https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6183 Shtetl-Optimized The Blog of Scott Aaronson If you take nothing else from this blog: quantum computers won't solve hard problems instantly by just trying all solutions in parallel. Also, next pandemic, let's approve the vaccines faster! --------------------------------------------------------------------- << My values, howled into the wind Book Review: "Viral" by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley Happy New Year, everyone! It was exactly two years ago that it first became publicly knowable--though most of us wouldn't know for at least two more months--just how freakishly horrible is the branch of the wavefunction we're on. I.e., that our branch wouldn't just include Donald Trump as the US president, but simultaneously a global pandemic far worse than any in living memory, and a world-historically bungled response to that pandemic. So it's appropriate that I just finished reading Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, by Broad Institute genetics postdoc Alina Chan and science writer Matt Ridley. Briefly, I think that this is one of the most important books so far of the twenty-first century. Of course, speculation and argument about the origin of COVID goes back all the way to that fateful January of 2020, and most of this book's information was already available in fragmentary form elsewhere. And by their own judgment, Chan and Ridley don't end their search with a smoking-gun: no Patient Zero, no Bat Zero, no security-cam footage of the beaker dropped on the Wuhan Institute of Virology floor. Nevertheless, as far as I've seen, this is the first analysis of COVID's origin to treat the question with the full depth, gravity, and perspective that it deserves. Viral is essentially a 300-page plea to follow every lead as if we actually wanted to get to the bottom of things, and in particular, yes, to take the possibility of a lab leak a hell of a lot more seriously than was publicly permitted in 2020. (Fortuitously, much of this shift already happened as the authors were writing the book, but in June 2021 I was still sneered at for discussing the lab leak hypothesis on this blog.) Viral is simultaneously a model of lucid, non-dumbed-down popular science writing and of cogent argumentation. The authors never once come across like tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists, railing against the sheeple with their conventional wisdom: they're simply investigators carefully laying out what they're confident should become conventional wisdom, with the many uncertainties and error bars explicitly noted. If you read the book and your mind works anything like mine, be forewarned that you might come out agreeing with a lot of it. I would say that Viral proves the following propositions beyond reasonable doubt: * Virologists, including at Shi Zhengli's group at WIV and at Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance, were engaged in unbelievably risky work, including collecting virus-laden fecal samples from thousands of bats in remote caves, transporting them to the dense population center of Wuhan, and modifying them to be more dangerous, e.g., through serial passage through human cells and the insertion of furin cleavage sites. Years before the COVID-19 outbreak, there were experts remarking on how risky this research was and trying to stop it. Had they known just how lax the biosecurity was in Wuhan--dangerous pathogens experimented on in BSL-2 labs, etc. etc.--they would have been louder. * Even if it didn't cause the pandemic, the massive effort to collect and enhance bat coronaviruses now appears to have been of dubious value. It did not lead to an actionable early warning about how bad COVID-19 was going to be, nor did it lead to useful treatments, vaccines, or mitigation measures, all of which came from other sources. * There are multiple routes by which SARS-CoV2, or its progenitor, could've made its way, otherwise undetected, from the remote bat caves of Yunnan province or some other southern location to the city of Wuhan a thousand miles away, as it has to do in any plausible origin theory. Having said that, the regular Yunnan-Wuhan traffic in scientific samples of precisely these kinds of viruses, sustained over a decade, does stand out a bit! On the infamous coincidence of the pandemic starting practically next door to the world's center for studying SARS-like coronaviruses, rather than near where the horseshoe bats live in the wild, Chan and Ridley memorably quote Humphrey Bogart's line from Casablanca: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." * The seafood market was probably "just" an early superspreader site, rather than the site of the original spillover event. No bats or pangolins at all, and relatively few mammals of any kind, appear to have been sold at that market, and no sign of SARS-CoV2 was ever found in any of the animals despite searching. * Most remarkably, Shi and Daszak have increasingly stonewalled, refusing to answer 100% reasonable questions from fellow virologists. They've acted more and more like defendants exercising their right to remain silent than like participants in a joint search for the truth. That might be understandable if they'd already answered ad nauseam and wearied of repeating