ago on a previous thread about this:

To my mind, there are a few reasons why people are so fixated on the lab leak thing

1) It makes the pandemic deterministic (bad lab security means an outbreak) instead of stochastic (wildlife spillover). That is, to be frank, even as an epidemiologist who is very skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis, a comforting thought.

2) It's a popular topic in the Substack/Medium set, because it moves the pandemic back into their wheelhouse of expertise, international relations, policy, etc. It becomes a human problem with human solutions.

3) It appeals to the contrarian mindset.

4) All of the lab leak papers at least attempt to show definitive proof. In contrast, actually finding the source of spillover events is the work of decades (and isn't always or even often successful). "Science is slow and uncertain" is a less compelling narrative.

There's a greater burden of proof for spillover when there just happens to be a lab doing virus research near the epicenter of the outbreak.

There have been two other spillover events from coronaviruses in the last 30 years. One of those (SARS) was from Chinese wet markets.

Wuhan has a population of 13 million. It would be surprising if the city didn't have a lab doing virus research.

The WIV had the single largest collection of novel sarbecoviruses in the world. There's zero question that the UNC and WIV wished to engineer those sarbecoviruses to produce an enhanced virus broadly similar to SARS-CoV-2, in their unfunded DEFUSE proposal. An unconfirmed intelligence leak further claims that work was actually performed, at the WIV only.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/inside-wuhan-lab-covid-p...

Lots of cities have "a lab doing virus research". There's no reason to shift to that broader category except willful obfuscation, though.

As to prior spillovers, proximal hosts have been identified for those other two coronaviruses (SARS-1 and MERS), for both within a ~year of emergence. For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting.

> There's no reason to shift to that broader category except willful obfuscation

It's to point out the earlier argument that the mere presence of a virology lab in a large city should be a point of suspicion.

> An unconfirmed intelligence leak further claims that work was actually performed

And how much should we trust unconfirmed intelligence leaks?

> For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting.

Part of what's different here is that the entire world shut down, and the trail went cold.

I understand the desire to blame someone, but the features of the virus are all things that have evolved in naturally in other coronaviruses. The amount of mixing that happens in a single human body in a lingering infection dwarfs what labs do in a year.

Even the most "suspicious" thing about the virus, the furin cleavage site, seems to be something with a natural evolutionary path: https://bmcgenomdata.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...

> It's to point out the earlier argument that the mere presence of a virology lab in a large city should be a point of suspicion.

But we know it's not just "a virology lab", which indeed is not uncommon. It's the world's largest collection of related viruses, and one of only two sites in the world (with UNC) known to have proposed to enhance a sarbecovirus by genetic engineering. That's a much narrower thing.

The comment that you responded to used carelessly broad language, but I did not. So why have you reverted to that?

> Even the most "suspicious" thing about the virus, the furin cleavage site, seems to be something with a natural evolutionary path:

That's one researcher's unfalsifiable speculation, and the unusual coding has also been proposed as evidence of genetic engineering. I think the ability of genomic evidence to resolve that question of origin has been generally overstated by both sides. After DEFUSE it's certainly not evidence against lab origin, though.

The reality is that we don't know. The CIA's updated position is "lab" with "low confidence", and both parts of that seem correct to me. Public opinion has swung further towards lab origin than I would; but after years of smearing anyone who entertained that possibility as a conspiracy theorist and banning their social media accounts, it's no surprise to see a backlash.

Almost all origin theories "blame someone", since the usual alternative to lab origin is trafficking of wildlife known (from SARS-1) to present high risk. So I don't think that bit of amateur psychoanalysis explains much.

There are 42 BSL-4 facilities in the world. I'm too lazy to do the math, but I'm curious what percent of the world's population is near one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#List_of_BSL-4_...

One of these BSL4 had major incident on Sep 16 2019, just before start of epidemic.

If the work on coronaviruses that WIV was doing was at BSL-4, I'd be more skeptical of a lab leak origin. It was being done at BSL-2; see Ralph Baric's testimony covered in this Vanity Fair article:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-...

