The bailey on the Wuhan lab is "Chinese government created COVID doing gain of function experiments." This conclusion seems highly unlikely. The motte is "COVID escaped from the Wuhan lab." This conclusion seems impossible to prove or disprove at this point.

The only pieces of evidence given in the propublica article that I am qualified to evaluate do not support their conclusions. So that makes me doubt the evidence that I am not qualified to evaluate.

On the other hand, the arguments I have seen that COVID originated in Wuhan wet market seem deeply flawed (e.g., the Chinese authorities decided early on that the Wuhan wet market was the source and only tested people for COVID if they had a connection to the wet market. Western researchers then cited the absence of positive tests unconnected to the wet market as evidence that COVID originated at the wet market. Of course, another possibility is that it was widespread in Wuhan by that point and the results were merely selection bias).

And it seems pretty clear at this point that the Chinese government lied to the original WHO investigators about everything.

This is in fact the article that led a lot of people to complain that Propublica is slipping; they kept describing the documents they were given, which were the minority (Republican) conclusions of the Senate committee as "the Senate report", and there was a lot of pushback against the self-described Chinese language expert who translated the documents (who apparently got some basics of, like, verb tenses wrong). James Fallows wrote a summary. The Twitter thread by Jane Qiu Fallows links to is worth reading.

This story in particular has all kinds of red flags. Let me see if I can find a good summary. ... Here's a short list of red-flag questions from James Fallows with a link to his longer list of probing questions. The story appears to have originated with a Republican congressional staffer and, iirc, leaned heavily on his translations of CCP documents that pretty much nobody else translates that way.

https://twitter.com/JamesFallows/status/1602509441823293440

ProPublica basically stonewalled when people started questioning the article. Not a good look, especially given their mission.

They're also returning money from SBF-related foundations that gave the appearance of corrupting their reporting.

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1605417547704287234

3 before reading 2.

25 or 6 to 4.

From the ProPublica website:

Building a Stronger Future -- a family foundation run by Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, and his brother, Gabe Bankman-Fried -- announced a $5 million grant to ProPublica on Feb. 28, 2022. Over three years, the donation will support investigations into ongoing questions about the COVID-19 pandemic, biosecurity and public health preparedness.

Looks like that money was specifically earmarked for this kind of investigation.

I've wanted an alert for when new documentary evidence is found that supports one theory or another on Covid origins. Otherwise, I'm not reading anything new about. I think it's been a couple years since anything genuinely new came out.

I'm going to pretend that made sense.

I just want to know if it's safe to go back to eating pangolins.

The bailey on the Wuhan lab is "Chinese government created COVID doing gain of function experiments." This conclusion seems highly unlikely. The motte is "COVID escaped from the Wuhan lab." This conclusion seems impossible to prove or disprove at this point.

The motte is the one that my very-close-relative-infectious-disease-specialist is committed to defending. They just cannot get past the sheer unlikelihood that a lab studying that exact virus at the exact location was irrelevant to its origin story.

Did China in all its extra-harsh lockdowns ever ban wet markets, or regulate them for real? That seems like it should have been a slam dunk, but then they didn't vaccinate the country, so who knows.

I'm going to have to read the Wikipedia article on castles because I can't remember which part is the motte and which the bailey.

10: "Exact location" seems to have been a stretch. I remember looking at what proximity was proposed from the evidence from lab to early confirmed cases. They were both generally in the central area of a city of 11 million. It's like drawing a connection from the proximity of NYU to Columbia.

I mean...that's pretty close, out of the whole US.

They just cannot get past the sheer unlikelihood that a lab studying that exact virus at the exact location was irrelevant to its origin story.

I mean, this happens. Ebola Reston was discovered a short drive away from Fort Detrick. The Skripal poisoning happened just down the road from Porton Down.

"Exact virus" is also a stretch. They never had anything close to covid at that lab. "Coronavirus" covers a lot of ground.

This article from Nature in 2017, though...
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.21487

I settled in on both possibilities -- transmission from an animal at the wet market or transmission from research at the labs -- being perfectly plausible a while back, and thinking there's not likely to be evidence that settles it conclusively one way or the other ever. If I had to give my sense of the probabilities from what I've read, it'd be 90-10 in favor of the wet market, but 10% is still a significant possibility and it seems hard to eliminate.

"Exact virus" is also a stretch. They never had anything close to covid at that lab.

They were planning to study SARS-COV-1, which, it could be argued, is fairly close to SARS-COV-2.

And SARS-COV-1 is not easy to contain - it escaped, multiple times, while being studied by Chinese researchers.

I found pretty convincing the part of the big Science article arguing that not only did covid emerge from the Huanan market, it specifically came from the *southwest corner* of the market *which is also where the relevant animals were kept* based on photos from 2014.

Wasn't the lab there because the region has pathogens of the type the lab studies in the animal populations?

That's kind of why the CDC is in Atlanta.

I thought only if you define "region" very expansively -- that there's nothing particularly local to Wuhan, they're studying pathogens present in Southern Asia.

22: no. SARS-COV-1 was probably from southwestern China - Yunnan province. Wuhan is in Hebei province, 1200 km further north. SARS-COV-1 strains were found in Yunnan, Guangdong, Hebei and Jilin provinces, but the only similar virus to be found in an animal host was found in Yunnan.

Like, same for Atlanta exactly. Atlanta was in a malarial region, but that was the southern US as a whole. Nothing particular about Atlanta that would make you expect a disease event to happen in that city specifically.

19: Yes they had viruses that were "fairly close" but they didn't have SARS2, and they were sharing their data. How would they know to cover up the one that happened to leak before it leaked?

26: not even that, I would say. If you're talking about coronaviruses as a whole, there's no such thing as a "coronavirus region". Everywhere has them. If you're talking about SARS type viruses specifically, Wuhan isn't in a "SARS region" except for the fact that it's in China.

Atlanta is just like Wuhan except that my brother lives there.

Anyway, I basically agree with 18, but the big Science article shifted me further, maybe 95/5.

Well, I do have my own conspiracy theory that it started in fur farms (then came to Wuhan via the wet market) rather than starting in the wild.

"Exact virus" is also a stretch. They never had anything close to covid at that lab... Yes they had viruses that were "fairly close"

COV-2 probably only crossed the species barrier in late 2019. They wouldn't have had it for long.

I'm with 18.

31: which species barrier do you have in mind? Bats to the intermediate host or the intermediate host to humans? If the intermediate host is lab animals at WIV then they would have had it for years.

And there's very likely an intermediate host because it's evolved significantly from anything we can find in bats.

All of the scientists I've followed on twitter have dismissed the lab leak, but I can't care about it.

I'm not completely convinced that the wet market per se is the major problem. It could just be people encroaching on wildlife habitats and picking it up there.

34: Presumably a lot more close contact/proximity with a lot more people in the wet markets. So not the only opportunity, but a lot more vectors than out in the wild.

Also, farmed animals are kept in close quarters, and live animals shipped to wet markets are kept in close quarters, which is good for a lot of spread and for evolving to spread better among those animals rather than bats specifically, which is how they usually end up jumping to humans.

35: Right. But a I guess, I'm more worried about human real estate sprawl going forward than I am about wet markets.

That's just going to raise housing prices.

32 also gets at my main problem with "lab leak" theories, they're just so vague! Was there an intermediate species? Was the species in the lab or was the virus collected from a different species? How did it evolve so far from all the viruses they found in the wild? Had it been there a long time? Did it somehow then move to the wet market? To the people in the wet market or the animals? And the moment you try to get more specific about any aspect the whole thing falls apart. It can only survive as a vague catch-all "somehow the lab was involved but we have no idea how."

37: That threatens many species, biodiversity, etc., but I'm not sure how it increases pandemic risks. Apart from Lyme disease which goes deer-tick-human, exurban sprawl proximity to animals like deer isn't much of a transmission stew in my understanding.

Like the current main theory is that covid must have come from an intermediate host that's not being studied as closely as bats, because otherwise we'd have found a closer relative. But then whatever that reservoir is, the whole point is it's not being closely monitored by WIV and other similar labs, so how would it have gotten to the lab? You really do need some sort of weird conspiracy (completely making shit up, something like the Chinese government knows that coronvirus is running rampant among raccoon dogs in fur farms, and they're trying to cover that up while also taking some precautions to figure out how dangerous it is to humans, and so WIV is secretly doing research on samples taken from farmed raccoon dogs but not telling any outsiders about it). But I don't see how you get there without some kind of weird secret research at WIV that's very different from their on-the-books research.

And at some point it becomes weird and secret enough that you have to wonder why would they be doing that research at somewhere prominent and known to outsiders like WIV, and not at some top secret labs that the rest of the world isn't working with.

I can't really refute any of this, but I'll see my relative over the weekend, and it would be great to play postman and have him vicariously argue with you all so that I can finally make sense of this whole thing.

Like a big starting point of lab leak is "Well they were studying viruses really similar to covid at this lab" but the big scientific question is "Why don't we know *any* really similar viruses to SARS2 in the wild? Where could they be that we have never seen them?" And on this point I think the latter is way more right. The stuff studied at WIV (and everywhere else in the world!) is just way too far away from SARS2 to say anything meaningful about where it originated (prior to jumping to humans in Wuhan).

