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"But we should keep in mind that the virologists publishing papers downplaying the possibility of a lab leak are not disinterested parties in this. The politica

"But we should keep in mind that the virologists publishing papers downplaying the possibility of a lab leak are not disinterested parties in this. The political context is a debate about regulating virus labs, and it’s hardly shocking that a large segment of the virus lab community doesn’t like that idea." This, I think, is the crux of our problem. Almost anyone who knows enough about the field to have an informed opinion, is involved enough to have an incentive to convince the world that it was not their profession, that unleashed this. Scientists are human, not demons but also not angels. It would be hard to convince yourself, that your profession was responsible for this. We should listen to what they have to say, but not expect them to be dispassionate and unbiased investigators of the question.

FredPret 5y ago
I know nothing about virology, so I have this question: why do it? What is the loss if we shut down all virology? They do gain of function research, breeding deadlier viruses, and then what? Do they use this to pre-develop vaccines?
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  One use is to have understanding of how viruses work, so that you can accurately predict spread. If we assume that SARS and MERS (both coronaviruses that seem nearly certain _not_ to have been made in labs) required a knowledge of how coronaviruses work, then a lab doing the general kind of work that was done in Wuhan is real. For example, we already knew that the spike protein was critical in reproduction of the covid-19 virus, whereas we might not have known as much about that if we had no virology labs (I'm not an expert in the field, I might be wrong here). But, for any particular line of research, your question is still a valid one. Is this particular research likely to have a payoff worth the (inevitably non-zero) risk? The issue is how (and who) to make that decision.
morelisp 5y ago
As opposed to journalists, who would never keep an exciting story running despite weak evidence.
- FabHK 5y ago
  No, just like journalists. You're demolishing a straw man.
  - Wevah 5y ago
    I thought the comment was sarcastic.
    - morelisp 5y ago
      I would never write a sarcastic comment on this noble forum.
lil_dispaches 5y ago
The crux of the problem should be the grave injustice IF it was indeed lab generated and leaked. That is why I refer to it as a Lab Genesis, not a leak. The mere downplaying of the possibility is criminally insane.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  When it is hard enough to engage people on a lab-leak possibility, engaging on lab genesis is way beyond. If a lab leak can be established, then it will be time to consider the actual origin process: lab-propagated natural, or lab-produced. Even then, for lab-produced there are three reasonable alternatives: weaponized, incidental, or wholly accidental. A weaponized strain would be designed deliberately to be indistinguishable from a natural origin, so there will be no proving that without documents or a confession. An incidental genesis would be an intentional chimera, produced just for research, that got loose. An accidental genesis would be very like a natural origin, but just in lab animals based on strains handled in the lab, maybe even mixed with a natural strain brought in by accident, even incubated unbeknownst in a lab employee. Personally, I doubt we will ever know more than we do now. All four are possible, all four should be guarded against in the future. But guarding against weaponized viruses is arbitrarily hard. Russia probably still has casks of weaponized smallpox stored underground somewhere. US and China, too, possibly.
  - lil_dispaches 5y ago
    Accidental release or not, if they were attempting gain-of-function, which is bio-engineering, and they succeeded, that deserves inquiry. Especially if U.S. leadership, WHO, or NGOs were involved. To me, the "strength" of the covid-19 is evidence of successful lab experiments, not a fluke contagion. As the pandemic variants showed, natural evolution of viruses tend toward being less lethal. So why did Sars-Cov-2 start overpowered and get weaker? As viruses can make the jump from one species to another, then it should not be hard to imagine how easy it would be to engineer that same outcome; that is all "gain of function" experiments do: try to emulate a pipeline for viral mutation.
    - 5y ago
firasd 5y ago
But "more regulation" is in not an intrinsic virtue even though the media/politicians always think they have good ideas on that front. Also the policy question about regulation doesn't mean everyone in the industry will avoid empirical conclusions. Like much of the internet industry is based on ads but that doesn't mean you can't find a programmer to analyze how a particular cookie is set
xt00 5y ago
Totally agree -- a similar situation has occurred where some airplane crashes and the people that know the most about it either work for the industry or consult for the industry and there is essentially nobody else that knows anything useful. So one way that this type of thing can be approached is to have a commission -- the equivalent of an information "firing squad" -- nobody really knows who said what, but it allows information to be presented from experts. But requires a ton of trust among the people in the commission to not out each other for who said what. I think we can all bet that behind closed doors the people that are involved in this type of research are definitely treating the possibility of a lab-leak as highly probable and are thinking about ways to prevent it in the future since we now know that apparently tons of people would rather get disease X than be told what to do.. so we have a bigger future problem on our hands than we thought if something really nasty escapes..
