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> This remains the only scientifically supported theory for how the virus emerged. I am not so sure about this assertion. And definitely, the lab leak hypothes

> This remains the only scientifically supported theory for how the virus emerged. I am not so sure about this assertion. And definitely, the lab leak hypothesis should not have been so forcefully suppressed as a conspiracy theory.

willcipriano 3y ago
It's not the only scientifically supported theory, it's the only Scientifically supported theory. science is the thing you do. Science is the thing you trust.
- eimrine 3y ago
  Are you talking about a lab-leak hypothesis? When did it became a theory?
  - telmo 3y ago
    How could lab-leak ever become a theory? A theory is an explanation of some repeatable pattern of phenomena that is observed in nature and that can be empirically verified. "Lab-leak" is a single possible event, that may or not have happened. The most that can happen is for strong evidence to emerge for or against the hypothesis that this specific event occurred.
    - Retric 3y ago
      There’s plenty of debated scientific theories around single events such as what killed off the dinosaurs or how old the universe is etc. Testability happens when you accurately predict what evidence will be found, ie there’s excess iridium globally at the K-T boundary. Similarly there’s theories around collections of events such as the timing of the ice ages which are collectively significant.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        There is, but all possibly viable theories will have to incorporate the available evidence.
        Retric 3y ago
        Mostly, some of the available evidence in any domain will come from experimental error etc. Even the hard sciences gets messy at the edges.
      - telmo 3y ago
        That is a very good point, you have convinced me.
    - eimrine 3y ago
      > "Lab-leak" is a single possible event I don't agree because there are plethora of possible details depending on level of conspiracy. Was the virus synthesized at least partly? Was the virus selected from a number of not so harmful viruses? Was the virus went from naively non-infected bat when the fact is that it was infected? Was the lab-leak done intentionally, kind of something able to pause WW3? And so on and on.
  - spamizbad 3y ago
    It didn’t. There’s some evidence (taken in isolation) that might point to such a thing could potentially occur but data and historic evidence points to the wet market. At this point I feel like the argument is over some broader meta-argument that the lab leak hypothesis was dismissed too aggressively and the consensus formed too quickly over the wet market.
    - stringsandchars 3y ago
      > but data and historic evidence points to the wet market Because almost no-one has covered this news, you may have missed that the data pointing at the wet-market (from Worobey et al) has been thoroughly debunked using solid scientific data.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    You empiricists often loose the plot when it comes to these sort of matters. A thought experiment: A murder during a fancy dinner party. Victim was shot in the head with a 9mm round. Guest A is very evasive and was in the vicinity where the body was found. Guest A is known to have a 9mm handgun. Guest A quickly destroys his handgun and forensics cannot recover any information from it. Guest A writes a letter explaining that the shot came from outside the house, without any mention of his potential role in the murder, and his friends at the local newspaper not only run the letter, citing him as a expert, but run hit pieces that anyone claiming otherwise is a racist. Reason allows us to know Guest A was involved. In the absence of evidence sometimes reason is all you have. This is one of those cases, no science is required just a little life experience.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      This analogy gets a little strained when wild Glocks breed in the vicinity of the home, and have randomly shot people fairly regularly over the course of the house's existence. "Guest A quickly destroys his handgun" is, thus far, not supported by evidence in the lab leak hypothesis, which posits but has never proven the existence of samples of SARS-CoV-2 in the lab.
- dragonelite 3y ago
  Science and theories has been used politically for centuries. Such as malthusian theory and Darwin's survival of the fittest to support colonialism. To free market and competitive advantages as a way to destabilise domestic economics in global south. western people will believe in the wuhan virus leak and some others will believe in Fort detrick virus leak theories. You also had Russians finding a lot of virus labs in ukraine etc. The world will split into multiple realities and histories.
- SantalBlush 3y ago
  >science is the thing you do. Not really. We can build vinegar and baking soda volcanoes in our kitchens, but we can't build particle accelerators. You will never personally prove where COVID-19 originated, so if you don't want to rely on trusting other accounts, you'll need to permanently abstain from holding an opinion either way.
- paulsutter 3y ago
  I think you're saying - science is the methodology, - Science is the institution that requires trust to be believed? Folks might interpret your comment to mean we should trust the institution, when of course we all know it's a grave error to trust institutions. Institutions get captured, usually by low-iq lifers Richard Feynman: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts... science - a.k.a. research - is in the making, belongs to the (unknown, yet to be discovered) future, while expertise is based on the past, with in-built obsolescence"
