Yes. You’ve admitted that your claim had no factual basis. It can be dismissed in its entirety, because you made it up.
Your revised claim can be dismissed on the same grounds. So can your follow-up claim that “many scientists also warned us it was bound to happen with GoF research”, as can anything else you say on this subject, or on any other subject, because you make things up.
You said it yourself, so that’s something. We know the possibility exists without intervention; how would you eliminate the possibility of intervention?
What does help in deciding whether the pandemic resulted from a lab leak or a zoonosis is actual data. Such as is given in Holme’s review. And oft mentioned in this thread.
In order to support the idea that the Wuhan market was the epicenter of the pandemic, Holmes makes much of Worobey and Pekar’s articles. But the validity of these two articles have been disputed for various reasons.
It is also worth mentioning that the quite weird behavior of many different actors in this story is to be factor in for deciding the issue. IOW, the issue here may be more a forensic one than a scientific one.
What’s the difference?
Edward C. Holmes is in a position to make an independent appraisal of the evidence.
Edward Holmes, Ph.D., FRS, FAA, dubbed the “Virus Hunter,” is a world-renowned expert on virus evolution and a key figure in the debate over the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based in Sydney, he has published more than 600 papers on various viruses, including HIV, influenza and SARS, including research that links the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic to raccoon dogs. Dr. Holmes’ work has earned him international acclaim and awards of the highest honor, including the Australian Prime Minister’s Prize for Science. His work has shed light on the processes behind outbreaks and epidemics and has had a significant impact on our understanding of how diseases spread and evolve.
While we are unable to trace SARS-CoV-2 through prior intermediate hosts, that is an absence of evidence, and contrary to some assertions, not in the least surprising. Wildlife viral surveillance is hardly comprehensive in the best of times. The same may not be said for laboratory lineages, for which genetic analysis is much the point. Outside a Hollywood thriller, this is near conclusive evidence against a lab escape.
Morens…Taubenberger - The Origin of COVID-19 and Why It Matters
SARS-CoV-2 contains neither the genetic fingerprints of any of the reverse genetics systems that have been used to engineer coronaviruses nor does it contain genetic sequences that would have been “forward engineered” from preexisting viruses, including the genetically closest sarbecoviruses. That is, SARS-CoV-2 is unlike any previously identified coronavirus from which it could have been engineered.
…
It is also highly unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 was released from a laboratory by accident because no laboratory had the virus nor did its genetic sequence exist in any sequence database before its initial GenBank deposition
The question is, why do some hold so dearly to the lab escape hypothesis in the face of extensive contrary scientific investigation? The issue may be more of a political and social one, rather than a forensic one.
Not even remotely convincingly, if one examines the data. You’re not looking at any data, ever, are you, Gil?
How close are the 4 cases that Lisewski cherrypicks, not showing any others, to the Institute? How close are the many cases that Lisewski doesn’t show to the market?
Précisement.
Speaking of Lisewski, how does their claim:
In the following it is shown, by the authors’ own data, that means, but not medians,
introduce the location of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) as geographically
associated with the Huanan market (“the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic”) at
the same statistical significance level as the earliest known lineage B cases.
… make any statistical sense? The WIV and Huanan market are fixed locations, ‘constants’ statistically speaking. So how is talking about the “statistical significance” of their ‘geographical association’ meaningful?
Jeez. Would you just look at this nonsense?
The earliest known case of Covid-19 at the Huanan market was not at or nearly a wildlife stall; there is no statistical correlation between cases and the locations of wildlife stalls; environmental samples taken after the pandemic began are more consistent with spread from toilets at the market than with spread from wildlife stalls
I mean, imagine if the earliest Covid cases had been linked to the men’s room of the WIV. Would anyone be saying “Oh, sure, but that doesn’t mean the virus was in any of the labs, does it?” These people are desperately looking to any excuse to keep their debunked conspiracy theory alive.
It’s definitely a political/social issue. I’ve seen a strong correlation between anti-vaxxers, lab-leak-proponents, evolution-deniers and conservative nationalists.
If evolution can’t generate new information, then it wouldn’t be able to generate the new information a virus needs to cross species, so couldn’t have shifted from infecting bats or raccoon-dogs to humans by itself; it must have been engineered, and those dastardly orientals would be prime suspects, especially after they failed to convince the US government to fund their plot to create a virus that only affects white people. They’re probably shipping boxes of COVID over the southern border. Not that COVID is real, it’s all a plot by the simultaneously masterminding but braindead Biden to make everyone take fake antibiotics containing microchips and wear masks that are far more dangerous than any virus. And the vaccine is worst of all - it caused healthy young athletes to drop dead before it was available. They must have been secretly travelling to foreign countries as medical tourists.