themselves, but with many crucial questions, they haven't answered even once. They've refused to make available a key database of all the viruses WIV had collected, which WIV inexplicably took offline in September 2019. When, in January 2020, Shi disclosed to the world that WIV had collected a virus called RaTG13, which was 96% identical to SARS-CoV2, she didn't mention that it was collected from a mine in Mojiang, which the WIV had sampled from over and over because six workers had gotten a SARS-like pneumonia there in 2012 and three had died from it. She didn't let on that her group had been studying RaTG13 for years--giving, instead, the false impression that they'd just noticed it recently, when searching WIV's records for cousins of SARS-CoV2. And she didn't see fit to mention that WIV had collected eight other coronaviruses resembling SARS-CoV2 from the same mine (!). Shi's original papers on SARS-CoV2 also passed in silence over the virus's furin cleavage site--even though SARS-CoV2 was the first sarbecoronavirus with that feature, and Shi herself had recently demonstrated adding furin cleavage sites to other viruses to make them more transmissible, and the cleavage site would've leapt out immediately to any coronavirus researcher as the most interesting feature of SARS-CoV2 and as key to its transmissibility. Some of these points had to be uncovered by Internet sleuths, poring over doctoral theses and the like, after which Shi would glancingly acknowledge the points in talks without ever explaining her earlier silences. Shi and Daszak refused to cooperate with Chan and Ridley's book, and have stopped answering questions more generally. When people politely ask Daszak about these matters on Twitter, he blocks them. * The Chinese regime has been every bit as obstructionist as you might expect: destroying samples, blocking credible investigations, censoring researchers, and preventing journalists from accessing the Mojiang mine. So Shi at least has the excuse that, even if she'd wanted to come clean with everything relevant she knows about WIV's bat coronavirus work, she might not be able to do so without endangering herself or loved ones. Daszak has no such excuse. It's important to understand that, even in the worst case--that (1) there was a lab leak, and (2) Shi and Daszak are knowingly withholding information relevant to it--they're far from monsters. Even in Viral's relentlessly unsparing account, they come across as genuine believers in their mission to protect the world from the next pandemic. And it's like: imagine devoting your life to that mission, having most of the world refuse to take you seriously, and then the calamity happens exactly like you said ... except that, not only did your efforts fail to prevent it, but there's a live possibility that they caused it. It's conceivable that your life's work managed to save minus 15 million lives and create minus $50 trillion in economic value. Very few scientists in history have faced that sort of psychic burden, perhaps not even the ones who built the atomic bomb. I hope I'd maintain my scientific integrity under such an astronomical weight, but I'm doubtful that I would. Would you? Viral very wisely never tries to psychoanalyze Shi and Daszak. I fear that one might need a lot of conceptual space between "knowing" and "not knowing," "suspecting" and "not suspecting," to do justice to the planet-sized enormity of what's at stake here. Suppose, for example, that an initial investigation in January 2020 reassured you that SARS-CoV2 probably hadn't come from your lab: would you continue trying to get to the bottom of things, or would you thereafter decide the matter was closed? For all that, I agree with Chan and Ridley that COVID-19 might well have had a zoonotic origin after all. 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. Searching my inbox, I found an email from April 16, 2020 where I told someone who'd asked me that the lab-leak hypothesis seemed perfectly plausible to me (albeit no more than plausible), that 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 on this 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 thoughts whatsoever about the origin of COVID-19 ... but I did have some, and I didn't share them here 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! At one level, Viral stands alongside, I dunno, Eichmann in Jerusalem among the saddest books I've ever read. It's 300 pages of one of the great human tragedies of our lifetime balancing on a hinge between happening and not happening, and we all know how it turns out. On another level, though, Viral is optimistic. Like with Richard Feynman's famous "personal appendix" about the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, the very act of writing such a book reflects a view that you're still allowed to ask questions; that one or two people armed with nothing but arguments can run rings around governments, newspapers, and international organizations; that we don't yet live in a post-truth world. Email, RSSEmail, RSS Follow This entry was posted on Saturday, January 1st, 2022 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Nerd Interest, The Fate of Humanity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. 