There’s a lot of shouting right now about whether SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Some of the more partisan shouting is that Donald Trump and his minions were right last year to “consider” a lab leak. They were right last year in the sense that a stopped clock is right twice a day. Yes, they mentioned that possibility, embedded in claims that the virus was a bioweapon and the overwhelming motivation to blame China to take the focus off Trump’s inability to deal with the pandemic.
The virologists I follow have kept a lab leak as a possibility all along. I haven’t followed this story closely until now because
- The most important story has been dealing with the spread of the pandemic and
- We are not likely to know how the virus got into humans for a long time.
The probability that most scientists (including me) assigned to the possible origins was bioweapon 0%, once the genome was analyzed and showed no telltale signs of human-caused rearrangements; transmission from animals to humans, most likely because that’s how we’ve gotten most of our diseases; and lab leak possible but unlikely because accidents happen but people handling viruses take precautions against leaks.
Far too much of the shouting comes from people who have no experience in the field or have been discredited in other ways. Jonathan Chait is loud and decidedly not a virologist. His home magazine published a long article by Nicholson Baker, who writes novels about such things. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a long piece by science writer Nicholas Wade, who also published, a few years back, a book detailing his genetic theories about why Chinese are good at business and Jews at money. That should have discredited him from being taken seriously on anything relating to genetics again.
Then there are the reporters. Some are doing a reasonable job. Last night a tweet reminded me that Michael Gordon, who reported a Wall Street Journal article with the unconfirmed claim that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute had been hospitalized in November 2019, also coauthored with Judith Miller the infamous New York Times article saying erroneously that the US Intelligence community found that Saddam Hussein’s aluminum tubes were suitable for centrifuges.
I have a strong emotional reaction to that error. It helped to precipitate the Iraq war, for which people in the Middle East and the rest of us will continue to pay for a very long time. More personally, I was watching the Times carefully for that article. An intelligence finding was expected to be released. I had had professional interactions with the group at Oak Ridge who design centrifuges. I knew that they would be involved in the evaluation of those aluminum tubes. My own sense was that the aluminum was not of the quality needed for centrifuges, but I knew those folks would know.
Eighteen intelligence agencies make up the US Intelligence Community. The Department of Energy includes one of them, and that is where the Oak Ridge people would have input. I was surprised when the Miller-Gordon article said that the intelligence community assessed that the tubes were appropriate for centrifuges. I scoured the article to see what the DOE said, but that wasn’t made explicit. I reluctantly accepted the finding and the likelihood of war.
Years later, we learned that a CIA analyst, who had no particular knowledge of centrifuges or materials, drove the assessment. The DOE and the Department of State’s INR bureau dissented.
The Times later evaluated their coverage of the runup to the Iraq war, and found this article wanting. Editorial decisions around the article – placement of the article and corrections to it – were also problematic. Gordon continued at the Times until 2017, when he moved to the Wall Street Journal. Miller was forced to resign from the Times in 2005, largely for her coverage of the Iraq war.
There are subsidiary issues that this history brings up. The overwhelming urge to give white men second chances, for one. We see this with Nicholas Wade being rehabilitated to push the lab-leak theory. Miller’s fate was more appropriate. There is no shortage of capable reporters to replace those tho mess up badly.
The motivation behind the big push on the possibility of a lab leak. Far too many people tweet about it with NO – repeat NO – background to evaluate it in any way. They are “following the logic” or other excuses to push their names out in the hope that they will be the lucky clock on which the correct answer stops. But we are unlikely to know how the virus jumped to humans for many years; that has been the case with other diseases.
Three big science stories now surrounded with misinformation. Microwave directed-energy weapons (Havana Syndrome), the lab leak, and UFOs. The zone is flooding with shit. Is it that too many people don’t understand science, that we’re looking for excitement after a year of grim science news, or disinformation? They all have a political side, mostly justifying war against China or Russia if they turn out to be responsible. Good grief, haven’t we been here before?
I might as well add that there is a crappy lab-leak article in Vanity Fair that is not worth your time to read. Not linking.
And the Times, back in 2004, had the integrity to look back at what went wrong with their reporting which helped to precipitate a national disaster. It’s almost five years now, and they haven’t bothered to look into how Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers reported “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia” on the eve of 2016’s disastrous election.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner
Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Beverages
Mallard Filmore
With regard to Trump, it doesn’t matter where the virus came from
The job of the President is to protect the citizens. Dolt-45 failed spectacularly.
Roger Moore
I am in the camp that says a lab leak is always a possibility, but none of the evidence I’ve seen is at all convincing that it was a lab leak. If anything, some of the evidence people have used to push the lab leak theory seems like it actually makes a leak seem less likely.
A good example is the claim none of the viruses we know of are very closely related to SARS-CoV-2, which is somehow supposed to make it more likely that the virus escaped from a lab. That would make sense if you are pushing the escaped bioweapon theory, but genetic analysis already rules that out. If it were an accidental release of a virus under study in the lab, you’d think they would have sequenced it, and probably a bunch of closely related viruses, before they had worked on it enough to make a lab leak likely. So the lack of a similar virus seems to me to be a sign that they hadn’t been studying it in the lab and thus it couldn’t have escaped.
debbie
It’s dispiriting to see how expertise is ignored and discredited. Someone pushed this world into the wayback machine and locked the door.
