Thanks for the book, alina. As a former molecular biologist (who worked on non-pathogenic enzyme gain-of-function projects) when the details of the virus came out I looked at it and immediately thought, "huh, that's exactly what I would have done", caveat I wasn't a virologist, of course, but I felt like I was being gaslit for being told that there was "no way" it could have been a lab leak. I know that I am not the only molecular biologist who felt this way. In no small part due to your work I think it's being taken more seriously, and maybe this is selfish in the context of the crazy situation going on worldwide but I feel 'less crazy'.
I'm looking forward to reading your book. As a former microbiologist / biochemist with a fair amount of knowledge about what is possible in terms of gain-of-function research, and with a fair amount of experience reading technical research papers and a long-standing interest in both environmental and infectious microbiology and virology, the discussion of origins of the virus in the literature really seemed shady during the first six months of the pandemic.
In particular, the early flood of 'data' about potential links to pangolins and a supposed bat-pangolin cross-breeding event, which was discredited pretty quickly, indicated that someone was trying to muddy the waters. Past natural outbreaks involving these kinds of cross-species jumps (MERS and camels for example) had a a long-term natural history, they didn't just appear wholly formed out of the blue, and the natural reservoirs were quickly identified[1, 2]
The failure to identify any such natural source of the virus within six months despite intensive searches really put the Wuhan lab leak theory back on the front burner, and the fact that the Lancet and Nature op-eds proclaiming a 'natural source' were organized by those linked to providing U.S. funding to the Wuhan lab was another huge red flag. When it became clear that the funds sent to Wuhan were intended to continue a branch of research (gain-of-function with respiratory viral pathogens) that the U.S. government had severely restricted in 2014[3], well...
Clearly both some elements of the US government's academic funding wing and of the Chinese government have a deeply vested interest in not allowing an open and independent inquiry into the actual source of the pandemic. This only encourages future similar outbreaks - as it really seems that there may be literally hundreds of wild-type animal viruses that can be turned into human pathogens by selective modification of their cell-surface-protein binding capabilities via techniques such as CRISPR etc. International bans on this kind of research (including an inspection regime as with nuclear non-proliferation treaties) really make sense.
These conversations all miss the single most important underlying detail.
Even if covid didn't come from a lab, we clearly possess the technology.
The cherry on top is that we're still actively working on said technology.
We have collectively and silently learned that we have the technology to end the world, and no one is really shocked by it.
This is far worse than nukes because M.A.D. doesn't apply, and it's not resource constrained. Viruses can come from anywhere and be enhanced with the right equipment and knowledge, which probably isn't all that expensive.
Why the hell aren't we shutting these labs down, or at the very least this type of research?
This does seem to be the case. Pathogenic (or even nonpathogenic 'silent riders' with minimal effects) respiratory viruses exist in a wide variety of animal species, and it seems the main barrier to cross-species transmission is that the natural host's cell-surface receptor proteins are different enough from human cell-surface receptor proteins that transmission is blocked.
With all the modern biotech tools, it's now possible to swap out the cell-surface binding domain from any virus with one that matches a human cell-surface receptor protein, which is how the viral particle gains access to the cell's interior. Cellular interiors seem more highly conserved across species, i.e. it appears that once you breach the outer defenses, the rest of the viral package can replicate within the cell without being constrained so much by inter-species differences. The ribosomal machinery will build just about anything in other words.
Hence the 'gain-of-function' game, which proponents justify as 'finding the potentially dangerous mutations before they arise naturally' is just creating novel pathogenic viruses with a high chance of escape from the labs where they're being created. This kind of research was temporarily banned in 2014 in the USA, but then that ban was lifted in 2017, all with little public discussion.
A permanent international ban on this kind of research, including an inspection and monitoring regime, is likely the only long-term solution that will work.
Because we have natural pathogens that could be released to do the same as a bioengineered one. For example the Spainish Flu, smallpox, plague. All of these could be introduced into our cities and kill millions. In addition there is and has been for quite a while the potential for buoengineered viruses as well.
