Your entire comment is a strawman. Wade claimed Dr Shi conducted gain-of-function (GOF) experiments on bat viruses. He cited a study that featured Dr Shi and claimed it was proof that she was involved in GOF studies on bat viruses. I went through the study and found that to be a lie.
An email notification popped up on my phone and it linked to a New York Times (NYT) article featuring comments from Dr Shi denying she partook in GOF studies. I recalled Wade’s misrepresentation of the Shi-featured study he cited and decided to share the link to the NYT article because her comments were consistent with the research objectives and experiments performed in that study Wade cited. Think about it, if she had been conducting GOF experiments and publishing their results, Wade would have found and cited them all in his article. Instead he cited a single Shi-featured study wherein no GOF was done, indicating he made a baseless claim. He ended up contributing to the smearing efforts on Dr Shi’s reputation.
Its true that we can’t properly verify all of Dr Shi’s claims about the activities of her lab without thorough investigation, but if you are going to claim she did GOF experiments, the burden of proof is on you to show so. And if you misrepresent a paper featuring her, creating misinformation about her and her type of research, then its your responsibility to publicly apologize and correct yourself. I don’t think Wade has met any of these demands.
I don’t know if it is or not. I find that usually when someone resorts to a rebuttal with the application of a label, their argument is dubious. And logical fallacies seem difficult to pin down.
For the last 4 or 5 years we’ve seen labels tossed around by one political party with little or no justification, intending the mere label to lead to the virtual cancelling of the person. Racist, facist, homophobe, transphobe, populist, zionist, etc.
You’ve label my comment a strawman. Wouldn’t obvious bad faith be helpful before labelling my argument a strawman. My comment was not offered in bad faith at all. And does that simple application of the label dismiss the point about the value of the accused testimony.
I’m merely asking what value is Shi Zhengli’s testimony? Without knowing any facts, I think that one could predict that the responsible person would deny culpability, absent a smoking gun. Has anything at all resembling candor come out of China regarding this? I don’t ‘expect’ candor from anyone found responsible for tragedy or catastrophe. I pointed to similar actions on the part of NASA. If the Rogers Commission had not done its job, we’d not have known of their gross oversight in contribution to the ‘accident’. How much more difficult would things be under an autocratic regime.
Try if you can to imagine for a moment that this is the result of a lab leak? How would the coverup look different?
Do you know what strawman in the context of argumentation means?
I don’t see how calling an argument a strawman is in anyway akin to calling a person “racist”, “fascist”, etcetera. You certainly have got it wrong somewhere.
That’s where your strawman comes. I never argued that we should take Dr Shi’s words at face value in the absence of proper investigation.
See where your strawman has led you. None of these things is related to my comments about Wade’s inappropriate citation of a Shi-featured article as proof that she did GOF studies and her comments to the contrary in the NYT article which are consistent with experiments done in that Shi-featured study.
One could also predict that a person who has done nothing wrong would deny culpability. That leaves you with a net zero in the way of hints towards guilt.
But you’d have to know what actually happened to be able to determine whether their statements constitute “candor” or not. Finding that someone denies an accusation is not evidence of guilt.
Pardon me but you don’t have any actual evidence of a coverup, so you can’t really say anything we’re currently seeing is what such a thing would look like.
Try if you can to imagine for a moment that there was no lab leak. How would this look different from there having been a leak? Wouldn’t the Chinese then also deny a leak, if in fact it didn’t occur?
Yes. The Chinese regime having commited an atrocity in the past and lied about it, does not mean, nor does it constitute evidence, that workers at a Chinese research facility have commit a crime, nor atrocity, nor that an accident have occurred. One does not become evidence for the other.
Each claim and each hypothesis must stand and fall on it’s own merits. “They could be lying this time too” is evidence of nothing.
The main reason this lab leak business has become prominent again is a claim by US intelligence that some workers from the Wuhan lab fell ill with an illness that resembled COVID-19 and were hospitalized.
