This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life. I'd ask everyone to please read it because it is incredible.
One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity."
Plus there's all the stuff about the miners shoveling bat poop for weeks and then dying of coronaviruses, and the Wuhan institute collecting and doing gain of function research on these similar-to-SARS samples. And then several of the lab's gain of function researchers became ill in late 2019. And there's the weird renaming of samples to hide the unmatched closeness of the mine samples and covid. This is just the absolute surface of the article. There's too much to list here
Edit: here's another amazement for the list: "Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories." And the article says "BSL-2 [is] roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office."
I can’t find sources for this right now but apparently Dr Anthony Fauci played a key role in getting the ban lifted. He’s also the head of the NIAID ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci ) which (apparently) is the ultimate source for all funding on gain of function research.
So the lead guy we’ve been listening to (and still are) for scientific advice on this pandemic is entangled in a massive conflict of interest.
Edit: I assume this is getting down-voted either because is sounds like conspiracy theory or just everyone has already heard it and it's not news. Fauci has already admitted having been involved in funding Wuhan - https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/fauci-admits-nih-funding-of-wu... - that on it's own should not have been something he first admitted to in May 2021, while holding such a responsible position. Looking for more sources right now...
> "Given these uncertainties, important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory."
It doesn't explicitly mention gain of function but - while raising the concerns, it's arguing for research which would include gain of function. Meanwhile listening to this panel discussion which included Fauci from Nov 2017 - https://www.c-span.org/video/?437187-1/johns-hopkins-forum-e... ... again he's arguing for more aggressive types of research
You are getting downvoted because it's muckraking. There is nothing shady about NIAID giving a (verrrry small for this type of research) grant to a foreign research lab, which is doing research about a topic of interest. That's how you ensure the U.S. government gets a copy of the results.
I'm not saying it's shady to provide that funding. What I'm saying is it demonstrates conflict of interest. Last year in May 5 2020 Fauci dismissed the idea that the virus came from a lab that his own organisation was providing funds to - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthony-fauci-wuhan-lab-coronav...
Whether or not anything shady was happening, the conflict of interest is clear.
Would Fauci have even known? Budget numbers say NIAID clears around $5 billion in grant funding per year and this grant was more at the $100k per year level. Another source shows that NIAID receives around 3,000 grant applications per year and that's just in two of their multiple grant types. It seems most likely to me that the grant was approved and funded by a subject-area committee without Fauci being involved at all. I would guess that when he "admitted to it" was probably the first time he knew.
Pretty sure if I ran an organization that funds a bunch of labs that do virus research, and a global pandemic started in the neighborhood of a lab doing virus research, and people started floating the theory that the virus leaked from that lab, one of the first things I'd do is call my grant-funding team and ask them if we funded that lab. If Fauci didn't do that, he's a strange dude.
100K from a 5B budget is peanuts and you couldn't reasonably expect the person at the top to know the details of what each recipient of 100K is doing exactly.
If all of the 5B is spent on coronavirus research then it's a different story. Most likely it's spent on an incredibly wide array of topics.
This is the difference between responsibility and accountability.
The person at the top might not know what each recipient is doing, but is still accountable for the funding decisions that were made (and oversaw the people and process that made those decisions on the organisations behalf).
Is this a different grant than what I'm thinking of? The institution that got the grant is a global non-profit(I think, and run by americans afair). They actually appealed this and said how damaging this is because they've had a long term working relationship with various labs across the globe relating to virus research. They've been on This Week on Virology many times on a variety of different subjects. Is the funding in question here different from that? Rand Paul makes it sound like the money went directly to China, which isn't the case.
This amuses me because some people are going to incredulously think "you would never keep such important information in excel" and others are going to skeptically say "there's no way they've managed to consolidate that down to just one excel file".
I inherited a application for grants tracking database last year and the grants themselves do not have a location. There are persons and institutions associated with each Application/Grant, and each of those has a location.
Interestingly, the application is designed for a very specific workflow, audit and review as part of the intake, but has no facilities for auditing after the fact. The data and relationships exist and there is a wealth of information in the database including known conflicts of interest but there's no easy way to query or browse this data from the application unless you're reviewing a specific grant or application.
For example:
The application doesn't allow you to search for persons by location and doesn't show you grants associated with persons. Rather you can only see persons associated with grants.
You can search for institution by address but again, it doesn't show you grants associated with an institution.
These interfaces were designed to just update Persons or Institutions when changes occur. They weren't intended as a way to back into a Grant or Application.
Or the person searching it ctrl+f’d a typo. Or a Chinese intern who helped compile the spreadsheet deleted that row on “accident”.
People are too quick to notice conflicts of interest. Everyone of us lives a life filled with such conflicts, yet we manage somehow to rise above, for the most part. Fauci seems like a nice guy to me.
In our org there's an entire team in the Research department dedicated to maintaining grants/applications and they rely on staff in IT and Finance for continuous support. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say it's at least 15 people.
to expand on just how small comparatively that number is... 100,000 seconds is a little over 1 day worth of seconds... 5 billion seconds is a little bit over 158 years of seconds.
This isnt a good political argument for Fauci though, because the next question from a reporter would be something like:
> “So you are saying that the organisation you lead helped fund a lab that caused a pandemic, but that funding was without your oversight because you thought it wasn’t important/big enough for you to look at? Are you going to resign?”
Note, I don’t believe the above is a fair question, but Fauci has to be careful to not set himself up for a gotcha.
Given the extreme danger of gain of function experiments, whatever their claimed benefits, while Fauci per his early February FIOA found email(s) wasn't aware his NIH institute was funding at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it could be argued he should have arranged to be in the loop for all of such grants and was doing his best to make sure they were done as safely as possible.
That's not to say it would have made any difference, unless per the article per the Bat Woman "The coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories," "our" includes all the WIV's coronavirus research—it's a fair size outfit with a number of labs and there's no reason to assume she was the Principle Investigator for all of its coronavirus research—and he or a direct report could have insisted the funded research would be done at the BSL-4 lab or maybe one of the BSL-3 labs. This assume the gain of function research was being done at a lower level, which starting with the 2011 bird flu work in the West has been too often true, one or both of those labs were BSL-2, one of the reasons it was controversial and so alarming to a lot of people watching this including myself.
But it turned out without his knowledge gain of function research there was being funded by his institute through the EcoHealth Alliance, and in another email he's thanked by it's leader Peter Daszak for helping to push the zoonotic transfer explanation, which the latter was or had arranged through a group letter to The Lancet to be the only acceptable narrative until around now.
It would also have been good if someone had done a gut check on the EcoHealth Alliance's MO, which as described by a Rutgers' biological chemistry professor was "looking for a gas leak with a lighted match" by as the author of the Vanity Fair article as "bringing samples from a remote area to an urban one, then sequencing and growing viruses and attempting to genetically modify them to make them more virulent."
Again, nothing unique to the Alliance or China, the US is in the process of moving the research on animal pathogens done at Plumb Island, New York to college town Manhattan, Kansas. Which I'm sure is a much more pleasant place to work at, but just happened to be in the heartland of American animal agriculture. Someday one or more Congressmen who fought to bring home the bacon may be called to account for this, to the extent that ever happens.
There are many emails stating Fauci did know and people that worked for him panicking. Worried that it would be discovered and their research would get canned.
I think the first thing you would probably do is try and protect the population as best as possible instead of trying to find your tracks. As an organization that large why do you think Fauci would even know suspect that there is any funding connection.
Hindsight is wonderfully clear.
Maybe you should be in charge since you are so clearsighted and clearly so wise.
Does it really matter though ? The fist thing I would do is find how to keep people from my country safe, not worry about where did my funding go (especially since the lab's funding has absolutely nothing to do with how we can find a cure or a vaccine).
Yes, because you need to keep up the appearance of neutrality. If there is a conflict of interest, then you need to be careful to ensure that everyone knows you are ensuring those conflicts don't happen. That means you need to know and admit a lot of things that don't happen.
My company wants to know if my brother in law works for a competitor. It won't change my job, but they will be careful to ensure that I don't work on things that it would matter if I let something slip over dinner.
It does though. If it is a lab leak Fauci has to be fired for political reasons given that he made the mistake of funding the lab. Therefore he has incentive to hide evidence if it was.
We don't know that it was a lab leak or natural; and probably never will. There is the possibility the if it was a lab leak Fauci used his position to hide that evidence to protect himself.
Because of the above Fauci should have disclosed his potential conflict of interest. That way the rest of us can consider his actions to ensure we are more likely to catch him abusing his position.
The above is a normal thing that happens all the time. I'm accusing him of doing wrong by not disclosing this over a year ago. Do not expand that to accusing him of actually doing anything else wrong in handling the pandemic.
And it makes a big difference to the world if there is a pandemic of 2018 flu and COVID-19 intensity every century or more often. Wikipedians found a gain of function experiment from 2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gain_of_function_research, but it became a big issue in science policy in 2011 when two groups used serial passage of H5N1 avian influenza in ferrets (a favorite animal model for respiratory diseases) to get it to transmit between them by respiratory droplets. This got a lot of people very concerned, including myself at the time, especially since one or both of the groups did this with no more than BSL-2 level protection against a leak.
So if this COVID-19 origin hypothesis is true and it took only 8 to 19 years for a lab leak of a gain of function experiment to cause the worst pandemic in a century, we ought to be very interested in making sure this happens a lot less often. Ideally not at all, but I see no way to impose a world wide ban on this type of research.
Until computational biology (including at the systemic macro level) becomes a viable alternative, GoF is one of our best tools to prevent nature from killing us.
That this should be done under the strictest protocols is obvious (and internationally-monitored, no less).
But pretending that dice aren't continually rolling in nature and hoping for the best seems shortsighted.
Please name a single consequential advance in science relevant to protecting people that's come out of the last 8 years of heavy duty gain of function research starting with bird flu and ferrets in 2011.
Considering it was a scientific ethical live wire from 2011 to 2014, and banned in the US from 2014 to 2017, that's a bit of a tall order.
I would point out that the some primary points against GOF utility in the 2014 survey report weigh very differently now: (1) lack of viral genetic surveillance at national levels, (2) inability to quickly generate novel vaccines, (3) inability to distribute vaccines worldwide.
Whatever chilling effect it had, tall order at this stage of this general program of research or not, it's high time its advocates including yourself point to tangible progress of one sort or another, for we now can reasonably assess the risk side of the risk benefit trade off.
See this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398081 on why the advancements in vaccines don't even begin to cover the risks, or note as of now how long it looks it'll be before the Third World gets vaccinated against as much as is humanly possible, no sooner than sometime in 2022. Consider the possibility of a sufficiently good escape variant requiring another dose or two.
Consider how little the the whole world can afford the expense of a pandemic, and the Third World in particular, including viral surveillance of any sort, "molecular" (PRC based) tests or sequencing samples. And this time they're lucky, COVID-19 mortality risks are highly weighted with age, something that hits the young harder will hit them a lot harder.
Consider how many possible, probable, or proven lab escapes will it take before the world's governments clamp down on a lot more than gain of function research.
Yes, nature wants to kill us, although your itemized points also address that issue. It's just not very good at it, and almost all of that was before the germ theory of disease was accepted in the end of the 19th Century.
mRNA vaccine technology is just a platform for presenting antigens to the immune system, the fastest one to make vaccine candidates by far, literally over a weekend for Moderna after the first SARS-CoV-2 sequences were published by Chinese researchers. It also has many advantages in simplicity.
That doesn't mean we'll be able to provide safe vaccines for sufficiently novel pathogens, behind Moderna's candidate was a decade and a half of research into making safe vaccines for SARS type coronaviruses, with researchers at the NIH finding one solution in 2017 for the antibody-dependent enhancement issue that had been plaguing such attempts starting with SARS and inactivated whole virus vaccines.
A fast pandemic can also get a long distance before you can ramp up production and vaccinate 8 billion people, with vaccines that so far need freezing for shipping, and medical grade refrigeration afterwords until used. Plus you need to make at least 8 billion syringes and needles and so on.
What's been highlighted of the FOIA released emails so far suggests he didn't know if his NIAID was funding Wuhan Institute of Virology SARS type coronavirus gain of function experiments, but he was quite concerned that might be the case. Look for the one where he tells someone to keep his cell phone on.
It's something he'd likely be concerned about, because he's been a big booster of gain of function research, and the Institute famously houses China's first BSL-4 lab, although the article claims the Bat Lady said prior to the pandemic they were only using BSL-2 and -3 labs for their coronavirus research. This assumes she'd know about all that was going on the Institute.
The email trail is damning. Fauci knew that the possibility was there. Instead of pushing for discovery and transparency of what actually happened, he publicly and vehemently denied the possibility and gave fuel to those who wanted to call the "lab leak theory" people "conspiracy nuts".
Fauci's elevation to sainthood was way too premature. His constant media appearances where he hasn't been questioned on any of this should be an object lesson to the public on media bias and the subsequent narrative bubbles that impact our society.
It's not surprising that the same people pushing Michael Avenatti as the next great politician have been the same people promoting Fauci.
This is an issue for sure. The core reason though, IMO, was the contrast - for example, you have the president calling for injecting bleach, publicly. Any reasonable person is going to drift away from that, and towards someone who seems more reasonable, and thoughtful. Now that there is less extreme rhetoric, the seams in this particular leadership are starting to show. Can't say the same for Michael Avenatti, who seemed unhinged from the beginning although again just my opinion.
"you have the president calling for injecting bleach"
Please don't repeat that. If you do even a little bit of research, you'll see that he didn't say that, and by repeating it you're lowering the dialog you want to raising.
Seems like a live press conference is a bad time to just "ask questions". It's a very idiotic time, in fact, to start spitballing medical treatment ideas to the general public.
That trope is only slightly wrong. He didn't say bleach, he said disinfectant. And that was in the context of disinfectant used to clean surfaces.
"And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?
"So it'd be interesting to check that."
Pointing to his head, Mr Trump went on: "I'm not a doctor. But I'm, like, a person that has a good you-know-what."
I think yes. Perhaps not upfront, perhaps not in the following days or weeks. But if your organization had funded a laboratory's gain of function research, and that laboratory is suddenly the topic of global speculation for potentially leaking a virus, a virus which is ostensibly a product directly of your funding and became one of the deadliest global pandemics ever... I think it would be hard to not know at some point.
I've lost faith in Fauci when he admitted he lied about the efficacy of masks early on in the pandemic. He literally came
out and stated he lied in order to make sure frontline healthcare workers had enough PPE. That was the most insane statement I've ever heard a public health leader make - lying about healthcare to the public that may result in more infections. That is how you destroy public trust.
What's sad is that the population would understand if you just told them the truth, namely that masks help, but our frontline works desperately need them so getting them masks and PPE is a priority.
And in case there was any doubt he also came out and said he intentionally lied about the required level of vaccination needed to achieve herd immunity [0] so that people don’t get too discouraged. He seems to be squarely in the “ends justify the means” camp. While the effectiveness of that is debatable, I find it hard to believe anything he says at this point.
[0] “In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...
I don't like these "strategic" lies either. And I agree the population in general would understand, but I think there'd still have been plenty of people that would've hoarded every mask possible, and at the time they had to make decisions based on possible scenarios, whereas now we have hindsight. Especially if things were handled differently in the beginning and the mask vs non-mask polarization manifested differently, who knows.
>And I agree the population in general would understand, but I think there'd still have been plenty of people that would've hoarded every mask possible
And many people did hoard masks, and toilet paper, and sanitizers. So Fauci solved nothing except destroy trust in public health authorities. It also wasn't the last time that he lied for 'people's own good'.
I believed him. I did. I don't believe him anymore.
> What's sad is that the population would understand if you just told them the truth, namely that masks help, but our frontline works desperately need them so getting them masks and PPE is a priority.
Maybe elsewhere, but not in America. This is one of the most selfish/individualist countries on earth.
>Maybe elsewhere, but not in America. This is one of the most selfish/individualist countries on earth.
That's a disgusting statement. People are people. And the vast majority of people in every country are good people.
It's also not true, but even if it was, he has no right to lie to people about their healthcare and well-being. You can't do that because this kind of lie actually hurt people who would have wore a mask (homemade or otherwise) but didn't (and maybe got sick or died), all because they trusted him.
Firstly, he has no excuse to be ignorant. Secondly, I’d wager every administrator and CEO who has any involvement with viral biomedical research were making urgent albeit possibly discreet inquiries into any possible involvement around February 2020.
Would Fauci have known that gain of function research was now legal again?! Of course he would. Whether or not to fund that sort of risky research that has gone back and forth in legality is precisely the kind of thing that his job required him to know, isn't it?
According to Wade's article it's actually even murkier than that. Only Fauci or one other person could have actually overridden the ban to keep the money flowing and prevent oversight of it:
The moratorium, referred to officially as a “pause,” specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. It defined gain-of-function very simply and broadly as “research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.”
But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”
This seemed to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the exemption in order to keep the money flowing to Dr. Shi’s gain-of-function research, and later to avoid notifying the Federal reporting system of her research.
Right you are. But you're supposed to run grant proposals past a board which was created as part of the end of the funding moratorium, and it's been alleged this wasn't done, and that was routine for either Fauci's institute or the NIH as a whole.
It's not a conflict of interest because Dr. Fauci wasn't gaining anything. The agency he is head of is specifically interested in infectious disease and has a large budget for grants. $120K per year pays for a couple plate of genetic samples and tech time to run them. Maybe in China you can run a few more for that cost, I don't know.
As head of that agency, it's also his job to share his professional opinion with the public. For this, his reward is a public servant's salary. Seriously, what's he getting here for his supposed "deception"?
A conflict of interest does not depend on whether a person actually gains (or prevents himself from losing) anything, but whether he has some personal interest (such as fame, money, even gifts for a family member, etc.) that coexists with some duty-bound interest to some other party/society (e.g. fiduciary duty, professional ethical duties, etc.), and the person is entrusted with making a decision that implicated either interest depending on the outcome. Conflicts of interest are usually resolved either by disclosure or isolation from the adverse interest.
In this case, Fauci has sort of a small, debatable conflict. His personal stake is not money per se, but his reputation and clear preference for gain-of-function research. If it came out that gain-of-function research caused the pandemic, and Fauci was one of the leading cheerleaders for that since the early aughts AND Fauci may have provided some of the funding for this particular research, then Fauci would stand to lose quite a bit of reputation and standing. That's a real adverse incentive to determine that lab leak of a gain-of-function virus is not possible.
If his job is to share his opinion to the public, then he has a conflict of interest with respect to that decision, since the public doesn't know if Fauci-the-expert is talking or Fauci-the-reputation-seeking-bureaucrat. If he had merely disclosed any of his involvement with restarting funding of gain-of-function research in 2017 or his past advocacy for gain-of-function research, that would significantly resolve the conflict.