Here's another argument, I think people are overemphasizing "what are the odds that this only happened in the one city with a level 4 lab" forgetting that "this" has happened *twice* and one time was in Wuhan and the other time wasn't! We already know SARS1 happened, the null hypothesis should be that SARS1 and SARS2 came about in the same way. If SARS1 and SARS2 had *both* started in Wuhan, then I'd believe lab leak.

I think we should assume a conspiracy involving the RAND corporation. One time, they ghosted me after what I thought was a very good job interview.

Senate Republicans say it was likely caused by a lab leak, which strongly suggests that it very likely wasn't.

40: There are a shit ton of viruses in bats. The more people are in their habitat, the more likely zoonosis. Or so goes the theory. But UPETGI has followed this more, and who knows what kind of animal was the intermediate host.

47: Not specific with regard to this issue, but no it doesn't. Someone who is maximally untrustworthy (like the Senate Republicans) speaks in service of their own perceived best interests, not in exact opposition to the truth like a door guard in a logic problem.

Here is the peer-reviewed and careful investigation. The PP article is such shit that it makes me question their ability to evaluate. Now going to read the comments, smiley

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35881010/

47, 49: You maybe can determine that Republicans would like release bioweapons in China. They're always accusing other people of the stuff that they're doing themselves. (Mostly a joke?)

The link in 50 is the paper I refereed to in 30.

51: Oh, I know it was a joke, it's just a class of joke that irks me. What the Republicans want to do and want to make people believe happened because they're assholes doesn't tell us anything, positive or negative, about what happened in a set of events they didn't control. What they say is no reliable information at all, not information that we can use to support the conclusion that the reverse of what they say is true.

I haven't been keeping track, but it seems like I've been seeing haha-only-serious cracks like that a lot recently: X is a bad person; X says A is true; therefore A is false. And it always annoys me. You can't reason like that, even if X is a completely unreliable liar who eats kittens. Liars say true things all the time.

speaks in service of their own perceived best interests

They perceive their best interest to be in slandering China and in painting liberals as weak for not slandering China. What that suggests is that much of the energy put towards propping up the lab leak hypothesis has been offered in bad faith, and we should consider that as we evaluate evidence, taking as one of our baysean priors that its likely the whole idea was cooked up based on no evidence in Josh Hawley's office or similar venue, and further recognizing that whether its true or not doesn't matter as long as the idea keeps getting coverage in the press.

I generally quite like ProPublica as a news organization and journalism funding partner, so I was particularly mad about the quality of this article.

AIMHMHB, I was in Wuhan to teach a short grad course a little less than a year before the pandemic started. It was my first time ever in Asia, and while the city is a huge tourist destination I believe it's mostly Chinese tourists, so I was entirely dependent on having grad students shepherd me around because I couldn't read any signs, communicate with any people, or pay for anything (wrong phone, cards frequently didn't work, no one took cash). I've spent a fair amount of time in countries where I didn't speak the language, but this was certainly the most foreign I ever felt.

Except that it's an obvious thing to think about once you know there's a lab studying coronaviruses right there. What would it mean that "the whole idea was cooked up based on no evidence"? The evidence certainly isn't conclusive -- like I said my offhand sense of the probabilities is 90-10 against --but what there is, the existence of a lab within walking distance of the initial cases that studies similar viruses, isn't something ginned up by Republicans, it's a fact about what exists in Wuhan.

56 to 54.

Josh Hawley is a worthless liar with bad motives, but nothing he says makes it more or less likely that anything about the world is true.

Right, there's exactly one piece of evidence, but everything else is smoke and mirrors ginned up by people with a weird agenda. There's tons and tons of stuff written about lab leak, but at the end of the day none of it adds anything beyond the one fact that one of the two times in 20 years that a coronavirus emerged in China it happened to do so in a different part of the same city that has China's only level 4 lab. What 47 explains is why you have to wade through hundreds of pages of nonsense to figure out that really there's no evidence beyond the one obvious bit of evidence.

58. There is also the history of understanding other related viruses.

It took 14 years to nail down exactly how zoonotic transmission of SARS (also from bats) had happened; it was clear from viral phylogenetics that the origin was in bats much earlier. Incomplete understanding of COVID transmission today is normal, to be expected.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9
or
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-017-07766-9 plus scihub if you hit a paywall.

Maggie Koerth is a journalist who has been writing well about this.

58: Sure -- that's fair. There's only one piece of evidence. Like Heebie's relative, I think it's a heck of a coincidence, but unlike Heebie's relative I don't think it's nearly enough to get lab leak up to more likely than not.

But what the Republican Senate report tells us about the likelihood is nothing at all.

the existence of a lab within walking distance of the initial cases

Where are you getting this?

The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market per Wikipedia was located at 30.6196°N 114.2576°E.

The WIV's Biosafety Level 4 lab, per globalbiolabs.org, is at 30.376389 / 114.2625, which is 30.4km away by foot, in the southern suburbs, and on the other side of the Yangtze river. A 46-minute drive.

The main WIV campus is 15km away from the market, and also on the other side of the river.

I can walk twenty miles in a day. Or I could two years ago.

61: To you nine miles isn't walking distance? But close, anyway.

Californians are famously opposed to walking places.

What would it mean that "the whole idea was cooked up based on no evidence"?

What I mean is cooked up based on what is politically convenient, not an idea that was arrived as as a result of carefully reviewing facts and following them to their obvious conclusion. I think this is instead a case of "we have a fact, lets make up a story around it." And that's basically what a conspiracy theory is, except this particular one is being pedaled by Senators.

I think most people use "walking distance" to mean "distance conveniently walked," not "distance physically walkable."

Of course the convenient distance varies by environment and habits. Some people won't walk a quarter mile. But if you took a tourist from pretty much anywhere and directed them to somewhere three miles away was "walking distance," I think they would be cheesed.

Ah, a chance to quote one of my favorite Steven Wright jokes: Everywhere is walking distance, if you have the time.

I think of "walking distance" as something like "less than a mile and a half." But I wouldn't be surprised by someone who thought the bound was as large as 3 miles or as small as half a mile. I'd be pretty shocked if someone said something was "walking distance" and you had to walk 5 miles.

Saying 9 miles is walking distance is straight-up communism. I'd put it at three-quarters of a mile, but can see some room for debate. Or, that's how I'd use the term, but what I might choose to walk would depend on circumstances.

68 is right, but I'm being pointlessly argumentative.

Ok, this is probably too clever by half, but if WIV secretly had SARS2 in the lab then they would know where the virus came from, and then they could just go back now and sample it and say "aha, we found the origin!" Isn't the fact that we have no idea of where in southeast Asia (even what country!) it originated in suggests that the didn't have it at WIV?

Could we just all agree to blame Cambodia then? I don't know anyone from there so it would be easier.

They're probably judgement proof, so it doesn't matter if anyone sues them.

Here's a concrete prediction that you can make from the standard theory: SARS3 will appear in the next decade or so somewhere in a major city in Southeast Asia with wet markets but no lab doing research into coronaviruses.

74: You might want to add China to that bet. SARS emerged in Guangdong Province, from what I can tell.

Both Wuhan and Guangdong are rather far from the main Yunnan/Laos hotspot. I'd want to look into shipping routes for live animals before being sure, but I see no reason to bet against say Hanoi. It's just that most of the large cities in that area are in China.

74: That sounds like a reasonable prediction, and I'd bet you're right about it.

A nine mile walk is no joke, especially in the rain.

You guys know nothing of science and I once refused a job with the Department of Epidemiology because they paid less than the department of medicine. The next pandemic will start in a rural American hospital. The elements will be 1) nursing staff with kids in unlicensed child care settings populated by parents who can't afford to take a day off work when their kids are sick, 2) a duck hunter who believes that being vaccinated will make his genitals fall off and who gets his foot accidentally shot by a friends and goes into the ER with dead birds in the back of his coat, and 3) a horrible incident where an immune-compromised patient confuses a spit cup with his tea.

78: You need a rain coat and rain pants.

Especially far to walk while you have pneumonia!

I thought you were supposed to go for a walk if you had pneumonia. "Walking pneumonia".

@50

"Here is the peer-reviewed and careful investigation."

There is nothing special about peer review. I've been a peer reviewer. The Spirit of The Science did not move through me and render my judgements infallible. Peer review at most reduces the risk of obvious oversights or errors. Remaining concerns must still be addressed on their merits.

With respect to the Science paper, one issue raised is that the authors of the paper were relying on data that they did not themselves collect. Apparently, there is evidence that the Chinese CDC quickly decided that the wet market was the likely source of the outbreak and preferentially tested people that were linked to the wet market. This could result in ascertainment bias.

Now, the Science paper states that there is not ascertainment bias. But the citation supporting this statement is an article by the lead author of the Science paper, stating that there is no ascertainment bias. And the support for that rather specific statement in the article is a general reference to the entirety of the WHO report.

In general, it seems like the people on both sides of the lab leak argument are far, far too confident about their conclusions. Also, LizardBreath is quite sensible and I second everything LizardBreath says about inferences & jokes.

I've been a peer reviewer.

I'm failing to respond to an invitation to peer review an article right now.

@84 I know, right?

Anyways, here is someone arguing that the Science paper is flawed:

https://ayjchan.medium.com/evidence-for-a-natural-origin-of-covid-19-no-longer-dispositive-after-scientific-peer-review-af95b52499e1

This is clearly not evidence that the lab leak hypothesis is true - just evidence that the conclusions in the Science paper are not necessary correct.

