Worth noting that this occurred back in February 2020, when almost nothing was known about the virus. Scientists were doing their thing and exploring every possibility. Only when the evidence was...
Worth noting that this occurred back in February 2020, when almost nothing was known about the virus. Scientists were doing their thing and exploring every possibility. Only when the evidence was considered as a whole did they draw their conclusion and publish the eventual paper.
I think it's fine (and interesting) to scrutinize the work that led to their conclusions, but it seems a little dangerous to cherrypick specific quotes and imply that there's some sort of cover up. Science is iterative, and they were learning in real time just as everybody else was.
Absolutely agree and I hope I haven’t posted from an inflammatory or conspiracy theorist rag (I know nothing about the website). I mostly thought it was interesting that there seemed to be a...
Absolutely agree and I hope I haven’t posted from an inflammatory or conspiracy theorist rag (I know nothing about the website).
I mostly thought it was interesting that there seemed to be a decision to play down any possibility of a lab leak, and I’m assuming this is more to do with cultural relations than anything else, though there is not much speculation on this in the article beyond not wanting to encourage conspiracy theories. This aspect I find very interesting. I’m honestly not very interested in knowing the origin of the spread at this point, though I acknowledge it’s important to others for valid reasons like preventing it happening again. That’s a little above me though!
This site provides backgrounds on news sites including political leanings, possible bias, and controversies they or their owners are known for. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/intercept from...
This site provides backgrounds on news sites including political leanings, possible bias, and controversies they or their owners are known for. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/intercept from what it seems like, its a left leaning news site with a history of pushing the lab leak theory on Covid.
My general rule of thumb is check multiple sources for the same story, and see which outlets are pushing it. Then go with a site that you know is trustworthy rather than one you know nothing about.
My feels is if the lab leak was all but confirmed, it would be big news everywhere, not just on this site. Sure you would have sites pushing or suppressing it more than others, but when they are the only site talking about a piece of news, especially something that has a lot of conspiracies and controversy behind it, I would be skeptical.
It's important to remember that theories about a lab leak were being conflated with unfounded conspiracy theories about covid being an intentional weapon and Trump's constant "chyna virus"...
It's important to remember that theories about a lab leak were being conflated with unfounded conspiracy theories about covid being an intentional weapon and Trump's constant "chyna virus" rhetoric that routinely straddled the line into xenophobia and racism.
If any serious scientists or media were being cautious about declaring a leak, I think it was because they understood that it would be used in bad faith to inflame a political group that was already starting to show increased hostility and violence towards asians and asian americans.
I think most everyone assumed it was probably leaked from the lab at the time though, no? Like, there was a lab in Wuhan studying covid, I don't remember most people strongly denying the possibility of a leak. Jon Stewart even went on Colbert or whatever and joked as much.
Also it is important to point out that the paper in article that supposedly was "lying". Was not answering the question whether the virus was leaked or not, it was answering the question whether...
Also it is important to point out that the paper in article that supposedly was "lying". Was not answering the question whether the virus was leaked or not, it was answering the question whether it was man made or not.
Seems like a lot of people put an equal sign between these two, which is a bad assumption.
Whatever that site does related to this topic. It is inflammatory. It implies that scientists were lying, when what was said in the report, that there's no evidence the virus was man made. There...
Whatever that site does related to this topic. It is inflammatory. It implies that scientists were lying, when what was said in the report, that there's no evidence the virus was man made.
There are at least 3 possibilities
virus came from animal then transferred to us in a natural way
the lab collected a sample of the virus from bats and that sample leaked
the virus was man made and leaked from the lab
The paper in question was saying that based on the RNA of the virus, the 3rd option is highly unlikely. That's it.
Everything now points that likely it was #2, but the difference between #1 and #2 is just a technicality. And the Republican investigation is hanging on to that trying to give credibility that the virus was created to kill us all.
What I find amazing, is that the exact same people also believed that covid is not a big deal. So it's a bioweapon but also not a big deal. It's such a massive cognitive dissonance.
In short, The Intercept is what I'd call "outsider media", and don't have a heavy left-right bias. Instead they swing for the fences with unusual, high-risk stories that are outside the typical...
In short, The Intercept is what I'd call "outsider media", and don't have a heavy left-right bias. Instead they swing for the fences with unusual, high-risk stories that are outside the typical focus of mainstream publications, kinda like the indie-documentary movie genre in written form. This comes with upsides and downsides: they do seriously valuable investigative journalism, but their stories typically have a dramatized/emotionally charged narrative, and can be hard to fact-check, especially at publication time, since they're typically much more bleeding-edge than other publications.