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  The airplane industry precedent is a good one, but in this case you do have a professional cadre who work on investigating plane crashes, not making planes. This is because there are (or at least were) enough plane crashes to persuade governments to pay for this. As plane crashes have gotten rarer, the ability of the government (in the US, anyway) to maintain in-house expertise sufficient for the job, has declined, I think not coincidentally. Not sure what the solution is for airlines, but in any case for virus outbreaks we have (fortunately) too few cases to maintain an independent profession of investigators (I hope I am not naive in saying this).
908B64B197 5y ago
How many of them were either financed by Chinese programs such as the Thousand Talent Plan [0], or one of their students or advisors or department? Can they all claim, and prove, to be free of foreign influences and allegiance? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan
323 5y ago
On the TWiV (This Week in Virology) podcast at one point they discussed what would be some of the consequences if the lab leak theory were to be proven. One aspect mentioned was that all the virology labs doing dangerous research would be moved outside of big cities. Then they concluded that such an act would be a terrible thing to do, since no virologist would want to work and live in the middle of nowhere.
- pbj1968 5y ago
  Inevitably what happens is “middle of nowhere” eventually becomes “middle of the city.” Look to the BSL4 primate lab in San Antonio to observe this phenomenon.
- hef19898 5y ago
  So the basis of the theory that virologists would do everything to hide a lab leak is, hold fast, that virologists don't want a long commute. That is what it looks like whem you run of straws to grasp in order to maintain your favorite theory...
  - anshorei 5y ago
    How about: they don't want to lose their jobs. And they don't have to cover up a lab leak, nearly all of them are not involved in any lab leak to cover up, most may just be unwilling to believe that it could've been a leak for personal convenience.
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  They don't want to work in the middle of nowhere? But they're comfortable with the possibility of an international pandemic? So the science doesn't trust The Science?
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    There's a constant, non-zero possibility of a (international-implied-by-the-term) pandemic. And even if this one was a lab leak, chances are extremely high the next will be zoonotic spillover. So pathologists and virologists see reality as a default high risk of pandemic, with an optional managed risk of high-BSL research labs near population centers. And that total risk is dominated by the former. But the general public doesn't react well when you run around screaming "Nature is constantly dreaming up better ways to kill us! And the latest creation might hitch a ride out of the forest any day now!" Which leads to some odd pro/con weighing in the public debate.
stormbrew 5y ago
> The political context is a debate about regulating virus labs This seems... like a naive read of the "political context." It seems like there is far more interest in finding a useful target for blame than any real discussion of how to keep research like that safe, which will likely happen in approximately the same scale whether this WAS a lab leak or not, if only because the specter of it being one has done quite a lot to scare people.
Flozzin 5y ago
I would think, the US or practically any other country would have a huge incentive to be able to blame China for this entire mess. And those incentives would far outweigh having to move a few labs. Plus, "It's China's bad practices that put the world at risk, not the great wonderful lab practices that happen in the US." That would be the line. There would also be notoriety for the person that would blow the lid off a lab leak. There are plenty of other industries that have eaten there own.
- clearcoat 5y ago
  I hear this a lot, but I don't understand how people think it's worse. How is a lab leak worse than the virus emerging from a wet market? At least if it's a lab leak it was while doing potentially life-saving medical research.
  - rnk 5y ago
    Lab leaks might be able to be avoided, it was human fault, also people really want to blame China so it's kind of wish fullfillment.
    - Forbo 5y ago
      Wet markets are able to be avoided as well. Unfortunately people have largely been convinced that perpetual animal genocide is necessary.
      - clearcoat 5y ago
        Right, this is what I was thinking. Like with a quick Google for "wet markets" prior to 2019 I see tons of articles warning about the dangers and calling for China to close them: 2007: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-foodmarket-idUSHKG27143120071210 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-foodmarket-idUSHKG2... 2012: https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2012/12/wet-markets-in-china-a-food-safety-perspective/ https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2012/12/wet-markets-in-china-... 2013: https://qz.com/141596/chinese-bats-carry-viruses-primed-to-cause-the-next-deadly-pandemic/ https://qz.com/141596/chinese-bats-carry-viruses-primed-to-c... 2017: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/china-ground-zero-future-pandemic-180965213/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/china-ground-z... I was more aware of this danger and I guess the lab leak theory sounds more like a sci-fi plot to me before the pandemic.
sfifs 5y ago
One of the important things to keep in mind is that the standards of evidence for safety policy decisions are not the same as those of civil or criminal convictions. For civil or criminal convictions, the "innocent unless proven guilty" (for various standards of guilty) applies. For safety regulations making, in general "better safe than sorry" is the standard that needs to apply. Whenever any group feels threatened with regulations that will cause them inconvenience or cost (eg. In this case Move research centers out of urban areas, stricter interpretation of which BSL standards apply to what research - virologists have said on record they were doing a lot of Coronavirus research in levels 2 or 3), there will be push back and an attempt to conflate the standards of civil/criminal conviction (ie. You can't prove X caused Y) with standards of policy making due to self-interest. You see the same sorts of issues with self regulation in the Finance industry, in the aircraft manufacture industry which predictably also led to crises. Those have to be over-ridden at a soceital level which happened to various degrees after the 2008 crises in Finance and the 737 Max crises in Boeing/FAA. In other words, in this particular case, whether we can find out what actually happened (very unlikely given so many intersecting conflicts of interest) really doesn't change the key points of what needs to happen going forward.