So, what should we do if the local chapter of the Aryan Nation or whatever bad actor we choose to discuss were to go on a bioterrorism campaign? What could we do if we had not capability to test, evaluate and develop counters for these agents? These labs are where the folks that understand these agents come from.
Lab leak doesn't necessarily mean it was man made.
They were storing coronavirus samples from all over the world here, it could have been a contamination accident, yet still a "lab leak"
We've always known humans do dangerous things, the takeaway is that you need safety procedures to mitigate risk.
The scandal that needs to be addressed is the dangerous experiments being done in BSL2 conditions and every country deciding their own tolerance for safety.
These are internationally supported and funded projects. There is no excuse for the stakeholders not to be on the same page about safety procedures.
I’m a flaming liberal but I still thought we should at least pursue the lab leak hypothesis for one simple reason. I was a scientist and I’ve seen the lax way people treat biohazardous samples and just how fallible humans are.
After going down a long rabbit hole I lean towards non lab leak, but if we can’t ask questions because of politicization of ideas we are done.
It is infinitely disturbing that political sides are a factor in determining whether to pursue justice and truth, in this case, the Covid-19 lab leak question.
Accusations should be ignored when asking valid scientific questions.
Imagine a scientist not being curious about HIV in its early days because of homophobia (it was definitely a thing but the right people ignored it). Maybe the analogy isn't perfect ... I didn't want to open a can of worms but hopefully you get my point :)
Not just that, but the long history of lab leaks (with e.g. smallpox and SARS) that indicates lab leaks are not an unusual occurrence.
I too think the evidence in this particular virus comes down on the side of a natural origin, but the a priori denial of the possibility (and need for investigation) of a lab leak early in the pandemic was really unjustified. In fairness, the right wing demands to sanction (or even attack) China certainly didn't help things.
Does “flaming liberal” === excusing the CCP’s behavior? At least in the US, the CCP is condemned by most politicians from across the classic liberal-conservative spectrum.
It is very obvious that "gain of function" research described here is basally manufacturing biological weapons, but supposedly this is done "the good of all humans" what is just another communist party slogan.
Where are the vaccines or medicine invented by this facility?
I can understand storing and analyzing the viruses. Yet gain of function is basically bioweapon research. How is this even allowed when it breaks bioweapon conventions?
Also isnt the famous wet market in Wuhan like 300 yards from the Chinese center for disease and control building? (Not to be confused with other buildings in same town).
China had to slaughter and dispose of millions of pigs up to november 2019. There were stories of drones being used to infect pig farms through the summer to drive up pork prices. Odds are that this was covered up so much that when it hit the breaking point, people blamed the lab, even though wuhan is down stream from farm lands.
The movie "Don't Look Up" but the asteroid scientists funded by NASA create an artificial black hole to pull asteroids towards Earth with sophisticated "gain of destruction" methodology - how better to study the potential civilization-ending power of asteroids?
When an asteroid appears from out of nowhere right near the Wuhan Black Hole and on course to kill us all, head scientist DiCaprio dedicates himself to leading the effort to label anyone questioning the natural origins of the asteroid's planet-killing trajectory a conspiracy theorist, and almost everyone goes along and gets those people banned from the internet. The end.
Carl Sagan expressed essentially the same idea in 1994 -- that the development of asteroid-deflecting *nuclear weapons* would be more likely to destroy the world than to save it. That the baseline risk of major asteroid impacts is low enough, that the threat of asteroid-deflecting technology being turned into a weapon -- a loose analogy to "gain-of-function" research, I guess -- is more probable than the natural threat it defends against.
>"In our view, development of this asteroid-deflection technology would be premature. Given twentieth-century history and present global politics, it is hard to imagine guarantees against eventual misuse of an asteroid deflection system commensurate with the dangers such a system poses. Those who argue that it would be prudent to prevent catastrophic impacts with annual probabilities of 10^-5 would surely recognize the prudence of preventing more probable catastrophes of comparable magnitude from misuse of potentially apocalyptic technology."
