For completeness’s sake, should we not include:
Virus collected during field work and stored at the lab.
Infection contracted by lab worker during field work.
Those two scenarios could also result in the epicentre of the pandemic being the WIV,
A lab worked intentionally infected himself with a wild isolate collected during field work that had been intentionally modified as part of a scientific study of bioweapons, then started hanging out exclusively with animals to be sold at the wet market.
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It all fits!
I included those under #3 as lab leak of a wild isolate. Sorry for not being clearer.
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My oversight. Sorry.
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How about:
Lab worker selling stolen lab animals in wet market?
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Or lab worker buying animals at the wet market to use in the lab? 
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Gesundheit!
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In fact the real number of animals sampled was 188, and 456 was the total number of samples taken from those 188 animals. A good chunk of the animals sampled were always bound to pretty unlikely sources, like salamanders and reptiles.
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Playing the persecution card is in no way a replacement for evidence. That’s just a red herring.
What evidence do the lab leak proponents have? Who is preventing them from presenting it?
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You have misunderstood my point.
Somehow you seem to think I’m advocating for the lab leak idea. I’m not. Can you point to where I’ve done so? If I have it has been inadvertent. I don’t much care about it. However, I am in a way,
And the evidence for that is right there in the Francis Collins’s email.
And, in fact I’m not even that fussed about that. What I’m really on about is how unscientific Peaceful Science is. This site or at least the people I’ve interacted with are rife with groupthink.
How is it that so few can break ranks and say that Collins email attempting to squash the GBD is anything akin to a display of scientific inquiry?
There is no one here that I’ve seen do that. Such behavior if done by someone with otherwise approved ideas gets a pass. I wish everyone, including Collins would admit what is clearly obvious.
Or the calling of those who even suggested the idea of lab leak racists and conspiracy theorist. I brought that up and surprise of surprise found some of the Peaceful Scientist in attempting to support it,
Someone was here bringing up ad hominem with apparently little idea of what constitutes one. But this is a classic one. But I’m sure to have that challenged with a lot of doublespeak.
Assume that someone is both a racist and conspiracy theorist, how does that form an argument against the lab leak theory?
And again, in a Haaretz online article dated, Jul 16, 2021,
“That theory, which until not long ago was identified with conspiracy theorists from the zany right, was censored for months by Facebook and Google.”
Is that consistent with scientific dialogue, or more with the Peaceful Scientists? I posted it and there is not a peep against such autocratic dictatorship of the discussion space.
You get the same dialogue fostering tripe from the Lancet of February 19, 2020. Again not a peep of disapproval from the Peaceful Scientists.
Then I’m informed (as if I wasn’t aware of it) that,
What am I supposed to do with that? Well, what I do with it is relish it. What it does is reveal the kind of argument one can expect from the Peaceful Science crowd if one hasn’t got the sense to get the party line and adopt the duckspeak.
So, I don’t care about the origin of the Covid virus. And I certainly don’t have the knowledge to engage in the science. I am interested in what I as a layman can expect in the way of transparency and in not being propagandistic. And I conclude very little in that way can be expected. It is pretty much the party line or the highway.
As Robert Redfield said the other day, the approach (of the Nature Journal) is antithetical to science,
It is no surprise that @swamidass had to concede the point of the foibles of this discussion board when in discussion with DI’s Gunter Bechly,
I feel bad for Josh. This is his baby and I believe he has done all he can to make this the best it can be. But Josh’s, “Like, you know we’re scientists, we really want to engage.” is something I see little evidence of.
Surprise me and acknowledge that the Collins example, the racist/conspiracy theory charge, the Facebook and Google censorship are in the words of Robert Redfield antithetical to science.
They are (well at least in some sense, though I don’t think science is conducted by facebook debate or google searches). For whatever it’s worth I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically racist about suggesting Covid came from a lab-leak (and I wouldn’t ever jump to even suggest that), nor is the idea that it could have come from a lab-leak outside the realm of rational discourse. There does seem to be legitimate scientific debate about that possibility occurring in the peer reviewed literature.
For my own part one of the biggest problems I have with the lab-leak hypothesis is that it seems unavoidable that it has to take the form of a conspiracy theory, as you’re required to posit literal conspiring to explain why evidence for it ever having existed at the WIV, or having infected workers there, is lacking. Once you’ve entered into that kind of territory there’s basically no end to what you can’t explain away by having people run around scrubbing evidence away.
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You keep referring to that email as antithetical to the practice of science. I really cannot see how you conclude that.
There is nothing unscientific about challenging and refuting, in the strongest possible terms, falsehoods and misinformation that are being publicly disseminated and even influencing the views of legislators. One could go so far as to say a scientist is ethically obliged to do so.
Are you going to have us believe that members of the Discovery Institute never exchange emails about how they are going to respond to an article on evolution with which they disagree? I highly, highly doubt that.
So here is where you are confused: If someone came here and started lecturing us about how the earth is flat, people will not simply accept what he says and thank him for the information. He will be challenged with the evidence that shows him to be wrong. And he will also find that if the tries to influence politicians and other decision makers to treat Flat Earthism as a legitimate scientific idea that should be taught in schools and receive research funding, he can expect scientists to oppose him and publicly correct and refute his claims.
There is nothing unscientific about this. And (I presume) you agree because (again, I presume) you understand that Flat Earthism is false.
However, you admit that you do not understand why the Lab Leak theory is false, and don’t even much care whether it is. And, similarly, you do not understand why Intelligent Design is false. You think both are scientific positions that are of equal validity to a zoonotic origin in the wild and unguided evolution, respectively.
They are not. Both are the equivalent of Flat Earthism. And when one argues against them and tries to prevent people from being misled by them, it is not being anti-scientific. It is, rather, the very essence of science.
