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These threads are long, contentious, and often go in circles. To save time, I propose a scale: 1. It was definitely zoonotic, and suggestions otherwise are rac

These threads are long, contentious, and often go in circles. To save time, I propose a scale: 1. It was definitely zoonotic, and suggestions otherwise are racist conspiracy theories. 2. While it's impossible to rule out a lab leak, I believe it's zoonotic unless confronted with hard evidence. 3. While I admit the possibility of a lab leak, I secretly am pretty sure it was spillover. 4. Both lab leak and spillover are plausible, and the best priors are past experience (dozens or more spillovers, probably one or two lab leaks). 5. Lab leak and spillover seem equally likely, and a lot of the behavior of the CCP, WHO, EcoHealth Alliance are suspicious. 6. It was almost certainly a lab leak, the CCP is covering it up. 7. Definitely at least a lab leak, probably an engineered bioweapon. 8. Kill Fauci, he was in on it. This article is 3. The recent Vanity Fair article is 5. Most virologists I follow on Twitter are 2 or 3. As I say, you can save time in responding by just posting the number of where you are on this scale. Explaining why you think so won't add too much more information, it's a function of what sources you pay attention to and that can be pretty reliably inferred from the position on the scale.

waterhouse 5y ago
5.5
0-_-0 5y ago
Correction to 4: Biosecurity incidents are common, there were about 17 in the last decade [0]. Just SARS-CoV-1 leaked from the lab 4 times [1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome#Laboratory_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
- raphlinus 5y ago
  This is fair! I was only really counting events with large numbers of infections (so the 1977 flu and maybe one or two others), but biosecurity incidents themselves are, as you say, common, and many prominent people in the field (Marc Lipsitch particularly comes to mind) have been calling for better biosecurity - and strict limitations on gain of function research - for some time.
  - jMyles 5y ago
    Although he has been consistently wrong on interventions during this pandemic, I have enormous respect for Marc Lipsitch; I wish he were in a position of decision-making on dispersal of NIH funds wrt pathogen research. And for that matter, the rest of CambridgeWG has also had a consistent record of calling for investigation into lab-leak incidents at WIV for several years, including from the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Hats off to all of them.
  - logifail 5y ago
    > biosecurity incidents themselves are, as you say, common Let's generalise that a touch to defang it, incidents in scientific laboratories are common. #1: I worked in a university science lab for four years. One of my colleagues blew up a fume cupboard* and, since he was deafened and had minor wounds from flying glass shards, I - personally - called the emergency services. * don't apply a heat gun to stuff that looks like ice but might not be.... I met the fire service and ambulance at the front door to the department, as requested, and led them up to our laboratory, accompanied by bemused looks from other students and staff. The lead guy from the fire service asked me (I'm not kidding) "is there anything dangerous in your lab?" ... I tried hard not to giggle (the adrenaline had taken over by that point), I told him it was a Chemistry lab and asked if he had anything specific in mind? We stored dangerous stuff alphabetically, and as I recall, the fume cupboard that blew up was the second one along, so had everything dangerous from (approximately) F to L. #2: After they'd carted my colleague off to hospital, a professor turned up and asked who had called the emergency services. I fessed up. He gave me a dressing down and told me "the press will hear about this!". I was dumbfounded. My colleague was in the back of an ambulance on the way to hospital covered in glass shards and the prof was worried about us getting in the papers?
- newacct583 5y ago
  "Biosecurity incidents" aren't the same thing as a global pandemic, though. We're being asked to believe that Wuhan was doing secret GoF research, and that they had a security incident, and that this escaped detection until spreading in the general population, and that no one involved so far has blabbed about it. Any of those in isolation would be pretty unlikely. In combination they really don't say much at all. The one thing saving the conspiracists so far is the Journal story of two weeks ago that western intelligence agencies were aware of an outbreak of something among lab staff at more or less exactly the right moment to explain a covid origin. That's the one thing that's hard to explain as a coincidence. And even then... meh. I give it even odds at best. Again, if this was really happening you don't think some enterprising PhD would have tried to leverage a tenure position at Stanford or something in exchange for testimony? The incentives to tell the world about this are huge.
