I knew that some people still think the market hypothesis is true (despite the lack of good evidence), I was more interested in the response to this particular testimonial? For example, did anyone push back on specific points?
I ran the doc through AI and asked it to form the strongest counter arguments it could muster. It didn’t do well and concluded lab leak was more likely than market.
1) We'll never actually know the answer
2) Even if we did, it wouldn't change anything about what we ought to do
There's no way China would be "punished" for something if it was a lab leak, and there's no way that [the actually dangerous end of] GoF research is a good risk-reward tradeoff anymore in light of instant mRNA vaccines.
Every breath spent pointing fingers on origin is another breath not spent on the remediations we have to do no matter who's responsible.
We feel differently about this. Personally, I find all the evidence collected so far quite compelling. And I believe humanity has a responsibility to our children to investigate all worldwide pandemics to the fullest extent possible.
> Even if we did, it wouldn't change anything about what we ought to do
Whether or not it would change what we ought to do, it would absolutely change what we actually do. I think there would be broad public support for increased safety procedures at a minimum. The testimony I linked offers additional suggestions.
Your scenario of ending all GoF research might be on the table, or might not, but there is a broad range of less dramatic options available. Among them, locating GoF research labs away from densely populated metropolitan areas and international airports.
I actually think the obsession with root cause makes it less likely we'll create the interventions we need. First because it suggests to people that the root cause of this pandemic changes the risk calculation for future pandemics (it doesn't) and secondly because the mitigations of one root cause are distinct from the mitigations for another. And we actually need to mitigate both zoonotic and lab leak threat vectors.
> Your scenario of ending all GoF research might be on the table
To be clear I did not suggest this. GoF is an extremely broad term which includes e.g. mutating E. coli to produce insulin or other biologics. Increasing contagiousness of a lethal agent or increasing lethality of a contagious agent should become much more of a no-go zone though. That's a small subset of GoF research.
> locating GoF research labs away from densely populated metropolitan areas and international airports.
We should do this regardless of whether this pandemic came from a lab.
Sadly, the funding to do so will not be made available without reason. Reason which could come from determining the root cause.
So your fixation on root causing is having precisely the effect that I mention, which is preventing mitigation.
Friend, I don't seem to be the one with a fixation here. Please avoid personal attacks.
It's not a personal attack, it is referring to a belief that you stated you have.
Not sure what's triggering about "fixation" but feel free to swap out any of the above phrases.
No, I'm not sure any of those phrases fit a casual conversation on a message board.
> Not sure what's triggering
Are you triggered? I'm not triggered. I just posted a link, and responded when prompted.
And more subtle issues along those lines.
It's a bit like an air crash investigation. You have several million killed and want to understand what happened so as to try to prevent the next one.
This is like saying it's important to know whether the last dice roll was a 2 before you decide whether to bet on a 4 or 6 coming up next.
It's a bit like looking at the 737-MAX crashes and saying the investigation was pointless. Planes should be designed not to crash regardless, don't you agree?
Brilliantly put.
If so, yes, focusing on debugging a 737-MAX crash that happened to be completely full and hit an occupied building on the ground (therefore extra horrific/attention-grabbing) would be pointless.
Doubly so if the evidence required to root cause it was evaporated upon impact.
Triply so if people decided they had to know what caused that specific crash before they could address the probabilistic falling of airplanes out of the sky.
This statement and others you've made about dice and probability suggest that you think actions of humans bear no weight on probability of infection or outbreak. History teaches us otherwise.
Basic statistics and logic teaches us this.
If humans didn't learn and adapt, that may be true. And in that scenario we would all be suffering from cholera, still drinking from the community well John Snow identified in 1854.
Thankfully, he performed a root cause analysis, made his famous map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology#/media/File:Snow-... identified the well as the source of the outbreak, and we all changed our behavior in accordance.
And the probability of another cholera outbreak is much lower. But further! The probability of other water born illness outbreaks is also reduced.
You're so knowledgeable, surely you know all this already.
Note that he didn't need to identify which specific bacteria was causing the infections. He needed to know which well to remediate and that chlorine would remediate it.
If he decided not to chlorinate the well in order to fully decide which specific bacteria was causing cholera, that would have been stupid.
The additional information would not have been worth the cost of acquiring it.
It would not have changed anything about the correct remediations and it would have incurred significant cost to acquire that information.
Great analogy, to my point :)
Thankfully that is not the choice anyone is confronted with. John Snow identified and treated the well and also proposed the first substantially complete and correct model for the cause of the disease. Both efforts informed each other and contributed to the solution which may not have been possible otherwise.
Proponents of the miasma theory surely thought he was wasting his time.
Fillipo Pacini isolated the bacterium the very same year. How wonderful it is that we can all collaborate to solve many aspects of the same problem.
What should we do differently depending on the outcome?
The miasma alternative for cholera is another excellent illustration of my point, not yours. The answer to whether miasma theory or contaminated wells was correct very obviously had bearing on how you’d mitigate the problem, and this characteristic was totally evident even before answering the question.
If someone could specifically state what we should do differently depending on the answer, I’m amenable to it. But you haven’t done that because the answer is: nothing!
Feel free to respond to them.
Then tried a poorly reasoned analogy to reach their prior conclusion indirectly.
I note that, once again, you can’t answer the simple question that’d settle the debate in your favor.