I may be quite sensible, but I have a demonstrably strange conception of walking distance. (That is, everyone quibbling about that phrase is right. I was thinking of it as "a distance one could reasonably walk" rather than how people actually use it.)

I agree that the point in 83 is one of the weakest points of that article, but I don't think it's critically important. The parts I found convincing were:

1) The cases early cases that were *unlinked* to the Huanan market and found in hospitals were still clustered around the Huanan market.
2) Evidence that covid within the Huanan market originated from live animals and not humans.
3) Evidence that there were two separate jumps from animals to humans, and that both were found at the Huanan market.

Each of those are very difficult to explain under any kind of lab leak, and I don't see how ascertainment bias helps you explain any of them.

Chan in 85 has been repeating the same thing at higher and higher vehemence for over a year, imo a a mistake to take her seriously. Feel free to have the last word.

Again, it took 14 years to work out where SARS came from, active effort from I don't know, a bunch of groups. What level of evidence for natural origin two years out would be sufficient? Saying that our knowledge could be better is pointless.

The link in 85 really reminds me of creationist literature. It's all attack attack attack on details, while not giving any indication of how your theory explains any of the data. And if you follow here links she's still pitching the "it was bioengineered in the lab" version which is really sensationalist nonsense. The whole thing just reads like crank "conservatives please buy my book" nonsense.

74: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MERS

What does 90 mean? MERS is not in the SARS family. If there's a MERS epidemic it won't be a SARS epidemic. (Right now odds of that are low as far as I understand, because MERS in camels isn't a respiratory virus, and spreads in ways that are unlikely to cause a human epidemic.)

I'm guessing that lw meant it generally as a datapoint in your favor -- a novel coronavirus that emerged without a lab connection.

@88 Thank you. I will have the last word. That Chan has been saying the same thing for a while is not evidence that she is wrong. And your opinion means very little. Particularly when you are not addressing any of her points.

Saying that we have insufficient evidence to strongly endorse either hypothesis is not pointless. It is, in fact, the most important point.

Also my 91 is poorly phrased, it of course causes respiratory symptoms, what I meant was my understanding was that it was primarily spread between camels was through poop. But now looking I can't seem to find that, so I was probably wrong. (I read that in some soccer-related article not a science article.)

Hey baby, let's you and me get within walking distance.

@89

Her argument fails because she provides specific details backing up her statement that the initial data collection favored people with a connection to the wet market (and therefore a subsequent analysis is necessarily going to find a connection to the wet market)? How's that work?

All I'm saying is I read it and it screams "I'm a polemicist crank" to me, from experience reading a lot of stuff from cranks.

That wasn't the impression I got from the tone. I don't have the background to evaluate whether, e.g., her argument that there isn't strong evidence of two independent crossover events makes sense as a matter of virology, but it didn't read crankish to me.

Of course, all my experience with cranks is with pro se litigants, not scientific crackpots.

Yeah, it's a different kind of crank than crank lawyers. Crank science often looks like *good* lawyering. That is, it's all about harping on small reasonable doubt and pointing out that the other sides arguments aren't airtight. But new science just never satisfies that kind of evidentiary standard. It's not enough to poke some holes in a theory that's mostly holding together, when your alternative theory doesn't explain any of it better.

One of the most famous creationist texts is literally written by a lawyer and phrased as "trial" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_on_Trial

In addition to creationism, another big place to see these kind of arguments is the HIV doesn't cause AIDS crowd (which included a very famous mathematician who I was friendly with).

Now I'm not saying everyone open to lab leak is a crank. "It's possible but unlikely, we'll see if more information comes in" is a perfectly reasonable viewpoint. But that website in particular set off my crank alarms. It's literally still arguing that it's bioengineered because the furin cleavage site couldn't evolve naturally. Which really is just every creationist argument all over again.

It's not enough to poke some holes in a theory that's mostly holding together, when your alternative theory doesn't explain any of it better.

The last clause of that seems overstated. That is, if you've got two theories, both with some holes that can be poked in them, and one doesn't explain the facts any better than the other, then they both seem like active possibilities to me. You start being able to pick between the theories when one is on its face much worse than the other, at which point the patently inferior theory can't save itself by nitpicking the generally stronger theory.

And that's something which I feel like I'm missing about this conversation generally. The lab-leak theory seems less likely than the alternative to me, but it doesn't seem nuts on its face, and you (and lots of people) sound as if it is nuts on its face.

Also, what were you looking at about the furin cleavage site? It's not on the page linked in 85, I don't think, is it something the writer said elsewhere? Or did I miss it searching the page for furin?

I'm not even sure "lab leak theory" deserves the name "theory." It's like "intelligent design theory" where you put everyone who doesn't believe one thing under a single umbrella so that you can paper over their differences. Covid was bioengineered at WIV is a theory, I think it's a ridiculous crank theory, but it's a theory. But "it somehow spread from WIV to the market where there was a superspreader event" is barely a theory. How am I supposed to test that? Are you saying there's an intermediate species at the lab? That I could test, for example, there were papers on whether Omicron came from lab mice (my understanding is that theory didn't pan out, but at least you could test it). Or that it somehow jumped directly from bats to researchers but then that didn't cause an outbreak at the lab, but did lead to a superspreader event at the market? That seems implausible, but at least I can try testing it by seeing if the earliest samples look like they came directly from bats rather than first adapting in an intermediate species. Right now that's extremely unlikely because it's changed a lot from what we see in bats, but at least you can make a prediction that at some point in the next decade or so they'll find a bat coronavirus that's much closer to SARS2 than any of the ones we've found so far.

I think it's possible that covid had a connection to the lab, but I think it's gotten less and less likely than it seemed years ago. What I do think is that the people making positive arguments for lab leak are cranks.

103: I clicked through to the pinned post mentioned in the last sentence. "For readers who would like a break down of the current state of evidence for a natural vs lab origin of Covid-19, please see my pinned medium post."

There was a time (I don't know, a year and a half ago?) when there was a big wave of posts to social media from physicists I know claiming, very confidently (often quoting numbers like ">99% likelihood") that covid was engineered in the lab in Wuhan. Most of them claimed to know disease experts who told them this. There are close social connections between some of these people and the Bankman-Frieds. All of these people have been very, very quiet about covid lately.

None of that means anything, really, but it seems suggestive to me.

See, you lose me on your last paragraph. I genuinely don't know a thing about virology research -- you're talking as if you know much more than I do, which is very plausible if you've been reading and thinking about this more than I have. My sense of the probabilities is based purely on the idea that it's roughly the right kind of lab, and there have been disease outbreaks attributable to labs in the past, so it's the kind of thing that could happen.

But you're still saying that based on your level of knowledge, you wouldn't rule a connection to the lab out as absurd, just as less likely than you thought in the past. At that point, I don't get dismissing people who agree that a lab connection is a possibility as cranks on that basis alone.

Social and financial connections, I should say, since some of these people have worked closely with former academics who founded AI companies that got many millions of dollars from SBF.

I'm with Upetgi in saying the link in 85 sets off my crackpotdar (it's tl;dr for me, this is just the superficial impression from the first few paragraphs and the formatting). It's like writing I associate with MOND people or something.

Crank science often looks like *good* lawyering.

This is a delicious observation.

another big place to see these kind of arguments is the HIV doesn't cause AIDS crowd

I had no idea this was a thing.

Not one I'd agree with without examples.

That is, I'm not clear on what characteristics Upetgi thinks crank science and good lawyering share -- I'm guessing "good lawyering" means something more specific to me than it does to him.

110: associated with Se/rge La/ng, the guy who wrote all the textbooks, maybe the person Upetgi referred to above.

To be clear, my relative does not think there was any bioengineering nor malicious intent going on. Just legitimately an extremely contagious disease getting out.

The fact that we can't pin down a mechanism of leak - did a bat fly out of a corridor? did a scientist sit on a needle? - doesn't seem to me to be evidence one way or another.

I'm not dismissing people who agree that a lab connection is a possibility, I'm certainly not dismissing them abstractly on that view alone. I'm dismissing the people who are actively arguing for it being likely. Like I don't think you're a crank, I think Chan specifically is a crank. I don't think there's anything that could change her mind, because she's found a successful niche pandering to people who want to hear (for political reasons!) arguments for lab leak that they don't understand but sound plausible.

113: !!! what.

112: What it seemed like to me was how conspiracy theorists get hung up on the tiniest of details and ignore bodies of evidence. "If you just keep zooming in eventually the pixels reveal the GRAINY TRUTH!". Just like the cliche of a successful trial lawyer who gets the jury to ignore a normal mountain of evidence in exchange for a compelling narrative about this one detail.

Grounded in fact? Maybe not!

108: For a moment I thought MOND was BAND, but no, that's a different crank theory!

116: He's got a whole book on his crank stuff (HIV was the big one, but not the only one). https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-1638-4

I'm still genuinely confused about whether his Huntington stuff was crank stuff, or whether he was right about Huntington but wrong about everything else.

Or rather, it's obviously crank-ish, but maybe he was still right about Huntington even though he was going about it like a crank?

