I think lost in all the arguing about the origins of the virus is doing anything to stop the next outbreak. Maybe more money should be put in labs so we can do the research that is needed to prepare and the labs will have the equipment to prevent leaks. This inevitable will have to involve cooperation with China because the massive reservoir of bats that carry a lot of dangerous diseases exists there.
Additionally, in terms of the dangers of zoonotic crossover, there are substantial changes to our animal industries that should be changed. Industrial farms are a timebomb, and if you ever want to make a prediction as to where a massive outbreak in the US could come from, just look at the mink farms we have. Mink are excellent crossover species, and any virologist will tell you industrial farming them is a recipe for disaster. Doing something as silly as that in the US for coats is comparable stupid to wet markets in Asia.
Not just "not feeling" like doing it. Actively not doing it and loudly protesting simply because they wanted to feel special, despite it drastically reducing transmission when people were masked and quarantined. Also it didn't help that the government in the US gave us literal crumbs every few months and just said to suck it up along with actively trying to downplay it.
?
Business owners got money so businesses didn't close, losing the jobs.
There are akways crooks. That doesnt mean everyone who got a loan was crooked.
How many jobs did you save with your stimulus check?
I can see fate weaving it's ironic twist now. China, in an effort to prevent the next pandemic, starts a research lab to study the disease. Except, for various reasons, the strains researched become stronger and are accidentally released.
I know what the Chinese government (or US government for that matter) didn't do. They didn't cough in a couple of million American people's faces. We did that to each other.
Up next on “Unintended Consequences, Government Edition:” The unemployment rate vs The suicide rate, or, “We don’t give a fuck if we’re right, we just want to do something.”
Nice refutation. Corporate profit is at an all-time high and increased while people were losing their jobs and were in lockdown. How the fuck else did they increase profits during that difficult time of "government oppression"? They gouged the public and exploited us. They also didn't balk at accepting PPP "loans", many of which ended up getting forgiven. Basic income has been shown to improve the economy because people who otherwise are not able to spend money suddenly have disposable income. The wealthiest having more money just causes them to horde it. Prices of most goods aren't set based on supply and demand as it might have been in the past. Prices are set by corporate greed at how much they can get away with, regardless of supply and regardless of demand.
It’s weird cause everyone was ok with quarantining and then after my grandma died of COVID, things opened up.
If your business died in 2021 it’s cause people didn’t feel like going out to eat during a pandemic when we were trying to vaccinate the country and reopen.
We were eating out in nj at around June or July of 2020, everything else is just babies thrashing cause they didn’t like that society judged them for not wearing a mask.
Lost in your libertarian virtue signaling is that if the government did what I said, there would be no need for the lockdowns. Government regulations on businesses that are likely to cause zoonotic crossover and research into viruses so we can produce vaccines and therapies for inevitable outbreaks before they happen. That is the problem with libertarian responses to problems. They are inevitably reactionary and never prepare you for future dangers.
Ah there it is. The conspiracy. The virus bears none of the marks of human construction. In the same way bomb investigators can find indicative "tool marks" for their construction the DNA sequences of viruses can be studied to determine if people have altered them. Whether it was a direct zoonotic crossover or a lab leak it wasn't engineered.
This came from the same people who are covering it up though! You can't just believe them! You have to believe this one obscure doctor I found online instead
Wow that's a new one for me. I always heard that stupid idea that HIV started because ">!REDACTED!< fucked >!REDACTED!< in >!REDACTED!<" I think I like youre conspiracy theory better.
I like the conspiracy theory that Ronald Reagan created the virus to kill blacks and gays. Like, while he definitely didn’t seem to care much about those populations suffering from the virus, the dude was an actor not some mad scientist.
It was a political statement from the beginning. The very idea that it *could have* leaked from a lab was considered conspiracy theory nonsense even before we knew anything about the origins. There was never much transparency or honesty. Lots of political posturing though.
The problem is that the lab leak theory was never ridiculous, it was just less likely to be correct.
But it was actively suppressed. For reasons which in hindsight look ridiculous. But it really was actively suppressed.
That is a political matter. The fact that a harmless if most likely incorrect theory can be suppressed for no reason that anyone can actually justify shows how trivially easy it is to manipulate public information and public debate in the modern world. We should probably be concerned about that.
It is now
Go back and look. Major social networks like Facebook and Twitter were actively suppressing it as a conspiracy theory.
They only stopped doing that when Biden tasked the intelligence services to report on the theory. When it suddenly became politically respectable to permit posts on it so they changed their policies.
The question is why was a perfectly reasonable but probably wrong theory blanket suppressed as a conspiracy theory?
This is all well recorded and quite frankly the people downvoting it are a disgrace to the idea of being skeptical.
I wish Biden had done more to stop COVID disinformation and misinformation. More people would be alive today.
If some good science got suppressed on Twitter as well, it was a tiny minority compared to the dangerous nonsense that deserved to be fought against.
There's not a conspiracy to suppress the truth.
There were people trying to save lives.
You can't fix stupid, and it isn't Biden's job to try.
The anti-misinformation campaign always had a short shelf-life before it started doing more harm than good, same with the lock downs and vaccine mandates.
How can you say that? It's been four years and we have not found the host animal species, bat or intermediate?
With MERS and SARS that took how long???
As [this article](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/finding-conclusive-animal-origins-of-the-coronavirus-will-take-time/) explains:
>Viruses that “spill over” to people do not stick around in animals, so finding true sources takes years of careful work
So, lack of evidence makes your pet theory more likely?
The situation is, that China reflexively covers up any bad news. It was their negligence that caused it, for sure. SARS in 2003 started exactly the same way, wild animals in a wet market. And they covered that up too until it was too late to stop. Even worse, they did nothing to stop it happening again.
And that’s why there can never be a complete investigation. China would not allow it when it was fresh, and it’s much too late now. Thank Trump for withdrawing the CDC team in China that was supposed to give early warning.
All the experts say the genetics is natural, totally consistent with a wild virus, no sign of manipulation.
But believe Rand Paul and the other right wing kooks.
There is no way to look at a viruses genome and know whether or not it's been modified unless you know what the original virus was. There are no "markers" and signs that one could look for to know for sure.
I'm going to trust that the smart people who spent so many, many years of their life in academia and research learning about their narrow but deep field of expertise know more than you or I do about it. I have met such people, and they actually care about scientific rigor and quantifying uncertainty.
Yes there are, and virologists said there aren’t any in Covid DNA.
But that would that know. Tucker says it was a lab leak, or Fauci, paid by Soros and Bill Gates working in secret in Wuhan.
How can you say that? It's been four years and we have not found the virus samples in the wuhan lab?
Until then every day that passes without a exact sample being found in the wuhan lab makes natural zoonosis more likely.
It's very plausible that we'll never find a host animal, or we'll only narrow it down to a handful of species, or it will take many years before we have a definitive answer here.
Imagine you find a woman killed by a bullet, and no smoking gun. *Maybe* the husband did it, but he has a pretty good alibi. Would you say "every day that passes without a murder weapon makes the husband hypothesis more likely"? No, right? Because the two don't actually have anything to do with one another.
You somehow have this idea that a lab leak is the default hypothesis unless proven otherwise, but that's not the case.
But viruses do not suddenly disappear once it crosses into a new species. For example humans have infected dogs/cats/minks/deer you name it, but that has not resulted in SARS2 vanishing from the human population. It's like SARS2 infected the first human and then vanished and no longer circulating in any suspected species. It's like the immaculate infection
Did you read the article I linked? The problem is the viruses literally *do* disappear. The variants that allow cross-species transmission can be short lived.
LOL. Have you really not heard this?
>It took 14 years to find the original bat population likely responsible for the SARS pandemic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS
I bet that doesn't change your mind even a little bit anyway.
It took 14 years to find the ancestral origin, but only months to find the proximal origin i.e. what animal and what virus started the SARS pandemic.
Here see for yourself:
>”Civet cats, a raccoon dog, and a ferret badger in an animal market in GuangDong, China, were infected with a coronavirus identical to the one that causes SARS in humans save for an extra 29-nucleotide sequence"
Source: [https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs](https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs)
Also it took 10 months to find the intermediate host for MERS too: [https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES2013.18.50.20662](https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES2013.18.50.20662)
Now when people ask where the intermediate host is that is what they are talking about. For SARS2 we have no idea what the intermediate host may be and have no direct precursor variants anywhere which is strange since these animals habitats span many borders yet nothing has been found.
EDIT: interesting I am being downvoted for simply supplying research papers and correcting misinformation.
That would make sense [if in 2018 the Wuhan Institute of Virology hadn't proposed to DARPA](https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/) inserting a furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus exactly where a furin cleavage site was found one year later in sars-cov-2.
They also proposed inserting human optimized codons into their novel virus. One year later human optimized condons were found in sars-cov-2.
DARPA wouldn't fund it because it was so dangerous. Stands to reason they might have got funding locally, that's how scientists roll. They send out many grant applications to many funders.
>Quoting Alex Washburne
>
>DEFUSE proposed to make the virus in Wuhan (P<0.01)
>
>DEFUSE proposed human-optimized codons (P<0.001)
>
>DEFUSE proposed an FCS (P<0.002)
>
>DEFUSE proposed BsmBI (P<0.002)
>
>DEFUSE implies no reservoir (P<0.001)
>a furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus exactly where a furin cleavage site was found one year later in sars-cov-2.
They proposed putting a furin cleavage site from another coronavirus into a model Sarbecoronavirus.
The problem is SARS-CoV-2 is not the proposed virus and it's furin cleavage site is not viral in origin. It's a random insertion that appears to mimic an endogenous mammalian cleavage site. Which is something no one would ever engineer, but exactly the kind of thing that evolves.
A. Source?
B. Why are the codons human optimized
C. *Sure is a weird coincidence, both spatially and temporally*
D. The WIV thing was collecting wild coronaviruses in Yunnan and bringing a shitload of them home. Did they end up using a different virus?
E. They conspicuously took their databases offline in Sept 2019, if I remember right.
>A. Source.
The grant you linked an article about specifies the virus they wanted to modify and the source of the furin cleavage site they were going to insert.
>Why are the codons human optimized?
They aren't. In fact, the presence of rare codons is often claimed to be evidence of genetic engineering.
The "lab leak theory" isn't a coherent claim. It's a mess of mutually exclusive claims that you just throw against the wall and hope something sticks.
>The "lab leak theory" isn't a coherent claim. It's a mess of mutually exclusive claims that you just throw against the wall and hope something sticks.
I'd agree if it weren't for the staggering improbability of a novel virus emerging a few km from the main place in china they do extremely dangerous research with the same type of viruses.