Even in the wildlife spillover case don't you still blame it on people doing business with bat carcasses or was there some kind of obviously fine as an animal product intermediary between the bats and the people?

Edit: name checks out.

>It makes the pandemic deterministic

I don't understand why determinism comforts you, but you do you. Unfortunately, a lab leak is totally stochastic, and I hope this revelation doesn't keep you up at night.

>It's a popular topic ... because it moves the pandemic back into ... policy, etc. It becomes a human problem with human solutions.

Zoonosis is a wet market hypothesis, not a random encounter. China failed, and continues to fail, to ban or regulate the wet markets to solve the problem. Zoonosis is clearly policy and human problem.

>It appeals to the contrarian mindset.

The lab leak appeals to anyone who groks statistics. Wet market zoonosis could happen at any one of 40,000 Chinese wet markets. But a lab leak could only happen at one of ~2 Chinese laboratories. Zoonosis happens more overall, but lab leaks are more probable in the direct vicinity of the lab specializing in collecting and studying samples of this exact family of viruses.

>finding the source of spillover events is the work of decades

The reservoirs for both SARS and MERS were found quickly with much less interest. The probability of the lab leak increases every day that we don't the reservoir. Worse, at this point even finding a reservoir isn't definitive, because we would need to establish that the reservoir predates the pandemic, and that it didn't spillover into the animal population from humans.

Given all publicly available information, the lab leak is far more likely. The uncertainty is very high, because China destroyed or concealed the data. Unless someone's memoirs leak it in 50 years, it's unlikely that we'll ever know.

That's one way to look at it. Another is that a lab leak makes the government seem much more culpable, since they would presumably have more direct control over the activities of government funded scientists. In any case, I think world governments have been reluctant to endorse theories that place more blame on the Chinese government for fear of forcing them into a defensive posture and risking a larger confrontation. But there are also those who desire such a confrontation. That makes it hard to trust the motives that any given party might have for promoting one theory or another.

At the end of the day, all that any sane person should care about is preventing another similar pandemic.

It may be true that other states don't want to antagonize them, and that may also be why we don't see enough emphasis placed on how absurd it is that China has allowed these wet markets to exist so long. Imposing a basic set of health codes is a very fundamental task of any government, and their inability or unwillingness to do so does not reflect well on them.

If anything, one reason why the China hawks may prefer the lab leak theory is because it makes China look more threatening than the alternative: the we-couldn't-enforce-basic-health-codes version of the story doesn't mesh well with the image we have in the West of the CCP as an all-powerful Big Brother that has complete control over every aspect of their citizens' lives. It instead projects a CCP that can barely perform the minimum functions of a state, which is harder to be afraid of.

Same reason Senators claimed American blood was spilled on American soil in ~1835 in the Mexican state of Tejas, which we now call Texas. Notably, Abraham Lincoln demanded proof, but the senate was too happy to see manifest destiny come about even on lies. Fast forward ~200 years and you're starting to hear the same things.

Lax health codes mean the virus came about through sheer (bad) luck, by a bunch of "dumb hicks". The US doesn't have to do anything to compete with a bunch of yokels with bad hygiene. We have those in the US too. But if it came from a lab, using advanced technology that the west doesn't have, China goes from being more than where shitty knockoffs come from, to a much scarier boogieman that requires us to give more money to the military-industrial complex.

Yeah, I think this hits closer to home: the zoonotic origins story makes the Chinese government look incompetent. They actually are much less competent than Western popular culture likes to paint them, but emphasizing that doesn't provide a very effective external threat to rally the masses against.

A lab leak plays into the stereotypical German or Russian mad scientist trope of the 20th century: the incredibly powerful supervillain who in their hubris (nearly) destroys the world.

"Can someone help me understand why a lab leak looks worse for China than zoonotic spillover?"

I'm sorry but we can't this is something you need to figure out on your own. Just think about it for a couple of minutes I'll sure it will be evident.