Here's a quick history, mostly from memory, with some light fact-checking for stuff I was fuzzy on:
The outlet was formed in the wake of the Snowden leaks, by the reporter who broke that story, Glenn Greenwald, and two others: investigative journalist/nonfiction writer Jeremy Scahill, and documentary-filmmaker Laura Poitras.
In 2017, they famously bungled the handling of a document they'd been sent by Reality Winner alleging Russian interference in the 2016 US election, which led to Winner's arrest. Poitras was fired shortly thereafter, and publicly claimed it was in retaliation for her internal criticisms of the org's handling of the Winner case.
In 2020, Greenwald, who was arguably the "star figure" of the outlet, publicly resigned, claiming editorial censorship - because the editors wouldn't let him publish Hunter Biden stories (lol). I'm gonna get editorial myself here, but backing up a few years, 2016 did weird things to Greenwald. It probably wouldn't be fair to call him a full-on Trump supporter, but he began to make appearances on Fox News and other right TV instead of Democracy Now!, which was a previous favorite of his. Over the Trump presidency, he started making tweets pushing Trump's "witch hunt" narratives, and generally swinging more from alt-center to alt-right.
In the midst of his rightward move though, Greenwald broke the "Operation Car Wash" scandal in Brazil, where he lives, which exposed judicial corruption in the prosecution of then-former (and now current) President Lula. Though there's no evidence AFAIK that Greenwald was directly involved, the person who leaked the "Operation Car Wash" info to Greenwald was arrested, causing some blowback to The Intercept because of the surface-level similarities to the Winner case.
Anyway, post-resignation, there was a bitter back-and-forth between Greenwald and The Intercept's editors that went on for a year or so before fizzling out. While Greenwald's departure was a win for Team Normal, IMO they've occasionally been breadcrumbing some weaker, rightist opinion pieces in a bid to keep the Greenwald readership around and preempt suspicions of them being in the Biden camp (which they're clearly not).
To wrap this all up, my impression from watching over the years is that The Intercept is a hodgepodge group of political oddballs in the ACLU vein, who hold sincere but often strange beliefs... Their story is a colorful and winding one that throws hard left-right/good-bad dichotomies out the window. They're respectable enough, and you won't be wasting your time reading their pieces, yet everything they write should be taken with a grain of salt.
This is such a great overview, thank you! I don’t agree with their angle in this piece, but I thought the content of what they’re reporting on was interesting. I think that got missed in the...
This is such a great overview, thank you!
I don’t agree with their angle in this piece, but I thought the content of what they’re reporting on was interesting. I think that got missed in the comments and I came across as a conspiracy nut, though, so I deleted it.
While you’re not wrong, it might not apply in this case. The time between the discussions and publication was too short for the edits to be data-analysis driven. Also, the nature of the...
While you’re not wrong, it might not apply in this case. The time between the discussions and publication was too short for the edits to be data-analysis driven.
Also, the nature of the discussions suggest they were shaping their results and conclusions due to non-scientific pressure. My question is, who inside the US government is incentivized to provide that kind of pressure? And what is the incentive?
I think it comes down to the quote from the Slack messages; Science might be iterative, but this basically tells you all you need to know. They wouldn't get the answers, and a plain accusation...
I think it comes down to the quote from the Slack messages;
The truth is never going to come out ... would need irrefutable evidence
Science might be iterative, but this basically tells you all you need to know. They wouldn't get the answers, and a plain accusation would not suffice. So the next best thing was the plausibility of natural evolution. And to just "leave it at that".
These scientists never got the opportunity to scrutinize other peoples work.
Edit; to add to that
”Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
Whilst I'm not one to discount their work, and I assume their theory has solid foundations. When comparing this reporting with the final conclusion of the paper, it should've read;
Our analysis clearly show natural evolution is a plausible (and likely) origin for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
But instead confidently declares one of their most likely, albeit untestable hypothesis as a very unlikely scenario.
I'm reading The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self by Thomas Metzinger right now and one thing that was mentioned in the book that really puts science in perspective is...
I'm reading The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self by Thomas Metzinger right now and one thing that was mentioned in the book that really puts science in perspective is that since every person is viewing and interpreting the world through their own lens, it is impossible to verify the truth as an individual. Only by discussing with as many other people as possible, can you verify the truth.
That makes the peer review process make a lot of sense. A single paper may be interesting, but the truth doesn't get verified for a while after the initial theory no matter how convincing the data may be.
