COVID-19 - On the Ground

[JKLivin]

I started tuning out her message as soon as I was able to read her shirt and laughed.
She has more shit on her face than I have clothes on my body right now - and I am wearing underwear, shorts, and a t-shirt.

P.S. Unlike randy, I took a minute to see what other types of things Kristen Meghan (the woman in the video - not Jessica Rojas) shares on Twitter. Clearly she is a confused woman full of contradictions. Pretty much what I expected before I took the minute to research her.

Why do you hate empowered women so much, Gutter?

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

I started tuning out her message as soon as I was able to read her shirt and laughed.
She has more shit on her face than I have clothes on my body right now - and I am wearing underwear, shorts, and a t-shirt.

P.S. Unlike randy, I took a minute to see what other types of things Kristen Meghan (the woman in the video - not Jessica Rojas) shares on Twitter. Clearly she is a confused woman full of contradictions. Pretty much what I expected before I took the minute to research her.

Why do you hate empowered women so much, Gutter?

Typically I don't. I work with and for "empowered women" and have "empowered women" that I am friends with and related to that I like very much.
I do dislike women (and men) that are frauds, hypocrites, and/or intentionally manipulate easily manipulative people.

[JKLivin]

I started tuning out her message as soon as I was able to read her shirt and laughed.
She has more shit on her face than I have clothes on my body right now - and I am wearing underwear, shorts, and a t-shirt.

P.S. Unlike randy, I took a minute to see what other types of things Kristen Meghan (the woman in the video - not Jessica Rojas) shares on Twitter. Clearly she is a confused woman full of contradictions. Pretty much what I expected before I took the minute to research her.

Why do you hate empowered women so much, Gutter?

Typically I don't. I work with and for "empowered women" and have "empowered women" that I am friends with and related to that I like very much.
I do dislike women (and men) that are frauds, hypocrites, and/or intentionally manipulate easily manipulative people.

Relax, Gutter. It was a joke. I got (and agreed with) what you were saying.

[MICHHAWK]

it’s 2023. aren’t all women empowered. whatever that means.

[randylahey]

[Sparko]

Moving on.

[randylahey]

[jfish26]

This whole thing is worth a long, close read.

The Lab Leak Illusion

https://quillette.com/2023/08/19/the-lab-leak-illusion/

[The lab leak theory] has remained [a high-status belief as to Covid’s origins] ever since [specific articles were published in 2020 and 2021], particularly in the US. Polling reported by the Washington Post in March 2023 found that overwhelming majorities of Americans now endorse the lab-leak hypothesis of COVID origins. Influential voices on the Left, Right, and centre continue to support it and the GOP has brought the two US-based “Proximal Origin” authors before a Congressional committee to answer allegations of deliberately misleading public opinion.

All of which is odd, since a natural origin is better supported today than it was when the “Proximal Origin” paper appeared in early 2020. Evidence for a lab accident, meanwhile, remains conspicuously absent.

I started to take an interest in this debate after Quillette published Philippe Lemoine’s critical examination of the lab-leak hypothesis in late 2020. I began following advocates on both sides of the argument on social media, I read Chan and Ridley’s book, as well as papers, preprints, blogs, and articles, and I kept an eye on (but did not participate in) the endless discussion threads devoted to the topic proliferating across social media. And by the time I reached saturation point, I’d concluded that, popularity notwithstanding, the lab-leak hypothesis simply doesn’t add up.

In what follows I want to explain why. I am neither a scientist nor a science writer, so this will not be a technical essay. Nor will I be offering any original research. This will be a critical analysis of the debate along with some concluding thoughts about how and why the discourse on this topic has diverged so sharply from the available evidence. Although gaps remain in the natural hypothesis of COVID-19’s origins, the lab-leak alternative is poorly supported and internally incoherent. The debate only continues because popular consensus is not yet ready to accept this.