Here's a couple of hints: what's the difference between negligence and malice?

What is a bioweapon?

Even if there's no malicious intent, assuming only scientific or productive purposes, risk there's responsibility, liability that doesn't occur in natural zoonotic scenarios. See chernobyl.

It's the difference between an act of omission and comission, in one the government and people would be responsible for not hav8ng sanitation, in the other for actively playing with fire. see the trolley problem

Why don't you just answer the question? A lab leak makes China look incompetent.

It means sick animals infecting lab staff. It doesn't make it look malicious, it doesn't mean engineered bioweaponry, actively playing with fire or any other unsupported conspiracy nonsense.

>Just think about it

This always proceeds a cogent point.

>what's the difference between negligence and malice?

Wrong, these are both theories of Chinese negligence. Did you mean the difference in culpability for positive and negative action? The lab leak is negative action by the Chinese government, and positive action by some subset of the Chinese citizenry. Zoonosis is positive action by the Chinese government. China (government U citizenry) are 100% culpable either way.

Malice only appears in fringe theories about intentional release, which isn't a lab leak by definition.

I don't think it's an attack on China. It's a political attack on Fauci, who became public enemy #1 for conservatives early in the pandemic. They've been looking for reasons to blame him (oh, who just incidentally helped protect those dirty gay people during the AIDS crisis), and now our President has stripped him of security detail and announced he wouldn't feel responsible if something bad happened to him.

Lab leaks admit the possibility that China was developing a bioweapon. If you're a Chinahawk, this is something you'd be concerned about.

It's the difference between burning down the house because you were playing with fire indoors vs burning down the house because some cheaply bought electric appliance malfunctioned.

rootclaim gave the lab leak theory an 87% probability using Bayesian analysis back in 2020: https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV...

Which means what?

"Rootclaim" then bet $100,000 on being able to back that claim in a independant structured 18 hour long debate of their own devising .. and lost the $100,000.

The Rootclaim assessment was worthless.

See: https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses...

Or watch the entire 18 hour debate in which that claim was shredded.

Given your user profile about: it's easy to see why you might give weight to Saar Wilf's Rootclaim project .. championing this particular result while ignoring its full history seems professionally questionable.

Which means this; it gives further weight to the lab leak theory, and shows the reasoning behind it.

I don't have time to watch the 3hr debate or read all of that article (which makes some misrepresentative statements, and like your response, is rather venomous in tone), but here is the response from rootclaim about the debate outcome: https://blog.rootclaim.com/covid-origins-debate-response-to-...

I also know from experience that scientists, and people in general, are often not well trained in the kind of probabilistic reasoning that is required for combining and weighing up multiple sources of evidence.

> I don't have time to watch the 3hr debate

It was 18 hours.

Three blocks of six hours.

Plus preparation time by both parties and the multiple judges who were chosen to have the kind of expertise to weigh up arguments.

Both parties were invested in making a case, and each put up $100,000 in escrow to add weight to the debate.

The case that you put forward lost.

It was debated by the person that put it forward.

He lost.

I had a look at Eric Stansifer's write-up of his decision, but I didn't read all of it (83 pages!). He does seem to have a good understanding of Bayesian decision making and hypothesis testing.

What confuses me however, is his dismissal of two pieces of evidence in table 2 which he says should be ignored "following the presumption that HSM is the first SSE", and yet earlier, in footnote 24, he states "We are very specifically not conditioning on that place being HSM" (talking about the first SSE location). Can anyone enlighten me about this seeming contradiction?

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"

> 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.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2887442/

I will have to have a discussion with the editors of that page.

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)

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.

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.

Ex: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/vaccine-derived-p...

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.

If we actually care about public health, we should act as if both the lab leak and zoonosis theories are correct. We should take laboratory biosecurity, wet markets, the bush meat trade and intensive livestock management equally seriously as threats. We should do this because we have no idea where the next pandemic - and there will be a next pandemic - will come from.

