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It also conflates "lab-engineered" with "lab-leak". How would a disease from a bat from Laos make it to Wuhan? It still could be from the WIV!
by bpodgursky 5y ago
It also conflates "lab-engineered" with "lab-leak".
How would a disease from a bat from Laos make it to Wuhan? It still could be from the WIV!
- ummonk 5y agoThis is what the article authors mean by lab-leak arguments being unfalsifiable. No matter what evidence comes out, it can still be shoe-horned into a lab-leak theory.
- bpodgursky 5y agoThat's not really true. You could falsify it by: - Opening the records about which viruses the WIV was storing. It's not a mystery — labs track that kind of thing! But China refused to release any data about which viruses the WIV stored or modified. - Finding a clear chain of infection between a natural source and the outbreak in Wuhan - Finding clear evidence that there was a small outbreak which later spread to Wuhan Nobody has managed any of those.
- jimrandomh 5y agoNo, the Laos bats are strong evidence for the lab leak hypothesis because it makes a prediction which could have turned out false: that if a close relative of COVID-19 is found somewhere, predict that researchers took samples from that area to Wuhan prior to the start of the pandemic.
- estaseuropano 5y agoOthers below point out that it is indeed falsifiable but more importantly, why would it discredit the theory if you can't disprove it? You can certainly disprove some versions of it and as far as I can seen there has been a lot of outrage and occlusion by the Chinese government but very little effort to actually disprove anything.
- adolph 5y agoIt was winter so the manager of Alice Cooper’s Live Bat Bites at the Wuhan wet market has to bring them in from farther away.