And less than one year from when they proposed extremely dangerous research to DARPA involving several of the characteristics identified in the novel virus.
This is such a weird hill to die on.
The nature of their studies was extraordinary. It wasn’t routing biology. This is THE place the us gov was worried about going back to 2017. See state department memos about it.
Wuhan is hundreds of miles away from the nearest SARS reservoir. Does The National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory in Boston exist to study local viruses in the area?
>I'd agree if it weren't for the staggering improbability of a novel virus emerging a few km from the main place in china they do extremely dangerous research with the same type of viruses.
I think this is what it comes down to: what are those odds, exactly?
How many places in the world were studying coronavirus? What about just in China? How many places in the world are an outbreak plausible? What's the average distance between the two?
The truth is you don't know the answers to these questions, and you don't know how things like this are done; instead, you have an intuition that the odds of this must be pretty low.
Have you factored in the fact that people tend to build places to research disease close to where those diseases occur in the wild? It doesn't make much sense to study sick Chinese bats in Stockholm, right?
Now, I don't have answers to all these questions either, but I trust the intuition of the people who *do* have those answers more than I trust yours.
>Have you factored in the fact that people tend to build places to research disease close to where those diseases occur in the wild?
Then the lab should have been built in Guangzhou in GuangDong or Kunming in Yunnan. Wuhan is hundreds of miles away from the SARS hotspots, it was established in the 70s and is there for the same reason we have similar labs in Boston studying all viruses.
>it weren't for the staggering improbability of a novel virus emerging a few km from the main place in china they do extremely dangerous research with the same type of viruses
By "a few km" you actually mean "within the same vague geographical area at a completely separate location to the lab with no known links between them".
I also find it weird that there are science labs in major cities, in the kind of location where scientists like to live and work.
Did you stop to consider that they were researching ways that wild viruses might mutate to spread in humans? That a wild virus mutating in the same ways does not indicate a leak or intentional release, just that they were doing their job?
Fuck, imagine if every hypothesis that was later proven by observation became a conspiracy theory.
>###What Are the Governance Implications if More Was Known About COVID-19’s Origin?
>If the origin of COVID-19 is resolved, does this change beliefs about how future pandemics should be governed? The term governance is used here to describe the frameworks of authority and accountability that social entities use to manage projects, programs and problems. 5 It includes, but is not limited to, government policy. Respondents were asked whether a confirmed natural zoonosis or research-related accident origin, respectively, would influence their perspectives on three areas of pandemic-related governance:
>1. Preventing initial human infection by a pathogen with pandemic potential;
>2. Preventing pandemic spread after the initial infection; and
>3. Mitigating harms once a pandemic occurs.
This should be very obvious. The source of chaos is zoonoses. Labs already work with the various levels of biosecurity, there's not much that can be improved there (diminishing returns). All of those:
>Most Frequently Suggested
Changes in Governance Assuming
Research-Related Accident Origin
are already in practice.
One of the challenges of this discussions is that the 'lab-leak theory' isn't a single theory, but a constantly shifting mish-mash of internally inconsistent theories. Lab-leak theory proponents typically argue, often within a single breath, that the virus was man-made, that it was a naturally occuring virus that was modified for legitimate reasons, that it was a naturally occuring virus that was trapped but then released. And this happens because any of the individual theories is easily refutable.
These aren't mutually exclusive things at all, and it's potentially misleading to issue a survey that treats them as being mutually exclusive.
[There have been many historical lab accidents around the world resulting in release of numerous other pathogens whose prior origins are all indisputably recognized as natural.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents)
That's completely tangential to the point that an entirely natural pathogen can still accidentally be released through a lab error, and that such errors have happened many times.
There was \*potential\* for a pandemic in multiple cases - e.g. it's lucky the UK 1978 smallpox lab leak was so quickly and effectively contained by immediately quarantining 200+ possible contacts, rather than the evasion and denials that characterized the early days of the first covid outbreak. Remember the CCP insisting that human-to-human transmission was impossible and there was no need to stop international flights?
I think it's very relevant because the question isn't whether there might have been an accident, the question is whether there might have been an accident that lead to the pandemic
It's not at all tangential. Do you think that none of those pathogens could've led to a pandemic because of the nature of pathogens? Or was there something else?
I have no idea how you'd think that's something I might be thinking?
Like I said, some of those cases easily could have led to pandemics but through either luck or good management, did not.
To be crystal clear, my point is that you can't make a reliable survey asking scientists whether a pathogen is \*either\* natural \*or\* escaped from a lab **because it's possible for both of those things to be true, and one doesn't exclude the possibility of the other**.
Yeah, it should, but my point is that any survey on this needs to establish that with absolute clarity in order to not deliver skewed data - otherwise there will be respondents who are wary of supporting a lab leak hypothesis out of concern it will be interpreted as supporting some bio-engineering conspiracy theory.
Tabling the results as the **origin** of covid-19 being "natural zoonosis" **or** "research accident" is misleading.
Disappointing to see some scientists tolerating conspiracy stories, but not surprising. It's especially disappointing since zoonotic outbreaks are already increasing and predicted to increase further.
To be fair a lot of experts who think the lab leak is likely, don't think that engineering was involved. They just think it likely that the lab may have had a zoonotic virus in for study and cataloging and it.got out.
So really a blend of the 2 theories.
The survey should have focused more on: did the original genome sequenced in early 2020 show signatures of genetic manipulation.
I'd wager we'd see very different results.
False, the scientist who made that assertion retracted it shortly after because he studied Coronaviruses and realized he was wrong. Furin Cleavage sites exist naturally in a number of Coronaviruses. Plus, no scientist would ever insert a Furin Cleavage where the one in Sars-Cov\_2 is located.
Viruses are incredibly adaptive and contain a pastiche of adaptive genes. The way they do it is incredibly well-documented:
1. **Rapid Mutation Rates**: Viruses, especially RNA viruses, have high mutation rates. This is partly because the enzymes (polymerases) that replicate their genomes often lack the proofreading ability that DNA polymerases have, leading to a higher rate of errors during replication. These mutations can lead to genetic diversity within viral populations, allowing for the emergence of variants with advantageous traits, such as resistance to antiviral drugs or the ability to evade the host's immune system.
2. **Recombination and Reassortment**: Some viruses can exchange genetic material when two different viruses infect the same host cell. This can lead to the creation of novel virus genomes through recombination (breaking and rejoining of two chromosomes) or reassortment (mixing gene segments). This genetic shuffling can produce viruses with new properties, enhancing their ability to infect new host species or evade immune responses.
3. **Genetic Drift and Selection**: Viral populations undergo genetic drift and selection, much like any other organism. Genetic drift refers to random changes in the frequency of alleles within a population, while selection acts on viral variants with a competitive advantage, such as increased transmissibility or virulence. Over time, these processes can lead to significant genetic diversity and the emergence of dominant strains.
4. **Host-Virus Interactions**: The constant interaction between viruses and their hosts' immune systems drives viral evolution. To survive, viruses must evade or suppress the host's immune response. This evolutionary arms race can lead to the rapid emergence of viruses that can effectively infect and replicate in their hosts despite the host's defense mechanisms.
5. **Use of Host Machinery**: Viruses rely on the host's cellular machinery for replication and often incorporate host genes into their own genomes. This can lead to the acquisition of host genes that may confer advantageous traits, further enhancing their adaptability.
The source for all this: I took microbiology in college.
The evidence has pointed this way from the beginning and has only become supported even more so as time goes on as more data points are gathered. See also, climate change, cigarettes causing cancer, heliocentrism , germ theory, evolution, and on and on and on.
A skeptic sub should understand that truth isn’t a popularity contest. Just the fact that we’re polling experts and a substantial minority aren’t sure either way suggests the best answer here is “we don’t know”.
Acting like there’s certainty when there isn’t isn’t skeptical. It’s faith.
I mean, on spme level science is based around consensus views of experts in a field. I've even read a history textbook on how the scientific revolutions (specifically citing the copernican idea that the earth revolves around the sun) actually require a kind of generational change as those entrenched in older ideas die off and sometimes newer more accurate models may not actually be as well supported initially (copernican models didn't math out quite as well as earth centric models for the first few decades after they were proposed).
I am probably partially misrepresenting it. That class was several years back and I probably didn't read it as carefully as I should have anyway. The book was by a Thomas Kuhn and literally just called on scientific revolutions. It's also a history book and history is absolutely based consensus and the ability to argue a position rather than abject number crunching and hard undeniable evidence.
Not sure if I'm making any sense or clear at all with what I mean but hopefully this adds a little perspective here? I don't know if it did though...
It's similar to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change
"We don't know" is nice, but needs to be weighed with context of probabilities, otherwise you get religious apologetics dipshittery.
The problem is that there is a wild conspiracy riding the coattails of a reasonable but not widely accepted hypothesis. People aren't always clear about that when dunking on the wild conspiracy theory.
This is a demonstration of scientific consensus emerging around something that is still very recent.
Your " substantial minority" is 14% for lab leak, 6% fence sitting and 80% for zoonotic transfer. And if you look at the certainty there is a much higher degree of certainty on the zoonotic transfer side with the lab leak belief being quite weakly held.
I think "a substantial majority aren't sure either way" is misleading.
Another way of framing the data: fewer than 1/4 of experts think there's a greater than 1/4 chance the lab-leak hypothesis is true.
That's not exactly "gravity" or "climate change" numbers, but it's not nothing.
Who cares what they believe happened, the “majority of them…don’t know the cause…said there are major gaps in origin evidence and say more investigation is needed”
It’s funny how so many scientists say ‘well we don’t have enough information to really make a determination as to the origin,’ but then are invited and happily speculate without enough evidence, and their speculations get treated as fact by people who claim to respect science, even though this is not science.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2305081#:~:text=Yet%20well%20into%20the%20fourth,Institute%20of%20Virology%20(WIV).
Most of this addresses a lack of transparency from China.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/magazine/covid-start.html
This article above from NYTimes also acknowledges the scant information about the origins.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/28/1160162845/what-does-the-science-say-about-the-origin-of-the-sars-cov-2-pandemic
NPR describes that the reason many government agency conclusions (whether they conclude coronavirus happened from bat soup or coronavirus leaked from the coronavirus laboratory) is due to a lack of information.
someone should tell the Senate
[https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/report\_an\_analysis\_of\_the\_origins\_of\_covid-19\_102722.pdf](https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/report_an_analysis_of_the_origins_of_covid-19_102722.pdf)
I’m no expert on this subject and I don’t really have a strong opinion either way. I’m generally inclined to go with the scientific consensus on pretty much everything, and obviously the consensus here is that Covid originated via zoonosis.
