Wuhan Lab-leak Theory Timeline
Wuhan Institute of Virology is a research institute by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Jiangxia District, south of the Wuhan city, Hubei province, China, December 2016. Photo by Ureem2805, CC BY-SA 4.0
Over at The Washington Post, Fact Checker Glenn Kessler has a timeline laying out the Wuhan lab-leak theory that has the Covid-19 pandemic originating from the Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The timeline is a bit long, but the context is an important one. The “suddenly” there is going to get scoffed at by the group of folks who have maintained from the start that there was lab leak that was covered up to one degree or another. As Kessler notes, the Wuhan lab-leak theory emerged almost immediately, but between the Chinese government’s efforts to CYA any responsibility at all and the discussion of the virus turning into a social and political grenade that left some running for cover, some wielding it like a weapon, and a bunch of other folks not knowing who or what to believe, it has always labored under the most important and powerful players in this drama not wanting it discussed.
It’s also worth noting several things can be true at once. The Wuhan lab-leak theory doesn’t exclude a natural cause of Coronavirus before it’s rapid spread into a global pandemic, and doesn’t mean the leak was malicious or intentional. I doubt we ever find the real answer. The Wuhan lab-leak theory will probably be forever just that, unprovable and forever a source of controversy, conspiracy, and anger. There will be, and should be, investigations. With the Chinese government as it is, calls for investigations a year and half later are going to be so much spitting in the wind as far as truth finding goes. But it will be important to not memory hole who reacted how, who were honest brokers of information, who jammed current events into their ongoing agendas, and who can and can’t admit they maybe didn’t handle the Covid-19 crisis as well as they could have.
The Wuhan Lab-leak theory timeline:
Early speculation
Dec. 30, 2019: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issues an “urgent notice” to medical institutions in Wuhan, saying that cases of pneumonia of unknown cause have emerged from the city’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.Jan. 5, 2020: Earliest known tweet suggesting China created the virus. @GarboHK tweeted: “18 years ago, #China killed nearly 300 #HongKongers by unreporting #SARS cases, letting Chinese tourists travel around the world, to Asia specifically to spread the virus with bad intention. Today the evil regime strikes again with a new virus.”
Jan. 23: A Daily Mail article appears, headlined: “China built a lab to study SARS and Ebola in Wuhan — and U.S. biosafety experts warned in 2017 that a virus could ‘escape’ the facility that’s become key in fighting the outbreak.”
Jan. 26: The Washington Times publishes an article with the headline: “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” An editor’s note is added March 25: “Since this story ran, scientists outside of China have had a chance to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They concluded it does not show signs of having been manufactured or purposefully manipulated in a lab.”
Jan. 26: A study by Chinese researchers published in the Lancet of the first 41 hospitalized patients In Wuhan who had confirmed infections found that 13 of the 41 cases, including the first documented case, had no link to the seafood marketplace that originally was considered the origin of the outbreak.
Jan 30: Sen. Tom Cotton, speaking at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, says: “This coronavirus is a catastrophe on the scale of Chernobyl for China. But actually, it’s probably worse than Chernobyl, which was localized in its effect. The coronavirus could result in a global pandemic.” He adds: “I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”
Feb. 3: WIV researchers report in the journal Nature that the novel coronavirus spreading around the world was a bat-derived coronavirus. The report said SARS-CoV-2 is 96.2 percent identical at the whole-genome level to a bat coronavirus named RaTG13. (This is roughly equivalent to the difference in the genomes of humans and orangutans.)
Feb. 6: Botao Xiao, a molecular biomechanics researcher at South China University of Technology, posts a paper stating that “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.” He pointed to the previous safety mishaps and the kind of research undertaken at the lab. He withdrew the paper a few weeks later after Chinese authorities insisted no accident had taken place.
Feb. 9: In response to criticism from China’s ambassador that Cotton’s remarks are “absolutely crazy,” the senator tweets: “Here’s what’s not a conspiracy, not a theory: Fact: China lied about virus starting in Wuhan food market. Fact: super-lab is just a few miles from that market. Where did it start? We don’t know. But burden of proof is on you & fellow communists. Open up now to competent international scientists.”
Feb. 16: Cotton, in response to a Washington Post article critical of him, offers four scenarios on Twitter: “1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market) 2. Good science, bad safety (e.g., they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred). 3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach). 4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in). Again, none of these are ‘theories’ and certainly not ‘conspiracy theories.’ They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence.”
Scientists respond
Feb. 19: A statement is published in Lancet by a group of 27 scientists: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” the statement says. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The statement was drafted and organized by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, which funded research at WIV with U.S. government grants. (Three of the signers have since said a laboratory accident is plausible enough to merit consideration.)March 11: Scientific American publishes a profile of virologist Shi Zhengli, who heads a group that studies bat coronaviruses at WIV. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” she said. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?” The article said that after the virus emerged, Shi frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, but she “breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves.” She told the magazine: “That really took a load off my mind. I had not slept a wink for days.”
March 17: An analysis published in Nature Medicine by an influential group of scientists states: “Although the evidence shows that SARSCoV-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 [receptor- binding domain] and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
The intelligence community weighs in
March 27: A Defense Intelligence Agency assessment on the origin of the coronavirus is updated to include the possibility that the new coronavirus emerged “accidentally” due to “unsafe laboratory practices.”April 2: David Ignatius, writing in The Washington Post, notes: “The prime suspect is ‘natural’ transmission from bats to humans, perhaps through unsanitary markets. But scientists don’t rule out that an accident at a research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly bat virus that had been collected for scientific study.”
April 14: Josh Rogin, writing in The Post, reveals that in 2018, State Department officials visited the WIV and “sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.”
April 22: Yuri Deigin, a biotech entrepreneur, in a long and detailed post on Medium, reviews “gain-of-function” research undertaken at the lab and concludes that “from a technical standpoint, it would not be difficult for a modern virologist to create such a strain” as the new coronavirus. He adds: “The opposite point is worth repeating too: the inverse hypothesis about the exclusively natural origin of the virus does not yet have strong evidence either.”
April 24: Under pressure from the White House, the National Institutes of Health terminates the grant to EcoHealth Alliance that funded study of bat coronaviruses at WIV.
April 30: President Donald Trump tells reporters: “You had the theory from the lab. … There’s a lot of theories. But, yeah, we have people looking at it very, very strongly.”
May 3: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says in an interview with ABC News: “There’s enormous evidence that that’s where this began. … Remember, China has a history of infecting the world, and they have a history of running substandard laboratories. These are not the first times that we have had the world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab.”
New evidence emerges
July 4: The Times of London reports that a virus 96 percent identical to the coronavirus that causes covid-19 was found in an abandoned copper mine in China in 2012. The bat-infested copper mine in southwestern China was home to a coronavirus that left six men sick with pneumonia, with three eventually dying, after they had been tasked with shoveling bat guano out of the mine. This virus was collected in 2013 and then stored and studied at WIV.July 31: Science magazine publishes an interview with Shi Zhengli of WIV. She said it was impossible for anyone at the institute to have been infected, saying “to date, there is ‘zero infection’ of all staff and students in our institute.” She added: “President Trump’s claim that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from our institute totally contradicts the facts. It jeopardizes and affects our academic work and personal life. He owes us an apology.” In the interview, she admitted that some coronavirus research was conducted at biosafety level 2, not the more restrictive BSL-4.