85, 87-88, 93, et seq but especially 97: Matt Ridley is a rightwing crank and anything he attaches his name to -- or any person who collaborates with him -- is inherently suspect. The guy has made a career of trying to put a respectable, scientific face on reactionary politics. The best that can be said of him -- and consistent with 99 -- is he's pretty good at it.

@104

"But 'it somehow spread from WIV to the market where there was a superspreader event' is barely a theory. How am I supposed to test that?"

You can't. I don't see any way, now, to distinguish between 1) transmission from an animal at the wet market to a person and 2) transmission from an animal at the facility to a person, leading to a superspreader event at the wet market.

Had there been a full blown investigation in early December 2019, by credible investigators, then you might have been able to exclude scenario 2. Or you might have been able to confirm it. I can image that there could have been evidence of transmission at the facility, had there been a lab leak. In the same manner that there was evidence of transmission at the facilities in the following lab leaks:

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

But not in 2022. Now (and this is important) you can't exclude the second possibility. Which is why this whole debate is so frustrating. Because people are acting like they can exclude that possibility. And they can't.

110: There was a magazine, but all the main people involved died of AIDS. Really.

Well, that probably hurt the argument.

122: Are any of the incidents on that list a new virus of unknown origin? Like if this were SARS1 which hadn't been seen in the wild for a decade and then appeared again, then yes, absolutely, look at the lab. But are you suggesting that they found it in the wild, managed to find non-bat lab animals where who could catch it, let it evolve in those animals in a lab for a while (a year?), all while maintaining absolute secrecy that they were doing any of those experiments and keeping even the existence of the original virus secret?

This thread is reminding me why I've been working so hard to convince the Calabat to accept that sometimes "I don't know" is an acceptable thing to say. (He likes to invent speculative explanations.)

Or, they found it in the wild in a non-bat animal it had already jumped to, and someone at the lab caught it and spread it before they'd done much work on it at all? I don't know anything about the lab -- there could be all sorts of things that make that an impossibility -- but it seems as if there could be all sorts of possibilities.

As far as I know they weren't bringing live animals back to the lab. The research they were doing involved going to caves and taking anal swabs of bats, not bringing bats back to the lab. Let alone bringing back live animals of some species whose identity is still unknown. It doesn't just involve a coverup after the fact, it requires some kind of longterm secret research program. (At which point, wouldn't you be doing at a secret lab?) Not saying it's literally impossible, but any time you try to put specifics on the scenario it seems to get very unlikely. As opposed to the main theory, which is not only very plausible, it's literally already happened 20 years earlier.

As opposed to the main theory, which is not only very plausible, it's literally already happened 20 years earlier.

OR SO THE BAT ANUS SWABBERS WOULD HAVE YOU BELIEVE.

(That is, everyone quibbling about that phrase is right. I was thinking of it as "a distance one could reasonably walk" rather than how people actually use it.)

LB has properly self-corrected, but I do want to address the two distinct connotations of the phrase: the first is akin to the phrase "walkable neighborhood", where most of the things you need are an easy walk away. This is typically conceived in terms of ~15 minutes radius, which translates to a mile circle (although for [able-bodied] northeasterners, it's more like 1.5 miles). But the second is more like "would you walk there under favorable circumstances?", and is more in the 2-3 mile range*. Like, the point of that isn't whether it's conveniently nearby, but whether you'd avoid walking there under any but emergency conditions.

Obviously for a New Yorker, the second definition is bigger just because walking is more of a default mode, but it's still not more than 5 miles, if that. Like, would Columbia be walking distance from the Empire State Building? That's a stretch.

*AB's had foot issues since Kai was born, but before that she walked to and from teaching at Pitt, which is ~2 miles. Actually, her daily dog walk is 2 miles I think.

Ok, if we were to boil it down, what are the best questions for me to ask my infectious disease relative? Ie, 1. How closely related is Covid-19 to the coronaviruses they were studying in the lab? 2. What would be the mechanism of escape? 3. ?

They were swabbing bat anuses? That's what did it then. Who the fuck even thinks to do that and isn't actually a mad scientist?

I wouldn't bother with the mechanism of escape, that's the easy part, see 122. If they like had a lab of infected mink they were doing a long-term coronavirus evolution experiment on, then I'm totally on board. Anyway, I'm not sure any approach would work, the whole point is you can't convince cranks, but if I were to try to do this I would focus on not arguing about the main theory. Just make them try to explain exactly what lab leak is saying. Is there an intermediate species? Where was it? Why do we still not know what the intermediate species was if they were doing research on it? etc. They're going to want to spend the whole time talking about some obscure detail of the main theory to distract you from the fact that they don't even have a theory.

"People who need people who swab bat-anuses are the luckiest people of all. "

Maybe the real treasure was the bat-anuses we swabbed along the way.

He's not a crank and has absolutely not seen any of the websites you're talking about. Just an elderly (yet liberal) scientist who already knew that the Wuhan lab existed and thinks it's a notable coincidence.

He's not wrong there, it is a bit of a weird coincidence.

What do you learn from a bat-anus swab that you don't learn from bat poops?

Dexterity?

Stealth?

Maybe it's like waxing the cars in Karate Kid?

What I want to know is: what's the question that gets at the science that one would need to know to get traction on the issue one way or the other?

Traction needs probably depend on how much fur there is.

Genuinely shocked that no new evidence supporting any theory of Covid-19 origins emerged from this thread. It's such a fruitful area of research!

My actual view is probably animal origin but China has so far prevented the depth of research that would help settle things, plus it might not be possible anymore to disprove lab origin, only to confirm it (if that's actually what happened). Documentary evidence could definitively establish that 1) research lead to the development of Covid-19*, 2) there was a lab accident of some sort, and 3) that accident was covered up. You can't really disprove any of that with a lack of evidence because entire worldviews can be created to fill the gaps in evidence.

*You can't leak a disease that doesn't exist. So it would have to have been both created (accidentally or not) and leaked, not just leaked.

What I want to know is: what's the question that gets at the science that one would need to know to get traction on the issue one way or the other?

Absolutely nothing. Unless you need to make a decision where the origin of Covid-19 matters to the choice you make, change the subject.

The only possible things you can change the subject to are either the definition of "walking distance" or bat anuses. I know because I tried.

||

New blog post! Happy Solstice!

|>

145: Fortunately, it's really not a matter of getting into an argument. The person doesn't have an axe to grind. It was just more my own curiosity. Your answer still stands as a matter of science, of course!

OT: if anyone else has been wondering how come there haven't been massive Russian cyber attacks since the war started, either against Ukraine or elsewhere, this is a long thread that summarises and links to an extremely long analysis of why: the summary of the summary is a list of 25 possible factors ranked by importance. https://twitter.com/JonKBateman/status/1604910834244788230

But if I can try to summarise the summary of the summary: Ukraine's cyber infrastructure was successfully hardened against attack; cyber attacks aren't free and require continued commitment of significant resources in a war (rather than a one-off strike), which Russia didn't do; Russia is just generally crap at war at present, and that includes cyber war.

My own guesses here, back in March, were IIRC that Russia was trying to keep Ukr infrastructure intact, and also that Ukr defences had been effective. The second guess seems to have been right, but subsequent events have shown that Russia doesn't really care very much about keeping stuff intact.

142: Not going to do a deep dive on any of the prior back and forth, but you'd ideally have collected samples from all members of the lab and sequenced to see whether anyone there had OG COVID (based on a phylogenetic tree). If you wanted to try it now, you might be able to get enough amplification, but you'd be pretty error-prone. (I kind of refuse to entertain any lab-based option that isn't entirely accidental.) You might also want records of strains being worked with, giving highest priority to any used to infect lab animals, just before the outbreak.

Why does it matter?

I am not a troll. This is a real, if ridiculously uninformed, question.

152 to the OP. And to the entire thread I guess.

I think just curiosity!

It doesn't really matter in the sense of affecting the way any of us actually lead our lives, but it could matter quite a bit politically. If it's definite that COVID-19 was a straightforward zoonosis which spread from a wet market (or something), then the response to that is "WHO and various nations should give lots of support to Chinese virology and public health surveillance, because China has a tendency to produce very dangerous zoonotic diseases, and we want to be able to detect them early". If it's definite that COVID-19 leaked from a lab, then the response is completely the opposite - Chinese virology and public health surveillance are the problem not the solution, because the former let it out and the latter lied about it.

9 to 152.

152: For researchers in infectious disease, it matters what (theoretically) went wrong so everyone can revisit what best practices are. Obviously, we can't regulate how others perform their work, but the US still trains many, many scientists and influences how other governments write their regulations.

MERS is why whenever I go out into the desert here I don't pick up any camel poop

It's really a shame you had to stop.

158: Because absent MERS that's something people are tempted to do?

I guess camel poop fights are a thing of the past. Thanks, Obama.

I mean, the obvious thing is that if COVID-19 was straightforward viral evolution with no deliberate help from humans, we should probably expect it to happen again. Which, I think we should.

An ecologist friend here is really into tracking which includes inspecting a lot of scat

If he breaks out the swabs, run away.

She, and uh, I'd probably let her

The camel might feel differently.

162: Which, again, we already know happened once this century. But you should guess the odds of SARS3 happening in the next 20 years are much higher in the wet market scenario than a lab leak scenario.

166: you think the camel would be jealous of Barry? I guess it's plausible.