UncleEbeneezer
When I first heard these mutterings about Lab Leak!!1!, my initial thought was to check and see if Richard Preston (journalist and author of The Hot Zone and Panic At Level 4) had written anything recently, since he sort of covered this beat years ago. Curiously, he doesn’t appear to do any science journalism nowadays, as far as I can see. Anyone know what happened to him?
TKH
Let me plug the “This week in virology” podcast again, specifically episodes #760 & 761, for those who want to understand what one would be looking for if one wanted to actually accrue evidence for a lab leak. There are short stretches in 761 that are a bit technical, but most of the discussion can easily be followed if your brain has not been poisoned by watching fucks news all day.
the difference between the sound and fury in the media of all stripes over this and the careful reasoning on display with these scientists is something to behold.
caphilldcne
The UFO stuff drives me nuts. The physics of interstellar travel essentially prevents the likelihood of visitors from outside the solar system. Joel Achenbach wrote an entire book about this. It’s ridiculous.
Carlo
One of the deeply strange things about the theory is that SARS-CoV-2 makes such a crappy bioweapon.
It’s not that lethal (about 0.1% infection fatality rate tops, less for young fit soldiers). It spreads uncontrollably. And it took hundreds of billions of dollars and an crash emergency program to develop immunization agents. No nation state would want to develop this.
So which is it: do we think the Chinese are Evil Geniuses Bent On taking Over The World, or do we think that they’re incompetent? Or, do we have our tinfoil hats on backwards?
germy
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-revisited/
NotMax
Obviously extant viruses were beamed aboard a UFO where they were recombined and altered* by means of energy directed mechanisms and thence released.
*Procedure most effective when the stars are correctly aligned, which by happenstance they were only over a specific area of China.
Wapiti
@caphilldcne: Well, I’d put the caveat that the immense energies that interstellar travel would require means that if we do have visitors, they’re so far advanced there’s fuck-all we can do about them, so why worry?
ColoradoGuy
Thanks for the info on the sketchy backgrounds of these “reporters”. Good to know. And a very useful reminder of the Iraq War disinformation campaign, and the key players in it.
Roger Moore
@Carlo:
We know the IFR is a lot higher than that. Almost 0.2% of the whole US population has already died of COVID, and we’re not anywhere close to 100% of the population infected. It’s probably closer to 1% IFR. ETA: Your basic point still stands, though; it’s a lousy choice for a bioweapon. Especially the part where China hadn’t vaccinated its own population yet.
BruceFromOhio
Time to bring back the classics.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mallard Filmore:
This is really all that needs to be said. The origin of COVID-19 is interesting, but irrelevant to what happened in its wake, which was the utter criminal incompetence of TFG, his minions, and of course, the GQp hardwired scum of the Village.
Emma from Miami
@caphilldcne: You mean the same way science told us conclusively that if we traveled faster than 50 miles an hours we would suffer severe physical damage? Or that ifwomen did (insert male dominated job here) they would suffer from “female problems?”
I think the best we can say is that “as far as our current knowledge allows us to extrapolate, interstellar travel is not possible.”
P.S. And I don’t believe in UFOs.
Villago Delenda Est
@BruceFromOhio: Then you build a bridge out of her.
Another Scott
+1
Excellent examples. The screaming about “critical race theory” (and the continuing effort to discredit the 1619 Project) is of a piece of this as well.
They’re trying anything and everything to rile up their base (and people who aren’t paying attention) to distract from the good things that Biden-Harris and the Democrats are doing (and they bad that they did when they were in charge).
Real investigations of real things don’t happen in tweets and WSJ editorials. Science and investigations involve months of careful grunt work, months of analyzing data, weeks of writing up results in ways that satisfy all the authors and all the reviewers.
The louder the WSJ editorial page, and Hillsdale College’s newsletter, and Fox, and all the rest scream about something, the less likely anything is actually there.
Thanks Cheryl.
Cheers,
Scott.
Villago Delenda Est
@Emma from Miami: UFOs happen every day. You see something in the sky, and you can’t figure out what it is, so it is unidentified.
It does not follow that it’s from outer space, of course, but we’ve got this entire mythology (thank you, Hollywood!) built up around that premise.
DB11
There’s actually a fairly sober article on Slate’s site (posted today) — titled “A Very Calm Guide to the Lab Leak Theory” — that avoids sensationalism and seems to properly weight the current evidence for different origins. Eg:
So not all popular media representations are as slanted as those that Cheryl cites — it probably helps when the agenda of the writer is to inform rather than to incite.
I should note that I’m leery of much of Slate’s political content, but they do have some good writers in certain subject areas. This is the first time I’ve read Rebecca Sohn, so don’t really have a take on her yet, but this effort is encouraging.
ETA: Fogot to include the link:
https://slate.com/technology/2021/06/lab-leak-theory-questions-explainer.html
I didn’t see anything in the article that seemed problematic (as a take), but I would be curious if anyone else saw it differently.
Geoduck
@UncleEbeneezer: According to his Wikipedia article, Preston was still writing about Ebola as of 2019.
BruceFromOhio
@Villago Delenda Est: It pains me no end the wreckage humans cause one another when righteously convinced of … something.
“It came from a lab!” does nothing for the dead, the fools, or the ignorant; all remain exactly as such.
UncleEbeneezer
@Geoduck: Interesting. Given the inside look he’s had at the handling of extremely infectious diseases I’m surprised he hasn’t written more over the past year.