Though it's interesting to see the process I really dislike this article. It looks like the article makes hay (and has an inflammatory headline) by conflating two things. The article says : This...
Though it's interesting to see the process I really dislike this article. It looks like the article makes hay (and has an inflammatory headline) by conflating two things.
The article says :
(the authors privately said that) “The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely–it’s not some fringe theory.”
But the paper they were drafting argued the opposite and would be used to label the possibility of a lab leak as a fringe conspiracy, confidently asserting, “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
This seems to conflate the idea of lab leak, potentially supported by the distance of the closest related SARS-virus, with the idea of it being a constructed or manipulated virus.
It is entirely possible that the virus could have been found in the wild and brought to the lab for study and "escaped," without any manipulation, and the article doesn't cite anywhere the idea that the authors ever seriously thought manipulation was a reasonable possibility.
This is an important distinction because it a) removes support for the headline, and b) doesn't support the "Covid was a bioweapon," conspiracy theory that this committee is digging into.
The attitude in the article is that the scientists aren't sure that the strain in the public didn't come from the lab, and every time they uncover more evidence about where it did actually come...
The attitude in the article is that the scientists aren't sure that the strain in the public didn't come from the lab, and every time they uncover more evidence about where it did actually come from (the pangolins?) it seems to point more and more towards coming from the lab.
The meat of it is that Nature forced them to draw a heavy conclusion about where it came from before they were ready to, and now they're having to back up a bit on that because of the new evidence. Nature should not have stepped in and made them do that. It's not a conspiracy theory if it could be true, it's just a theory.
They might have circumvented the entire "maybe a bioweapon" stuff if they had just admitted that it could have been an accident in the first place.
It might be helpful for the conversation to include the relevant conclusion section directly from the published paper under discussion: From a bio pov, the "laboratory-based scenario," they refer...
It might be helpful for the conversation to include the relevant conclusion section directly from the published paper under discussion:
Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.
From a bio pov, the "laboratory-based scenario," they refer to here is manipulation, as they cite the features being found in related coronaviruses in nature as evidence to support that conclusion.
Notably they don't draw a heavy conclusion about where it comes from, but just exclude "purposely manipulated virus," as an possibility. The purposely manipulated virus is the conspiracy theory, and nothing in the article provides evidence that it's anything beyond that.
My point is that the the article blurs the difference between accidental escape and manipulated virus to make the topic more sensational. The difference is very significant.
btw: I totally agree that the NIH providing any editorial pressure is just a bad thing and shouldn't have happened, although shit was crazy early in the pandemic and a lot of fairly bad decisions were made.
The pangolin question is really interesting..and still a hot topic of debate. here's a recent article that narrows down a close pangolin mutation. Whether pangolins from that far away were brought to the market I have no idea, but it's good to see that researchers are still trying to get to the truth.
Yes! Exactly! Leaving out that there could have been an ACCIDENTAL laboratory escape actually left a wider hole for conspiracy theories than if they were to just say that they can't rule this out....
Yes! Exactly! Leaving out that there could have been an ACCIDENTAL laboratory escape actually left a wider hole for conspiracy theories than if they were to just say that they can't rule this out. It was a massive mistake and its obviously still being sensationalized. I'm glad they're still trying to get to the truth, I hate that it takes longer than people just making shit up.
The pangolins thing is wild, though, because they're from Africa. So they'd have to be transported and kept alive and then sold for them to be an intermediate host, and that's way more horrifying than my previous knowledge of the illegal pangolin trade.
I'm curious, if it was a cover-up, why? Obviously China would want it kept under wraps and I imagine they would have pull over some countries, but why would the US government not have called it...
I'm curious, if it was a cover-up, why? Obviously China would want it kept under wraps and I imagine they would have pull over some countries, but why would the US government not have called it out? I mean, we went through 4 years of a President that tried to weaponize every aspect of the Federal apparatus to use against people who so much as made a joke about him on a talk show. We've been embroiled in a Trade War with them for years now that's never really ended, why wouldn't the US Government have just come out and said, "It came from a Chinese lab," and pinned the blame on them? I've read different things over the years that suggest that it could have been a Chinese bio-weapon that got loose and all that, it wouldn't surprise if that was the case, but why would the US even bother with a cover-up at all if we're in such an adversarial relationship with them? It seems at this point we may never know the truth and the rumors will just perpetuate for years/decades to come.
The biggest problem with most conspiracy theories is they can't really explain who benefits and why. Like with fast earth. Who benefits from hiding that knowledge? No one. In this case, how would...