Gupie 5y ago
0
bigpumpkin 5y ago
This. Oftentimes people are mad at the media too quickly dismissing the possibility last year rather than actively suggesting it was a lab leak.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  I think it's normal. Rarely our media and politicians show their true colors in this fashion
murph-almighty 5y ago
I feel like a combo of 2 and 4 yet not 3, where I'm pretty sure it's zoonotic but given the CCP being the CCP I wouldn't be shocked if it was spillover.
- khuey 5y ago
  Yeah my personal opinion is similar. IMO the best evidence for it being a lab leak is the extent to which the involved parties (the Chinese government, the head researcher at the lab, and the Ecohealth Alliance guy) are acting like they have something to hide. That's entirely circumstantial of course, but it's not like there's a ton of evidence for anything. The second best piece of evidence IMO is the lack of an alternative explanation, but these things do take time to piece together.
zionic 5y ago
6
goatlover 5y ago
4.7 trending up. What's disconcerting is how the lab leak was treated as a conspiracy theory that needed to be censored for the past year.
- SirensOfTitan 5y ago
  And many scientists acting as if it were anathema to suggest a lab origin while conveniently keeping quiet on their own conflicts of interest.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Which in some ways is even worse, since one would expect scientists to have a higher standard for veracity than the media and politicians.
    - encryptluks2 5y ago
      Why put someone or something up on a pedestal like that? Academia and scientists have justified almost every horrific thing the US has ever done and yet here we are again like this time is going to be any different.
      - spookthesunset 5y ago
        > Why put someone or something up on a pedestal like that? Since March of 2020 all criticism and skepticism has been shouted down with "are you 'An Expert'"? The entire pandemic has been nothing but a thinly guised appeal to authority. And a very narrow set of authority at that--the only authority we were allowed to listen to are the ones who sold this as the worst thing ever. Hope or optimism or just asking basic questions was never allowed.
        belltaco 5y ago
        Nah, it was a reaction to things like this at the beginning and far worse later on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o
heroHACK17 5y ago
6
chowells 5y ago
Being an effectively racist talking point is independent of how plausible one believes the topic to be. I'd be at 3 on your scale, but as an independent matter I worry about the combination of how non-actionable the idea is along with how effectively it supports racist rhetoric. Note that my wording was specific there. It's effective because it has a bunch of people talking about it. It supports racist rhetoric because it creates an environment in which people are comfortable making statements blaming China, and there are a lot of people who are sloppy about distinguishing between the government of China and Chinese people. Whether the theory "is" racist or not is the wrong question. The right question is whether discussion of it helps to normalize racist positions. That seems like a much easier matter to study - no need to divine anyone's private beliefs. And it's completely independent of any question of how the new coronavirus got into human spread. I think it's very important to separate these two topics, so that the far more important question of how much damage this is doing to Asian communities doesn't get buried in some completely unactionable nonsense about the virus's means of introduction to the human population.
- silicon2401 5y ago
  > Whether the theory "is" racist or not is the wrong question. The right question is whether discussion of it helps to normalize racist positions. This is incredibly problematic and anti-scientific sentiment. Science is about expanding knowledge. Whether covid came from China or Spain or Madagascar doesn't matter; we should determine where it came from and then see where that takes us. Racism and racist uses of fact and fiction are a separate, societal issue; tackle that separately.
  - chowells 5y ago
