Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

Lots of individuals denounced the system, but you didn't hear from them because they didn't meet the demands of the entirely-manufactured scientific "consensus" on the wet market theory. As it turns out, that "consensus" was almost entirely driven by Anthony Fauci's camp of virologists (it's not just him, but a relatively small group of people who have a monetary/career interest in continuing the type of research that happens at the Wuhan Institute) who saw the "lab leak" theory as a fundamental threat to their ability to continue doing research that many saw as unethical and bordering on bio-weapon development. In response, they essentially took control of the COVID response and the official COVID narrative.

That is why the director of the NIAID, which is a research organization and not a public health agency at all, took charge of the century's biggest public health situation over the head of the (sadly impotent) CDC, which should have been in charge of coordinating the US's response.

The scientific consensus that you were sold was never really a consensus. It was a power play.

By contrast, there's a strong consensus on climate change, for example, that involves a very large number of scientists who should know and who are not incentivized to believe it.

I completely disagree with your characterization of this example, and on the contrary I think your example perfectly shows how "follow the incentives" gives you truer, clearer understanding of what happened:

1. If you dug in to the authors of the now infamous Lancet letter ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_(COVID-19) ), you could see how they had huge conflicts of interests.

2. Early on in the pandemic, you could see how some people went to a lab leak (intentional or not) theory very quickly with no evidence (e.g. "The China Virus"). On the flip side, though, I think you had a lot of people pushing against this who felt that any acknowledgement of a potential lab leak was playing into "conspiracy theories". So my point is that you have to trace incentives on both sides, and both sides had incentives that were actually against finding the actual truth.

3. I think the other thing that is extremely important is to realize that nearly all humans prefer some explanation to "I don't know". Even today you see people on both sides of the Covid origins debate who are adamant their position is right, when I think the real situation is more "Some lab leak or escaped zoonotic virus being studied by a lab is more likely than not". So early on in the pandemic, you had people confidently proclaiming their personal theories as facts that weren't backed up by evidence. And importantly, the truth nearly always eventually comes out. You say "that hypothesis was totally suppressed for the mainstream media for about 2 years". That timeline is wrong, there were lots of things being reported in early 2021 about a potential lab leak - this article that summarizes the state of reporting is from June 2021: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-media-cal...

Your treating the lab leak hypothesis as near fact is exactly the kind of bullshit we need less of.

There are not "a few (orders of) magnitude" in probability between these hypotheses.

That would at least need to be 1% vs. 99% and that's being charitable.

What we need is an education system that teaches people to simultaneously entertain conflicting hypotheses and update the belief in them as information becomes available.

Your post is the perfect example of what that doesn't look like.

(Footnote: There are a number of examples in history for pathogens leaking from labs, and for zoonotic origins, so having such strongly biased priors under poor evidence in either direction really just shows that you want to believe something.)

the irony for me at least, is that even at hyper liberal institutions all my colleagues (students, post doc, faculty even) entertained the idea that a lab leak was possible. just when it came to the media this hypothesis was labeled as a conspiracy theory.

There is a virus lab in Wuhan because a lot of coronaviruses originate in that region. Its existence/location is not evidence of a lab leak.

If anything, the lab leak “theory” has received too much media attention when the primary evidence (location of a lab) is easily explained by other factors.

Imagine a virus was spread from penguins to humans. It would not be surprising if research on the virus were conducted in Antarctica!

At the very least it was such an obvious connection that ruling it out should have been an early step; when the PRC clammed up, and stopped letting any data out that should have been seen as the attempt at a cover-up that it likely was.

Maybe it didn't come from the lab. Maybe it didn't come from China at all. But maybe we should have checked that? Maybe we should know if some senior coronavirus researchers at that lab got sick with weird illnesses in the later part of 2019? Maybe we should have confirmed their virus handling procedures were up to snuff, and that a lab leak was unlikely because they were such upstanding and responsible scientists?

I agree with #1 and #3, but in trying to be overly fair, you're leaving out some important details in #2.

people went to a lab leak (intentional or not) theory very quickly with no evidence

It was known at the time that the Wuhan lab was studying coronavirus, and known they had both safety and security lapses. That is far from proof, but it is evidence.

Also, the incentive was to blame China was mixed. At the time, Xi had recently the US, and both sides were advancing a trade deal. It was a moment the US govt was trying to improve relations, and particularly get US agricultural sales to China boosted. The lab leak talk was tamped down for months. It wasn't until March that you had US officials really start to talk about it.

The lab wasn’t just studying coronaviruses. The director had intimate knowledge of gain-of-function techniques, with publications and grant proposals to document this. Some of the research was published during her tenure at the lab, so it can be assumed that the research was performed there.

Coronaviruses are a big family of viruses.