The biggest problem with most conspiracy theories is they can't really explain who benefits and why.
Like with fast earth. Who benefits from hiding that knowledge? No one.
In this case, how would the U.S. government benefit from covering this up? They simply wouldn't.
Conversely, you can ask them why people would choose not to benefit from these conspiracies. If it were true, why would someone NOT make the edge of the world a tourist destination with stunt...
Conversely, you can ask them why people would choose not to benefit from these conspiracies.
If it were true, why would someone NOT make the edge of the world a tourist destination with stunt shows, slingshot rides and the like based around it?
If it were true, why would the omnipresent "they" not use the Chinese Lab scandal to make more money off dividing the US and China or everyone else and China?
Not just the US. The entire scientific medical community. Europe, at the minimum, also has little interest in putting pressure on independent labs to push a narrative
Not just the US. The entire scientific medical community. Europe, at the minimum, also has little interest in putting pressure on independent labs to push a narrative
Yeah, the only semi-plausible reason I can think of is that the US Govt wouldn't want to destabilize trade relations with China "too much", like maybe the whole Trade War thing is really just a...
Yeah, the only semi-plausible reason I can think of is that the US Govt wouldn't want to destabilize trade relations with China "too much", like maybe the whole Trade War thing is really just a behind-the-scenes agreement between the countries to try to decouple their economies from each other and the whole Trade War is just sort of political theatre. However, that's just some off-the-cuff idea I wrote up in 5 minutes with no basis in reality, just grasping at straws. It's just sort of magical thinking that assumes ulterior motives behind anything and everything happening in the world. There's been alot of effort on the US side to try to contain China and to weaken them, I think if there had been even a shred of truth to the Covid Lab Leak that we would've already been all over it, even just making the accusation to try to alienate China from the rest of the world. Though given how much the US probably contributed to the spread, I guess we don't have much room to point the fingers at others anyways.
There's a huge range of conspiracy theories out there, but for this particular one I'd have to disagree with you. Lots of people benefitted from COVID. Pfizer made mountains of money. China was...
There's a huge range of conspiracy theories out there, but for this particular one I'd have to disagree with you.
Lots of people benefitted from COVID. Pfizer made mountains of money. China was able to justify a severe clampdown on their population just as a series of protests were getting serious. The US was able to implement contact tracing and a whole suite of tracking tools with little to no pushback.
Generally I lump conspiracy theories into two groups: "The world is not what we thought" and "People are doing something bad." Any conspiracy theory that falls in the second group usually has very well defined sets of people who are benefiting from whatever the theory is about.
I think there's a massive difference regarding paranoia in being able to understand a person or group leveraging a situation to their advantage and investing in the idea that the person or group...
I think there's a massive difference regarding paranoia in being able to understand a person or group leveraging a situation to their advantage and investing in the idea that the person or group had a hand in creating that exact situation.
My old boss benefitted from the pandemic business stimulus. I can confidently say my old boss did not manufacture and release COVID-19 in China to cause the situation they benefitted from. I think Moms for liberty and a ton of other far right lunatic groups benefitted from donations and membership due to lockdown pushback, but I don't think they created covid. Spread it, maybe, but accidentally.
Oh, absolutely agree - COVID was a time for opportunists everywhere. But generally "follow the money" has gotten me very good answers to what's going on in the world around me.
Oh, absolutely agree - COVID was a time for opportunists everywhere.
But generally "follow the money" has gotten me very good answers to what's going on in the world around me.
Ok, but who benefits from hiding that covid was a Chinese lab leak? If the U.S. Government knew China was responsible wouldn't it be in their interest to broadcast that as much as possible? The...
Ok, but who benefits from hiding that covid was a Chinese lab leak? If the U.S. Government knew China was responsible wouldn't it be in their interest to broadcast that as much as possible? The conspiracy is that they knew and didn't.
My personal opinion is that it was an attempt to save face politically. The lab leak hypothesis was initially put out by fringe groups, and the scientific community probably wanted to avoid all...
My personal opinion is that it was an attempt to save face politically. The lab leak hypothesis was initially put out by fringe groups, and the scientific community probably wanted to avoid all appearance of supporting them.
I'm not really concerned about any possible coverup, what bothered me were the spaces in the media where you were not allowed to question the "official narrative". That concerns the hell out of me.
I'm curious, if it was a cover-up, why?
I'm not really concerned about any possible coverup, what bothered me were the spaces in the media where you were not allowed to question the "official narrative". That concerns the hell out of me.