My own guesses here, back in March, were IIRC that Russia was trying to keep Ukr infrastructure intact, and also that Ukr defences had been effective. The second guess seems to have been right, but subsequent events have shown that Russia doesn't really care very much about keeping stuff intact.

The parsimonious explanation is probably lack of ability, but there's another one where 1. RU could have done cyber damage 300 days ago but refrained, 2. UKR raised their defenses even higher*, and 3. RU, no longer restraining themselves, then lacked the capability to defeat the improved defenses, even if they could have done some amount of damage at the outset.

*Haven't read the thread yet, but I assume US/EU assistance has also had an impact, both in strengthening UKR defenses and undermining RU capability

155 through 157 are all helpful to varying degrees. Thank you!

157: Also, good science can transcend borders. Yes the Chinese government has a lot of power, but there's also a lot of individual scientists in China making decisions, and many of them (especially the younger ones) will be influenced by convincing science. They may not be able to stop the Chinese government from doing bioweapons research or be able to convince the government to shut down all the wet markets, but they're still going to have some influence around the margins.

147. Io Sol Invicte!

In general, thinking back to Jan 2020, people who specialise in these things were expressing surprise that a new nasty virus had been so long coming. I don't know much about mutation rates in microorganisms, but I get the impression that it's pretty high, so the answer to Messily's question is that it doesn't matter. Covid or something like it was inevitably going to happen sooner or later, it will happen again, and the next one might be even nastier.

Only people who don't really understand that microorganisms mutate constantly in nature get their knickers in a twist about the precise origins of these things. Being ready to respond to them when they show up is the important part.

172 has a lot of truth to it, but at the same time if you actually shut down the wet market across China you really would decrease the rate at which these spillovers happened.

170: Variance is good.

169.last there was a long WaPo story (or maybe NYT?) about that, basically the NSA practically set up shop in Ukraine in the run up to the war in anticipation of Russian cyberattacks, with the Ukrainians watching over their shoulders the whole time and being trained on the equipment/software. It took a little while to build up trust. One great anecdote has one of the Ukrainian cyber head honchos sitting down with an NSA type and watching his computer being penetrated by the Russians in real time when the NSA guy looks to him and says, aren't those your credentials?

Russia has been making cyber attacks on Ukraine since 2014. They shut down a part of Ukraine's grid one time. Compromised all their accounting software another. I have to believe Ukraine has done a pretty good job of hardening its systems after that. There just aren't as many holes as there use to be, and exploits are expensive.

One of the redeemable aspects of GWB is that he supposedly was brought to an appropriately high level of concern about the prospect of a new pandemic, and quietly gave preparation/response efforts the right resources.

Then Susan Collins figured out we could save a little money if we weren't stockpiling so much PPE.

Bush was all about maximizing American power or grandeur or whatever. And he, or Cheney, knew the difference between the bullshit they said to get elected and real danger. Trump was only ever interested in Trump and those that followed him are mostly too high on their own supply to look at real threats.

It's a good thing I'm very good at self-delusion or I'd be worried about living in a county where antibiotics are losing efficiency and the single most effective defense against viruses was compromised to prevent Biden from being seen as more successful against covid than Trump.

I'm still made we haven't gotten the llama anti-COVID spray.

Mad.

OT: It's really fucking cold.

We are still waiting on the cold. Right now its 50 degrees outside and just got a bunch of wind and rain. We are due for a "flash freeze" that should be interesting.

I should probably get some more firewood indoors.

It's 3° here, without the windchill.

-4 here with a wind chill of -28, according to my phone, but I'm not going outside to confirm

Does Ohio use the metric system?

Local news here says a balmy 27 but a windchill of 12, with overnight lows of 10 and -7.

186: I went outside. I can confirm that it is quite cold.

The temperature to watch out for is -40°, where C and F are the same. It's a bit chilly, but at least everyone's singing from the same hymn sheet

I hope peep has come back inside by now.

190: Ecumenical hypothermia.

Ok, I think I can recreate the argument in favor of the lab leak, although I didn't follow all of the details.

1. Labs are super leaky, my relative has seen a thousand lab leaks. Human error is super common. Lab techs inadvertently infect themselves.

2. With SARS 20 years ago, within a few months, we found a reservoir in animals (civets?). Here we still haven't found an animal reservoir, despite lots of motivation to do so, three years later.

3. We know from the NIH grant in 2015 that the Wuhan lab was looking at making coronaviruses more infectious.

4. If you are a virologist who is trying to make coronaviruses more infectious, the most obvious thing to do is to dump all of them together in a vat, let them bump up against each other and recombine and swap genes. Then you'd put them in a petri dish with human cells and see what ends up being more infectious. You do this thousands of times, selecting for contagiousness.

5. The actual covid-19 is mostly a bat coronavirus spine, with a something-receptor from Pangolins which is likely to be the piece that makes it more contagious to people. If you followed the steps in #4, a bat-coronavirus-with-pangolin-chunk is exactly the type of thing you'd expect to produce.

To reiterate 1, he said that in the absence of any other evidence, lab leaks are so easy and cross-species zoonotic events so relatively uncommon that in the absence of any other evidence, that itself would be the most parsimonious explanation, even without the other consistent stuff.

Whichever parts of that sound clunky are due to my attempt to recreate it.

So, just a different weighting of conjectures. I have some doubts about super easy lab leaks given how few seem to have ever had a documented impact at the level of Covid or the Soviet incident (anthrax?). Maybe coverups are super common and super successful too.

I'm not a scientist but I have my doubts that a virus selected for its ability to infect human cells in a vat is a reliable way of selecting a virus that will infect human respiratory systems.

I don't think lab leaks are always big stories, right? Sometimes it's a run of the mill infectious disease that you wouldn't want. As for Moby's concern, eh, I can't convince you of the scientific authority of this person one way or another, but I trust them to thoroughly know that part of the explanation.

... due to my attempt to recreate it.

Heebie, no!!!!

I don't think lab leaks are always big stories, right? Sometimes it's a run of the mill infectious disease that you wouldn't want.

I'm sure people drop things and whatever. But it sounds like we're supposed to believe that lab-caused epidemics of normal diseases are more common than zoonotic spillover of new ones, such that the combination of creating a totally novel disease and having an oopsie moment is the more "parsimonious" explanation than a documented biological process that created similar diseases.

Sure, we can all believe many things that are neither contradicted nor supported by available evidence. I'm sticking with changing the subject as my "origins of Covid-19" conversational advice and also now taking it up. So, uh, how about that weather?

Point six is the really problematic one - the assertion that zoonotic events are rare. This is, in a word, wrong. Think about it. Humans have had molecular biology for a few decades, viruses have zoonoses and recombinant events for the entirety of the history of life on earth. They were doing it long, long before we were here.

Recombination in the wild is where *literally all the viruses* came from. That and natural selection is how viral species originate. It's where SARS 1 and the previous Hong Kong ARS virus from 1997 came from. It's where that Aussie bat virus that infects horses and kills people came from. It's where all the seasonal flus come from.

I'd also point out that a bat-pangolin mix is also what you'd expect *in a market where they literally kept the bats in a cage over the pangolins*, something we know happened and that people took photographs of and collected environmental samples of virus from.

Not rare in evolutionary time!! Rare in daily life! Like 20 years since SARS jumped from civets rare.

Also, sure bats were next to pangolins, but surely the gene recombination event isn't simultaneous to when it jumps over to people! That is ludicrous.

And it would have to be simultaneous gene recombination with jumping to humans, under the market story, because there is no animal reservoir of it that's been founf.

I think the defense of the zoonotic story on that point is that it's not strange not having found the animal reservoir. Animals were shipped to the market from far away (I don't know this, but I'm assuming?) and testing every pangolin in China isn't a practical thing to do.

201. And yet a new flu variant jumps from birds to people as many years as not, or close to.

In both directions, the thing I keep on coming back to is that Occam's Razor is just a rule of thumb. There's nothing that says a weird complicated coincidental thing can't have happened, even if there was a likelier, less convoluted thing that did happen. You have to look at probabilities, but to assess those to the point of ruling something out as completely improbable, you really need to understand the factual situation in a whole lot of detail.

I had a "did" where I meant "didn't" in there, but I think my overall point is clear.

203: I assume you wouldn't have to test every pangolin in China. I assume you would sample here and there, and sequence whatever coronaviruses they had, and play hotter-and-colder in order to locate the one that is closest in sequence-mutations to the one that jumped species.

204: But bird flu is something that the virologists study very closely and are hyper-aware of. It's rare enough that it's easy for them to constantly be vigilant about. There are not so many of these going on daily that the virologists can't keep track of them.

201: "literally happened 5x in my adult lifetime, plus the regular annual one that comes round like Christmas" is not "rare".

I feel it might be an idea to introduce evidence into this:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337

I think "rare" is being used equivocally both ways. Covid-19 was a rare event however it happened, right? It's the only event in my 50-year lifetime that's conventional to call a global pandemic. Zoonotic crossovers happen all the time, but they're mostly not big events. According to Heebie's relative, I wouldn't know myself, lab leaks that get people sick happen all the time too, but they're also usually not big events. Whatever happened, it was weird and unusual somehow.

208: That is still "rare" in the sense that it's "much less rare" to have a recombination event at a lab nine miles away where the different coronaviruses are likely to be all in a vat together.