Gretchen
Thank you. Virtually all the articles assume lab leak means genetically engineered bio weapon. They don’t understand that the lab studied naturally occurring coronaviruses and it is slightly possible that one of those got out, but that doesn’t mean that they were genetically engineering virus. Anyone who doesn’t understand this distinction isn’t worth listening to on the subject at all.
debbie
@BruceFromOhio:
I’ve always wondered whether anyone pointed out at the time that that was a really stupid test.
Cheryl Rofer
@DB11: Some decent articles are starting to come out, and I think there will be more. The problem is that there is so much garbage, it’s hard to sort it out. I hadn’t seen the Slate article.
In a couple of days, I’ll post some reliable articles.
Headed out now, will check back later.
Gin & Tonic
My son has been employed for the last year tracking and analyzing disinformation. He says the US is very bad at counter-disinformation.
Gretchen
@Roger Moore: thank you. That’s a good point that I hadn’t thought of.
Brachiator
There is also no shortage of mediocre white women just waiting for their opportunity to be toadies and suck-ups. Prime example, Maggie Haberman. And then there is the assembly line of brain-dead babes who worked for Trump and previous GOP administrations and who find a comfortable home at Fox News and other right wing outlets. The rest of the media is not much better.
So true. The right wing is hot to blame China. But what if it were absolutely true? No one is going to war with China, nor would there ever be serious sanctions.
The right wing seems to really want to brand China as America’s Number One Enemy just to keep the people riled up and to use as a political wedge against Democrats.
BruceFromOhio
@Emma from Miami:
The good news is, you don’t have to. In the vastness of the universe, something has figured it out, and is having a helluva party someplace we can never visit.
And why anything would visit a hick backwater shithole like this one makes it even more unlikely.
Villago Delenda Est
@debbie: To question the test would be to question God himself. Back then, such things simply were not done.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore:
There were some pretty believable analyses last year concluding that original-recipe COVID-19, in an unvaccinated population, had an IFR of about 0.7%. The current variants may be a bit more lethal, so 1% is still a good ballpark number.
RSA
In addition to the others mentioned, Marc Thiessen, former G. W. Bush speech writer, has held forth on this topic in more than one piece in the Washington Post. Marc, we know everything to know about you from your support for torturing foreigners. Why are you still here? Oh, right—American journalism is broken in some ways.
WhatsMyNym
@Brachiator:
So they can piss off the Repugent donor class that makes and buys their products in China. Seems like a winner to me.
Also, Nixon.
matt
I’d find it pretty easy to believe that Trump leaked the virus from a lab in the US thinking he’d slam dunk the response and reap political gain. But he’s a crazy old moron who spent 100% of his time in office doing squirrelly, fucked up, useless shit like that.
DB11
@Cheryl Rofer: Would definitely be interested in your take on the Slate article — as well as any others that you think get it (mostly) right.
Wondering if you saw this ArsTechnica article by John Timmer about the meta issue of spreading false news:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/dunning-kruger-meets-fake-news/
Brachiator
@WhatsMyNym:
The right wing seems to really want to brand China as America’s Number One Enemy just to keep the people riled up and to use as a political wedge against Democrats.
China manufactures or assembles stuff for the entire world. This is not going to change any time soon.
Republicans still love them some Tricky Dick.
Emma from Miami
@BruceFromOhio: Actually, I have thought about it seriously. The problem is our location. Bad location, away from the center. If I were a spacegoing race, I’d head for the center. More chances of getting lucky.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Emma from Miami: No, the point is in the Milky Way galaxy alone there are 200 billion stars, that we can detect, and that’s not counting brown dwarfs, exoplanets, stars hidden by dust clouds and so on, all of which could potentially have life. Even assume the speed of light limit is wrong, some alien race picking out the earth as a place to go looking isn’t very likely. We are very small needle in a very big haystack.
sanjeevs
What I’m seeing now is Climategate/Hilarygate redux with anodyne emails in the NIH being quoted out of context.
The people pushing this shit know that no-one is reading through tons of boring emails.
Carlo
The other thing is, the real conversation that needs to occur with the Chinese government has nothing to do with lab leaks. We need to talk to them about transparency and epidemic surveillance. The 2-3 or so months lost between the inception of the epidemic and the government’s response – and alert of WHO etc. – was an important contributing factor to the catastrophe that followed.
The problem is urgent, and certainly does not only involve China. But this is now the second global epidemic originating in China in a decade, and it’s time to discuss these risks frankly. The conversation doesn’t have to be a blamefest, but it will be necessary to face up to errors, in order to avoid repeating them, and this will be some difficult but necessary diplomacy. The lab leak bullshit is the worst kind of distraction at the worst time.
Emma from Miami
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: See no. 37 right above yours.
Fair Economist
*All* three new human coronaviruses since we started following new viruses came from animals, and specifically farmed or domesticated ones:
The common cold virus OC-43 came from cows.
SARS1 came from civet cats.
MERS came from camels.
The obvious null hypothesis would be that SARS2 did the same, even if we knew nothing. But in addition, we know it spreads very well in mink and raccoon dogs, which are both extensively farmed in China.