Nov. 17: An influential paper written by Rossana Segreto and Yuri Deigin is published: “The genetic structure of SARS-CoV-2 does not rule out a laboratory origin.” The paper noted that “a natural host, either direct or intermediate, has not yet been identified.” It argues that certain features of the coronavirus “might be the result of lab manipulation techniques such as site-directed mutagenesis. The acquisition of both unique features by SARS-CoV-2 more or less simultaneously is less likely to be natural or caused only by cell/animal serial passage.” The paper concluded: “On the basis of our analysis, an artificial origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not a baseless conspiracy theory that is to be condemned,” referencing the Lancet statement in February.
Nov. 17: WIV researchers, including Shi, post an addendum to their Feb. 3 report in Nature, acknowledging that RaTG13, the bat coronavirus closely associated with the coronavirus, was found in a mine cave after several patients had fallen ill with “severe respiratory disease” in 2012 while cleaning the cave.
Jan. 4, 2021: New York magazine publishes a lengthy article by Nicholson Baker, who reviews the evidence and concludes the lab-leak scenario is more compelling than previously believed.
Jan. 15: Days before Trump leaves office, the State Department issues a “fact sheet” on WIV that states: “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses. … The WIV has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses. But the WIV has not been transparent or consistent about its record of studying viruses most similar to the covid-19 virus, including ‘RaTG13,’ which it sampled from a cave in Yunnan Province in 2013 after several miners died of SARS-like illness.”
Jan. 20: Joe Biden becomes president.
Feb. 9: A joint report by the World Health Organization and China declares: “The findings suggest that the laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain introduction of the virus into the human population.”
Feb. 11: WHO Secretary General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus refuses to rule out the lab-leak scenario. “Some questions have been raised as to whether some hypotheses have been discarded,” he said. “I want to clarify that all hypotheses remain open and require further study.”
Feb. 19: National security adviser Jake Sullivan issues a statement about the WHO report: “We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them. It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government. To better understand this pandemic and prepare for the next one, China must make available its data from the earliest days of the outbreak.”
March 22: The Australian newspaper reports: “Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers working on coronaviruses were hospitalized with symptoms consistent with covid-19 in early November 2019 in what U.S. officials suspect could have been the first cluster.”
May 5: Former New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reviews the evidence and makes a strong case for the lab-leak theory. He focuses in particular on the furin cleavage site, which increases viral infectivity for human cells. His analysis yields this quote from David Baltimore, a virologist and former president of the California Institute of Technology: “When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus. These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2.”
May 14: Eighteen prominent scientists publish a letter in the journal Science, saying a new investigation is needed because “theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.” One signer is Ralph Baric, a virologist who worked closely with Shi.
May 17: Another former New York Times science reporter, Donald G. McNeil Jr., posts on Medium: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory.” He quotes W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University — who had signed the March 2020 letter in Nature Medicine — as saying his mind had changed in light of new information.
Hrm. So it might be a chimera after all.
“Now what?”, I suppose the question is.Report
“Now what” in terms of investigation or in terms of adjusting people’s reputations? I doubt there’s any “now what” about treatment; maybe some about lab safety.Report
If you want to flash back to what we knew last march:
(It has since had a correction added)
Report
“Suddenly became credible”
Report
It’s the perfect trap.
If you refuse to reconsider earlier positions in light of new evidence, you obviously have an agenda.
And if you change your position, you obviously have an agenda.
Out of curiosity, were those Vox pieces written by the same person?Report
It’s not the reconsidering of earlier positions in light of new evidence that is the problem.
Indeed, that’s *SCIENCE*.
It’s the “THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED!” followed by “OKAY, NOW THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED!” followed by “OKAY, *NOW* THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED!” that is the problem.
Pivoting from “that position is not credible!” to “okay, that position suddenly became credible” that is the problem.
Out of curiosity, were those Vox pieces written by the same person?
The Vox piece was a single piece. Originally published in March 2020, then editorially updated on May 24th, 2021.Report
What is the difference between ” reconsidering of earlier positions in light of new evidence” and “Pivoting from “that position is not credible!” to “okay, that position suddenly became credible” ?Report
It’s the difference between a media consensus and a scientific consensus.Report
I’m fairly certain none of the scientists – here or in the media – said the science was settled. We did say – which was a remains true – that the longer this goes on the more we know.Report
This is an excellent point that seems to have been ignored.Report
So @juliaoftoronto screwed up. Grab the pitchforks.Report
Where does Alex Jones go to get his reputation back?Report
Was that a subtle attempt to conflate everyone who disagrees with you with Alex Jones? If so, very subtle. Couldn’t have been subtler.Report
To be fair to everyone, some people had honest questions about theory #1;
Many were not; many, most, of the people pushing theories 2-6 were in fact bad faith conspiracists and trolls.
Were media outlets unfair to the honest brokers by conflating them with Alex Jones?
Yeah, probably.Report
Indeed she did!
I’m not calling for pitchforks.
I do think that the use of the term “conspiracy theory” was inappropriate to the point where I will notice its casual use in the future.Report
The term “conspiracy theory” is an interesting one.
I mean, conspiracies do exist. They’re real things that happen.
If the virus indeed originated in a lab and that was covered up, it would indeed involve a conspiracy: many people would have been involved in the cover up.
However, ‘conspiracy theory’ has become shorthand for dismissing a non-mainstream explanation.
The headline definitely seems to be using the latter, colloquial definition. And yet… if the “lab theory” is correct, it would indeed be a conspiracy.
Go figure.Report
Let’s engage in some fun word substitution using the full phrase that you say “conspiracy theory” is shorthand for:
In a public health crisis, non-mainstream explanations are a distraction.
That headline reads a hell of a lot differently now.Report
You missed the “dismissing” part.
The headline was undoubtedly intended to delegitimize certain explanations for the source of Covid.
I’m just noting that when we allow “conspiracy theory” to mean that, we lose the ability to discuss actual… theories about conspiracies.
There may indeed have been a conspiracy to hide the true origin of Covid! This is definitely a theory worth investigating! But we can’t actually call it a conspiracy theory because that delegitimizes it from jump.Report
Meh, you don’t need a conspiracy. You can come up with explanations for why it was an emergent theory that came up independently among multiple, diverse media groups from NPR to Vox.
See? Both then-Pres Trump *AND* Pompeo both suggested they’d seen evidence this was formed in a lab.Report
I do believe we’ve ceased talking about the same thing.
If it came from a lab, there was undoubtedly a conspiracy to hide that fact. Many many people worked in concert with one another to present an alternative explanation for its origin. That clearly fits the definition of a conspiracy.
But we’re not talking about accusations of a conspiracy.
We’re talking about this possible explanation being written off by dubbing it a “conspiracy theory.”
“What ya gonna belief… the truth or those whacky conspiracy theories?”
I have no problem with Vox or any other outlet reporting 14 months ago that all/most of the available data and analysis points towards this thing occurring naturally. And I’d prefer if those same outlets changed their reporting in light of new information. And I wouldn’t even fault them for taking a stance of, “Who cares where it came from right now the focus is on what to do?”
The issue — as you point out — arises from completely delegitimizing a possible explanation by framing it as a “conspiracy theory.”
Tl;dr: As far as I understand your point, I agree with you. Do you even agree with yourself?Report
If it came from a lab, there was undoubtedly a conspiracy to hide that fact. Many many people worked in concert with one another to present an alternative explanation for its origin. That clearly fits the definition of a conspiracy.
Oh, yeah. On China’s part?
If it leaked from a lab, yep. China conspired to make and keep that particularly secret.
Remember when China argued that Covid came from a U.S. Army Base?
I have no problem with Vox or any other outlet reporting 14 months ago that all/most of the available data and analysis points towards this thing occurring naturally.
I suppose that I wouldn’t either (though I would prefer a phrasing that pointed out “all available data and analysis would fit in a thimble at this point” and move from there to “people who argue that they know that it came from X, or Y, or Z are arguing for a position that the evidence does not yet support… whether for X, or Y, or Z.”).