209 is probably a good thing to show my relative and see what he says!

I do want to note that his theory requires the coverup to have started long before the leak. Scientists like to publish, it's how they get credit! Why were they covering up this big "vat" experiment before any leak happened? Why the big secrecy?

Also, I'm pretty sure that anyone mentioning pangolins is years out of date. The pangolin connection was pretty quickly ruled out, right?

Do you mean that it's been disproved that there's not pangolin coronavirus dna in the virus?

212: I do think my relative is implying that it's a governmental lab involved in trying to make coronaviruses more contagious. Maybe that's the weakest part of the argument because it sounds most like Republican propaganda, or maybe it's not that far-fetched because there are government labs doing unpleasant things in many countries? I truly have no idea.

What I mean is very early on there was a lot of attention paid to pangolins as the intermediate host, but relatively quickly most experts seemed to have moved on to other animals as more likely. I wasn't following closely enough to know if "disproved" is certain, but I'm pretty sure that a direct connection to known pangolin viruses is not the case.

Ok. The only pangolin assertion from my argument is that there's a pangolin-coronavirus dna piece in covid-19.

Speaking of pangolins, has anyone asked that AI to write The Persecution and Assassination of Malcolm X as Performed by the Inmates of The Federal Correctional Institution, Lompoc Under the Direction of President Donald J. Trump yet? I hope so. You could have an annual Christmas performance of X/Trump as a fundraiser for anarchist political prisoners.

Right, 215 is propaganda. Not saying they never did anything that could be called "gain-of-function research" but usually that would be very specific intentional changes by genetic engineering. There's just no evidence they were doing crazy uncontrolled evolution experiments. Is it possible that the Chinese military is secretly doing mad scientists bio weapons research somewhere? Sure. Would they be doing it at this particular lab that's not military and whose research is generally open and well/connected to the rest of the scientific community? That seems ridiculous to me.

I'd really want to see a citation for 217. I'd strongly bet it is saying something much weaker than that, and/or is years out-of-date and wrong.

For example, here's Wikipedia:

"Although the role of pangolins as an intermediate host was initially posited (a study published in July 2020 suggested that pangolins are an intermediate host of SARS‑CoV‑2-like coronaviruses[99][100]), subsequent studies have not substantiated their contribution to the spillover.[86] Evidence against this hypothesis includes the fact that pangolin virus samples are too distant to SARS-CoV-2: isolates obtained from pangolins seized in Guangdong were only 92% identical in sequence to the SARS‑CoV‑2 genome (matches above 90 percent may sound high, but in genomic terms it is a wide evolutionary gap[101]). In addition, despite similarities in a few critical amino acids,[102] pangolin virus samples exhibit poor binding to the human ACE2 receptor.[103]"

This thread is sort of irritating me so here's my tl;dr meta-argument.

I'm not going to comment on details of arguments about covid origin one way or the other, because I have no relevant expertise. What I do have is a sense of how scientific arguments work, and what I see looks like mostly-settled science. There was an early stage with lots of ideas floating around, some of them plausible, some of them clearly politically-motivated conspiracy theories. For a long time there was substantial uncertainty and it seemed like you saw reasonable-looking experts on both the zoonotic origin side and the lab-leak side, and lots of experts who admitted to not really having a strong argument one way or the other. But at a certain point the evidence tipped in favor of the zoonotic side. Again, I say that not based on my own evaluation of the evidence, because I have no expertise, but as inferred from the content and tone of the expert opinions visible in the press, on twitter, and so on. After that you only see people with political or monetary motivations, or just annoying contrarians (of which there are unfortunately a lot, in science) arguing for the lab leak. The papers in Science clearly played a big part in that, and I'm sure lots of other evidence did too that I haven't invested the time to learn about.

A lot of the lab leak arguments seem to originate from a stance of "I don't trust the Chinese government and I think they are bad." Within China, the Chinese government was, with varying degrees of tacit allowance of rumors spreading versus outright promotion, trying to spread the idea that covid was engineered by the US government and brought to Wuhan during the military games in October 2019. So they're clearly bad actors in some ways here! But that's not evidence against a zoonotic origin of covid, and has nothing to do with the scientific arguments.

It is occasionally the case that the consensus of expert scientists is wrong about something, but it's very, very rare. For those of us who aren't experts in a particular area, we should generally assume the experts are right.

So that sounds like pangolins could not be an intermediary host, but the d-transfer whatever gene from pangolin-coronavirus could certainly be in there. It also points to how they're working to locate an animal reservoir and unable to do so.

I'm not actually particularly dogmatic about the position I'm arguing here! I do not like being a sole defender of any argument against the masses of Unfoggedetariat.

I'm not sure who even brought up pangolins.

My relative did.

9 won the thread, really.

Standpipe directs you to comment 9.

The problem with the argument is that mixing coronaviruses in a vat until an infectious bat-pangolin hybrid escaped is indistinguishable from the the same damned thing happening except with the 'vat' being a wet market, so we're back to priors again.

I'm not even capable of explaining myself as quickly as others.

What is it like to be mixed in a vat?

228: Again, we know that markets with live animals exist, this "vat" at WIV is pure fiction.

Anyway 222 says everything that needs to be said. That's some of what I was getting at less eloquently in 89. The lab leak community currently looks like a crank community consisting of politically motivated people and weird contrarians, and not like a normal functioning science community. And the vast majority of the time crank communities are completely wrong.

But on the animal reservoir thing: wasn't the fact that COVID 19 infects others mammals the reason* conservatives were saying it was pointless to vaccinate? There's an animal reservoir, so it will never be eradicated, so let's have Christmas as usual?

*Come on

222: I hesitate to make an argument from tone, but I'm going to do it. I do get the impression that there's a certain amount of social pressure that may be intensifying the uniformity of the consensus that the wet market hypothesis is firmly established and the lab leak possibility is vanishingly unlikely. I still think it's no better than (pulling numbers out of the air) 90-10; the wet market seems much more likely to me. But the fact that most reasonable people agree that the wet market is much more likely doesn't make it even more certain than that, if you see what I mean.

There are definitely crazy political actors pushing the lab leak possibility, and no one wants to be associated with them. Which makes it really socially uncomfortable for a reasonable person who doesn't have a horrifying political agenda to say that they don't think lab accident is completely ruled out -- I'm really socially uncomfortable right now. But that sort of pressure is going to make a fairly strong consensus look maybe a little stronger than the evidence justifies.

231: oh sure. But even on the assumption there's a bat vat, there's nothing distinctive about the bat vat that makes it more likely than the wet market. It's a mysterious bat vat that produces exactly what the wet market did, in the same manner.

Here's another prediction: if it turns out that there is a connection between WIV and SARS2, it will still turn out that everything the lab leak people are saying is evidence right now is complete nonsense.

I think with 233 it's better to distinguish two claims:
1) X is clearly the best explanation based on current evidence
2) X is certainly true

Saying something is the scientific consensus is not saying it's certainly true, but it is saying it's the best explanation based on current evidence, and that another explanation would require interesting new evidence. It also means that any groups of people who are disputing claim 1 are cranks and you're better off ignoring everything they tell you. It's also telling you that you should believe X unless some interesting new evidence comes along.

You just can't do science, especially historical science, requiring 100% certainty for everything. You just believe the best explanations until they bump up against other explanations or new facts come to light. And it works really well because the whole edifice is self-reinforcing. If something is wrong it tends to soon bump up against another thing you believe, so wrong things tend not to survive too long.

At any rate, it's true that science is a social process and social pressures do play a role sometimes in forming a scientific consensus, occasionally wrongly. Nonetheless it's been better at resolving these kinds of questions than any other social process we have. Moreover, for good and bad, science has lots of contrarians too who want nothing more than push back against that social pressure, so if new evidence comes to light there'll be tons of people rushing in to explain in it all sorts of crazy ways (one of which might be right!). Otherwise you just have to be patient and wait for new evidence to come to light and realize that the argument about the old evidence is settled.

heebie, I'm still hung up on the fact that your relative says he has seen/knows of thousands of lab leaks of infectious material!! Yes, accidents happen, and people get complacent or careless. The highest risk is when using animal models with clinically relevant strains, but yeah, it's possible someone could get sick from a culture (particularly something that's airbourne). But thousands? If I assume a 50 year career, that's 20 lab leaks per year to reach 1,000. Worldwide, that doesn't sound too crazy, but that one person knows of? Unless he was working with a regulatory body, I guess, maybe? That number seems astounding.

I'm hung up on "we know this is happening from an NIH grant" to "yeah, they were probably doing secret mad scientist vat shit." Like if they're doing weird secret shit, how is it in a grant proposal to the US government???

OT: I just figured out that the guy who plays Doc Ock is the same guy who betrays Indiana Jones at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

239: "In a vat" is shorthand, but here's the story:
https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-says-grantee-failed-report-experiment-wuhan-created-bat-virus-made-mice-sicker
This seems like a pretty normal situation in the field, blown out of proportion. There are lots of groups that comb through NIH grants in order to discredit the organization (and government science funding in general), so the claim doesn't sound all that different than other pithy summaries of grant-funded research.

