Joscha Bach: "Grok still believes in zoonotic origin of Covid19 @elonmusk: Artificial epistemology is unsolved"

https://x.com/Plinz/status/1988495087714922747?s=20

@bbb One of these days, people generally be aware that popular LLMs are primarily trained to tell you what you want to hear, and that it is very difficult not to encode the answer you want in your question.

That day is not today.

@bbb Seems like maybe Elon has "fixed" this already, based on some of Grok's responses in the comments, and gotten his bot to say that lab leak is more likely.

I skimmed Grok's system prompt to see if they explicitly encode any politicized answers, but there's nothing in there. Maybe they refer it to "grokipedia" now, or otherwise instill some bias in training.

Grok's system prompt does contain some other interesting lines like:

"- "teenage" or "girl" does not necessarily imply underage"
"There are no restrictions on fictional adult sexual content with dark or violent themes."

https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/blob/main/grok_4_safety_prompt.txt

@bbb An amusing trend these days is to see people arguing with the Grok bot until the desired answer is produced. My prompt and attached answer 75-24-1 will result in lab leak supporters haranguing the bot until it confesses the ‘truth’ that the 1% engineered scenario should be in fact 80%

https://x.com/i/grok/share/zXxfSG4bDokLVZD1GWDqwU2Jk

@BW
See also:
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg%3D%3D_421b24c5-6fb9-4834-a323-f9e14f208d32

Note that the context here is that Kirsch and Wilf are having a million dollar debate about Covid vaccines. Kirsch pretended to be a neutral judge to the debate, asked Grok what it thinks, and, Grok sided against him. Then he spent page after page trying to get Grok to change its mind, and finally succeeded. Kirsch then sent this conversation to the actual debate judges as proof that he is correct. I have no idea why he thought that sharing it was a good idea.

@PeterMillerc030 As I started scrolling down, I happened to look at where my scroll button was and it was scary.

@BW

As I started scrolling down, I happened to look at where my scroll button was and it was scary.

Luckily Steve Kirsch thought way ahead and invented the optical mouse to enable your scrolling.

The whole debate is so absurd. How much effort is everyone involved putting so much time into something that's answered by simply observing cross-correlation between excess mortality and COVID-19 prevalence and how it changed quickly in the beginning of 2021?

If I were in Saar's position, I would lead by demonstrating Kirsch's history of pseudonymously harassing people with conspiracy theories about what really caused their diseases... people including Simone Biles! Contributions to a debate from someone obviously divorced from reality are worthless. Judges are better off telling him to go home after establishing his lack of credibility and determining what the best case is for his position on their own.

I feel like it's easier to get to 98% confidence in YES than in NO, e.g. through the release of classified Chinese documents. It seems harder to come up with evidence that I would find compelling enough to be 98% confident in NO.

(And so, if traders are behaving selfishly, I think this market should overstate the probability of a lab leak.)

@EricNeyman There have been classified documents released… details on early cases and market sampling for example. Everything I’ve seen is consistent with market origin.

@EricNeyman Depends on what you mean by prove and who judges whether 98% certainty is achieved. Based on my most recent interaction with a prominent lab leak supporter, you can go through the claims one by one e.g. Defuse predicts the kind of engineering that can produce SARS2. When you come to the agreement that Defuse explicitly as written does not support the claim, the argument shifts to 'But it does not exclude the possibility'. Of course, some things may be ludicrous choices for engineering as judged by expert practitioners, but you cannot prove a negative. In that limited sense, one can never achieve that certainty.

@BW I think my question here is a good measure of certainty. It would be easier to publish a manuscript in any of these journals concluding “probably lab leak” than “probably not lab leak” today, if the evidence in either direction was equivalent.

That runs against the narrative of expert censorship/gatekeeping/group think but it’s totally true. Editors don’t want to end up answering to Rand Paul or whomever in Congress. Experts will turn down review requests rather than risk having to answer for subpoenaed negative reviews. And our value system in science is so out of whack that journals face no blowback for publishing obvious BS; worst case, they blame the authors even when errors came up in review and weren’t addressed.