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Yeah this is an important point. Scientists can have perfectly legitimate motives for wanting to counter what they see as misinformation. For example that they genuinely believe it’s factually wrong, politically rather than scientifically motivated, and that this has negative societal consequences.
To return to the example of China I think it’s no secret that the relationship between the US and China is frequently a topic in US presidential elections, with particularly the republican party having made it a talking point of theirs that the democrats, or liberals, are either weak on China, or worse that they’re in cahoots with them in some way or another.
Any reasonable person would have to admit that there are people who have no compunction against tarnishing their political opponents with being somehow responsible for or otherwise culpable in the Covid pandemic.
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Which could also explain why that Democratic house rep that @Sam quoted earlier asserted that the Chinese authorities have obstructed every single effort to determine the origin of COVID, when the plain facts contradict that claim. They want to look like they’re tough on China, and who really cares about the facts.
None of which is to deny the generally authoritarian and non-transparent nature of the Chinese regime. But there is no evidence to suggest that investigators have been denied access to information pertinent to the origins of COVID. I earlier posted a video in which three of these investigators described the degree of cooperation and openness they encountered when they interviewed officials of the WIV.
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Congratulations. You are one of the few here who do not seem to be trapped In group think.
To imagine that a person could try to hide the evidence of her involvement in an accident to avoid the social and/or financial penalties that would be inflicted to her if her guilt could be proven, is not to be conspiratorial but simply to show a minimal knowledge of human nature.
To be clear, I also do not believe there is anything inherently racist about the initial suspicions of a lab leak. In fact, about the first person to suspect this was director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology herself.
But the specific question that was asked was: Why, here in 2023, is it racist to suspect a lab leak and not to suspect spillover from livestock in a wet market? And my answer is that there is abundant evidence to support the latter, but not the former. Given that, there is no reason to accuse those who accept the wet market scenario of racism, since they are just following the evidence. However, the question arises of why so many are continuing to advocate for the lab leak scenario in the face of this contradictory evidence? And it is arguable that racism is at least one possibility. Though I think suspicion of the Chinese gov’t is not necessarily racist, and in many instances is quite justified.
Of course.
So, then: What evidence is there that this actually happened? TIA
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I could hardly feel more congratulatory to you on that admission tiny as it is. Sincerely. Congratulations!
Nor do I. Nor was that ever my point. My point has been from the beginning, (to use this issue and then only as an example) not about what exists in the way of scientific evidence, but that many (including the massive platforms of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) not only showed no interest in the debate (similar as shown to Sam Harris) but that their interest was to quash debate and do all that they could to prevent the debate to take place.
It might be helpful to see you challenge the Peaceful scientists that refuse to see that. As Harris said (following the lead of Glenn Greenwald) the alternative view most often proffered sounds more racist.
Maybe. But again, why was it that that didn’t happen right at the beginning (As Sam Harris just acknowledged, “Alina Chan made the point that you know actually that the best time to figure out the origin of this is immediately”)
Peers, you know, the ones that produce, “peer reviewed literature” can become corrupt and hijacked (this is simply self-evident and should require no one to swallow hard to be able to acknowledge) and in this case, the peer reviewers and their literature were used in the service of placing the conversation “outside the realm of rational discourse”.
But only the highjacking of your thinking would lead you to see anything at all unusual about that. Simply ask yourself (despite all the noise to the contrary) what is it to conspire.
Here is dictionary.com’s entry,
conspire - to agree together, especially secretly, to do something wrong, evil, or illegal
So how many conspiracies may have taken place yesterday? Is it unlikely that there were in excess of a million? A friend had their truck broken into last night. If it involved more than one person, isn’t it likely that they “conspired” together? Or to quote Behe (sure to rankle so many of Peaceful Science crowd, causing them to see red)
“So if, for example, a good friend tells you that your co-workers at the office are planning a surprise birthday party for you, you may believe that collusion (design) is going on, even though you see no physical evidence of it.” In other words, your friends are conspiring.
And real conspiracies of huge consequences take place involving huge players. Maybe especially in the world of politics. And maybe especially in light of international disasters. Maybe remember the Soviet first response was to deny everything. Volkswagen emissions scandal anyone?
So to suggest that a conspiracy may have occurred and is still occurring is to suggest a very ordinary event. But, again, I’m not suggesting it. My point is the lab leak is now and always was as you are bold enough to suggest, does “seem to be legitimate scientific debate”
For anyone to assert that the lab leak is a conspiracy theory is to pretty much admit they’ve got nothing in the way of substance to say.
How about we just ask for as much transparency as possible and drop the banal conspiracy theory charge?
But for me, this whole issue of lab leak is only useful as an example of how ‘groupthink’ Peaceful Science is. I’d love to be able to ask questions of the scientists here and have a smidgeon of assurance that I was getting anything but partisan propaganda.
Again, congrats on the,
Your evidence that it didn’t…?
Here is one article that evaluates the possibility that COVID originated from a virus that was manipulated in lab. It dates to March, 2020. That’s pretty close to the beginning of the pandemic.
The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 | Nature Medicine
Oh, absolutely. Transparency, by all means.
So when the FBI announces that they have evidence to support a lab leak, exactly what is that evidence? Could we have some “transparency” on that, please? Or from any of the other intelligence agencies that are making that suggestion?
In that video I posted earlier, which seems to have greatly confused you for some reason, one of the investigators expressed frustration that some agencies had suggested workers at the Wuhan lab had fallen ill just before the pandemic was declared. He asked the agency to provide them with more information, as they were at that very moment interviewing staff at the WIV and such information would have been very useful, for obvious reasons. He received no reply. So what was he supposed to do with that?
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I’ve only got a moment but isn’t your,
at least on the surface in conflict with,