[…]

The 2021 WHO-China investigation into COVID origins found that positive environmental samples were clustered in the west of the market, where live-animal stalls were situated and where a number of early COVID patients worked. Previously unreported genomic data from the Chinese CDC’s environmental samples, fortuitously obtained by Western researchers in March 2023, have confirmed that COVID-susceptible wildlife, including raccoon dogs, was being traded in the Huanan market when the outbreak began. The illegal wildlife trade was able to deliver them from rural China right into what would become the epicentre of the outbreak. In accordance with the principle of parsimony (aka Occam’s Razor), the only further assumption we need to make is that some of those animals were infected when they arrived.

The lab-leak hypothesis, on the other hand, requires a two-stage trip from rural China to the market via the lab. And the second stage of that journey requires a further chain of ad hoc assumptions, every one of which has to be correct and not one of which is presently supported by any evidence. A lab researcher either (a) successfully isolated and cultured the SARS-CoV-2 virus or its proximal ancestor (which the lab also had the wherewithal to turn into SARS-CoV-2) or (b) synthesised a novel virus from an existing genomic sequence. Then one or more researchers became infected in some unspecified way without their knowledge and visited the Huanan Seafood Market when they were contagious without seeding an outbreak at the WIV itself or in the surrounding neighbourhood.

And all these assumptions rest on the biggest assumption of all—that a live sample of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (or its proximal ancestor) was actually inside a Wuhan virology lab in the first place. Nobody has yet provided any evidence that it was (or that it was inside any laboratory anywhere in the world) prior to the discovery of a novel pathogen in Wuhan in December 2019. Until this is demonstrated, all subsequent assumptions can be chopped away with Occam’s razor and discarded.

[…]

[Portions of a 2018 DARPA grant focused on by those interested in advancing lab-leak theory suggest that certain researchers] wanted to insert a furin cleavage site (or something very like it) into the backbone of another coronavirus at the precise point at which it appeared in the SARS-CoV-2 genome. From this, lab-leak theorists concluded that SARS-CoV-2 had been engineered using American grant money before it escaped from the WIV. Daszak knew this, they alleged, and a statement published by the Lancet on February 19th, 2020, which he had organised and co-signed, dismissing the lab-leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory, was a disgraceful attempt to shut up those who were getting uncomfortably close to the truth.

There were at least three problems with this narrative. First, the DEFUSE proposal indicated that the engineering work was to be conducted by Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, and not in Wuhan. Second, none of the coronaviruses that we know the WIV possessed could have been used as a backbone to make SARS-CoV-2 in this way, which makes the DEFUSE proposal irrelevant to the question of COVID origins. And third, the grant proposal was rejected, the funding was denied, and so the experiment was never conducted anyway.

Lab-leak theorists like to speculate that the work went ahead regardless, but they have no evidence of this and Daszak and the EHA have repeatedly denied it. Theorists further speculate that the WIV had undisclosed coronaviruses in its holdings which could have been turned into SARS-CoV-2, and that this work was being kept secret for reasons unexplained. But there’s no evidence for any of that either, and we’re now simply stacking conjecture on conjecture—further make-work for Occam’s Razor.

[…]

The nature of [a supposed November 2019] biosecurity breach [at Wuhan Institute of Virology relied upon by lab-leak theory proponents] was unspecified in the 10,000-word article and nothing was adduced to indicate that it had involved a live SARS-CoV-2 virus sample or researchers working with one, which meant its relevance to the origins debate was entirely speculative. But the most implausible part of this story was that Reid had determined all this by parsing Communist Party dispatches he had downloaded from the WIV website. Why on earth would a regime notorious for its secrecy and control-freakery leave incriminating documents where Western journalists and analysts could obtain them at any time of their choosing?

As Reid explained it, the dispatches were written in “party speak”—“a secret language of Chinese officialdom”—which he was able to decode but which even native speakers of Mandarin could not be expected to understand. Almost as soon as the article was published, however, a more obvious explanation emerged when a number of Chinese speakers read the dispatches for themselves. As it turned out, they were able to understand them just fine and it was Reid who had made a mess of the translation. The supposedly incriminating passage about a biosafety emergency was in fact just political boilerplate about the willingness and readiness of loyal Party officials to meet the challenges of running a BSL-4 lab.