In my opinion, Fauci is simply an opportunistic bureaucrat and a liar (I repeat myself), and the conflict of interest claim against him is weak. Peter Daszam has much, much more problematic conflicts of interest. This is a guy who (1) discredited fellow scientists in the Lancet for considering an alternative hypothesis and (2) led a sham WHO investigation into the WIV lab, all while funneling NIH grant money to WIV, not complying with disclosure and review requirements and standing to lose his career if gain-of-function were to be seriously discredited. It would be hard for him to be more conflicted.
Also, for what it's worth, Fauci is the highest paid federal employee. He makes more than the president. Most "public servants" make $150k/year or less. Not to mention, Fauci had also made a book deal as a result of his celebrity.
By these standards, everyone (in such a position) is always in some "conflict of interest". Had Fauci blamed that lab, he certainly would have been, as his organization also funds its competitors, and of course because he works for the US administration.
The ideology behind throwing around this kind of allegations is: all facts are fabricated by somebody, nobody can be trusted (they all have a conflict of interest), so we can as well make up our own "alternative facts" that fit our ideology best. In the end, it's just "us against them", so arguments and facts don't matter any more.
As a side-note: I doubt that Fauci just spontaneously pushes out his personal opinion about this kind of affairs, so I suppose his organization largely agrees with him. All corrupt and in a "conflict of interest"?
And I think his position should definitely be paid better than the president. Why not?
None of this says anything about Fauci as a person. He might be opportunistic, a bureaucrat, and whatnot, but that is hardly relevant in this context (other than discrediting everything he says).
> By these standards, everyone (in such a position) is always in some "conflict of interest".
Yes. But not everyone becomes the leading figure in a global pandemic which has killed 3.7 million people and thrown the world into complete disarray. At the point where you realise you're in that position, the correct, ethical thing to do is put all your cards on the table.
How is he "the leading figure"? Fauci is hardly relevant outside the US. As you mentioned we are discussing a global phenomenon and it's useful to distinguish between global and US specific matters.
If Fauci is responsible (in part, vis funding) for "assembling" the virus that caused the pandemic and is also responsible (in part) for abetting a sham WHO investigation, then certainly he would be relevant globally. The fact that the US NIH is sort of a clearinghouse for top-tier global medical research, by virtue of US hegemony, also makes him more relevant than just about any other national expert.
EDIT: Please don't downvote Pyramus. He asked a legitimate question and as far as I can tell followed HN rules. There are ~7.7B people who are not in the US.
You are mixing accountability and responsibility here - to give a less politically charged analogue: was Steve Ballmer responsible for the spread of the ILOVEYOU virus? No, but he held ultimate accountability for VBA being enabled by default.
I'm not disagreeing with the importance of US R&D spending, which is huge (25-30% of global spend), or that Fauci is an important public health official.
I'm simply telling you that the rest of the world is mostly indifferent to the persona Fauci, based on what I'm observing in the EU & UK and extrapolating to Asia.
> The ideology behind throwing around this kind of allegations is: all facts are fabricated by somebody, nobody can be trusted (they all have a conflict of interest), so we can as well make up our own "alternative facts" that fit our ideology best. In the end, it's just "us against them", so arguments and facts don't matter any more.
That isn't true at all. Mere disclosure (e.g. "Full disclosure: I ran gain of function research for years at NIH, a couple years ago got a ban on gain-of-function research lifted at the White House and our team is currently looking into whether WIV received our funding") is sufficient to mitigate most conflicts of interests. Conflicts of interest exist all the time, but they're fairly easy to disclose (as long as someone has an ethical backbone), and in extreme cases can be mitigated with things like divestment or blind trusts (in the case of financial conflicts of interest).
Suppose your doctor was also a paid consultant for a pharmaceutical company, advising them on their new drug X. One day, your doctor starts telling you all of the benefits of drug X for certain medical issues you have, and she's very enthusiastic about it. If she simply disclosed, "full disclosure: I'm consulting with the manufacturer on the effects of this drug; that said, I really believe in it," wouldn't that entirely change the ethical dynamic vis-a-vis nondisclosure? If she disclosed, you could get a (non-conflicted) second opinion, or maybe you implicitly trust your doctor and go along with her recommendation as is. But if she didn't disclose and you later learned some other way that she has this conflict, you would lose trust.
This is what happened with Fauci and the gain-of-function crowd. They stood on the pedestal of unbiased scientific expertise, failing to disclose their conflicts, and then enabled the browbeating of anyone with alternative hypotheses (literally anyone: scientists had their professional reputations and research funding threatened; social media users had their accounts suspended or posts deleted). Without alternative hypotheses, science entirely falters. Full disclosure on the part of Fauci and especially Daszak would have gone lightyears in evaluating their credibility.
I should note that conflicts of interest do not change facts or true scientific conclusions themselves; that would be ad hominem. But conclusions are typically dependent on myriad facts, and experts have a much better idea about the universe of discourse around these facts than laypeople. A conflicted expert may thus present cherry-picked facts that support his conclusions, ignoring those that cut against them. To be fair, non-conflicted scientists may do this as well, but their credibility is only harmed insofar as they should have addressed countervailing evidence when presenting conclusions. Having a non-disclosed conflict of interest undermines a scientist's credibility and a commitment to ethical inquiry.
In my opinion, the scientific community has severely undermined their ethical and persuasive capital over the past year and even longer. If disclosure were a normal part of scientific discourse where it impacted policy, we likely would have more people who believe that vaccines work, that climate change is a threat (though likely not an apocalyptic one) and that the scientific process generally works. Instead, we have this browbeating culture where not trusting the "experts" is like some sort of scarlet letter, at least until we learn the experts were looking out for their own interests and suddenly they lose their luster. I love science, so I wish the scientific community would get its fucking act together so that large segments of the population on my "side" start to believe in the scientific method again.
Finally, lost in all of this is the fact that gain-of-function was supposed to produce vaccines more rapidly. As far as I can tell, this never happened. The vaccines we received had been researched for a decade through a different program not funded by NIH, and did not depend on gain-of-function research, but instead used unmolested SARS viruses.
Is a scientist actually a scientist if they don’t adhere to the scientific method and try their best to maintain skepticism and abstract themselves from personal and political bias. I would say they are not actually scientists, they just think and claim they are.
Humans are flawed, biased, and fundamentally limited creatures that are wrong a lot of the time. So we invented a system to evaluate hypothesis based on experiments, data, etc... A person speaking gospel or pushing a trust “The Science” while prematurely rejecting unproven hypothesis is NOT a scientist. They are no better than those who sought to banish or kill Galileo and the like.
In my opinion, the scientific community has severely undermined their ethical and persuasive capital over the past year and even longer
I would agree with the "even longer". I think it most noticeably started with the scientific community's intermixing of concerns regarding climate change with political forces who have had their own agendas. It's made it extremely difficult even for scientifically-minded and informed people like myself to sort through the bullshit vs the good information. People without even my background have no hope of knowing whom to trust, so they've fallen back to just trusting their political inclinations.
This past year and the politicization around pandemic issues has definitely seen an increase in the the problem, though. It's been a sad year for Science. Hard-won public trust in scientists has been thrown away. You can see it in the hesitancy to get the vaccine.
But it could be perceived as a conflict of interest, and that of itself is the reason to at least declare it (for transparency). This is how it works in ethics.
Indeed, avoiding the perception of impropriety is second only to avoiding impropriety itself. When people perceive impropriety, even when there is none, trust in the system is undermined.
At the end of the day it's up to everybody to apply their own version of the "reasonable person" test. Might a reasonable person misconstrue what you're doing to be unethical? If so, rethink your approach. Maybe there is no other option, but often there is.
Anything could be perceived as a conflict of interest. This entire subthread is an argument about whether it’s reasonable to consider this case a conflict of interest.
EcoHealth secured a NIAID grant of roughly $3.7 million, which it allocated in part to various entities engaged in collecting bat samples, building models, and performing gain-of-function experiments to see which animal viruses were able to jump to humans.
It was a $3.7million dollar grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which I wouldn't doubt he was involved with. $600,000 was sent from EcoHealth to Wuhan Institute of Virology.
He has now been called in to testify in front of congress on it ... twice. However insignificant the dollar amount, knowing the details of it is his job.
Ultimately yes - but not at grant time, just like how a CEO is responsible for everything in a company either directly or indirectly. Shit flows up, he may not be personally involved in the decision but he absolutely has to be briefed on it (or know who to ask) if things go sideways so he can answer to Congress/President (just like a CEO to the board).
It’s an obvious conflict of interest. To be making public judgments about whether a lab could be responsible when you are partly responsible for what that lab has done is precisely the definition of conflict of interest.
It’s called self-policing elsewhere, and anybody would see the conflict of interest immediately at FAANG, for example. Was FB causing teen depression? Researcher says no. (Then it turns out the researcher had done consulting work for FB or had been in contact with FB, advocating that they use the timeline feed to run experiments on unsuspecting teens…
Just playing devil's advocate, not convinced fauci had any malicious intentions, but he has one of the most highly public jobs in America, he gets to keep his job/power and maintain a future in politics. But he definitely does not seem like some power hungry egomaniacal player to me. His beliefs before and after and actions after the outbreak seemed to be consistent with someone that was trying to do the right thing for our country.
I don't know about malice, but covering up or downplaying the possibility of a global pandemic being caused by activities he was involved in or encouraged... shit can be corrupt even if a person is not trying to take advantage of a situation.
Placing blame isn't really all that important. Making sure none of this happens again for the same reasons is.
If I was placing a bet, I'd say Wuhan researchers regularly got a handle on patents zero for cross species infection. In the course of the research a virus infected workers because of lax, sloppy, or otherwise inadequate controls; then despite the threat in order to save face government did everything they could to hide the mistake until it was far too late for anything to really be done about it.
So you’re criticizing a scientist for expressing skepticism toward a scenario that had (especially at the time) very limited evidence, and then just placing your own bet on a far more extreme, also non-substantiated version?
The article states that at the time people were denying the possibility of a lab leak, there was a lack of credible evidence for zoonosis. If I’m evaluating hypotheses, it’s generally better that I wait for hard evidence before ruling one out. e.g. some kind of patient zero animal population.
The lancet letter was at best extraordinarily premature.
Errr... yes? None of that is relevant to the claim GP goes on to make. Not only was skepticism warranted toward the lab leak hypothesis (and it continues to be), but going on to speculate that this "regularly" happened is a bit rich.
Seriously, what's he getting here for his supposed "deception"?
Fauci has been covering this up since early on. Have you not followed the story of the released emails from the FOIA request? He knew this research was being conducted. He gave cover to those who attacked people like Sen Tom Cotton, who was trying to get this looked into from the beginning.
For this, his reward is a public servant's salary
Fauci is the highest paid employee in the Federal government.
> It's not a conflict of interest because Dr. Fauci wasn't gaining anything. The agency he is head of is specifically interested in infectious disease and has a large budget for grants. $120K per year pays for a couple plate of genetic samples and tech time to run them. Maybe in China you can run a few more for that cost, I don't know.
So it is not a conflict of interest because of the sum of money? Someone doesn't need to gain anything to be in conflict, by definition: "a situation in which the concerns or aims of two different parties are incompatible."
Do you at least think he had a duty to disclose his involvement/investment in gain of function research? Specifically with the Wuhan lab at the center of this?
> As head of that agency, it's also his job to share his professional opinion with the public. For this, his reward is a public servant's salary. Seriously, what's he getting here for his supposed "deception"?
Did you know he's the most highly paid government official? His measly public servant salary only paid him $417K. [0]
It's still not clear to me what the conflict of interest is. The amount of money is kind of important, because it gives you an idea of the level of involvement. As I said, $600K over 5 years is very little money, it basically makes sure you get the results of whatever research is already being done.
> His measly public servant salary only paid him $417K.
The top scientist in the country, with several Ph.Ds, 50 years of experience in a both public leadership and an incredibly complicated branch of biology, is making roughly what a staff engineer at a FAANG company makes...and you are complaining? That's the bargain of the century. He's a sick fuck for actually sticking it out - he could have bailed and consulted on "return to the office" for all the big tech and entertainment companies. He is 80 years old, working insane hours, and probably would have made more money in 6 months than he has in his whole public career from a really nice beach. You will never convince me that THIS is the smoking gun that proves Dr. Fauci corrupt, finally, after 50 years in public service. It's too stupid.
> It's still not clear to me what the conflict of interest is. The amount of money is kind of important, because it gives you an idea of the level of involvement. As I said, $600K over 5 years is very little money, it basically makes sure you get the results of whatever research is already being done.
Maybe he's covering his own ass? Maybe he's trying to protect gain of function research? He was, after all, the most vocal proponent that the risks with gain of function research were worth it. [0]
> The top scientist in the country, with several Ph.Ds, 50 years of experience in a both public leadership and an incredibly complicated branch of biology, is making roughly what a staff engineer at a FAANG company makes...and you are complaining? That's the bargain of the century. He's a sick fuck for actually sticking it out - he could have bailed and consulted on "return to the office" for all the big tech and entertainment companies. He is 80 years old, working insane hours, and probably would have made more money in 6 months than he has in his whole public career from a really nice beach. You will never convince me that THIS is the smoking gun that proves Dr. Fauci corrupt, finally, after 50 years in public service. It's too stupid.
Oh, ok. So before his only reward was his "public servant salary", but now that you know he's the most highly paid government official (including the President) his salary is now being compared to FAANGs and he's underpaid. What a sacrifice.
> Oh, ok. So before his only reward was his "public servant salary", but now that you know he's the most highly paid government official (including the President)
He is far from the top paid government official. That honor, by a long shot, in nearly every state in the country, goes to college athletic coaches[1].
I assumed this was a typo the first time, but since you repeated it - it's gain* of function. As in a virus gaining a new function.
Did you even read that paper? I doesn't say what you are claiming at all. It says they're going to hold a conference to determine if it's worth the risks, and says they should continue the moratorium while they do more research. Ah jeez.
> Oh, ok. So before his only reward was his "public servant salary", but now that you know he's the most highly paid government official (including the President) his salary is now being compared to FAANGs and he's underpaid. What a sacrifice.
Compared to what he could be making right now? Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate his sacrifice — he's criminally underpaid for how valuable his skills and experience are to the country.
You've broken the site guidelines repeatedly and egregiously in this thread. We ban accounts that do that.
Most of the accounts that have been doing that in this thread, I've let off with just a warning. Yours, however, seems clearly to be using HN primarily for ideological/political/nationalistic battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for, because they're destructive of what this site is supposed to exist for. Therefore I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
> You've broken the site guidelines repeatedly and egregiously in this thread. We ban accounts that do that.
What guidelines have I "repeatedly and egregiously" broken in this thread? Was it the pointing out that a monetary gain is not a requirement for a conflict of interest? Was it where I asked the other poster if they thought Fauci had a duty of care to disclose his involvement in activities that some might see as a conflict of interest? Was it pointing out the fact that Fauci is the highest paid government official in the federal government (with citation)? Was it referencing and quoting Fauci's paper from 2012? Or was it me pointing out the other poster's bad faith responses to my comments (with the "Aw jeez")?
I've read the HN guidelines and this decision is not inline with them.
No, it has to do with name-calling, flamebait, and generally posting in the flamewar style. It's perfectly possible to do all the things you mentioned without any of that.
Also, it's against HN's rules to use the site primarily for political battle, which you've obviously been doing, and we warned you about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25692385. Not cool.
That comment was four months ago. And it wasn't directed at anyone in particular. Guess that qualifies as "repeated" in your book? Seems like a stretch.
What name did I call the other poster? I remarked that he appears to have a Fauci bromance, but that was after the "Aw jeez" sarcastic / flame bait comments. Prior to that I was commenting in good faith. And frankly, pointing out someone has a bromance for someone else after they've lavished praise upon that person in two separate comments does not name calling make. It's an observation, one that wasn't refuted by the other poster. Furthermore, despite being accused of having not read a paper because of a typo, I stuck to good faith commenting by quoting directly from said paper.
Can't help but notice I'm being banned for largely benign comments in a thread where I speculate about Fauci's conflict of interest. Comments other commenters expressed agreement. But the poster making sarcastic / bad faith comments who is defending Fauci gets off with a warning.
This conduct is your political battle, dang. Which is both not cool and, in my opinion, actively hurting debate on HN. HN would benefit from more balanced moderation.
"You continue to sidestep and move goal posts. Ah jeez. You cling to an obvious typo instead of addressing my questions. Ah jeez. Your obvious (and frankly cringeworthy) Fauci bromance aside..." is filled with name-calling (pejorative 'you' language).
I must admit that you have a point, though: I shouldn't have said that you'd broken the site guidelines "repeatedly and egregiously in this thread". You may have broken them repeatedly, but when I looked back I only saw one comment that was egregious in this thread (the one I initially replied to). I'm sorry for the overstatement. I usually try to make sure my statements are strictly accurate, and that one wasn't, and I apologize.
It doesn't change the ban, because that wasn't the reason for banning you. As I explained, we ban accounts that use HN primarily for political/ideological battle. Surely you're not arguing that your account hasn't been doing that? It plainly has.
Everyone in this situation feels like we're only banning them because we secretly disagree with their politics, but the truth is that we do these bans regardless of what the account is battling for or against. We're trying to enforce the guidelines because the guidelines are the best blueprint we have for the kind of forum HN is supposed to be.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. That means using HN for curious, thoughtful conversation, not getting into flamewars, not trying to smite enemies, and so on.
> Did you even read that paper? I doesn't say what you are claiming at all. It says they're going to hold a conference to determine if it's worth the risks, and says they should continue the moratorium while they do more research. Ah jeez.
A bad faith comment ("did you even read your link?") followed by a sarcastic "Aw jeez". Sure, two wrongs don't make a right, but only one wrong is being banned. For rthe record, I don't think the other poster should be banned, either.
> It doesn't change the ban, because that wasn't the reason for banning you. As I explained, we ban accounts that use HN primarily for political/ideological battle. Surely you're not arguing that your account hasn't been doing that? It plainly has.
I used HN for debate. It is difficult, if not impossible to avoid treading into political/ideological realms. I've gone through your comment history and have found numerous examples of you entering into the political/ideological yourself. If you need examples, I'd be happy to provide some recent ones. But I brought more than political/ideological debate to HN, I also submitted scientific papers, recently declassified documents and other materials that (at least to me) were of interest. But that's not the point, the banning of all "political/ideological battles" is a shortsighted policy that will eventually render HN a dead sea where nothing interesting is discussed because no ideas can be openly challenged.
> Everyone in this situation feels like we're only banning them because we secretly disagree with their politics, but the truth is that we do these bans regardless of what the account is battling for or against. We're trying to enforce the guidelines because the guidelines are the best blueprint we have for the kind of forum HN is supposed to be.
Well, you had to go back four months for a previous guideline violation and my account is only six months old. Two strikes and I'm out I guess, and the previous violation was a throwaway comment that wasn't targeting anyone. Seems like I was on a list (of sorts) and this was as good an excuse as any to ban me. But banning posters for expressing political/ideological viewpoints is itself a political/ideological battle. The political/ideological views that survive on HN (and they do) are nested firmly in your political/ideological blindspots. Which is why I suggest a more balanced approach to moderation would ensure that at least this poorly thought out policy is applied more evenly.