It seems fairly clear to me that a lot of people are much more concerned about finding someone to blame for the last pandemic than about preparing for or preventing the next pandemic.

Agree, that's the only sane way to approach things. I worry that it's already relatively rare for people to realize that problems in general can be multi-causal, let alone that we can approach problems as probabilistically multi-causal. Placing blame, on the other hand, is something everyone understands.

The blame game is kind of like a variation of a bikeshed discussion, except it might lead to war.

War happens to be my least favourite colour for a bikeshed...

The problem is that the two theories can have competing indications as to how to prepare. Specifically: should we do gain of function research, or is that foolish — depends on how you read what happened in 2020.

I think the parent is arguing that lab leak is plausible, even if it wasn’t certainly the cause. GoF is foolish if you think the lab leak was remotely plausible.

Most folks had no idea about the sort of GoF being done, and the attitude of many researchers (highly dismissive of risks) should worry us a lot.

We should also be more worried about zoonotic transmission too, and press harder to ban wet markets.

I don't think these conclusions compete, that’s the point; the actual fact of the matter regarding origins doesn’t much affect the weight of the damning evidence.

> GoF is foolish if you think the lab leak was remotely plausible.

Even if you don’t think the lab leak was the source of COVID-19 virus, we know for a fact that lab leaks occur even at the highest level security facilities.

I’m not sure about gain of function research one way or the other, I’m just commenting that leaks will happen.

There's a couple of probability distributions we don't know. And whether this leaked in Wuhan or not doesn't affect them.

1. What's the probability distribution and damage distribution of GoF research lab leaks? It's not zero-- it likely has enormous long tail risk. But:

2. What's the probability distribution and damage distribution of not knowing as much about how gain of function happens in the wild? Because nature is doing some of these GOF experiments on its own, without much effort at containment.

The actual future risks don’t change based on which specific origin happened.

The correct response is likely to spend significantly more on doing actual research and a great deal on making sure everyone is well contained. It’s likely a good idea to locate such labs outside of highly populated areas as part of a defense in depth strategy.

The risks don't change. Our risk assessment accuracy changes.

> The correct response is likely to spend significantly more on doing actual research and a great deal on making sure everyone is well contained.

Strongly, strongly disagree. When even a teeny risk of escape means that millions of people could die, I think a much better argument is to simply make certain types of research completely off limits.

I'm certainly not the only person who thinks this. Zeynep Tufekci, who in my opinion had the most rational commentary during the pandemic, argued that much virus research just doesn't work from a cost/benefit analysis. For example, even if the root cause of COVID wasn't a lab leak, it's probably not a great idea having researchers milling around bat caves collecting sick bats and what not - it's very possible a zoonotic virus made the jump not necessarily in the lab but from researchers specifically looking for zoonotic viruses.

Looking at risks alone always biases you to avoid doing anything.

The benefits of research here are also human lives. So doing nothing has a real cost and the benefits extend indefinitely into the future.

Suppose you’re deciding between a 1% chance of a lab leak costing 10 million lives and a 20% chance you save 50 million lives over the next 100 years. That’s heavily weighted towards doing something, while still carrying significant risk. Some people would still say the risks aren’t worth it, but it’s not an obvious decision.

I think you need to discount possible farther future benefits, because so much change can intervene and make the analysis invalid.

That is, when people want to do something-- risks tend to be understated and possible future benefits tend to be overstated.

I don't back the precautionary principle, but I do think risk in cost-benefit analysis has to be viewed from a pretty cautious place, in general (not just science).

Ultimately, we don’t know the actual benefits and I just picked numbers from thin air to illiterate a point. But yea linear extrapolation of such estimates hundreds of years into the future is nonsense.

What is there to research with GoF that could be worth the massive risk? We had a vaccine for COVID in a weekend. Approval and manufacturing where the bottlenecks.

There’s a lot of GoF research on a lot of different diseases with a wide range of goals.