- fluidcruft 3y ago
  It's always interesting that the conspiracy theorists go after their own government and don't seem to stop and think how easily all of Science can be manipulated by a motivated intelligence service. It's easy enough for actual scientists to get away with fabricating data. Imagine what a motivated adversary could do to misdirect Science. Scientists can be far too trusting.
ben_w 3y ago
I'm not sure why it's supposed to matter. In both cases, China did a bad thing; in both cases, it's a good idea to review and possibly improve biolab safety protocols and also to end wet markets as the latter were obviously a biohazard even before the pandemic.
- metalspot 3y ago
  > China did a bad thing The WIV lab was built by the French with money from many different countries and the research was being done by EcoHealth Alliance with US funding so blaming it on the Chinese is probably not the whole picture. EcoHealth alliance made a grant application to DARPA and DARPA turned them down because it was too risky but it seems pretty obvious that they got the money somewhere else. https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/ https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
- worksonmine 3y ago
  China? Look into Peter Daszak, he even mentioned his bias when the WHO sent him to investigate his own lab. Fauci was involved in funding the research via NIH, and he didn't mention this when shit hit the fan. The goal of the research was to manipulate the virus to see if it could transfer to humans, ie gain-of-function. There's a reason it was conducted in China and it's not the chinese. And it gets worse, even though EcoHealth Alliance lied in their books they recently received another grant to keep doing similar research. It was discussed here at the time. What could go wrong? It's a rabbit hole but you might be surprised how corrupt it looks. Don't get fooled by those trying to shift your focus to China.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    "Here look instead at the other people who did bad things too" is a great way to repeat every disaster and accident across history and learn zero lessons. The government of any place gets to take the blame for things happening in that place, even in more extreme cases where deeds were fully funded by a hostile government who sent in secret agents. ("The buck stops here"). So, if you want to blame $meme_de_jour as well, then go for it — but even if guilty, regardless of whether that's malice or incompetence or bad luck or a novel failure that nobody could have foreseen, that doesn't exonerate anyone else who dropped a ball, which China absolutely did more than once regardless of the origin, as they also tried to downplay the initial infections.
_notreallyme_ 3y ago
Technically, the lab leak hypothesis has not officially been suppresssed as a conspiracy theory. It is has been ranked from "extremely unlikely" to "likely with low confidence". The reason why you may think it has been suppressed as a conspiracy theory is probably because the people pushing the more for it actually use conspiracy theory patterns. In reaction, report about these loud yeller providing out-of-context, with often ridicule arguments, are dismissed as conspiracy theories. There is nonetheless some objective reports a lab leak hypotheses and how improving lab security is important to prevent this kind of things either way.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- walleeee 3y ago
  It absolutely was suppressed at the beginning. A small cadre of scientists, in coordination with a high-level government official, published claims they knew or suspected to be unsupported or misleading in a leading medical journal. This is public knowledge now.
- SamPatt 3y ago
  This feels misleading. Social media platforms were removing content discussing lab leak theories, and there's enough evidence of government officials colluding with those platforms generally to suspect they could have played a role in that. That's apart from the scientific community itself, which is what this hearing is ostensibly about.
  - simonh 3y ago
    The problem was that a lot of the 'evidence' of a lab leak and genetic engineering of the virus was contrived, exaggerated misinformation. So if you want to exclude contrived exaggerated deliberate misinformation from your platform, what are you going to do? Personally I have been from the start saying that a lab leak was possible, on the basis that lab leaks have happened before, and should be investigated. That makes me a lab leak theory supporter as a possibility from day one. I've never got silenced, banned, insulted or de-platformed for saying so. I have no common cause or sympathy for people knowingly spreading lies and contrived 'evidence' to push the lab leak hypothesis though.
cwmma 3y ago
part of the problem here is that when people say "lab leak" they are talking about two different theories 1. that the lab "created" the virus via genetic engineering or something. 2. the virus was natural but the lab was studying it and it escaped. The paper is explicitly about case one, saying the virus seems completely natural, they explicitly say case two is not off the table.
pcrh 3y ago
The key part is "scientifically supported". There's no science supporting the lab leak theory, i.e. actual scientific data linking the lab with SARS-CoV2.