> If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. That means using HN for curious, thoughtful conversation, not getting into flamewars, not trying to smite enemies, and so on.
No, that's ok. I think I brought considerably more good faith debate to HN than anything else. It may not have aligned with your political/ideological sensibilities, but there's little I can proactively do about that minefield. The "rules" won't save me here.
How have I moved the goal posts? I've maintained that there is no conflict-of-interest here. I like Dr. Fauci, but I mostly don't understand the point of this line of reasoning. Right wing media sources have a long history of vendettas against individuals they perceive to be liberal or against them in some way - that's what this appears to be.
I specifically didn't focus on the "typo", except you said it 3 times, so I figured you'd want to know.
...and that quote hardly conveys to "the most vocal proponent". Talk about moving the goal posts!
> His measly public servant salary only paid him $417K
Oh please. The median CEO pay at a pharmaceutical company is nearly $5 million. It take all the way up to nearly $50 million per year, which someone with the incredible experience (not to mention government contacts) of Dr Fauci would be on the upper end of, and that's not too mention the tens of millions in signing bonus and retirement packages. [1]
Fauci is clearly dismissing the notion that it was engineered. He says pretty clearly that if a natural virus escaped the lab it would still be a natural virus and hence not a useful topic when it comes to treating it. I don't think he ever said it wasn't possible just that there's no reason to believe it. And it's understandably not his primary concern to figure out.
I just want to point out that there is no real evidence of this. Statistically, I'm sure it happened at least once, you can find one example of anything, but this phrase originates with a single anecdotal story from a single nurse.
There was no trend or array of stories. Just one lady who said she had someone denying it on their deathbed with zero corroboration, and then she got 2 days of news cycle.
There were random interviews in the capitol saying all these weird stuff from the internet, and people in US often know someone who'd be convinced this way.
So its not like this crazy stuff is hard to prove is prevalent (pun intended) among certain groups.
What is hard is actually putting figures on it when worldviews get so warped due to circular logic. This is bad, because there are real reasons people are upset. Underlying reasons that need to be properly addressed.
> Local mainstream “fact checkers” have even called Covid-19 a “right-wing conspiracy theory” in early 2020.
Would love a citation or two. I remember the right-wing administration saying it would disappear as if by magic and Fox News saying "0 deaths" and that playing up covid was a left wing invention at least up to april or so.
I don't know about this particular wording, but from my point of view here is what happened:
At first the loosely defined right-wing were panicking about the virus. Myself included, although I wasn't really panicking, just getting myself mentally prepared that this might possibly be the second black plague that could wipe out a similar percentage of the population. Meanwhile the loosely defined left-wing was ridiculing it, laughing about it, saying that there is no evidence that the virus is dangerous and calling people fearmongers and racists (?). And then everything switched. As it turned out, the virus wasn't as nearly dangerous as I initially though it'd be and the left-wing suddenly started acting like we're all going to die.
Fascinating how your PoV is so fundamentally different from mine, even when archive browsing the web a bit now.
Regarding:
> calling people fearmongers and racists (?)
I remember asian (or of asian descent) acquaintances being spit on and yelled at in the vein of "you're killing us!" on the subway for ostensibly looking Chinese (I'm guessing), at a time when the virus was already likelier to spread from other countries, and I'd say the more left leaning were pointing this out. People doing that don't reach that stage of racebased profiling independently without someone drumming up "chinavirus" as soon as it was no longer feasible to shrug it off. Is that maybe what you're referring to?
Yes, it really is fascinating how there are basically two entirely different worlds out there. But we're not in disagreement that the positions switched at some point, right?
I've seen people talking about the rise in anti-asian hate crimes and it being incorrectly blamed on white supremacy, but that happened somewhat recently. At the point in time we're talking about I haven't really heard about anything too much, although it's not hard to imagine it being the case. I think it's to be expected, what are you supposed to do about it? Should you ignore the actions of Israel, because it's associated with Jews? Or actions of Russian government, because someone could discriminate a Russian person over that? Or what happens in some Islamic country? And we're fine with talking about about "systemic white supremacy", so I find these concerns to be hypocritical frankly. I also don't believe that pretending like the virus didn't originate in China would help anything. People might be stupid, but they're smart enough to figure out that this is just BS.
> But we're not in disagreement that the positions switched at some point, right?
I think we are in disagreement. I don't remember such a switch, nor can identify one browsing backwards.
> I think it's to be expected, what are you supposed to do about it? Should you ignore the actions of Israel, because it's associated with Jews? Or actions of Russian government, because someone could discriminate a Russian person over that? Or what happens in some Islamic country?
I doubt everyone in Israel agrees with the decisions of the state of Israel, just as half of Americans don't agree with any current administration. Even further beyond that you shouldn't equate every jew with Israel, just as you shouldn't every muslim with Iran.
Talking about China as it relates to covid is fine. Calling it "chinavirus" (repeatedly) has no practical benefit, and is only used as a polemic.
> And we're fine with talking about about "systemic white supremacy", so I find these concerns to be hypocritical frankly.
I don't equate every white person with white supremacy, including myself. I don't see the hypocrisy.
> I think we are in disagreement. I don't remember such a switch, nor can identify one browsing backwards.
Well, I definitely remember left-leaning people ridiculing it when people were buying out the toilet paper, saying that there is no virus and stuff.
> I don't equate every white person with white supremacy, including myself. I don't see the hypocrisy.
And I don't equate every Chinese person with the virus or the Chinese government. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the criticism is that the narrative or the words you use, even if factually correct, might cause some people to have prejudice against the members of a certain group. You're (maybe not you specifically, I don't know) concerned about backlash against Chinese people over the virus, but you aren't concerned about the backlash against white people over systemic racism theory. That's what I find hypocritical.
But yeah, "china virus" might be a little bit over the top.
> Well, I definitely remember left-leaning people ridiculing it when people were buying out the toilet paper, saying that there is no virus and stuff.
I didn't even realize buying up toilet paper during early pandemics was partisan, but I definitely remember memes about how inconsiderate it is to buy up years worth of toilet paper at once, emptying the cache for everyone else with no indication that toilet paper manufacturing was affected. I admit I made fun of this too, but drew no political association to it. It had nothing to do with (the existence of) the virus.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the criticism is that the narrative or the words you use, even if factually correct, might cause some people to have prejudice against the members of a certain group.
Yeah, I guess, but I don't think there's any valid and accurate criticism that would lead anyone to blame random Chinese people.
> You're (maybe not you specifically, I don't know) concerned about backlash against Chinese people over the virus, but you aren't concerned about the backlash against white people over systemic racism theory. That's what I find hypocritical.
I haven't experienced any backlash against white people for any and all systemic racism built by other white people. I still do not see your point.
I don't think there really should be any political association to the virus in general, it just so happened that the issue divided itself along the partisan lines as usual. The buying out toilet paper was just to give you the time frame, that's when overall people were being ridiculed over concerns about the virus. Personal anecdote, one somewhat heavily left-leaning friend we know was insisting on a meeting and we got laughed at when we refused, because we were afraid of virus.
> I haven't experienced any backlash against white people for any and all systemic racism built by other white people. I still do not see your point.
And I'm really glad you didn't. Not every Chinese experienced any backlash either. That's great for them too. But not everyone was so fortunate. Example from a BLM protest: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5ebji8
I don't know if that NPR article has been edited, but the only thing it's saying is that in january 2020 there was low risk of contracting covid compared to a regular flu, not that the virus was less dangerous, which at the time seems accurate.
From your vanityfair link:
> As Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and much of the GOP parroted the president’s no-worries line, MAGA originals like Steve Bannon and Mike Cernovich sounded the alarm.
I did notice the difference in Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity coverage, but you're right, there seems to have been a split within the grouping. Seeing as how many on the right are Trump loyalists (to a fault), that was the generalization I was drawing.
If you don't remember that, then you should question your information sources. I remember the accusations of racism online quite vividly as I voiced my concerns in early February that people should start taking precautions: buying quarantine supplies, PPE, etc.
Tucker Carlson had some early reports on COVID and was attacked for fear-mongering by his usual left-leaning political opponents.
This is Fauci (serving under Trump) saying in January 2020 that he didn't think it was a threat, or am I missing something?
Are you saying that a then Trump official, now Biden official was speaking out of partisanship?
> I remember the accusations of racism online quite vividly as I voiced my concerns in early February that people should start taking precautions: buying quarantine supplies, PPE, etc.
I stocked up on ~3-4 weeks worth of supplies too, and replenished bi-weekly since early february, as well as many of my friends, neither of whom politicised it.
> Tucker Carlson had some early reports on COVID and was attacked for fear-mongering by his usual left-leaning political opponents.
Conservative media has been and is almost exclusively doing the vocal delusional pandemic denial. You are completely right about this. The source claiming the right-wing conspiracy theory has been an outlier here.
There was an article from a popular outlet I've been particularly surprised about, since left-wing media otherwise mostly took the pandemic seriously here and around the world, and tried to stay science-based.
This article remained in my memory because they present themselves as fact checkers and are popular with many prominent people in my primary political and media spectrum.
This is from 27th January 2020, while many people here on HN likely have read the first concerning reports about this virus at the end of December 2019. I started being careful from mid January.
Until today this page self-righteously claims that "the available facts at that time" pointed towards nothing to be concerned about in the Western world, which is simple not true if you took your research seriously.
I mentioned that Men in Black scene. There were several other topics where I could find concerning evidence by carefully browsing otherwise questionable sources very early on – the lab leak theory (ProjectEvidence, Zerohedge), the aerosol transmission, that mask wearing is reasonable, the unclear and potentially harmful effects of the spike protein itself –, while I've been completely ignoring such websites before covid. ( Other things like people just dropping dead on Chinese streets did not turn out true ofc. )
Separate from the article, the damming thing in his email release is the strong suggestion that he knew it was engineered early on and may have participated in hiding this fact.
er, who has shown any evidence at all that covid-19 was "engineered"? this whole discussion is about the unproven possibility that it leaked from a lab.
The “engineered” component is about the Furin cleavage site on the sars-cov-2 spike protein.
The virus shares 92% genetic similarity to bat coronaviruses, except the spike protein, which is nearly identical to a pangolin coronavirus(which is otherwise only ~38% similar) with one key exception: The Furin cleavage site using “lab standard” sequences.
The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that are rarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair. For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.
According to Andersen, the CGG codon isn't quite as rare in coronaviruses. He also comments that the stability of the CGG codon in the Furin cleavage site has been remarkably high over the course of the pandemic, which is a hint that the CGG codon may be selected for and crucial for the virus.
Quoting him:
> Now, the codons. Here, Baltimore is talking about the two codons coding for the first two arginines (R) following the P - CGG. The CGG codon is rare in viruses because it's an example of an unmethylated "CpG" site that can be bound by TLR9, leading to immune cell activation.
> Despite being rare, however, CGG codons are found in all coronaviruses, albeit at low frequency. Specifically, of all arginine codons, CGG is used at these frequencies in these viruses:
> Furthermore, if we go back to the FCoV sequences and compare them to SARS-CoV-2 at the nucleotide level you'll see that FCoV also uses CGG to code for R immediately following the P. The next R is CGA (non-CpG) in FCoV, while it's CGG in SARS-CoV-2 - one nucleotide difference.
> We see CGG multiple times in different ways - here's an example comparing another "PR" stretch between SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, and SARS-CoV in the N gene. Note how SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 both use CGG, while SARS-CoV-2 uses CGC for the first R, while later R's are coded by CGT or AGA
> One final point about the CGG codons in the FCS - if they were somehow "unnatural", we'd see SARS-CoV-2 evolve away from "CGG" during the ongoing pandemic. We have more than a million genomes to analyze, so what do we find if we look at synonymous mutations at the "CGG_CGG" site?
> Remarkably stable. Specifically, CGG is 99.87% conserved in the first codon and 99.84% conserved in the second.
> This is very strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 'prefers' CGG in these positions.
I'm only a former bioinformaticist (not a clinical practitioner), but people tend to anthropomorphize the blind idiot god of evolution a bit too much. "Selection" is just the end result of survivorship bias.
CGG-CGG is the most potent furin cleavage site because it works on the outer cell membranes and on the interior. Viruses that have it will outcompete all others -- but all this means is that SARS-Cov-2 with the CGG-CGG FCS has been well adapted to humans since the beginning of the pandemic and less potent mutations haven't been able to keep up. There's no "natural/unnatural" axis to consider. The most infectious virus "prefers" to be the most infectious, indeed. It's tautological. Evidence of efficacy doesn't disprove laboratory alteration.
Fauci was responsible for the work of large swathes of the US medical research establishment, and was questioned on that work on a daily basis. Does it make any sense to say he can't comment on the work of an organisation he runs because he runs it?
In this case the lab didn't even work for him, it just got some small amount of funding from his organisation's budget but he had no say in it's operations. So he can comment on the work of his organisation, but not about the work of an organisation he partly funded?
We know perfectly well he is not an external observer. That's not the capacity in which he's commenting, any more than a president is commenting in an external or impartial capacity about the work of the executive branches, or e.g. UN agencies partly funded by the US.
Why is disclosure of potential conflict of interest made out to be such a high bar? And why do you put arguments forth that did not exist in what you replied to?
> Does it make any sense to say he can't comment on the work of an organisation he runs because he runs it?
Is a straw man argument, because what was said was that the conflict of interest should have been disclosed. And, not that he cannot make a comment.
Ok, that's fair, but what I'm saying is no reasonable person would consider Fauci to be an independent observer of any of this. That's just not his role.
"Conflict of interest" primarily describes situations in which you're deciding policy that applies to personal financial stake.
A situation in which you've (a) contributed to decision-making on multiple public funding priorities including this lab and (b) state a judgment that lab was not the source of the outbreak isn't a conflict of interest, it's everyday policy life. Especially given that there's nothing glaringly wrong with the reasoning Fauci gave for that judgment in the article you linked.
If you think that reasoning has shortcomings, by all means, feel free to actually come up with something resembling a counterargument instead of vaguely implying "whether or not anything shady was going on."
The conflict of interest is with Trump. He lifted the ban and should take all the blame for any bad outcome from gain-of-function research. Instead he pushed a deliberate leak conspiracy as cover.
Wow you weren't kidding. His wife, Christine Grady, Christine is Chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. She's cited in papers on "conflicts of interest" in medicine. They must have some interesting dinner table talk...
Here's an interview with her... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhwrICQTcQg ... her opening statement (paraphrased) is "saving lives in the context of vaccines ... is about firstly maximising benefit and secondly about fairness and equity" ... make of that what you will.
It isn't muckraking. Fauci has a clear conflict of interest. Further he argued in favor of GoF research while acknowledging it could lead to a pandemic. He literally wrote that in an academic paper.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fauci-argued-benefits-of...
>In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario...
>Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.
So the basic risk calculation Fauci is using (which is disputed by many scientists and virologists) is this:
Lives saved by GoF research > lives lost by inevitable lab leak + lives lost by inevitable natural pandemic
Gain of function research has been going on for decades now. What evidence is there that this research has actually served its purpose to help save lives? Did GoF help us at all with the current pandemic?
There is a lot of evidence that Fauci had quite a bit of conflict of interest, and knew about the gain of function research long before he denied it to Rand Paul in May.
It's not muckraking. There is heavy smoke, and people denying the existence of fire while trying to get people to stop looking for it.
Since when has muckraking taken a pejorative meaning - especially one that would justify somebody’s downvote. The early 20th century muckrakers enabled much-needed and widespread reform.
Plain Jane American here: my gut sense is something is off : you do not give funding to the Chinese (that's government to government) for research in this area. Something does not sit right. In the recent 25 years the US outsourced too much ... There's no implied or explicit coequal on this kind of R&D.
Why wouldn't you? All the research is (supposed to be) shared with the world anyway. If you're interested in a topic, and some other country is also interested, and they have a lab ready to go - why not throw some money at them to study your thing? Cheaper than building your own lab - especially when the phenomenon is regional.
At the height of the Cold War, when the U.S. and Soviet Union governments were sworn enemies and on the verge of shooting nuclear weapons at each other, U.S. and Soviet scientists collaborated openly and productively on a wide variety of subjects. Even with government funding.
It’s not unusual to expect scientists to collaborate openly across national borders despite political winds, and in fact it is desirable.
Because they are competing on a vaguely equal footing with all the other researchers around the world. Funders want published results in return for funding, and will typically give funding to the researchers that have the perceived highest chance of publishing results if given the money. This incentivises researchers to publish anything they can. It means that money gets sent to China if it looks like the Chinese researchers are likely to make good use of it and return results. That's how academia works.
No, we're not. That wasn't the stated purpose of the research, and is deeply unlikely to have been a covert purpose either. What is the use of a "weapon" you can't aim?
Article gave me the impression that the Obama ban wasn't real. It included an "unless its important" exception and everyone just kept on doing it anyway.
>Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO framework was largely met with shrugs and eye rolls, said a longtime agency official: “If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research anyway.”
Your May 2021 story includes the following quotes:
> But Fauci emphatically denied that the money went toward so-called “gain of function” research, which he described as “taking a virus that could infect humans and making it either more transmissible and/or pathogenic for humans.”
> “That categorically was not done,” he insisted.
> Earlier in the hearing, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins told Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) that researchers at the Wuhan lab “were not approved by NIH for doing “gain of function research” before adding “we are, of course, not aware of other sources of funds or other activities they might have undertaken outside of what our approved grant allowed.”
Are you saying these are still lies? It doesn't really matter if the NIH funded some other kind of research on coronaviruses if that research was not risky. Presumably the question is whether gain of function research performed there created covid-19. And the grant, which I assume is public record, is claimed not to be for that. Maybe there's more to the story, but seems like guilt-by-association at this point. If Wuhan used the funding for some research it was not supposed to be used for, then it might just as well have been funding for any other disease anyway.
They indirectly gave WIV funding to support research into Pig SARS -- Swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus (SADS-CoV).
There is exactly fuckoff zero evidence that funding wound up supporting gain of function research for anything.
And giving China money to study diseases in pigs happening in China that are closely related to a human disease that we were worried about it (or maybe a close relative) spilling over into humans only makes sense.
> There is exactly fuckoff zero evidence that funding wound up supporting gain of function research for anything.
From the Fauci e-mails: People Fauci directly worked with seemed surprised and shocked to learn otherwise, and could not even instantly say if their funding had made it abroad.
There are papers resulting from GoF research of concern at the WIV. There are grant proposals, which specify the exact modifications they will do to Bat SARS to increase infectivity on mice with humanized lungs. How can you speak so certain, if you are unaware of this?
> And giving China money to study diseases in pigs happening in China that are closely related to a human disease that we were worried about it (or maybe a close relative) spilling over into humans only makes sense.