> Searching my inbox, I found an email from April 16, 2020 where I told someone who’d me asked that the lab-leak hypothesis seemed entirely plausible to me, that in fact I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t being investigated more, but that I was hesitant to blog about these matters. As I wrote seven months ago, I now see my lack of courage as having been a personal failing. Obviously, I’m just a quantum computing theorist, not a biologist, so I don’t have to have any opinion at all about the origin of COVID-19 … but I did, and I didn’t share it only because of the likelihood that I’d be called an idiot on social media. Having now read Chan and Ridley, though, I think I’d take being called an idiot for this book review more as a positive signal about my courage than as a negative signal about my reasoning skills!
The groupthink around the lab leak hypothesis, and especially that letter signed by scientists in the early days of the pandemic, has done a lot of damage. The problem is that is isn't just this topic. About a dozen other topics have become minefields of politics and mind control masquerading as science. We only see the idiocy of this approach in the case of the lab leak because the consensus has crumbled.
Hopefully, this won't be the last wall to fall under its own weight.
"that letter signed by scientists" does not do justice to the fact that the organizer of that letter had a severe conflict of interest that he failed to disclose. Like why the hell would a scientist not disclose that??! Having been a scientist myself it boggles the mind.
I got into a slightly heated argument with my mother when she claimed that "China had manufactured the virus in a lab" - I didn't even consider the possibility of virus manufacture for study and a possible leak happening, I just assumed she was being fed propaganda that this was the beginning of some kind of bio-war being started by China. So that is my failing, and after reading more about the lab-leak hypothesis I learned to hold my tongue and be curious about such left-field claims instead of judgemental
The intertwined nature of country, financial and personnel relationships is not easy for people to understand.
I was just at a gathering the other day where a woman couldn't comprehend that the lab in Wuhan is a joint venture with US public resources, US private sector resources, Chinese resources, and personnel from both countries and others, which includes Dr. Fauci.
She had, until that point, mostly been enamored by Dr. Fauci and mostly been quite angry at Wuhan as a general disavowal of the CCP.
There is nothing to conclude from any of that observation alone, aside from noticing gaps in US federal oversight. Many people will just spiral into some other rabbit hole since nuance isn't their strongsuit. We still have to react to the pandemic whether that bolsters a lab leak hypothesis, or leads to a smoking gun, or not.
If only the American president at the time had been more responsible and less inflammatory it would have resulted in a lot less reflexive aggression - asian people beaten in the street included.
The CCP is not very responsible if they know and hide it or if they don't and refuse to look, but to their defense, it's also because it will be used and reused to their detriment (possibly deserved) if proven. Having a sound diplomatic strategy would have maybe helped convince them otherwise, but it was apparently more interesting to ALSO play down the virus in the U.S. for whatever reason and make absolutely clear that China would pay a dear price for it. So hard to blame China :s
Also yes, there will be both good and bad consequences to every action, or inaction.
But ffs give the dust time to settle before doing the after action analysis.
--
I mostly blame the popular medias for boosting and accelerating the human tendency for fear, outrage, blame. Knowing this about ourselves, that crap has to be toned down.
Writing this now, I guess I'm just repeating the "thinking, fast and slow" critique.
> I don’t have to have any opinion at all about the origin of COVID-19 … but I did, and I didn’t share it only because of the likelihood that I’d be called an idiot on social media.
This is a great justification for anon accounts -- both "primary anon-only" users and also fully- or semi- anon alts for people who have thoughts like this (which, in my opinion, ought to be every smart intellectual who doesn't make the Culture War their primary stomping ground).
Blaming a lack of courage is all well and good after the tides have turned, but courage is slim comfort when the eye of sauron turns on you. You will not feel much better for martyring yourself in service of the beliefs you hold with about-as-much-confidence as Scott expresses here -- and you'd be wise not to do so.
If you must put something down in writing that you know has the potential to cause political heat to fall on your shoulders, and it's not something core to your life's work, it's perfectly fine to either a) use a semi-anon alt or b) write in a circumspect manner. Preferably both.
Anonymity is a thin shield to hide behind, so I say "semi-anon" in support of the idea that, though the anonymity may be imperfect and the identity may be tied to your own, it can clearly be shown as a vehicle to express thoughts you are less sure of, or that you wish to distance yourself from somewhat.