36 Responses to "Book Review: "Viral" by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley" 1. Michael Says: Comment #1 January 1st, 2022 at 6:08 pm The zoonotic risks encountered by mankind moving further and further into new wilderness areas (Amazon rainforest etc) have been laid out in a number of popular science books since the 90s. There was an estimate (magnitude I can't recall) of novel viruses per square metre) which is extremely sobering when we consider the square kilometres cut down each year. Also, readers may not be familiar with the horrific species-leaping lyssavirus that came from bats in Australia in the 1990s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Australian_bat_lyssavirus 2. Michael Says: Comment #2 January 1st, 2022 at 6:11 pm *I forgot to mention that the lyssavirus came hot on the heels of the Hendra virus. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendra_virus 3. Andrew White Says: Comment #3 January 1st, 2022 at 6:15 pm Goodness, that's a very different take to this review, https:// newrepublic.com/article/164688/viral-lab-leak-theory-covid-19 . I'll be interested to see where I land once I've read it. 4. Scott Says: Comment #4 January 1st, 2022 at 7:09 pm Andrew White #3: Thanks for the link to that review, which I hadn't seen! I hated its sneering tone, particularly since the core of its case is based on new research that the authors couldn't have had access to when they were writing. Nevertheless, yes, that new research clearly is relevant, and yes, it does at least somewhat undercut the lab leak theorists' heavy reliance on the Moxiang mine and RaTG13. I'll eagerly look forward to Chan and Ridley's response to the new work. I do strongly disagree with the review's contention that the lab leak theory is unfalsifiable, like a classic conspiracy theory. I say: find the natural progenitor of SARS-CoV2, as was eventually done for the original SARS, and find the route by which it gets from wherever it lives to the wet market, and the lab leak theory is dead, full stop, and even Chan and Ridley will admit that it's dead if they're as intellectually honest as they present themselves. 5. Book Review: "Viral" by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley - The web development company Lzo Media - Senior Backend Developer Says: Comment #5 January 1st, 2022 at 7:52 pm [...] Article URL: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6183 [...] 6. Ummon Says: Comment #6 January 1st, 2022 at 8:41 pm "and even Chan and Ridley will admit that it's dead if they're as intellectually honest as they present themselves." - in my experience, people's actual intellectual honesty tends to slightly inversely correlated with how intellectually honest they present themselves. As to the existence of newly published evidence that undercuts their main theories, that's exactly how falsification works. When authors put forth and portray a high degree of confidence in a theory that relies on features that are subsequently falsified by new evidence, the credibility of the theory and its advocates is undermined. 7. Nicholas Teague Says: Comment #7 January 1st, 2022 at 8:49 pm A more fruitful question than whether or not it originated in a lab could be to consider how might we extend modeling of molecules and catalysts to simulating microorganisms, which could negate the need for running such a lab in the first place. Perhaps this blog's domain of interest could have a part to play. Call it a long term objective. 8. Scott Says: Comment #8 January 1st, 2022 at 8:59 pm Two more thoughts about the negative review in New Republic: (1) Given that we know RaTG13 occurred naturally in the Yunnan cave, and that it diverged from SARS-CoV2 decades ago, I'd expect that many similar viruses would also appear in other caves, and some would be even more similar to SARS-CoV2. That was never the biggest difficulty for an origin theory: the biggest difficulty was how it gets from the cave to Wuhan without being noticed anywhere else along the way. Certainly there's no answer to that question (yet) with the new Laos paper. (2) I felt like the weakest part of the review was its response to Chan and Ridley's points about WIV and EcoHealth refusing to share relevant data, like the comprehensive virus database that was mysteriously taken offline in September 2019 and still not made available, despite its direct bearing on many of the questions at issue. The best response the review can offer is sneering gotcha: "well, if this coverup already started in September 2019, I guess that contradicts other conspiracy stories according to which it started in November 2019!" This misses the broader questions of why not just make the goddamn database available? isn't it, like, WIV's moral responsibility to the world to share whatever it knows? 9. LB Says: Comment #9 January 1st, 2022 at 9:50 pm A quick google search for "Laos" and "Peter Daszak" leads to this article: https://theintercept.com/2021/12/28/ covid-pandemic-virus-hunters-ecohealth-alliance-peter-daszak-wuhan / See the section titled "The Laos Connection." 10. James Picone Says: Comment #10 January 1st, 2022 at 10:10 pm Matt Ridley is well-known amongst people in climate science discussion for spreading absolute bullshit with the backing of being in the House of Lords and also being a science writer. He's not intellectually honest; his association with this book makes me think its conclusions are less credible. This is unfortunate because it sounds like an important book covering important topics, but, well, spread bullshit and people will justifiably think you're a bullshitter. 