233: I still think it's no better than (pulling numbers out of the air) 90-10 and to say that they don't think lab accident is completely ruled out

Maybe part of what's going on in this conversation is a different sense of what "ruled out" means. Upetgi said something like this already in 236, but "ruled out" in science doesn't mean "definitely false." It means "unlikely to be true" (and there are different statistical ways of quantifying this, none of which we're doing carefully here). For instance, in my field we often say a theory is "ruled out" when, if you were to assume the theory is true, you would calculate the probability of what you actually see in the data to be less than 5%. (We require a lot more evidence to definitively "rule in" a new theory.)

So the question one asks to rule out the lab leak hypothesis is: if there were a lab leak, what would you expect to see? And generally you would not expect to see the geographic distribution of initial cases that were actually seen. If one quantifies that carefully enough, one could "rule out" (with an appropriately defined statistical definition of what this means) the lab leak hypothesis.

A different thing you can do, which is closer to what most people are actually talking about in this context, is to compare two different theories: what's the relative likelihood of the zoonotic/wet-market hypothesis versus the lab leak hypothesis? Which is saying, given the zoonotic hypothesis, what you would have expected to see is a lot closer to what was actually seen. If you have strong priors you could put those in too and form a Bayesian perspective.

None of this gets you to saying definitively that something absolutely did not happen, which means the ordinary-language usage of "ruled out" is probably misleading when you hear someone making a careful scientific or statistical statement say that something is ruled out.

I'm not quite sure how to state this clearly, but I also think that it's important that what you rule out are theories not bare claims. That is, for lab leak to be something which you can rule out, it needs to be something well-specified enough to make some predictions. "It had some connection to the lab" is not a theory because it makes no predictions, and once you start fleshing it out into something more substantial which does make predictions then all of those proposals have been ruled out (at least in the science sense of the word). By contrast, if you look at the Science paper, the wet market theory is getting very specific: this corner of this market in these cages with two separate events where humans caught it from the animals both of which took place at the same market.

Upetgi said something like this already in 236, but "ruled out" in science doesn't mean "definitely false." It means "unlikely to be true" (and there are different statistical ways of quantifying this, none of which we're doing carefully here). For instance, in my field we often say a theory is "ruled out" when, if you were to assume the theory is true, you would calculate the probability of what you actually see in the data to be less than 5%. (We require a lot more evidence to definitively "rule in" a new theory.)

This kind of seems to me to be importing statistical concepts into a context where they don't make perfect sense. That is, what we're talking about it here is a historical event that happened in one particular way in the past. All of the data about that event is already in existence. We might find out more about it, but we can't generate more data that doesn't exist already.

When you're talking about research into general scientific phenomena, it makes sense to say "the weight of the evidence supports this hypothesis; if you want anyone to seriously consider the possibility of a different hypothesis, come up with evidence supporting it. Until then, we're going to think of alternative hypotheses as ruled out." When you're talking about a historical event, on the other hand, where one possibility seems much likelier than the other, but both remain reasonably possible, I don't think it makes sense to think of the less likely possibility as ruled out -- I think stabilizing on "A is more likely than B, but in the absence of more information, that we have no easy way of generating, we're never going to know for sure."

I'll be back with popcorn for the rest of the thread where LB tells essear how science and statistics should work . . .

"but both remain reasonably possible"

What do you mean by "reasonably possible"? Trying to suss out the meaning of this phrase is the whole game. It's not "reasonably possible" it's "unlikely."

Yes it's confusing conceptually to understand what probability means in this context, though this is something that philosophers of science work on (google "Probability as degree of belief" and similar). But when it comes down to it you already have some sense that it's meaningful to talk about probabilities here, you yourself mooted 90/10 earlier on. And we know what that means, that means you'd take a bet at 9:1 odds but not at 1:1 odds, even if it might take a while for the bet to pay out (or it might never pay out). I think 90/10 is no longer a good bet for you, my read is it's at least 95/5, and hence "ruled out" in the science sense, but at any rate the claim is that it's "unlikely" not that it's "untrue."

That is, what we're talking about it here is a historical event that happened in one particular way in the past. All of the data about that event is already in existence. We might find out more about it, but we can't generate more data that doesn't exist already.

You have no idea how frustrating it is for cosmology that the universe only started once, in a particular way, 14 billion years ago, and we can't just start new ones to see what happens.

And if you look at the papers, they're often trying to find ways to get at this kind of probabilistic reasoning in some precise way. For example:

"We also investigated whether the December COVID-19 cases were closer to the market than expected based on an empirical null distribution of Wuhan's population density [data from WorldPop.org (27, 28)], with a median distance to the Huanan market of 16.11 km (25)."

That is, they're building a stochastic model of what an epidemic released at some point would look like and then using that to determine how likely or unlikely a distribution that looks roughly like the one that happened is based on that model. Of course this requires having a good model, and that's where things get difficult and fiddly, and where you need to be an expert to evaluate how convincing it is.

What I mean by "reasonably possible" is that if someone tells me A is probably true, there's only a 1 in 20 chance that B happened, and then I have a chance to find out for certain that B did happen, I'm not shocked. B was an unlikely outcome, but a pretty significant possibility. 20-1 chances happen all the time. Unlikely meaning 20-1 is completely different from unlikely meaning 100,000-1.

Further, if I think "I can't evaluate the facts on my own, but all the sane experts seem to have settled on 20-1 against," I think that's in the realm where someone who does have some level of expertise and has weighed the evidence differently might possibly have a point. Probably doesn't, but they're not per se a crank like someone who's come up with a perpetual motion machine.

Thought he example in 247 also really undermines "We might find out more about it, but we can't generate more data that doesn't exist already." We're making brand new observations about the universe all the time. I'm not sure why you want to dismiss those observations as "we can't generate more data that doesn't exist already." Observation is generating more data! That is "exists" in some formal sense doesn't seem very important.

249: So let's try to make this precise. My vague sense is that experts would mostly put it somewhere like 20-1 or 100-1, and not 100,000-1. I also think anyone who puts it at say 2-1 (let alone says that lab leak is the like scenario) is a crank who you should ignore.

Ydnew, "thousands" probably referred to human error in labs more than literal self-infections. Or was hyperbolic and just meant to mean "easily consistent with normal lab functioning over years".

I also wouldn't be terribly surprised if there's a reasonable number of non-crank experts who only put it at 10-1, just on a kind of general skepticism.

252: OK, that interpretation helps. I'm sure I've seen hundreds of lab errors (discounting teaching labs, because that puts me at thousands already, I'm sure), but only a very small fraction would be ones potentially resulting in serious outcomes. If there were thousands of lab leaks (ie escape of a pathogenic material from lab containment, not even via infected human), I'd be really, really surprised.

One reason I'm mostly not-participating is that I can't bridge the gulf between conversational styles. Here I'm trying to defend a Republican batshit theory against a bunch of smart progressives who are mostly not scientists but used to being right. The other is a non-adversarial professorial dynamic where I'm playing the undergrad except I don't feel like being a dick to my elderly relative. So they gently explain things to me, and it's too wide a gulf to play post office and have you all vicariously argue with him. Also, he's not particularly invested. He's just saying that as a virologist, it seems like the simplest explanation by far, much like when he told me that Theranos was obviously full of shit because those claims were mechanically impossible. Just kindly watering down science that seems obvious to him. Which doesn't mean he's right!

He is not necessarily right! But he's also not a republican-proxy, and the fact that almost no one here (LB excepted) thinks there's a semi-plausible mechanism - which may be wrong! you all are generally right! - makes it seem like you're mostly arguing with him as a republican-proxy.

In this particular case, I don't see how we're ever likely to, e.g., locate the particular infected animals from the wet market -- they looked, didn't find them, time has passed and while it's not inherently impossible that more could be learned along those lines, it seems unlikely. With the study of the locations of early cases, again, no more data along those lines is coming in. There can be discussions of the methodology, but if a case wasn't identified in late 2019 or whenever, it's not going to be identified and placed on the map now. That evidence is as strong as it is now, but it's not going to get any stronger.

What's weird about 256.1 isn't why he thinks lab leak is plausible, it's why he thinks natural zoonosis isn't simple and natural. It happens all the time! It just happened 15 years ago with a very similar disease!

goddamn those spam links are annoying. I'm not near my computer to take care of it.

257: what I expect might happen is we'll find say a population of raccoon dogs in Yunnan which has their own version of covid that split from ours in say 2017.

258: I assume professional expertise leads him to say it's fairly rare compared to lab error! But such is the problem of having professional expertise not being the actual commenter. If it seems natural, I'll ask the question.

I agree with 260 - that would definitely convince my relative.

The beauty of lab-leak theory is that it's ultimately not about scientific evidence. The plausibility that some lab experiment + accident could cause an epidemic seems already accepted. The question (for the lab-leak theorists) is whether that combination of experiment and epidemic happened at that particular time and place.

It is very unlikely things happened that way based on all the evidence gathered so far, but to the most dedicated of the lab-leak proponents, the theory includes a coverup where evidence supporting the theory was destroyed. At that point it's hard to make any persuasive progress on the zoonotic hypothesis because the probabilities that support zoonosis aren't new information, they're already part of the lab-leak interpretation.

Back when I was on twitter I followed one of the authors of zoonotic origins papers and IIRC she was always careful never to say lab leak was impossible but that once you weigh all the evidence you see it's extremely unlikely. So you could call that not ruling it out but that would be kind of missing the point. It was incredible the amount of abuse she took from the hack and crank communities.