But arguing that the scientific consensus has debunked Theory X and then going back and undebunking it indicates that there are problems with premature removal of hypotheses from discussion.
And, worse than that, there are conspiracies theories that are true.
It’s almost enough to make you wonder whether there’s a coordination effort or something somewhere…
Or, at the very least, that the media does not know the difference between a media consensus and a scientific one.Report
Yep, I’d agree with that.
Many aspects of Covid became politicized. And for those whose political or political-adjacent agenda were primary, they acted accordingly.
I will push back on that inclusion of long-winded disclaimers such as the one you offer. But maybe I’m too optimistic.
I would love us to be at a point where a sincerely written science article can say, “The data supports X,” and a later article can say, “The data now supports Y,” and any honest person can understand that data changes and as a result the conclusions drawn from that data changes and we don’t need to always yell “DATA SUBJECT TO CHANGE!”
Semi-relatedly, the insistence of articles and headlines to write in absolutes is a major issue here.
Why did they have to “debunk” a “conspiracy theory”? Why can’t it just be enough to say, “All available evidence supports this theory and other theories are very unlikely to be true”? I mean, we know why that is. But why do we insist on making it so?Report
“Why did they have to “debunk” a “conspiracy theory”?”
Because Trump said it.Report
I concur. See my comment below.Report
The old “I’d tell you but then I’d have to kill you.” defense. You don’t think loudmouth Trump would have spilled to someone if he’d actually seen something?Report
“If you refuse to reconsider earlier positions in light of new evidence, you obviously have an agenda.”
reconsidering your earlier position in light of new evidence looks a lot more intellectually sound when your earlier position wasn’t “what I think is obviously true and if you disagree then you’re either a damn liar or a damn fool.”
reconsidering your earlier position in light of new evidence looks a lot more intellectually sound when your position is “here’s why I thought what I thought, and here’s why I now think differently”, and less so when it’s “well technically, I didn’t say exactly the thing that you’re saying I said.”
and when the earlier position that you’re reconsidering involved several million people dying in about ten months, you maybe want that reconsideration to look as intellectually sound as you can manage.Report
It’s an impossible world.
“Well, it seems like X is most likely to be true?”
“SEEMS? MOST LIKELY??? BULLSPIT! Why should we trust you when you don’t even trust yourself.”
“Okay, let’s try again… It is obvious that X is not only true but is so true that any consideration of other potential truths is ridiculous.”
…
“I’d like to reconsider my earlier position.”
“YOU MEAN THE ONE YOU INSISTED WAS THE ONLY POSSIBLE EXPLANATION?!?!?!?!”
Most discourse these days is not about the exchange of ideas or pursuit of knowledge, but about making the other person look like a jackhole.Report
Kazzy
we have repeatedly explained to you
that it’s not “this is most likely to be true” that concerns us
it’s “if you question what we’re saying, you’re an idiot” that concerns us
it’s “the government is telling us the science and science is always right and there’s no possible reason to disagree other than you being pointlessly argumentative and probably racist” that concerns us
it’s “I wasn’t wrong before, you’re just a moron who misunderstood me then and you’re still misunderstanding me now” that concerns us
it is the unrestrained joy that people took in, as you put it, making the other person look like a jackhole when the other person said things like “the official story on this one strains credulity, maybe we should look into it” that concerns us
they can say “I changed my mind based on new information” and that’s great, that’s actually what we want, but a year ago they weren’t saying “here’s what we think but we are entirely willing to reconsider as soon as we receive new information”, they were saying “this question has been answered and there’s no reason to look into it anymore and only Trumpie Trumpkins would ever think it worth discussing further. Black Lives Matter.”
basically,
“I’d like to reconsider my earlier position.”
“YOU MEAN THE ONE YOU INSISTED WAS THE ONLY POSSIBLE EXPLANATION?!?!?!?!”
yeah!
this!
because the people who insisted there was only one possible explanation were giant assholes about it
and what’s concerning us is how we’re all just supposed to pretend that didn’t happenReport
“The cruelty is the point.”Report
Are we concerned that this standard of “what concerns us” might be applied to Republicans?Report
Obviously, it is worth investigating this for the sake of finding out what happened. And such an investigation should be pursued to the extent that the Chinese government doesn’t block it. And if the Chinese government does block it, that fact should be made clear to the world.
As far as we know now, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to suspect any deliberate action behind the creation and spread of the virus, but it is still worth finding out how this happened if we can.
Knowing whether the virus came from a fish market or an infected lab worker probably would not have made much difference in real time in dealing with the spread of the virus, so finding that out then was likely a low priority with so much else to worry about, and it is unsurprising that preliminary views changed over time when we developed more information and had more time to devote to the question.
Not that any of this will stop certain types of people from making political hay over it.Report
Both sides make hay when they can. I’d rather each side did some self-examination. Anyone who unconditionally accepted the idea that a novel virus naturally appeared near a virus lab, simply because Vox told them to, they should be doing some reconsidering of their sources and their thought processes.Report
So tell me about your sources and thought processes, if any.Report
I think you may be responding to a typo in my first draft.Report
Anyone who “unconditionally accepted” any theory of how the virus spread is a damn fool. The Vox reporting seems to have been a fairly responsible account of what was then known or suspected and its more recent reporting seems to be a fairly responsible update based on new information. Which is what we ought to expect. So tell me about your sources and thought processes, if any.Report
We should also note which players were completely incurious and unquestioningly parroted propaganda because it was temporarily convenient.
Might come in handy in the future.Report
Tom Cotton and Rand Paul are probably safe no matter what. Oh, you don’t mean them?Report
Who else could I possibly have meant?Report
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/05/20/no-science-clearly-shows-that-covid-19-wasnt-leaked-from-a-wuhan-lab/?sh=7a6a9a965585&fbclid=IwAR0SfRGX7r4P7bJgW3pAM7KstcW5Jhpq6t0YJr9IYuS1LupD1C4EOgeHays
“…..This means, right off the bat, that if SARS-CoV-2 were engineered for the purpose of infecting and severely harming humans, it would have had to have been tested in at least hundreds of human subjects in order for scientists to know how effective it was. While we do have the ability to manipulate the genomes of viruses, or any other organism, for that matter, what we don’t have the ability to do is to know how that will translate into effects of the virus in human (or any living) subjects.”
“There’s no technological reason why a researcher couldn’t have switched the codons for one amino acid, like tyrosine, into the codons for another one, like alanine. But then what? You can’t make a virus more deadly — or, at the very least, you have no way of knowing what that switch would do to the virus — by switching out one amino acid for another. No virologist living today has that knowledge; that’s not how this scientific field works. Without intensive and extensive studies of the virus in human beings, which we know we need because of the inherent genetic variabilities in human populations, we cannot predict what the resultant effects in humans will be.”Report
Yeah, people who suddenly think this theory is credible need to read this article. A lot of the conspiracy theory is based on weird observational bias concept of ‘Multiple things happened in this virus that we don’t normally see in viruses’, which…duh?
A pandemic-causing virus is, by definition, going to have unique features. The coronavirus that escapes into the human population has to be, in some manner, different than the ones that _don’t_. It has be better at what it does. Of course something uncommon happened, because _we don’t commonly have pandemics_. We have them once every 100 years, in fact, which considering the rate of reproduction of viruses and amount of them means the mutations requires can be _incredibly unlikely_, like ‘getting stuck by lighting while winning the six lotteries at once’ unlikely.
And, as that article points out…we have literally no way to engineer those features. Yes, we can change the genetic structure of viruses however we want, but we have literally no idea of what the _results_ will be.