11. Scott Says: Comment #11 January 1st, 2022 at 11:19 pm Update: On a Hacker News thread about this post, Alina Chan herself points me to a recent Twitter thread of hers where she responds to the Laos paper. Briefly, Alina interprets the same new revelation through a completely different lens. Thus, instead of: "viruses similar to SARS-CoV2 can be found in lots of bat caves, not just the Mojiang mine--in fact, some even more similar than RaTG13 is--so the case for a lab leak based on Mojiang is discredited, and SARS-CoV2 probably had a natural origin after all," it's "aha! the only reason we know all this, is that in the years leading up to COVID-19, even more viruses similar to SARS-CoV2 than we'd previously imagined, in fact some even more similar than RaTG13 is, were being collected from all over Southeast Asia and then shipped directly to the WIV! which remains the clearest route for any of these viruses to find themselves in Wuhan." Not sure what to think. 12. J Allen Says: Comment #12 January 1st, 2022 at 11:23 pm It was an awful book. I've bought and read every book Ridley has written in the past, and this one was so bad, it is making me wonder about the biased and downright misrepresentation that might've existed in his previous books that I enjoyed so much. Without having followed the debate closely one could be forgiven for thinking the biased and omissions in this work were merely due to ignorance about the new research that came out while the book was being written. But Ridley and Chan were repeatedly supplied with pointers to new research that undermined their central claims, including being called out repeatedly by experts like Angie Rasmussen and Kristian Anderson. As the preponderance of evidence in favor of zoonotic origin mounted, the authors obdurately stuck to their preconceived narrative, which was essentially repackaged DRASTIC claims. Since I have the compete Ridley collection, I'm sure I'll buy his next book, too. But I will undoubtedly read with a more critical eye. 13. Scott Says: Comment #13 January 2nd, 2022 at 12:20 am J Allen #12: Could you expand on what, specifically, was the new research that Chan and Ridley ignored that undermines their central claims? 14. Scott Says: Comment #14 January 2nd, 2022 at 12:22 am Update: Excellent New Yorker article, covering some of the same ground as Chan and Ridley's book and as this post, while making a real effort to present both sides. 15. Paul Hayes Says: Comment #15 January 2nd, 2022 at 12:30 am For all that, I agree with Chan and Ridley that COVID-19 might well have had a zoonotic origin after all. Depending on what you mean by "might well have", everyone can agree with that. But, as David Gorski said in May last year, "From the very beginning, the general scientific hypothesis has been that, while it is possible that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab, it's far more likely that it had a natural origin." 16. Scott Says: Comment #16 January 2nd, 2022 at 1:23 am Paul Hayes #15: Actually we now know, from FOIA'ed emails and so forth, that initial expert opinion about the origin of covid was much more evenly divided--until Peter Daszak, and others with obvious-yet-undisclosed conflicts of interest, managed to get the lab leak hypothesis labeled a "conspiracy theory" (and conflate it with Trump, QAnon, anti-China animus, the COVID-as-bioweapon theory, etc. etc.) which intimidated almost everyone into silence. In other words, the more open discussion that we've seen for the past ~6 months is not something new, but a reversion to what the range of expert opinions was like in January-February 2020. Read the book! 17. A Levskaya Says: Comment #17 January 2nd, 2022 at 2:13 am I just don't think the known early epidemiological evidence is that supportive of a WIV origin. Michael Worobey, who was a supportive signatory on the letter urging further exploration of origins, found upon reanalysis that all of the index cases really do seem to cluster on the Huanan market, well across the river from WIV. We also know due to the attendance of a number of WIV researchers in Singapore in early Dec 2019 for a Nippah virus conference that coronavirus couldn't have been widespread inside the institute at that point, or they probably would have carried it there much earlier. (We also know from an Australian virologist Danielle Anderson who was at WIV in November that there was no sign of any disease inside WIV at that point.) So you have to craft a pretty unlikely set of events to explain the absence of any more obvious nexus of cases around WIV that somehow instead exploded among some animal vendors across the river. I spent two decades doing synthetic biology work in immune cells, viruses, etc. It would make sense to *sequence* a large set of diverse samples... but not to actively culture every random sample they took. All of the synthetic metagenomic experiments ever outlined in grants (eg. furin site introduction, etc.) about the spike protein would almost certainly have taken place in a vector from the SARS1-clade. Even if for some perverse reason they used the previously known RAT13g, etc. in a new backbone construct, SARS-COV-2 would simply never arise from that, it's too distant. I suppose one could argue someone acquired it during some recent sampling mission... but all of this remains quite tenuous compared to the fact that we've seen 2 previous coronavirus epidemics from zoonotic crossover in only the previous 20 years, and that we know the Huanan wet market was selling tons of host species in awful conditions. 