It makes sense, but you'll see through studying the records that it was the cover for military funding. What was the Defense Threat Reduction Agency funding doing at the WIV where military researchers shared floors with civilian researchers working on the same animals? Making sense to research spillover?
- There was GOF research done on US soil at UNC Chapel Hill which collaborated with WIV. They took a SARS-CoV-1 backbone and splied in a surface protein from another coronavirus and ran it through mice to produce a mouse coronavirus.
- There's no papers out of WIV indicating GOF research
> but you'll see through studying the records that it was the cover for military funding.
You're offering a blatant conspiracy theory now with no substantiation.
The funding to WIV had nothing to do with GoF and there's no evidence of anything else. But it HAD to be GoF research. Circular, evidence-free logic.
> There's no papers out of WIV indicating GOF research
This is something I'm confused about. There are a bunch of papers from the WIV and the North Carolina lab which describe "reverse genetics", spike protein modification, and other obvious gain of function research which acknowledge funding from USAID and EcoHealth Alliance. (The most recently famous of these is Menachery et al, Nature 2015.) But it looks like the actual GoF was done at the Baric lab in North Carolina. The closest I could find was serial passaging experiments done at Wuhan to isolate viruses and test vaccines. One could argue that testing virus infectivity by serial passage is dangerous enough...
> The funding to WIV had nothing to do with GoF and there's no evidence of anything else.
The funding to EcoHealth Alliance specified GoF under such terms as "reverse genetics", "virus infection experiments ... humanized mice."
EHA may have put restrictions on how this money was used, but with the revelation in this article that WIV has lied about doing military research... I'm not so confident we can say no GoF was done there.
I wouldn't say that all GOF research is for bioweapons, part of it is to see where the virus is likely to evolve next and protect against that, which is more on the defensive side of that.
Doesn't mean it's less risky, mind you, and this is convincing me that the experts on this need to reassess whether it's worth the risks and if so, what safety precautions are needed. I would think that BSL-2 is just way too low, but I would defer to the scientists on this and only say that I think this shows that anything done to make something more infectious to humans should be treated as though it already was highly infectious to humans.
> I assume this is getting down-voted either because is sounds like conspiracy theory
I would imagine that is true and it's because how you are presenting it is absolutely conspiratorial. You seem to be very adamant about involving Fauci with weak evidence which is the MO for almost all other biased conspiracy theorists in regards to this topic.
Fauci seems to be a scapegoat for many peoples frustrations with very little rational reasoning - similar to Soros and BLM. Conspiracy theorists rarely talk about the repercussions of their perspectives or tangible calls to action and instead get obsessed with who to blame and nefarious-by-default tangential financial associations.
Maybe if you addressed some of the evidence in the article or even the content of the comment you are replying to then your comment wouldn't be perceived in the same light.
The conflict of interest is: was this statement actually what he believed to be true at the time, or was it to draw attention away from the Wuhan lab, so there wouldn't be ugly questions about why his organisation provided funding to it?
You write this as if NIH is a privately run foundation with Fauci at the head. He's not even head of the NIH, and while I have no doubt that he was directly involved in decisions to fund research at the Wuhan lab, this is a government agency, which as we're told over and over (when it's convenient to say so) means layers upon layers of bureaucracy and red tape , particularly when handing out money.
Is it your position that he was able to run it as some personal fiefdom?
Suppose that Fauci had known for a fact in May 2020 that SARS-COV-2 originated in that lab. How would that have changed the advice he (attempted to) offer regarding public health and safety?
> Suppose that Fauci had known for a fact in May 2020 that SARS-COV-2 originated in that lab. How would that have changed the advice he (attempted to) offer regarding public health and safety?
If he had known the virus was being researched and escaped the lab, certainly his recommendation should have included requests for any and all research and records related to the virus research. As such records have been very pertinent to public health guidelines and guidance, if not potentially toward treatments and future vaccines.
Also there is the very real financial and legal component if that were the case. On a much smaller scale it would be on par with destroying video evidence of a slip and fall, denying it ever existed, then when caught claiming it’s immaterial to the medical treatment of the injured…that’s still fraud and at minimum a clear attempt to escape legal and financial liability.
When I do incident command at my workplace, there are two goals in dealing with an incident: solving the problem, and preventing it from happening again. They are both extremely important, but they happen in order.
While the incident is ongoing, any attempts to prevent the problem from happening in the future are a complete distraction. Write down notes and ideas somewhere so we don't forget, but the priority is on solving the incident that actually happened and is causing problems. If you say "What if we fixed this longstanding piece of tech debt that led up to the incident," however reasonable it is to fix it in light of the fact that it caused an incident, it's useless to bring it up now if you can't fix the tech debt immediately to resolve the incident. Along the same lines, attribution is interesting if it will help you deal with what is going on (e.g., there's high load on a low-level system and you want to know if anyone deployed anything recently, so that you can ask them to roll back); it's not really interesting if you know what's broken (e.g., a machine is powered off and needs to be turned back on... figuring out who pressed the power button isn't yet relevant).
Similarly, "We should stop funding gain-of-function research" may (or may not) be a valid conclusion, but it wouldn't have dealt with COVID-19 in particular. It might be worth doing it to make sure there's no COVID-22.
Even if it turns out to be true that COVID-19 came directly from research that would not have happened if it were not for Fauci, absent a reason to believe that anyone's response to COVID-19 specifically would have been different if they knew that, I don't see any reason it was improper not to draw attention to it at the time, and quite a few reasons why it was proper to focus attention on the problem at hand.
His comments in that May 2020 article are spot-on. If we knew that it was engineered, then yes, publicizing the lab notes that were used to build it could perhaps speed up the process of a vaccine or other countermeasure (but COVID-19 had already been sequenced by January 2020 and the sequence published, and vaccines were already in development then). But theories like "what if the researchers brought it in from the wild, and then it escaped their lab" should just have prompted the response "yes, so what." It's interesting now to prevent the next COVID; it's irrelevant re COVID-19.
And I certainly don't see the conflict of interest - what was Fauci gaining? His continued role? Again, at the time, the role was not determining whether to fund gain-of-function research, the role was figuring out how to get rid of COVID-19.
You could say that the NIH should have paused all funding for new virus research projects (unless they specifically related to dealing with COVID-19 in the short term), but that would have been a good idea regardless of the NIH's previous role in funding.
And I certainly don't see the conflict of interest - what was Fauci gaining? His continued role?
Yes. Obviously you don't put an arsonist in charge of fighting fires, so if this information had come out early last year then he would have lost not only his role much sooner, but also his social status and career. If what's coming out now came out last year, Trump's replacement of him with Scott Atlas would have been more widely supported (maybe), and Biden may not have dared to put him back in his post.
That would have been a huge financial hit. Fauci does very well out of his position. "Very well" might even be an understatement. He is the highest paid federal employee [1], earning more in 2019 alone than the US President. Despite this fact, he has deflected questions about conflicts of interest by laughing it off and saying he has a "government salary", creating the impression he is paid far less than he really is.
Fauci charges between $50,000 and $100,000 per hour for motivational speeches [2].
Despite being theoretically in charge of a crisis situation in which nobody has time to ask how it started, Fauci has found time to write a book called, "Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward". He has also appeared on TV more than 300 times [3].
This is not a man who is too busy to investigate basic questions that may have direct relevance to developing treatments for the virus. And given that knowing where it came from would be of immense scientific value yet he has every incentive to cover it up, he is also not a man who should be running things.
This is a global pandemic that came out of China. In the worst possible case, Fauci hid the fact that an org he's involved in donated a minuscule portion of its budget to the lab from where the virus leaked due to incompetence.
It's not like he took the vial home for lulz and dropped it on the subway. His role in the origin of this thing is so small it's irrelevant.
The only thing that's up for discussion is that he may not have been 100% correct during one of his many public statements, hardly something that can be held against him considering the shitcreek the whole world is in.
Personally I'd give the guy some credit for everything he's done right, I mean he's been at it since 1968.
What is there to gain by nailing him to the cross, or pointing out his income and book deals?
> This is a global pandemic that came out of China. In the worst possible case, Fauci hid the fact that an org he's involved in donated a minuscule portion of its budget to the lab from where the virus leaked due to incompetence.
> It's not like he took the vial home for lulz and dropped it on the subway. His role in the origin of this thing is so small it's irrelevant.
By dissuading an investigation into the cause at the time, he might have shot down our only chance of ever knowing for sure. I sure as hell don't trust China to be truthful about it. There's no incentive on their part.
> The only thing that's up for discussion is that he may not have been 100% correct during one of his many public statements, hardly something that can be held against him considering the shitcreek the whole world is in.
He's been spreading mixed and misinformation for months and possibly lying to Congress. Many give him the benefit of the doubt by saying that he either did not know or he did it in the interests of the public as a whole (ex: We need the N95 masks so let's lie and say nobody else does). Neither is acceptable to some of us.
> Personally I'd give the guy some credit for everything he's done right, I mean he's been at it since 1968.
Past good behavior doesn't get you out of a trial. At best it's a factor during sentencing.
> What is there to gain by nailing him to the cross, or pointing out his income and book deals?
The book deal looks like a last minute cash grab before he gets sacked.
> He's been spreading mixed and misinformation for months and possibly lying to Congress. Many give him the benefit of the doubt by saying that he either did not know or he did it in the interests of the public as a whole (ex: We need the N95 masks so let's lie and say nobody else does). Neither is acceptable to some of us.
That very advice was offered here in Belgium as well and it smelled like BS. Obviously they had to make a hard choice: tell people they need masks, stocks get plundered and medical professionals have none. Or, say the opposite and grab every mask you can find for medical personnel. The second option was probably the best, hopefully you can understand that these kind of hard choices need to be made and this guy shouldn't lose his job over it.
Interestingly, in Jan / Fed before it really hit Europe and nobody was wearing masks in public they were already sold out in most places. At the time it was probably Chinese plundering EU stores and govt must have picked up on it.
No, this is the problem. Fauci and others in public health have confused everyone with their lies so badly now they're being defended.
There was never a mask crisis. Masks don't work, they have never worked, this had been known for a long time partially because the world went through this exact process with the Spanish flu. And scientists knew that which is why they originally said masks don't work.
This all fell apart quickly because they are collectivists at heart and were being lobbied by political forces that wanted something they could tell everyone to do. The WHO actually admitted this to the bbc! Masks seemed like a good fit, so the scientists promptly jumped on board and started saying masks worked. Problem: how to explain their prior position? So they came up with this double layered lie: we said masks didn't work because it was a noble lie to protect healthcare workers.
But it was never the case. All the documents before March 2020 are consistent on this, including the new Fauci emails.
There's plenty of peer-reviewed evidence that masks are aerosol barriers and that aerosol barriers help reduce transmission/infection.
The term "collectivist" has no particular meaning other than to those who have what they consider to be an opposite worldview.
This is just several lines of misinformation, the same nonsense that's been an issue since SARS-COV-2 emerged. It's all be debunked hundreds of thousands of times, both on HN and elsewhere.
But "peer reviewed evidence" is frequently either wrong, or irrelevant (e.g. lab studies without external validity), or both. The whole discussion here is that scientists have been engaged in political manipulations since the start.
Mask mandates don't work. If they did then the removal of masks would have caused a noticeable spike in cases in Texas, to pick just one example of many. The complete uselessness of masks has been "debunked" in the same vein the lab leak theory was "debunked" - a bunch of people asserting that scientists cannot be wrong, even as they say things that are clearly and very obviously wrong. Anyone can see the truth just by looking at government data sets for a while. It is ridiculous that people still aren't learning to think for themselves, even after all that's happened.
Their usefulness in non crowded spaces in open air is probably debatable but if you're in an elevator with 10 people sneezing wouldn't you rather wear one? Why does every surgeon in the world wear one?
So the question is in what exact circumstances are they useful. I'd say during a pandemic it's probably better to err on the safe side.
The internet is full of them but my favourite source is just the raw data. Look at case graphs for different regions. Look at the dates when mask mandates were added and removed. There should be very sharp, inorganic looking drops and spikes but there are none.
Many people have put together the charts with arrows indicating the dates when things changed, for example
That site is old now but there have been many since.
You can also find plenty of studies saying the same of course, but you can also find studies saying the opposite - academic research has failed on this topic. Fortunately the question in simple, so you don't need any research papers to see the truth: mask mandates do not work because if they worked, we could see it in the graphs, and we can't.
Wore mask at all times: 11% got infected
Wore mask never: 23% got infected
Mask mandate doesn't mean people actually wore them. Maybe in shops they did cause it was illegal not to. If people kept having gatherings with friends & family then a mask mandate is meaningless.
And honestly, you should be ashamed to link to these type of websites. They don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny.
A poll by a news website that relies on self-diagnoses? Really? I was expecting at least a scientific study. Come on, you could try harder than that - it's easy to find peer reviewed published scientific studies that conclude masks "work" yet which are wrong.
Mask mandate doesn't mean people actually wore them.
Well, people do wear them, that's been studied quite extensively. Compliance >95% in the studies I've seen. If mask mandates don't affect the data even with the very high levels of compliance seen during COVID times then they will never work, because compliance won't be higher in future.
But even if "not enough" people wore them or didn't wear them 24/7 or whatever, that still means mask mandates failed. People were forced to wear masks a whole lot, in any crowded space, and they had no impact on the data at all. Affecting the data was the only justification for mask mandates, so their failure to do so is fatal to the concept - why they failed might make for an interesting debate, but given how tiny viruses are, how much airflow can occur around masks and that most transmission happens inside homes, care homes and hospitals where mask wearing 24/7 is not practical, their failure is no big shock.
And honestly, you should be ashamed to link to these type of websites. They don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny.
Look in the mirror, my friend. I've linked to examples of actual case curves, which is what matters. Mask mandates aren't intended to affect opinion polls on obscure news sites, they're meant to affect whole countries. They do not. Therefore they have failed.
Google will easily point you to mountains of evidence that they do work, from scientific studies. If you don't want to look at them or convince yourself you know better than the people who conducted these studies then that's unfortunate.
I've looked at a lot of COVID related research papers over the last year, which is exactly why I don't take them seriously anymore. The quality is extremely low and they routinely do things that aren't scientifically valid without any obvious repercussions for the authors.
Fortunately, again, one more time. You do not need scientific studies to see the truth here. The goal of mask mandates was to change case curves. That was their only justification. In a large number of places mask mandates were added or removed without the case graphs changing. Therefore, they do not work. Everything beyond that is irrelevant and frequently confused, e.g. studies on masks are not relevant to the question of mask mandates.
Please do. Perhaps after a few more years of articles like the one this thread is originally about, you'll look at it in a new light. The sort of "scientists" who inhabit our universities have no monopoly on the truth, as the world is slowly coming to accept.
Nailing public figures who lie for personal gain to the cross serves a very important function by dissuading other public figures from doing the same. Otherwise, the math suggests that every public figure should be lying for personal gain since they can just get away with it. At least in the US, there are far too many politicians who think they can get away with lying through their teeth to the public.
However, it looks like Fauci has outlived his usefulness to the ruling class, and they are currently in the process of throwing him under the bus.
> Yes. Obviously you don't put an arsonist in charge of fighting fires
Sure, but to go back to my analogy, you absolutely do put the guy who hit the power button by mistake in charge of pressing it again - they know exactly where it is and they're already in the datacenter. You put the team that deployed a new service that's DoSing your infrastructure in charge of rolling it back. You don't say "You broke the system, so we're finding someone else to do the rollback."
If the allegation is that Fauci intentionally funded a lab in Wuhan to work on gain-of-function research with the express purpose of having the virus escape and cause a global pandemic because Fauci is a murderer rivaling Hitler, that's a very different (and much harder to substantiate) claim than that he merely was causally involved in an accident and like anyone else wants the accident to not have happened.
And if that is the claim, the "conflict of interest" argument becomes clearer: Fauci is on the side of COVID-19 and in charge of stopping it. It's the same conflict of interest as putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires.
Short of that, the idea that he had a conflict of interest is like the idea that the team that accidentally DoS'd the infrastructure has a conflict of interest because they each get Fauci-scale salaries and they might be fired. Technically yes, but we all know that firing them wouldn't help solve the problem and losing their expertise would make other things work, so it's not even on the table unless we suspect malice is involved.
(And if it is on the table, either at my workplace or in Fauci's case, so is criminal prosecution. Loss of salary is the least of your worries.)
I don't think anyone is claiming anyone wanted it to escape, only that it was very likely, they know it was likely, that's why it had been banned but Fauci overrode the ban then started constantly lying about it and many other things for career and financial reasons.
You make comparison to tech workers. Sure, if someone makes a genuine honest mistake then you can argue they should be retained as they won't make that mistake again. But that does require deep and total honesty. If a tech worker caused an outage and then manipulated management for a year to cover up their involvement, there would be no such leniency.
Because you can't trust him. Full stop. That's the problem with conflicts of interest.
And to get more particular, the reason you can't trust his advice about the pandemic is because you can't trust him to give advice that would be based on or would reveal information related to the conflict of interest. Pretending as if that's impossible is silly. It's obvious it could happen, whether it did or not.
> It gets worse - gain of function research was banned under Obama until the ban was lifted in 2017 under Trump
It was never really "banned", there was a moratorium on such research after a string of safety lapses in US laboratories, moratorium's are always only of a temporary nature [0].
The often mentioned "GoF research" involving bats with US participation and funding, didn't even fall under that moratorium [1].
> you have Fauci making the case for creating viruses in a lab
Of course he would make that case, because that's a useful tool to have in research. No offense, but trying to make this out as something so binary and only bad, reminds me a lot about the more radical and clueless takes on GMO that see "All GMO as bad".
JANUARY 9, 2017 AT 9:06
Recommended Policy Guidance for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight
"Adoption of these recommendations will satisfy the requirements for lifting the current moratorium on certain life sciences research that could enhance a pathogen’s virulence and/or transmissibility to produce a potential pandemic pathogen (an enhanced PPP)."
_IF_ Covid-19 is the result of a lab leak on research that Fauci funded and promoted AND he colluded w/ a group of scientists to hide this fact, it literally is the greatest conspiracy of our generation.
It isn't a big if. The recently released e-mails support this line of reasoning but don't confirm it. To argue the opposite of this, you should have better than ad hominem attacks.
> gain of function research was banned under Obama until the ban was lifted in 2017 under Trump
There's no need to politicize the discussion.
1) There's no evidence any recent president or cabinet member had a clue, or if they did have a clue it was off their radar anyway.
2) All this gain of function research was administered either in academic circles or at lower governmental circles where politicians are not involved. See for yourself. Fauci's own email from January 2020 referenced research already published in 2015. (That's during Obama's gain of function research ban, for those of you keeping score at home). Start at 5:00 into the referenced video.
EDIT: The paper was published after the ban was initiated. The research began before the ban, but apparently continued.