I say all this will the empathy & sympathy of a fellow online writer, though with only a tiny fraction of Scott's reach...
> If you must put something down in writing that you know has the potential to cause political heat to fall on your shoulders, and it's not something core to your life's work, it's perfectly fine to either a) use a semi-anon alt or b) write in a circumspect manner. Preferably both.
I would say today, it's dangerous to speak uncomfortable truths. Assange is still in prison for speaking out about the NSA and looks like he will die there.
Does humanity deserve people like that to walk amongst us, or do we deserve to just get a society where we have no freedom even over our bodies?
After covid i think humanity sucks. We have easily been put into two camps, arguing with eachother. The divide and conquer strategy always works it seems. Like idiots we are not seeing the bigger picture of who profits and benefits from the change society now is transforming into.
Unfortunately the problem is that anonymous information is untrustworthy. It's fine for speaking unpopular opinions, but reporting something anonymously discredits it. This will only get worse with deep fakes. Pretty soon we will be flooded with fake video evidence of things like the Qanon claims.
> it's perfectly fine to either a) use a semi-anon alt or b) write in a circumspect manner. Preferably both.
This is the reason I use an anon account but there are still problems on HN. I apologize if I cause some trouble here on HN, but the flagging aspects of HN beyond rude/spam comments (which is what I suspect it is designed for) does a disservice to the community. My comments about inflation were flagged in March 2021 despite of being cordial and respectful. I trusted the scientists and the intellectual community, but I similarly saw some Lab Leak theory comments being flagged on HN. Vouching is a great feature, but not many people know it since it requires a couple of prerequisites - enough karma + settings to show flagged comments.
I hope we restrain ourselves to flagging behavior on HN. It also enrages people for trying to be reasonable, but contrarian, and seeing their comments disappear. Now, they're resolute and firmly dug into their contrarian views even if they were false.
So, if HN has these issues, the outside world is even worse. Try the same on Twitter and hard echo chambers form (blocking/etc). I am not engaged on Twitter or Reddit, but I occassionally observe this.
Social media has basically turned the world into a sort of bizarre mob rule situation when it comes to unpopular opinion.
I think that we have a responsibility to speak out on matters we believe in and ignore negative pushback.
The alternative is that anyone can shut down a viewpoint by simply flooding the opposite side. You don't know whether a poster is a troll, a real person that's simply misguided, or a real person that posts in good faith.
You don't even end up with what's merely emotionally satisfying - that would be bad enough - but with the set of events or opinion that wins out purely based on competition.
In addition, I also recommend watching 4.5 hours of Jamie Metzl, who is on a first name basis with WHO's director Tedros Adhanom and even talks about how he called Tedros on his cell phone a time when it was urgent to relay the message, describe the insanity of what happened in 2020 with regards to Lab Leak theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K78jqx9fx2I
The conclusion "we don’t yet live in a post-truth world" is hard to swallow, considering two years after the facts there is no truth about the origin of the pandemic. The reasons for this lack of scientific proof are the subject of the article and the 300 pages reviewed book. The author is once again lacking courage not to admit we do leave in a post-truth world.
Expanding a bit on my comment: truth has not been established, that's one thing. The other thing is that there is no significant hope that truth is ever established. It is said that all the archive of Wuhan's P4 have been destroyed. That would not be surprising at all. A large part of the world is under very stringent information control, far more stringent than in the USSR at any period of time. It combines social control, total control over electronic communications, and a huge PR influence thanks to a wide spread diaspora. In this context truth has become relative.
At the start of the pandemic I thought the leak of a modified virus from a lab was very unlikely and that a naturally occurring virus being brought to Wuhan by lab activities or a natural origin were both far more likely. At this point I think that's the second most significant thing I was wrong about, coming in after my early doubts about aerosol spread.
While certainly more plausible than 9/11 conspiracy theories, the lab-leak proponents have the same tendency to put forth several mutually incompatible theories, while believing each has a strong amount of evidence for it.
