Let me clarify: By “fully plausible” I did NOT intend to mean “most likely”. Sorry for the confusion.
Lab leak is far less likely but still fully plausible in the sense that it has not yet been ruled out.
Why? Aside from a few early leaked case reports (one whistle-blower was summoned by police and forced to recant) and a stage-managed lab visit in 2021, outside researchers have been entirely dependent on data filtered through Xi Jinping’s special COVID information task force.
Click the link above for details on how speech of doctors and researchers is controlled in China on all things related to this virus. If you don’t trust the AP, you can read about it in the Washington Post, Reuters, The Guardian, and so on.
To be clear, this censorship is not proof of a lab leak. It’s like pleading the 5th or declining to let a potentially crooked cop search your car. But it DOES mean we can’t confidently declare that we know what happened.
Certainty is not on the menu.
Nullius In Verba.
Except that Wuhan is not a region where bat colonies prone to zoonotic spillovers of SARS-related coronaviruses are common; those are found over 1,000 km away in southern China and Southeast Asia.
That seems to be using deceptive phrasing to make the lab leak explanation sound more likely than it is.
This has been tremendously helpful, and pretty close to being right on time. There was a recent Big Discussion about zoonotic vs lab leak origin over on Jerry Coynes’ page: Once again, Covid in humans: from a lab leak or a wet market? – Why Evolution Is True , and in the discussion there were a couple posts from very confident lab leak proponents citing papers about how Bayesian analyses strongly support the lab leak. So there. A Google search will turn up other such papers, and quite a few scathing conspiracy-leaning articles in the popular press.
But here I learn how key talking points that are central to those conclusions seem to fall apart with just a tiny bit more detail. To summarize:
- IF there were earlier samples of Sars-Cov-2 in the lab, they would most likely be tiny and quickly rendered inert since that is what happens to samples of the virus when collected from the field.
- Draft publication of all samples well ahead of any outbreak lacked inclusion of Sars-Cov-2
- Lab workers with unidentified illnesses ahead of the outbreak were reported to be negative for Sars antibodies.
- Yes, lab leaks happened before – only those were from live hi titer cultures, not from tiny (and generally inert) samples like fecal swabs from bat heinies and genomic samples.
One has twist and turn oneself into knots to preserve the conspiracy theory by believing in illuminati-level mendacity of independently working Chinese and American researchers and authorities, OR one simply remains unaware of these key details. It’s easy to keep a conspiracy theory alive with only low-res sound bites.
Anyway, the damage is done. The lab leak is woven into US policy, and a large % of Americans believe it and one can understand why, given the wall of disinformation out there. It is unfortunate that this status will not change for at least a generation, unless and until public communicators of science, working thru social media, are willing to shoulder the task.
Like the Eiffel Tower is over 1,000 km from Paris, in Spain.
From a press article published in 2018
A tall Ph.D. student with an easy smile, 26-year-old Luo is part of a team of researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Their one-day expedition to Taiyi Cave — a cavern 2,200 meters deep, located 100 kilometers south of Hubei’s provincial capital, Wuhan — is less about the bats themselves than the viruses they carry.
and the following paper has a map of bat collection caves, all within Hubei province.
From May 2018 to August 2020, bats were collected from caves in Xianning City and Wuhan City of Hubei Province in Central China
Neither has the existence of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.
That doesn’t mean their existence is a hypothesis that one must take seriously.
No, it means nothing of the sort. The evidence for a zoonotic origin with the epicentre being the Huanan seafood market is so strong that it can be confidently asserted as true.
A situation which @Jon-Perry has worked quite diligently, it seems, to help perpetuate.
Oh and welcome to the forum Jon, I’ve been a fan of your work for some time. I still am even though we might disagree on this topic.
When I look on Google Maps, the other Chinese BSL-4 labs are even father away. It was not an exhaustive search, and I invite you to improve upon it.
Well the problem is the word ‘plausible’ has multiple possible interpretations, one of which is believable. Is the idea of a lab-leak believable? Obviously.
I think this puts the burden very high. What have we really, trully, “ruled out” in science? Couldn’t everything we think we know, technically, be wrong?
Things are never really ruled out in science. They just become less and less probable given the evidence, and as that continues the amount of new evidence it would take to out-weigh the old evidence becomes so massive it seems perverse to expect the trend to reverse.
It means we can’t be certain about whether some people are telling the truth, but even if we can have low confidence in the statements by those scientsts, we can have other data (such as serological tests, molecular phylogenies of betacoronaviruses, the behavior of the virus in cell culture etc.) that raises our confidence in a zoonotic spillover. That data, entirely independently of assertions by chinese lab workers, can itself be strong enough to allow us to state with confidence that the pandemic was the result of a zoonotic spillover.
We don’t have to take anyone’s word for it.
Welcome, I’ve enjoyed your video’s, and am glad to have you present in the forum.
I find Worobey’s argument that the Haunan Market, and not a lab leak, was the source of the covid outbreak, to be convincing. There is plenty of additional historical and genetic analysis to support that account. Nonetheless, the sliver of a possibility that the virus could have found its way to the market from the research lab or field work, perhaps months or years before, cannot be 100% ruled out.
The problem with that message is, as per the expression, when you mix science and politics, you get politics. Nothing kills nuance faster than politics, and nothing involving science is more political than covid. In the fervid paranoia of the political right in America, not 100% ruled out means the lab leak is proven, and if a lab leak is proven, then the virus was deliberately engineered and weaponized to destroy 'merica. People who have not the slightest idea as to how a virus works, let alone the biochemistry of cleavage sites, are cheering lab leak conspiracies in rallies in stadiums, and actual experts are being fired and losing funding. All that tends to make rational in depth discussion, and even the slightest degree of scientific tentativeness, pretty challenging.
So here is the solution. Yeah, as if I have one for this train wreck.