The discovery that the documents at the centre of the article’s most sensational claim were innocuous ought to have been fatal to Kao and Eban’s reporting (and certainly to their reliance on Reid as an authoritative source). On November 30th, ProPublica and Vanity Fair both amended their copy, and published a lengthy editorial response from ProPublica editor-in-chief Stephen Engelberg to the translation controversy, and to a list of other omissions and errors critics had subsequently identified. Engelberg and his team had consulted three other Chinese speakers and determined that Reid’s translation was at least plausible enough that ProPublica and Vanity Fair could be spared the embarrassment of having to retract the entire article. That didn’t change the fact that the substance of Reid’s allegation—that a biosafety crisis had occurred at the WIV in November 2019—was almost certainly incorrect.

[…]

On June 10th, 2023, the Sunday Times published a startling investigation alleging that SARS-CoV-2 may have been the product of a secret Chinese biowarfare programme. DRASTIC researchers and sympathetic journalists had been careful to avoid making this claim since the lab-leak hypothesis had been popularised in mid-2021. Not only did it risk complicating their own concerns about the risks of approved engineering research, but it smacked of exactly the kind of geopolitical paranoia that had helped to stigmatise the lab-leak hypothesis in the first place. On the other hand, the existence of a clandestine programme within the WIV would resolve one of the more puzzling problems with the DRASTIC narrative: if SARS-CoV-2 was the result of legitimate research, why did nobody seem to know anything about it?

The Sunday Times attributed the bioweapon allegations to three unnamed US investigators involved in preparing a fact sheet about COVID origins for the State Department in the final days of the Trump administration. The fraught production of that document was subsequently detailed by Christopher Ford, the Trump administration’s Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation and acting Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. Among the officials tasked with preparing the fact sheet were Ford’s deputy Tom DiNanno and an Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance (AVC) Bureau consultant named David Asher.

[…]

At the top of a remarkably restrained Twitter thread responding to the Sunday Times article’s many allegations, Florence Débarre described their investigation as “the most scientifically inept and journalistically shameful article on Covid origins I have read so far (the bar was high).”

No mention was made in the Times article of the misgivings expressed by the State Department’s panel of experts. The Mojiang mine, RaTG13, the DEFUSE grant proposal, the furin cleavage site, and the State Department cables were all disinterred for tendentious reinspection, but counterpoints were not acknowledged (still less addressed) and nobody with the relevant domain expertise seemed to have been approached for context or analysis or any kind of comment at all. Unsupported assertions, hearsay, and conjecture attributed to unnamed sources were all reprinted without any indication that the substance of these allegations had been subject to any editorial scrutiny or verification, even though the implications of these allegations were unambiguously grave.

“Having something that sounds scientific to say when making assertions to laymen is not the same thing as being correct,” Christopher Ford had advised Tom DiNanno. “I do not have the scientific expertise to critique David [Asher]’s claims. Nor do you. Nor, in fact, does he have actual technical training in the first place. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong, of course, but it does have implications for how to deal with the complex and controversial claims you guys are making about weedy bioscience.” Ford had the humility to grasp what he didn’t know and a stabilising commitment to the principle of verifiability. The fact-sheet investigators and the journalists they exploited apparently had neither.

Thirteen days after the Sunday Times investigation appeared, a long-awaited report from the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was released pursuant to the terms of the 2023 COVID-19 Origin Act, which mandated the declassification of “any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin” of the pandemic. The report was just 10 pages in length, fewer than four of which were devoted to substance. Nevertheless, it effectively reduced to rubble every intelligence-based claim about a link between the WIV and COVID-19 that had made its way into the media.

[…]

Three and a half years after the pandemic began, neither the West’s most powerful news organisations nor the US intelligence community had been able to find anything to support claims of a lab accident in Wuhan. The lab-leak hypothesis was a bust.