18. H2O Says: Comment #18 January 2nd, 2022 at 2:52 am The next time some eminent group of know it alls wants to opine on global warming, Trump, education, or anything outside their narrow specialties the first thing to think of should be the open letter at https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/ 6967-ecohealthltr/09c09853350d9794b271/optimized/full.pdf from 77 Nobel laureates forcefully supporting funding for Ecohealth Alliance. May their reputations forever be blemished 19. XD Says: Comment #19 January 2nd, 2022 at 3:19 am J Allen #12: Shouldn't you provide some evidence proportionate to such dramatic claims about the quality of the book? Otherwise it seems like you're just doing a drive-by smear-job. 20. Paul Hayes Says: Comment #20 January 2nd, 2022 at 4:05 am Scott #16: Where are you getting that "FOIA'ed emails and so forth" from? Does it really amount to an accurate representation of expert (in viral origins) opinion and show that lab leak and zoonotic origins were/are considered comparably likely? Reading the book won't help: as others have pointed out, Matt Ridley isn't a trustworthy source. My understanding of the progress of expert opinion on this issue is that it's the outright dismissal of the lab leak hypothesis has attracted criticism recently but it doesn't amount to a substantial revision of the relative plausibility of the two. 21. Thomas Kehrenberg Says: Comment #21 January 2nd, 2022 at 4:51 am Have you seen this article? https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ the-covid-lab-leak-theory-just-got-even-stronger Then last month a bunch of emails, uncovered by a lawsuit from the so-called White Coat Waste Project, returned the ball right back over the net. They comprised an exchange between the American virus-hunting foundation, the EcoHealth Alliance and its funders in the US government. The scientists discussed collecting viruses from bats in eight countries including Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos between 2016 and 2019. But to avoid the complication of signing up local subcontractors to their grants in those countries, they promised to send the samples to a laboratory they already funded. And where was this lab? Wuhan. EDIT: nevermind, I see that an article linked above already talks about this. 22. Scott Says: Comment #22 January 2nd, 2022 at 9:44 am H2O #18: What makes this difficult is that we know Trump would and did interfere with science for crass political reasons, in countless cases where there didn't also happen to be an actual defensible reason for doing so. It's analogous to a corrupt, out-of-control police force arresting someone with no probable cause, who coincidentally turns out to be an important suspect. Anyway, I'll endorse your comment if you agree never to opine on any subject outside your narrow expertise, or to note when lots of Nobel laureates agree with you, when they do! 23. Name J. Required Says: Comment #23 January 2nd, 2022 at 9:54 am Regarding the New Republic article, one thing stood out to me: most of the scenarios Ridley and Chan entertain would require improbably large and durable conspiracies to hide all solid evidence of a lab leak for at least two years. The same Peter Daszak who funneled millions of dollars in US research grants specifically into coronavirus research in the WIV was the only US representative on the WHO task force investigating the origins of the virus, and when later asked if they got a look at that virus database that was taken offline, he said: And we did not ask to see the data.... As you know, a lot of this work has been conducted with EcoHealth Alliance.... We do basically know what's in those databases. There is no evidence of viruses closer to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13 in those databases, simple as that. Here's a video of him saying that: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=GMllEF58944&t=3249s Btw, he was also the head of the Lancet investigation into the origins of Covid-19, later disbanded when people noticed. And I want to point out one thing: I hope that any normal person's first reaction to this is to demand proof, like how do we know that the person in the video is actually Peter Daszak, that Peter Daszak is a real person at all, and so on. And I want the reader to hold onto the feeling that motivates that, that what's being alleged is obviously monstrously wrong and can't possibly assumed to be real without overwhelming evidence. Because after seeing the evidence you'll be tempted to downplay just how wrong it all is, to protect your idea of the world where there's no improbable conspiracies. I think that the idea that a large enough conspiracy must eventually fall apart is predicated on the assumption that it's composed of evil people trying to perpetuate some villainy. Because the larger