The particular viruses they were working with were only distantly related to covid. Related in the same way that house cats are related to tigers.

In addition they were not doing “gain of function research”, unless you want to say that they were also doing “loss of function research”. What they were doing was seeing how point mutation affected infectivity both positively and negatively.

We know what they were working with, and it wasn’t the virus that gave rise to covid. There are much closer matches than in other species.

The initial cases of covid 19 cluster around the wet market. The lab is in another part of the city.

If it were a lab leak then we’d expect the initial cases to cluster around the lab, and to show up in those who had contact with lab workers.

Nobody considered the lab as a source because the basic epidemiological evidence doesn’t support it.

From what I know you’re mischaracterizing the research.

To the extent that they were looking at gain of function, they were also looking at loss of function. My understanding is that the research was looking at how random point mutation affect infectivity, both positively and negatively.

They were using also using virus evolutionary pretty distant from covid 19.

There are corona viruses present in species in the wet market that were much closer to covid 19. (eg pangolin caron’s viruses)

Blaming the wuhan lab is like finding that your child has been eaten by a tiger and the blaming a house cat breeder on the other side of town.

The idea that the lab was in Wuhan due to the prevalence of bat coronaviruses in the region was one of the most frequent, yet almost universally unreferenced claims, that was made to explain away why the virus coincidentally showed up first in the same city as the lab. Hubei, where Wuhan is located, is not a central hot spot of bat coronaviruses in China. The available information points toward bat coronaviruses being much more common in the Southern provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and in particular Guangdong. This can be seen in Figure 1 ("Geographical distribution of bat coronaviruses") in the below referenced Chinese study on bat coronaviruses from 2019, published by members of the Wuhan Institute of Virology less than a year before the sars-cov-2 outbreak.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6466186/

Because people don't commute around the city? Or come into contact with other people who do? Also, you're assuming that the 'initial' cases were actually the first cases. You don't know that for sure.

A big part of the problem here is that the term "conspiracy" has multiple meanings. Here's the dictionary definition:

> An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.

This means that for there to be a conspiracy, the conspirators have to communicate with each other about it. Many people would read your post and conclude that you think that there's a centralized organization that all the journalists get their marching orders from.

I feel like in reality you probably think that the journalists, like most humans, are very good at knowing what is "in vogue" and what is "outside acceptable discourse" for their circles, and so they engage in systematic bias.

A lot of arguments over conspiracy theories consist of people using the dictionary definition of the word scoffing at people who are using the second definition of the word.

I agree, just not sure when the gain-of-function information really came out. It was being denied in congressional hearing pretty late in the process. The early speculation about the lab may not have been based on that knowledge.

The WIV had the largest program in the world to sample novel sarbecoviruses from nature. At the beginning of the pandemic, the published virus closest to SARS-CoV-2 (RaTG13) was from the WIV. Closer viruses (BANAL) have since been published, by a different group but from areas where the WIV was also recently sampling.

There's no serious question that the WIV has unpublished viruses--even with no attempt at secrecy, every active research group has unpublished work. Researchers found an unpublished merbecovirus in contamination from shared equipment. This isn't related to SARS-CoV-2, but shows the claim that the WIV had zero unpublished viruses to be specifically false. Public access to the WIV's database of viral genomes was removed early in the pandemic, and never restored.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2

Pangolins were initially proposed as the proximal host, but that's been abandoned for years. After a long delay, the paper in Nature was extensively corrected, following Alina Chan's discovery that the alleged multiple samples were all from a single batch of smuggled pangolins. These were probably infected during trafficking, in the same way that housecats are sometimes infected by SARS-CoV-2 but aren't the source.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2

The goal of research like DEFUSE was gain of function, a deadlier or faster-spreading virus. That goal wasn't always successfully achieved, but that's true for all goals. The point is that skilled researchers specifically trying to achieve a goal (like by directed evolution during serial passage, or by genetic engineering) are much more likely to do so than would random point mutations alone.

None of this means it's certain that SARS-CoV-2 arose from an accident at the WIV. The picture that you've received isn't accurate, though.

By that argument, we'd expect the first major clusters outside Asia to appear at airports or seaports, since the virus couldn't have been introduced anywhere else. They didn't, instead appearing in nursing homes, choir practices, and other locations where it spread particularly fast to patients who were particularly likely to seek medical attention.

There is no reason to believe it's possible to determine the point of introduction with such granularity from initial epidemiological data. The form of modeling behind these geographic claims shows no history of correct predictions, making them essentially unfalsifiable.

The misleading claims that you're repeating here are exactly those promoted by the scientific press, including both the highest-impact peer-reviewed journals and popular outlets like Scientific American. If you are willing to entertain the possibility that they'd misinform you and seek sources outside that bubble, then I believe you'll see that yourself.