Lab-leak theorists have stubbornly refused to accept this fact. On Twitter, David Asher joined other lab-leak theorists in alleging that the intelligence services were now participating in the cover-up. The more straightforward explanation for the failure of the ODNI investigation to uncover any evidence of a lab accident is that there was nothing to find. Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. But if something really does not exist, the only evidence of that nonexistence will be a lack of evidence to the contrary. That is precisely why the burden is on those alleging a lab leak to provide proof of their allegations. Otherwise, what is asserted without evidence should be dismissed in the same way.

Some theorists seized on a single line in the ODNI report which allowed that, “All agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection.” But this is only true in a very narrow sense, and the existing balance of probabilities need not strand us in agnosticism.

[…]

Scientists have managed to amass an incomplete but compelling body of evidence supporting a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2, a review of which was published by Eddie Holmes et al. in Cell in August 2021. In sum:

* Striking similarities exist between SARS-CoV-2 and other known human coronaviruses, all of which had a zoonotic origin. For instance, “In direct parallel to SARS-CoV-2, HCoV-HKU1, which was first described in a large Chinese city (Shenzhen, Guangdong) in the winter of 2004, has an unknown animal origin, contains a furin cleavage site in its spike protein and was originally identified in a case of human pneumonia.”

* Epidemiological data show that “55% of cases during December 2019 had an exposure to either the Huanan or other markets in Wuhan, with these cases more prevalent in the first half of that month.” Although the authors cautioned that early clustering around the Huanan market might be affected by sampling biases, they added, “These districts were also the first to exhibit excess pneumonia deaths in January 2020, a metric that is less susceptible to the potential biases associated with case reporting.” Asymptomatic spread might explain why some early cases had no epidemiological link to the market—the same was true of the early SARS outbreak in Foshan in November 2002.

* “SARS-CoV-2 was detected in environmental samples at the Huanan market, primarily in the western section that traded in wildlife and domestic animal products, as well as in associated drainage areas.”
The earliest known mutation in SARS-CoV-2 split the virus into two lineages, A and B, “consistent with the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 involving one or more contacts with infected animals and/or traders, including multiple spill-over events, as potentially infected or susceptible animals were moved into or between Wuhan markets via shared supply chains and sold for human consumption.”

* “Viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been documented in bats and pangolins in multiple localities in South-East Asia, including in China, Thailand, Cambodia, and Japan.”

The authors acknowledged that, “No bat reservoir or intermediate animal host for SARS-CoV-2 has been identified to date,” but they cautioned that this is likely due to undersampling or low prevalence. It is also not unusual. “The animal origins of many well-known human pathogens,” they noted, “including Ebola virus, hepatitis C virus, poliovirus, and the coronaviruses HCoV-HKU1 and HCoV-NL63, are yet to be identified.”

Finally, the authors concurred with Andersen et al.’s conclusion in the March 2020 “Proximal Origin” review that nothing about the SARS-CoV-2 genome is inconsistent with a natural origin.
On July 26th, 2022, Science published two related papers that expanded on Holmes et al.’s conclusions. Worobey et al. looked more closely at the early case data in Wuhan and reconstructed a map of the market in an attempt to show where the environmental samples of SARS-CoV-2 were clustered. Pekar et al. examined the genomic diversity of the virus in the early days of the pandemic and concluded that lineages A and B “were the result of at least two separate cross-species transmission events into humans.”

[…]

Here, multiple mutually reinforcing kinds of data all fit together to create a coherent picture of a zoonotic event with the Huanan market at its centre. Some of these data may be stronger than others, but the possibility that they are all wrong—and so completely wrong that they can be disregarded entirely—is vanishingly remote. The most parsimonious explanation for this convergence is that it is exactly what it looks like and exactly what we would expect to see had a spillover occurred in the market.