We are nowhere near the level of genetic engineering that allows us to introduce new traits and know what they do (Or even have them do anything.), we’re still at ‘breaking this genetic sequence and seeing what happens’. with the rare ‘copying and pasting genetic sequence to see what happens’. We can’t invent _new_ genetic sequences yet.
Not would we have to test any modifications on hundreds of people, as the article points out, we’d also have to test the random modifications that _failed_ on a bunch of people, and at that point you’re talking about such large scale…I can’t even imagine what is being alleged at this point.
Also…RaTG13, the bat coronavirus, does _not_ appear to be the ancestor of Covid 19. So everything talking about how the lab was doing research on _that_ is nonsense.Report
People never find “stuff happens” to be a comforting thing. Whether COVID-19 came from a bat disease deciding to jump to humans or a lab accident is stuff happens. Stuff happens deprives people of a villain to be punished and doesn’t quench their first for vengeance. If this was a result of intentional experiments in Wuhan than every Asian becomes an acceptable target to those that want blood even if the Asian is Vietnamese rather than Chinese.Report
I think it’s important to segment the matter as one of scientific prudence and auditing rather than political side taking.
The highlevel survey of possible origins looks like this:
1. Zoological
2. Zoological related to work at Wuhan institute (i.e. bat guano thesis)
3. Natural Virus Lab Leak via negligence/accident
4. Natural Virus Lab Leak via gross-negligence/protocol failure
5. Engineered Virus Lab Leak (Gain of Function via various techniques)… Negligence/Gross-Negligence
6. “Bio-Engineered” weapon with malicious intent.
Personally, I think #6 was never really on the table… and I’m fine excluding it (absent some ‘smoking gun’ evidence) from polite conversation.
But #1 – #5? All plausible. And our position should be that it is important to understand whether ‘mistakes were made’ (scenarios 2 thru 5) by entities we trust with important research and funding such that those entities (and people) might be sanctioned from future funding and/or leadership roles in research and/or Lab management.
If we find that #5 played a role, there absolutely should be a review of the risks associated with Gain of Function research and weather it needs to be restricted to Labs with better safety protocols… or whether the benefits even out weigh the risks.
But the primary takeaway before it gets politicized (more than already) is that proclaiming that #1 was the and ONLY possible cause *without* access to all the data … and with the data suppressed at the source. Well, that’s a failure that may prohibit us from definitively making a conclusion about this event… but it is also a failure that should change our Funding and Research sharing processes – which are global and standards based.
This should be the baseline… it’s an Audit, and if you’re the Wuhan Instutite studying a virus that’s also the source of a Global Pandemic… then yes, all your data and records and personnel records *have* to be reviewed without redaction. That’s part of the Scientific Method. If this is prohibited, then it’s an epistemic failure that must result in scientific sanctions.Report
This is reminiscent of the recent “now that we’re demasking let’s not make this political” article. The events of the past year actually happened. They’ve been bullying the short kid until he shows up for 7th grade bigger than everyone else, and now they’re saying we should move past bullying?
Personally, I’m not looking to trash anyone. But the people who’ve been horrid have been noted.Report
As someone who has followed this from the beginning, I’m not sure I’m on-board with your point.
In May 2020, it wasn’t in fact that important to identify the source as it was to coordinate a good response. in May 2021 auditing sources is now an appropriate project.
Some folks talking about sources in May 2020 were failing in their duty to prioritize coordinating a good response.
Some folks who wanted to shut down discussion in May 2020 possibly did so in bad-faith on one and maybe two counts… unless they are totally vindicated by scenario #1.
All of these things actually happened and it doesn’t change the fact that you do the arson review after you control the fire.Report
As someone who checks in on conspiracy theories from time to time, this whole thing of “okay, maybe this particular conspiracy theory was true” is, like, a reason to check up on them more often.Report
Yeah… I suspect an Ox or two may be gored along the way… and I’m not really competent to say who’s. BUT, the crew that jumped in to action to suppress any discussion/investigation seem to be the owners of many Oxen.
I still think that’s a second order phenomenon as surely the scientific consensus once the fire is out is to have a full investigation, right?
I mean, why would you not?Report
BUT, the crew that jumped in to action to suppress any discussion/investigation seem to be the owners of many Oxen.
The take on this that I could not possibly agree with more said, rather elegantly: “if scientific consensus can shift maybe banning people for questioning it is a mistake”.Report
Is there a “whole thing of ‘okay, maybe this particular conspiracy was true'”? An accidental leak or a sick lab worker, which look more plausible than they once did, isn’t a conspiracy theory. Is someone worth listening to still flogging the real conspiracy theories that were actually going around, and is anyone buying them?Report
Much of the initial science reporting *wasn’t* conspiracy theories though… it required a sort of distortion to associate/obfuscate initial reporting with less credible conspiracies. But that’s a different audit.Report
From what I understood at the time, a “lab leak” theory was the conspiratorial one. There’s a Vox article that debunks these conspiracies, if you want to read it.
Zoonotic theories were the non-conspiratorial one.
Was Rand Paul right about *ANYTHING*?Report
OK. I’m all for investigation. I was more reacting to “before it gets politicized (more than already)”.Report
“Wuhan Flu” had no purpose other than to distract from Trump’s laziness and incompetence. Anyone who says anything else is selling something (something well past its sell-by date, though even before that it was already rancid.)Report
“Wuhan Flu” and “Chinese coronavirus” were the preferred terms in the press initially, which is typical with flus. Then it became a political football. The press then shifted to “novel coronavirus”, “covid-19”, et cetera. I don’t fault them for using more scientific terms to avoid politics, but since all of us are more than 1 year old, I have to fault you for your memory or for selling something. Even more so because you’re the first one to bring up the naming debate.Report
Trump and his lackeys still call it that.Report
If you defy people, they’ll often not change.Report
And by “defy”, you mean insisting their god-king lost?Report
Wuhan Flu is the same distraction if it came from a wet-market vs. a lab leak in Wuhan/China.
I don’t think that particular distraction is relevant to this matter…
I acknowledge that Trump’s initial bungling of the matter (compared to his middle and late bungling) was hoping to deflect attention away from his bungling.
That isn’t an excuse to ignore another institution’s bungling, even if Trump’s deflection was in bad faith.Report
If by “distraction” you mean not changing his use of terminology when the press decided to, and by “bungling” you mean federalism plus overseeing the creation of an unprecedented vaccine.Report
And the bleach thing was all part of the cunning plan.Report
An adjacent phenomenon that is of interest:
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Everyone should bookmark this for next time we debate the state of the Hollywood film industry. It is all right here.Report
There are quite a few people who seem to care very strongly about what China’s official position happens to be.
Remember this guy from the WHO?
Remember this report from NPR on the WHO’s investigation into the virus’s origin?
Anyway, there are quite a few people who seem to care very strongly about what China’s official position happens to be.Report
I blame the state courts in Arizona and Georgia. The Arizona court forced Maricopa County to turn over 2.1M ballots and all their voting machines, despite no evidence that fraud had happened and despite the consequences. Something similar is now happening in Georgia. The conspiracy nuts are beginning to think that they will be allowed to rummage through whatever records whenever they want. China has declined to allow them to do that.Report
Georgia is still controlled by Putin, is it not?Report
No business in this world is giving up a $16 billion market.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/296431/filmed-entertainment-revenue-worldwide-by-country/Report
I do not disagree with this insight one bit!
Indeed, there are quite a few people who want access to a piece of that $16B.Report
So, scientific point of order. None of @marchmaine’s 1-5 is a theory. The are all hypotheses, some more easily testable the others. But science doesn’t elevate things to being a theory until there’s lots of replicable data.