So it’s virtually certain it hopped over from some domesticate. Anybody *really* interested in the origins of SARS2 would propose as a *first* step extensive sequencing of coronaviruses in mink and raccoon dogs, followed by sequencing of coronaviruses from other farmed animals in China. But you hear nothing of this, because the people ranting about lab escape are not really interested in SARS2’s origins.
pika
@TKH: ITA agreement about TWiV! I had been listening to This Week in Parasitology for a while and learned a whole bunch. Back in March 2020 I started listening to Michael Osterholm’s podcast and abandoned it because it just was too grim. So I returned to Racaniello and co. and found the transparency refreshing…Through Daniel Griffin’s Saturday clinical updates, I’ve been able to get the word out to friends about monoclonals, how to get them, and when they need to be gotten…
Roger Moore
@Gretchen:
Many of the people who say “lab leak” are deliberately vague about what they mean. They want conspiracy theorists to think they’re talking about a weaponized virus, but when pressed they’ll say they’re only talking about an accidental release of a virus under study. It’s that kind of thing that makes me deeply suspicious of the people pushing it.
Fair Economist
@Brachiator:
Indeed, which is why the countermove is not to talk about the real origins, but to point out that Trump removed the lab observers we had in Wuhan primarily to watch for misconduct, and then sabotaged the US response to the coronavirus, while he was seriously indebted to the Chinese government bank.. If China was responsible for this virus or its spread, Trump was acting as their agent.
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
I think the IFR varies a lot depending on circumstances. It was higher early in the pandemic when doctors didn’t know the best treatment for serious cases. It came down over time as they figured it out, but it could spike if/when hospitals were overloaded. My main point was that 0.1% is obviously an underestimate because there are plenty of places where the population fatality rate has been higher than that.
Viva BrisVegas
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
If you assumed 1,000,000 (random round number) technological civilisations in the Milky Way, given the volume of our galaxy there would be on average about 300 light years separation between civilisations.
Given energy/time trade-offs there is just no way anything biological is travelling 300 light years. It’s very doubtful we could even get a coherent radio message that far.
As for going FTL, it’s technically possible to say that science may find a solution, but it would require that science rewrite itself from scratch as everything we know would be wrong.
Roger Moore
@sanjeevs:
This. The thing I noticed looking at one of the anti-Faucci hashtags on Twitter was that people were quoting emails sent to him as if they reflected his thinking.
Brachiator
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I certainly don’t believe in UFOs and mainly just don’t care. But I can also see that if there is intelligent and advanced life out there, they might think it interesting to look for other civilizations precisely because they might be rare. Or not.
I also find it interesting that the various Mars rovers and other planetary craft now have scientists seriously thinking about what it might take to get humans onto Mars, and potentially other planets. What was once probably impossible is now an incredibly daunting, but potentially doable challenge.
ETA: I still like to note that I am so old that when I was a kid my science books sagely noted that our solar system was the only one in the universe that had any planets, don’t even think about looking for planets anywhere else, thank you very much. Now you almost have school kids using their smartphone cameras to find new planets.
Who knows what else might be out there.
Chetan Murthy
@UncleEbeneezer: I read Preston’s _Hot Zone_, but around the same time I read Laurie Garrett’s _The Coming Plague_, and …. I’d rank her as a much more trustworthy journalist who can be relied upon to not sensationalize (IIRC, at the time, Preston’s book was dinged for sensationalizing). In any case, Garrett’s been tweeting (probably writing articles, too) all thru the pandemic; she has been notably silent (besides retweeting the Biden Admin stmt) on this “lab leak” theory. Though she -did- pillory the NYT article (the one by Nicholson Baker).
I trust her more than almost all science journos: she’s been there for a long time, and written a really, really serious book on the subject. I guess I’d also trust Carl Zimmer, but … this isn’t his beat.
debbie
@Villago Delenda Est:
More’s the pity. If people had questioned more, a lot of nonsense would have been avoided.
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator: I wish I could find this one cartoon: it was perfect for XKCD, but apparently that’s not where I saw it. Two frames, each with a graph. X-axis both times is “over time”. Y-axis is resolution (as in image resolution). Left frame is “resolution of UFO pictures over time”; right frame is “resolution of smartphone cameras over time”.
Left frame has a horizontal line; right frame (of course, is a near-exponential rising curve.
Heh. Heh.
prufrock
He’s also loud and decidedly not an educator, but he never shuts up about the school system either.
KSinMA
@ColoradoGuy: Co-sign. Thank you for continuing to do the work on this, Cheryl.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: It’s that “motte and bailey” technique– imply an outrageous and attention-getting but indefensible claim, but couch it in terms that allow you to say when pressed that you’re just making a less spectacular but more defensible claim.
Feathers
@Villago Delenda Est: My history of witchcraft class was long enough ago that I don’t remember the details of the witch tests.
However, one thing to remember is that a lot of the witchcraft materials were written by nuts and crackpots. Some may take them as what people actually believed, most scholars do not.
My main takeaway was the degree to which the Catholic Church has gotten the historical bad rap for the Inquisition and burning witches, when you actually had a far better chance of surviving a witchcraft accusation if made under the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church. The mass trials, hysteria, and burnings took place in the areas Protestants controlled. The Church’s best outcome for a witch was to have him or her confess their sins, do public penance, and return to the faith, in pious attendance at Mass every Sunday. The new Protestant faith really didn’t have a way to handle something evil without destroying it. Things were either holy or of the devil. Predestination meant that God had ordained these things and they were not for man to change. This is why when the shit goes down, horror movies always call in a Catholic priest.