I think too many people were dying and too many members of the scientific and medical community were receiving death threats for it to just be a simple difference of opinion. I suppose that's the...
I think too many people were dying and too many members of the scientific and medical community were receiving death threats for it to just be a simple difference of opinion. I suppose that's the issue, is that it was treated as a difference in opinion like they were equal but opposite perspectives instead of being scientifically founded vs. made up. People were getting riled up over conspiracies during a dire moment of human history. We needed to work together and humoring rugged individualists in their fantasies had direct and dire consequences.
This was the galling part for me as well. I'm happy to deal with wingnuts in discussion spaces - even a significant number of wacky theories is preferable to the authoritarian "correct story"...
This was the galling part for me as well.
I'm happy to deal with wingnuts in discussion spaces - even a significant number of wacky theories is preferable to the authoritarian "correct story" being enforced.
For what it's worth, I only saw comments being suppressed or tagged as misinformation when they were making direct unfounded claims. It was always fine to discuss the evidence and ask questions,...
For what it's worth, I only saw comments being suppressed or tagged as misinformation when they were making direct unfounded claims. It was always fine to discuss the evidence and ask questions, even if they didn't support a Zoonotic explanation.
At the same time, a lot of people were making claims for which there was no evidence, stoking prejudices, and posting bad medical advice that endangered others during the peak of a pandemic. Think people unnecessarily taking hydroxychloroquine, a drug for treating malaria, which largely exhausted its supply for those who really needed it.
I do understand the concern about social platforms overstepping boundaries, and I think that's something we should be careful about. However I also recognize that these platforms bear some responsibility in not endangering their users by allowing misinformation to spread.
I think the majority found a good balance by allowing discussion of the issues, but not allowing false claims (as understood by the latest science recommendations), or by tagging them as unverified.
In short, head-on geopolitical confrontation between the US and China would be a disaster that nobody benefits from. There would likely be a Great Depression-level economic collapse if the US and...
In short, head-on geopolitical confrontation between the US and China would be a disaster that nobody benefits from. There would likely be a Great Depression-level economic collapse if the US and a coalition of western allies fully axed all trade with China, and that's what public pressure would demand if the US dropped hard evidence that the virus was a lab leak.
Granted, I don't think the US intelligence community has any such evidence, and I'm mostly agnostic on the origins of COVID (Segreto/Deigin's writing probably best sums up my views). But that being said, IMO there's clearly a political motive to not stoke the flames of great power conflict on the side of the US.
Maybe international embarrassment. Maybe country governments didn't want people to lose faith in their own government if their country is responsible for causing a global pandemic due to a serious...
I'm curious, if it was a cover-up, why?
Maybe international embarrassment. Maybe country governments didn't want people to lose faith in their own government if their country is responsible for causing a global pandemic due to a serious accident, or maybe countries didn't want their citizens to get irrationally mad at citizens of another nationality. Some people in America were already being blatantly racist to Asian Americans during COVID when we were told it was not a lab accident, I can't imagine how much worse it might have been if governments did announce it was a lab accident. I feel like that'd drive general citizen paranoia even worse than telling them the virus came from an illegal wet market.
Of course, telling a white lie is still telling a lie. When people find out someone has told them a lie, even if it was "for their own good," people feel betrayed. Also if someone is told a lie "for their own good," they may also feel insulted, as the implication is the person who is lying to them basically thinks the person they are lying to cannot handle truth. It is a disingenuous interaction from the start, which is not a good way to build trust in any sort of relationship.
After having read through a better part of the Slack messages, I came away with the same argument I've been making since virus broke the pandemic barrier: it is possible that this virus has...
After having read through a better part of the Slack messages, I came away with the same argument I've been making since virus broke the pandemic barrier:
it is possible that this virus has natural origins
it is possible that this virus has lab origins
it is impossible to prove either
...which means ultimately that the decisions to communicate it as a definitively naturally-occurring virus was done so because
a. it is the vector easiest to explain to a very wide public (read: the entire world)
b. it is the vector that puts the least onus back on scientific community to explain
c. it is the vector that has the lowest risk of damaging the reputation of virologists/national health research institutions
So then ask yourself: if there's no way to prove it, then does it matter in which way it happened? If it doesn't, then does it matter what was communicated? At the end of the day, control and prevention measures all failed on a long enough timeline everywhere in the world, so communication on the source is, to me at least, the least interesting part of it. The utter failure of societies of all stripes to handle it cleanly is the most interesting bit, burning away the veneer of control they actually have in such a scenario.