As in all things, words matter in science.Report
If I smoosh hypotheses 2 through 5 together, and accuse anyone who believes #3 to be arguing for #6, would someone who calls me out on that be operating unscientifically?Report
(applause)Report
If someone smooshes hypotheses 2 through 5 together, and accuses the mainstream media of suppressing the secret truth of #6, is it fair to call them a conspiracist?Report
Who accused the mainstream media of suppressing the secret truth of #6?
But, sure. Without hearing your answer to my question there, I’d say that that’s a fair accusation to make.Report
Well, actually I guess no one, anywhere accused the mainstream media of covering up Chinese bio-engineering with malevolent intent.
So..Yay, we all agree there was no coverup by the mainstream media!Report
Covid would be really stupid as a bioweapon.
Not fatal enough. Not transmittable enough. Your optimal target would be young and healthy, Covid goes for the old and sick. Ideally you’d have a vaccine (and have vaccinated your own population) before you release it and not need to wait for the Americans to make one.
At a bare minimum you could stockpile N95s without raising any suspicion because other countries (like us) have occasionally done that.Report
I guess no one, anywhere accused the mainstream media of covering up Chinese bio-engineering with malevolent intent.
If you want to point out an example for me to denounce, I’ll let you dig it up and then I can denounce it.
Until then, I think that the examples of what Vox actually did (and that I linked an example of) is more interesting than FirstNameBunchaNumbers on twitter (who has 3 followers and started an account in April 2021) tweeting out “THE LAMESTREAM MEDIA COVERED UP A BIOATTACK”.
And doubly so without so much as an example of FirstNameBunchaNumbers tweeting that.Report
I’m still having a hard time seeing the Vox story as anything more than stating a 90% certainty, when today we know it is more like 80%.
Is there something bigger than that?Report
It depends on whether the Vox story is a stand-alone one or a representative example of several such stories.
How many examples of “several such stories” would it take for me to provide for you to admit that the Vox story is not a stand-alone story but a representative example from the time?Report
Let’s guess that your answer is “Five”.
Here is an article from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
NPR discusses how the lab leak theory has been debunked here.
Here’s a paper from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
And National Geographic wrote about it here. (Let me know if you need a hint on how to read it without scrolling down.)
Is five good?Report
And if you’d like a collection of media articles that doesn’t rely on obscure organizations like the ACDFR or the CIDRP, there’s this thread here (it contains examples from the NYT, CNN, the Washington Post, Politico, NPR, and the BBC):
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Famously non-partisan Drew Holden FTW. “Ha, ha, told you it was the kung flu.”Report
He’s partisan, therefore the things he points to can be dismissed?
If we weren’t in the middle of a story about a bunch of media organizations taking that attitude about Trump, we wouldn’t be discussing the whole “debunked conspiracy theory now suddenly credible” phenomenon.Report
Let’s just say he’s not my first source for news.Report
How do you feel about the NYT, CNN, the Washington Post, Politico, NPR, and the BBC?Report
No qualms at all with the reporting of any of those, with the caveat that I’m hardly familiar with Politico, and since I don’t have cable I’m not overly familiar with the straight news section of CNN, either.Report
I’m having the same trouble as you are seeing the problem here. Responsible reporting in real time updated when new information surfaces. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Insert obligatory Keynes quote here.Report
OK so the point here is that media outlets often run like a herd with a Conventional Wisdom which doesn’t really have much grounding in fact, but is presented as such?
That’s true enough to where it is pretty much the conventional wisdom.Report
The point here is that there is a difference between a scientific consensus and a media consensus.
And that the latter is quite regularly portrayed as the former and, get this, alternate hypotheses are excluded from “the discourse” based on the media consensus as if it were representative of the scientific one.Report
Right, but is that the fault of the media? How people take their reporting is outside the control of media organs.Report
How is “THIS THEORY HAS BEEN DEBUNKED!” being interpreted as “the theory has been debunked” the fault of the media?
I’m sure you can’t be asking what I think you’re asking so I guess I need you to clarify your question.Report
My point applies to the original reporting. The media was reporting on scientists being skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis. Oftentimes, the formulators of the hypothesis couched it in sinister terms, to created more smoke to obscure the U.S. administration’s bad response to rising American cases.
I think Kazzy states the objection a little more clearly below. And CJ does it a little more colloquially even further down.Report
Its a staple complaint among my leftist friends that most media outlets fail to distinguish complexity and nuance, and portray complex scientific issues with dumbed down simplicity.
And further, they have this herd mentality where once a major outlet says something, the rest often follow along.
The only objection I raise here is that when people talk about “the media” or “the discourse” or the “the narrative” they commit the same error.
There is no “Media”. The cable news outlets operate very differently than Fox News or OAN, which operate differently than the NYT or the Guardian.
Referring to them all as a singular implies a level of coordination and control which approaches conspiracy theory level of absurdity.Report
which approaches conspiracy theory level of absurdity
Huh.
There is no “Media”. The cable news outlets operate very differently than Fox News or OAN, which operate differently than the NYT or the Guardian.
So, like, what if I were to show a selection of “the media” that you agree were not, like, Fox or OAN but, instead, the NYT, CNN, the Washington Post, Politico, NPR, and the BBC?
And made the caveat that my interest was not disreputable sources like Fox or OAN but reputable ones like the NYT, CNN, the Washington Post, Politico, NPR, and the BBC?Report
What point of mine are you trying to counter?Report
What point of mine are you trying to counter?
You may have to scroll up for a ways to see it.
It goes back to when I asked the (rhetorical!) question “If I smoosh hypotheses 2 through 5 together, and accuse anyone who believes #3 to be arguing for #6, would someone who calls me out on that be operating unscientifically?”
You may remember that you responded with asking, presumably rhetorically, “If someone smooshes hypotheses 2 through 5 together, and accuses the mainstream media of suppressing the secret truth of #6, is it fair to call them a conspiracist?”
I asked for an example of this happening but, yes, I agreed that it would be fair to call them a conspiracist.
Then I provided multiple examples of media that even you would agree shouldn’t be clumped in with Fox or OAN engaging in so-called “conspiracy theory” suppression.
Which, I’d argue, should be put into a different category than FirstnameBunchanumbers on Twitter.Report
OK, but your links don’t show anything than can honestly be called “suppression.”
Have you considered that you are seeing “slight exaggeration” and “conventional wisdom” and ginning it up into some sinister coordinated message control?Report
By pointing out that a conspiracy theory has been debunked by a scientific consensus, that’s not suppressing the conspiracy theory?
Um… what word would you prefer I use?
Have you considered that you are seeing “slight exaggeration” and “conventional wisdom” and ginning it up into some sinister coordinated message control?
No, not really. My evidence for this is stuff like the “lab leak theory timeline”.
The original post is about it.Report
No, it really isn’t “suppressing the conspiracy theory”, not at all.
Because at the time, and even right now, the evidence for the lab leak theory was and is very thin.
Its completely fair to say that those media outlets exaggerated the degree of certainty.
But that’s miles away from meeting the definition of “suppressing”.Report
The lab leak theory evidence seems to have wandered from “conspiracy theory” to “something that, seriously, we need to revisit”.
As for “suppression”, I’d say that the articles formed a media consensus that was used to justify Facebook policies on talking about it. (I link to a story below.)
Its completely fair to say that those media outlets exaggerated the degree of certainty.