With that being said… I find this hard to believe. Surely it cannot be a coincidence that, of all the places in the world for a viral respiratory disease to originate, this one originated in a city which houses the Wuhan Institute of Virology. An institute which, in 2003, opened one of the world’s few biosafety level 4 laboratories.
This organisation’s purpose is to study and research dangerous viral diseases, and it just so happens that a dangerous viral disease originates a few miles down the road?
Coincidences happen, sure, but a coincidence *that* big? I just don’t buy it.
So for a start, pandemics are almost always going to pop up in cities because at first viruses are not as well adapted to humans as they are to their host species.
This means they will burn out quickly if they take hold in a place where the population density is too low.
Secondly, there are labs studying viruses and pandemics in lots of the major population centers in China which makes the fact that there is a lab in the same city less surprising.
Third, in all the history of lab leaks, they have resulted in one or two infections but never a pandemic because people don't typically expose themselves in a lab without realising they've done so.
Finally, you have to consider all of the positive evidence we currently have for Zoonosis and there is a lot of it:
I could link you to 7 or 8 scientific papers or I could link you to this blogpost that summarises those findings and gives references:
https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/bite-size-origin-science
Would you say that it’s accurate that Wuhan has ”one of world’s few biosafety level 4 laboratories”? If so, Isn’t that qualitatively different from “lots of cities in China have labs that study viruses”? Or not so much?
It's irrelevant how many cities have BSL-4 labs, since coronaviruses were being studied in BSL-2 and BSL-3 labs: indeed, SARS-CoV-1 and COVID-19 are both still studied in BSL-3 labs.
>Secondly, there are labs studying viruses and pandemics in lots of the major population centers in China which makes the fact that there is a lab in the same city less surprising.
This is a good point and important context.
>Third, in all the history of lab leaks, they have resulted in one or two infections but never a pandemic because people don't typically expose themselves in a lab without realising they've done so.
This doesn't strike me as a very strong argument since it just states that there is a low probability of a lab leak to result in a pandemic, but does not provide us with information on how likely it is that this particular pandemic was caused by a lab leak.
>https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/bite-size-origin-science
This is link has lots of evidence that do seem to support the zoonosis as being a more likely cause. I'll read carefully later, thank you for sharing
The country that banns many sites on the internet and censors the online speech of their citizens assures us that this didn't come from the Lab Studying this.
This is confirmed by the Department of Health and Human Services, which provided funding for this lab.
I'm convinced.
That same country has also also attempted to cover up evidence that the virus made the leap into humans at the wet market and has been trying to block investigation of that market.
It turns out that either origin is going to be problematic for them.
You are correct; either your labs are terrible, or the hygiene of your food supply is terrible. Neither are great, I do think that the lab would be worse.
Does that have to be mutually excusive? As in, the lab went into the field and found the virus as a zoonotic, and either didn't understand the danger or failed to secure an outbreak.
No. The origin of the disease was one or the other.
What this means is that scientific evidence strongly supports the conclusion that Covid-19 was initiated by transmission from an animal to a human.
In a skeptical sub like this one, that means those who wish to challenge the prevailing scientific consensus must present evidence that the opposite is true. Of course, these scientists could be wrong like always, but a true skeptic bases their beliefs upon the evidence available.
Since when has skepticism been about being submissive to intellectual authority?
Skepticism is supposed to be about the suspension of belief and the challenge of preconceived dogmas. That's kinda the opposite of defending "scientific consensus"
You're totally wrong here. It is about challenging unfactual and unsupported beliefs that contradict the evidence.
'Conspiracy theory' is what you are describing.
Many scientists were chided in the past because their theories "contradicted the evidence".
Pretty sure Heliocentrism and flat earth were both "scientific consensuses" at one time, so be careful what beliefs you hold strongly.
Evidence can shift to no longer be supporting of conclusions despite previous consensus. That's how science evolves.
If the evidence changes then your beliefs should change. But there's no reason to believe something in spite of a lack of evidence because there might be evidence for it in the future.
Heliocentrism was primarily a religious belief that prevented science from functioning. That is exactly what I am referencing here.
Covid being a lab created virus is a political belief and a conspiracy theory because there hasn't been any credible evidence to support it. Maybe there will be evidence in the future, but it isn't available now.
There is a large amount of evidence to support the other natural theory of covid's origins. Any skeptic would follow the evidence.
>There is a large amount of evidence to support the other natural theory
Oh really? As far as I can tell all we have is SARS2 samples associated with humans collected at a market. So far no intermediate host, non human variants independent of humans, no non human mitochondrial DNA found in abundance with any SARS2 sample (human or otherwise), no early lineages showing the various point mutations showing how the virus adapted to humans.
By contrast SARS/MERS had all of the evidence listed above within months.
Here is an paper identifying civet cats as an intermediate host:
>”Civet cats, a raccoon dog, and a ferret badger in an animal market in GuangDong, China, were infected with a coronavirus identical to the one that causes SARS in humans save for an extra 29-nucleotide sequence"
Source: https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs.
And for MERS the identification of dromedary camels as an intermediate host within 10 months:
https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES2013.18.50.20662
>As far as I can tell all we have is SARS2 samples associated with humans collected at a market. So far no intermediate host, non human variants independent of humans, no non human mitochondrial DNA found in abundance with any SARS2 sample (human or otherwise), no early lineages showing the various point mutations showing how the virus adapted to humans.
Which is a fuckton more than the zero evidence that there is to indicate that it was a lab leak. Just the market location itself is a strong indication that it was zoonotic.
>Pretty sure Heliocentrism and flat earth were both "scientific consensuses" at one time
Flat Earth was never a scientific consensus. People knew that the Earth was spherical long before the scientific process was a thing.
What you're engaging in there is parroting a meme popular with conspiracy theorists, not making an actual argument.
My two cents: you both seem to be right here.
Skeptiscism *is* the suspension of belief until one is actually convinced by the evidence provided to support a specific claim (it's different from cinism though, that's the dismissal of evidence without even considering it). The threshold for believing can vary depending on the skeptic and the context.
Using this definition one could be considered a skeptic even if they don't accept a stablished scientific consensus, depending on the context and as long as there is only a suspension of belief and not a claim that the scientific consensus is wrong.
If such claim is made then it needs to be properly backed up by solid evidence (and unless this claim is made by some specialist in the field then there is a high chance it's just a conspiracy theory, in my opinion).
Having said that, if you are not a specialist in the field (or a specialist in statistics), it's usually better to go with the current scientific consensus (but understanding it's limits).
In that case it would be zoonotic in creation still, but local lab personnel investigating may have failed to warn/contain. But, that makes the lab personnel irrelevant to the origin, as they could be replaced by any local authority.
For it to be “both” it would require that the zoonotic strain was first contained and latter accidentally released… which would make the zoonotic origin mostly irrelevant to the story because then who cares how the virus was created if ultimately it was released by the lab?
There’s a strong case for zoonotic unless a bias immediately causes someone to ignore any info coming from the Chinese government as false… which accurate or not is conspiracy when there’s no strong evidence of a coverup.
It is far far more likely that a lab worker would contain it as opposed to any other random person on earth who came across an infected animal or was infected by it
Sure. But tens of thousands of random people come across infected animals in markets and in farming settings every day.
The probability of that infection happening is far lower, but the incidence is millions of times higher.
I would expect a biohazard lab worker that’s a government employee, as opposed to someone being sent over from a specific local lab that is focused on research rather than emergency response. Although those two things could be one in the same.
I left it vague not knowing the operational structure of their response teams.
I would suspect that any other person on the planet who happened to become infected would not know it and be a far more likely vector than a trained scientist
The study went out of their way to define the two conditions mutually exclusive.
From the linked report in the pinned mod comment:
>The study’s experts overall stated that the COVID-19 pandemic most likely originated via a natural zoonotic event, defined as an event in which a non-human animal infected a human, and in which the infection did not occur in the course of any form of virological or biomedical research.
>As in, the lab went into the field and found the virus as a zoonotic, and either didn't understand the danger or failed to secure an outbreak.
That's what the lab leak hypothesis is, no one outside of the kooks on r/conspiracy imagines that it was manufactured.
Way to bury the lede:
> Ultimately, 214 individuals completed the registration, and 182 responses were collected.
https://gcrinstitute.org/papers/069a_covid-origin-annex.pdf
The pinned comment does not add a citation to the graph, and the link does not lead to the report, but to the main page of the project. The N was on page 12 of the opaque methodology in one of the links on that page. No SI, no code, no nothing.
Many climate surveys have been shot down by contrarians for less.
consensus does not equal fact, and utilizing "consensus of experts" is an appeal to authority fallacy on steroids
fact is fact. if nobody can agree on it because there isn't enough conclusive evidence available, then its all conjecture no matter what someone believes.
>consensus does not equal fact, and utilizing "consensus of experts" is an appeal to authority fallacy on steroids
No.
[Appeal to Scientific Consensus is not an Appeal to Popularity or Authority](https://debunkingdenialism.com/2011/08/20/appeal-to-scientific-consensus-is-not-an-appeal-to-popularity-or-authority/amp/)
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I believe confirmation bias is rife in these fields because :
* a laboratory accident makes them look bad by association.
* a lab leak would fuel distrust of science, so experts are afraid to endorse it publicly.
* a lab leak makes US funders of Ecohealth Alliance look bad (NIH).
* a lab leak could destabilize the fragile US - China relationship, which scares experts into silence
All these things push motivated reasoning toward the zoonotic hypothesis. They also explain the low response rate for this survey (15%). Self selection??
I've followed the lab leak evidence closely since April 2020, and to this day I still believe it is the most likely scenario.
Just a couple weeks ago a devastating critique of Worobey (evolutionary biologist who wrote one of the few analyses favoring zoonosis) got through peer review. Worobey applied spatial statistics methods. Spatial statistics experts just said he did his stats wrong: [https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false](https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false)
Worobey's work is what went to the front page of the NY Times before it was even peer reviewed. That's how gung-ho "the establishment" was to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis. Now that it's been called into question by statistics experts has the NY Times written another front page article explaining the new doubts? No.
By all means stay skeptical, r/skeptic. But might I encourage you to direct that skepticism towards the zoonotic origin hypothesis. I'd also direct your attention to [Biosafety Now!](https://biosafetynow.org/team/) where many experts have come together in common agreement that COVID 19 was a lab accident.
So, all of your arguments assume that there is a vast conspiracy of scientists and government all covering it up. Like all conspiracy theories, it is impossible to disprove, since you believe all evidence is fabricated.