    I can't agree that it's unscientific at all. There's a huge difference between doing science and constantly pushing public discussion of your unsupported hypothesis. Should there be people tracking the origin of the disease, how it got into the general population, and how to reduce similar incidents in the future? Yes, absolutely. That's doing science. But what, exactly, is scientific about spreading your hypothesis across popular media for public discussion when the entirety of your evidence is "there's no concrete evidence to the contrary"? This isn't how science is done. It's how propaganda is done. I am disturbed by the number of people here who fall for such propaganda so easily. Being a testable hypothesis does not make something intrinsically science. Actually doing science does. And science is not done by media talking heads selling you fear in order to increase their advertising income.
natch 5y ago
Your scale looks pretty biased toward one side. If you throw away the two most extreme options and focus on 2 - 4, notice there is no reasonable counterpart to those expressed on the other side. In other words, 2 - 4 are worded to look reasonable, while 6 - 7 are not, when they easily could have been worded differently to be more reasonable. Number 5 is worded to have the appearance of looking neutral, while it's really expressing the fallacy of "there are two sides so let's assign them 50/50 likelihood even though the data weighs clearly on one side." So that one is also on the side of 2 - 4, while appearing on the surface to be reasonable. Then 6 immediately leaps to an extreme and untenable position, saying "almost certainly" and making that side look non-credible, as if they jump to conclusions and near certainty when the evidence is still coming in. And 7 goes even farther to the extreme. So again I would suggest this scale is a bit weighted against one side here. I assume this was not your intent. If my assumption is correct, perhaps you could edit it to address this issue. But the view that is really not expressed at all on this scale is: We do not know for certain at this time. But we should continue to follow the evidence where it leads, and we should not solely rely on people who have a conflict of interest, especially people who have tried to hide their conflicts of interest, such as Peter Daszak reportedly did in the Lancet.
- raphlinus 5y ago
  I never claimed my scale wasn't biased :) Point 5 could be the "when you don't know, all probabilities are roughly 50%" fallacy, but I think it can also charitably interpreted as belief that a careful weighting of the evidence is roughly equal. But your points are well taken. I'm not going to edit it here, as I don't think that would be fair to the people who have responded. Your final paragraph is of course the only reasonable position for the truly open-minded (and actually represents my own position quite well), but I didn't bother to put it on the scale as it seems hardly represented at all, at least in Twitter discussions and HN threads.
tobiasSoftware 5y ago
You should add one between 5 and 6, I'm sure plenty of people lean towards lab leak without being almost certain of it.
jchw 5y ago
It’s worse because holding a rational-sounding position for irrational reasons is not good. It creates a sense of consensus among experts that may be wholly unwarranted and could threaten trust in experts. The reason why this is especially contentious for this particular opinion is that it’s pretty clear China would prefer everyone to believe in 2 or maybe even 1. Why exactly that is is unclear, but the “data-free” part of the title warrants asking why we have no data over a year and a half later. Is it radical to suggest that the data was suppressed? I’m no expert, but the Vanity Fair article certainly paints the picture that it has been. Now we just have to be in the unfortunate position of not being able to ascertain whether it was due to paranoia or because they knew things that we didn’t. I don’t have a number right now. I do have some suspicions regarding the consistent attempts to squash the lab leak theory. It has been rather aggressive at times.
swalsh 5y ago
What number is "we don't have conclusive evidence for either, but there is more evidence for lab leak then there is for zoonotic" Suspicious behavior is not an indication towards one or the other. There are negative effects if it IS lab leak, so of course they are going to say things that lead away from that hypothesis... but the behavior cannot be a part of the base of evidence.
silicon2401 5y ago
I'm a hard 4.5. There's no reason to believe the US, WHO, or CCP would be entirely honest, and plenty of reason to believe they say what's convenient for them. Anything at 1 or 8 is basically extremist and certainly not a party with pursuit of truth as their main priority.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ksec 5y ago
Thank You. Saves us all so much time. Next time we will just point to this post and say it is number [x] again .