At the end of the day, it appears these entities communicated things pragmatically to keep faith in their institutions - I'll leave it up to anyone else to decide if that morally gray choice was the best. I'm personally indifferent, but I understand.
Isn't this conflating two things? There were at least three possibilities covid just came to be like most diseases, transferred to us via animals same as above, but sample was collected from...
Isn't this conflating two things? There were at least three possibilities
covid just came to be like most diseases, transferred to us via animals
same as above, but sample was collected from animal (bat) and that sample leaked due to carelessness
covid was man made and it leaked (some conspiracy theorists were saying it was purposefully released, but let's ignore that to make it simpler) from the lab
I only saw scientists denying the last one, saying that there was no sign that it was man made, and that was also what the criticized paper from March 2020 said as it was analyzing the virus' RNA.
Edit: here's the paper's conclusion:
Conclusions
In the midst of the global COVID-19 public-health emergency, it is reasonable to wonder why the origins of the pandemic matter. Detailed understanding of how an animal virus jumped species boundaries to infect humans so productively will help in the prevention of future zoonotic events. For example, if SARS-CoV-2 pre-adapted in another animal species, then there is the risk of future re-emergence events. In contrast, if the adaptive process occurred in humans, then even if repeated zoonotic transfers occur, they are unlikely to take off without the same series of mutations. In addition, identifying the closest viral relatives of SARS-CoV-2 circulating in animals will greatly assist studies of viral function. Indeed, the availability of the RaTG13 bat sequence helped reveal key RBD mutations and the polybasic cleavage site.
The genomic features described here may explain in part the infectiousness and transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 in humans. Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.
More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another. Obtaining related viral sequences from animal sources would be the most definitive way of revealing viral origins. For example, a future observation of an intermediate or fully formed polybasic cleavage site in a SARS-CoV-2-like virus from animals would lend even further support to the natural-selection hypotheses. It would also be helpful to obtain more genetic and functional data about SARS-CoV-2, including animal studies. The identification of a potential intermediate host of SARS-CoV-2, as well as sequencing of the virus from very early cases, would similarly be highly informative. Irrespective of the exact mechanisms by which SARS-CoV-2 originated via natural selection, the ongoing surveillance of pneumonia in humans and other animals is clearly of utmost importance.
I really like how this is used to manipulate politically by relying that most people won't verify anything.
Tried to search to see if this has been posted, sorry if this is a repeat. Seemed like quite a big story. For what it’s worth I think their decision was likely the correct one from a cultural...
Tried to search to see if this has been posted, sorry if this is a repeat. Seemed like quite a big story.
For what it’s worth I think their decision was likely the correct one from a cultural relations POV, but I also think it’s good to know about it now. Will be interesting to see if further papers are published or whether any part of this one is retracted.
I’m thinking about deleting this because my purpose for posting it was lost in the comments. What I thought was interesting was that it seemed to me pressure may have come down to side on the...
I’m thinking about deleting this because my purpose for posting it was lost in the comments. What I thought was interesting was that it seemed to me pressure may have come down to side on the natural theory more heavily to protect cultural relations. This is an interesting aspect of public health to me. I don’t think many saw/read my comment before posting their own, though
Worth noting that this occurred back in February 2020, when almost nothing was known about the virus. Scientists were doing their thing and exploring every possibility. Only when the evidence was considered as a whole did they draw their conclusion and publish the eventual paper.
I think it's fine (and interesting) to scrutinize the work that led to their conclusions, but it seems a little dangerous to cherrypick specific quotes and imply that there's some sort of cover up. Science is iterative, and they were learning in real time just as everybody else was.
Absolutely agree and I hope I haven’t posted from an inflammatory or conspiracy theorist rag (I know nothing about the website).
I mostly thought it was interesting that there seemed to be a decision to play down any possibility of a lab leak, and I’m assuming this is more to do with cultural relations than anything else, though there is not much speculation on this in the article beyond not wanting to encourage conspiracy theories. This aspect I find very interesting. I’m honestly not very interested in knowing the origin of the spread at this point, though I acknowledge it’s important to others for valid reasons like preventing it happening again. That’s a little above me though!
This site provides backgrounds on news sites including political leanings, possible bias, and controversies they or their owners are known for. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/intercept from what it seems like, its a left leaning news site with a history of pushing the lab leak theory on Covid.
My general rule of thumb is check multiple sources for the same story, and see which outlets are pushing it. Then go with a site that you know is trustworthy rather than one you know nothing about.