One goal for disease likely to cause pandemics is ultimately to create better treatments for those already infected. There’s a long lag between a vaccine being designed and scaling production and distribution to actually protect people. That means there’s going to be a lot of people infected in an outbreak, including many vaccinated people.

Are there any examples of medication that was developed for a disease that came out of GoF where the medication was approved and preventive mass production took place?

My understanding is success have come more from protocols more than medication.

Take antimicrobial resistance, you need to understand how microbes gain resistance by actually creating resistant bacteria/fungi etc before you can develop efficient countermeasures.

With COVID there was a lot of confusion around using masks and disinfecting public spaces in the early days. A better model of the disease could have been really useful both in the early days and how people responded to mixed messages.

The question of whether we should do gain-of-function research is a fairly complex cost/benefit analysis. The precise cause of the 2019 pandemic is only a very minor variable in that analysis, because that specific outcome doesn't change the underlying probability of a lab leak. More to the point, do we realistically believe that everyone will stop doing it, even if there's a credible international moratorium? If not, then we need to plan accordingly.

> The question of whether we should do gain-of-function research is a fairly complex cost/benefit analysis.

Has there ever been benefit to such research? People fall back on wishy-washy "we could learn ___" when trying to defend it, but with how long it's been going on have we ever actually had a solid benefit from it?

Isn't the above-the-board justification for gain-of-function the promise of built-for-purpose microbes? The dream of "we spilled a million litres of toxic soup, here's a jar full of bacteria that eat that stuff and poop out useful compounds" or "let's make a virus that selectively over-infects tumours to weaken them?"

We might have the usual problem with every high-powered technology, from the fission reaction to the silicon fab: the underlying science is viewpoint-neutral, but people will be overwhelmed by doom scenarios associated with it.

Gain-of-function in the virology context doesn’t mean creating helpful microbes/viruses. It means purposely engineering pandemic-caliber viruses so that (the theory goes) we find them before evolution produces them naturally and so have time to study them and create vaccines before they are widespread.

This seems to be one of the most dangerous propositions that I have ever heard of. Given human history, human psychology, human error, politics etc.

What am I missing here? That biolabs are the only human made thing that can be made absolutely 100% secure?

As far as I know you're not missing anything and this is why gain-of-function research was banned in the US for a while. EcoHealth Alliance outsourced it to China in the mid-2010s because of the ban, so technically none of it was happening in the US.

> It means purposely engineering pandemic-caliber viruses

This is not true.

GoF includes any research that amplifies specific characteristics. Transmissibility or severity of infection are just two of those possible dimensions.

For example, the research that enables us to produce insulin (and tons of other biologic medicines) with E. coli is GoF.

I lean on the side of banning GoF that's designed to increase transmissibility of a contagion, but that is indeed just a subset of GoF generally.

Fair enough that it has that meaning more generally in biology. My point is 100% of the policy discussions about it are referring to that particular subset—no one means producing insulin when they talk about the risks of GoF.

Yes but this is what causes confusion when scientists push back against proposed bans which seems like a legitimately insane and evil position to take.

We can sharpen the language and say "ban GoF research that increases transmissibility of infectious disease", for example.

I think the best term of art is ePPP (enhanced potential pandemic pathogens), which clearly limits that scope. Academics use that reasonably often, though politicians and the general public unfortunately don't yet.

There's also GOFROC (gain of function research of concern). That's better than just GOF, but rather vague.

This is useful! Thank you for chiming in :)

GoF pro: might help in some case, to the best of our knowledge never did. (Some scientists like their deadly toys!)

GoF contra: might cause a pandemic, kill millions, probably did.

So, yeah, I don't know, tough decision.

All sorts of medicines are manufactured using GoF'd E. coli. We need a tighter definition of "bad" GoF.

I guess research along the lines of "What if this microorganism was more dangerous (infectious, resistant, damaging) - well, let's try that!"

I’ve seen no compelling evidence gain of function has benefited us in any pandemic — or even a theoretical justification.