[…]

The failure to uncover a similar convergence on any alternative possible hypothesis explains lab-leak theorists’ inability to settle on a coherent narrative of their own. They remain unclear about whether Chinese scientists sampled SARS-CoV-2 or its progenitor, since there is no evidence to suggest either. Assuming the latter, they have not decided whether SARS-CoV-2 was created using genetic engineering or serial passage in culture or both. They are not even positive about which lab in Wuhan the virus is supposed to have escaped from. And amazingly, the mutual exclusivity of these possibilities has never particularly bothered them.

“I feel validated,” Alina Chan announced in March 2023 when the US Department of Energy decided that the pandemic was probably caused by a lab accident. “Not because they lean toward the exact same lab leak scenario as me but because they weren't suckered by the double spillover market hypothesis.” The DoE believed that SARS-CoV-2 may have leaked from the Wuhan CDC, which is a lot closer to the market than the WIV but does not conduct bioengineering experiments. But Chan had spent most of her book casting suspicion on the experimental work carried out by WIV scientists and their US collaborators.

This is like reading an investigative account of JFK’s assassination that blames his murder on the mob, only to watch its author stand to applaud a government report blaming the CIA because at least the report’s authors hadn’t been suckered by the Warren Commission. The COVID-origins question only has one right answer, and if Chan believes the virus escaped from the WIV, then the theory that it escaped from the Wuhan CDC must be as wrong as the theory that it spilled into humans at the Huanan market. I’m left to wonder what Chan actually believes. If she’s not clear in her own mind, it’s because no evidence provides her with a good reason to prefer one lab-leak hypothesis over another.

Had the outbreak actually begun at the WIV, at least some incriminating evidence would have converged on that conclusion by now, even if that evidence was scanty and imperfect. Not only is there no evidence of an outbreak at the Institute or an epidemiological link there, but it has continued its operations uninterrupted and Shi Zhengli remains at her post to this day. This is an unthinkable state of affairs if the CCP knew that her lab was responsible for the pandemic.

[…]

Nowhere has [lab-leak proponents’ bad faith] been more evident than in the recent disclosure of the Slack-channel archive with which I opened this essay. The flagrant misrepresentations of those Slack discussions are emblematic of lab-leak theorists’ approach to scientific inquiry. In an effort to prove mendacity at every turn, each decision, judgement call, and statement is subjected to the most uncharitable and sinister interpretation available, even when a charitable or innocuous alternative will do just as well or better. Apparent anomalies, discrepancies, and contradictions are all treated in the same way—the possibility of human error, faulty memory, mitigating context, happenstance, or coincidence is dismissed a priori, and everything become grist to a narrative mill of institutional malfeasance and corruption.

This behaviour consumes an inordinate amount of lab-leakers’ time and energy, even though it does nothing to advance the argument about COVID-19 origins in any useful direction. The unending row about whether or not Andersen et al. prematurely dismissed the possibility of a lab-leak in their March 2020 “Proximal Origin” review, and whether or not that public document properly reflected its authors’ private doubts, tends to obscure two facts. First, that the authors’ conclusions have dated remarkably well. But second, even if they had got everything wrong, nothing in their paper or the disclosed emails and Slack chats can possibly prove or disprove a lab origin, which is what this entire debate is supposed to be about.

[…]

Some lab-leak sympathisers were simply persuaded by the presence of a virology lab in Wuhan and considered the question no further. Others embraced the hypothesis because they loved Trump (or rejected it because they hated him). Some liked it because (for a long list of very good reasons) they despise and distrust the CCP. Others just want to see Anthony Fauci’s head on a pike, either because he recommended social restrictions to control the pandemic or because he was unable to stifle a smirk during one of Trump’s incoherent press conferences (or both). Some decided that public-health authorities and other experts are simply credentialed frauds who had screwed the pooch on public masking and various other aspects of pandemic messaging, thereby forfeiting any reasonable expectation of trust. All allowed themselves to be seduced by a heroic narrative in which humble internet gumshoes, armed only with a laptop and a commitment to the truth, humiliated arrogant elites and exposed a cover-up that reached all the way to the top of the US medical establishment.