willcipriano 3y ago

It's not the only scientifically supported theory, it's the only Scientifically supported theory. science is the thing you do. Science is the thing you trust.

eimrine 3y ago
Are you talking about a lab-leak hypothesis? When did it became a theory?
- telmo 3y ago
  How could lab-leak ever become a theory? A theory is an explanation of some repeatable pattern of phenomena that is observed in nature and that can be empirically verified. "Lab-leak" is a single possible event, that may or not have happened. The most that can happen is for strong evidence to emerge for or against the hypothesis that this specific event occurred.
  - Retric 3y ago
    There’s plenty of debated scientific theories around single events such as what killed off the dinosaurs or how old the universe is etc. Testability happens when you accurately predict what evidence will be found, ie there’s excess iridium globally at the K-T boundary. Similarly there’s theories around collections of events such as the timing of the ice ages which are collectively significant.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      There is, but all possibly viable theories will have to incorporate the available evidence.
      - Retric 3y ago
        Mostly, some of the available evidence in any domain will come from experimental error etc. Even the hard sciences gets messy at the edges.
    - telmo 3y ago
      That is a very good point, you have convinced me.
  - eimrine 3y ago
    > "Lab-leak" is a single possible event I don't agree because there are plethora of possible details depending on level of conspiracy. Was the virus synthesized at least partly? Was the virus selected from a number of not so harmful viruses? Was the virus went from naively non-infected bat when the fact is that it was infected? Was the lab-leak done intentionally, kind of something able to pause WW3? And so on and on.
- spamizbad 3y ago
  It didn’t. There’s some evidence (taken in isolation) that might point to such a thing could potentially occur but data and historic evidence points to the wet market. At this point I feel like the argument is over some broader meta-argument that the lab leak hypothesis was dismissed too aggressively and the consensus formed too quickly over the wet market.
  - stringsandchars 3y ago
    > but data and historic evidence points to the wet market Because almost no-one has covered this news, you may have missed that the data pointing at the wet-market (from Worobey et al) has been thoroughly debunked using solid scientific data.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  You empiricists often loose the plot when it comes to these sort of matters. A thought experiment: A murder during a fancy dinner party. Victim was shot in the head with a 9mm round. Guest A is very evasive and was in the vicinity where the body was found. Guest A is known to have a 9mm handgun. Guest A quickly destroys his handgun and forensics cannot recover any information from it. Guest A writes a letter explaining that the shot came from outside the house, without any mention of his potential role in the murder, and his friends at the local newspaper not only run the letter, citing him as a expert, but run hit pieces that anyone claiming otherwise is a racist. Reason allows us to know Guest A was involved. In the absence of evidence sometimes reason is all you have. This is one of those cases, no science is required just a little life experience.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    This analogy gets a little strained when wild Glocks breed in the vicinity of the home, and have randomly shot people fairly regularly over the course of the house's existence. "Guest A quickly destroys his handgun" is, thus far, not supported by evidence in the lab leak hypothesis, which posits but has never proven the existence of samples of SARS-CoV-2 in the lab.
dragonelite 3y ago
Science and theories has been used politically for centuries. Such as malthusian theory and Darwin's survival of the fittest to support colonialism. To free market and competitive advantages as a way to destabilise domestic economics in global south. western people will believe in the wuhan virus leak and some others will believe in Fort detrick virus leak theories. You also had Russians finding a lot of virus labs in ukraine etc. The world will split into multiple realities and histories.
SantalBlush 3y ago
>science is the thing you do. Not really. We can build vinegar and baking soda volcanoes in our kitchens, but we can't build particle accelerators. You will never personally prove where COVID-19 originated, so if you don't want to rely on trusting other accounts, you'll need to permanently abstain from holding an opinion either way.
paulsutter 3y ago
I think you're saying - science is the methodology, - Science is the institution that requires trust to be believed? Folks might interpret your comment to mean we should trust the institution, when of course we all know it's a grave error to trust institutions. Institutions get captured, usually by low-iq lifers Richard Feynman: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts... science - a.k.a. research - is in the making, belongs to the (unknown, yet to be discovered) future, while expertise is based on the past, with in-built obsolescence"
fluidcruft 3y ago
It's always interesting that the conspiracy theorists go after their own government and don't seem to stop and think how easily all of Science can be manipulated by a motivated intelligence service. It's easy enough for actual scientists to get away with fabricating data. Imagine what a motivated adversary could do to misdirect Science. Scientists can be far too trusting.