And past experiences inform future actions. It's called learning, and some of us feel it's worthwhile for no other reason than the knowledge.
Put another way, one might ask your same question about polio or smallpox or any other outbreak of any other disease. Everything we learn about every one of them prepares us in some way for the next.
It's literally the foundation of epidemiology.
But in reality, it isn't. It creates precisely the faulty logic that we're seeing in this thread, where people believe certain mitigations are justified only after certain conclusions are reached about the origin of COVID.
This just isn't true and we do ourselves a disservice to frame the conversation such that people believe that to be the case.
If we discover that COVID came from a lab and therefore decide to eliminate GoF research but not increase surveillance efforts (since eliminating GoF research addresses "the threat"), that is bad.
If we discover that COVID came from a zoonotic origin and therefore decide to continue doing dangerous GoF research in metropolises, that is bad.
If we fail to determine either of these things with sufficient certainty to take action against either threat vector, which is the most probable case, that is really bad.
If we instead acknowledge that it hardly matters where COVID came from because it indicates nearly nothing about where the next pandemic will come from, and therefore we need to mitigate both vectors, that is good.
I'm not following. It seems as though you've run wildly to some conclusion not present in the conversation. Perhaps there's some outside context I'm missing.
> If we instead acknowledge that it hardly matters where COVID came from because it indicates nearly nothing about where the next pandemic will come from
It seems you would do away with the entire field of epidemiology. I find that the discipline has been quite useful to humanity. I'd like to keep it.
How do you know GoF research is bad? By analysing the consequences of previous GoF research.
If lab origin is confirmed, it adds support to GoF research being bad hypothesis helps creating relevant regulations. If zoonotic origin is confirmed, it adds another data point of naturally created dangerous pathogens and weakens the argument of banning GoF research.
There are no _a priori_ truths, only approximations at a time based on past statistics.
Let me know if you are convinced, either way :)
Why would a zoonotic origin of COVID reduce the risk of GoF?
A poor analogy is suppose in 1800s humans encountered nuclear explosion near nuclear research lab. It could have human or natural origin. If natural then it is important for us to accelerate nuclear research with relatively lax regulations and develop countermeasures. If human origin, lack of sufficient regulation is a more probable cause.
This is effectively not true in light of the mRNA platform, which negates the rest of your argument as well, because the existence of the mRNA platform is not contingent upon the origin.
Dangerous GoF was made excessively dangerous by the invention of the mRNA platform regardless of whether COVID itself even happened, never mind the specific origin of it.
We already know everything we need to know about zoonotic possibilities which is that nature can produce pathogens orders of magnitude worse than COVID on any dimension.
> Doing GoF research in major metropolitan areas is very obviously unacceptable.
It is not so obvious to the people wanting to accelerate the research and solve cancer, aging or whatever their pet problem at (in their opinion) slim risk of catastrophe.
> nature can produce pathogens orders of magnitude worse than COVID on any dimension
Everything is possible, including nature producing mass extinction pathogens. The key missing information is the probability. Else we all will be living in bunkers.
> If after learning that COVID was zoonotic, your conclusion is "guess it's okay to keep WIV and WIV-like labs in major cities doing the type of research they were doing," then you are simply insane.
Agree, a single data point does not warrant extreme change in status quo. But it does weaken the argument to a non-zero extent that GoF research leads to global pandemic. This has trickle down effects of eschewing additional regulations which would have been added otherwise.
What GoF research either a) increases contagiousness of a pathogen or b) increases pathogenicity of a contagion and has anything to do with "cancer, aging, or whatever their pet problem" is?
> The key missing information is the probability.
COVID did - not - change the probability.
> But it does weaken the argument to a non-zero extent that GoF research leads to global pandemic.
No! It literally doesn't! The probability of GoF research leading to a future pandemic was the same the day before the COVID outbreak as it was the day after which is the same as it is today.
The only thing that will shift those probabilities are mitigations that we put in place.
> COVID did - not - change the probability.
True from the perspective of omniscient universe, but for humans with limited knowledge, it will change our priors based on the origin.
There is a valid reasoning for how GoF research can lead to pandemic but we do not know how often it will happen in practice. There are many things we already do with potential global consequences. Historical example is the risk of chain reaction during first atomic test. Contemporary example is the universal dependance on digital infrastructure which can be hacked. Timeless example is asteroid hitting the earth.
We make decisions for each of the scenarios based on perceived (objective + subjective) probabilities and the tradeoffs.
If natural origin is proved, there is less reason to add mitigations to the GoF research because mitigations are hard to design and limit the exploration space.
To summarize:
P(GoF causing pandemic) = P(GoF) = GoF pandemics / total pandemics
Mitigations ∝ P(GoF)
If natural origin, P(GoF) stays same. If lab origin P(GoF) increases and calls for commensurate increase in mitigations.
It's legally permissible for the government to do what it did, at least as far as any of the several court cases have been able to find evidence for, which is merely requesting content moderation.
It's obviously First Amendment protected speech for social media platforms to suppress whatever discourse they feel like for whatever reason they want.
More importantly, neither the legality nor ethical valence of these actions hinge on whether the claims actually end up being true.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-Qu...
It references a great deal of information from https://project-evidence.github.io/
And I've found Jamie Metzl's collection of resources interesting as well: https://jamiemetzl.com/origins-of-sars-cov-2/