How, precisely, do you believe that gain of function will benefit us the next pandemic?

Edit:

Swap “aid” to “benefit us” for hopefully better clarity.

I haven't been following it closely but I am guessing the documents from the Select Committee were the closest thing to "compelling evidence"

The Intercept wrote an article about it: https://theintercept.com/2023/07/12/covid-documents-house-re...

It begins as:

House Republicans on the subcommittee probing the origin of the Covid-19 virus appear to have inadvertently released a trove of new documents related to their investigation that shed light on deliberations among the scientists who drafted a key paper in February and March of 2020. The paper, published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, was titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and played a leading role in creating a public impression of a scientific consensus that the virus had emerged naturally in a Chinese “wet market.” The paper was the subject of a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, which coincided with the release of a report by the subcommittee devoted to the “Proximal Origin” paper. It contains limited screenshots of emails and Slack messages among the authors, laying out its case that the scientists believed one thing in private — that lab escape was likely — while working to produce a paper saying the opposite in public.

The newly exposed documents include full emails and pages of Slack chats that were cropped for the report, exposing the “Proximal Origin” authors’ real-time thinking. According to the metadata in the PDF of the report, it was created using “Acrobat PDFMaker 23 for Word,” indicating that the report was originally drafted as a Word document. Word, however, retains the original image when an image is cropped, as do many other apps. Microsoft’s documentation cautions that “Cropped parts of the picture are not removed from the file, and can potentially be seen by others,” going on to note: “If there is sensitive information in the area you’re cropping out make sure you delete the cropped areas.”

When this Word document was converted to a PDF, the original, uncropped images were likewise carried over. The Intercept was able to extract the original, complete images from the PDF using freely available tools, following the work of a Twitter sleuth.

I phrased that poorly:

I understand how WIV could have caused a pandemic, but I don’t understand the other direction — how WIV doing gain-of-function would help the situation in which there was a zoonotic origin, eg at the wet market.

The person I was replying to said that our opinion on gain-of-function should depend on the origin — but I don’t understand how gain-of-function would have helped at all. Only how it poses a risk, whether or not this particular virus was such an example.

The theory is quite clear, if you know which strains could hop to humans then you can prioritize monitoring them, just like we monitor influenza types in animal populations now.

The problem is just that P(avert catastrophe) is fairly low, and P(create catastrophe) is substantially higher.

It's not about nature. It's about biological weapons. If Russians will create a new biological weapon (they do), then we must have a cure before they will use it in their fight with NATO. And they will use it even if millions of their own citizens will die.

> It's not about nature. It's about biological weapons. If Russians will create a new biological weapon (they do), then we must have a cure before they will use it in their fight with NATO.

And the best solution is to research this... in China?

Yep, another continent from the home is the best place for such kind of research.

If you want to research a cure from engineered virus from one hostile country, paying another hostile country to do virus engineering research for you is surely great logic.

China was not a hostile country in 2014, before Russians started the war.

I’m pretty sure there is funding on both sides; NIH vs DARPA for example. I suspect that NIH funds a lot more here and I’m skeptical that DARPA funds labs in China for this.

The experiments WIV were doing were specifically targeted at identifying wild-type viruses that could cross over. This is not where you would start for a bioweapon. (Unless, tinfoil hat, you want to start a pandemic that looks like a zoonotic event. But that’s not the threat model the US military is worried about in the research they fund.)

Oh, now I see what you mean.

I am not in the sector but AFAIK there has been no direct benefit from GoF. There is huge potential which some experts believe outweigh the risks, which is why it is controversial, and that is why it has been politicized.

Protecting the funding and ability to continue the research would explain why scientists have a preference for spillover as opposed to leak. Then there are the politicians...

Nobody in this thread seems to know what gain of function means. It's a very broad term covering a large percentage of all virology research. If you ban it, you might as well say that we don't want to do any research into understanding viruses from now on.