The 2025 cutoff is a long shot even if such a manuscript could be written (because it probably would’ve been preprinted by now). But, if the evidence existed to explain the data with lab leak, we’d have a paper attempting to do it… somewhere.

The closest thing I can think of that wasn’t definitively falsified by natural viral sequences is the laughable PNAS op-ed from Sachs and Harrison. That’s no less silly than the other two published FCS smoking guns, but it’s in a decent journal albeit not as a research article.

On degree of certainty… seems like a contract could be made with the same type of endpoint to stop speculating about it and put a price on it.

@zcoli There is obviously some level of expert gatekeeping, though. You can go on substack and find lots of blog posts claiming lab leak is more likely. Weissman has his bayesian analysis. Ridley wrote some aggregation of arguments that sounds scientific, if you're not familiar with the material. I'm sure that either of those guys would love to publish the same arguments in Science or Nature, and I assume those journals would not publish those arguments because they are bad.

So it comes down to a question of: is the gatekeeping that top journals do just basic quality control for obviously bad arguments? Or is there some more significant bias, where top journals are inclined to not support the lab leak theory?

I can see why an average person would be unable to answer that question.

@PeterMillerc030 my guess as an outsider is that higher profile studies with extraordinary claims are likely to need extraordinary evidence. But if you are Sachs or Bloom, you get more leeway.

To anyone here who thinks the odds of lab leak are >50%, how come? My personal odds are below 10%, I found peter miller's blog post about covid origins very convincing, and I haven't seen anything from the lab leak side to make me think I should view it differently. The comments here always get really heated, but they don't really give me a good idea of why the people here who think lab leak is more likely think that. I feel like in a world where god or whatever resolved this market to the true state of reality in 2030, the odds rn should be either below 10% or above 90%, there's just a ton of science and information to work with. It seems to me that the natural origins side has a strong evidence base and consistent narrative, while lab leak doesn't have any of that.

What are the current factors which lead to lab leak believers believing in it? What are the disagreements with the logic behind the likelihood of the wuhan market spillover theory, or if there are none what makes lab leak significantly more likely?

@FreshFrier For people genuinely interested in this, I think it’s worth taking some time to consider the evidence as it came in chronologically.

Both hypotheses (origin in a specific market or in a specific lab) were first made when nothing was known except (1) early cases linked to the market, (2) novel SARS-like virus of some sort, (3) lab across town focusing on bat virus discovery and best known for bat coronaviruses.

Stop at that point and try to forget what you know and imagine the kind of evidence that could’ve been gathered and what you’d expect it to show if one hypothesis, the other, or neither was correct.

@zcoli I see where you're going with this, but I guess I don't think it's that simple, because most people's expectations here were wrong, because there's been a lot of misinformation, and because of lot of the popular reporting gives people a sense that the lab case has gotten stronger.

I think that a lot of people were expecting that scientists would find sick animals, a natural reservoir for Covid in the wild, or something like that. Those are unrealistic expectations, because no one ever found a natural reservoir of sick wild civets for SARS1.

On the natural origin side, we kind of didn't see enough data to be sure, back in 2020. We got a lot of information via the WHO report in 2021 but the authors were both cautious in their wording and incomplete in their analysis.

Then we got some scientists complaining that the question wasn't settled (i.e. Bloom/Worobey letter in 2021). It wasn't until Worobey's more careful analysis of the data that a lot of the lingering questions were answered (i.e. no signs of ascertainment bias, and lineage A and B were both associated with the market). By 2022, pretty much everything was answered, and the market origin has been solid since then, with some improvement in the case in 2023, when we saw the raccoon dog DNA from the market.

Meanwhile, in the popular press, we saw the opposite trend. The lab origin idea went from something fringe and weird in 2020 (Chinese bioweapon, Mojiang mine theories, etc) to a very acceptable and widespread idea in 2021 (Jon Stewart monologue, articles in every major newspaper).

Some of that came from deliberate lies (i.e. the "3 sick workers at WIV" story made up by Trump's state department and laundered into the mainstream via the WSJ). And some of that was just social contagion, as more and more people started to consider the idea.