ben_w 3y ago

I'm not sure why it's supposed to matter. In both cases, China did a bad thing; in both cases, it's a good idea to review and possibly improve biolab safety protocols and also to end wet markets as the latter were obviously a biohazard even before the pandemic.

metalspot 3y ago
> China did a bad thing The WIV lab was built by the French with money from many different countries and the research was being done by EcoHealth Alliance with US funding so blaming it on the Chinese is probably not the whole picture. EcoHealth alliance made a grant application to DARPA and DARPA turned them down because it was too risky but it seems pretty obvious that they got the money somewhere else. https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/ https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
worksonmine 3y ago
China? Look into Peter Daszak, he even mentioned his bias when the WHO sent him to investigate his own lab. Fauci was involved in funding the research via NIH, and he didn't mention this when shit hit the fan. The goal of the research was to manipulate the virus to see if it could transfer to humans, ie gain-of-function. There's a reason it was conducted in China and it's not the chinese. And it gets worse, even though EcoHealth Alliance lied in their books they recently received another grant to keep doing similar research. It was discussed here at the time. What could go wrong? It's a rabbit hole but you might be surprised how corrupt it looks. Don't get fooled by those trying to shift your focus to China.
- ben_w 3y ago
  "Here look instead at the other people who did bad things too" is a great way to repeat every disaster and accident across history and learn zero lessons. The government of any place gets to take the blame for things happening in that place, even in more extreme cases where deeds were fully funded by a hostile government who sent in secret agents. ("The buck stops here"). So, if you want to blame $meme_de_jour as well, then go for it — but even if guilty, regardless of whether that's malice or incompetence or bad luck or a novel failure that nobody could have foreseen, that doesn't exonerate anyone else who dropped a ball, which China absolutely did more than once regardless of the origin, as they also tried to downplay the initial infections.

_notreallyme_ 3y ago

Technically, the lab leak hypothesis has not officially been suppresssed as a conspiracy theory. It is has been ranked from "extremely unlikely" to "likely with low confidence". The reason why you may think it has been suppressed as a conspiracy theory is probably because the people pushing the more for it actually use conspiracy theory patterns. In reaction, report about these loud yeller providing out-of-context, with often ridicule arguments, are dismissed as conspiracy theories. There is nonetheless some objective reports a lab leak hypotheses and how improving lab security is important to prevent this kind of things either way.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
walleeee 3y ago
It absolutely was suppressed at the beginning. A small cadre of scientists, in coordination with a high-level government official, published claims they knew or suspected to be unsupported or misleading in a leading medical journal. This is public knowledge now.
SamPatt 3y ago
This feels misleading. Social media platforms were removing content discussing lab leak theories, and there's enough evidence of government officials colluding with those platforms generally to suspect they could have played a role in that. That's apart from the scientific community itself, which is what this hearing is ostensibly about.
- simonh 3y ago
  The problem was that a lot of the 'evidence' of a lab leak and genetic engineering of the virus was contrived, exaggerated misinformation. So if you want to exclude contrived exaggerated deliberate misinformation from your platform, what are you going to do? Personally I have been from the start saying that a lab leak was possible, on the basis that lab leaks have happened before, and should be investigated. That makes me a lab leak theory supporter as a possibility from day one. I've never got silenced, banned, insulted or de-platformed for saying so. I have no common cause or sympathy for people knowingly spreading lies and contrived 'evidence' to push the lab leak hypothesis though.

cwmma 3y ago

part of the problem here is that when people say "lab leak" they are talking about two different theories 1. that the lab "created" the virus via genetic engineering or something. 2. the virus was natural but the lab was studying it and it escaped. The paper is explicitly about case one, saying the virus seems completely natural, they explicitly say case two is not off the table.

pcrh 3y ago

The key part is "scientifically supported". There's no science supporting the lab leak theory, i.e. actual scientific data linking the lab with SARS-CoV2.