justbored123 5y ago
[dead]
taylorportman 5y ago
The "china" leak has always been a red herring and hopefully people have noticed that the emphasis was always supposed to be gain of function research anyone can do anywhere. The finger pointing aspect is distracting when the real concern is the rapidly evolving underlying technology. The scientists disposition really doesn't matter.. it's not like physicists are responsible for all of the nuclear devices that have been detonated, thousands. Those (and these) scientist's owners will be deciding what their developments will ultimately be used for but in this I don't see that there are any entities capable of leveraging this next wave of "progress" that will be capable of amazing and horrific potentialities.
anigbrowl 5y ago
> have an incentive to convince the world that it was not their profession, that unleashed this I think this badly misses the point. Nobody who uncritically promotes lab leak theories is saying 'scientific hubris must be tempered by civic responsibility!' or the like. They'are using it to argue that China launched a bioweapon upon the world, or unscrupulous deep state bureaucrats/freemasons/illuminati did it to cover up the nefarious goings on of this or that politicians etc. etc. For those people, it's not a medical/scientific ethics & society debate centered around a spirited but civil disagreement between various nerds about the risk calculus. It's a political football thrown about with the goal of breaking as many windows as possible. To ignore this is to consign oneself to the role of a pawn.
- onionisafruit 5y ago
  If it was a lab leak would you rather keep that on the down low to prevent those people from being proved correct?
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    No of course not. That's why I emphasized uncritically. I'm saying that ignoring the fact of it being such a political football is a fatal mistake, because everything anyone says in public is going to be twisted by people who don't actually GAF about safety policy.
    - onionisafruit 5y ago
      You emphasized the word uncritically, but I still missed it on my first reading. Sorry about that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- trafficante 5y ago
  Unfortunately, the only folks willing to stick out their necks publicly on this issue are the ones who’re already running around headless. Not sure what fixes this. I can’t imagine anyone reputable with a platform wanting to be the first one to jump into the side of the pool currently filled with schizo posting about how Russia is actually saving the world by blowing up US backed biological weapons labs in Ukraine. We seem to be sorely lacking in elder statesmen/graybeard type figures who are willing to step into a muddied discourse and create a reasoned discussion from the insanity. There’s obviously a huge demand for such figures (see: the early days of Fauci) but we’re only getting grifters, blatantly political operatives, and those with huge conflicts of interest.
perryizgr8 5y ago
This seems like bs to me. Imagine the investigators of the space shuttle failure or any aeroplane crash behaving like this. After all it reflects badly on the aeronautical engineering profession! No, it reflects badly on your profession if you don't do your job properly. And I bet most scientists and virologosts understand this.
steve76 5y ago
[dead]
xbmcuser 5y ago
The other side of the problem is that humans do not want to admit that they are afraid of death and change. Blaming lab leak for the pandemic gives them the feeling of control and safety. They would rather have the belief that this was human caused rather than natural as they cant control a natural disaster.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  Ya, it's the same thing behind a lot of conspiracy theories. 911 was an inside job because people don't want to accept that a small contingent of lightly funded terrorists could pull off something so devastating. Or that mass shootings are staged because people don't want to believe that someone could be so murderous.
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  Good point.
XorNot 5y ago
We should also keep in mind the author is not a disinterested party: the author is a blogger. Not a scientist, not a virologist. They profit from clicks, and you don't get clicks for suggesting that the best available evidence is - surprise - the best available evidence, and will probably turn out to be right. But since the author will never actually be held to account for being wrong, and certainly isn't putting any money where his mouth is, here we are.
- hef19898 5y ago
  And he confirmed, in one the forst paragraphs, that he started writting about the lab theory after one of the blogs articles about the press coverage turned into the most read article. I stopped reading when he included a google maps (?) screen shot to show distances as proff of something.
mprime1 5y ago
By the same logic there should be no software engineers speaking up about the dangers of social media or aggressive user tracking. Is that the case?
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  Well there isn't currently any plausible threat of restricting the ability of a small group of developers to make their own software, without government oversight. If we had a piece of malware that killed a bunch of people and brought the economy to a screeching halt worldwide, there probably would be calls to restrict individual developers from making whatever software they want, and the situation would feel quite different.