This claim first arose in a State Dept memo issued by the Trump government. I will leave you to decide how trustworthy a source that is.
Shi and the WHO have denied any knowledge of such illnesses and have asked the US gov’t for more information so they can investigate the claim.
The US has yet to respond to this request.
Isn’t that exactly the response you would expect if this claim was baseless? Why not provide the evidence, if it actually exists?
This is why the Lab Leak theory sets off my BS detectors. When people cite China’s denial as evidence that they actually had the virus leak out of the lab, how are we supposed to take the accusations seriously?
Without physical evidence of doping I wouldn’t have challenged their denials.
How many examples do we have of new viruses spreading through the population that have been leaked from labs? How many examples do we have of viruses jumping from a different species into the human population?
The difference here is that no one can show that there was a natural disaster at the Wuhan facility. They are being blamed for something that happened outside of their lab. It would be a bit like blaming NASA for a house exploding somewhere in southern Florida.
Thanks for sharing. David has spoken like a real scientist. However, I wish he had put more emphasis on the low plausibility of a lab leak relative to the zoonotic (bat to human or bat to intermediary host to human) hypothesis.
In my reading, this simply isn’t true. There are other betacoronaviruses that have a furin cleavage site:
Baltimore goes on to say that other coronaviruses do have furin cleavage sites, but maintains that betacoronaviruses specifically do not. This is refuted in figure 6 from the paper above:
I find it a bit ironic that Baltimore is giving voice to a lab leak theory which attacks the very institution that was setup to monitor natural outbreaks of viruses. He is sowing distrust in the very institution he is advocating for. Wuhan has historically been a hotbed for the emergence of zoonotic viruses which is why the Wuhan lab was created.
Yes, but there are several classes of betacoronavirus and within the class to which SARS2 belongs, the only one that has a furin CS is SARS2. So Baltimore is correct when he says that within the SARS-CoV-2 genome there is an insertion of 12 nucleotides that is entirely foreign to the beta-coronavirus class of virus that SARS-CoV-2 is in. There are many other viruses in this class, including the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 by sequence, and none of them have this sequence. The sequence is called the furin cleavage site
So where did it come from in SARS-CoV-2? There are other viruses that have furin cleavage sites, other coronaviruses, though not the family of beta-coronaviruses. So this sequence’s nucleotides could have hopped from some other virus. No one has identified a virus that has exactly this sequence, but it could have come from something close, then evolved into the sequence that we see today.
I’m perfectly willing to believe that happened, but I don’t think it’s the only way that that sequence could have appeared. The other way is that somebody could have put it in there. You can’t distinguish between the two origins from just looking at the sequence. So, naturally, you want to know were there people in the virology laboratory in Wuhan who were manipulating viral genetic sequences? It’s really a question of history: What happened?
When I first saw the sequence of the furin cleavage site—as I’ve said, other beta coronaviruses don’t have that site—it seemed to me a reasonable hypothesis that somebody had put it in there. Now, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know that it’s a hypothesis that must be taken seriously.
It seems to me the same could be said for literally any other virus in existence: It could have arisen thru natural evolutionary processes, but that does not mean it was not created in a lab.
So what is there about this virus in particular that suggests it may be an exceedingly rare example of a virus that was genetically engineered and then escaped into the human population? Nothing that I can see. What am I missing?
You could say that the CIA designed the virus and planted it in China to make the Chinese look bad. It’s possible. Anyone can dream up any conspiracy theory they want, and plant “it’s possible” at the end.
So by class, he means the clade with the two closest known relatives. So out of those three viruses, if we ignore the rest of the phylogeny of betacoronaviruses, only one of them is know to have that cleavage site. And it’s implausible that evolved because? How’d all the other ones that do have such sites get them?
Another thing, look at the alignment as a whole. That locus within the spike protein seems to evolve a lot. There’s a lot of substitutions, a lot of small deletions and insertions happening there.