Considering the current political climate between US and china, supporting a non-lab origin is slowly becoming the contrarian idea.
I wonder if the authors discuss the evolution of the virus since it was first leaked/mutated. For example , eventhough it is believed, as the authors say, furin cleavage is a key to the virus' transmissibility, a computational study of the Omicron variant suggests the furin cleavage site has evolved for less efficient replication of the virus[1] (but still more transmissible due to immunity escape).
beyond the flashy politics, the lab leak hypothesis is terrifying as it means that someone can create a worldwide crisis by doing relatively well understood modifications to existing viruses, and the world is clearly not prepared for such biodefense attacks. We should be talking about the day-after covid and what measures we need to prevent such rapid worldwide spread of pathogens.
> beyond the flashy politics, the lab leak hypothesis is terrifying as it means that someone can create a worldwide crisis by doing relatively well understood modifications to existing viruses, and the world is clearly not prepared for such biodefense attacks. We should be talking about the day-after covid and what measures we need to prevent such rapid worldwide spread of pathogens.
Scientists have been able to create viruses in a lab for some time now, e.g. it's pretty well-known how to create smallpox from scratch. None of this is new. The point is, as the pandemic has shown, it makes a really lousy bioweapon when the whole world gets infected. Even if you're a psycho and your goal is total world destruction, a pandemic still sucks for your goals because a comparatively teeny percentage of people actually die.
> And one point Viral makes abundantly clear is that, if our goal is to prevent the next pandemic, then resolving the mystery of COVID-19 actually matters less than one might think. This is because, whichever possibility—zoonotic spillover or lab leak—turns out to be the truth of this case, the other possibility would remain absolutely terrifying and would demand urgent action as well. Read the book and see for yourself.
This logic does not convince me. If it did come from lab leak, there are lots of things the scientific community need to do to themselves to prevent the next lab leak from happening. It's defenitely not the same as a zoonotic spillover. Scientists are not wild animals, they can regulate themselves.
If the virus did leak from one of the two Wuhan labs, at least these actions need to be taken:
* All the Chinese labs doing this kind of research need to be seriously examined by the international community
* All the bio research funding from the western countries to China labs need to be stopped and only can be restarted with serious conditions met
> a global pandemic far worse than any in living memory
I beleive author means that 1918 Spanish flu, with death toll of 25m to 50m according to different sources, is something no on living today has a memory of.
But smallpox death toll in XX century was about 300m, and there are a lot of people alive with memories of it.
[+] [-] ayjchan|4 years ago|reply
This is Alina Chan, one of the authors of the book.
Thank you very much for your thorough review of our book :)
On the Laos connection, I made a thread on Twitter to lay out the latest findings about virus samples being sent directly from Laos to Wuhan over several years: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1476231824267485190?s=20
I hope this is a good update on that point.
Happy new year!
[+] [-] dnautics|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|4 years ago|reply
Hey Alina! Welcome to HN!
I hope you will stick around and spend some time here with us. This is hands down the best online community I've ever seen in my life.
[+] [-] photochemsyn|4 years ago|reply
In particular, the early flood of 'data' about potential links to pangolins and a supposed bat-pangolin cross-breeding event, which was discredited pretty quickly, indicated that someone was trying to muddy the waters. Past natural outbreaks involving these kinds of cross-species jumps (MERS and camels for example) had a a long-term natural history, they didn't just appear wholly formed out of the blue, and the natural reservoirs were quickly identified[1, 2]
[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/middle-east...
[2] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/20/8/14-0596_article
The failure to identify any such natural source of the virus within six months despite intensive searches really put the Wuhan lab leak theory back on the front burner, and the fact that the Lancet and Nature op-eds proclaiming a 'natural source' were organized by those linked to providing U.S. funding to the Wuhan lab was another huge red flag. When it became clear that the funds sent to Wuhan were intended to continue a branch of research (gain-of-function with respiratory viral pathogens) that the U.S. government had severely restricted in 2014[3], well...
[3] https://www.science.org/content/article/us-halts-funding-new...