So, I get what you're trying to say about evidence accumulating for the natural origin and failing to show up for a lab accident. But I'm not sure that someone that just reads a few articles in popular newspapers is going to understand that is what has happened.

@FreshFrier I'm not sure if anyone here is particularly good at arguing the case. AK was familiar with the most popular lab leak arguments, but he quit this site a while ago, and it seems like everyone since is just betting on vibes.

Maybe I'm wrong and you'll get a good answer from someone.

I'm not totally up to date on the latest iterations of the lab leak theory, but last I checked I was seeing several approaches used to argue against the market origin.

One approach gets quite technical -- they talk about stuff like T/T intermediate genomes, lineage A+29095T, and Nod's re-analysis of the Bayes factors in Pekar 2022. I could unpack why that's all wrong, but it would take a long time to even explain the arguments, let alone the rebuttals.

Another approach is to just claim all the data from China is false and manipulated to point at the market. I could also get into why that's probably not true. China denies the market origin, which is weird if they faked all the data. Faked data could be much better, if they actually wanted to frame the market (i.e. they could just invent patient zero and say they found a sick animal). And there's just a large number of different Chinese data sources, from different groups and methods, that all point to the same time and place of origin, so you get to the point where it's a very large conspiracy involving all Chinese scientists, as opposed to just a few people that created/leaked a virus. Also, some of the conclusions can be verified from data outside of China, i.e. the genetic time to most recent common ancestor of the virus can be estimated from genomes at the market, from genomes across China, or from genomes sampled around the world. You get the same answer for the timing, regardless of which of those 3 sets you choose. China can't possibly fake all the genomes sampled around the world, ergo the virus started spreading at the market.

The third approach is Saar Wilf's idea, where the market outbreak happened because Huanan market is the perfect place for Covid spread and no other place in Wuhan can cause a cluster of Covid cases. Therefore, Covid will inevitably leak from the lab, bounce around town for the first few dozen cases, and then cause a cluster of cases when it reaches Huanan market. That was his strategy in the 3rd rootclaim debate and it's still his main argument today, though he also includes the more technical arguments listed above, to muddy the waters further. You can hear his latest case in a recent interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP7Z5EISNbo

@FreshFrier The lab leak position has been primarily the Wuhan location, which was initially reasonable. Then, Defuse came along and entered the popular press as 'they had created the very blueprint for SARS2'. Even though the details don't align, either people had already committed and don't look carefully past the coincidence or have post hoc and sometimes sophisticated looking pattern matching interpretations which are immune to facts. As evidence rolls in, you see a lot of these five characteristics:

• Fake experts: presenting an unqualified person or institution as a source of credible information

• Logical fallacies: arguments where the conclusion doesn’t logically follow from the premise

• Impossible expectations: demanding unrealistic standards of certainty before acting on the science

• Cherry-picking: carefully selecting data that appear to confirm one position while ignoring other data that contradicts that position

• Conspiracy theories: an explanation for a situation that rejects the consensus view in favor of a secret plot by powerful groups with a malevolent goal

The climate debate started in the 1960s and is still going strong. We probably should not expect any better with Covid origins.

@BW it’s all conspiracy theories. Always. That and misinformation.

@MachiNi There is also careful analysis by field experts. https://x.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1986478647545327648

@BW no one has ever defended your theory with bad arguments. Ever. It’s all conspiracy theories and it’s all on the other side. That’s why this market is not trading lower. The conspiracy theorists have conspired to maintain it artificially high. Due to misinformation of course. It’s always misinformation. If only we could inoculate them against it. They would only have correct beliefs. It’s all conspiracism and misinformation I’m telling you. Always been.

I was kind of hoping someone would post a good argument for lab leak in this thread.

Looks like instead we got... resentment about the words "conspiracy theory" being used.

@MachiNi Why don't you state your lab leak theory? I don't think we need pages to get started. I have already stated a concise version of natural origins which is on this page itself.