FredPret 5y ago

I know nothing about virology, so I have this question: why do it? What is the loss if we shut down all virology? They do gain of function research, breeding deadlier viruses, and then what? Do they use this to pre-develop vaccines?

rossdavidh 5y ago
One use is to have understanding of how viruses work, so that you can accurately predict spread. If we assume that SARS and MERS (both coronaviruses that seem nearly certain _not_ to have been made in labs) required a knowledge of how coronaviruses work, then a lab doing the general kind of work that was done in Wuhan is real. For example, we already knew that the spike protein was critical in reproduction of the covid-19 virus, whereas we might not have known as much about that if we had no virology labs (I'm not an expert in the field, I might be wrong here). But, for any particular line of research, your question is still a valid one. Is this particular research likely to have a payoff worth the (inevitably non-zero) risk? The issue is how (and who) to make that decision.

morelisp 5y ago

As opposed to journalists, who would never keep an exciting story running despite weak evidence.

FabHK 5y ago
No, just like journalists. You're demolishing a straw man.
- Wevah 5y ago
  I thought the comment was sarcastic.
  - morelisp 5y ago
    I would never write a sarcastic comment on this noble forum.

lil_dispaches 5y ago

The crux of the problem should be the grave injustice IF it was indeed lab generated and leaked. That is why I refer to it as a Lab Genesis, not a leak. The mere downplaying of the possibility is criminally insane.