A book which looks at the Protestant/Catholic divide and what it has meant for art, science, and the imagination is Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Life of Puppets. Highly recommended. She talks about the sub-zeitgeist, the beliefs that flow through the sorts of popular culture that the elites disdain. The followup, Gothicka, is about our current moment and what happens when society as a whole is no longer ruled by religious faith and the sub-zeitgeist takes over the culture. Have been meaning to re-read it in the wake of Q.
Fair Economist
There is, incidentally, a specific reason that new viruses to humans overwhelmingly come from farmed or domesticated species. If a virus in a wild species develops a mutation that lets it infect humans – but poorly – then the mutant will just die out because it’s got nowhere to go from the few humans it infects. *But* if the virus is in a species associated with humans, humans can act as a vector, spreading it to new groups of the host animal, even without being able to spread well in humans. So spread in humans can be selected for, even when it’s still inadequate for sustained spread between humans.
The furin cleavage site in SARS2 is powerful evidence for this kind of mechanism. It’s weird, suggesting a weird selection pressure like infecting two very different kind of animals, and it’s only useful in whole-animal transmission, and dies out rapidly in cell culture.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: Yes, I remember some YouTuber cranks pushing IFRs well below 0.1% early in the pandemic based on some specious math, and I could knock all these arguments down just by pointing out that so many people died in New York City in the spring of 2020 that IFR could not be that low even if everyone in NYC got infected.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
And the nearest star, which probably doesn’t have any habitable planets, is something like 200,000 times further away than Mars. To put that in perspective, 200,000 times smaller than the travel distance to Mars is like traveling from one side of a mid-sized state to the other.
lofgren
Help me out here.
If it turns out that this virus was some kind of Chinese bioweapon, doesn’t that make Trump et al who downplayed it and refused to help curb the spread into unwitting collaborators with a foreign attack on the US?
Why do they think this narrative makes them look better than the natural evolution theory. They’re now pushing a narrative that makes them look even more inept in every way, as far as I can tell. What the hell is even going on here?
cmorenc
This overlooks plausible alternative possibility for lab origin. Let’s stipulate that to the extent any genetically human-altered COVID genome was produced by the Wuhan lab that NONE of the genetically altered samples produced escaped the lab or infected anyone in the lab. NEVERTHELESS, wouldn’t normal lab protocol be to keep a sample of the original “natural” unaltered COVID as a backup, control, or source from which to obtain samples for further genetic manipulation research? And so, the plausible possibility exists that an inadvertent leak occurred from this backup sample of original unaltered COVID virus, which leak infected some lab workers? Who then unintentionally spread it to the general population of Wuhan and from there to the rest of the world?
Uncle Cosmo
Yeah? So what? A very modest cohort of machine intelligences incorporating Von Neumann machine capabilities – maybe even a single one – launched into interstellar space at sublight speeds could reproduce and propagate to result in at least one circling every star in the Milky Way – including a very mediocre and unremarkable Sol – within a small fraction of the galactic age.
We assume in our arrogance that spacefaring species have to be fragile resource-hungry mayflies like us. ‘Taint necessarily so.
Calouste
@lofgren: Yes, you are right, and yes, right-wingers are that stupid that they don’t see that connection.
rikyrah
Ari Berman (@AriBerman) tweeted at 5:46 PM on Thu, Jun 03, 2021:
It’s just incredible to hear Joe Manchin & Kyrsten Sinema say voting rights legislation needs bipartisan supermajority in Senate when GOP is unilaterally changing the rules in the states to prevent Dems from ever winning another fair election. Total asymmetric warfare
(https://twitter.com/AriBerman/status/1400584754324455427?s=03)
Grover Gardner
Thank you for this post, Cheryl. It’s reassuring. I thiught I was going nuts with all these “credible” journalists suddenly waving the Wuhan flag. Guess there isn’t much else at the moment to draw the clicks.
Ken
There’s a counter-argument to that which I find compelling, which is that it would take only a very few more such small fractions for the machines to convert all suitable matter into more machines. Since we still have a planet, such machines have not been launched.
The counter-counter-argument is that the alien programmers would of course build in safeguards to prevent such uncontrolled reproduction from happening. The c-c-c-argument to that is a hollow laugh at the thought that no errors would ever be made, and it takes only one such error to remove the constraint.
Ella in New Mexico
I think over the coming weeks it will be VERY important to use specific language regarding this issue.
Thanks for reading the crap article in Vanity Fair so we don’t have to be even more enraged, Cheryl. Although I should probably read it because now I’m sure I’ll get at least a few patient’s coming in and directly quoting it, like they do every single false conspiracy laden “fact” about COVID and vaccines.
YY_Sima Qian
Huh, I just read the Vanity Fair article last night, agree it is very problematic, and the reporter is quite credulous to assertions by the State Department team that was investigating the origins of the virus. Are we supposed forget that it was Mike Pompeo’s State Department last year? Curiously, the article makes the explosive claim that the 3 researchers supposedly fell sick in Sept. 2020 were working on gain of function research with the Chinese military. This claim was repeatedly made by anonymous sources in the article, but each time almost in passing. I would have thought this would be a key circumstantial evidence pointing toward a lab leak (while also insinuating human manipulation), and be closely scrutinized. However, none of the other reporting I have seen around the State Department report suggested that the researchers were working on gain of function research with the Chinese military. The Vanity Fair reporter simply regurgitates the claims without critical assessment.