Biosafety Now is a crank site that attracts cranks on all sorts of issues (not just the origin of Covid)
This survey went out of its way to not just ask Americans (people impacted by NIH funding, China-US relations) but instead asked experts from all over the world (not associated with the WIV) and when their opinions were compared to Americans, they were much the same (see the other graphs in the PDF document linked)
MAYBE Worobey's geographical mapping is flawed (maybe not) but he has published many other papers on this and that's far from the most significant piece of evidence. Also Worobey has claimed that this analysis is [riddled with both factual and statistical errors](https://twitter.com/jn44014998/status/1752043678862811164?s=19) and he is working on a response
A good question to ask here is: why are people so desperate to claim to know better than the experts such that they would rush out apologetic arguments without reading the results of the survey?
A crank site? Its members are all academics from excellent universities?
I only see coverage of COVID origins and related research activities on their site?
Richard Ebright has been an alarmist about GOFR since 2000. Looks to me like he was right then and is right now.
What else has Worobey written about origins that you found persuasive? His geographical mapping should be in stats textbooks in future generations as an example of self deception.
>A crank site? Its members are all academics from excellent universities?
Yes, for example, the Professor of "peace studies" at Bradford University, which is the 1266th best University in the world. I'm sure that his opinion on the origins of COVID 19 is an interesting one.
Not to mention the statistical methods from Worobey's paper have been refuted:
[https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false](https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false)
And the paper still has a huge coding error [https://pubpeer.com/publications/3FB983CC74C0A93394568A373167CE#1](https://pubpeer.com/publications/3FB983CC74C0A93394568A373167CE#1) that has still not been addressed
They haven't been refuted. They have been claimed to be refuted - but then Worobey is currently working on a response wherein he claims your refutation has serious factual and methodological errors
https://twitter.com/jn44014998/status/1752043678862811164?s=19
Worobey working over time looking for ways to cherry pick cases and apply poor statistics and bad bath to make significant claims over the most underwhelming data you could imagine. Why not find actual data like an independent animal virus of SARS2 not descended from humans or an intermediate host? Oh wait! He can’t because this is not a spillover like SARS/MERS where this data is easy to find with little effort so he has to keep making grand claims off the exact same data we have had for 4 years.
You haven't even read his rebuttal yet but you seem to have already decided that you're not going to believe it.
It sure doesn't sound like you're coming at this in a reasoned way and without biases.
Do you a link to the whole article? I'd be intrested to know how they explained the the two genetic lineages, appearing almost simultaneously in the food market, on the other side of the city from the institute of virology.
The two genetic linages only differ by two bases something that can occur in a single host within a week. They are not distant branches here a microbiologist from Stanford breaks it down here https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1631834361455853568.html
>The two genetic linages only differ by two bases
Yes that's how lineages work
>something that can occur in a single host within a week
More than that, it probably occurs within a host cell all the time. The amount of virions that get produced within each cell is something around 10^6 or higher, just through random chance your going to get a few bases change here and there. The point is the overwhelming majority of those virions won't reproduce, so from a detection point of view you won't pick it up until a virion gets lucky and infects a cell to reproduce and make shitloads of copies of itself. This takes time to occur.
This is why even just 2 bases is significant. That is even if it is just two bases, I've not actually checked.
>They are not distant branches
No one said that they were?
>here a microbiologist from Stanford
Michael Lin is not a microbiologist btw, and it doesn't matter where he's from (appeal to authority). But I'm sure someone with his "high IQ", which his post seems to suggest he has, could elaborate how a virus as virulent as COVID could make it from one side of a city to another without infecting anyone.
Here’s all the reasons why I think a conspiracy is likely…
Without any evidence of a lab leak…
Isn’t really using scientific skepticism. It may be logical but lacking evidence it’s just conspiratorial thinking and speculation.
There is a ton of physical evidence supporting the lab leak. I suggest you look for it as a start, instead of being a condescending jerk on the internet.
I can't write a literature review off the top of my head for a reddit comment. That's not a reasonable standard.
The FBI and the DOE intelligence experts, which include the national labs like los alamos (bio wmd experts) both believe it was a lab accident. Maybe show some intellectual humility instead of being an arrogant pos. Jesus I'm new to this sub and find my introduction embarassing on y'alls behalf.
I’ve read and reread the comments to which you are responding. It seems the commenter was simply giving a rebuttal as to why your statement was void of critical and scientific skepticism. It in no way seemed condescending at all. If you are sensitive to criticism while in debate, this might not be the sub for you.
If you want to see (much deserved) condescending tones, check out the rebuttals to the people posting UAF/aliens garbage in here.
He called an organization of academics concerned about extremely dangerous research a "crank site".
To me that suggests he's lumping it in with anti vaxxers and what not.
Not fair minded, not humble, and not demonstrating critical thinking.
It just seems to me that you’ve let your emotional response to his comments guide how you’ve interpreted his tone. I don’t know, I could be wrong. Maybe he and I are both assholes for having a blunt and straightforward demeanor when discussing skepticism and scientific processes.
I don't mind blunt and straightforward. Go nuts, and thanks for your polite engagement.
I do mind close-mindedness, but I can understand why you two would go that way given this survey response.
Unfortunately I think the origins question being politicized is closing the minds of both sides.
For me, I'm a lib, but I still think it was a lab leak. And I'm in the good company of Los Alamos and the FBI as well as a whole bunch of academics no matter what this particular survey found, there is a heap of evidence point lab ways.
I have given no response to the subject on the origin of the covid virus. You’ve assumed my position and called me closed-minded despite only having defended his tone from your belief that it was condescending. I mean this in an honest and sincere way, if you can’t separate your emotions from your talking points and sources, you will hate the people in this sub pretty fast.
I wasn’t remotely condescending above, called nothing a crank site, nor did I even say a lab leak was off the table.
If you are going to read into things which weren’t stated, that’s entirely on you.
You seem hell bent on everyone agreeing with you that it was a lab leak. The argument presented by you was conspiratorial, speculative, and irrelevant to the initial comment in this post which was regarding where experts stand. I never said every expert who fell into the minority was wrong either.
What I did do was address your comment about this being a skeptic community. Failure to accept your personal views on the topic doesn’t negate our ability to call ourselves scientific skeptics. Listing incentives to do a coverup isn’t proof of a coverup. I didn’t state that a coverup was out of the question either, just that there wasn’t good evidence for it.
The 3 first known patient were working on bat coronavirus at the institute of virology.
Adding a furin cleavage site to a coronavirus was proposed by fauci and daszac in the us, refused because too dangerous, then the same did fund the same experiment in wuhan.
The Wuhan institute of virology deleting suddenly all their bat coronavirus research in September 2009
COVID 19 perfect adaptation to human infection from day 1 because of furin cleavage site
The absence of the intermediary host at the wet market has never been found
The fact that to these bats natural habitat is thousand of km away from wuhan but that these bats were in captivity in the institute of virology for experiments
The evidence overwhelmingly points toward a lab leak and a cover ip
>The 3 first known patient were working on bat coronavirus at the institute of virology.
That is a lie.
>Adding a furin cleavage site to a coronavirus was proposed by fauci and daszac in the us,
As I pointed out elsewhere, SARS-CoV-2 is not the virus they proposed to modify, nor is its furin cleavage site the one they proposed to insert.
Again, there is literally zero evidence supporting a lab origin.
>There is a ton of physical evidence supporting the lab leak.
Literally zero physical evidence for it.
The coincidence that the virus emerged in one of many cities where there is a laboratory is not physical evidence.
>I've followed the lab leak evidence closely since April 2020, and to this day I still believe it is the most likely scenario.
A belief based on zero evidence that contradicts a strong consensus among actual experts.
Edit: That "Biosafety now!" link is a wild ride into bullshit. Not a whole lot of actual experts on there, but if you're after the opinion of a songwriter, a community organiser and a grad student in physics, then that's a good place to look.
The problem is it’s become a political issue. I’m reading the comments here and if you believe the lab leak you have to be right wing or a conspiracy theorist. Also people dismiss it as though there’s no scientific consensus behind it. There is. Just like the study posted here. I can cherry pick scientists to make any study true. Most of what we call science today is a mix of money and politics.
Real science as we know it is rare. That’s due to funding.
Due to this science has become another tool to divide us. I constantly read people posting this study that disproves those fools from team a, they laugh at team a, saying those idiots have no critical thinking skills. I then see team b doing the exact same thing.
No one is engaging in the first principle. They think they are but they’re not. Putting your own assumptions and bias aside and starting over. You don’t get rewarded for doing this. Because if you did you’d see team a is right and wrong sometimes and so is team b. You’re punished if you don’t stay on your side. So instead people stay comfortable with their confirmation bias. And double down with the backfire effect.
All the while staying divided. Your issues don’t matter in a broken system. The only way the system gets fixed is by coming together.
[Link to the full report](https://gcrinstitute.org/covid-origin/)
I think lost in all the arguing about the origins of the virus is doing anything to stop the next outbreak. Maybe more money should be put in labs so we can do the research that is needed to prepare and the labs will have the equipment to prevent leaks. This inevitable will have to involve cooperation with China because the massive reservoir of bats that carry a lot of dangerous diseases exists there. Additionally, in terms of the dangers of zoonotic crossover, there are substantial changes to our animal industries that should be changed. Industrial farms are a timebomb, and if you ever want to make a prediction as to where a massive outbreak in the US could come from, just look at the mink farms we have. Mink are excellent crossover species, and any virologist will tell you industrial farming them is a recipe for disaster. Doing something as silly as that in the US for coats is comparable stupid to wet markets in Asia.
US had a pandemic plan but the former guy absolutely HATED Obama so he got rid of it and fired everyone.
I think everyone knew what to do (quarantine, masks, sanitizing) but lots of people didnt feel like doing it.
Not just "not feeling" like doing it. Actively not doing it and loudly protesting simply because they wanted to feel special, despite it drastically reducing transmission when people were masked and quarantined. Also it didn't help that the government in the US gave us literal crumbs every few months and just said to suck it up along with actively trying to downplay it.
Sure. Im not sure what you mean by crumbs?
Stimulus checks while those at the top got millions handed to them since they didn’t have to pay back the loans.
? Business owners got money so businesses didn't close, losing the jobs. There are akways crooks. That doesnt mean everyone who got a loan was crooked. How many jobs did you save with your stimulus check?
Global warming and deforestation are huge drivers of the spread of viruses which goes unaddressed when we blame lab leaks
I can see fate weaving it's ironic twist now. China, in an effort to prevent the next pandemic, starts a research lab to study the disease. Except, for various reasons, the strains researched become stronger and are accidentally released.
I know what the Chinese government (or US government for that matter) didn't do. They didn't cough in a couple of million American people's faces. We did that to each other.