My feels is if the lab leak was all but confirmed, it would be big news everywhere, not just on this site. Sure you would have sites pushing or suppressing it more than others, but when they are the only site talking about a piece of news, especially something that has a lot of conspiracies and controversy behind it, I would be skeptical.
It's important to remember that theories about a lab leak were being conflated with unfounded conspiracy theories about covid being an intentional weapon and Trump's constant "chyna virus" rhetoric that routinely straddled the line into xenophobia and racism.
If any serious scientists or media were being cautious about declaring a leak, I think it was because they understood that it would be used in bad faith to inflame a political group that was already starting to show increased hostility and violence towards asians and asian americans.
I think most everyone assumed it was probably leaked from the lab at the time though, no? Like, there was a lab in Wuhan studying covid, I don't remember most people strongly denying the possibility of a leak. Jon Stewart even went on Colbert or whatever and joked as much.
Also it is important to point out that the paper in article that supposedly was "lying". Was not answering the question whether the virus was leaked or not, it was answering the question whether it was man made or not.
Seems like a lot of people put an equal sign between these two, which is a bad assumption.
Whatever that site does related to this topic. It is inflammatory. It implies that scientists were lying, when what was said in the report, that there's no evidence the virus was man made.
There are at least 3 possibilities
The paper in question was saying that based on the RNA of the virus, the 3rd option is highly unlikely. That's it.
Everything now points that likely it was #2, but the difference between #1 and #2 is just a technicality. And the Republican investigation is hanging on to that trying to give credibility that the virus was created to kill us all.
What I find amazing, is that the exact same people also believed that covid is not a big deal. So it's a bioweapon but also not a big deal. It's such a massive cognitive dissonance.
In short, The Intercept is what I'd call "outsider media", and don't have a heavy left-right bias. Instead they swing for the fences with unusual, high-risk stories that are outside the typical focus of mainstream publications, kinda like the indie-documentary movie genre in written form. This comes with upsides and downsides: they do seriously valuable investigative journalism, but their stories typically have a dramatized/emotionally charged narrative, and can be hard to fact-check, especially at publication time, since they're typically much more bleeding-edge than other publications.
Here's a quick history, mostly from memory, with some light fact-checking for stuff I was fuzzy on:
The outlet was formed in the wake of the Snowden leaks, by the reporter who broke that story, Glenn Greenwald, and two others: investigative journalist/nonfiction writer Jeremy Scahill, and documentary-filmmaker Laura Poitras.
In 2017, they famously bungled the handling of a document they'd been sent by Reality Winner alleging Russian interference in the 2016 US election, which led to Winner's arrest. Poitras was fired shortly thereafter, and publicly claimed it was in retaliation for her internal criticisms of the org's handling of the Winner case.
In 2020, Greenwald, who was arguably the "star figure" of the outlet, publicly resigned, claiming editorial censorship - because the editors wouldn't let him publish Hunter Biden stories (lol). I'm gonna get editorial myself here, but backing up a few years, 2016 did weird things to Greenwald. It probably wouldn't be fair to call him a full-on Trump supporter, but he began to make appearances on Fox News and other right TV instead of Democracy Now!, which was a previous favorite of his. Over the Trump presidency, he started making tweets pushing Trump's "witch hunt" narratives, and generally swinging more from alt-center to alt-right.
In the midst of his rightward move though, Greenwald broke the "Operation Car Wash" scandal in Brazil, where he lives, which exposed judicial corruption in the prosecution of then-former (and now current) President Lula. Though there's no evidence AFAIK that Greenwald was directly involved, the person who leaked the "Operation Car Wash" info to Greenwald was arrested, causing some blowback to The Intercept because of the surface-level similarities to the Winner case.
Anyway, post-resignation, there was a bitter back-and-forth between Greenwald and The Intercept's editors that went on for a year or so before fizzling out. While Greenwald's departure was a win for Team Normal, IMO they've occasionally been breadcrumbing some weaker, rightist opinion pieces in a bid to keep the Greenwald readership around and preempt suspicions of them being in the Biden camp (which they're clearly not).
To wrap this all up, my impression from watching over the years is that The Intercept is a hodgepodge group of political oddballs in the ACLU vein, who hold sincere but often strange beliefs... Their story is a colorful and winding one that throws hard left-right/good-bad dichotomies out the window. They're respectable enough, and you won't be wasting your time reading their pieces, yet everything they write should be taken with a grain of salt.
This is such a great overview, thank you!
I don’t agree with their angle in this piece, but I thought the content of what they’re reporting on was interesting. I think that got missed in the comments and I came across as a conspiracy nut, though, so I deleted it.