When you compare the massive risks of spillover from animal populations, which have millions of interactions with humans every minute of every day, with the risks from a small number of highly contained biology labs, the ratio between the two risks is so enormous that this entire discussion is absurd.

You're right that we should still do the research. But we should be doing it on an island, or a ship at sea, with supplies delivered by drone, and as little population exchange as possible.

That depends on whether the research increases the risk of a pandemic by any appreciable amount, compared to all the other things humans do.

It's kind of absurd that he have hundreds of millions of farmers and hunters interacting with infected animals every day, and nobody cares, but then we have a few researchers interacting with the same viruses under highly controlled conditions, and that's what we're worried about.

The reason is that people have watched too many sci-fi horror movies and listened to too many xenophobic / fear-mongering politicians who want to find scapegoats.

The problem with imposing even tighter conditions on research is that you end up making the research much more difficult, expensive, unattractive to actual scientists who have to live their lives. And all that for security theater, just to pander to ignorant politicians who won't actually be satisfied.

I don't know how you can read about the half dozen or more documented cases of lab leaks in this thread - regardless of what you believe about covid - and call heightened restrictions for experimental work with human-infectious viruses security theatre. It's not sci-fi horror movies folks are worried about, it's people making mistakes the way all people do. The way you seem to be doing.

We take the effort to air gap infected or security critical IT systems, but can't be bothered to air gap humanity from existential threats.

The examples of "lab leaks" being given in this thread are things like a large-scale human vaccine trial not using a properly inactivated virus. This is not a "lab leak" in anything like the sense of that is being alleged here.

> We take the effort to air gap infected or security critical IT systems, but can't be bothered to air gap humanity from existential threats.

My whole point is that we're not air-gapped in the first place. Millions of humans are interacting with infected animals every day, under conditions that are much less safe and controlled.

Imagine if all of your data had been leaked to the public internet, was mirrored across a dozen websites, and was being downloaded 1000 times a day, but then one security researcher had your data on an encrypted drive, and only read it on an air-gapped computer. Would you be more worried about the one security researcher, or the dozens of publicly accessible websites?

> If protecting all of humanity from the next pandemic is too much work for virologists, maybe it's best that they consider another career?

They are protecting you, and the thanks they get is that you scapegoat them, hound them online, and cheer when they get fired. You should be grateful that people like Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology worked so hard on understanding coronaviruses for decades, and warned about the risks of a pandemic. Instead, without any knowledge of the subject, you're participating in a witch hunt against her and her colleagues.

> My whole point is that we're not air-gapped in the first place. Millions of humans are interacting with infected animals every day, under conditions that are much less safe and controlled.

Factory farming is indeed a dangerous breeding ground for infectious disease which needs to be addressed. Farmers, however, are not performing gain of function research on the diseases in their herd. The largest danger of factory farms seems to be the widespread application of front line antibiotics, which is another issue entirely. Attempts to conflate the two are disingenuous at best. Unscientific whataboutism at worst.

> people like Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology worked so hard on understanding coronaviruses for decades, and warned about the risks of a pandemic. Instead, without any knowledge of the subject, you're participating in a witch hunt against her and her colleagues.

I've worked in science for more than a decade. I have lab experience. I have never named or witch hunted anyone as you seem to have. I have advocated for the most basic level of isolation of potentially dangerous experiments, and this is your response.

Thank you for demonstrating the arrogance which underlies the problem.

> Farmers, however, are not performing gain of function research on the diseases in their herd.

The phrase "gain of function" has become a general-purpose bogeyman, but 99% of the people using it have no idea what it means.

Farmers are interacting with viruses that are far more dangerous than the gain-of-function viruses. Gain-of-function experiments are generally just characterizing properties of viruses that already exist out in the wild. An effective way of doing that is to insert a component of the wild virus into a virus you can already grow and have characterized in the lab. The lab virus gains a function, but that function already exists in the wild.

> I have advocated for the most basic level of isolation of potentially dangerous experiments

Shi Zhengli and her colleagues are taking far more than the "most basic level" of precaution. Yet you're participating in the witch hunt against her and the virology community.

