I should note that others are also investigating as well and I look forward to seeing their results. I’m especially interested in the committee that was selected by the WHO, but I really wish that Christian Drosten had not been on vacation when the invitations were sent, as I’d really like for him to be part of this research.
That’s just not true though is it? “based fully on supposition?” it contains plenty of verifiable facts and any supposition about the viability of the lab leak hypothesis seems justified and couched in appropriate terms.
It is not a shock that that journalists and scientists can both be wrong about their work and any conclusions drawn from it.
Why do you reference a completely different article that no-one is familiar with rather than criticising the detail of the one that’s under discussion?
This begins to read as just a clumsy attempt at well-poisoning. If the facts of the article are wrong then deal with that. The author is secondary to the facts.
It sure looks like a lot of “attacking the gaps to prove creation”. Can you point to a single piece of concrete evidence in that piece that shows it originates in the lab?
Except that the scientists (multitudes of them) weren’t wrong, the journalist was.
For the same reason that I no longer give any effort to debunking anything that comes from Charles Murray, VDARE, Alex Jones, or Andrew Wakefield.
That well was poison before I stepped within a hundred yards of it.
In the end, it might turn out that someone from the WIV got it while visiting a cave and then had a quick lunch in the market a few days later. It might turn out that the Chinese government wanted to cull the world’s old and infirm, for who knows what reason. It might turn out that it came from a pangolin, a bat, or something else entirely in the wet market. When we have some concrete evidence of any of those theories from credible sources, be it the New York Times, BBC, the Washington Post, the WHO, or the US Intelligence community, or more likely, a combination of all of them, then I’ll start paying strong attention. The factual answer, if we actually determine what it is, does matter. The guess, not so much.
Ross Douthat in the NY Times is doing a great job mixing together the lab leak hypothesis with the lab-created hypothesis here. That may be paywalled, unless you know the magic of incognito browsing.
The article does not seek present concrete evidence that it orginates in the lab.
Were you under the impression that it did? or that it should?
and if he has something wrong here then it should be possible to point out the error.
I don’t know what you’re referring too but Biden cancelled an investigation that started a year ago. So the process is starting from scratch. The previous Secretary of State had said China destroyed samples of the virus which would make tracing the evolution of the virus impossible. Hopefully FOIA requests make that investigation public…
But my question remains. Under what conditions do you see the investigation taking place?
China censored it’s own medical people for even suggesting there was a problem when it first started and cancelled all imports from Australia for suggesting the virus was linked to a lab that researches viruses.
What is the likelihood there will be legitimate cooperation from them.
No, which is why I said it was “based fully on supposition”, which you seemed to have a problem with. Hell, the racist, discredited author himself states:
It’s important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either theory. Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far lacks proof. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. But those clues point in a specific direction. And having inferred that direction, I’m going to delineate some of the strands in this tangled skein of disaster.
Perhaps we disagree on the definition of supposition, but it would seem to me to be a reasonable word to describe “a set of reasonable conjectures.”
When he provides any actual evidence, I’ll point out why it is, or is not, valid evidence backing up his theory.
I think the article contains verifiable facts. Do you deny that? The “clues” that he refers to are verifiable facts are they not?
And in your own quote you state that no conclusion is offered.
Exactly. I would like to add, once again, that there is genetic evidence that the virus may have originated outside of Wuhan in Northeast China and way before December 2019. Maybe as early as October 2019. If you trace the variants, you can see that the virus was already widespread throughout China by the very beginning of December.
If Wuhan lab members got sick in November 2019, they probably got sick studying SARS-CoV-2 from human samples. They may have been the source of the “lab leak”, but covid-19 was likely already out there.
It wasn’t wide open to begin with, but it’s getting smaller every day because we keep jumping to conclusions before we’re handed the keys to the outhouse, much less to the castle.
Nature: Divisive COVID ‘lab leak’ debate prompts dire warnings from researchers
quote from your article
Well here’s the problem, People and opinion don’t scare me. governments invoking drastic punishment on people’s opinion scares me.
China spies on it’s own people to the point they give them a social rating and penalize those with a low rating. They’ve now gone beyond their border and have done the same thing to Australia.
Given this behavior there is ZERO chance they will allow an investigation that does not meet with their foregone conclusion. In fact I would go so far as to say less than zero. What they did to Australia is so over-the-top that it demonstrates how far they are willing to go to achieve an outcome.