waterhouse 5y ago

5.5

0-_-0 5y ago

Correction to 4: Biosecurity incidents are common, there were about 17 in the last decade [0]. Just SARS-CoV-1 leaked from the lab 4 times [1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome#Laboratory_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

raphlinus 5y ago
This is fair! I was only really counting events with large numbers of infections (so the 1977 flu and maybe one or two others), but biosecurity incidents themselves are, as you say, common, and many prominent people in the field (Marc Lipsitch particularly comes to mind) have been calling for better biosecurity - and strict limitations on gain of function research - for some time.
- jMyles 5y ago
  Although he has been consistently wrong on interventions during this pandemic, I have enormous respect for Marc Lipsitch; I wish he were in a position of decision-making on dispersal of NIH funds wrt pathogen research. And for that matter, the rest of CambridgeWG has also had a consistent record of calling for investigation into lab-leak incidents at WIV for several years, including from the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Hats off to all of them.
- logifail 5y ago
  > biosecurity incidents themselves are, as you say, common Let's generalise that a touch to defang it, incidents in scientific laboratories are common. #1: I worked in a university science lab for four years. One of my colleagues blew up a fume cupboard* and, since he was deafened and had minor wounds from flying glass shards, I - personally - called the emergency services. * don't apply a heat gun to stuff that looks like ice but might not be.... I met the fire service and ambulance at the front door to the department, as requested, and led them up to our laboratory, accompanied by bemused looks from other students and staff. The lead guy from the fire service asked me (I'm not kidding) "is there anything dangerous in your lab?" ... I tried hard not to giggle (the adrenaline had taken over by that point), I told him it was a Chemistry lab and asked if he had anything specific in mind? We stored dangerous stuff alphabetically, and as I recall, the fume cupboard that blew up was the second one along, so had everything dangerous from (approximately) F to L. #2: After they'd carted my colleague off to hospital, a professor turned up and asked who had called the emergency services. I fessed up. He gave me a dressing down and told me "the press will hear about this!". I was dumbfounded. My colleague was in the back of an ambulance on the way to hospital covered in glass shards and the prof was worried about us getting in the papers?
newacct583 5y ago
"Biosecurity incidents" aren't the same thing as a global pandemic, though. We're being asked to believe that Wuhan was doing secret GoF research, and that they had a security incident, and that this escaped detection until spreading in the general population, and that no one involved so far has blabbed about it. Any of those in isolation would be pretty unlikely. In combination they really don't say much at all. The one thing saving the conspiracists so far is the Journal story of two weeks ago that western intelligence agencies were aware of an outbreak of something among lab staff at more or less exactly the right moment to explain a covid origin. That's the one thing that's hard to explain as a coincidence. And even then... meh. I give it even odds at best. Again, if this was really happening you don't think some enterprising PhD would have tried to leverage a tenure position at Stanford or something in exchange for testimony? The incentives to tell the world about this are huge.

Gupie 5y ago

bigpumpkin 5y ago

This. Oftentimes people are mad at the media too quickly dismissing the possibility last year rather than actively suggesting it was a lab leak.

jokethrowaway 5y ago
I think it's normal. Rarely our media and politicians show their true colors in this fashion

murph-almighty 5y ago

I feel like a combo of 2 and 4 yet not 3, where I'm pretty sure it's zoonotic but given the CCP being the CCP I wouldn't be shocked if it was spillover.

khuey 5y ago
Yeah my personal opinion is similar. IMO the best evidence for it being a lab leak is the extent to which the involved parties (the Chinese government, the head researcher at the lab, and the Ecohealth Alliance guy) are acting like they have something to hide. That's entirely circumstantial of course, but it's not like there's a ton of evidence for anything. The second best piece of evidence IMO is the lack of an alternative explanation, but these things do take time to piece together.

zionic 5y ago

goatlover 5y ago

4.7 trending up. What's disconcerting is how the lab leak was treated as a conspiracy theory that needed to be censored for the past year.

SirensOfTitan 5y ago
And many scientists acting as if it were anathema to suggest a lab origin while conveniently keeping quiet on their own conflicts of interest.
- goatlover 5y ago
  Which in some ways is even worse, since one would expect scientists to have a higher standard for veracity than the media and politicians.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    Why put someone or something up on a pedestal like that? Academia and scientists have justified almost every horrific thing the US has ever done and yet here we are again like this time is going to be any different.
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      > Why put someone or something up on a pedestal like that? Since March of 2020 all criticism and skepticism has been shouted down with "are you 'An Expert'"? The entire pandemic has been nothing but a thinly guised appeal to authority. And a very narrow set of authority at that--the only authority we were allowed to listen to are the ones who sold this as the worst thing ever. Hope or optimism or just asking basic questions was never allowed.
      - belltaco 5y ago
        Nah, it was a reaction to things like this at the beginning and far worse later on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o

heroHACK17 5y ago

chowells 5y ago

Being an effectively racist talking point is independent of how plausible one believes the topic to be. I'd be at 3 on your scale, but as an independent matter I worry about the combination of how non-actionable the idea is along with how effectively it supports racist rhetoric. Note that my wording was specific there. It's effective because it has a bunch of people talking about it. It supports racist rhetoric because it creates an environment in which people are comfortable making statements blaming China, and there are a lot of people who are sloppy about distinguishing between the government of China and Chinese people. Whether the theory "is" racist or not is the wrong question. The right question is whether discussion of it helps to normalize racist positions. That seems like a much easier matter to study - no need to divine anyone's private beliefs. And it's completely independent of any question of how the new coronavirus got into human spread. I think it's very important to separate these two topics, so that the far more important question of how much damage this is doing to Asian communities doesn't get buried in some completely unactionable nonsense about the virus's means of introduction to the human population.