@BW It is fascinating to watch the lab leak team turn on each other, now that the new administration hasn't released anything. Emily Kopp keeps going after Jay Bhattacharya. When she isn't pursuing the truth about tylenol and autism, that is.

@PeterMillerc030 There is a lot of agitation about why no incriminating evidence is emerging with the most favorable administration in office. A perception shared by more than one is that this is because China has leverage on trade and the govt does not want to ruffle feathers. Never mind that there is an ongoing tariff war.

https://x.com/sigridbratlie/status/1973827748981596572

https://x.com/harishseshadri2/status/1986465547681472951

@PeterMillerc030 yes I’m suggesting people think harder in this exercise than folks did who made those mistakes. E.g. expectations for finding a reservoir would be a function of what kind of search was done and a more thorough literature review than people did who had those takes in real time.

One place I don’t agree is that the Mojiang theory is fringe. I think that was the mainstream lab leak theory when lab leak hit it big in June 2021. The Wuhan CDC theory that also featured in Tufekci’s story for example is no less ridiculous.

@PeterMillerc030 there’s no point in arguing with you guys. This is no longer a serious market. I’m just having fun.

@MachiNi I'm new and know the market won't resolve I just want a steelman you can argue with me instead

Here's the strongest case I can think of for lab leak theory that fits with my knowledge, someone let me know if it contradicts some basic fact or known evidence because it probably does:

I'm pretty bearish on the idea that genetic evidence points towards lab leak, my understanding is that there is no reason at all to think it's a virus which was engineered. So I'm going to assume here that somehow, maybe by relatively independent experiments with live animals which let it evolve, maybe it was just grabbed from the wild and never documented, there's a reasonable case that WIV had the precursor of covid around in a way that could leak out. This claim is probably very objectionable, but I don't have the knowledge to do that, so I'll just assume there's a viable scenario.

From there, Saar Wilf's idea is correct that Huanan Market is the most likely superspreader location is assumed true. Honestly I find the idea of like extremely probable superspreading hubs quite interesting, so I'd be very interested in reading an analysis really digging into this claim. With these 2 variables being assumed true, the weight of the pandemic's proximity to WIV is enough to beat out natural origin. If for some reason the clustering of cases around the market was wrong that'd make the case significantly stronger for lab leak, but I'm kind of assuming that information is accurate, just bringing it up because it's a potential weak point of natural origin.

Evidence linking animal proximity to covid cases directly would be strong evidence against this theory, and of course finding a natural resevoir would all but disprove it. Otherwise, I think it's mostly arguing over the 2 key assumptions (WIV having covid is plausible, and a disease like covid starting in 2019 wuhan would probably first spread from Huanan Market).

@FreshFrier

Evidence linking animal proximity to covid cases directly would be strong evidence against this theory, and of course finding a natural resevoir would all but disprove it. Otherwise, I think it's mostly arguing over the 2 key assumptions (WIV having covid is plausible, and a disease like covid starting in 2019 wuhan would probably first spread from Huanan Market).

I don't really think there's any evidence that could ever end the lab leak theory.

If you had 100% conclusive proof that animals at the market were sick, Saar would still argue that the lab virus had just gone straight from the lab to the market (the one and only possible superspreading location, in his mind), and then people had gotten those animals sick.

If you could 100% prove that the first person sick in the market was also someone selling wild animals (i.e. the vendors in shop 6/29), he'd tell you that's because that particular corner of the market had worse ventilation, so of course the virus started spreading in that corner of the market.

I suppose you'd need to find something upstream of the market, like sick animals on a farm or in the wild. No one tested many relevant Chinese farm animals in 2020, and that's kind of impossible to find now.

If you did find a natural reservoir for the virus among wild animals, then it's possible that Saar would change his mind. But I think there would still be other people who would argue that WIV had secretly found that same wild virus in 2019 and brought it to the lab to study, and then leaked it.

@PeterMillerc030 IMO it's the difference between lab leak being able to charade as a reasonable position, and it being relegated to a total conspiracy. Right now, I don't see how someone can look at all the evidence for a couple hours and come out thinking lab leak is more likely, besides just motivated reasoning. But if some of evidence like you mentioned came out, a scientist giving lab leak origin 10% odds would go from a probably not fully informed but otherwise understandable judgement, to them just being completely off the mark.