The whole video is well worth watching and walks trough Fauci's immediate responses as soon as it became apparent this is the real deal, and still 6 FULL WEEKS before the WHO declared a pandemic. A whole lot of CYA going on here. Fauci knew enough to reference this paper in the wee hours of the morning after a very busy day and before another hectic day he was headed for. Think he was familiar with the topic?
> Fauci said the Trump administration will not only be challenged by ongoing global health threats such as influenza and HIV, but also a surprise disease outbreak.
Well, of course. Disease outbreaks happen all the time. Just from the top of my head I remember tropical fevers (like Zika and yellow fever), Ebola, Corona viruses (such as MERS and SARS), zoonotic flues outbreaks that threatened to become a pandemic. This happens every other year. Fauci said "thing that happens every 1-2 years likely to happen during a 4-8 year period".
Supposedly, Fauci only got an approval from a low level Trump administration official.
IMO it’s not clear anyone even approved the research. I wouldn’t be surprised if the NIH just pulled a fast one. There’s also no evidence Fauci never mentioned the research to anyone near the beginning of the pandemic. Several Trump officials came out and said they were never told.
So it sounds like Fauci is saying they didn't fund gain of function research in the Wuhan lab.
If they did doesn't that really mean Trump is either more responsible for Covid or equally as responsible as China?
Trump allowed the ban to be lifted after the Obama whitehouse explicitly shut down this kind of research. Fauci just worked for Trump. It was ultimately on Trump, not an employee of his.
The other astonishing things is the sudden about face by the media. I'm glad they allowed themselves the liberty of looking at alternative origins. But... they were SO adamant and complicit in any discussion about alternative theories being shut down under the guise of conspiracy, Trumpism, anti-China, etc. (These are the same people who have no qualms about attributing anything to Russia even if evidence is thin, so it's clear there is hypocrisy involved).
Edit: It looks like Twitter is suspending the account of the Fauci email leaker(s). So the MoT is still on it.
China supported this in a psyop. Remember when they tried repeatedly to push the origin of the virus to Italy?
I'm ethnically Chinese, so I'm in contact with a lot of mainlanders. The brainwashing is very effective. Even if most mainlanders know that their state media is bogus, and that Xi is a dictator, they'll take it deeply personally when you say anything that threatens the whole China # 1 narrative. All they had to do was hire a few shitposters, feed a few media narratives and the US fights with itself over stuff like anti-china, racists etc, while the CCP takes over Hong Kong.
Or all the effort to not call it China Virus/Wuhan flu because that's racist and we don't name viruses after places anymore.
Virus variants named after places on the other hand are apparently perfectly fine. So we don't have the Chinese virus but we do have British, Brazilian and Indian variants.
Except it is TVs and newspapers that were lecturing us that it was racist to call it the chinese flu and that are now happily using the xx-variant designation. It is the obvious bad faith that I find appalling.
By the time it is deemed a variant, it has been sequenced number of times across the country and the health authorities always have a code or name to refer to this particular strain.
They had a code but not a name. The media can't refer to things by a confusing jumble of letters and numbers, they need a name, and if there's no official name then the media will create one themselves. Hence "India variant".
This is basic PR, e.g. when Heartbleed was disclosed it was given a name so that people could discuss it and attach meaning to it.
It's good, but it's not exactly easy to remember. Hence why the papers here in the UK now tend to say something like 'the Delta variant, which was first seen in India' - that's only marginally better than 'the Indian variant' tbh.
> It's good, but it's not exactly easy to remember [[.]
Saying "$origin virus" is _definitely_ easier to remember than - say - something like "Covid19".
Except that we were told that using "$origin" was racist, so we had to stop, and we had to use the non-easy-to-remember version.
Where we are the media has been happily talking about "the British variant" and "the Indian variant", but no-one seems to be calling _that_ racist. At least no-one who the media cares about.
Back in the early days Singapore very quickly created a fantastic web based information panel on the state of the Virus in the city. It's still running but they no longer use the original url:
http://wuhanvirus.sg
The Spanish Flu most probably originated in the US, not Spain. Spain just had a pretty free press and published much about it. Never heard about the Brazilian Flu and couldn't find out when and where this was supposed to be, so can't comment here.
The question wasn't historically if the place-of-origin names were accurate. The question was if they were historically common.
I think naming diseases after places is a bad practice we should probably do away with, but it certainly has precedent. Offhand, there's also the Marburg virus. My understanding is also that it was unusual to name the Ebola virus after the nearby river instead of the nearby town.
Isn't it similar to naming medical conditions after the people that discover them? After all, it's naming pathogens after the place where there were was adequate diagnostic expertise to identify them and in which there was sufficient scientific and press freedom to report on them. And geography is obviously important in the context of epidemics/pandemics. No country or locality should receive special treatment in this regard, but much of the MSM appears to have been bought or cowed into submission by the geopolitical influence of the CCP.
Does no one else remember the videos out of China with people laying dead in the streets, falling over as they walked, convulsing behind the steering wheels of cars? Who paid for all that acting, scenes, and filming and then have it presented as “news”?
CCP owns Hong Kong, that was over in 1997, the only surprising thing about HK is that China waited this long to make it better known. Now... The country of Taiwan on the other hand, it’s going to be a bit more tense there for some time.
EDIT: Added links from Jan, most videos have been removed but the articles and screenshots are there. The one I specifically wanted was removed from YouTube and I can’t find it, showed a guy being checked by a PPE marshmallow then nearly immediately going into spasms in his car.
EDIT2: To whoever might have been upset at my thoughts on Taiwan; I updated it with some italics for you.
> Does no one else remember the videos out of China with people laying dead in the streets, falling over as they walked, convulsing behind the steering wheels of cars?
Could you provide a link? I never saw such video on YouTube.
These videos [1] were published by a number of tabloids such as The Daily Mail [2] and The Sun [3]. I also remember that a very popular french TV show (Quotidien [4]) published them as well.
I saw the videos but they weren’t on YouTube. There were pastebins listing dozens of links to videos and photos BUT there was also zero proof it was connected to the virus or any timestamps, so who knows.
I saw these too, mostly on Twitter. I shorted Boeing based on them and made some nice money. My friends didn't believe me that this was looking real bad.
> didn't believe me that this was looking real bad
I think the problem was the world also didn't believe it. Perhaps if every other country had had the balls to just shut down travel in/out of China for a month or so back at the very start it might never have been so bad. I remember when the very first reports of a novel Coronavirus in Wuhan were making the news that it had the potential to be really bad, but also had some wishful thinking that it was probably just a storm in a teacup.
China should have shut down international flights. Instead they shut down internal travel and happily exported the virus to the world. They have lost the last bit of good will I had for them and I suspect this is a sentiment shared the world over. The WHO are also complicit.
I share your feeling and this concerns me most: China's leadership don't care anymore what the world think of China. China gave up the PR war because their next big move might be ugly.
Hang on a second, remember Trump was called racist and xenophobic for shutting down travel to China?
And how weird that Zuckerburg sent an email to Fauci about vaccine funding and offers of help exactly the same time Nancy’s Pelosi was literally saying come to Chinatown and hug and Asian person. How were they talking about a vaccine at that point?
There seems to have been a lot of public and private statements going on, and everyone wants to memoryhole it.
I remember when he shut down travel from China... On January 31st. There were ~2k new cases every day, and internal travel was heavily restricted.
Meanwhile, it took until March 11th to ban travel from Europe, which at the time was seeing ~10k new cases a day, with full freedom of movement from affected areas to unaffected ones.
The problem wasn't that he banned travel from China. The problem is that he didn't ban travel from Europe, until it got way worse than China.
You: The problem wasn't that he banned travel from China. The problem is that he didn't ban travel from Europe, until it got way worse than China.
Okay. Yes, you're a very pro-lockdown Seattlite with access to almost every comfort you could want without leaving your home. I believe that you were probably not mad at Trump for stopping flights, and wanted more to be stopped. That is within your character as read by your comments. I'm skeptical you understand what lockdowns actually meant for other people, but that's besides the point.
Me: [Democrats and the media called Trump racist for shutting down travel from China]
Okay, so we agree then? I don't think I said anything about Europe or if Trump Admin had gone far enough and when.
I could both have preferred a harder lockdown, and also be cognizant of the hypocrisy of banning travel from one country, but not from another region, when the other region is worse off by nearly every metric.
Was accusing him of racism for that particular thing on February 1st a bit early? Maybe.
Did history prove the critics right? Yeah. It did. It only took six weeks.
Addendum: I appreciate that you have gone to some length to research the context of my character and my previous posts, in order to best form a context in which to interpret my current ones. I suggest that perhaps Trump's critics on this subject may have done something similar. The man has given them a few years of material to work with by that point, after all.
There is a guy on r/China I think who archived a bunch of disturbing videos from last January /February. I think I saved them or links, but I'm away from my computer. Will update if I find it.
Well, this is genuinely irritating. I'm pretty sure I saved the post on reddit, saved a link, or saved some videos, but I cannot find anything. I must not have wanted to have a bunch of videos of people dying, so I think I might have just saved the post on reddit... Other reddit posts with a link to the archive had been deleted, so I should have taken more care.
It's a new acount which only posted this link - likely just some automated link spam detection. If you to to the comment's page (click the timestamp) there should be an option to vouch for it.
> Even if most mainlanders know that their state media is bogus, and that Xi is a dictator
I am an ethnic Chinese, I don't see this impression at all.
Disclaimer: this is quite normal, China is huge with 1.4b people, there are a lot of social bubbles. And the readers should read this comment and the parent of proving that. Not that this comment or the parent is true.
Well its turtles all the way isnt it, "And the readers should read this comment and the parent of proving that. Not that this comment or the parent is true.".
That's the weird think about propaganda. Even if you know it's propaganda, it works pretty well when it's heavily pushed. I come from a former communist country, and most people despised the communist party and risked their lives in a revolution. After the revolution, they began to parrot the same talking points the heard in the decades before. Even with all the information we have today, the talking points induced by communist propaganda remain alive.
This is the Iraq war situation all over again, by which I mean the same people (literally) are pushing the same angle through the same media outlets in the same way.
It was obvious wmd angle was bs from the start. The was never any concrete evidence for it. None. It just appeared out of thin air. Hearsay. It was also obvious that the lab leak hypothesis is worth investigating because there is active documented research on these viruses happening there. I don’t think they are comparable.
Most of the folks I recall from last year shutdown the thought that the virus was bio-engineered, not that I couldn't have come from the lab in Wuhan. Yes, people said there was no evidence of a lab leak (because there isn't) but few people were saying it was impossible.
People are conflating the virus being bio-engineered (pretty sure this did not happen) with it coming from the Wuhan lab (might have happened, need more evidence).
IMHO, we were in the middle of the problem. The important part to was to figure out how to get out of it. The investigation at that point would not be helpful as it may make cooperation more difficult. Even if the result is that is natural origin and it escaped from a Wet Market. It was China's responsibility and the whole world must make sure to force China to ban wet markets. But as I said before, it will come a time for that.
Suppressing the truth because you want to game the outcome is an extremely dangerous position to take. It never ends well for the little guy, who ends up getting neither truth nor the best outcome.
> It was China's responsibility and the whole world must make sure to force China to ban wet markets.
lol, have you ever been to a wet market? Are you sure you even know what they are? It’s a typical Asian stall market that they hose off every night.
I’ve been to “dry” markets that they’re still cutting the faces off hogs and slaughtering chickens next to fruit vendors. That’s not particularly better.
I’m not sure if you think “banning wet markets” is a thing, but it’s definitely not.
Essentially banning all slaughtering on place and relegating it to specialty businesses which would be no better regulated than any slaughterhouse anywhere.
Meaning, you'd change nothing besides forcing Chinese to use more transport and freezer cars.
> The other astonishing things is the sudden about face by the media. I'm glad they allowed themselves the liberty of looking at alternative origins. But... they were SO adamant and complicit in any discussion about alternative theories being shut down under the guise of conspiracy, Trumpism, anti-China, etc.
I agree. However, I can empathize with the media's position. Their business model has been under intense pressure for decades, so they're far too understaffed to do the kind of job we'd all like them to do; and viral disinformation/misinformation has become far more prevalent and influential in the last several years. Donald Trump also acted as a siren (in the Greek mythology sense) during his presidency to greatly exacerbate both difficulties. It's not surprising that, when they were faced with a crisis where they were arguably on one of the front lines, they were forced to take shortcuts out of expediency that were ultimately mistakes. After all the lab-leak theory is both 1) extremely plausible, 2) conspiracy-theory bait.
An alternative explanation is that the other COVID-19 narrative - that vaccines work, but those who are hesitant are essentially beyond convincing, and this is going to be both a long and boring years long slog to control globally and longer to find the origin - makes for exceedingly boring news.
On the other hand, talking about "If X is true, then..." and spending the rest of the section talking about the lab leak hypothesis as if it was true" is much more exciting.
Especially given there are now three "lab leak" camps - Bioweapon, GoF Gone Wrong, and Genuine Accidental Release of a Natural Virus all of whom claim they have the smoking gun for three mutually exclusive theories.
All over this thread, for one thing. Nate Silver and a number of other "data driven centrist" type commentators acting like there has been a massive shift in the weight of evidence. Dozens of "We're not saying this is true, but the next 10 pages will act entirely based on that supposition..." articles.
at the same time he was saying Xi handled the situation perfectly, had it completely under control, and that COVID would be gone from the US by April 2020
This is not at all what happened. This article has a good overview of the shifting narrative. The initial position was that it was crazy to even consider a lab leak.
Parts of the media listened to a bunch of people who all had good reason to dismiss theories that would point to them as in some way connected to research they knew was dangerous and this assessment was used for widespread censorship of contrary opinions.
The media is supposed to be a bit more skeptical of their sources than that. At this point I follow rules that look a lot like these:
Right, while ignoring their previous protests and their censorship of opposing voices who offered alternative theories from the beginning while theories were being developed and discussed. The CCP said "wet market" and that made it authoritative?
To me, the only really horrible thing is the way that anything other than the mainstream version of events was treated. I think there are different plausible theories, and I'm not surprised they have different adherents that are mostly all motivated by something other than a pure quest for the truth. That's life. If this was e.g. a civil or criminal trial, you'd see the same thing.
The only difference is, in a trial, nobody would try and brand the other side as a conspiracy theorist, racist, denier, anti-xer, whatever the most popular inflammatory term is. Nobody would try and block dissent from all mainstream communication forums.
To me, that's the only thing that's new, is the institutional suppression of any suggestions outside of an orthodox version. And it's honestly way scarier than the idea that government labs are doing biological research, or that diseases can jump from animals to people.
That’s another symptom of the same disease. People have an idea that “trust the experts” can replace all the messy, gross, and often wrong processes we have developed to deal with the fact nobody can be trusted. Trusting scientists involved in gain of function research will neutrally investigate the origins of the pandemic is one manifestation of that conceit. So is trusting fact checkers and review panels to decide what’s “misinformation” and what’s factual.
The marketplace of ideas is better than trusting gatekeepers of knowledge. That’s one of the huge lessons of the enlightenment that we have somehow forgot. We think “it’s different this time.”
There is a problem though. Without access to source material of any real journalist (not a reporter) you have no way of knowing whether whatever they're saying is true.
Marketplace of ideas is just measuring the average of views at best and fringe views may on occasion be valid, or not. It is also gameable by promoting "truthy" or plausible explanations with no data behind them.
In this case, it is irrelevant what the source of the pandemic was, securing the labs doing viral research to BSL-4 is prudent. The only issue faced is one of funding, which is vastly insufficient to maintain these facilities.
Or at least placement in remote locations with quarantine in place to prevent leaks.
Data only weakly suggests a composite and does not categorically exclude natural origin. Leak of a natural or modified virus would be just as bad. Same if it's from consumption of rare animals sent from remote places or research on the samples from them. In either case, only different degree of luck is required for a pandemic.
"In this case, it is irrelevant what the source of the pandemic was ..."
...
"Leak of a natural or modified virus would be just as bad. Same if it's from consumption of rare animals sent from remote places or research on the samples from them."
I disagree.
I actually think "lab leak" is better and more optimistic news than a natural outgrowth or animal consumption, etc.
Lab leaks are a problem we can fix - probably without too much trouble. They don't represent a fundamental problem with accelerating globalization, urbanization and travel.
On the other hand, a natural origin or a human-animal crossing due to animal husbandry in or near urban areas ... or "bush meat" consumption ... those vectors could indicate that globalization, urbanization and travel have crossed a threshold where events such as this become likely and will recur regularly.
Given the relatively recent emergence of SARS and MERS, I have been fearful that our very connected, urbanized and globalized world (which I enjoy greatly) is at risk.
The world of easy travel may be doomed either way.
If it's a lab leak? The rhetoric may shift to blaming China and trying to punish them (especially in more conservative circles). New Cold War, more Iron Curtains, less freedom of travel.
If it's just globalization making things risky? Then maybe we can't let people fly from Wuhan to Bergamo for public health reasons. Less freedom of travel, for an entirely different reason.
This "Marketplace of ideas" is run by English speakers, in our case, and completely ignores the idea that we or our allies may have been involved in a biological attack on China. Very convenient, in my opinion, since history says NATO countries are the most likely to deploy biological weapons.
It's very unlikely anyone was doing any research on directly using SARS-CoV2 as a weapon. It kills or maims too low a percentage of people to have tactical value, and it's too difficult to contain. (The most effective weapons severely handicap their victims and allow them to live into old age, taking fighters off the field, and turning them into long-term liabilities and living reminders for anyone who might think about fighting you in the future.)
I'm not saying SARS-CoV2 leaked from a lab, but if it did, it was probably more of a basic science/weapons background research rather than an engineered weapon itself. You might want to add some SARS-CoV2 characteristics to a bioweapon, but you'd want to start out with something with greater morbidity and more easily quarantined as a starting point for a weapon.
North Carolina lab was shipping covid around the world. Wouldn't be surprised if the lab in Fort Detrick was doing similar research.
You seem to assume a bio-weapon has to cause mass death to be effective and meet the deployer's objectives...you are wrong in the case of economic attacks.
> You seem to assume a bio-weapon has to cause mass death to be effective and meet the deployer's objectives...you are wrong in the case of economic attacks.
> The most effective weapons severely handicap their victims and allow them to live into old age, taking fighters off the field, and turning them into long-term liabilities and living reminders for anyone who might think about fighting you in the future
I do not believe that covid was intentionally designed and released as a bio weapon.
The number of people with long COVID symptoms is a tiny tiny fraction of those exposed to SARS-CoV2. If it's a designed feature of SARS-CoV2, it's very poorly implemented, unless it's actually very specifically targeting some as-of-yet unidentified demographic. (This seems very unlikely.)
Why should I believe this is any more real than "chronic lyme"? There are a whole lot of hypochondriacs out there; something proponents of "long covid" and "chronic lyme" never seem willing to acknowledge.