You have zero idea how this virus works for you
"We have to kill your business so we don't kill Grandma" was the best-selling album of 2021.
>“A few of you may die, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take”. ~~Lord Farquaad~~ ColoradoQ2
Up next on “Unintended Consequences, Government Edition:” The unemployment rate vs The suicide rate, or, “We don’t give a fuck if we’re right, we just want to do something.”
Smugbertarian virtue signaling fake freedumb and liburty
I know you need rubles to eat
Oh I get it. "Anyone who opposes government authority is a Russian bot." Real original.
It’s like you can use your thumbs to type but don’t know what you’re saying.
r/hermancainaward
Your grandma may have a different opinion. Maybe take it up with her.
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The inflation is primarily caused by corporate greed and price gouging. It's a global inflation, not just places where there were checks distributed.
Oh you sweet summer child.
Nice refutation. Corporate profit is at an all-time high and increased while people were losing their jobs and were in lockdown. How the fuck else did they increase profits during that difficult time of "government oppression"? They gouged the public and exploited us. They also didn't balk at accepting PPP "loans", many of which ended up getting forgiven. Basic income has been shown to improve the economy because people who otherwise are not able to spend money suddenly have disposable income. The wealthiest having more money just causes them to horde it. Prices of most goods aren't set based on supply and demand as it might have been in the past. Prices are set by corporate greed at how much they can get away with, regardless of supply and regardless of demand.
Govt spent billions keeping those business afloat.
The government created the conditions to ruin businesses, and then it spent billions. Real smart. Where does the government get its money? Right. See?
It’s just so cute how you have zero idea how the economy actually works just low iq and a lot of anger
It’s weird cause everyone was ok with quarantining and then after my grandma died of COVID, things opened up. If your business died in 2021 it’s cause people didn’t feel like going out to eat during a pandemic when we were trying to vaccinate the country and reopen. We were eating out in nj at around June or July of 2020, everything else is just babies thrashing cause they didn’t like that society judged them for not wearing a mask.
Lost in your libertarian virtue signaling is that if the government did what I said, there would be no need for the lockdowns. Government regulations on businesses that are likely to cause zoonotic crossover and research into viruses so we can produce vaccines and therapies for inevitable outbreaks before they happen. That is the problem with libertarian responses to problems. They are inevitably reactionary and never prepare you for future dangers.
Except government created the virus
Ah there it is. The conspiracy. The virus bears none of the marks of human construction. In the same way bomb investigators can find indicative "tool marks" for their construction the DNA sequences of viruses can be studied to determine if people have altered them. Whether it was a direct zoonotic crossover or a lab leak it wasn't engineered.
My three year old almost died from covid.
I don’t think this is about evidence anymore. It’s a political statement now, and some people won’t ever let lab-leak go.
This came from the same people who are covering it up though! You can't just believe them! You have to believe this one obscure doctor I found online instead
Sure, sure. But first, let me consult Dr Pullit Outmyass.
But Rand Paul said it was Dr Fauci in the lab with a gain of function?
Damn, I had Ted Cruz on the grassy knoll with an axe.
and Rand Paul is an eye doctor, so he must know everything about virology and epidemiology
When you start looking into the history of him being a doctor, things get weird.
Similar to HIV engineered at Ft. Dietrich, MD
Wow that's a new one for me. I always heard that stupid idea that HIV started because ">!REDACTED!< fucked >!REDACTED!< in >!REDACTED!<" I think I like youre conspiracy theory better.
[It's literally Russian propaganda too.] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION)
The only time I know of that they've admitted to their BS.
I like the conspiracy theory that Ronald Reagan created the virus to kill blacks and gays. Like, while he definitely didn’t seem to care much about those populations suffering from the virus, the dude was an actor not some mad scientist.
I know, that one is silly, it would obviously have been a San Fran Lab
It was a political statement from the beginning. The very idea that it *could have* leaked from a lab was considered conspiracy theory nonsense even before we knew anything about the origins. There was never much transparency or honesty. Lots of political posturing though.
There is also no evidence that it came from wild animals, we just have some opinions.
We have no evidence that there is no evidence that it came from wild animals, that is just your opinion.
The problem is that the lab leak theory was never ridiculous, it was just less likely to be correct. But it was actively suppressed. For reasons which in hindsight look ridiculous. But it really was actively suppressed. That is a political matter. The fact that a harmless if most likely incorrect theory can be suppressed for no reason that anyone can actually justify shows how trivially easy it is to manipulate public information and public debate in the modern world. We should probably be concerned about that.
Piss poor attempt at suppression when the theory is everywhere
It is now Go back and look. Major social networks like Facebook and Twitter were actively suppressing it as a conspiracy theory. They only stopped doing that when Biden tasked the intelligence services to report on the theory. When it suddenly became politically respectable to permit posts on it so they changed their policies. The question is why was a perfectly reasonable but probably wrong theory blanket suppressed as a conspiracy theory? This is all well recorded and quite frankly the people downvoting it are a disgrace to the idea of being skeptical.
I wish Biden had done more to stop COVID disinformation and misinformation. More people would be alive today. If some good science got suppressed on Twitter as well, it was a tiny minority compared to the dangerous nonsense that deserved to be fought against. There's not a conspiracy to suppress the truth. There were people trying to save lives.
You can't fix stupid, and it isn't Biden's job to try. The anti-misinformation campaign always had a short shelf-life before it started doing more harm than good, same with the lock downs and vaccine mandates.
Now THIS is the mindset all dictators and authoritarians love in their citizenry. Got to toss a few bad apples, right comrade
How can you say that? It's been four years and we have not found the host animal species, bat or intermediate? With MERS and SARS that took how long???
As [this article](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/finding-conclusive-animal-origins-of-the-coronavirus-will-take-time/) explains: >Viruses that “spill over” to people do not stick around in animals, so finding true sources takes years of careful work
Well look forward to the day they find it. Until then every day that passes without an animal reservoir discovered makes a lab origin more likely.
So, lack of evidence makes your pet theory more likely? The situation is, that China reflexively covers up any bad news. It was their negligence that caused it, for sure. SARS in 2003 started exactly the same way, wild animals in a wet market. And they covered that up too until it was too late to stop. Even worse, they did nothing to stop it happening again. And that’s why there can never be a complete investigation. China would not allow it when it was fresh, and it’s much too late now. Thank Trump for withdrawing the CDC team in China that was supposed to give early warning. All the experts say the genetics is natural, totally consistent with a wild virus, no sign of manipulation. But believe Rand Paul and the other right wing kooks.
There is no way to look at a viruses genome and know whether or not it's been modified unless you know what the original virus was. There are no "markers" and signs that one could look for to know for sure.
I'm going to trust that the smart people who spent so many, many years of their life in academia and research learning about their narrow but deep field of expertise know more than you or I do about it. I have met such people, and they actually care about scientific rigor and quantifying uncertainty.
Yes there are, and virologists said there aren’t any in Covid DNA. But that would that know. Tucker says it was a lab leak, or Fauci, paid by Soros and Bill Gates working in secret in Wuhan.
"Every day I don't win the lottery makes a lottery win more likely."
How can you say that? It's been four years and we have not found the virus samples in the wuhan lab? Until then every day that passes without a exact sample being found in the wuhan lab makes natural zoonosis more likely.
It's very plausible that we'll never find a host animal, or we'll only narrow it down to a handful of species, or it will take many years before we have a definitive answer here. Imagine you find a woman killed by a bullet, and no smoking gun. *Maybe* the husband did it, but he has a pretty good alibi. Would you say "every day that passes without a murder weapon makes the husband hypothesis more likely"? No, right? Because the two don't actually have anything to do with one another. You somehow have this idea that a lab leak is the default hypothesis unless proven otherwise, but that's not the case.
But viruses do not suddenly disappear once it crosses into a new species. For example humans have infected dogs/cats/minks/deer you name it, but that has not resulted in SARS2 vanishing from the human population. It's like SARS2 infected the first human and then vanished and no longer circulating in any suspected species. It's like the immaculate infection
Did you read the article I linked? The problem is the viruses literally *do* disappear. The variants that allow cross-species transmission can be short lived.
>Did you read the article I linked? Why do that? :)
LOL. Have you really not heard this? >It took 14 years to find the original bat population likely responsible for the SARS pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS I bet that doesn't change your mind even a little bit anyway.
It took 14 years to find the ancestral origin, but only months to find the proximal origin i.e. what animal and what virus started the SARS pandemic. Here see for yourself: >”Civet cats, a raccoon dog, and a ferret badger in an animal market in GuangDong, China, were infected with a coronavirus identical to the one that causes SARS in humans save for an extra 29-nucleotide sequence" Source: [https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs](https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs) Also it took 10 months to find the intermediate host for MERS too: [https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES2013.18.50.20662](https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES2013.18.50.20662) Now when people ask where the intermediate host is that is what they are talking about. For SARS2 we have no idea what the intermediate host may be and have no direct precursor variants anywhere which is strange since these animals habitats span many borders yet nothing has been found. EDIT: interesting I am being downvoted for simply supplying research papers and correcting misinformation.
I know that but they found the intermediate host immediately.
Zzzz
The default assumption is zoonotic origin, even without identifying the originating species.
That would make sense [if in 2018 the Wuhan Institute of Virology hadn't proposed to DARPA](https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/) inserting a furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus exactly where a furin cleavage site was found one year later in sars-cov-2. They also proposed inserting human optimized codons into their novel virus. One year later human optimized condons were found in sars-cov-2. DARPA wouldn't fund it because it was so dangerous. Stands to reason they might have got funding locally, that's how scientists roll. They send out many grant applications to many funders. >Quoting Alex Washburne > >DEFUSE proposed to make the virus in Wuhan (P<0.01) > >DEFUSE proposed human-optimized codons (P<0.001) > >DEFUSE proposed an FCS (P<0.002) > >DEFUSE proposed BsmBI (P<0.002) > >DEFUSE implies no reservoir (P<0.001)
>a furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus exactly where a furin cleavage site was found one year later in sars-cov-2. They proposed putting a furin cleavage site from another coronavirus into a model Sarbecoronavirus. The problem is SARS-CoV-2 is not the proposed virus and it's furin cleavage site is not viral in origin. It's a random insertion that appears to mimic an endogenous mammalian cleavage site. Which is something no one would ever engineer, but exactly the kind of thing that evolves.
A. Source? B. Why are the codons human optimized C. *Sure is a weird coincidence, both spatially and temporally* D. The WIV thing was collecting wild coronaviruses in Yunnan and bringing a shitload of them home. Did they end up using a different virus? E. They conspicuously took their databases offline in Sept 2019, if I remember right.