But for the most committed lab-leakers—the members of DRASTIC and their associates who tweet about nothing else—the single issue motivating their reasoning on this issue has been opposition to gain-of-function research, which absolutely terrifies them. Some of them refuse to concede that this kind of research can yield any benefits whatsoever and maintain that it is simply a malign expression of scientific hubris, the public funding of which incentivises pocket-lining irrespective of risk. A thoughtful debate about biosafety protocols would probably be a good idea. Conducting that debate during a feverish moral panic would not. Hysteria about nuclear power, intelligence research, and AI are already disfiguring our ability to debate those issues rationally, and I do not believe that adding virology to that list will be conducive to sound decision-making.

The lab-leak hypothesis may also be appealing for a more human reason—just as many people were reluctant to believe that someone as important as Kennedy could be murdered by someone as unimportant as Lee Harvey Oswald, perhaps the search for a human agent who can shoulder the blame for the pandemic relieves us of the idea that we live on a dangerous and chaotic planet, fraught with natural risks we do not yet properly understand and which we are presently powerless to control.

While these may all be compelling reasons to find the idea of a lab-leak appealing, they do nothing to prove that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from a Wuhan lab. The lab-leak hypothesis is not a moral or political matter, it is an empirical question. The answer may have consequential moral and political implications, but first we need to establish what happened. That answer is emerging, albeit more slowly than any of us might like. And when it finally arrives, it will be the product of laborious and painstaking research by people who know what they are talking about, not of investigations by amateur sleuths and agenda-driven activists who don’t.

For now and the foreseeable future, much of the COVID-origins discourse remains committed to an illusory explanation that appeals to misfiring intuitions and trades almost entirely in suspicion and innuendo. Highly intelligent minds are as vulnerable to irrational thinking and conspiracist ideation as those of the cognitively impaired, particularly if they are used to perceiving problems in political terms. Reasoning well, Scott Alexander reminds us, is hard and “all factual claims can become the basis for emotional/social coalitions.” The best way to avoid this trap is to try to remember that we do not live through the looking glass where up is down and black is white. In quotidian reality, things are usually exactly as they appear to be.

[KUTradition]

this might be my favorite:

In an effort to prove mendacity at every turn, each decision, judgement call, and statement is subjected to the most uncharitable and sinister interpretation available, even when a charitable or innocuous alternative will do just as well or better. Apparent anomalies, discrepancies, and contradictions are all treated in the same way—the possibility of human error, faulty memory, mitigating context, happenstance, or coincidence is dismissed a priori, and everything become grist to a narrative mill of institutional malfeasance and corruption.

[KUTradition]

sadly, i doubt our resident dissidents will take the time to read that

(and even if they do, the take-away seems likely to go right over their heads)

[JKLivin]

sadly, i doubt our resident dissidents will take the time to read that

(and even if they do, the take-away seems likely to go right over their heads)

The same Jamie Palmer who was editor of the same Quillette that fell for the Archie Carter hoax in 2019?

https://www.vox.com/2019/8/9/20794325/q ... hie-carter

Seems credible. Lulz.

[KUTradition]

guaranteed more credible than ANY of your sources

[JKLivin]

guaranteed more credible than ANY of your sources

You betcha! Maybe they’ll run a piece about how time shares are essentially paying yourself to take a vacation or the magic of multilevel marketing.

[KUTradition]

now that’s clever!

[JKLivin]

now that’s clever!

Trying to keep pace with the master.

[Overlander]

Wow, ever since Psych established himself as the Alpha Dog, badass, king fu master….he has been on a roll here.

[TDub]

Wow, ever since Psych established himself as the Alpha Dog, badass, king fu master….he has been on a roll here.

40 posts a day as he's fond of saying

[randylahey]

Lolllll. Perfect proof why you people should've never listened to compromised dipshot politicians

[Sparko]

Randy: do something else. Disinformation is killing your brain cells

[Overlander]

Just admit, he is owning us all