Clearly both some elements of the US government's academic funding wing and of the Chinese government have a deeply vested interest in not allowing an open and independent inquiry into the actual source of the pandemic. This only encourages future similar outbreaks - as it really seems that there may be literally hundreds of wild-type animal viruses that can be turned into human pathogens by selective modification of their cell-surface-protein binding capabilities via techniques such as CRISPR etc. International bans on this kind of research (including an inspection regime as with nuclear non-proliferation treaties) really make sense.
[+] [-] ricksunny|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disambiguation|4 years ago|reply
Even if covid didn't come from a lab, we clearly possess the technology.
The cherry on top is that we're still actively working on said technology.
We have collectively and silently learned that we have the technology to end the world, and no one is really shocked by it.
This is far worse than nukes because M.A.D. doesn't apply, and it's not resource constrained. Viruses can come from anywhere and be enhanced with the right equipment and knowledge, which probably isn't all that expensive.
Why the hell aren't we shutting these labs down, or at the very least this type of research?
[+] [-] photochemsyn|4 years ago|reply
With all the modern biotech tools, it's now possible to swap out the cell-surface binding domain from any virus with one that matches a human cell-surface receptor protein, which is how the viral particle gains access to the cell's interior. Cellular interiors seem more highly conserved across species, i.e. it appears that once you breach the outer defenses, the rest of the viral package can replicate within the cell without being constrained so much by inter-species differences. The ribosomal machinery will build just about anything in other words.
Hence the 'gain-of-function' game, which proponents justify as 'finding the potentially dangerous mutations before they arise naturally' is just creating novel pathogenic viruses with a high chance of escape from the labs where they're being created. This kind of research was temporarily banned in 2014 in the USA, but then that ban was lifted in 2017, all with little public discussion.
A permanent international ban on this kind of research, including an inspection and monitoring regime, is likely the only long-term solution that will work.
[+] [-] sgt101|4 years ago|reply
So, what should we do if the local chapter of the Aryan Nation or whatever bad actor we choose to discuss were to go on a bioterrorism campaign? What could we do if we had not capability to test, evaluate and develop counters for these agents? These labs are where the folks that understand these agents come from.
[+] [-] kjaftaedi|4 years ago|reply
They were storing coronavirus samples from all over the world here, it could have been a contamination accident, yet still a "lab leak"
We've always known humans do dangerous things, the takeaway is that you need safety procedures to mitigate risk.
The scandal that needs to be addressed is the dangerous experiments being done in BSL2 conditions and every country deciding their own tolerance for safety.
These are internationally supported and funded projects. There is no excuse for the stakeholders not to be on the same page about safety procedures.
[+] [-] Dowwie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astronautjones|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|4 years ago|reply
After going down a long rabbit hole I lean towards non lab leak, but if we can’t ask questions because of politicization of ideas we are done.
[+] [-] VoodooJuJu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stef25|4 years ago|reply
Imagine a scientist not being curious about HIV in its early days because of homophobia (it was definitely a thing but the right people ignored it). Maybe the analogy isn't perfect ... I didn't want to open a can of worms but hopefully you get my point :)
[+] [-] ummonk|4 years ago|reply
I too think the evidence in this particular virus comes down on the side of a natural origin, but the a priori denial of the possibility (and need for investigation) of a lab leak early in the pandemic was really unjustified. In fairness, the right wing demands to sanction (or even attack) China certainly didn't help things.
[+] [-] ralmidani|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvba|4 years ago|reply
Where are the vaccines or medicine invented by this facility?
I can understand storing and analyzing the viruses. Yet gain of function is basically bioweapon research. How is this even allowed when it breaks bioweapon conventions?
Also isnt the famous wet market in Wuhan like 300 yards from the Chinese center for disease and control building? (Not to be confused with other buildings in same town).
[+] [-] downrightmike|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themgt|4 years ago|reply
When an asteroid appears from out of nowhere right near the Wuhan Black Hole and on course to kill us all, head scientist DiCaprio dedicates himself to leading the effort to label anyone questioning the natural origins of the asteroid's planet-killing trajectory a conspiracy theorist, and almost everyone goes along and gets those people banned from the internet. The end.