silicon2401 5y ago
> Whether the theory "is" racist or not is the wrong question. The right question is whether discussion of it helps to normalize racist positions. This is incredibly problematic and anti-scientific sentiment. Science is about expanding knowledge. Whether covid came from China or Spain or Madagascar doesn't matter; we should determine where it came from and then see where that takes us. Racism and racist uses of fact and fiction are a separate, societal issue; tackle that separately.
- chowells 5y ago
  I can't agree that it's unscientific at all. There's a huge difference between doing science and constantly pushing public discussion of your unsupported hypothesis. Should there be people tracking the origin of the disease, how it got into the general population, and how to reduce similar incidents in the future? Yes, absolutely. That's doing science. But what, exactly, is scientific about spreading your hypothesis across popular media for public discussion when the entirety of your evidence is "there's no concrete evidence to the contrary"? This isn't how science is done. It's how propaganda is done. I am disturbed by the number of people here who fall for such propaganda so easily. Being a testable hypothesis does not make something intrinsically science. Actually doing science does. And science is not done by media talking heads selling you fear in order to increase their advertising income.

natch 5y ago

Your scale looks pretty biased toward one side. If you throw away the two most extreme options and focus on 2 - 4, notice there is no reasonable counterpart to those expressed on the other side. In other words, 2 - 4 are worded to look reasonable, while 6 - 7 are not, when they easily could have been worded differently to be more reasonable. Number 5 is worded to have the appearance of looking neutral, while it's really expressing the fallacy of "there are two sides so let's assign them 50/50 likelihood even though the data weighs clearly on one side." So that one is also on the side of 2 - 4, while appearing on the surface to be reasonable. Then 6 immediately leaps to an extreme and untenable position, saying "almost certainly" and making that side look non-credible, as if they jump to conclusions and near certainty when the evidence is still coming in. And 7 goes even farther to the extreme. So again I would suggest this scale is a bit weighted against one side here. I assume this was not your intent. If my assumption is correct, perhaps you could edit it to address this issue. But the view that is really not expressed at all on this scale is: We do not know for certain at this time. But we should continue to follow the evidence where it leads, and we should not solely rely on people who have a conflict of interest, especially people who have tried to hide their conflicts of interest, such as Peter Daszak reportedly did in the Lancet.

raphlinus 5y ago
I never claimed my scale wasn't biased :) Point 5 could be the "when you don't know, all probabilities are roughly 50%" fallacy, but I think it can also charitably interpreted as belief that a careful weighting of the evidence is roughly equal. But your points are well taken. I'm not going to edit it here, as I don't think that would be fair to the people who have responded. Your final paragraph is of course the only reasonable position for the truly open-minded (and actually represents my own position quite well), but I didn't bother to put it on the scale as it seems hardly represented at all, at least in Twitter discussions and HN threads.

tobiasSoftware 5y ago

You should add one between 5 and 6, I'm sure plenty of people lean towards lab leak without being almost certain of it.

jchw 5y ago

It’s worse because holding a rational-sounding position for irrational reasons is not good. It creates a sense of consensus among experts that may be wholly unwarranted and could threaten trust in experts. The reason why this is especially contentious for this particular opinion is that it’s pretty clear China would prefer everyone to believe in 2 or maybe even 1. Why exactly that is is unclear, but the “data-free” part of the title warrants asking why we have no data over a year and a half later. Is it radical to suggest that the data was suppressed? I’m no expert, but the Vanity Fair article certainly paints the picture that it has been. Now we just have to be in the unfortunate position of not being able to ascertain whether it was due to paranoia or because they knew things that we didn’t. I don’t have a number right now. I do have some suspicions regarding the consistent attempts to squash the lab leak theory. It has been rather aggressive at times.

swalsh 5y ago

What number is "we don't have conclusive evidence for either, but there is more evidence for lab leak then there is for zoonotic" Suspicious behavior is not an indication towards one or the other. There are negative effects if it IS lab leak, so of course they are going to say things that lead away from that hypothesis... but the behavior cannot be a part of the base of evidence.

silicon2401 5y ago

I'm a hard 4.5. There's no reason to believe the US, WHO, or CCP would be entirely honest, and plenty of reason to believe they say what's convenient for them. Anything at 1 or 8 is basically extremist and certainly not a party with pursuit of truth as their main priority.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ksec 5y ago

Thank You. Saves us all so much time. Next time we will just point to this post and say it is number [x] again .