They were assessing distances of reported cases to geographic locations. @Giltil, can you speculate as to why different conclusions would be drawn when using means and medians as the way to assess these measurements? Perhaps the statisticians here can weigh in to help out the discussion.
If that were what they were doing, then it would make sense – but that does not appear to be what they’re doing. They appear to be comparing the mean distance from the market to the reported cases with the distance between the market and the lab:
Yet the distance between the Huanan market and the Wuhan Institute of Virology is nearly as far, 12.1 km … In contrast, when tested against expected n=11 or n=10 medians, the 12.1 km distance is not statistically significant (p < 0.184).
They are treating the (fixed) distance between the market and the lab (12.1km) as though it was a random variable.
Lisewski:
However, with respect to its possible statistical effects and epidemiological implications, the selective use of “medians rather than means” ([1], Supplementary Materials) was not sufficiently justified by the authors, as they simply discarded the difference between means and medians altogether as “outliers”.
Worobey et al.:
We used medians rather than means for our analyses so as to not give undue influence to outliers like those that can be seen in fig. S8.
…
As a central tendency measure for groups of locations (e.g. the 155 COVID-19 cases locations from December 2019) we chose the coordinate-wise median latitude and longitude in order to reduce the influence of outliers (for convenience we refer to these as ‘center-points’).
Fig S8:
Statistically speaking, what Worobey et al are talking about would seem to make sense. Medians are less sensitive to outliers than means, and cases that are within walking distance of a suspected epicenter provide more ‘signal’ than outliers that likely would have been a car ride away, and thus could have come from anywhere in Wuhan, or even a neighboring city.
Indeed, I concur with Tim’s assessment, and with Worobey et al. here. The mean may have greater mathematical significance[1], but if the distribution is assymmetrical, it is going to reflect that bias, where the median is far less likely to. If it is symmetrical, there is (noise aside) no difference between the two.
With many underlying distributions, a small sample is also very likely to show a bias like that. Seeing the median considered is more common when talking about data sets with, say, a few dozen or hundred points because of this. Another common technique to present data in such cases is to show (in text or what’s called a ‘box plot’) some quantiles. If you are dealing with some hundred thousands points or so, and the distribution is not something very wild indeed, describing it by its moments can be more efficient, both in presenting it, as well as in what ever theoretical treatment one interprets the given data set with.
The only time the median is a bad representative is when it’s smack-down between two clusters of values, when the distribution in total happens to have a vacated region like that. In such cases, however, the mean is not going to fare any better. One would have to come up with some other way to describe data so distributed.
It is, to be technical, the distribution’s first moment, which is arguably a more precise characterization of the totality of all data points than the median, but at the risk of giving too much weight to outliers. ↩︎
The fact that the proposal was unfounded by DARPA doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been implemented through some other route for, as Wade rightfully noted It’s common practice to strengthen a grant application by doing much of the proposed work beforehand.
Robert Garry, the last author of the Proximal Origin paper, disagrees with you for he said privately that a single graduate student at an institution such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology could do it.
Is it not also common practice to publish said work? Indeed, when applying for a grant, is having actual publications of the work you wish to continue/deepen not a much better look than not having it? So is there really ever any reason to cite the application, other than when that’s all there is, and none of the work was ever done? Would one otherwise not much rather just cite the studies directly?
The essay was very misleading about that.
Even clicking through to the source, there’s nothing that Garry wrote that disagrees with what Art wrote. Garry didn’t state a time, so claiming he disagrees with Art about that is utterly false. He didn’t write about “a single graduate student at an institution such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Art and I know a whole lot about how long things take to do in the lab and you obviously don’t.
Did you make this highly misleading claim on the basis of ignorance, dishonesty, or both? Since you’re pretending that Garry disagrees with Art and agrees with you, why is he an author of the Science paper titled simply, The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic?
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
It appears that you are hiding the fact that Dr. Garry is in complete disagreement with you about the big picture. How can you then cite him in support of your conspiracy-mongering without noting this much larger disagreement?
Don’t forget what you wrote:
How many points have you avoided in this thread alone? As just one example, when are you going to address the data in Figs. 1 and 2 of the review Art cited?
He’s already been caught making stuff up. This can be dismissed as more of the same.
Added: I’ve just checked @Giltil’s link. He’s misrepresenting what Kopp wrote, and she’s misrepresenting what Garry wrote. It’s garbage on top of garbage.
He didn’t say Garry wrote it. @Giltil says Garry “said privately that a single graduate student at an institution such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology could do it.” (My emphasis.)
Are you questioning @Giltil’s privileged insider knowledge about what researchers say in their private conversations? 