[+] [-] perihelions|4 years ago|reply
>"In our view, development of this asteroid-deflection technology would be premature. Given twentieth-century history and present global politics, it is hard to imagine guarantees against eventual misuse of an asteroid deflection system commensurate with the dangers such a system poses. Those who argue that it would be prudent to prevent catastrophic impacts with annual probabilities of 10^-5 would surely recognize the prudence of preventing more probable catastrophes of comparable magnitude from misuse of potentially apocalyptic technology."
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1038/368501a0 ("Dangers of Asteroid Deflection", Carl Sagan & Steven Ostro)
[+] [-] telesilla|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pezzana|4 years ago|reply
The groupthink around the lab leak hypothesis, and especially that letter signed by scientists in the early days of the pandemic, has done a lot of damage. The problem is that is isn't just this topic. About a dozen other topics have become minefields of politics and mind control masquerading as science. We only see the idiocy of this approach in the case of the lab leak because the consensus has crumbled.
Hopefully, this won't be the last wall to fall under its own weight.
[+] [-] dnautics|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] animal_spirits|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
I was just at a gathering the other day where a woman couldn't comprehend that the lab in Wuhan is a joint venture with US public resources, US private sector resources, Chinese resources, and personnel from both countries and others, which includes Dr. Fauci.
She had, until that point, mostly been enamored by Dr. Fauci and mostly been quite angry at Wuhan as a general disavowal of the CCP.
There is nothing to conclude from any of that observation alone, aside from noticing gaps in US federal oversight. Many people will just spiral into some other rabbit hole since nuance isn't their strongsuit. We still have to react to the pandemic whether that bolsters a lab leak hypothesis, or leads to a smoking gun, or not.
[+] [-] xwolfi|4 years ago|reply
The CCP is not very responsible if they know and hide it or if they don't and refuse to look, but to their defense, it's also because it will be used and reused to their detriment (possibly deserved) if proven. Having a sound diplomatic strategy would have maybe helped convince them otherwise, but it was apparently more interesting to ALSO play down the virus in the U.S. for whatever reason and make absolutely clear that China would pay a dear price for it. So hard to blame China :s
[+] [-] specialist|4 years ago|reply
I'm done with "hot takes".
Yes, we need rapid responses during a crisis.
Also yes, there will be both good and bad consequences to every action, or inaction.
But ffs give the dust time to settle before doing the after action analysis.
--
I mostly blame the popular medias for boosting and accelerating the human tendency for fear, outrage, blame. Knowing this about ourselves, that crap has to be toned down.
Writing this now, I guess I'm just repeating the "thinking, fast and slow" critique.
[+] [-] cjmb|4 years ago|reply
This is a great justification for anon accounts -- both "primary anon-only" users and also fully- or semi- anon alts for people who have thoughts like this (which, in my opinion, ought to be every smart intellectual who doesn't make the Culture War their primary stomping ground).
Blaming a lack of courage is all well and good after the tides have turned, but courage is slim comfort when the eye of sauron turns on you. You will not feel much better for martyring yourself in service of the beliefs you hold with about-as-much-confidence as Scott expresses here -- and you'd be wise not to do so.
If you must put something down in writing that you know has the potential to cause political heat to fall on your shoulders, and it's not something core to your life's work, it's perfectly fine to either a) use a semi-anon alt or b) write in a circumspect manner. Preferably both.
Anonymity is a thin shield to hide behind, so I say "semi-anon" in support of the idea that, though the anonymity may be imperfect and the identity may be tied to your own, it can clearly be shown as a vehicle to express thoughts you are less sure of, or that you wish to distance yourself from somewhat.
I say all this will the empathy & sympathy of a fellow online writer, though with only a tiny fraction of Scott's reach...
[+] [-] mherdeg|4 years ago|reply
Huh. This has me thinking about https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1241551327743770624 and https://www.kalzumeus.com/2020/04/21/japan-coronavirus/ and wondering how things went with that experiment.
[+] [-] peakaboo|4 years ago|reply
Does humanity deserve people like that to walk amongst us, or do we deserve to just get a society where we have no freedom even over our bodies?
