Comment by shlant
16 hours ago
almost nobody who understands the science and how viruses spread gives more credence to the lab leak theory over a zoonotic source. There are huge leaps of faith required by the lab leak theory that don't hold up against slight scrutiny. People will get into the weeds about "furin cleavage sites" etc. when none of that argumentation is necessary to determine the most likely source.
Quite the opposite. We have the Slack chat logs where virologists themselves say things like "it's so friggin likely it came from the lab", even after they published a paper claiming it was absolutely of natural origin. They were lying and knew they were lying, and the entirety of academia went along with it because they didn't want to take the blame for COVID or risk the funding that Fauci controlled.
Even Fauci himself kept a private diary where he wrote, "now we know the wet market was not the source, it was an amplifier" - while telling the public the opposite.
The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning. It's not just one line of evidence or inference, it's dozens. The only people I've met who still cling to the idea it wasn't a man-made pandemic tend to be people who work in public sector science themselves.
>We have the Slack chat logs where virologists themselves say things like "it's so friggin likely it came from the lab", even after they published a paper claiming it was absolutely of natural origin.
They said those things before publishing their paper.
You can read the messages here:
https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Proximal_Origin...
From what I can see, they start off by saying that the lab leak seems likely, and then re-evaluate in light of new evidence (see page 65, page 67 "again, it doesn't rule out lab infection/release, however, there is now no longer any ‘mysteries’ to explain"). This is just science being done. You can see them discover new evidence and update their beliefs. You can read how they revise their paper over time.
You can also see that they criticize other researchers for publicly decrying the lab leak theory absent sufficient evidence (page 23).
Here is the statement from the paper that you claim is a lie:
"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
I think that statement is measured and supported by the available evidence. They state that they can't rule out a lab origin but that it does not seem likely. If you don't buy the conclusion, the evidence to support that conclusion is all accurately laid out in the paper. You are free to draw your own conclusions.
do you realize that the entirety of the "evidence" you have presented is just hearsay? Slack messages and a diary? Seriously?
> The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning.
the irony
No it's not "hearsay", you can download the logs and diaries and read them for yourself. They are verified documentation.
I only bothered citing evidence relevant to your claim:
> almost nobody who understands the science and how viruses spread gives more credence to the lab leak theory
... which isn't true. Some of the people who pointed out early on that there was a coverup were molecular biologists (e.g. Alina Chan), virologists themselves admitted right up front it probably came from the lab despite their massive incentive to not conclude that, and it is obvious to anyone regardless of background that a novel coronavirus appearing literally right next to the only lab in the world doing GoF research on coronaviruses is not likely to be a coincidence.
The wet market was a distraction in the end caused by ascertainment bias. Most cases, once the data was fully collected, appeared along the length of a railway line with Wuhan Airport at one end and the WiV at the other.
But I have weary experience of this debate on Hacker News. Before anyone goes further with you, please confirm you do not yourself get grant money to do scientific research, nor have you in the past? Because way too many times over the years when this topic has come up the people most dismissive of the obvious facts about COVID have turned out to be epidemiologists, public health workers, virologists and so on - people with incentives to mislead the public about this topic and who have done so repeatedly. Fauci being a case in point, where there is abundant proof that he misled the public.
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>"it's so friggin likely it came from the lab", even after they published a paper
This particular was over a month before it was published, who's lying again? But this is discussions between colleagues as new evidence was coming in. If the investigation was tilted in the direction of the wet market we would have seen evidence of that, instead we see different people having different opinions on early and incomplete evidence and eventually coming to an agreement on what is more likely based on evidence they had at the end.
>"now we know the wet market was not the source, it was an amplifier"
Doesn't exclude that it was from natural origin. Amplifier meaning where it entered the human population and started spreading widely.
> The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong
There is a lot of conjecture for the lab leak theory, no real evidence. Meanwhile there's plenty of actual evidence that points to the wet market, such as the initial spread was clustered around the market.
>to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning.
This sentence alone is rather telling...
I am not the user you responded to, but you are making a fairly egregious logical error. China is an authoritarian, autocratic state. It will never permit any incriminating evidence to surface. Arguing that hard scientific evidence is required for us to come to any conclusions is a de facto rejection of any scenario in which China, its provinces, or any individuals are culpable of anything. Ever. This is much closer to an ideological position than a logical or evidence-based position.
In these situations we rely heavily on intelligence services. For example, the German secret service has assessed an 80-95% probability that it was leaked from a lab in Wuhan and presented a report to then Chancellor Angela Merkel. [The assessment was later leaked and was published in a German Newspaper.](https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/corona-bnd-china-li.3217...) I think the German intelligence services are far better equipped, resourced, and have far wider access to sensitive and privileged data, than either of us.
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