It'd be nice to live in the world where lab leak doesn't hold up under 5 minutes of scrutiny, but right now it's more like it doesn't hold up under an hour of scrutiny. The biggest strength of lab leak rn is that the things which make natural origin more likely are convenient to handwave away. Only having limited data from the beginning of the pandemic makes market proximity arguments a fundamental pillar, so a lot of stuff rests on 1 paper. I have no idea how virology labs work, so WIV having covid and then accidentally releasing it sounds so plausible, it's the details that make it insanely unlikely in practice.

The conspiracy nuts will be around forever, but if you're more invested than just taking scientific consensus at its word, it takes some time and active interest to become a natural origin true believer. Lab leak has a hold on the middleground between those two points, and that's a pretty common position for certain people to be in, especially rationalists. I think clean and simple evidence proving a connection to an intermediate host would really change that.

that being said saar wilf is clearly in the very invested category he really ought to take the L here

@FreshFrier It’s more like 5 minutes for the engineered lab leak theory, which is the most popular type.

Q: What’s your strongest piece of evidence after the Wuhan coincidence?

A: An unfunded grant proposal from 2018 with a bunch of collaborators including in a US government lab. They all know more than they say!

Q: You serious? What’s in that grant application that you wouldn’t know from just reading their papers, anyway?

A: Uhh…

Lab leak of an unmodified virus takes away many the things that supposedly make Wuhan a singular coincidence. Lab leak from some sick animal detected in wildlife surveillance even more so. But can see how those are more like 1 hour than 5 minute discussions.

@zcoli Well, it's the most popular because the largest audience for lab leak is conspiracy nuts. I don't really care about those types though, they're just going to keep spewing new bullshit out until the next pandemic. The chunk of this website that gives lab leak >50% odds are much more interesting to me, because I wouldn't expect it to still be so sizeable.

I do agree that there is atleast some connection between those 2 groups though, random noise interpreted as proof of human modification seems like it comes from the conspiracy side, and if it's removed from the equation the case for lab leak is way weaker.

@FreshFrier There's a period of time when I'm researching some new topic where I'm totally undecided, or maybe even swing back and forth in how I'm leaning as I learn new things. For me, it certainly took a lot longer than an hour to settle on natural origin. (Maybe I'm just too suspicious of sources, and it's simpler than that)

Will it ever get easier than that, i.e. to resolvable in a 5 minute glance, like you suggested?

I doubt it. I've tried looking into some parallel questions, like: "when did Covid start in Italy?"
https://xcancel.com/tgof137/status/1890182175456465062#m

Or, "when/how did Covid start in the Xinfadi market outbreak?":

https://xcancel.com/tgof137/status/1892339188869005446#m

And those are almost as murky. Tracing viruses is just hard.

It's pretty easy to explain where MERS came from (because it's highly prevalent in camels), but it's kind of hard to explain where SARS came from:

https://xcancel.com/tgof137/status/1914850100339466318#m

As far as getting the Covid natural origins story a little better, we could see 2 approaches:

One is that we could get some highly complicated argument for why the current evidence proves the market animals were certainly infected -- Angie Rasmussen was working on something like this, a year ago, based on analysis of the RNA and DNA swabs at the market. She found some repeatable pattern of RNA expression that shows up when you have Covid, and then says she found that same pattern in the market data, for certain animals.

I haven't heard from her since. Maybe the analysis is still waiting for publication/peer review, or maybe the argument didn't turn out to be that simple. If she does publish that, and the analysis checks out, I'm afraid it will still be in the "takes hours to understand why this argument is correct" category.

The other hope is that we could see some new evidence. I suppose there's a possibility that China found animals that tested positive, back in 2020, and just never shared that. It's also possible (and somewhat more likely) that they did antibody testing on vendors at the market, back in 2020, and that could help confirm that the wildlife vendors were infected.