it is the more probable it becomes that it has to involve someone who is not that evil, or is more selfish than evil, and becomes a whistleblower. However when a conspiracy involves good people who are literally trying to save the world from future pandemics by protecting Science from evil people (or so they think about themselves) it doesn't easily fall apart like that and can achieve surprisingly much. In fact as we can see in this example, maybe the largest threat to such a conspiracy is conspirators getting too open about it because they honestly don't see anything wrong with what they are doing. Some sources: https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2414 https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/2020/11/ members-of-the-lancet-covid-commission-task-force-on-the-origins-of-sars-cov-2-named (yes, I did link to Peter Daszak's website) https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/ the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=856932 https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/ the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan / 24. Alex Zavoluk Says: Comment #24 January 2nd, 2022 at 9:56 am I greatly enjoyed Ridley's The Rational Optimist, so maybe I'll have to add this one to my list. 25. Scott Says: Comment #25 January 2nd, 2022 at 10:23 am Paul Hayes #20: If you dislike Matt Ridley--understandable, I suppose, given some of his other views--then spend a few hours reading Alina Chan's Twitter. You'll see many examples of these emails, where often the same virologists who publicly stood behind Daszak and EcoHealth, were privately expressing serious doubts to each other. I despise conspiracy thinking, which I've described as a known bug in the human nervous system. But it seems to me that you could take the most mainstream, epistemically cautious, anti-conspiracy-theory person in the world, and if they looked at this with fresh eyes and no political preconceptions, they'd say "well, obviously EcoHealth and WIV and NIAID should divulge whatever they know so there can be a credible investigation, and so they can be cleared if appropriate." But that obvious thing is the thing that hasn't happened. Instead, for two years there's been one crazy revelation after the next (WIV having collected many more SARS-CoV2-like viruses, RaTG13 having been well-known to WIV because of its connection to the Mojiang mine, EcoHealth and WIV having applied for a grant to add furin cleavage sites to SARS-like viruses, etc. etc.) that the principals hadn't seen to fit to mention until various online sleuths forced them to acknowledge it. Do you agree that this is not a good look? 26. Thomas Says: Comment #26 January 2nd, 2022 at 12:16 pm To my eye, the most striking aspect of the lab leak discourse is how the most intransigent and vocal zoonotic proponents are a particular type of scientist - virologists, a small specialized discipline comprised of people with a lot to lose professionally should a leak be proven. The second most intransigent and vocal proponents are journalists in their professional capacity trying to make people look like idiots. 27. fred Says: Comment #27 January 2nd, 2022 at 12:57 pm I haven't read the book, but I've had the following on my mind: My understanding is that in all previous serious viral outbreaks from animals, scientists were quickly able to trace the path the virus took through the animal populations (by literally catching animals, testing them, and sequencing the virus). And it's not clear (besides the lab hypothesis) why it hasn't been the case here. Another thought is that, if covid was able to transmit itself so easily from animals to humans, and vice-versa, across long distances, then we should expect that the animal world is itself currently totally overflowing with covid contaminations and mutations. That pool of the virus could be orders of magnitude bigger than in the human population. I've read now and then reports that pets and wild animals (e.g. deers) have been testing positive. And if that's the case I wonder how much of the new variants we see now or in the future could be re-emerging from new mutations in animal populations and from animal to human contamination... also, we would expect to see China deal with re-emergences of the virus even with strict zero tolerance measures... and it is the case that China is having local outbreaks now and then (a few hundred cases a day), but of course there's no way of knowing if that's from animal contamination or from the virus being imported through humans traveling to china (because I don't think they would share their data, and because covid is now so widespread, it's very difficult to trace particular paths of transmissions). 28. Patrick Dennis, MD Says: Comment #28 January 2nd, 2022 at 1:02 pm Ummon #6 "When authors put forth and portray a high degree of confidence in a theory that relies on features that are subsequently falsified by new evidence, the credibility of the theory and its advocates is undermined." No. If the theory is indeed falsified, the credibility of the theory is undermined; the credibility of its advocates hinges upon their reaction to the new information. 