The groups promoting both of these organize and operate the same way, and make similar claims. Huge lists of nonspecific generic symptoms and facebook groups full of uncritical believers mutually reinforcing each others' beliefs (parallel to the well understood phenomena of "support groups" which promote eating disorders and create social feedback loops for reinforcing/worsening body dismorphia.)
>I do not believe that covid was intentionally designed and released as a bio weapon.
History says you are wrong to discount NATO countries (I include Japan as an unofficial member) using bio-weapons. They have a long history of deploying and supporting deployments of these kinds of weapons against military and economic foes.
Ridiculous to think that it was deployed by NATO because NATO countries were affected by it just as much if not more. That would be the most idiotic weapon used ever. It literally makes no sense.
Sorry, but the idea of NATO deploying the most idiotic weapon imaginable on the entire world vs. the idea of an accidental escape from a lab are NOT equally plausible at all. In fact, this entire article goes thru evidence that it was not NATO because of all of the internal investigations and such.
What you are suggesting is tin foil hat conspiracy theory crazy.
I disagree, NATO countries (including Japan) have benefited from sabotaging/disrupting Chinese trade for more than a century. They know what they stand to gain by making China the "virus spreader/origin" of the world.
The Fauci emails in March 2020 that described the exact components of the virus with subject 'coronavirus bio-weapon production method' hints at the actual purpose of this release.
> The Fauci emails in March 2020 that described the exact components of the virus ...
which is a complete lie. The email does NOT describe the components of the virus at all. You clearly are lacking in any sort of biochemical background as this is obvious. Do you actually fact check anything you are posting?
>The marketplace of ideas is better than trusting gatekeepers of knowledge.
That's such a simplification of the real situation that it's harmful to apply as an axiom.
There are many levels of the marketplace of ideas. Ideally, the gatekeepers of knowledge also create a marketplace of ideas so that expert opinion is varied and shifts as new information come in. This is in inline with what we're seeing here.
The marketplace of ideas with no experts to guide discussion often results in crank ideas that seem plausible but heavily influenced by our biases bubbling to the top. That's how things like the Anti-vax movement gained a foothold.
No one argued that it should be applied as an axiom. You're responding to an argument that wasn't made.
Also, the "gatekeepers of knowledge" have a mostly.....negative past when you look at the sum of recorded human history. Are you arguing that humans today are just way better and far more trustworthy than the rest of history?
>Also, the "gatekeepers of knowledge" have a mostly.....negative past when you look at the sum of recorded human history.
The gatekeepers of knowledge have a past that reflects those that are in power. People that challenge them can be on the right or wrong side of history. Just because they were wrong in the middle ages doesn't mean the gatekeepers of today are wrong. If the gatekeepers can and do apply scientific principles, then logically it is a self-correcting system. This is in theory what we see more or less today (or should at least).
Furthermore, the gatekeeper system is not mutually exclusive to the marketplace of ideas model, as the latter operates on many levels. However, by bringing down the gatekeeper model, it is harder to enforce discussion based on scientific principles, merit and sound arguments. This is the exact reason why we have moderation in almost all forums, and the ones that don't end up as cesspits of people shouting crazy ideas at each other and hence counterproductive places.
Giving everyone a voice doesn't necessarily mean we are bound to give everyone a equal voice in everything. Any weighing is in essence introducing a gatekeeper.
Let's be sure to use the same definition of "gatekeepers" for the past and present knowledge. What I see is, people look at the past examples of politicians and religious leaders telling people what to believe, and try to use those to dismiss opinions of present-day domain specialists. Which is a nasty case of motte-and-bailey fallacy.
I'm saying that I think past and present day "specialists" are not as different as we are inclined to think, it's the opposite of a motte-and-bailey position.
Perhaps it would've been easier for the scientists involved in gain of function research to remain unbiased, if they weren't fully aware that anything but total denial will make the world think they're responsible - as a profession and individuals - without as much as shred of evidence to support it.
> People have an idea that “trust the experts” can replace all the messy, gross, and often wrong processes we have developed to deal with the fact nobody can be trusted.
I observe the opposite. People seem to have the idea that experts are always in on it, or out to get something out of a crisis, and thus should be ignored. The alternative is, of course, to listen to whatever uninformed opinion piece confirms one's worldview the most. I think we'd all do better with trusting the experts more - they may be wrong, but they're also in the best position to discover and correct that. They may be also right. Most people - including journalists, pundits and bloggers - are not capable of telling whether experts are right or wrong. So trusting them seems like a better bet than trusting random opinions (unless yourself you have enough familiarity with the field, at which point your own interpretation may be valid too).
> To me, that's the only thing that's new, is the institutional suppression of any suggestions outside of an orthodox version.
This isn't new at all. It's been a staple of many human cultures throughout history, including US culture for much of the 20th century (and, I would say, all of the 21st century). I think what's probably a new experience for most of us is just how all-encompassing the pandemic has been as an issue of discussion.
The problem with this is that the American public discourse is broken.
The Republicans (I can't tapdance around the direct call out with weasel words) and the right-wing media have lost all credibility because they often DO behave as racist, selfish, inconsistent conspiracy theorists. On those rare occasions when they are right or properly play the role of opposition rather than pushing an absurd agenda alongside their media manipulation, their prior behavior causes an automatic immune-like response. You can't trust anything they say or their intentions, and they are experts at the Gish Gallop (constantly coming up with new bs you have to respond to, when response takes far more effort) - why would this particular action be any different? Also, this seems more of a case of "a broken clock is right twice a day" than an indication that the right should be taken seriously as a general rule.
Non-credible actors that are known to be untrustworthy should never be the people who put forth any hypotheses if you want them to be taken seriously. The American far-right politicians/media and 4chan are not credible actors, and any idea associated with them will face an uphill battle.
Unfortunate, the "left media" also faces massive credibility problems due to their willingness to uncritically publish anything they could spin as negative for Trump, regardless of veracity or verifiability.
Partisanship is a disease that is destroying our democracy.
Part of it was also probably that Trump was known for bucking expectations when those expectations where based on "surely this is ludicrous to consider true", to the point that lots of things that would have previously been held back for more verification were allowed forward because things that used to stretch credulity no longer did.
That's not an excuse, just what I think is a partial explanation.
What is even more shocking is that the mass media and big tech have done everything to keep this covered. Most of the revelations are nothing new if you read alternative news sources where true journalism still exists. Big tech and mass media are now more like China state television, they decide what and how to tell you something based on what they want you to believe.
The greatest threat of our times is not the Corona pandemic or lies about it's origins. It is the loss of true journalism from mass media and free speech on social media. Mass media journalism and big tech are so terribly corrupted that due to that billions of people around the world are being fooled all the time. They are lying to you "for the greater good".
When you start reading alternative news sources you'll find out soon enough something is very wrong. From all over the world renowned scientists, doctors, politicians, lawyers, noble price winners, and many more, are being totally silenced and criminalized. It's truly horrifying.
Isn’t it mass media covering this now? It seems like this is a credit to mass media in that it moves as data moves. I always feel this is a highly underrated attribute in organizations and individuals.
How exactly are alternative news sources more trustworthy than mainstream news sources? Your reasoning is that "mainstream" (I truly hate this moniker) news serves to present biased information, how do alternative non-vetted sources avoid this pitfall?
> From all over the world renowned scientists, doctors, politicians, lawyers, noble price winners, and many more, are being totally silenced and criminalized.
This sentence literally tells me nothing. Which specific people are being "criminalized" and by whom?
The reason that big tech is corrupted is mass media and activists (here I mean anyone who pushes for their company to do good things rather than just neutral thinhs) within the big tech organization.
The (non-rightwing) news orgs had constantly been going on about the evils of Trump and racism and fake news and virus misinformation how very bad it all was, the activists were convinced (because most people don't know how the "news" sausage is made and how it misleads) and pushed to stamp out what they saw as dangerous behaviour. The solution is probably to stop trusting the news media and bring back freedom of communication.
This New York mag article [1] published eons ago already made it clear to any sane biologist that all you mentioned are important things to consider. However the issue is sane biologists or scientists in general are actually in extreme short supply, the vast majority are often under the delusion that they “understand the system” better than they actually do. They also are often knowingly and unknowingly more interested in persevering their personal agenda (for eg. Gain of function research in the general sense in this case) than the overall good of humanity or scientific rigor.
Take Fauci for example, is he a good scientist? Yes. But it’s also clear that he too subconsciously has pushed for the method of approaching pandemics that coincidentally he was good at, and now we are left with this mess. I doubt him or anyone in between is going to acknowledge it even if they realize it. I was downvoted here to oblivion for pointing this out weeks back but doesn’t matter. I threw away a decade of my life’s experience because I didn’t believe in this cult of an academic system, downvotes don’t hurt nearly as much.
> Was there some other, better, established method?
We may learn from Taiwan*.
Quote: "Extensive public health infrastructure established in Taiwan pre-COVID-19 enabled a fast coordinated response, particularly in the domains of early screening, effective methods for isolation/quarantine, digital technologies for identifying potential cases and mass mask use."
It's really obvious at this point that Taiwan got lucky and that the geographical luck of not being close to Europe or having lots of visitors from there helped a lot. The moment Covid-19 actually got a foothold in the country they really started struggling and their testing for it collapsed under the load - and this was in May 2021, when we knew a lot more about Covid and tests for it were a commodity item produced in massive numbers. Western Europe and the USA hit this point in March 2020 with much less information available about the disease, no treatment options, and far less production capacity for Covid tests. (Probably due to all the people travelling there from a country that was reporting zero cases whilst a substantial proportion of their population was infected. Something seems to have gone seriously wrong in Italy that's been almost entirely ignored by the media, maybe because it's lead by the kind of boring technocrat they like.)
Unfortunately, all the media reporting on which countries have succeeded or failed and why seems to have been incredibly inaccurate and blatantly partisan.
In the US at least, given our culture of individualism/“freedom” we would never be able to replicate Taiwan. Isolation/Quarantine seem to have dubious political and legal support. Mask wearing is also seen negatively.
I meant Fauci at al.’s approach of proactively looking for the next pandemic via sample collection and lab engineering of new variants which predates the trump administration. By all appearances Faucis performance during the pandemic is nothing to be questioned. These are different topics.
I read Biohazard by Ken Alibek years ago and the current situation reminds me of one of the anecdotes in it.
He was a Soviet scientist in charge of creating bio-weapons- the book starts with him planning world war 3.
In one of the anecdotes talks about a lab leak they had, caused by someone not replacing a filter and the the lab accidentally pumping out anthrax all day and killing a lot of people.
The government blamed it on local meat sellers at the market and executed them all. Blaming the local market seems to be part of the bio-weapon-denial playbook.
"This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life."
Dare we inquire how long you have lived. :)
But seriously, I am not sure that the scientific community, nor all national governments, have reached a clear consensus on gain of function research. It is still a developing issue. Welcome to be corrected on that. Such research could potentially help to prevent pandemics as well as accidentally start them. The idea that scientists in the US might have been working with scientists in other countries, including China, on GoF research is not shocking to me. Here is a paper from 2016 on the ethics of GoF research:
Perhaps the old saying about mistakingly attributing malice to incompetence applies here.
As for the cover-up, it is difficult to imagine that David Baltimore is wrong. I used a textbook he co-authored when I was in school; he is one of the pioneers of the biotech industry. It seems unlikely this was not created in a lab. Then again, it is probably easier to prove someone in a lab made a mistake than to prove soemthing exists in nature.
Gain of function research outside of hyper-secure settings is, frankly, idiotic. It’s massively more dangerous than criticality experiments because of the potential for exponential spread.
From the beginning gain of function research has been done at levels as low as BSL-2, and this article claims the Bat Lady said that all their coronavirus research prior to the pandemic was done at BSL-2 or -3 levels. The Wuhan Institute of Virology's BSL-4 lab would likely be booked up for research known to be very dangerous, and as you go up in levels it's more and more inconvenient to get anything done from the physical protections (there are also supposed to be biological ones).
Plus it appears that the lab was poorly run: She noted that a September 2019 paper in an academic journal by the director of the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory, Yuan Zhiming, had outlined safety deficiencies in China’s labs. “Maintenance cost is generally neglected,” he had written. “Some BSL-3 laboratories run on extremely minimal operational costs or in some cases none at all.”
Even if it wasn’t created or modified in a lab, it’s not hard to imagine it was known and known to be dangerous. The conditions described about how these researchers were sifting through bat guano are quite poor to say the least. From the start of the pandemic I sort of shrugged about how it started. I thought denying a lab leak so early on was quite odd, or at least no one should trust that. For simple reasons: governments lie and do dangerous things, harming its citizens and other global citizens in the process. Then they classify it all and lie about it. There are so many examples of this, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. See: Rocky Mountain flats plutonium production, etc.
We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. Scientists are human and have human motivations and flaws. They are political, they cover their ass, they suffer from results oriented thinking.
“Science” should be trusted within its domain, but it’s not a replacement for all of the processes western society has developed to address the reality that nobody can be trusted with power. Everyone needs to perform their roles. Reporters still need to be skeptical and question scientists’ motivations and investigate the story. And politicians still need to be in charge of translating scientists’ judgments as to various scenarios and probabilities into the political decisions of figuring out what to do accounting for the entire universe of economic and social considerations that are within their ambit.
> "Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity."
The interesting part of this - and I'm curious about the personal experience of others here - is that the scientists I know have been the strongest questioners of the wet market theory from the get-go.
I don't think anything resembling scientific unanimity ever emerged, or even appeared to emerge.
Heck, here on HN we've been talking about this consistently at least since the PNAS letter, and probably since the beginning of the pandemic.
And, for this thoughtful observation, you get... DOWNVOTES. These Covid origins comment threads are so brutal!
But yeah, I agree. I’m just a lowly PhD student (an older one, though) but it’s pretty clear from my limited experience that “scientific consensus” is a PR term that bears little relationship to how scientists perform their work and engage with their colleagues.
To be fair they (on This Week in Virology) said they think it's unlikely that it leaked, but urge anyone with actual evidence to come forward. Their guest on that episode also said that, while RaTG13 is indeed a SARS-like coronavirus, the nucleotide sequence of the genome is only 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2. The guest said it's not similar enough to do gain of function research with. Bats with other similar SARS-like coronaviruses appear in (at least) Japan, Thailand, and Cambodia, and migratory bats have a range of several thousand kilometers.
I don't think lab workers getting sick is really a useful data point. People get sick all the time. Could have very easily been seasonal flu or whatever.
It also seems The Lancet letter doesn't actual address the question of lab leak. Only that it wasn't engineered. That was a pretty hot conspiracy theory at the time and one that remains far fetched. They didn't positively say it couldn't be a naturally occurring virus that leaked. I don't know enough to comment on gain of function leaves any hallmarks but I'm guessing it doesn't since it tries to replicate evolution.
I quoted this bit in another comment, but Steven Quay (interviewed by the US gov as mentioned in tfa)
The “engineered” comments refer to common amino acid sequences from lab practices, they leave a signature because ordinary biology is more random.
The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that arerarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair. For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.
I grant it's totally possible for this to occur naturally, at random (thank you, genetics) -- but when we haven't found any intermediate host animals and there's a lab at the outbreak location that:
Developed chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses
Conducted ’dangerous’ gain-of-function research on the SARS-CoV-1 virus, some of which had been funded by the US government (Asia Times)
Established a 96.2% match with SARS-CoV-2 and a virus they sampled from a cave over 1,000 miles away from Wuhan
Injected live piglets with bat coronaviruses as recently as July 2019
Published a paper on a close descendant of SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, in November 2019
Was hiring researchers to work on bat coronaviruses as recently as November 2019
You have to imagine the very real possibility that it was just an accident.
This kind of pattern hunting easily steps into a logical fallacy where meaning is derived from noise. We also need to know how many other viruses contain codons not typically found in other viruses. If in fact every virus has one or two unique traits, then we could likewise claim that all viruses are engineered.
Not saying that is the case, just want to caution against the perils of searching for patterns in large data sets like this.
Lab workers getting sick should be a starting point to begin analyzing archived blood samples for instance. Also, you don't usually visit a hospital for seasonal flu. And three people from the same lab at the same time suggests a wider outbreak in the lab. Even if it were the seasonal flu, it would have warranted a wider investigation, given what that lab was working on.
> you don't usually visit a hospital for seasonal flu
there's numerous posts in previous discussions saying that in China people do, because they don't typically have a GP and so go to the hospital for any acute ailment.
I think lab workers researching viruses are some of the less likely to do so, unless they're in a really bad state. If they were in a very bad state, it's less likely that it was the seasonal flu.
It's so far fetched to think a lab with known safety issues could be responsible for leaking a virus. We all know that humans are infallible and never make mistakes and accidents rarely occur in place with poor safety standards. Its just so crazy....
Thanks for correction, I think that's still an alarming rate for a specific mission to fetch samples of Bat feces for virology research. That should be a clear, undisputably abnormal indication of something wrong.
" When Trump himself floated the lab-leak hypothesis last April, his divisiveness and lack of credibility made things more, not less, challenging for those seeking the truth."
Maybe this is naive, but what the issue here? These people are alive, the documents exist, the physical locations are accessible. This isn’t archeology.
Couldn’t we ... just... check? Like maybe the UN or the group of 7 or something similar?
You shut down the globe for a year, seems like it’d be worth running down all the Rabit holes.
Hollywood actor Cena just begged in Mandarin for forgiveness after mentioning Taiwan is a country (which it is). Local Amsterdam politicians are not allowed to go on the photo with Taiwanese politicians etc.
The Communist Party is overly controlling and will not allow anything that will challenge their vision.
While Europe and the US were busy with their internal quarrels the last decades, China has been making moves.
China has blocked any and all independent access to the site, the only group allowed access was the WHO research group that somehow happened to include the most rabid opponents of the lab leak theory (Peter Daszak, mentioned in the article).
In all honesty, why would they be? Without them addressing anything, the west, particularly the U.S., has had their pitchforks out and ready since day one. With our idiotic president calling it the Chinese virus from the start, why in the hell would China want to be upfront about what they knew about the origin if it indeed was a lab leak? I wouldn’t. That’s all on the assumption that they themselves even knew or know. If our president had been less like a child, it would have been a better environment to get to the truth.
You and others act like this is some elementary school incident where honesty is the best policy. But with politics involved and the already prevalent mass hysteria and propaganda going on everywhere, it makes sense, on a realist and not idealist level, why one would not be forthright.
There’s also the idea that the U.S. was terribly ill-prepared and ill-equipped to handle the virus. The U.S. needs to be prepared for such viruses, no matter their origin, because zoonotic crossover events will remain a possibility with even higher likelihood going forward. My worry is if the virus origin is or is even believed to be of lab-based origin, that will weaken the prerogative and narrative to be prepared for zoonotic diseases. Because then, it was something “done to us” rather than a natural event we should be prepared for, an event which remains a big possibility even if this particular virus was of lab origin.
What kind of an insane statement is that? Because that's the right thing to do when it comes to something like a GLOBAL pandemic.