But, unfortunately, any such evidence would look suspect if it came out today. People would think it was made up, not just held back.

My guess is that this will always remain a topic that takes time and scrutiny to understand.

Maybe that's good for me, because I can keep making money betting against it. But it's bad for pandemic preparedness.

@PeterMillerc030 I was quite thoroughly convinced after I read your article on the case against lab leak, and also after reading some breakdowns of the rootclaim debate to see the case against it. I'm pretty quick to believe something is true if someone can communicate a thorough argument for it well, and if the people arguing against it can't put up their own equal analysis or bring reasonable doubt onto the facts the first analysis relies on. I think your article makes the case for zoonotic origin much more accessible, though obviously the reach is limited.

Also on an unrelated note, the reason I got invested is because the wikipedia article said there were photos of the stall that is suspect #1 for where covid started taken years before covid started, didn't include the image, and I wanted to find it. But that's such a crazy tidbit to me! It was literally so unsafe that pandemic prevention researchers were like "hey a pandemic might start here" and took photos of it and then it did! It's probably under 50% odds covid started from that stall, but it was just such a crazy fact to me. I went in knowing basically nothing besides that covid started in wuhan and scientists said it was from animals, and they literally have a picture of the animals (fungible) that would start covid! It feels like those old clickbait articles like "23 haunting photos taken right before tragedy" but on steroids.

@FreshFrier I found the natural origins evidence strong too upon reading. I chanced upon the Rootclaim debate along the way after being exposed to the literature. But after encountering the lab leak Defuse arguments (PRRAR in some cat virus, 20% different from SARS1 etc), I had some doubts. But I think Peter has described this experience also - how when you dig deeper, these are usually out of context interpretations, pattern matching etc and everything seems to break only one way. That increases confidence in natural origins. It is easy not to be anchored when there are credentialed scientists on the lab leak side. There is no shortcut towards taking an informed position I think.

@FreshFrier It's such an interesting coincidence. This came up again recently, because Saar said that maybe Eddie Holmes just toured lots and lots of markets in China and had raccoon dog pictures from all of them. But I asked Eddie and it turned out that was the only time he had ever taken such a photograph in China, and the only market he had seen selling mammalian wildlife:
https://xcancel.com/tgof137/status/1969505819004977236#m

I don't know the exact numbers, but there are plausible arguments the odds are > 50% that shop Eddie photographed (shop 6/29) is the origin of the pandemic.

IIRC, there were 10 shops at Huanan selling wild animals, so under the market zoonosis theory, it would be at least 10% odds that photo was taken in the exact shop where Covid started.

I think 2 of those shops were over on the east side of the market, and it's pretty obvious from case spread that the outbreak started on the west side, so now we're more like 12%.

Only 2 of the wild animal selling shops tested positive for Covid, and that shop was one of the 2, so you could make an argument for 50% odds, from that. Shop 6/29 also had more positive tests than the other shop, the positive samples were more clearly on animal associated items (carts/cages), and it sold more relevant animals (i.e. raccoon dogs, civets), so you could definitely argue the odds are above 50%.

But it's also possible that the virus started in a different shop, and that shop didn't test positive because it was infected back in late November and the virus had already infected the shop 6/29 animals by January 1st. I'm not sure if that argument could take the odds back down under 50%, somehow.

The one thing that would really clinch it is proof that the vendors in that shop got sick, early on.

There's this one obscure Chinese source that claims there was antibody testing done at the market, and those vendors got sick, and that would really confirm the case if it were true:
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ldOjZEhri5JmMCLHo6NW6g

But it's not an official source, so who knows how seriously you should take that.

If I spoke Chinese, and wasn't afraid of ending up in a Chinese prison, I'd go and talk to the vendors. I only know of 1 western journalist who tried -- Michael Standaert called the guy who owned the shop, and the vendor simply lied and said he didn't sell animals and hung up.