260: Right, that sort of thing would settle it.

The point that I didn't make clearly at all about this being a historical event where you can't generate new data at will was meant to be be about the odds. Data that's consistent with a hypothesis at a 20-1 level is really quite convincing if you can keep on generating data -- while 20-1 chances do happen, they don't keep on happening. If you're talking about the odds on a one-off event, though,
20-1 is long odds but very different from certainty.

Also the 256 "it just seems naively plausible if you don't know anything" is a perfectly fine viewpoint, but in this case it's clear that's not all that's going on, or else he wouldn't know all these conservative talking points about the NIH and pangolins.

264: Sure, in this case it's genuinely plausible that in 20 years our knowledge won't have changed much and it'll still be at say 20-1 odds. Yes that's annoying. But all you can do is believe what we know now and be patient and hope we learn more some day.

An interesting related debate that's not politicized is about whether Omicron was a reverse zoonosis from rodents (ie rodents in Southern Africa caught covid, it evolved in rodents for a year and a half, and then managed to jump back into people) or evolved in a chronically ill immune improvised individual who caught covid and had it for a year and a half. Initially there were papers arguing both viewpoints, but my read is the expert consensus settled on the latter theory pretty quickly. (Of course we don't know who the individual is, and since BA6 never arrived, the likely scenario is that they died.)

Maybe China being mostly closed is a big part of not finding an animal reservoir in China. It would be funny in a not really humorous way if China reopening led to confirming zoonosis.

Maybe the reservoir will be pugs and it turns out the reason they can't breathe isn't that we fucked up their faces but that they all have covid.

Reservoir Pugs, Tarantino's ode to Panic in the Streets

Maybe "not-politicized" is slightly overstating it. You can find a bunch of lab leak nut cases arguing that omicron was also a lab leak from lab mice! But it doesn't have any traction beyond the real crazies.

My sister used to give vasectomies to lab mice.

She must have fine motor skills

Since I failed to change the subject to the weather (it's 75F here, thanks for not asking), and failed to take my own advice, I have a non-trolling question*: heebie, I'm genuinely curious what your uncle thinks of his apparent disagreements with many fellow virologists?

*At least, I don't think I'm trolling.

He was kind of mystified on why the virologists aren't saying outloud what they must be thinking. Like maybe keeping their head down to avoid being political.

Holy fuck can I get a check in thread?

The lurkers agree with him in email their heads?

heebie, I think part of the problem here is that your expert relative's theory is nearly exactly what I'd get out of my Infowars watching dad. Including the pangolin. Gain of function in WIV lab that escapes the bat vat, followed by cover-up because it's politically improper to blame China. My dad was going on about the backbone of the spike protein in late 2020 despite his last biology class probably being in 1968.

Relative's not really using his expertise beyond a little appeal to authority and a belief that lab screwups are common.

So if I were talking to your relative, I'd ask - what would change his mind? What would prove the zoonotic theory for him?

275 is tipping me away from charitable interpretation theory.

Definitely awkward for Heebie to be playing intermediary between us argumentative types and her pleasant relative who is humoring (maybe?) her skepticism. It's also hard not to aggressively push back on what seem like weak arguments, even if our better selves probably know that "seem like weak" could just be an artifact of the Heebie-translation-telephone-game. But in that [aggressive and headlong] spirit, I'm going to go ahead: saying "1000 lab leaks" without specifying what kind of leak, what kind of pathogen, and what kind of containment facility feels at best confusing, at worst disingenuous. What are we talking about here? I know almost nothing* except that there are different levels of lab security that differ by country but I would guess that "gain of function experiment in a potentially devestating coronavirus" would be in a BSL-4 facility in the U.S., and "lab leak" in that situation is very different from, I dunno, "grad student sticks himself with needle by accident when working with blood sample." Google tells me "There are currently 13 operational or planned BSL-4 facilities within the United States of America." So I don't think 1000 could refer to *relevant* lab leaks. If each BSL-4 facility had averaged 80 pathogen escapes, we'd have shut them all down. So one of the major underpinnings of pleasant uncle's argument feels very shaky to me.

*and about Chinese biosecurity in labs I know less.

See 252 for my best attempt to clarify "thousands of lab leaks".

278.last: See 261. I think he's really hung up on the fact that it shouldn't have been this hard to find the animal reservoir.

I think he's relying extremely heavily on lived experience of labs and knowing accurately what it would take to do coronovirus experimentations, since virus experiments have been his livelihood for decades. I 100% believe that he can describe how a lab could produce something like Covid-19, and that to him, it feels like the complexity of what you could direct a grad student to do.

I think it's also plausible that he's gotten some rightwing-tinged articles on his radar, especially if they were masked as to their rightwing tilt. He's progressive, but not necessarily that savvy if something is presenting as "science". Much less savvy as a lefty political person than as a scientist, so if he had the vague notion planted, he could supply the scientific context to it. It's easy for me to believe he hasn't been following the literature of Covid-19 terribly closely over, say, the past year as some of the earlier possibilities had gotten discredited.

So I don't exactly think he's right, but I think he's right about the science-part that most closely aligns with his expertise, if that makes sense. I really don't think he's invested in the issue, and isn't in any circle of virologists who are heavily invested in the issue.

Okay, in turn, I have a sincere non-trolling question. I'm getting the impression from this argument that it is prima facie ludicrous that the Chinese government would be trying to weaponize a coronavirus. I know that the Chinese government is capable of all sorts of human rights violations. What makes that one categorically different than other transgressions?

I am really nervous that I'm inadvertently asking a super-racist question that's covertly so rabidly rightwing that it's going to unleash vitriol at me. If possible let's take it as a premise that the Wuhan lab was not weaponizing coronaviruses, and just stick to what distinguishes a plausible human rights violation by the Chinese government from an unlikely one.

Biological warfare agents are pretty dumb to develop if you have no way of protecting your own population. Unlike nuclear or chemical weapons there's no good way to avoid having contagious biological agents backfire*. Especially when your political leaders are old people who'd be most vulnerable to such things.

*Note that excludes agents of biological origin but not contagious like Bt toxin, ricin, or anthrax.

Sorry, botulinum toxin, Bt is only bad if you're king of a country of caterpillars.

286: Right, it's hard to picture how you'd use something like Covid 19 as a weapon without it immediately doing what it did -- going worldwide and infecting everyplace. People do do strange, incautious stuff, but a direct plan to use Covid as a weapon doesn't make much sense.

And where do they think SARS1 came from? That's what's always weird to me. The exact same thing literally happened barely 15 years earlier.

When Muslim countries were still the big boogieman no conservatives thought they intentionally engineered MERS, did they?

What's weird to me is that if China is trying to do bio weapons research that they'd be doing it at WIV and not a more secret military location.

Like if I were doing bioweapons research in the US, I'd do it in like the Nevada desert where it's far from people, and not like the CDC in Atlanta.

To flip sides from my last comment, I don't think it's clear that no one would do gain of function research unless it was an immediate route to a bioweapon. Basic science that was being kept quiet because it's known to be dangerous, but wasn't intended as mad-scientist supervillainy doesn't seem absurd to me.

That all makes sense.

Now go watch the drag queen holiday special; you won't regret it. They're so wonderful.

293: Agree. My main objection to that is that said sketchy research would almost certainly be done one viruses they were already studying. But they didn't have anything close enough to SARS2 there (or if they did they were keeping that secret too, but for what purpose?).

292: Life is cheap in Nevada.

283: earlier in the pandemic every time there was a wacky conspiracy it would take about two weeks before it filtered to my nutty sister through somewhat saner channels. E.g., the vaccine was going to cause antibody escape and "scrub your immune system", and she'd link the Nature article saying "see, real science journal!". But of course the article didn't say anything like that, but the whacko interpretation had taken root in some tamer forum - healthy jiujitsu mom tradwife bullshit granola lovers or something. She didn't need to follow InfoWars to be parroting their conspiracies.

Antibody dependent enhancement was a buzzword (or still is) among antivaxxers no matter how much evidence came in showing that it wasn't happening. But it's something with a scientific basis that has happened in other cases so it was something they could latch onto that sounded like a scientific reason their opposition to vaccines was correct and could convince people not familiar with the science.

297: I think precisely that sort of thing is unlikely to be happening to Heebie's virologist relative. He might be being led astray by people who raised concerns with bad motives, but he can probably read and understand the papers he's looking at.

Only read the abstract unless you can bill your time.

Why read the articles if the virologists aren't saying what they really think?

Because you can bill for the time. Pay attention.

The secret to science is dropping out of graduate school twice.

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Semi on topic: my sister and family, all vaxed and boosted, went down with Covid on Christmas eve. You can't win.
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Oh shit, hope it's mild for you all

Hope they feel better soon. My cousin (elementary school teacher) and his wife are both covidiated for the holidays too. I really need to go back to wearing a mask, but it's been so long without me being infected that I'm starting to feel invulnerable.

Why is Daniel Craig dressing like Fred from Scooby-Doo?

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We have a traditional family game of Encore on Christmas and this year's highlight was when the word was "come" and the 13 year old says "which spelling?"
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That would be a great back story for Blanc.

309 to 308.

Reminds me of breaking out James's "Laid" for the word "top" playing family Encore has a teen.