>Without them addressing anything, the west, particularly the U.S., has had their pitchforks out and ready since day one.
Is that a rationalization for not being forthright about the pandemic and origins of the virus (regardless if it was accidentally from a lab, or came directly from nature)?
And China is not some timid wallflower. Stop pretending like they are. They are a global superpower that really fucked up here in multitude of ways and if they get some criticism then so be it - China is a big boy, it can take it.
>With our idiotic president calling it the Chinese virus from the start, why in the hell would China want to be upfront about what they knew about the origin if it indeed was a lab leak? I wouldn’t.
You would lie to the global public because you don't like Trump? How could you say something like that and even try to justify it. I'm flabbergasted. It's such an immoral statement that I'm surprised anyone would seriously make.
Trump said many dumb things but there's a lot of crazy shit that came out of very high-level Chinese officials as well, such as that the virus came from America. But that's all immaterial. They have a responsibility to be transparent.
>You and others act like this is some elementary school incident where honesty is the best policy.
It's a GLOBAL pandemic. It affects everyone. Transparency is critical! Fault the west for many things, but these kinds of things tend to have full transparency around them. Communist authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, can never find a way to be truthful. The truth always seems to be needed to be dragged out of them. This is shaping up as another Chernobyl moment for another authoritarian communist regime. Ultimately, it's everyone else that pays the price.
>To be frank, your responses show a naive understanding of how the world works and human behavior.
When it comes to pandemics, this is how the world health authorities have done things. There very much was a lot of world collaboration and transparency around epidemics and pandemics. So don't gaslight and say that this is somehow 'naïve'. That's how everybody did things, until China decided it would be embarrassing to them. Hell they were silencing and incarcerating doctors and frontline workers when they suggested there is some sort of a new virus out there as late as January 2020.
This is the modus operandi of communist and authoritarian regimes.
>My comment is simply an observation of the way things are, not the way I would want them to be.
You literally said that had Trump insulted your honor you would have lied and obfuscated the same way that China did. Here's your statement (emphasis mine): "our idiotic president calling it the Chinese virus from the start, why in the hell would China want to be upfront about what they knew about the origin if it indeed was a lab leak? I WOULDN'T."
How is that not an immoral statement.
>If you believe that, then I don't know what to say.
I'm under no illusions when it comes to the general idea that nations are always truthful - they aren't. I didn't make a general statement. I scoped it to transparency around epidemics and pandemics. And yes, the vast majority of nations (not just the West) are very transparent on this point. China is a major outlier here.
“I wouldn’t” is taken within the context as if I was a nation governing people in the current global environment. It’s a hypothetical because I’m not a nation state. Would I actually if I was? Who knows? I put it there to basically say I can see why all this has happened the way it has. I thought all of this context was obvious.
And what you say I said about Trump is not at all what I said. You say I literally said something that I literally did not. My point is that he created a certain environment, a highly politicized and biased environment, not conducive in any way to discovering truths about the virus and damn near everything else. He was a catalyst for non-truths and has been his entire life. It has nothing to do with honor or insults.
This is just about what I would expect from governments to behave (both US and China).
This kind of bullshit where people are more concerned about their departments future funding and prospects, and try to bury "unfortunate" incidents is happening in all the governments(and even inside larger companies) I am familiar with. It's a lot easier to bury if you can prevent investigation, than bury results of such investigation. As shocking as might sound this is pretty much businesses as usual in bureaucracy .
For me that doesn't even comes close to Snowden revelations (even though, again we suspected some of it).
IMO the most upsetting part about this is people like Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak being repeatedly caught in outright lies and coverup behavior. These people seemed to have the best of intentions at some point in their career but they are doing irreparable damage to their field and science in general with the public lies and coverups.
One example is Shi Zhengli publicly stating the the 6 miners that died after shoveling bat guano in a mine in Mojiang died from a fungal infection while the DRASTIC group was able to dig up two papers that specifically stated the miners died from a SARS-like virus. They also dug up evidence that Zhengli's lab visited the mine multiple times since 2012 to take samples after the miners died and retrieved as many as 9 unique Coronaviruses similar to SARS-Cov-2 from the mine.
It's a tremendously good bit of reporting, especially for a generalist outfit like Newsweek. I didn't notice anything wrong in it or the science of the Vanity Fair article this topic is based on, or contradictions between the two articles.
The DRASTIC team's story is an amazing example of "open source intelligence," for that primarily focused on an anonymous Indian who goes by the handle The Seeker who dug up a bunch of papers and theses for the data scientists and others on the team to assemble into a picture that is more and more convincing about the lab leak hypothesis, although having wet lab experience I'm predisposed to suspect this over the zoonotic transfer hypothesis.
But speaking of predispositions, it's exactly the sort of thing the US intelligence community could have done if most of the government and world scientific establishment hadn't already decided on the zoonotic transfer narrative, which is detailed in the Vanity Fair article.
Also an example of how Silicon Valley censorship can backfire, his first posting on this to Reddit got his account permanently banned, which suggested to him he was on to something. On the other hand Twitter didn't have any problems mentioned in either of these articles hosting the discussions of the DRASTIC team.
"One obvious demand would have been access to the WIV’s database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, which had been taken offline. At an event convened by a London organization on March 10, Daszak was asked whether the group had made such a request. He said there was no need: Shi Zhengli had stated that the WIV took down the database due to hacking attempts during the pandemic. “Absolutely reasonable,” Daszak said. “And we did not ask to see the data…. As you know, a lot of this work has been conducted with EcoHealth Alliance…. We do basically know what’s in those databases. There is no evidence of viruses closer to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13 in those databases, simple as that.”"
What did she mean when she said that the database is offline? It's not like the data would be gone if the service is not running?
Not really clear why it hasn't been released, it would be technically trivial and save a lot of speculation.
There is a bit of a pattern of DRASTIC researchers finding interesting tidbits in various science portals, followed by those portals going offline or being restricted.
>"Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories."
This is important for another reason that may not be immediately obvious. The WIV (BSL-4) is ~8 miles from the Wuhan Market. There's a BSL-2 lab (the CCDC) that's literally just a few hundred yards from the market. If the lab leak theory is correct, it may have escaped from the latter rather than the former. Or a visiting worker may have inadvertently transmitted it from the former to the latter before it escaped from the latter.
The calculation is simple and could have been made in early 2020. What's the joint probability of occurrence given everything you know about the origins of SARS-CoV-2?
There is _very_ high probability that this is just a human error.
I don’t dispute it is one point of suspicion, but Wuhan is also one of the 10 biggest cities in China. It isn’t a surprise the first US outbreak was in the biggest city. The first cases could have been anywhere.
If there were more evidence that it was lab made then the location would be another point, not to me without further evidence it doesn’t mean all that much.
And there have been 2 emerging coronavirus outbreaks in the last 20 years due to natural origin. Why is it so hard to believe there would be another one.
> I don’t dispute it is one point of suspicion, but Wuhan is also one of the 10 biggest cities in China. It isn’t a surprise the first US outbreak was in the biggest city. The first cases could have been anywhere.
Is that really so for animal-borne viruses though? I thought they came from place with lots of animals, hence the focus on the market. If it just showed up on some random high-rise employee downtown that would be hard to believe.
And after it starts, of course a highly-infectious virus shows up at densely populated places quickly. But for the same reason, I would also think it's hard for the first cases to travel to dense areas and spread the disease there without leaving a trail of cases along the trip. Ultimately they should point back to the animals they came from and testing can confirm it. Or at least rule various places out, if the govt was accommodating.
Plus wasn't the first US case somewhere in Washington state.
The first death in the U.S. was only discovered at least a month later, and this is long after we knew about the existence of the virus.
In China before there was a huge outbreak there is absolutely no way you can expect a small number of cases of a virus that nobody knows exists to be picked up. By the time of the big Wuhan outbreak there are already different variations in the virus. It had been in some population for a while before it broke out.
So the first outbreak in NYC is analogous to Wuhan. It could have started in Wuhan or it could have started anywhere else and then Wuhan had the right combination of factors for the outbreak to surge. We don’t know for sure.
We do know for sure that it started in Wuhan. The viral phylogeny is extremely clear. We have hundreds of thousands of viral sequences that describe a tree that is rooted in Wuhan around October 2019. That's incontrovertible. No evidence has arisen to contradict this despite an extensive search by thousands of scientists.
>There are two subclusters of A which are distinguished by the synonymous mutation T29095C. In the T-allele subcluster, four Chinese individuals (from the southern coastal Chinese province of Guangdong)
This reply only makes sense if covid-19 popped up at a random spot in Wuhan....and not literally right next to their coronavirus research lab.
It's not hard to believe that there could be another spillover event, and I don't have any certainty where covid-19 came from, but you're unfairly downplaying the level of circumferential evidence that does exist. There has been a significant effort against evaluating the lab-leak as a reasonable hypothesis (I say that in the scientific meaning of the word), and that effort has significantly damaged the reputation of scientific institutions around the world, and for good reason.
Yes I have read more than the articles, which is why I’m correctly saying it was unlikely to come from the lab.
I’m not saying it is impossible, just unlikely. And automatically degrading the opinions of experts who have detailed their arguments because you think they are biased is not proof of anything either.
Other pertinent data point, how many epidemics have been positively traced to a lab leak since virology has been widely studied? The Wuhan lab was founded in the 1950s. You can say the likelihood that a virus would one day escape from one of these labs is pretty high. The likelihood that a given virus would be from a lab is very low. All of which brings us back to where we were at the start. It's plausible and possible but not really likely.
A 2007 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (an important virus affecting cattle) was traced to effluent released from a laboratory in the UK [1].
A small number of SARS infections in 2003-2004 are also believed to have been due to laboratory accidents [2].
This article [3] gives an introduction to the subject from the perspective of a journalist who has reported on laboratory safety in the US.
This article [4] published in Nature in January 2012 by members of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity reviews the risk of a release of an engineered form of H5N1 influenza. It includes some alarming remarks such as:
'We found the potential risk of public harm to be of unusually high magnitude' and;
'A pandemic, or the deliberate release of a transmissible highly pathogenic influenza A/H5N1 virus, would be an unimaginable catastrophe for which the world is currently inadequately prepared'
The authors take the possibility of release of a dangerous pathogen from a laboratory seriously, though the article is prospective rather than retrospective.
For an epidemic to occur, you need not just a lab leak, but a population sufficiently naive to the pathogen. H1N1 was displaced by H2N2 in the late 1950's pandemic, which in turn was displaced by H3N2 in the late 1960s pandemic. Thus it hit the cohort of people aged 25-6 or less who'd never been exposed to H1N1.
That article doesn't support your argument. It just says it was suspected.
I found an NIH article that says the likelier origin is that the 1950 virus was used to produce a weakened live virus vaccine candidate that lead to the reemergence and not an accidental leak. It also concludes by saying there has never been a likely lab leak epidemic ever observed.
That article's definition of "lab accident" seems narrow and legalistic to me. In either case, the virus spent 1950-1977 in a lab freezer. It ended up in the wild, with ~700k people dead. The only question is whether it escaped in an infected researcher (or in infectious lab waste, or in whatever else you'd consider a proper lab accident) vs. in that failed vaccine candidate.
Those details do inform some details of the correct policy response. For example, they determine the relative importance of better PPE at the bench vs. better QA before allowing the vaccine to leave the lab. They don't change the overall question of whether scientific research has ever caused a pandemic, though. That causality is what matters, not whether the sign on the door said "lab" vs. "experimental vaccine nurse".
For example, if the pandemic originated from a WIV researcher who became infected in the field (during their many expeditions to remote bat caves that no other humans would routinely enter), was that a "lab leak"? Literally no, since they weren't in the lab. The causality would still be the same, though--if not for that scientific research, that virus would likely have never left the cave.
To avoid such confusion, it's probably better to say something like "unnatural origin", or "origin arising from scientific research". A much bigger mouthful than "lab leak", though.
I'd add that the article does not state that there have never been cases of accidental releases of pathogens from laboratories, only that such accidents had likely not led to a 'global epidemic' as of the date the article was written (2015).
The article's abstract opens with the statement 'The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event'.
These labs are in major cities. Epidemics are likely to be detected in Major cities. The chance of an outbreak being near a research lab aren't as long as you seem to think.
As pointed out in the article, there were exactly 3 cities in the world working on gain-of-function research related to bat-originated coronaviruses. Galveston, Texas, Chapel Hill N.C, and Wuhan. It’s way more narrow than just being near a biological laboratory.
That's not what the person you are responding to said at all. Please stop dishonestly conflating the two theories. You can believe that a coronavirus accidentally leaked from a lab that was studying coronaviruses without believing that it was intentional, or that the disease was a bioweapon.
Honestly, this is not a difficult distinction to understand. You have to wonder why people are so eager to conflate the two.
If it's nothing to do with an engineered virus conspiracy then there's no reason to constrain ourselves to the 1 or 2 labs doing that kind of research. If we don't have that constraint then appearing in Wuhan is much less coincidental.
Listen, if the virus originated in a city that simply had an infectious disease lab, that’s one thing.
For a virus to originate in a city with one of three labs in the entire world conducting heavy-duty researching involving the exact kind of virus that unleashed this pandemic, with the stated intention of working with said viruses to make them more infectious (NOT for the purposes of making a bioweapon) that deserves special consideration. Especially with the fact that the animal the virus is thought to come from ranges 1500 miles south from said city, and started during a time that animal is typically hybernating.
You do know that there's genetic evidence that seems to point to an origin 600 miles from Wuhan?
> Of 23 samples that came from Wuhan, only three were type A, the rest were type B, a version two mutations from A. But in other parts of China, Forster says, initially A was the predominant strain. For instance, of nine genome samples in Guangdong, some 600 miles south of Wuhan, five were A types. [0]
> with the stated intention of working with said viruses to make them more infectious (NOT for the purposes of making a bioweapon)
Why is this relevant unless you're claiming that the virus that we've observed has been engineered in that way? Otherwise it seems like the chance of a coronavirus outbreak caused by poor handling in a lab is the same for any lab that's studying them for any purpose.
Good point, now that you mention it, it does now seem possible that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of some sort of engineering tests. Not saying it’s a certainty, but it’s surely at least a plausible consideration.
Why? Im not passing judgement on whether it was engineered as a bioweapon. But there was a lab that was actively engaged in research of viruses that are exactly what COVID is. They were conducting research on making said viruses more infectious. I’m not sure why the more likely thing is that it was just a virus sitting in a lab that spilled out, as opposed to a virus that was actively being worked on using the techniques the lab was known to be studying.
You've artificially limited the number of possible labs to those doing bioweapon research. If this isn't your claim there is no reason to do so and if there are more labs studying coronavirus it's far less coincidental.
There is zero evidence that anyone, anywhere in the world was working to develop SARS-like bioweapons. The gain-of-function research in question would have been basic research, intended to develop more dangerous variants of the viruses in order to predict future pandemic emergence, develop more universal vaccines, etc. I believe this research was reckless and should never have been funded (by the USA!) or permitted, even considering only what they knew at the time. It wasn't malicious, though.
In any case, beyond gain-of-function, the WIV and Wuhan CDC also had the biggest program in the world to sample novel SARS-like coronaviruses from nature, from remote bat caves that no other humans had any reason to enter.
If SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus accidentally released by scientists, then Wuhan is the obvious place for it to emerge. That could have been directly from a lab, or a researcher could have become infected on a sampling trip, traveled home from the sampling sites (~900 miles away, to be clear; Wuhan was not an expected natural spillover region), and seeded the infection there. None of this is anywhere close to proven, but the previous dismissal of any unnatural origin as a "conspiracy theory" was an outrageous, unscientific smear.
> There is zero evidence that anyone, anywhere in the world was working to develop SARS-like bioweapons
How do I square that with this claim from the article?
> Eleven of its 23 coauthors worked for the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the Chinese army’s medical research institute. Using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs, then studied their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. As the NSC officials worked backward from the date of publication to establish a timeline for the study, it became clear that the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic even started. The NSC officials were left wondering: Had the Chinese military been running viruses through humanized mouse models, to see which might be infectious to humans?"
What this describes seems like it could be circumstantial evidence of the PLA developing bioweapons. Certainly it isn't proof of anything, and as evidence it's not very strong. But I wouldn't call it 'zero.'
"Running viruses through humanized mouse models" is a pretty normal (though frightening) part of virology. For example, Ralph Baric was doing it back in 2005:
So if the Chinese military had in fact been doing this, I'd guess it was just basic research, in the same way that lots of American basic research links back to DARPA. Of course they fund it because they believe there might be a military application, but I see no reason to think that application would be bioweapons (vs. the same kind of beneficial applications described in the open literature).
Perhaps "no evidence" would have been better phrasing than "no reason"? I do think it's possible that some Chinese (or American, or British, or ...) military officer has at some point wondered if coronaviruses would make good bioweapons, but there's still no evidence.
They don't seem like obvious candidates to me, though. Both SARS v1 and SARS-CoV-2 show unpredictable, stochastic person-to-person spread, via super-spreader events. For a bioweapon that would ideally infect all the enemy but no one else, that's the last thing you want, hard to reliably get started and hard to reliably stop once it starts. So that reinforces my belief that if SARS-CoV-2 was of unnatural origin, it was almost certainly an accident during basic research.
Non-scientists obviously go into bat caves all the time, for guano collection, mining, etc. This certainly is a possible pathway for the emergence of zoonotic diseases, including SARS-CoV-2. Those aren't the bat caves I was referring to, though.
The WIV and Wuhan CDC sent grad students to hike through the wilderness to remote bat caves too far from any road or farm to have been exploited yet for any practical use. They chose those caves based on their expert predictions of where they expected to see the greatest diversity of novel coronaviruses.
There's obviously far fewer WIV grad students than guano harvesters; but the risk per person seems orders of magnitude higher, for an expert deliberately seeking a virus vs. a merely indifferent laborer. So that seems like a new and non-negligible risk to me, and thus one that requires investigation. Note that I'm not alone in this; Marc Lipsitch, for example, often mentions this possible pathway.
Very easily, you can get to the other side of the world before you even become infectious, which can be days after contracting the virus. Even if there were a trail of infectious they were probably chalked up as the flu and is likely to be undetected. If it was spreading then the virus may not have been adapted enough for the explosive growth we saw in Wuhan.
Good question; I would guess that like SARS and MERS, whichever viruses they picked up, assuming that's what happened, didn't transmit well.
That's one of the independent vectors the author mentions that makes so many of us suspect very specifically a lab leak of a gain of function experiment: the virus started out very well adapted to humans.
A lot of emerging viruses are well adapted to humans… that’s why become outbreaks. How can you judge what level of adaption is expected vs unexpected in a virus.
Most virologists say the way this virus works is unlike anything they’ve seen or expected so they can’t imagine how a human would have engineered it. Why do you think your feeling about the virus’s level of adaptation trumps the experts opinions?