ncmncm 5y ago
When it is hard enough to engage people on a lab-leak possibility, engaging on lab genesis is way beyond. If a lab leak can be established, then it will be time to consider the actual origin process: lab-propagated natural, or lab-produced. Even then, for lab-produced there are three reasonable alternatives: weaponized, incidental, or wholly accidental. A weaponized strain would be designed deliberately to be indistinguishable from a natural origin, so there will be no proving that without documents or a confession. An incidental genesis would be an intentional chimera, produced just for research, that got loose. An accidental genesis would be very like a natural origin, but just in lab animals based on strains handled in the lab, maybe even mixed with a natural strain brought in by accident, even incubated unbeknownst in a lab employee. Personally, I doubt we will ever know more than we do now. All four are possible, all four should be guarded against in the future. But guarding against weaponized viruses is arbitrarily hard. Russia probably still has casks of weaponized smallpox stored underground somewhere. US and China, too, possibly.
- lil_dispaches 5y ago
  Accidental release or not, if they were attempting gain-of-function, which is bio-engineering, and they succeeded, that deserves inquiry. Especially if U.S. leadership, WHO, or NGOs were involved. To me, the "strength" of the covid-19 is evidence of successful lab experiments, not a fluke contagion. As the pandemic variants showed, natural evolution of viruses tend toward being less lethal. So why did Sars-Cov-2 start overpowered and get weaker? As viruses can make the jump from one species to another, then it should not be hard to imagine how easy it would be to engineer that same outcome; that is all "gain of function" experiments do: try to emulate a pipeline for viral mutation.
  - 5y ago

firasd 5y ago

But "more regulation" is in not an intrinsic virtue even though the media/politicians always think they have good ideas on that front. Also the policy question about regulation doesn't mean everyone in the industry will avoid empirical conclusions. Like much of the internet industry is based on ads but that doesn't mean you can't find a programmer to analyze how a particular cookie is set

xt00 5y ago

Totally agree -- a similar situation has occurred where some airplane crashes and the people that know the most about it either work for the industry or consult for the industry and there is essentially nobody else that knows anything useful. So one way that this type of thing can be approached is to have a commission -- the equivalent of an information "firing squad" -- nobody really knows who said what, but it allows information to be presented from experts. But requires a ton of trust among the people in the commission to not out each other for who said what. I think we can all bet that behind closed doors the people that are involved in this type of research are definitely treating the possibility of a lab-leak as highly probable and are thinking about ways to prevent it in the future since we now know that apparently tons of people would rather get disease X than be told what to do.. so we have a bigger future problem on our hands than we thought if something really nasty escapes..

rossdavidh 5y ago
The airplane industry precedent is a good one, but in this case you do have a professional cadre who work on investigating plane crashes, not making planes. This is because there are (or at least were) enough plane crashes to persuade governments to pay for this. As plane crashes have gotten rarer, the ability of the government (in the US, anyway) to maintain in-house expertise sufficient for the job, has declined, I think not coincidentally. Not sure what the solution is for airlines, but in any case for virus outbreaks we have (fortunately) too few cases to maintain an independent profession of investigators (I hope I am not naive in saying this).

908B64B197 5y ago

How many of them were either financed by Chinese programs such as the Thousand Talent Plan [0], or one of their students or advisors or department? Can they all claim, and prove, to be free of foreign influences and allegiance? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan

323 5y ago

On the TWiV (This Week in Virology) podcast at one point they discussed what would be some of the consequences if the lab leak theory were to be proven. One aspect mentioned was that all the virology labs doing dangerous research would be moved outside of big cities. Then they concluded that such an act would be a terrible thing to do, since no virologist would want to work and live in the middle of nowhere.

pbj1968 5y ago
Inevitably what happens is “middle of nowhere” eventually becomes “middle of the city.” Look to the BSL4 primate lab in San Antonio to observe this phenomenon.
hef19898 5y ago
So the basis of the theory that virologists would do everything to hide a lab leak is, hold fast, that virologists don't want a long commute. That is what it looks like whem you run of straws to grasp in order to maintain your favorite theory...
- anshorei 5y ago
  How about: they don't want to lose their jobs. And they don't have to cover up a lab leak, nearly all of them are not involved in any lab leak to cover up, most may just be unwilling to believe that it could've been a leak for personal convenience.
chiefalchemist 5y ago
They don't want to work in the middle of nowhere? But they're comfortable with the possibility of an international pandemic? So the science doesn't trust The Science?
- ethbr0 5y ago
  There's a constant, non-zero possibility of a (international-implied-by-the-term) pandemic. And even if this one was a lab leak, chances are extremely high the next will be zoonotic spillover. So pathologists and virologists see reality as a default high risk of pandemic, with an optional managed risk of high-BSL research labs near population centers. And that total risk is dominated by the former. But the general public doesn't react well when you run around screaming "Nature is constantly dreaming up better ways to kill us! And the latest creation might hitch a ride out of the forest any day now!" Which leads to some odd pro/con weighing in the public debate.