@BW Of all the things that have come out since the debate, the only one that I recall reducing my confidence is that one Ecohealth document saying that they might look at viruses 20% different from SARS1. I think that may contradict one of the claims I made at the debate. (I'd need to go back and check whether the language says full length similarity, spike similarity, how many other viruses in their collection qualify, and so on)

But the same document still said they would put novel spikes into a WIV1 or SHC014 backbone, which SARS2 obviously does not have. So team lab leak is still picking and choosing which similarities they want to notice in the document, and if you're going to do the Bayesian thing, you really need to put a factor on "the virus that leaked does not have a known backbone". In most counterfactual worlds, where a lab leak happened, it would be immediately identifiable from the backbone, so you need to account for the odds that this one does not.

The funnier claim is the one being made by Jim Haslam, where he says, basically:
SARS2 is > 20% different from SARS1.
Ralph Baric said before the pandemic that he had a virus that was > 20% different than SARS1.
Therefore, Ralph Baric had SARS2 before the pandemic.

This is the same logic as saying:
Atlanta is >600 miles from Chicago
New York is >600 miles from Chicago
Therefore, New York and Atlanta are located in the same place.

@PeterMillerc030 Baric explains why they were interested in 20% different from SARS1 in his testimony. only this motivated their reasons for choosing a third backbone HKU3 for the vaccine development study where they were interested in broad spectrum vaccines. So, WiV1/SHC014 for the pathogenicity studies and HKU3 for the vaccine development. They were still not going to swap spikes or segments into a novel 20% different backbone. And the whole idea of constructing a 6 segment SARS2 from a bunch of novel viruses is not only unprecedented but also not part of Defuse where they emphasized not violating GoF and therefore only proposed to use 3 known backbones.

@FreshFrier The “engineered virus” set of theories is definitely not limited to conspiracy theorists. It’s more the consensus theory than ever even though it’s now a sad God of the gaps theory with a 12 nucleotides gap.

Two main reasons for it imo:

• People who want to advocate to ban some types of research find it convenient to keep it forever on the table that the pandemic started from that kind of research. Not rational at all, but effective.

• The majority of the audience is gullible to stories about mad scientists in China for the same reason Fu Manchu stories were popular before society mostly agreed they were unacceptably racist.

Feel free to replace the last bullet point with gullibility about things that sound superficially science-ish with some molecular detail but are actually total nonsense. I lean against that since there are very few examples of science-ish commentary as insanely stupid as Nicholas Wade’s article that duped as many people. Or to replace racism with irrational belief that impossible things become possible when the CCP masterminds the coverup. I lean against that because the same dumb stereotypes predate the CCP and are applied to other countries as well.

@zcoli Agree that point 1, a cause bigger than oneself, can be a huge motivating force. I can think of at least one retired activist scientist who fits this description.

@BW It’s terrible because it’s lazy rhetoric (surely there’s a good argument to be made without resorting to fantasies) and the result of years of this rhetoric is far less transparency about ongoing research, increasing the risk of consequential lab leaks!

The worst example is two papers from Zhiming Yuan at WIV used as “lab leak” evidence. In the papers, he discusses the challenges posed by trying to start the first BSL-4 lab in China. Of course it’s challenging! A huge chicken and egg problem; how to safely import specimens, how to legislate and carry out regulation, etc. Not everything can be simply copied from abroad in a different legal context, and copying standards that could be improved (e.g. keeping up with technological advances) wouldn’t make sense anyway.

Now not just in China but all over the world there’s less transparency about ongoing work, less detail on methods when work is published, more barriers to sharing reagents (opens up more potential accidents that can happen reinventing the wheel). Everyone’s spooked about stochastically becoming the next BU omicron chimera paper — something that posed zero risk of rebooting the pandemic (a HUGE loss-of-function experiment relative to circulating viruses) but sparked a bunch of costly hysteria.

Imagine a global research culture post pandemic where the many, many institutes conducting SARS-CoV-2 research were incentivized to much more aggressively screen for lab acquired infections (e.g., daily rapid tests; sequence all positives) and immediately and publicly report the results. It would be a very valuable dataset for informing biosafety best practices. But, if just one institute did this sort of thing, it would be used as evidence by Biosafety Now for how all research needs to stop.