Do you know where you got this idea? It's completely wrong and incredibly prevalent; so I'm wondering if particular sources are misleading people, or if it just "feels right" and people come to it independently unprompted.

Beyond the general background already linked, Dr. Shi specifically did not expect that natural spillover of SARS-CoV-2 occurred near Wuhan:

> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210727042832/https://www.scien...

She could be wrong, but the idea that she chose her work location based on the natural abundance of sarbecoviruses is unequivocally false.

I think you're right about this. The appearance of conspiracy can easily occur among people who aren't covertly communicating with each other when they have aligned values and incentives.

If you're going to name one person, it definitely should not be Fauci, it should be Peter Daszak and his Ecohealth Alliance.

For the curious reader, here's a short introduction, the tip of the iceberg.

> Daszak’s $3.7 million NIH grant first set off alarm bells in early May 2016, as it entered its third year. The NIH requires annual progress reports, but Daszak’s year-two report was late and the agency threatened to withhold funds until he filed it.

> The report he finally did submit worried the agency’s grant specialists. It stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and killed 35% of the humans it infected. The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide. (A chimeric virus is one that combines fragments of different viruses.) These revelations prompted the NIH’s grant specialists to ask a critical question: Should the work be subject to a federal moratorium on what was called gain-of-function research?

> But the 2015 research paper he cited was not particularly reassuring. In it, Shi Zhengli and a preeminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina, Ralph Baric, mixed components of SARS-like viruses from different species, and created a novel chimera that was able to directly infect human cells. (Baric did not respond to written questions seeking comment.)

> If anything, the MERS study Daszak proposed was even riskier. So he pitched a compromise to the NIH: that if any of the recombined strains showed 10 times greater growth than a natural virus, “we will immediately: i) stop all experiments with the mutant, ii) inform our NIAID Program Officer and the UNC [Institutional Biosafety Committee] of these results and iii) participate in decision making trees to decide appropriate paths forward.”

> This mention of UNC brought a puzzled response from an NIH program officer, who pointed out that the proposal had said the research would be performed at the WIV. “Can you clarify where the work with the chimeric viruses will actually be performed?” the officer wrote. Ten days later, with still no response from Daszak, the program officer emailed him again. On June 27, Daszak responded, buoyant as ever:

> “You are correct to identify a mistake in our letter. UNC has no oversight of the chimera work, all of which will be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology…. We will clarify tonight with Prof. Zhengli Shi exactly who will be notified if we see enhanced replication…my understanding is that I will be notified straight away, as [principal investigator], and that I can then notify you at NIAID. Apologies for the error!”

> Allowing such risky research to go forward at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was “simply crazy, in my opinion,” says Jack Nunberg, director of the Montana Biotechnology Center. “Reasons are lack of oversight, lack of regulation, the environment in China,” where scientists who publish in prestigious journals get rewarded by the government, creating dangerous incentives. “So that is what really elevates it to the realm of, ‘No, this shouldn’t happen.’”

This. You might argue given only the information that the pandemic exists and the city of origin of the first cases, it's reasonable to prefer the lab leak hypothesis, but there's a lot more evidence around than that, and most of it favors the zoonotic origin. Lab leak isn't completely ruled out (especially versions of the theory where it was a zoonotic virus that was released, as opposed to a modified one), but it's far from the obvious favourite given the evidence.

My favorite post of all time that I can no longer find:

>Thesis: China is a backward country where basic hygiene is not followed and any animal will be eaten live and raw.

>Antithesis: China is more advanced than many first world countries, with state of the art biological research pushing boundaries beyond what current protocols can handle.

>Synthesis: An infected bat escaped from the Wu Han institute of virology and was promptly eaten.

Accurate. A few bits to support this:

- Yishan Wong, once Reddit CEO and still very much in the know, admitted to the following (direct quote):

> Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic because the "debate" included ...massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting, and abuse that spilled over into the real world - e.g. harrassment of public officials and doctors, racially-motivated crimes, etc.

- Twitter had a CCP-affiliated person on their board of directors during Covid

- I assume everyone here is familiar with the Lancet letter.

Yeah, Fauci has the most recognizable brand name (hence why I used his name), but it's not really him who is the ringleader of this club. He may actually be the official "fall guy."

And also journalists keep getting leaked as having internal journalist-only messaging lists, and often discuss the seemingly coordinated articles (or at least the events leading to them) in advent of publishing. See the JournoList (and related) scandals.

> The initial cases of covid 19 cluster around the wet market.

I remember a few years ago seeing a map of the raw data that led to the wet market conclusion: While it was in the area, but they only got it to be the main cluster by ignoring like half of the data points. I don't think the earliest confirmed cases even came from there. It was far more likely the first "superspreader" event than the origin.