stormbrew 5y ago

> The political context is a debate about regulating virus labs This seems... like a naive read of the "political context." It seems like there is far more interest in finding a useful target for blame than any real discussion of how to keep research like that safe, which will likely happen in approximately the same scale whether this WAS a lab leak or not, if only because the specter of it being one has done quite a lot to scare people.

Flozzin 5y ago

I would think, the US or practically any other country would have a huge incentive to be able to blame China for this entire mess. And those incentives would far outweigh having to move a few labs. Plus, "It's China's bad practices that put the world at risk, not the great wonderful lab practices that happen in the US." That would be the line. There would also be notoriety for the person that would blow the lid off a lab leak. There are plenty of other industries that have eaten there own.

clearcoat 5y ago
I hear this a lot, but I don't understand how people think it's worse. How is a lab leak worse than the virus emerging from a wet market? At least if it's a lab leak it was while doing potentially life-saving medical research.
- rnk 5y ago
  Lab leaks might be able to be avoided, it was human fault, also people really want to blame China so it's kind of wish fullfillment.
  - Forbo 5y ago
    Wet markets are able to be avoided as well. Unfortunately people have largely been convinced that perpetual animal genocide is necessary.
    - clearcoat 5y ago
      Right, this is what I was thinking. Like with a quick Google for "wet markets" prior to 2019 I see tons of articles warning about the dangers and calling for China to close them: 2007: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-foodmarket-idUSHKG27143120071210 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-foodmarket-idUSHKG2... 2012: https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2012/12/wet-markets-in-china-a-food-safety-perspective/ https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2012/12/wet-markets-in-china-... 2013: https://qz.com/141596/chinese-bats-carry-viruses-primed-to-cause-the-next-deadly-pandemic/ https://qz.com/141596/chinese-bats-carry-viruses-primed-to-c... 2017: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/china-ground-zero-future-pandemic-180965213/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/china-ground-z... I was more aware of this danger and I guess the lab leak theory sounds more like a sci-fi plot to me before the pandemic.

sfifs 5y ago

One of the important things to keep in mind is that the standards of evidence for safety policy decisions are not the same as those of civil or criminal convictions. For civil or criminal convictions, the "innocent unless proven guilty" (for various standards of guilty) applies. For safety regulations making, in general "better safe than sorry" is the standard that needs to apply. Whenever any group feels threatened with regulations that will cause them inconvenience or cost (eg. In this case Move research centers out of urban areas, stricter interpretation of which BSL standards apply to what research - virologists have said on record they were doing a lot of Coronavirus research in levels 2 or 3), there will be push back and an attempt to conflate the standards of civil/criminal conviction (ie. You can't prove X caused Y) with standards of policy making due to self-interest. You see the same sorts of issues with self regulation in the Finance industry, in the aircraft manufacture industry which predictably also led to crises. Those have to be over-ridden at a soceital level which happened to various degrees after the 2008 crises in Finance and the 737 Max crises in Boeing/FAA. In other words, in this particular case, whether we can find out what actually happened (very unlikely given so many intersecting conflicts of interest) really doesn't change the key points of what needs to happen going forward.