They’ve done that a lot, in past months.Report
You’d still have to show that they reported something wrong rather than accurately reporting something that turned out, possibly, to be wrong, and, later, accurately reported the new information.Report
I haven’t read the whole thread, but I don’t see why anyone has to assume conscious coordination and control. There’s a difference between conspiracy and congruency. If you have similar expectations, you’re going to compose similar stories. Add that to the way so many outlets report stories referencing NYT, CNN, et cetera, and as a practical matter the fact that they do tend to fall in line, and you’ve got a reasonable explanation.Report
Yes, I agree.
Which, for me, is the line between “unconventional theory” and a “conspiracy theory”.Report
Well, if you agree with that, then what did you mean by:
“Referring to them all as a singular implies a level of coordination and control which approaches conspiracy theory level of absurdity.”
More than that, why would referring to the media as singular count as movement toward conspiracy mentality? I know these are all slightly different ideas, but the overall framework of congruency allows us to think about the issue without falling into conspiracy thinking, or conspiracy-level thinking.Report
@Jaybird
Does it matter why the people pushing the “lab leak” theory were doing so? Like, if they had zero data to support such a theory and were doing it for politically expedient reasons, are they really entitled to an “I told you so”?Report
Is the important thing who does and who does not get clout?
Is the important thing figuring out what happened?
What’s the important thing?
If I have an answer to that question, I can better answer how much the motivations of the people matter.Report
In our internet age, there are always two important things: finding out the truth and adjusting the value we put on our sources. It’s possible that the weirdest conspiracy theorists were right, but that may not make them more credible. I suspect the soundest conclusion after all this is that the mainstream sources come out of it with less credibility.
I think we can all agree that comparative credibility is the battlefield of modern political / cultural debate.Report
“You’re right but you’re a jerk so I’ll act as though you’re wrong” is a surprising attitude to see in the intellectual, rational, reality-based community.Report
I think we’re ignoring the “zero data” part of Kazzy’s comment here.Report
@DD
Not my point. I don’t care if they were a jerk. I’m talking about process here. If someone was somehow able to sift through the information faster and see the potential for the lab leak theory, good on them. Whether or not they are a jerk. But if someone was just wildly tossing out accusations based on nothing, they weren’t exactly ‘right’.
So, how many of the folks who originally pushed the ‘lab leak’ theory in March 2020 had good reason to believe it and how many just wanted it to be true or at least didn’t want the prevailing theory to be accepted as true? You can say that doesn’t matter but, well, it actually does. In the same way that the folks who so vehemently pushed the “nature” theory should similarly have their motivations interrogated. I mean, that is what we are doing here, right?Report
“how many of the folks who originally pushed the ‘lab leak’ theory in March 2020 had good reason to believe it and how many just wanted it to be true or at least didn’t want the prevailing theory to be accepted as true?”
mmmhmm so how is this not “you’re wrong because you’re a jerk”, again?Report
“Two plus two equals four because the sky is blue.”
Is that person right about 2 + 2? Absolutely.
Are they someone we should trust on questions of arithmetic?
No. Not at all.Report
There is a mathematical consensus that 2+2=5 and the fourists are conspiracy theorists.Report
it’s funny that you pick that example, because the internet had a blowup last year about how saying that 2 + 2 = 4 was an example of white supremacyReport
Jaybird, you know Chip doesn’t read articles or sources or documents or silly things like that. He told you himself!Report
If anything besides 1 is true, masks don’t work.Report
Sen. Cotton, and his ilk, had no rational basis for positing anything about the origins of the novel corona virus. It was a bad faith effort to tar the Chinese government (who themselves are doing a fine job of proving how terrible it is), and distract the credulous rubes who supported his party from the administration’s negligence in handling the early days of the pandemic.
Now that the lab leak story has gained a little more credibility, Cotton is being hailed as prescient when all that really happened is a lucky shot. If Cotton, et al., had been serious about getting to the bottom of the origin they wouldn’t have been spouting off to the Western press about those nefarious Chinese. We all know how well the CCP responds to public criticism, and now we’re going to learn that also applies to getting the answer to the question “How did COVID-19 originate?”.Report
Yeah, that’s my impression too. It’s also how everyone behaved. If he’d known officially then he’d have acted differently and Trump would have been quoting official reports and forced them to be made public.
It is well within expectations for the Chinese to want to save face and be secretive of a natural virus.
It is well within expectations for Trump to make stuff up about the Chinese and go for conspiracy theories. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong, but if he’s right it’s not because he-as-President knew something. His reelection was on the line, he’d have declassified something to make China look bad and himself look knowledgeable if he could.Report
Isn’t an “Arkansas sharpshooter” someone who fires random shots at a barn wall and then draws a target around where they hit?Report
You’re thinking of the CNN sharpshooter who sees a hundred dead bodies near a virus lab and moves a bowl of bat soup into the middle.Report
Name names or go home.Report
Learn how to take stretched analogies or don’t dish them out.Report
I named who I was talking about, or, more precisely, the name was obvious from the context. Who were you talking about?Report
There is a phenomenon that shows up from time to time that takes a particular form.
It happens when the old consensus has been replaced by the new consensus.
There are a bunch of folks who pivot from the old consensus to the new one effortlessly. When questioned about this, they tend to pull the whole “when I get new information, I change my mind! What do *YOU* do?” line.
But there’s this weird undercurrent that feels like “when I was wrong, I was right to be wrong… and even if someone I disagreed with at the time was right, they were wrong to have been right.”
That weird undercurrent is really, really, really distasteful.Report
There’s the question of how it “feels” to you and the question of how it actually is. It may just be the case that X was right to be wrong and Y was wrong to be right, but that can’t be resolved by referring to anyone’s feelings.Report
It sure as hell can’t!
I do think that “previously debunked hypothesis has been rebunked” is a good reason to avoid doing stuff like yelling how the science is settled and shutting down the conversation, though. Like, in the future.Report
Memory is not the most reliable thing at my age, but I don’t remember any discussion being “shut down.” A certain view prevailed among a certain class of folks for a while, and despite the new information it may still be right, but the dissenters were certainly heard. I remember hearing them — on actual, over-the-air television. I can only imagine what they were up to on the Twitterverse.Report
Facebook prevented the sharing of stories that argued for the lab leak theory.
It’s since reversed its policy and now allows the sharing of stories that discuss it.Report
Usually, I’m the one dismissing social media sh*tstorms and looking for real-world examples. Interesting to see the reverse.Report
Yeah, it’s weird how examples of conversations getting shut down are provided.
I prefer it when people just make assertions based on their intuitions and then, when asked to provide an example, point out how crazy people believe all sorts of things and so of course there are examples out there and only crazy people would think that there wouldn’t be examples of the phenomenon.Report
pivot to “well, Facebook is a private company, they can set the terms of discourse in their own space, I thought you asshole conservatives liked that idea”Report
So there wasn’t discussion of the lab theory on real-world TV?Report
“It wasn’t censored *EVERYWHERE*” is not really a good counter example to examples of where it was censored.
I still think that “previously debunked hypothesis has been rebunked” is a good reason to avoid doing stuff like yelling how the science is settled and shutting down the conversation, though. Like, in the future.Report
Facebook should not have blocked folks from sharing articles on the “lab leak” theory.
But just to clarify… it doesn’t seem like Facebook “prevented the sharing of stories that argued for the lab leak theory.” It seems they labeled a single op-ed as “false information” based on their fact checking process.
The NYPost article you link to says that this prevented folks from opening the link. FaceBook’s page on their fact checking process does not mention that they block opening the link in such cases. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, of course. Maybe they just don’t advertise that they do that. Maybe they changed the process.
So, yes, I agree that Facebook’s actions point towards some folks attempting to shut down debate with “THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED” type thinking. But if we’re going to be discussing the quality of fact checking, we should, um, stick to the fact.Report
If we’re going to argue that it didn’t happen *EVERYWHERE* so I shouldn’t overstate that it happened when I am I talking about how it happened, I suppose… sure?