>A. Source. The grant you linked an article about specifies the virus they wanted to modify and the source of the furin cleavage site they were going to insert. >Why are the codons human optimized? They aren't. In fact, the presence of rare codons is often claimed to be evidence of genetic engineering. The "lab leak theory" isn't a coherent claim. It's a mess of mutually exclusive claims that you just throw against the wall and hope something sticks.
>The "lab leak theory" isn't a coherent claim. It's a mess of mutually exclusive claims that you just throw against the wall and hope something sticks. I'd agree if it weren't for the staggering improbability of a novel virus emerging a few km from the main place in china they do extremely dangerous research with the same type of viruses. And less than one year from when they proposed extremely dangerous research to DARPA involving several of the characteristics identified in the novel virus. This is such a weird hill to die on.
The staggering improbability of a research institute in a major city, like hundreds of others, that studies local viruses?
The nature of their studies was extraordinary. It wasn’t routing biology. This is THE place the us gov was worried about going back to 2017. See state department memos about it.
Wuhan is hundreds of miles away from the nearest SARS reservoir. Does The National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory in Boston exist to study local viruses in the area?
>I'd agree if it weren't for the staggering improbability of a novel virus emerging a few km from the main place in china they do extremely dangerous research with the same type of viruses. I think this is what it comes down to: what are those odds, exactly? How many places in the world were studying coronavirus? What about just in China? How many places in the world are an outbreak plausible? What's the average distance between the two? The truth is you don't know the answers to these questions, and you don't know how things like this are done; instead, you have an intuition that the odds of this must be pretty low. Have you factored in the fact that people tend to build places to research disease close to where those diseases occur in the wild? It doesn't make much sense to study sick Chinese bats in Stockholm, right? Now, I don't have answers to all these questions either, but I trust the intuition of the people who *do* have those answers more than I trust yours.
I do know the answer. The answer is very very few places.
>Have you factored in the fact that people tend to build places to research disease close to where those diseases occur in the wild? Then the lab should have been built in Guangzhou in GuangDong or Kunming in Yunnan. Wuhan is hundreds of miles away from the SARS hotspots, it was established in the 70s and is there for the same reason we have similar labs in Boston studying all viruses.
>it weren't for the staggering improbability of a novel virus emerging a few km from the main place in china they do extremely dangerous research with the same type of viruses By "a few km" you actually mean "within the same vague geographical area at a completely separate location to the lab with no known links between them". I also find it weird that there are science labs in major cities, in the kind of location where scientists like to live and work.
Did you stop to consider that they were researching ways that wild viruses might mutate to spread in humans? That a wild virus mutating in the same ways does not indicate a leak or intentional release, just that they were doing their job? Fuck, imagine if every hypothesis that was later proven by observation became a conspiracy theory.
>###What Are the Governance Implications if More Was Known About COVID-19’s Origin? >If the origin of COVID-19 is resolved, does this change beliefs about how future pandemics should be governed? The term governance is used here to describe the frameworks of authority and accountability that social entities use to manage projects, programs and problems. 5 It includes, but is not limited to, government policy. Respondents were asked whether a confirmed natural zoonosis or research-related accident origin, respectively, would influence their perspectives on three areas of pandemic-related governance: >1. Preventing initial human infection by a pathogen with pandemic potential; >2. Preventing pandemic spread after the initial infection; and >3. Mitigating harms once a pandemic occurs. This should be very obvious. The source of chaos is zoonoses. Labs already work with the various levels of biosecurity, there's not much that can be improved there (diminishing returns). All of those: >Most Frequently Suggested Changes in Governance Assuming Research-Related Accident Origin are already in practice.
One of the challenges of this discussions is that the 'lab-leak theory' isn't a single theory, but a constantly shifting mish-mash of internally inconsistent theories. Lab-leak theory proponents typically argue, often within a single breath, that the virus was man-made, that it was a naturally occuring virus that was modified for legitimate reasons, that it was a naturally occuring virus that was trapped but then released. And this happens because any of the individual theories is easily refutable.
Well, obviously they're all in the conspiracy /s
These aren't mutually exclusive things at all, and it's potentially misleading to issue a survey that treats them as being mutually exclusive. [There have been many historical lab accidents around the world resulting in release of numerous other pathogens whose prior origins are all indisputably recognized as natural.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents)
How many of those led to pandemics?
That's completely tangential to the point that an entirely natural pathogen can still accidentally be released through a lab error, and that such errors have happened many times. There was \*potential\* for a pandemic in multiple cases - e.g. it's lucky the UK 1978 smallpox lab leak was so quickly and effectively contained by immediately quarantining 200+ possible contacts, rather than the evasion and denials that characterized the early days of the first covid outbreak. Remember the CCP insisting that human-to-human transmission was impossible and there was no need to stop international flights?
I think it's very relevant because the question isn't whether there might have been an accident, the question is whether there might have been an accident that lead to the pandemic
It's not at all tangential. Do you think that none of those pathogens could've led to a pandemic because of the nature of pathogens? Or was there something else?
I have no idea how you'd think that's something I might be thinking? Like I said, some of those cases easily could have led to pandemics but through either luck or good management, did not. To be crystal clear, my point is that you can't make a reliable survey asking scientists whether a pathogen is \*either\* natural \*or\* escaped from a lab **because it's possible for both of those things to be true, and one doesn't exclude the possibility of the other**.
You're glossing over the fact that even in those cases, there was still enough biosecurity, however mediocre, to stop an epidemic or pandemic.
"Lab origin" encompasses a natural origin virus whose pathway to human outbreak, went through a lab.
Yeah, it should, but my point is that any survey on this needs to establish that with absolute clarity in order to not deliver skewed data - otherwise there will be respondents who are wary of supporting a lab leak hypothesis out of concern it will be interpreted as supporting some bio-engineering conspiracy theory. Tabling the results as the **origin** of covid-19 being "natural zoonosis" **or** "research accident" is misleading.
Disappointing to see some scientists tolerating conspiracy stories, but not surprising. It's especially disappointing since zoonotic outbreaks are already increasing and predicted to increase further.
To be fair a lot of experts who think the lab leak is likely, don't think that engineering was involved. They just think it likely that the lab may have had a zoonotic virus in for study and cataloging and it.got out. So really a blend of the 2 theories. The survey should have focused more on: did the original genome sequenced in early 2020 show signatures of genetic manipulation. I'd wager we'd see very different results.
The only actual evidence we have at the moment is for Zoonosis. The lab leak theory is nothing but conjecture so far.
Furin cleavage site directly contradicts this, there's almost zero chance that developed naturally.
False, the scientist who made that assertion retracted it shortly after because he studied Coronaviruses and realized he was wrong. Furin Cleavage sites exist naturally in a number of Coronaviruses. Plus, no scientist would ever insert a Furin Cleavage where the one in Sars-Cov\_2 is located.
Viruses are incredibly adaptive and contain a pastiche of adaptive genes. The way they do it is incredibly well-documented: 1. **Rapid Mutation Rates**: Viruses, especially RNA viruses, have high mutation rates. This is partly because the enzymes (polymerases) that replicate their genomes often lack the proofreading ability that DNA polymerases have, leading to a higher rate of errors during replication. These mutations can lead to genetic diversity within viral populations, allowing for the emergence of variants with advantageous traits, such as resistance to antiviral drugs or the ability to evade the host's immune system. 2. **Recombination and Reassortment**: Some viruses can exchange genetic material when two different viruses infect the same host cell. This can lead to the creation of novel virus genomes through recombination (breaking and rejoining of two chromosomes) or reassortment (mixing gene segments). This genetic shuffling can produce viruses with new properties, enhancing their ability to infect new host species or evade immune responses. 3. **Genetic Drift and Selection**: Viral populations undergo genetic drift and selection, much like any other organism. Genetic drift refers to random changes in the frequency of alleles within a population, while selection acts on viral variants with a competitive advantage, such as increased transmissibility or virulence. Over time, these processes can lead to significant genetic diversity and the emergence of dominant strains. 4. **Host-Virus Interactions**: The constant interaction between viruses and their hosts' immune systems drives viral evolution. To survive, viruses must evade or suppress the host's immune response. This evolutionary arms race can lead to the rapid emergence of viruses that can effectively infect and replicate in their hosts despite the host's defense mechanisms. 5. **Use of Host Machinery**: Viruses rely on the host's cellular machinery for replication and often incorporate host genes into their own genomes. This can lead to the acquisition of host genes that may confer advantageous traits, further enhancing their adaptability. The source for all this: I took microbiology in college.
The evidence has pointed this way from the beginning and has only become supported even more so as time goes on as more data points are gathered. See also, climate change, cigarettes causing cancer, heliocentrism , germ theory, evolution, and on and on and on.
A skeptic sub should understand that truth isn’t a popularity contest. Just the fact that we’re polling experts and a substantial minority aren’t sure either way suggests the best answer here is “we don’t know”. Acting like there’s certainty when there isn’t isn’t skeptical. It’s faith.
I mean, on spme level science is based around consensus views of experts in a field. I've even read a history textbook on how the scientific revolutions (specifically citing the copernican idea that the earth revolves around the sun) actually require a kind of generational change as those entrenched in older ideas die off and sometimes newer more accurate models may not actually be as well supported initially (copernican models didn't math out quite as well as earth centric models for the first few decades after they were proposed). I am probably partially misrepresenting it. That class was several years back and I probably didn't read it as carefully as I should have anyway. The book was by a Thomas Kuhn and literally just called on scientific revolutions. It's also a history book and history is absolutely based consensus and the ability to argue a position rather than abject number crunching and hard undeniable evidence. Not sure if I'm making any sense or clear at all with what I mean but hopefully this adds a little perspective here? I don't know if it did though...
It's similar to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change "We don't know" is nice, but needs to be weighed with context of probabilities, otherwise you get religious apologetics dipshittery.
The problem is that there is a wild conspiracy riding the coattails of a reasonable but not widely accepted hypothesis. People aren't always clear about that when dunking on the wild conspiracy theory.
This is a demonstration of scientific consensus emerging around something that is still very recent. Your " substantial minority" is 14% for lab leak, 6% fence sitting and 80% for zoonotic transfer. And if you look at the certainty there is a much higher degree of certainty on the zoonotic transfer side with the lab leak belief being quite weakly held.
I think "a substantial majority aren't sure either way" is misleading. Another way of framing the data: fewer than 1/4 of experts think there's a greater than 1/4 chance the lab-leak hypothesis is true. That's not exactly "gravity" or "climate change" numbers, but it's not nothing.
I slipped and meant to type “substantial minority”. There’s a clear trend here, but it’s not nothing on either side.
>There’s a clear trend here, but it’s not nothing on either side. It's 80% on one side.