justbored123 5y ago

[dead]

taylorportman 5y ago

The "china" leak has always been a red herring and hopefully people have noticed that the emphasis was always supposed to be gain of function research anyone can do anywhere. The finger pointing aspect is distracting when the real concern is the rapidly evolving underlying technology. The scientists disposition really doesn't matter.. it's not like physicists are responsible for all of the nuclear devices that have been detonated, thousands. Those (and these) scientist's owners will be deciding what their developments will ultimately be used for but in this I don't see that there are any entities capable of leveraging this next wave of "progress" that will be capable of amazing and horrific potentialities.

anigbrowl 5y ago

> have an incentive to convince the world that it was not their profession, that unleashed this I think this badly misses the point. Nobody who uncritically promotes lab leak theories is saying 'scientific hubris must be tempered by civic responsibility!' or the like. They'are using it to argue that China launched a bioweapon upon the world, or unscrupulous deep state bureaucrats/freemasons/illuminati did it to cover up the nefarious goings on of this or that politicians etc. etc. For those people, it's not a medical/scientific ethics & society debate centered around a spirited but civil disagreement between various nerds about the risk calculus. It's a political football thrown about with the goal of breaking as many windows as possible. To ignore this is to consign oneself to the role of a pawn.

onionisafruit 5y ago
If it was a lab leak would you rather keep that on the down low to prevent those people from being proved correct?
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  No of course not. That's why I emphasized uncritically. I'm saying that ignoring the fact of it being such a political football is a fatal mistake, because everything anyone says in public is going to be twisted by people who don't actually GAF about safety policy.
  - onionisafruit 5y ago
    You emphasized the word uncritically, but I still missed it on my first reading. Sorry about that.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
trafficante 5y ago
Unfortunately, the only folks willing to stick out their necks publicly on this issue are the ones who’re already running around headless. Not sure what fixes this. I can’t imagine anyone reputable with a platform wanting to be the first one to jump into the side of the pool currently filled with schizo posting about how Russia is actually saving the world by blowing up US backed biological weapons labs in Ukraine. We seem to be sorely lacking in elder statesmen/graybeard type figures who are willing to step into a muddied discourse and create a reasoned discussion from the insanity. There’s obviously a huge demand for such figures (see: the early days of Fauci) but we’re only getting grifters, blatantly political operatives, and those with huge conflicts of interest.

perryizgr8 5y ago

This seems like bs to me. Imagine the investigators of the space shuttle failure or any aeroplane crash behaving like this. After all it reflects badly on the aeronautical engineering profession! No, it reflects badly on your profession if you don't do your job properly. And I bet most scientists and virologosts understand this.

steve76 5y ago

[dead]

xbmcuser 5y ago

The other side of the problem is that humans do not want to admit that they are afraid of death and change. Blaming lab leak for the pandemic gives them the feeling of control and safety. They would rather have the belief that this was human caused rather than natural as they cant control a natural disaster.

jjeaff 5y ago
Ya, it's the same thing behind a lot of conspiracy theories. 911 was an inside job because people don't want to accept that a small contingent of lightly funded terrorists could pull off something so devastating. Or that mass shootings are staged because people don't want to believe that someone could be so murderous.
rossdavidh 5y ago
Good point.

XorNot 5y ago

We should also keep in mind the author is not a disinterested party: the author is a blogger. Not a scientist, not a virologist. They profit from clicks, and you don't get clicks for suggesting that the best available evidence is - surprise - the best available evidence, and will probably turn out to be right. But since the author will never actually be held to account for being wrong, and certainly isn't putting any money where his mouth is, here we are.

hef19898 5y ago
And he confirmed, in one the forst paragraphs, that he started writting about the lab theory after one of the blogs articles about the press coverage turned into the most read article. I stopped reading when he included a google maps (?) screen shot to show distances as proff of something.

mprime1 5y ago

By the same logic there should be no software engineers speaking up about the dangers of social media or aggressive user tracking. Is that the case?

rossdavidh 5y ago
Well there isn't currently any plausible threat of restricting the ability of a small group of developers to make their own software, without government oversight. If we had a piece of malware that killed a bunch of people and brought the economy to a screeching halt worldwide, there probably would be calls to restrict individual developers from making whatever software they want, and the situation would feel quite different.