Intramural conflicts within the scientific community are also proving to be distractions. Some appear to see the debate as a means to end what they believe to be dangerous practices (gain of function research and collective wild viruses and studying them in facilities located in population centers). Richard Ebright at Rutgers, inevitably quoted in every article on the subject, seems to have something of a personal vendetta against Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance. Others genuinely believe heating up the debate could potentially pressure the Chinese government into being more transparent. (Never mind that shaming from aboard tend to have the opposite effect.)
There is the Paris Group of people with varied backgrounds looking to employ big data analysis. They do appear to be well meaning, and the membership has virological/epidemiological expertise, but virtually no China expertise. This is how you end up with claims that parking lot occupancy in Aug. 2019 suggesting a large outbreak of infectious disease in Wuhan (which certainly would be news to residents of Wuhan), failing to account for underground parking lots at these hospitals. Or changes in traffic pattern and mobile data at the WIV in early Oct. 2019 suggesting a shut down of parts/whole of the facility, neglecting that there is a weekly long China National Day holiday at the beginning of Oct. (with people often tacking on additional vacation days), or construction along thoroughfare adjacent to the WIV affecting traffic. Or the WIV 3 researchers supposedly visiting hospitals is supposedly strong circumstantial evidence of lab accident, never mind the fact that people visit hospitals even for routine care in China, as there are very few GPs.
Citizen_X
@Chetan Murthy: Yes…and now, here’s a bunch of bad-quality videos from military sources, which no one else can confirm or question because they’re out in the middle of the ocean or what have you.
I would like to see a post from Cheryl on the UFO…hubbub. (I don’t really want to call it a “story.”) Especially since there was one (1) report of radar observation, and she might know better than most us about radar capabilities—and its potential for artifacts, false images, etc.
NotMax
@YY_Sima Qian
(Possibly) three workers fell ill with (possibly) something – during the height of flu season. I’m shocked, shocked.
Occam’s Razor never grows dull.
Brachiator
@Chetan Murthy:
Yeh. We got billions of smartphone cameras. But no photos of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster or UFOs.
Ultimately, I don’t think much about space alien visitors. But I greatly enjoy how we are coming up with innovative ways of exploring other planets and moons in our own solar system. This is enough for now.
Villago Delenda Est
@lofgren: All this is whataboutism scaled up to ridiculous heights, to avoid actually taking on the unspeakable incompetence of TFG and his lackeys.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator: What we have now is photographic evidence of cops killing blahs because they feel like killing blahs.
Villago Delenda Est
@Grover Gardner:
“The clicks” is literally the bottom line here.
Matt McIrvin
With the UFOs… this behavior where the phenomenon is always this indistinct blurry thing on the edge of perception, no matter how good our imaging techniques get, is not characteristic of something real–it’s characteristic of something mundane being mistaken for something else. There’s always the possibility of something there, but the occasional episodes of elevated cachet for UFOs have always triggered my Spidey sense.
I find it odd that people who don’t normally trust the military about anything will assume they’re trustworthy experts when they start acting more accepting of UFOs. They just assume that the military’s bias has to be toward hiding the amazing reality, because that’s what happens in fiction. But they have a history of sporadically encouraging UFO theorists as a cover or distraction for stuff they’re actually doing.
Another Scott
@Chetan Murthy: It looks like EM retweeted what you’re thinking of (with the graphs flipped).
This XKCD (#1235) is more persuasive, I think.
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Chetan Murthy
@Another Scott: Right, that XKCD is the one I remember; it was cited as an argument for the pervasive existence of police brutality, in the sense that, the more smartphones there are out there, the more of these horrific videos show up.
I don’t remember Musk tweeting the chart, but certainly that he’s done so, gives me a *little* pause. But hey stopped clocks, etc.
jl
@YY_Sima Qian: ” Or the WIV 3 researchers supposedly visiting hospitals is supposedly strong circumstantial evidence of lab accident, never mind the fact that people visit hospitals even for routine care in China ”
Thanks for picking that up. It’s known to international health systems people, but seems not many others. Even if there were three scientists sick with something (who knows what) and admitted to a hospital in a big Chinese city, it doesn’t indicate much. So, it shows why an interdisciplinary team working together (not stove piping their little silo of expertise) is necessary for issues as complex as this.
@Ella in New Mexico: I agree.
Cheryl Rofer
@DB11: I did not see the Ars Technica article and am a little overwhelmed right now. Hoping to take tomorrow off from all this. I think that some of the articles I know are coming will go into that meta space.
Cheryl Rofer
@YY_Sima Qian: The gain of function argument is garbage and one indicator that the Vanity Fair article is garbage. NIH has said that the research they had at the Wuhan lab was in no way gain of function, and I see no reason to question that.
Gain of function research is like working with plutonium. I wouldn’t subcontract plutonium work to someone who was further going to subcontract it. It’s done at very few labs in the US and in other countries. Just too dangerous.
jl
@YY_Sima Qian: I’m no expert, but another problem is that the articles I’ve read promise a gangbusters conclusion or the author’s theory about what happened. Never anything specific.