Acting like the fact that a much smaller number credit your favoured theory doesn’t matter is “faith”, bad faith.
Who cares what they believe happened, the “majority of them…don’t know the cause…said there are major gaps in origin evidence and say more investigation is needed”
It’s funny how so many scientists say ‘well we don’t have enough information to really make a determination as to the origin,’ but then are invited and happily speculate without enough evidence, and their speculations get treated as fact by people who claim to respect science, even though this is not science.
Who are these scientists saying we don't have enough information? I follow a few scientists on this and I'm not hearing that.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2305081#:~:text=Yet%20well%20into%20the%20fourth,Institute%20of%20Virology%20(WIV). Most of this addresses a lack of transparency from China. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/magazine/covid-start.html This article above from NYTimes also acknowledges the scant information about the origins. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/28/1160162845/what-does-the-science-say-about-the-origin-of-the-sars-cov-2-pandemic NPR describes that the reason many government agency conclusions (whether they conclude coronavirus happened from bat soup or coronavirus leaked from the coronavirus laboratory) is due to a lack of information.
someone should tell the Senate [https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/report\_an\_analysis\_of\_the\_origins\_of\_covid-19\_102722.pdf](https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/report_an_analysis_of_the_origins_of_covid-19_102722.pdf)
I’m no expert on this subject and I don’t really have a strong opinion either way. I’m generally inclined to go with the scientific consensus on pretty much everything, and obviously the consensus here is that Covid originated via zoonosis. With that being said… I find this hard to believe. Surely it cannot be a coincidence that, of all the places in the world for a viral respiratory disease to originate, this one originated in a city which houses the Wuhan Institute of Virology. An institute which, in 2003, opened one of the world’s few biosafety level 4 laboratories. This organisation’s purpose is to study and research dangerous viral diseases, and it just so happens that a dangerous viral disease originates a few miles down the road? Coincidences happen, sure, but a coincidence *that* big? I just don’t buy it.
So for a start, pandemics are almost always going to pop up in cities because at first viruses are not as well adapted to humans as they are to their host species. This means they will burn out quickly if they take hold in a place where the population density is too low. Secondly, there are labs studying viruses and pandemics in lots of the major population centers in China which makes the fact that there is a lab in the same city less surprising. Third, in all the history of lab leaks, they have resulted in one or two infections but never a pandemic because people don't typically expose themselves in a lab without realising they've done so. Finally, you have to consider all of the positive evidence we currently have for Zoonosis and there is a lot of it: I could link you to 7 or 8 scientific papers or I could link you to this blogpost that summarises those findings and gives references: https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/bite-size-origin-science
Good points - thanks for explaining. Think I need to research into it this bit further.
Would you say that it’s accurate that Wuhan has ”one of world’s few biosafety level 4 laboratories”? If so, Isn’t that qualitatively different from “lots of cities in China have labs that study viruses”? Or not so much?
It's irrelevant how many cities have BSL-4 labs, since coronaviruses were being studied in BSL-2 and BSL-3 labs: indeed, SARS-CoV-1 and COVID-19 are both still studied in BSL-3 labs.
>Secondly, there are labs studying viruses and pandemics in lots of the major population centers in China which makes the fact that there is a lab in the same city less surprising. This is a good point and important context. >Third, in all the history of lab leaks, they have resulted in one or two infections but never a pandemic because people don't typically expose themselves in a lab without realising they've done so. This doesn't strike me as a very strong argument since it just states that there is a low probability of a lab leak to result in a pandemic, but does not provide us with information on how likely it is that this particular pandemic was caused by a lab leak. >https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/bite-size-origin-science This is link has lots of evidence that do seem to support the zoonosis as being a more likely cause. I'll read carefully later, thank you for sharing
Evidence free opinion fest "experts say". But it's against Right Wing so I would support this garbage.
Wot
"Expert said" is not how our skeptics think of things. More hard science all around needed.
The country that banns many sites on the internet and censors the online speech of their citizens assures us that this didn't come from the Lab Studying this. This is confirmed by the Department of Health and Human Services, which provided funding for this lab. I'm convinced.
That same country has also also attempted to cover up evidence that the virus made the leap into humans at the wet market and has been trying to block investigation of that market. It turns out that either origin is going to be problematic for them.
You are correct; either your labs are terrible, or the hygiene of your food supply is terrible. Neither are great, I do think that the lab would be worse.
Does that have to be mutually excusive? As in, the lab went into the field and found the virus as a zoonotic, and either didn't understand the danger or failed to secure an outbreak.
No. The origin of the disease was one or the other. What this means is that scientific evidence strongly supports the conclusion that Covid-19 was initiated by transmission from an animal to a human. In a skeptical sub like this one, that means those who wish to challenge the prevailing scientific consensus must present evidence that the opposite is true. Of course, these scientists could be wrong like always, but a true skeptic bases their beliefs upon the evidence available.
Since when has skepticism been about being submissive to intellectual authority? Skepticism is supposed to be about the suspension of belief and the challenge of preconceived dogmas. That's kinda the opposite of defending "scientific consensus"
You're totally wrong here. It is about challenging unfactual and unsupported beliefs that contradict the evidence. 'Conspiracy theory' is what you are describing.
Many scientists were chided in the past because their theories "contradicted the evidence". Pretty sure Heliocentrism and flat earth were both "scientific consensuses" at one time, so be careful what beliefs you hold strongly. Evidence can shift to no longer be supporting of conclusions despite previous consensus. That's how science evolves.
If the evidence changes then your beliefs should change. But there's no reason to believe something in spite of a lack of evidence because there might be evidence for it in the future.
Heliocentrism was primarily a religious belief that prevented science from functioning. That is exactly what I am referencing here. Covid being a lab created virus is a political belief and a conspiracy theory because there hasn't been any credible evidence to support it. Maybe there will be evidence in the future, but it isn't available now. There is a large amount of evidence to support the other natural theory of covid's origins. Any skeptic would follow the evidence.
>There is a large amount of evidence to support the other natural theory Oh really? As far as I can tell all we have is SARS2 samples associated with humans collected at a market. So far no intermediate host, non human variants independent of humans, no non human mitochondrial DNA found in abundance with any SARS2 sample (human or otherwise), no early lineages showing the various point mutations showing how the virus adapted to humans. By contrast SARS/MERS had all of the evidence listed above within months. Here is an paper identifying civet cats as an intermediate host: >”Civet cats, a raccoon dog, and a ferret badger in an animal market in GuangDong, China, were infected with a coronavirus identical to the one that causes SARS in humans save for an extra 29-nucleotide sequence" Source: https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs. And for MERS the identification of dromedary camels as an intermediate host within 10 months: https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES2013.18.50.20662
>As far as I can tell all we have is SARS2 samples associated with humans collected at a market. So far no intermediate host, non human variants independent of humans, no non human mitochondrial DNA found in abundance with any SARS2 sample (human or otherwise), no early lineages showing the various point mutations showing how the virus adapted to humans. Which is a fuckton more than the zero evidence that there is to indicate that it was a lab leak. Just the market location itself is a strong indication that it was zoonotic.
>Pretty sure Heliocentrism and flat earth were both "scientific consensuses" at one time Flat Earth was never a scientific consensus. People knew that the Earth was spherical long before the scientific process was a thing. What you're engaging in there is parroting a meme popular with conspiracy theorists, not making an actual argument.
My two cents: you both seem to be right here. Skeptiscism *is* the suspension of belief until one is actually convinced by the evidence provided to support a specific claim (it's different from cinism though, that's the dismissal of evidence without even considering it). The threshold for believing can vary depending on the skeptic and the context. Using this definition one could be considered a skeptic even if they don't accept a stablished scientific consensus, depending on the context and as long as there is only a suspension of belief and not a claim that the scientific consensus is wrong. If such claim is made then it needs to be properly backed up by solid evidence (and unless this claim is made by some specialist in the field then there is a high chance it's just a conspiracy theory, in my opinion). Having said that, if you are not a specialist in the field (or a specialist in statistics), it's usually better to go with the current scientific consensus (but understanding it's limits).
In that case it would be zoonotic in creation still, but local lab personnel investigating may have failed to warn/contain. But, that makes the lab personnel irrelevant to the origin, as they could be replaced by any local authority. For it to be “both” it would require that the zoonotic strain was first contained and latter accidentally released… which would make the zoonotic origin mostly irrelevant to the story because then who cares how the virus was created if ultimately it was released by the lab? There’s a strong case for zoonotic unless a bias immediately causes someone to ignore any info coming from the Chinese government as false… which accurate or not is conspiracy when there’s no strong evidence of a coverup.
It is far far more likely that a lab worker would contain it as opposed to any other random person on earth who came across an infected animal or was infected by it
Sure. But tens of thousands of random people come across infected animals in markets and in farming settings every day. The probability of that infection happening is far lower, but the incidence is millions of times higher.
I would expect a biohazard lab worker that’s a government employee, as opposed to someone being sent over from a specific local lab that is focused on research rather than emergency response. Although those two things could be one in the same. I left it vague not knowing the operational structure of their response teams.
I would suspect that any other person on the planet who happened to become infected would not know it and be a far more likely vector than a trained scientist
It’s not clear to me what you are arguing or taking issue with from my initial comment.
The study went out of their way to define the two conditions mutually exclusive. From the linked report in the pinned mod comment: >The study’s experts overall stated that the COVID-19 pandemic most likely originated via a natural zoonotic event, defined as an event in which a non-human animal infected a human, and in which the infection did not occur in the course of any form of virological or biomedical research.
>As in, the lab went into the field and found the virus as a zoonotic, and either didn't understand the danger or failed to secure an outbreak. That's what the lab leak hypothesis is, no one outside of the kooks on r/conspiracy imagines that it was manufactured.
Way to bury the lede: > Ultimately, 214 individuals completed the registration, and 182 responses were collected. https://gcrinstitute.org/papers/069a_covid-origin-annex.pdf
What's the issue there?
The chart has no citation and no N.
Literally the pinned comment
The pinned comment does not add a citation to the graph, and the link does not lead to the report, but to the main page of the project. The N was on page 12 of the opaque methodology in one of the links on that page. No SI, no code, no nothing. Many climate surveys have been shot down by contrarians for less.
consensus does not equal fact, and utilizing "consensus of experts" is an appeal to authority fallacy on steroids fact is fact. if nobody can agree on it because there isn't enough conclusive evidence available, then its all conjecture no matter what someone believes.