But we’re getting into syllogism at this point and whether it’s fair to argue that an instance of X is arguing that All X or merely a Some X and whether defeating the argument of All X is a refutation of the argument.
We’ve got a situation where the media consensus manufactured a scientific consensus that didn’t exist and was used as justification to exclude hypotheses that may well turn out to be true.
That’s okay, I guess, if we’re talking about recycling or education policy but we’re talking about a global pandemic.Report
Sigh.Report
“Manufactured consensus” is a staple phrase heard around the leftosphere, particularly when it comes to warmongering like was done in the runup to the Iraq War.Report
Yes, we are talking about a global pandemic. How would we have addressed it differently if there’d been more discussion of the lab leak theory?Report
How would we have addressed it differently if there’d been more discussion of the lab leak theory?
How *WOULD* we have? I have no idea.
How *COULD* we have? Would it be too risible to suggest that we could have discussed it as a leak from a lab that was studying Gain of Function in coronaviruses and one of those coronaviruses has escaped and we need to treat it accordingly?
Instead of, you know, one of those viruses that you sometimes get when you eat bat soup?Report
And that would have meant …
Masks don’t work?
More social distancing?
Less hand-washing?Report
It’s interesting to see people say both “we should take note of someone’s past behavior and consider it when we evaluate their claims” and “no use arguing over spilt milk, let’s just move forward”Report
What I’m saying is that there are no consequences to having delayed this inquiry. At the time, it was a distraction (from the demagogue-in-chief, a deliberate distraction) from fighting a deadly disease. If you want to argue about it now (still in the absence of any actual information)? Knock yourself out.Report
“It was censored SOMEWHERE” is really not a good counter example to the claim that it was widely aired on, for example, network television.Report
Do you have any examples of it being widely aired at the time of those stories being printed?
To bolster your claim.
(Heck, examples might illuminate one of the problems!)Report
I saw them myself. On TV. I didn’t DVR them or put them in a Nielsen diary. Why would I? But I saw them. Maybe you didn’t, but I get the impression that you don’t watch TV very much.Report
Yeah, I try to stay away from the boob tube.
Well, I’d like to think that the clips from those shows would still be floating around the youtubes or, if they were news stories, the news stories attached to those shows would be floating around.
I mean, I’ve seen how memory affects people.Report
You’re the one making the Big Claim, so you’re the one who needs the Big Proof. If you’re backing down from widespread suppression of debate to Facebook is being dickish, you may be right. I’m notoriously uninterested in social media and don’t give a flying f**k what Facebook does. Take it up with someone who cares about Facebook.
But if you’re still flogging the Big Claim, you need to do better than point out that Facebook was being dickish.Report
My “big claim” is that the “debunked conspiracy theory” was not, in fact, “debunked” and the people who squashed talking about it were wrong to do so.
And if you’re going to no true scotsman the whole “nobody IMPORTANT squashed discussing the theory” and wave away examples of stuff like Facebook even as you fail to provide examples of whatever it is that you claim to remember seeing…
Well, there you go.Report
“People” is a plural.Report
No it’s not.Report
Is that what people are saying?Report
Facebook didn’t squash debate. They participated in debate by flagging an article as false.Report
That’s some pretty asymmetric participation, there.Report
So we went from “Facebook is blocking articles” to “Facebook flagged an article” to “Facebook is participating asymmetrically.”
Is this the part where it’s okay to question how asymmetric the right wing media machine’s participation in any discussion is?
You have a unique ability to encourage people who agree with you to disagree with you.
It’s almost as if the intention of your discourse is something other than the exchange of ideas and pursuit of knowledge.Report
Is this the part where it’s okay to question how asymmetric the right wing media machine’s participation in any discussion is
It depends on whether you want to argue that limiting participation is bad in theory or if you want to traipse down the “who/whom” distinction.
You have a unique ability to encourage people who agree with you to disagree with you.
If you notice that you are not agreeing with what I say but because *I* am saying it, then I’d say that that’s one heck of an observation you’re making.
Have you noticed ever agreeing with someone because of who happened to say it? (And, like, them ending up being wrong a few months later? Having to retract what they said? Pointing out that they change their minds when they get new information about the consensus?)Report
I agreed with you. I said I agreed with you. I continued to agree with you. And you continued to push the point to a place where I no longer could agree with you.
Not because of who you are… but because you started out saying A and somehow worked your way to G because you seemed somehow bothered by someone saying, “I think you’re right.”Report
I was responding to CJ, Kazzy.Report
@9:02?Report
At 5:06.Report
Didn’t realize I couldn’t participate.Report
Of course you can! But please don’t complain that I’m still disagreeing with you when I’m disagreeing with someone else.
Anyway, here’s an article and an excerpt from Politico:
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What’s often missing from that phenomenon is any amount of reflection.
Like, sometimes someone was “right to be wrong.” Or, more accurately, it was totally understandable that they were wrong. Maybe they had a good source with good but incomplete data and maybe they drew a reasonable conclusion from all that. When new data or new sources emerged, they revisited their conclusion. That’s a good thing, I’d argue.
But how many times does that have to happen before you evaluate your actual process? Before you reconsider what is or isn’t a good source. Or, hell, reconsider your ability to determine between the two?Report
When new data or new sources emerged, they revisited their conclusion. That’s a good thing, I’d argue.
Yeah. My problem isn’t “I changed my mind when I got new information”. It’s “I used my institutional power to stifle different information”.Report
I think that’s a different thing though.
My point is about folks who are CONSTANTLY needing to revisit their wrong conclusions and never bother to think about why they are so often starting with wrong conclusions.
Like, maybe start somewhere else next time.Report
They don’t have to constantly revisit previous conclusions if they are constantly in the middle of the current consensus.
They don’t even need to have a thought process if their guide is “what is the current consensus?”
They just have to wander over to where the crowd is today.Report
Matt Yglesias has a long-form essay on the whole lab-leak hypothesis and he tweeted a link to it. (It’s currently unlocked so it’s readable by everybody.)
Check it out. It’s worth reading.Report
I’ll spoil the conclusion (to the really good essay):
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This is in fact, the oldest of all human social situations.
When a known liar says something, holding a default assumption that his comments are lies is pretty much what any reasonable person should do.
I don’t see why Yglesias has his panties in a wad over this. If there is any soul searching to be done, maybe Cotton should reflect on why sensible people treat his every word as a radioactive lie.Report
When a known liar says something, holding a default assumption that his comments are lies is pretty much what any reasonable person should do.
I agree.
100%.
I don’t see why Yglesias has his panties in a wad over this.
Try assuming that he’s seeing something that you’re not instead of that he’s deceived. See where that thought process takes you.Report
There really isn’t anything beyond that first sentence, upon which we’re all agreed. There’s a reason why The Boy Who Cried Wolf has lived on all these years.Report
You still find people who explain that the boy who cried wolf was right to be wrong.
And who, when pressed, explain that wolves are threats to the flock and anybody who thinks that the shepherd is the problem has their eyes on the wrong threat.Report
Honest to God, I’ve never heard that tack. It’s a pretty simple story, with a pretty simple moral.Report
You’d think.Report
“You’re right that maybe the whole OK-hand-symbol thing was a joke that some dudes on 4chan thought up, but don’t you think that white supremacy is a real problem that we should really be concerned about?“Report
“There’s a reason why The Boy Who Cried Wolf has lived on all these years.”
this would be a much more trenchant point if Tom Cotton had been saying for years and years that there were evil death viruses getting out of Chinese laboratories and causing pandemicsReport
I’ll grant it’s not 100% on point, but noted fabulist Cotton shouldn’t get off that easy.Report
I think its kinda weird that, for a guy who has spent this entire thread arguing about how “the media” gets it wrong and follows a narrative, you just whip out the assertion that some pundit’s viewpoint on the matter is superior, that he is seeing something that others are not.