At the very least, we hopefully learned not to subsidize and encourage gain of function research at labs that were already known pre-Covid to have poor hygiene and containment practices.

Gain of function research in a lab you can't (and more damningly won't) prove had adequate precautions is bad regardless of the source of Covid or the utility of the research. We should be taking it as a wake up call to make sure standards are appropriate and the institutions to make sure those standards are met are strong.

If this wasn't a political problem, but me and my teammates dealing with the aftermath of an incident that cost the company serious money, that's how we'd approach it. But we are technicians trying to prevent a problem, with incentives very well aligned with the company.

Government committees just don't have anywhere near this level of goal alignment, and it's not as if there is a lot of media whose best interests aligns with prevention either. You aren't getting a lot of information in the future out of a group of people you badmouthed a year ago.

Well, assuming you’re part of the “we” that resides in the US, I think we’ve made it pretty clear we’re aren’t taking any of it seriously. Pulling out of the WHO is akin to burying our heads in the sand.

Sure, technically it “isn’t our problem” when some new disease breaks out in another country. But when (not if) it is eventually our problem, it’ll be a very big problem.

> It seems fairly clear to me that a lot of people are much more concerned about finding someone to blame for the last pandemic than about preparing for or preventing the next pandemic.

That's why avian flu was allowed ro spread to cows in 16 states.

It's also pretty clear in the article that the newly appointed head of the CIA is very politically motivated to endorse this conclusion.

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."

Two things to note:

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.

Sources?

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 is nothing wrong with that. You should worry about those, who do such experiments secretly. (Russians)

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?

Sources for this? Deserves it's own post if data are there to back it up

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.

Seriously, wouldn't have it been appropriate to do just the minimalistic wikipedia search before contributing to this thread?

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.

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.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Article-Principles-...

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.

Also in one article I read the intel or reading hadn’t changed? Just the reporting is open now

That's a two sided argument. You could also argue the prior view was being suppressed by the previous White House, for the same reasons.

There's not an equivalence between post-Cold War Democratic and Republican administrations manipulating intelligence. My evidence is the Iraq War and Valerie Plame.

Except those guys are all democrats now. My evidence is the Hunter Biden laptop CIA letter.

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.

Here's the full quote:

"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.

And then Liz Cheney deleted evidence and was pardoned. While the Russian conspiracy was proven a lie. And the Hunter laptop was proven real. And almost all things Trump was charged with also turned out false.

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.

But the quote is clearly referring to a theater of war, not a “firing squad.” Why misrepresent the quote?

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.

Trump threatened to invade and/or take over Denmark, Mexico, Canada and Panama.

I'm a Democrat; I'm upset about both.

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.

Isn't this practically an American election tradition at this point? The designated Republican at the DNC, and Democrat at the RNC?

Yes. And they chose a war hawk instead of all the others they could have grabbed.

It seems to me they chose the highest-profile Republican who would serve the role.

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.

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.

[0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2216179120

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!

Romney 2012 types are obviously not the marginal Democratic voter.

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.

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.

> We must be the exact same age.

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 done a bang up job, Iraq and Afghanistan aren't on us, and Trump's banging on NATO and creating some kind of comic book villain council of strongmen seem like obvious bad ideas. Strong disagree that Dems are now taking direction from Iraq/Afghanistan architects; I just don't see any evidence of that at all. Biden withdrew from Afghanistan at great political cost, after all.

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).

You can't tell someone you respect them in the same paragraph where you're accusing them of bad faith.

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?

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53106444

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7428442/

Sigh again this is where we were ending up.

> 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"__.

You have some interesting thoughts. But:

> 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.”

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

Log off and touch grass, man.

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.

Ah the “COVID wasn’t that bad” denial psychosis. Haven’t seen it in a while.

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.

Just more reasons for a trade war that is not good for anyone

Getting to the truth is a valid motivator for a bit over half of the country.