They seem to allow us to skirt around the periphery of politics in this forum, but to respond to that would require far more than skirting. For anyone who just wants to bitch about China’s policies, feel free to open threads elsewhere and I might participate (I might even agree with you, but not here).
The truth is that politics, in this case, is hindering the science. Shit needs to stop.
This is pretty hypocritical, when you’ve done little to engage with the facts and substance of the hypotheses under consideration, but instead focused on ad hominem attacks on people like Wade. There’s every reason to treat anything Wade writes with skepticism (just as with Cotton), but ultimately the character of these people is irrelevant. I don’t see much wrong with most of the points Wade raised in his article. You criticize it as “supposition”, but in fact what he (and others of less dubious reputation) are countering is that many people in this story have exaggerated the strength of the evidence against lab involvement, and dismissed it without justification. This is not a criminal investigation where a strong burden of proof rests on one side or the other, it’s a question of finding out the truth for important scientific reasons and for the future welfare of humanity. The location of the first major outbreak close to the Wuhan lab is significant circumstantial evidence that the lab is somehow implicated, and we need clear evidence of a purely natural origin and natural spread in order to dismiss it as just an unlikely coincidence. But so far, we equally have nothing but “supposition” in favor of a purely natural process with no lab involvement at all.
I’m not the media, I’m not a public figure, I’m a nobody on a message board. This is no different than discussing the guilt of someone on a message board before a trial. We’re not the jury, so we don’t have to follow the rules, even if we agree with the reason those rules exist in that environment. I have zero influence on well over 7 billion people. Wade, who used to have a voice, is now a hack who is looking for continued relevance wherever he can find it and is finding it by putting out a narrative that certain parties want to hear and will parrot.
I’m not a virologist, but I’ve been reading a shit ton of their work. I can’t actually find any reputable ones that support Wade’s findings, but a boatload who denounce it. I can find a few who think the zoonotic hypothesis has been stated more strongly than the evidence supports (and I have no issue with this although it’s feeding the political machine a bit), but none that support things like his “no-see-um” theories. He also hints strongly (just asking questions!!!) at “gain-of function” research being a driver. Turns out the NIH claims very specifically:
As stated, at no time did NIAID fund gain-of-function research to be conducted at WIV.
So now we have the Chinese government and the US government being involved in the creation of the pandemic and the coverup thereof. Possible? Sure, but bring proof.
This I completely agree with and I’m of the opinion that shit likes Wade’s piece and the ensuing shitstorm is hurting this process.
No, we just have China trying to cover it up and punishing those who get in their way.
Okay.
I read through the Wade article in its entirety because why not. He brings up some points that seem superficially compelling, like the furin cleavage site, which point not just to a lab-leak, but to an engineered virus. OTOH, as best as I’ve been able to suss out, the virologist community seems to think he’s full of shit on that.
However, Wade spends a lot positing various conspiracy theories as to why virologists as a whole don’t see things the same way he does: they’d get blamed for the pandemic, their funding streams would dry up, their colleagues would punish any long voices, etc, etc. The Occam’s Razor, though, is a little simpler: virologists don’t think his evidence is very compelling.
Furin cleavage sites are present in many coronaviruses families. It’s a small motif. Just because it’s not present in the more closely related sars-cov, isn’t very compelling to me.
If we expose ourselves to animals, it becomes a simple maths problem for viruses to solve: there are so many of them, mutating so often, that it is inevitable one will pick up the right combination of genetic changes to thrive in humans. Indeed, COVID-19 can infect a wide range of other animals; the virus itself is nearly identical to a virus isolated in bats. Samples of the virus were found at the Wuhan wet market, at or below floor level.
And we are exposing ourselves to animals more and more. Some 60 per cent of new diseases to emerge in humans between 1940 and 2004 came from animals, with that proportion increasing over time. And new viruses jump into humans all the time without us knowing. Surveys find antibodies to strange bat coronaviruses in the blood of people living near bats.
That’s why scientists had long warned about pandemics jumping from animals to humans, and why they were not surprised when COVID-19 arrived (coronaviruses, for reasons we don’t yet understand, seem particularly prone to jump).
“We have been monitoring these coronaviruses. They’ve been jumping species boundaries,” Professor Edward Holmes from the University of Sydney told me last year.
“We knew this was going to happen.”
The only thing the preceding article should have mentioned is that two lab workers getting sick may suggest a lab leak. There’s two caveats to that, 1) if the virus was already spreading throughout Wuhan, the workers could have gotten it anywhere and 2) we don’t even know if the intelligence was correct.