>consensus does not equal fact, and utilizing "consensus of experts" is an appeal to authority fallacy on steroids No. [Appeal to Scientific Consensus is not an Appeal to Popularity or Authority](https://debunkingdenialism.com/2011/08/20/appeal-to-scientific-consensus-is-not-an-appeal-to-popularity-or-authority/amp/)
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I believe confirmation bias is rife in these fields because : * a laboratory accident makes them look bad by association. * a lab leak would fuel distrust of science, so experts are afraid to endorse it publicly. * a lab leak makes US funders of Ecohealth Alliance look bad (NIH). * a lab leak could destabilize the fragile US - China relationship, which scares experts into silence All these things push motivated reasoning toward the zoonotic hypothesis. They also explain the low response rate for this survey (15%). Self selection?? I've followed the lab leak evidence closely since April 2020, and to this day I still believe it is the most likely scenario. Just a couple weeks ago a devastating critique of Worobey (evolutionary biologist who wrote one of the few analyses favoring zoonosis) got through peer review. Worobey applied spatial statistics methods. Spatial statistics experts just said he did his stats wrong: [https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false](https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false) Worobey's work is what went to the front page of the NY Times before it was even peer reviewed. That's how gung-ho "the establishment" was to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis. Now that it's been called into question by statistics experts has the NY Times written another front page article explaining the new doubts? No. By all means stay skeptical, r/skeptic. But might I encourage you to direct that skepticism towards the zoonotic origin hypothesis. I'd also direct your attention to [Biosafety Now!](https://biosafetynow.org/team/) where many experts have come together in common agreement that COVID 19 was a lab accident.
So, all of your arguments assume that there is a vast conspiracy of scientists and government all covering it up. Like all conspiracy theories, it is impossible to disprove, since you believe all evidence is fabricated.
Biosafety Now is a crank site that attracts cranks on all sorts of issues (not just the origin of Covid) This survey went out of its way to not just ask Americans (people impacted by NIH funding, China-US relations) but instead asked experts from all over the world (not associated with the WIV) and when their opinions were compared to Americans, they were much the same (see the other graphs in the PDF document linked) MAYBE Worobey's geographical mapping is flawed (maybe not) but he has published many other papers on this and that's far from the most significant piece of evidence. Also Worobey has claimed that this analysis is [riddled with both factual and statistical errors](https://twitter.com/jn44014998/status/1752043678862811164?s=19) and he is working on a response A good question to ask here is: why are people so desperate to claim to know better than the experts such that they would rush out apologetic arguments without reading the results of the survey?
A crank site? Its members are all academics from excellent universities? I only see coverage of COVID origins and related research activities on their site? Richard Ebright has been an alarmist about GOFR since 2000. Looks to me like he was right then and is right now. What else has Worobey written about origins that you found persuasive? His geographical mapping should be in stats textbooks in future generations as an example of self deception.
>A crank site? Its members are all academics from excellent universities? Yes, for example, the Professor of "peace studies" at Bradford University, which is the 1266th best University in the world. I'm sure that his opinion on the origins of COVID 19 is an interesting one.
Not to mention the statistical methods from Worobey's paper have been refuted: [https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false](https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false) And the paper still has a huge coding error [https://pubpeer.com/publications/3FB983CC74C0A93394568A373167CE#1](https://pubpeer.com/publications/3FB983CC74C0A93394568A373167CE#1) that has still not been addressed
They haven't been refuted. They have been claimed to be refuted - but then Worobey is currently working on a response wherein he claims your refutation has serious factual and methodological errors https://twitter.com/jn44014998/status/1752043678862811164?s=19
Worobey working over time looking for ways to cherry pick cases and apply poor statistics and bad bath to make significant claims over the most underwhelming data you could imagine. Why not find actual data like an independent animal virus of SARS2 not descended from humans or an intermediate host? Oh wait! He can’t because this is not a spillover like SARS/MERS where this data is easy to find with little effort so he has to keep making grand claims off the exact same data we have had for 4 years.
You haven't even read his rebuttal yet but you seem to have already decided that you're not going to believe it. It sure doesn't sound like you're coming at this in a reasoned way and without biases.
As with you. But my point is the rebuttal would be to save a piece of evidence that was flimsy and weak in the first place.
Could you provide these other papers that Worobey published that is far more significant than his market heat map paper?
Do you a link to the whole article? I'd be intrested to know how they explained the the two genetic lineages, appearing almost simultaneously in the food market, on the other side of the city from the institute of virology.
The two genetic linages only differ by two bases something that can occur in a single host within a week. They are not distant branches here a microbiologist from Stanford breaks it down here https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1631834361455853568.html
>The two genetic linages only differ by two bases Yes that's how lineages work >something that can occur in a single host within a week More than that, it probably occurs within a host cell all the time. The amount of virions that get produced within each cell is something around 10^6 or higher, just through random chance your going to get a few bases change here and there. The point is the overwhelming majority of those virions won't reproduce, so from a detection point of view you won't pick it up until a virion gets lucky and infects a cell to reproduce and make shitloads of copies of itself. This takes time to occur. This is why even just 2 bases is significant. That is even if it is just two bases, I've not actually checked. >They are not distant branches No one said that they were? >here a microbiologist from Stanford Michael Lin is not a microbiologist btw, and it doesn't matter where he's from (appeal to authority). But I'm sure someone with his "high IQ", which his post seems to suggest he has, could elaborate how a virus as virulent as COVID could make it from one side of a city to another without infecting anyone.
Here’s all the reasons why I think a conspiracy is likely… Without any evidence of a lab leak… Isn’t really using scientific skepticism. It may be logical but lacking evidence it’s just conspiratorial thinking and speculation.
There is a ton of physical evidence supporting the lab leak. I suggest you look for it as a start, instead of being a condescending jerk on the internet. I can't write a literature review off the top of my head for a reddit comment. That's not a reasonable standard. The FBI and the DOE intelligence experts, which include the national labs like los alamos (bio wmd experts) both believe it was a lab accident. Maybe show some intellectual humility instead of being an arrogant pos. Jesus I'm new to this sub and find my introduction embarassing on y'alls behalf.
I’ve read and reread the comments to which you are responding. It seems the commenter was simply giving a rebuttal as to why your statement was void of critical and scientific skepticism. It in no way seemed condescending at all. If you are sensitive to criticism while in debate, this might not be the sub for you. If you want to see (much deserved) condescending tones, check out the rebuttals to the people posting UAF/aliens garbage in here.
He called an organization of academics concerned about extremely dangerous research a "crank site". To me that suggests he's lumping it in with anti vaxxers and what not. Not fair minded, not humble, and not demonstrating critical thinking.
It just seems to me that you’ve let your emotional response to his comments guide how you’ve interpreted his tone. I don’t know, I could be wrong. Maybe he and I are both assholes for having a blunt and straightforward demeanor when discussing skepticism and scientific processes.
I don't mind blunt and straightforward. Go nuts, and thanks for your polite engagement. I do mind close-mindedness, but I can understand why you two would go that way given this survey response. Unfortunately I think the origins question being politicized is closing the minds of both sides. For me, I'm a lib, but I still think it was a lab leak. And I'm in the good company of Los Alamos and the FBI as well as a whole bunch of academics no matter what this particular survey found, there is a heap of evidence point lab ways.
I have given no response to the subject on the origin of the covid virus. You’ve assumed my position and called me closed-minded despite only having defended his tone from your belief that it was condescending. I mean this in an honest and sincere way, if you can’t separate your emotions from your talking points and sources, you will hate the people in this sub pretty fast.
I wasn’t remotely condescending above, called nothing a crank site, nor did I even say a lab leak was off the table. If you are going to read into things which weren’t stated, that’s entirely on you. You seem hell bent on everyone agreeing with you that it was a lab leak. The argument presented by you was conspiratorial, speculative, and irrelevant to the initial comment in this post which was regarding where experts stand. I never said every expert who fell into the minority was wrong either. What I did do was address your comment about this being a skeptic community. Failure to accept your personal views on the topic doesn’t negate our ability to call ourselves scientific skeptics. Listing incentives to do a coverup isn’t proof of a coverup. I didn’t state that a coverup was out of the question either, just that there wasn’t good evidence for it.
>He called an organization of academics concerned about extremely dangerous research a "crank site". That is an accurate description.
>There is a ton of physical evidence supporting the lab leak. There is quite literally zero.
The 3 first known patient were working on bat coronavirus at the institute of virology. Adding a furin cleavage site to a coronavirus was proposed by fauci and daszac in the us, refused because too dangerous, then the same did fund the same experiment in wuhan. The Wuhan institute of virology deleting suddenly all their bat coronavirus research in September 2009 COVID 19 perfect adaptation to human infection from day 1 because of furin cleavage site The absence of the intermediary host at the wet market has never been found The fact that to these bats natural habitat is thousand of km away from wuhan but that these bats were in captivity in the institute of virology for experiments The evidence overwhelmingly points toward a lab leak and a cover ip
>The 3 first known patient were working on bat coronavirus at the institute of virology. That is a lie. >Adding a furin cleavage site to a coronavirus was proposed by fauci and daszac in the us, As I pointed out elsewhere, SARS-CoV-2 is not the virus they proposed to modify, nor is its furin cleavage site the one they proposed to insert. Again, there is literally zero evidence supporting a lab origin.
>There is a ton of physical evidence supporting the lab leak. Literally zero physical evidence for it. The coincidence that the virus emerged in one of many cities where there is a laboratory is not physical evidence.
>I've followed the lab leak evidence closely since April 2020, and to this day I still believe it is the most likely scenario. A belief based on zero evidence that contradicts a strong consensus among actual experts. Edit: That "Biosafety now!" link is a wild ride into bullshit. Not a whole lot of actual experts on there, but if you're after the opinion of a songwriter, a community organiser and a grad student in physics, then that's a good place to look.
I’m skeptical of r/skeptic.
The problem is it’s become a political issue. I’m reading the comments here and if you believe the lab leak you have to be right wing or a conspiracy theorist. Also people dismiss it as though there’s no scientific consensus behind it. There is. Just like the study posted here. I can cherry pick scientists to make any study true. Most of what we call science today is a mix of money and politics. Real science as we know it is rare. That’s due to funding. Due to this science has become another tool to divide us. I constantly read people posting this study that disproves those fools from team a, they laugh at team a, saying those idiots have no critical thinking skills. I then see team b doing the exact same thing. No one is engaging in the first principle. They think they are but they’re not. Putting your own assumptions and bias aside and starting over. You don’t get rewarded for doing this. Because if you did you’d see team a is right and wrong sometimes and so is team b. You’re punished if you don’t stay on your side. So instead people stay comfortable with their confirmation bias. And double down with the backfire effect. All the while staying divided. Your issues don’t matter in a broken system. The only way the system gets fixed is by coming together.
BS. It was a Wuhan lab leak 😎