"A lot of emerging viruses are well adapted to humans…"
This is literally not true.
Most virologists say the way this virus works is unlike anything they’ve seen or expected so they can’t imagine how a human would have engineered it. Why do you think your feeling about the virus’s level of adaptation trumps the experts opinions?
1) Citation on "most" please. The world is a big place, so you will be able to find a citation for any opinion. If you are going to say "most" then please back it up with a source.
2) gain-of-function research doesn't require a human to engineer a new virus. It is a way to essentially speed up evolution and allow nature to do the heavy lifting. You're arguing points that no on here is making.
How can you judge what level of adaption is expected vs unexpected in a virus.
It's a long article so I don't expect you to find the argument in it; it highlights the work of Alina Chan who compared a fast mutation rate of SARS-CoV as it better adapted itself to human to SARS-CoV-2. Here are titles of three of them I've saved but not read, May through September of last year:
SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans. What does this mean for re-emergence?
Single source of pangolin CoVs with a near identical Spike RBD to SARS-CoV-2
COVID-19 CG: Tracking SARS-CoV-2 mutations by locations and dates of interest
The lab wasn’t conducting bioweapon research. Gain of function research isn’t to create a bioweapon, nominally. It’s to examine the behavior of viruses under manipulation in order to better understand how we can respond to them given an outbreak. It’s not nefarious by nature, though it does seem like its usefulness hasn’t panned out as was thought.
But again, you really should read the article to understand what gain of function research is instead of insinuating I said COVID was a bioweapon.
They may be, but the WIV wasn't. In the words of Dr. Shi herself:
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
The closest animal virus to SARS-CoV-2 was found in nature about 900 miles from Wuhan (RaTG13, in Mojiang), closer to Chongqing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, or HK.
According to Wikipedia the lab had been established many decades ago, "The WIV was founded in 1956 as the Wuhan Microbiology Laboratory" and got its current name in 1978. For better or worse, open, public labs tend to be set up in urban areas, see the insane move of the work done at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center to college town Manhattan, Kansas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan,_Kansas in the heartland of American agriculture.
Ebola Reston evolved naturally, and emerged in humans due to an infected lab monkey imported from the Philippines to a contract research organization in Reston. Anyone who guessed that it came from Fort Detrick would have been wrong about which lab it came from, but right that it came from a lab.
Put differently, if scientists there hadn't been experimenting with monkeys, Ebola Reston wouldn't have entered humans there. We don't absolve exotic wildlife traffickers or farmers of the consequences of their actions in releasing novel, naturally-evolved viruses; so I'm not sure why we'd absolve scientific researchers.
The lab leak theory doesn’t imply that the virus was created, or gain of functioned, in the lab, merely that it was studied there and escaped. The lab leak theory doesn’t imply unnatural origins.
An example of this would be the Marburg virus (unrelated to CoVs): leaked from a lab, but of natural origin, through an infected lab animal caught in the wild
When bats weren't even being sold in that market? When the nearest ones were hundreds of kilometers away and in hibernation? No it was just easier to call a guy racist and bury your head in the sand.
So when we find Anthrax outside its normal "range" but close to a lab we can just say, yeah, no, while it's not endemic to this location it is 1000 miles away, so nothing to worry about? Oh, and never mind the lab.
This is not remotely comparable. Russia uses Novichok as a signature "we did it, don't F around".
This one was, yeah, this is a virology institute, we study corona viruses, we were hiring for corona virus experts, we do GoF work, but trust us, just because it first appeared blocks from our facility, it did not come from us. Also, don't believe our former virologists who skipped town.
Doesn’t it seem likelier that zoonotic transmission from an animal in Yunnan would infect a local and result in an initial local outbreak, which we have no evidence of? What do you think the ratio of locals in Yunnan are to visitors from Wuhan or potential visitors to Wuhan are at any given time? 100 to 1, 1000 to 1? I have no idea, but excuse the incredulity. It’s less likely that a virus from Yunnan would break out somewhere other than Yunnan, perhaps by a couple of orders of magnitude or more.
I mean sure, anything’s possible, but we have only circumstantial evidence right now and this observation isn’t a smoking gun, but it ain’t worth nothing.
This presumes COVID-19 had to evolve in the place people are looking for possible coronaviruses and had to jump directly from bats to people, and not in surrounding or isolated areas where the bats might roam. Or that their wasn't - as is suspected now - one or several interim species.
SARS after all was found in civets, and then later several other species as well despite originating in bats.
It doesn’t presume that it had to, it just conjectures that it is either more likely or not significantly less likely than the scenarios you listed.
We can’t rule it out, ie. we only have evidence right now to try to make a determination based on the preponderance of evidence, not beyond a reasonable doubt. The story that is emerging is that we may never be able to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt because the debate was quashed for a year by political concerns, institutional biases, and motivated reasoning.
You're taking this the wrong way. You have to update your priors and calculate a joint probability knowing everything we know about the origins of this particular virus.
We know enough to calculate a joint probability. Just update your estimate with new information. This should be pretty non-controversial. Everybody does this every day especially in the face of uncertainty.
Are you expecting a number? The joint probability of low-probability events is itself very low.
I'm not saying you should calculate it like P(10 000 tails coin flip) * P(1 000 000 tails coin flip). That can be done numerically. I'm saying that based on everything I've read, the highest probability hypothesis according to my own evaluation is the unintentional lab leak. To me, that's as uncontroversial as it gets. Human error happens _all the time_. Arguing against the lab leak, knowing what we know about China's refusal to allow an actual thorough scientific investigation into it, seems quite a bit more controversial to me.
Labs burn down, medical errors happen, bridges collapse, whatever. That's just reality.
Yes, but, I've seen people try to do that both on here and on rootcause, and the probabilities are anything but objective. It's just people math-washing what they already thought
good time as any to highlight how "fact checking" suppressed the "lab leak" talk for over a year [1] and how "fact checking" is just groupthink by another name and people promoting "fact checking" driven censorship are the 2020 version of the useful idiots of the olds.
There's a lot of post-hoc engineering arguing for BSL-4 research into coronavirus when even if the lab leak theory proves true wasn't in evidence at the time.
There is a very important thing to mention: Both the US and Europe depended on China's supplies in order to fight the virus in the first place.
Guess what Chinese officials did? They called each individual country prime minister and said: Your news reporters are criticizing China, it seems like you don't want supplies.
So politicians will talk with the boss of the news Media and explain the situation, the journalist will shut up.
This happened in two big European countries I personally know of. I suspect the same happened in the rest.
This is a beautiful reminder that you should never outsource your strategic resources like essential food, energy or medical supplies and if you do, you better don't do that from totalitarian regimes.
I am not at all shocked. All this was known and reported over a year ago. Social media companies and the MSM actively censored this information then in the name of squashing fake news. It was called conspiracy theory. What is different now? The only new and shocking revelations are the release of Fauci's emails.
Potential mistakes across different countries should put to rest the idea that investigating COVID origins is a nationalistic endeavor. The motivation should be as straightforward and objective as investigating airplane crashes.
> Edit: here's another amazement for the list: "Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories." And the article says "BSL-2 [is] roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office."
"SARS-like" could mean quite a few things and without defining what they mean by that it strikes me as fear baiting or being intentionally misleading to further their thesis.
The state department memo disclosing the sick researchers story isn't anywhere near as strong as the article implies. It's not US original reporting and there is disagreement about how strong the unnamed sources really are.
I'm also going to attack the sources... This was strongly pushed by the Trump administration which was looking for this result. And originally reported by in the WSJ by Michael R. Gordon who is also one of the original reporters about the Iraq Aluminum tubes/centrifuge story that turned out to be wildly false.
It took about 15 years to trace the origins of SARS [1] to a specific bat cave. We cannot be this confident this early on SARS-CoV-2.
After reviewing most of the arguments in favor of a lab leak origin, I eventually concluded that when confronted to their counter arguments, the Occam's razor would be in favor of a natural origin for the sars-cov2.
Indeed, when I heard of the report about WIV workers being sick with covid-like symptom I immediately checked who reported that, and ended up with the same conclusion as you.
While a lab leak origin cannot be entirely dismissed, one should keep in mind that all this fuss is politicaly motivated.
I’m not sure the writing style promotes objectivity. It doesn’t explore certain threads enough to feel like you are reading a trustworthy and complete briefing on the story
Honestly, reading comments like these and articles like the OP has convinced me that we, as humans, will not at all be prepared for the next pandemic. And the one after that.
These viruses and their potential recombinations are out there, we don't need some virologist to go out and maybe catch it. People will catch them, we'll just know even less about them when the next pandemic starts.
If this is the most shocking article you have ever read in your life, I feel you haven't read many articles in your life.
There is absolutely no evidence in it. Just a pile of conjecture. It is absolutely the stuff of conspiracy theories.
The truly shocking thing is that world does not hold China liable for this disaster. It really doesn't matter if it started in a lab or in one of their wet markets; it was incompetence and negligence on China's part in either case. China should pay reparations to the world for turning it off for what looks to be like multiple years, and killing millions of people.
There is absolutely no evidence in it. Just a pile of conjecture
There is much more evidence in the article for a lab leak than there was for the wet market story which was uncritically parroted in the media for over a year.
> There is much more evidence in the article for a lab leak than there was for the wet market story which was uncritically parroted in the media for over a year.
There was zero evidence of a lab leak in the article, only conjecture. So the bar of "same amount of evidence as the article for lab leak" is pathetically easy to reach. The fact you are throwing the "parroting" term around is ridiculously ironic as well, the "lab leak" has been parroted around the world since day one.
More importantly, who gives a shit even if *was* a lab leak? It's literally the less evil/worse of the two possibilities (wet market vs lab leak). Since that means it was "only" a lapse in lab security (one which will probably be learned from and not repeated) rather than the result of negligence in keeping open these markets despite being told over and over again that they are going to cause outbreaks just like this one, and these markets are still open!
This did not happen as far as I can discover - there were stringent lock down measures in Wuhan, but they came very late. In fact six weeks into the outbreak the Wuhan authorities held a party for 40k people. So - in fact it was the opposite, they treated it recklessly, which makes me think that they didn't have much to hide (until they realised that they had recklessly let it, whereever it came from, get out of control).
China could - rightfully - point out that they in fact did get the situation more or less under control and that in spite of being fully aware of the seriousness of the situation the bulk of the governments in the West (those who presumably would be first in line to demand reparation) messed it up all by themselves.
> If it evolved in a lab, it is highly likely that the virus is better at infecting people in lab conditions, for example that would mean inside.
Zoonotic diseases jump from animal to human regularly. Countless recommendations from health organizations around the world warned about and predicted a zoonotic disease event base around one of these wet markets.
> If it evolved in a lab, it is highly likely that the virus is better at infecting people in lab conditions, for example that would mean inside.
Feels like you pulled that out of your ass. Random is random and evolution is a thing. The fact that covid is effective at infecting people means only that, it has no definitive statement on it's origin. Yes, we know that a virus can be engineered in a lab to be more infectious, but billions of humans come in contact with billions of animals so it don't matter if the chance of natural zoonotic boundary jump is small.
I would agree that it doesn't seem like much. But the article says that the director of the wuhan institute's BSL-4 laboratory wrote in 2019 that “Maintenance cost is generally neglected ... Some BSL-3 laboratories run on extremely minimal operational costs or in some cases none at all.”
Most importantly, "the WIV housed numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses. Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol: BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen. Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office."
"Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research—some involving live SARS-like viruses—had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories."
There is apparently a history of SARS escaping from Chinese labs on multiple occasions, and the bat coronavirus from the mine that was human transmissible was the "only one whose genome closely resembled SARS". And according to the Wuhan lab itself, the coronavirus is "96.2%" similar to this sample, though they tried to hide this.
The strain that was 96.2% similar was a well known strain inside and outside of China.
Experts do not believe that the many, many differences between those two virus look like anything a human would or could engineer. Again, not impossible, but seems unlikely. This research would also have to be done covertly in a lab that was not covert at all which routinely had foreign collaborators.
I also do not think “they” were trying to hide this. Remember that in the US the leadership was anti-WHO and anti-China and you can’t take on face value their value judgements of what the Chinese researchers were doing when they were asked what they were doing and had explanations.
I’m not saying that the WHO and China are unbiased either, they aren’t, but the initial actions of the US’ investigation were also heavily heavily biased and would hardly be described as impartial truth seeking efforts.
Crossing into personal attack is not allowed and will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. We've had to warn you about this kind of thing before. I don't want to ban you, so please fix this.
...yes? Listen, if you are prepared to seriously consider a lab leak, then you have to assume that any public statements from Chinese authorities are dubious. I’m pretty sure my own government makes dubious statements all the time so it’s not hard to imagine.
I’m seriously considering it and put it higher than 0%. But if you think your hypothesis is the most likely outcome (>50%), and your defense at any evidence that discounts your view is that it is a giant and incredible cover up by the Chinese government then I guess we have very different priors about how easy it is to pull off massive conspiracies.
And also remember the people that leaked that 2-3 employees were hospitalized without any additional details or evidence also had an agenda.
Are you familiar with the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak? The Soviets successfully blamed that on tainted meat, and the truth wasn't revealed until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Before that, the Western scientific consensus agreed with the Soviets, discounting speculation otherwise as a conspiracy theory, with reasoning similar to yours above.
(For emphasis, nothing above is meant to imply that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon. An accident in reckless but not malicious basic research seems far more likely to me, and natural origin certainly hasn't been excluded either.)
I’m not saying it is impossible, I’m saying it is not likely.
I think it is great for people to research the origins and dig into all the details and try to find the truth. But if the virus were of natural origin, which to me is the most likely truth, then all of this talk and speculation are just maligning completely innocent people. And many of the comments here are maligning left and right.
The tone of many comments is certainly unfortunate, and we certainly shouldn't go from unjustified confidence in natural origin to unjustified confidence in lab origin; I'd put the odds near a coin flip myself. That's perhaps a backlash to the last year, though, during which anyone pushing for investigation of this reasonable hypothesis was maligned as a conspiracy theorist or worse.
For example, here's a message from an academic virologist quoted frequently in the mainstream media with a wide Twitter following, who calls Yuri Deigin's summary of the evidence for lab origin a "Turner Diary-esque manifesto". (The Turner Diaries is a novel about a race war, popular among violent white supremacists including Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.)
That kind of rhetoric is nothing unusual from anonymous Internet trolls, or even from politicians. It was strange to see from scientists, though. I don't think the backlash is good, but it's not surprising.
Finally, if the CCP wanted to stop this speculation, then they could allow an open investigation, giving international scientists full access to the WIV's documents and samples. Perhaps the reason that the CCP hasn't is just an authoritarian state's reflexive secrecy, and there's nothing to actually cover up; but if that's the case, then they have only themselves to blame for the suspicion.
There was an investigation! International teams went over data and samples! Researchers were questioned! All of this is public and in reports. The problem with saying it is a cover up is that no matter what is provided you can just say nothing is enough.
Can we get more details about how we know for sure that 2-3 researchers were actually hospitalized? Oh, it’s classified, eh? Well I can’t imagine the US ever falsifying intelligence.
I’m not suggesting that the US is lying and CCP isn’t. But I think if you rationally look at the data and the reports and listen to the people that did the investigation they do not believe in the conspiracy. And yes, they are biased, but at least they have arguments and actual data to defend their position.
Are you referring to the team led by the WHO's Peter Ben Embarek? If yes, please note that he said explicitly that it wasn't an "investigation", despite the media widely using that word:
They reviewed summaries of data provided by Chinese scientists. They generally did not review raw data themselves, let alone physical samples, and took no steps (analogous e.g. to a financial audit) designed to uncover deliberate attempts to mislead.
For a specific example, what is your opinion of the WIV's virus database? This is a database-backed website that went offline in September 2019. The WIV has cited "hacking attempts" as the reason for this. Do you believe their explanation? If so, why are they still refusing to provide it in a different format (e.g., a dump on a flash drive) that would obviously present no computer security risk?
You obviously have no idea how much control and influence the Chinese government exerts over its citizens. I really don't know how people can still be so blatantly naive about how communist parties operate and how they maintain power over their citizens.
> I guess we have very different priors about how easy it is to pull off massive conspiracies.
Is it that difficult when you manipulate the media and control the narrative? This is why the principles of free speech are as important as the law itself.
Covid antibodies may or may not be produced and if they are seem to fade quickly. This has been widely researched and documented [1]. T cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 are a better indicator of exposure [2].
If several people were hospitalized that means several dozen to hundred people in the lab actually had COVID (hospitalization rates are low, especially among people who haven’t reached retirement age yet).
Testing was done on those people and nothing was found.
This means we would be looking at a huge coverup, not false negative testing results.
Also interesting to note that (per the leaked emails) Fauci was in regular correspondence with the guy who thinks everyone should die by age 75 or else they're a waste of space[1]....Discussing strategy on the pandemic that primarily kills people over 75.
> the guy who thinks everyone should die by age 75 or else they're a waste of space
You linked to an article where he expresses the opinion that he personally doesn't want to live past the age of 75. That's a far cry from advocating mass murder of the elderly.
> Fauci was in regular correspondence... Discussing strategy on the pandemic
Emanuel is the head of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy. It would be unusual if he wasn't in regular correspondence.
> That's a far cry from advocating mass murder of the elderly.
Not what I said. But you obviously didn't read between the lines of why he feels that way, or his statements on the second order effects of a small % of people causing a large drain on the overall healthcare system. I still consider this "Interesting to note".
> is the head of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy
Why would an employee at a random private university be expected to have correspondence with a public official?
The guy has a personal preference for not wanting to live a reduced quality of life, and you're using that to insinuate he wants to genocide old people?
The WaPo article where I first read about the theory said most of this stuff. I didn’t understand then why people were so quick to dismiss it - it is eerily plausible, and we just don’t have much other data to go on. But it’s like having an opinion one way or the other is a political dog whistle that puts you into one of two bins, neither of which I fit into comfortably. This article makes a decent point of that: now that Trump’s racism is out of the way, maybe we can more critically examine the facts. I still think the lab leak theory is less likely than evolution, but it’s at least a bit compelling.
> This article makes a decent point of that: now that Trump’s racism is out of the way, maybe we can more critically examine the facts.
I highly doubt it, in most cases "Reductio ad Trumperum" will remain a useful sleight of hand. This is a different matter, being "tough on China" is a bipartisan issue, it's just about showing how the other side was "doing it wrong". For instance, you could say that Trump had "no evidence" supporting his lab leak theory.
One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity."
Plus there's all the stuff about the miners shoveling bat poop for weeks and then dying of coronaviruses, and the Wuhan institute collecting and doing gain of function research on these similar-to-SARS samples. And then several of the lab's gain of function researchers became ill in late 2019. And there's the weird renaming of samples to hide the unmatched closeness of the mine samples and covid. This is just the absolute surface of the article. There's too much to list here
Edit: here's another amazement for the list: "Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories." And the article says "BSL-2 [is] roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office."