29. JimV Says: Comment #29 January 2nd, 2022 at 2:27 pm I don't have the standing or expertise to form a useful opinion on the subject, but I would rather not believe China's leaders and scientists want to engineer a virus to make it more dangerous. Not that I have much hope for humanity left, but that turning out to be true would end it. Fortunately, the more expert sources which I read (such as the Mike the Mad Biologist blog and its links) seem to believe a natural source for the virus is far more likely than any form of lab-leak. 30. Pete Says: Comment #30 January 2nd, 2022 at 2:54 pm I stopped reading your post after the third paragraph and ordered the book. It sounds very good and deals with a subject that I really want to understand. I need to read it and then I'll finish reading your post. 31. Scott Says: Comment #31 January 2nd, 2022 at 3:07 pm JimV #29: The most fundamental confusion in this subject--the thing people had to get past before the serious discussion could even start--is the idea that "natural origin" and "plandemic" are the only two possibilities. We know for a fact that WIV, like many other virology labs around the world, was and is collecting dangerous viruses and engineering them to make them even more dangerous. That's hardly a secret; papers about it are regularly published in journals including Science and Nature. Virologists have been doing this with the noble goal of predicting which natural viruses have the potential to evolve to cause a pandemic, and thereby averting a pandemic. The question is whether this work, instead, inadvertently caused the COVID-19 pandemic. To answer that question, it would obviously help to have full details about exactly which experiments WIV was doing on which viruses between 2016 and 2019. Incredibly, unbelievably, WIV has refused to divulge that information for the past two years. 32. Phil S Says: Comment #32 January 2nd, 2022 at 3:22 pm It's very frustrating how in most media articles about it, lab-related origin and manipulation are conflated. The lax precautions when collecting samples and low safety levels under which some of the viruses were handled in the lab make these scientists one of the highest-risk groups for a natural spillover in Wuhan. 33. Nick Drozd Says: Comment #33 January 2nd, 2022 at 3:38 pm Scott #16 > ... managed to get the lab leak hypothesis labeled a "conspiracy theory" (and conflate it with Trump, QAnon, anti-China animus, the COVID-as-bioweapon theory, etc. etc.) ... In the months before the 2020 election there was a Republican talking point floating around that said: China is an existential threat to America, human freedom, etc, and Trump is the only person who can save us. (This talking point even showed up in the comments of this blog.) But the whole lab leak theory episode illustrates what a massive liability Trump is to American stability. Suppose covid really did originate from a lab leak in China. If you were a Chinese official charged with manipulating public discourse in order to keep fingers pointed away from China, Trump would make your job much, much easier. Because of his well-known propensity for spewing lies and spreading all sorts of rumors and insane conspiracy theories, decent people don't want anything to do with anything he says. So to keep decent people from discussing the truth (the lab leak), you just have to get the truth associated with Trump and his lunatic followers. And that's all it takes! When the president is a notorious liar, all discourse becomes poisoned with distrust, and that makes foreign manipulation easy. 34. JimV Says: Comment #34 January 2nd, 2022 at 4:00 pm Scott, thanks for the clarification. I meant "to make it more dangerous" as "for the purpose of making it more dangerous". As I understand your reply, you are saying they were engineering viruses for the purpose of making them more understood and ultimately less dangerous. That being the case I would be more inclined personally to take them at their word that they were not working on the SC2 virus and did not leak it. Not that my opinion matters worth a hill of beans in this crazy world, but it makes me feel a bit better that way, without influencing anything important. 35. Michel Says: Comment #35 January 2nd, 2022 at 4:03 pm We can safely assume, rather than losing face, the PRC government will do anything to obfuscate the case of the -possible - origins of Covid-19. This was already visible in the reaction to the warning by Dr Li Wenliang - the first to publicly warn about the virus - and who later died of it. He was threatend to 'be brought to justice' for 'severly disturbing the social order'. 36. Alex Zavoluk Says: Comment #36 January 2nd, 2022 at 4:15 pm fred #27: It is definitely not the case that all zoonotic outbreaks could be quickly traced to their origin. SARS 1 took a year and a half, and Ebola still hasn't been pinned down after 50 years. Also, diseases like SARS 1 and MERS were substantially more severe, meaning it was easier to notice outbreaks. COVID is asymptomatic or mild in many people, but they can still spread it, so tracking down the first case is going to be harder. And those other diseases took quite a lot of effort to track down; if China doesn't want anyone to look, then it's unlikely they'll ever be found. Leave a Reply Comment Policy: All comments are placed in moderation and reviewed prior to appearing. 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