Why do you consider Yglesias any more trustworthy than Vox?Report
Chip, I wasn’t arguing that the media gets it wrong.
I explained how the NYT, CNN, the Washington Post, Politico, NPR, and the BBC got it exceptionally wrong in this particular case and, weirdly enough, how they all got it wrong in the exact same way.
“Why do you consider Yglesias any more trustworthy than Vox?”
Well, for one thing, Yggy went back and said “okay… how and why was this gotten wrong?”
You probably have no idea how much a “lessons learned” written on the white board does to increase the credibility of a project manager.Report
Didn’t the original reporters do that exact thing, asking how and why the alternate theorists got it wrong?
Except they ignored facts that didn’t fit their thesis, which is what Yglesias is doing here.
He ignores that Cotton is a serial liar and bad faith troll, and invents a Cotton who is merely “raising questions”.
It seems entirely arbitrary to declare Yglesias trustworthy yet others like Vox are not.
Yglesias is every bit as prone to group-think and herd-following as any Beltway reporter. He just follows a different herd.Report
I’m not in any state to explore whether “the original reporters” did do that exact thing.
But here’s what I’m going to do tomorrow: See who wrote the original stories. Then I’m going to see who did the corrections.
If they’re the same people, I’ll agree that the original reporters did that exact thing.
If they are not, I will not agree that they did.
It seems entirely arbitrary to declare Yglesias trustworthy yet others like Vox are not.
I imagine it would, if one were coming from a position of not understanding things, rather than one of questioning whether someone else has insight that one does not.
Yglesias is every bit as prone to group-think and herd-following as any Beltway reporter. He just follows a different herd.
Is it worth asking “how’s that different herd doing?”
If not, why not?Report
I found the text quoted in this tweet pretty compelling. See Cotton in there?
https://twitter.com/jxb101/status/1397614081415294978?s=21Report
As a sort of poetic justice for Cummings (or Cotton)? Sure. As an excuse for journalists whose jobs it is to see through the BS? I’d say not compelling at all. Really it supports Jaybird’s thesis that these people are confidently drowning themselves in a sea of postmodern parochial myopia, and are quite bad at their jobs.Report
Do you think that my argument is that “Cotton is good”?Report
Of course not.
Actually, we’re probably all arguing about a moot point here anyway. As Andrew points out in his post, getting to the bottom of it would require the cooperation of the Chinese government, which at this point, owing in part to bad faith statements like Cotton’s, is unlikely to happen.Report
Opinion: Biden blew it. He didn’t charge CDC with finding the source, he didn’t charge the NIH, he told the spies to figure it out. I can’t think of anything more likely to put China in a total non-cooperation mode.Report
Yeah, I think that’s by design.
Intelligence reports will always include all the possible options with discussions about weighted probabilities that decision makers can use to make decisions. It will be vague by design and I’m willing to bet that the ‘answer’ will be, we can’t say for sure what happened, but it is in everyone’s interest to make sure that all BSL4 labs have more funding.
Alternately, using NIH, CDC, WHO and others would hopefully provide a collaborative analysis… and, if healthy, would point out failures (if any) for the good of the praxis.
However, there’s strong temptation to NIH, CDC, WHO, and other players who are possibly complicit in ‘unleashing the worst natural disaster in the modern era’ (by accident, mind you) to make sure that the institutions are protected first. Not to mention institutional capture by not only the practitioners, but the government(s) themselves. I mean, it’s hard to imagine WHO as having any credibility in any investigation ever again.
Journalists might be a counter-balance to this, but a big part of what’s being discussed (or not discussed) above is that the journalists aren’t providing a counter-balance to this. Some of what ‘indie’ reporters have pointed out is that the Lancet article supporting the WIV (and originally ‘debunking’ the Engineered Virus) was sponsored by Dr. Daszak, who is part of EcoHealth Alliance, which funds WIV with grants from NIH – possibly even GOF Engineering. Which is to say, it is possible that Lancet/EcoHealth/NIH may have banal corporate/funding interests in not acknowledging certain things (if they need acknowledging). Again, the paper-trails are there to keep these possible conflicts above the board… but only if our journalism isn’t in the business of deciding who the “good guys” and “bad guys” and making sure the good guys win… no matter the science.
So Intelligence is the perfect way to de-fuse the situation by providing a report that comes from ‘secret spy soruces’ that provides a vague answer that ultimately results in more institutional funding.Report
That lack of anyone even attempting to be an honest broker of information is exactly the threat that’s so worrisome. Like, say we could conclusively determine that the lab leak hypothesis was wrong. No more dirty Trumpist Republicans about whom we must maintain moral clarity at all times are in the equation. Great.
But then say it could be proven that this emerged from zoonosis at the Hunan Seafood Market or whatever it’s called. If that happened I would argue there is a case that the globalized world can no longer tolerate live animal wet markets like that one. It simply is too risky, and the countries that have them need to shut them down and find alternatives. And maybe we need to be talking about that even if we never know where it came from!
But could our media honestly present and report the issue? Or would the discussion itself be deemed racist or Orientalist or some such thing? Obviously I have my suspicions.Report
There are some discussions which if pursued honestly yield conclusions that are deeply threatening to many people.
For a domestic version of this, recall how mad cow disease played out.
Or the discussions of the national meat diet on climate change.Report
“That lack of anyone even attempting to be an honest broker of information”
That’s a pretty big net you’re throwing. But true or not, it’s going to lead to a very tough question: what are the standards by which we can judge an outlet to be honest?Report
I don’t think it’s so impossible. Maybe ‘honest’ is too loaded a term given the ethical implications but my go to principles for evaluating assertions are Carl Sagan’s ‘baloney detecting kit’ he describes in the Demon Haunted World. I’m a total idiot, scientifically illiterate lawyer but I would start with those.Report
Right, as the great Philosopher @Steak-umm points out, we have an epistemology problem.
“science itself isn’t “true” it’s a constantly refining process used to uncover truths based in material reality and that process is still full of misteaks. neil just posts ridiculous sound bites like this for clout and he has no respect for epistemology”
https://twitter.com/steak_umm/status/1381800742286209027Report
What incentive would the Chinese have to cooperate with either the CDC or the NIH? The American well has been poisoned.Report
I’m pretty sure they plenty of reasons for not being transparent well beyond anything Cotton said.Report
No doubt.Report
There are bi-lateral leverage points… Chinese research benefits from American Grant $$, scientists need and want access to Western networks of Scholarship, Education, IP, and funding. It isn’t a matter of imposing US will upon China, but recognizing that the international standards and protocols that enable them to claim to have a BSL4 facility so that they can have access to all the support you need to run a BSL4 lab requires that you participate in the protocols.
Else, the funding, the IP, the exchanges, the networks, etc. etc. can be sanctioned.
That wouldn’t necessarily stop China dead in their tracks if they wanted to go solo… but there’s leverage… and reasonable leverage at that.
But that’s also partly what Michael means, I think, by Biden blowing it… they aren’t going to collaborate with Team Spy. So we’ve effectively closed the door on the Science Community sorting this out themselves.Report
I wonder who’s advising him on this. If you and Cain are correct, this is a pretty huge blunder.Report
I just ran across this really interesting article.
https://thebulwark.com/how-the-trump-administration-twisted-coronavirus-intelligence/Report
Good news. The WaPo edited their headline:
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