So, you read bibble babble like ‘someone messed around and an oopsie happened’. There needs to be a few specifics about what they were doing. Most specific thing I’ve read is gain of function experiments, but the covid bug is so distincit, hard to tell what would have gone into the entrance of the passage.
And, on top of that, the nearest relative to covid that is under suspicion is known to have been circulating for almost ten years in the wild. The lab leak enthusiasts write as if that version of covid was in that one abandoned mine, and no where else and stayed there for ten years. Which is ridiculous.
I don’t think you need to an expert to see problems with their arguments. So IMHO, lab lead possible and needs to be investigated, and Chinese need to be more open, but much less likely than natural zoonotic emerging disease.
And, not reported much, but there are outbreaks of zoonotic infections in humans around the world every year, just don’t make the news since not very transmissible between humans. And antibodies to previously unknown viruses, often unidentifiable, viruses found every year around the world too.
Also the claim that scientists were silenced for the topic of a lab leak was taboo among experts in the field is just not true. Been research, discussion and controversy on it every since the beginning of the pandemic.
catclub
@lofgren:
exactly. They should have used ‘The enemy chinese sent it’ to justify all the things that needed to be done to kill the epidemic. ‘Wear your mask and fight the war’. Instead they made bogus claims that it was China’s fault but did not treat it as an attack by china. Just an excuse to sit on their hands, or break the supply chains.
jl
@catclub: For the sinister lab leak angle, I think they’re just throwing stuff against the wall, often the same stuff that bounced back earlier, hoping something will stick that they can run as racist, xenophobic, commie scares and smears.
The lab leak theory has been peddled around several times since the beginning, and very little new in each subsequent round, and, whatever is new is also weak sauce.
It’s mostly argument by repetition.
mesmer a la carte
@Feathers: While doing research for a project that compared African vs European witchcraft, I came across what is considered the ur text of medieval witchcraft, the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ written by an ambitious and embittered cleric who wrote under the name ‘Henricus Institoris’ in 1486.
Long story short, he was striving to rise in the ranks of the church and was publicly shamed by a mistress of a ‘noble knight’ who accused the writer of sexual prudery and spat on him as they passed in the street.
He basically codified witchcraft and its punishments as revenge.
YY_Sima Qian
@Cheryl Rofer: I think the article, at least the anonymous sources quoted by the article, is suggesting that the WIV has been conducting gain of function research in collaboration with the Chinese military, not that they are conducting gain of of function research with NIH money. There are, of course, a lot of bad faith noise alleging that NIH has been funding gain of function research at the WIV.
There problem with the gain of function research hypothesis is that doing so without direct manipulation of the genomes, but by passage through animal hosts, would take forever to accumulate/acquire significant mutations in controlled lab environments and with limited animal hosts. It would happen much faster in nature, where there are no such constraints. Unless the WIV had a virus that was extremely close to SARS-CoV-2 to begin with, much closer than the 96% or 98% matches that have been discovered so far.
Another strike against the lab leak theory, even one where a naturally evolve virus was brought from the wild to the WIV or the Wuhan CDC lab and subsequently leaked, is that means China would know where the animal reservoir (specifically the intermediate host) is. Why wouldn’t China then declare that the natural reservoir has been found, to prove the zoonotic origin. Biologically, there is no difference between a naturally evolved virus jump directly to humans, versus being collected to be studied in a lab and then leaked and jumping to humans, the latter path being far more convoluted.
Matt McIrvin
@lofgren:
It’s a distraction, not an actual argument. If you think the really important mystery is the ultimate origin of the virus, and you can bloviate about supposed coverups and what Fauci knew when, you’re not thinking about all the ways that it was allowed to spread once it got here.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator:
Though the proliferation of early digicams with dinky flashes near the lens did spark a fad for taking pictures of “orbs” (defocused dust motes lit up by the flash, which looked like little balls of light). Aficionados insisted that these orbs were some sort of extradimensional beings and would talk your ear off about conclusive proofs that they weren’t what they obviously were.
Cheryl Rofer
@YY_Sima Qian: Thanks! I only skimmed the gain of function parts of the Vanity Fair article, read some others a bit more thoroughly. The number of times GOF occurred was an immediate red flag, but it’s far from the only thing wrong with the article.
YY_Sima Qian
@jl: I think the State Department report claims that the 3 researchers visited hospitals with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 and common cold (a lot of media coverage neglects the second half). This is rather unremarkable during flu season, and the WIV has thousands of employees. The report also does not state whether any of the researchers were hospitalized.
China can help clear up a lot of the suspicions by being more transparent. It would always have been very difficult, given the CCP regime’s allergy to outside scrutiny, but the GOPers in Congress and the Trump Administration poisoned the well very early on with their outlandish and bad faith claims surrounding the accidental lab leak and bioweapon theories (and intentional conflation of the two), and have persisted since. Sino-US relations has continued to deteriorate under the Biden Administration to date (though not as fast as during the last year of the Trump Administration), so the political and geopolitical conditions are not really there to allow a truly transparent, evidence based and fair investigation into the lab leak possibility.
As @Fair Economist has mentioned, China has not shared serological survey data from Chinese “wildlife” farms (raccoon dogs, minks, civets, etc.), that is clear from the Joint WHO-China Mission report. China either has done the surveys but is not willing to share them (strike on lack of transparency) or has not done them at all (strike on incompetence). Yet, almost no one is focusing on that, not the MSM, not the former members of the Trump Administration, not the Biden Administration, not members of either party in Congress, and not the members of the scientific community pushing for investigation into potential lab leak.