After covid i think humanity sucks. We have easily been put into two camps, arguing with eachother. The divide and conquer strategy always works it seems. Like idiots we are not seeing the bigger picture of who profits and benefits from the change society now is transforming into.
[+] [-] api|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] systemvoltage|4 years ago|reply
This is the reason I use an anon account but there are still problems on HN. I apologize if I cause some trouble here on HN, but the flagging aspects of HN beyond rude/spam comments (which is what I suspect it is designed for) does a disservice to the community. My comments about inflation were flagged in March 2021 despite of being cordial and respectful. I trusted the scientists and the intellectual community, but I similarly saw some Lab Leak theory comments being flagged on HN. Vouching is a great feature, but not many people know it since it requires a couple of prerequisites - enough karma + settings to show flagged comments.
I hope we restrain ourselves to flagging behavior on HN. It also enrages people for trying to be reasonable, but contrarian, and seeing their comments disappear. Now, they're resolute and firmly dug into their contrarian views even if they were false.
So, if HN has these issues, the outside world is even worse. Try the same on Twitter and hard echo chambers form (blocking/etc). I am not engaged on Twitter or Reddit, but I occassionally observe this.
My 2 cents.
[+] [-] throwaway55421|4 years ago|reply
I think that we have a responsibility to speak out on matters we believe in and ignore negative pushback.
The alternative is that anyone can shut down a viewpoint by simply flooding the opposite side. You don't know whether a poster is a troll, a real person that's simply misguided, or a real person that posts in good faith.
You don't even end up with what's merely emotionally satisfying - that would be bad enough - but with the set of events or opinion that wins out purely based on competition.
[+] [-] systemvoltage|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerome-jh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerome-jh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Symmetry|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TrispusAttucks|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ummonk|4 years ago|reply
While certainly more plausible than 9/11 conspiracy theories, the lab-leak proponents have the same tendency to put forth several mutually incompatible theories, while believing each has a strong amount of evidence for it.
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
I wonder if the authors discuss the evolution of the virus since it was first leaked/mutated. For example , eventhough it is believed, as the authors say, furin cleavage is a key to the virus' transmissibility, a computational study of the Omicron variant suggests the furin cleavage site has evolved for less efficient replication of the virus[1] (but still more transmissible due to immunity escape).
beyond the flashy politics, the lab leak hypothesis is terrifying as it means that someone can create a worldwide crisis by doing relatively well understood modifications to existing viruses, and the world is clearly not prepared for such biodefense attacks. We should be talking about the day-after covid and what measures we need to prevent such rapid worldwide spread of pathogens.
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.472704v1....
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|4 years ago|reply
Scientists have been able to create viruses in a lab for some time now, e.g. it's pretty well-known how to create smallpox from scratch. None of this is new. The point is, as the pandemic has shown, it makes a really lousy bioweapon when the whole world gets infected. Even if you're a psycho and your goal is total world destruction, a pandemic still sucks for your goals because a comparatively teeny percentage of people actually die.
[+] [-] causi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] temp8964|4 years ago|reply
This logic does not convince me. If it did come from lab leak, there are lots of things the scientific community need to do to themselves to prevent the next lab leak from happening. It's defenitely not the same as a zoonotic spillover. Scientists are not wild animals, they can regulate themselves.
If the virus did leak from one of the two Wuhan labs, at least these actions need to be taken:
* All the Chinese labs doing this kind of research need to be seriously examined by the international community
* All the bio research funding from the western countries to China labs need to be stopped and only can be restarted with serious conditions met
[+] [-] spookybones|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SergeAx|4 years ago|reply
I beleive author means that 1918 Spanish flu, with death toll of 25m to 50m according to different sources, is something no on living today has a memory of.
But smallpox death toll in XX century was about 300m, and there are a lot of people alive with memories of it.
[+] [-] Linosaurus|4 years ago|reply
Could have be been classified as an endemic disease in many areas and not a pandemic.
[+] [-] indigodaddy|4 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/IEfpWvQjD0Q
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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