[HN Gopher] I'm not convinced by the new lab leak debunking
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       I'm not convinced by the new lab leak debunking
        
       Author : jeffmh
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2022-03-05 21:52 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.slowboring.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.slowboring.com)
        
       | Jerry2 wrote:
       | If anyone wants to go down the "lab leak" rabbit hole, check out
       | Charles Rixey's Substack [1]. He's assembled a massive database
       | of articles and a complete timeline of events [2] that lead to
       | COVID-19 pandemic. He's one of the members of DRASTIC which is a
       | loose group of researchers looking into the "lab leak"
       | hypothesis. [3][4][5]
       | 
       | [1] https://prometheusshrugged.substack.com/
       | 
       | [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353547700_SARS-
       | CoV-...
       | 
       | [3] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-
       | theory-...
       | 
       | [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRASTIC
       | 
       | [5] https://drasticscience.com/
        
       | jeffmh wrote:
       | The article (by Matt Yglesias) is more nuanced than the title may
       | suggest. Here's a quote that gets at the gist of the piece:
       | 
       | "The evidence really does show pretty clearly that there were one
       | or more superspreader events at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale
       | Market. I just don't think that's really what the lab leak debate
       | is about; it's about why there was a superspreader event at the
       | market. Did an infected animal pass it to people there or did a
       | person who got infected at the lab pass it to people there?"
        
         | bediger4000 wrote:
         | Thank you for including the "by Matt Yglesias". Yglesias
         | periodically admits to trolling, but as near as I can tell,
         | also wants to be taken Very Seriously sometimes. I personally
         | think he comes too close to "trolling" a lot of the time he
         | wants to be taken Very Seriously, so I have to be careful when
         | reading his takes. I would advise other people to also read
         | Matt Yglesias carefully to decide if he's trolling in any given
         | article.
        
           | _dain_ wrote:
           | poisoning the well
        
           | xxpor wrote:
           | I can't recall an actual article where he's trolling. That's
           | more of a twitter thing.
        
         | dluan wrote:
         | I would not take anything Matt Yglesias says seriously, at all.
        
           | mhh__ wrote:
           | Why?
        
       | pbiggar wrote:
       | Here's a rebuttal to this by one of the authors of the paper:
       | 
       | https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/14994061482517544...
        
         | timr wrote:
         | This is not a "rebuttal". This is terrible.
         | 
         | Rasmussen asserts things she could not possibly know (e.g. the
         | Wuhan lab did not have "the fucking virus" -- we don't know
         | _what_ they had or did not have, because the Chinese government
         | is not exactly being forthright on the matter), and focuses on
         | a corner of the article (a side debate about RaTG13 and the
         | physical proximity of it to Wuhan), while completely brushing
         | off the core argument of the piece: the authors of these papers
         | have not demonstrated that the early infections at the market
         | came from animals.
         | 
         | That's the whole ballgame. Rasmussen spends a lot of words
         | setting up and knocking down straw men, but there's nothing
         | else here. To make it worse, she is rude, dismissive, profane
         | and needlessly aggressive.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-03-05 23:00 UTC)