Hob
That Nicholson Baker article was such a goddamn disgrace, even by the standards of the many other disgraces that have surrounded this whole mess. Him being a novelist was not necessarily a disqualification— a fiction writer could also have journalistic skill and write a decent overview of third-party reporting on a public health subject in narrative form. But Baker so clearly had no fucking idea what he was talking about, and moreover he all but literally said so in the beginning of his piece prior to ignoring his own ignorance and charging full speed ahead. I mean, he basically starts out by telling you how the moment he first heard of COVID-19, he just knew by gut feeling that it was a lab accident, because it just sounded sinister to him— in particular, how could it be so contagious if it were natural?! Then he goes on to talk about how he did some historical research on germ warfare for a book he just happens to be promoting right now, and that’s why he knows so much about this now, even though his research was about the 1950s. Meanwhile, not once does he acknowledge that the gut feeling he started out with was completely wrong: there are plenty of less dangerous coronaviruses that are also very contagious, so are flu viruses, COVID-19’s contagiousness alone doesn’t make it remotely improbable. If it were as much of an outlier in that regard as he thinks it is, we would be totally fucked.
The whole thing is written at the level of some “well actually” type dude cornering you at a party and trying to summarize from memory some articles he read that blew his mind, and telling you how most people just don’t understand these things like he does, and he’s pronouncing his words very carefully because he’s had about ten beers. Whoever okayed publishing that should be fired and laughed out of town.
YY_Sima Qian
It is really depressing to see works and persons of Dr. Shi Shengli and Dr. Peter Daszak being smeared in all of this. It is because of their work that we know the bat reservoir for the progenitor of the original SARS-CoV-1 virus, that we know bats are natural reservoirs of a huge number of coronaviruses, that spike proteins can bind to ACE2 receptors as potential pathway for infecting humans, and that such spike proteins can be stabilized for the purpose of making vaccines. It is because of such work (from a large number of researchers, but Dr. Shi prominently among them) that the mRNA and viral vector vaccines can be developed so quickly and successfully. I recall researchers at Oxford, Moderna and BioNTech specifically crediting Dr. Shi for her foundational work early on last year.
Gvg
@lofgren: Fox News type watchers like being scared and angry at “others” and they aren’t that particular about who they get to hate next. Russia may find out someday soon that encouraging this attitude is likely to come back and bite them sooner or later.
occasionally I browse fox on the web. I have noticed almost all the stories are sensational crimes, often gory. Not the democrats are terrible, the majority of the stories are someone killed someone else often in a weird way. Now in a population of our size, ther e always are real stories like that, but Washington post, NYT, ABC, NBC and CBS will just have a couple. Fox has 9 out of 10. Their viewers choose that. Sure over time it makes them worse, but they chose to watch that in the first place.
Hob
Also, Nicholson Baker has apparently never heard of that obscure and incredibly contagious viral disease, “measles.” Or if he has, he’s probably got a theory about how that can’t possibly be of natural origin either.
Martin
There was a lab leak ‘theory’ that was presented on Twitter by a reputable virologist. It wasn’t a theory so much as it was a hey, here’s all the weird shit coronaviruses that come out of China and it’s entirely possible it was one being studied in a lab that got out or more likely, if that variant developed and jumped from bats to humans, then it can probably replicate that act an infinite number of times in wet markets, other mines, and so on.
Basically to say, since we’ve seen nearly identical viruses in the wild, it’s not engineered, and it doesn’t matter if it leaked from the lab or not, it was basically a matter of time after that incident in 2012.
Martin
@Brachiator: Daughter’s theory is that bigfoot is a 2-dimensional creature. They just turn sideways when people come around.
mrmoshpotato
@Martin: Hahaha. Clever girl.
Ken
@Martin: I saw that episode of The Outer Limits at a young age, and it scared me terribly.
Jay
@Martin:
They are exceptionally adept at social distancing,….
caphilldcne
@Wapiti: that’s fair. I just think why would they waste time pretending to not to be here. Basically there’s a lot of people chasing ghosts.
caphilldcne
@Emma from Miami: sorry I fell asleep at like 7:30 last night. Sure, science is always open to revision based on new evidence. I think the evidence for near light speed or faster than light speed interstellar travel in a universe which is expanding is unlikely to change much. We’ve got a lot better handle on things than the 50 mph speed thing (which I don’t think was much more than pop science). It’s like how the population believed the world was flat but educated people knew it was round.
caphilldcne
@Viva BrisVegas: yes!! This!!
Matt
What I don’t get is why the “lab leak” crap is so beloved by the wingnutz.
Do they realize that if it WASN’T “just a natural virus” that their guy’s slack-ass, horribly-mismanaged, lets-go-for-herd-immunity response is even worse?
worn
@Chetan Murthy: Not exactly what you describe, but close:
https://xkcd.com/1235/
worn
And I see Another Scott got there first. Would add this as an ETA to my comment, but just faced a non-functioning edit box (as in nothing to edit).
Peale
@Matt: The Right detests Faucci because Donald Trump hated the idea that the public looked to the Doctor instead of him for advice on what to do during COVID. So the whole “lab leak theory” is a way to make it seem like Faucci was somehow involved in the country’s failed China Virus response by making excuses for the Chinese.