While you’re not wrong, it might not apply in this case. The time between the discussions and publication was too short for the edits to be data-analysis driven.
Also, the nature of the discussions suggest they were shaping their results and conclusions due to non-scientific pressure. My question is, who inside the US government is incentivized to provide that kind of pressure? And what is the incentive?
I think it comes down to the quote from the Slack messages;
Science might be iterative, but this basically tells you all you need to know. They wouldn't get the answers, and a plain accusation would not suffice. So the next best thing was the plausibility of natural evolution. And to just "leave it at that".
These scientists never got the opportunity to scrutinize other peoples work.
Edit; to add to that
Whilst I'm not one to discount their work, and I assume their theory has solid foundations. When comparing this reporting with the final conclusion of the paper, it should've read;
But instead confidently declares one of their most likely, albeit untestable hypothesis as a very unlikely scenario.
I'm reading The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self by Thomas Metzinger right now and one thing that was mentioned in the book that really puts science in perspective is that since every person is viewing and interpreting the world through their own lens, it is impossible to verify the truth as an individual. Only by discussing with as many other people as possible, can you verify the truth.
That makes the peer review process make a lot of sense. A single paper may be interesting, but the truth doesn't get verified for a while after the initial theory no matter how convincing the data may be.
Though it's interesting to see the process I really dislike this article. It looks like the article makes hay (and has an inflammatory headline) by conflating two things.
The article says :
This seems to conflate the idea of lab leak, potentially supported by the distance of the closest related SARS-virus, with the idea of it being a constructed or manipulated virus.
It is entirely possible that the virus could have been found in the wild and brought to the lab for study and "escaped," without any manipulation, and the article doesn't cite anywhere the idea that the authors ever seriously thought manipulation was a reasonable possibility.
This is an important distinction because it a) removes support for the headline, and b) doesn't support the "Covid was a bioweapon," conspiracy theory that this committee is digging into.
The attitude in the article is that the scientists aren't sure that the strain in the public didn't come from the lab, and every time they uncover more evidence about where it did actually come from (the pangolins?) it seems to point more and more towards coming from the lab.
The meat of it is that Nature forced them to draw a heavy conclusion about where it came from before they were ready to, and now they're having to back up a bit on that because of the new evidence. Nature should not have stepped in and made them do that. It's not a conspiracy theory if it could be true, it's just a theory.
They might have circumvented the entire "maybe a bioweapon" stuff if they had just admitted that it could have been an accident in the first place.
It might be helpful for the conversation to include the relevant conclusion section directly from the published paper under discussion:
From a bio pov, the "laboratory-based scenario," they refer to here is manipulation, as they cite the features being found in related coronaviruses in nature as evidence to support that conclusion.
Notably they don't draw a heavy conclusion about where it comes from, but just exclude "purposely manipulated virus," as an possibility. The purposely manipulated virus is the conspiracy theory, and nothing in the article provides evidence that it's anything beyond that.
My point is that the the article blurs the difference between accidental escape and manipulated virus to make the topic more sensational. The difference is very significant.
btw: I totally agree that the NIH providing any editorial pressure is just a bad thing and shouldn't have happened, although shit was crazy early in the pandemic and a lot of fairly bad decisions were made.
The pangolin question is really interesting..and still a hot topic of debate. here's a recent article that narrows down a close pangolin mutation. Whether pangolins from that far away were brought to the market I have no idea, but it's good to see that researchers are still trying to get to the truth.
Yes! Exactly! Leaving out that there could have been an ACCIDENTAL laboratory escape actually left a wider hole for conspiracy theories than if they were to just say that they can't rule this out. It was a massive mistake and its obviously still being sensationalized. I'm glad they're still trying to get to the truth, I hate that it takes longer than people just making shit up.
The pangolins thing is wild, though, because they're from Africa. So they'd have to be transported and kept alive and then sold for them to be an intermediate host, and that's way more horrifying than my previous knowledge of the illegal pangolin trade.
I'm curious, if it was a cover-up, why? Obviously China would want it kept under wraps and I imagine they would have pull over some countries, but why would the US government not have called it out? I mean, we went through 4 years of a President that tried to weaponize every aspect of the Federal apparatus to use against people who so much as made a joke about him on a talk show. We've been embroiled in a Trade War with them for years now that's never really ended, why wouldn't the US Government have just come out and said, "It came from a Chinese lab," and pinned the blame on them? I've read different things over the years that suggest that it could have been a Chinese bio-weapon that got loose and all that, it wouldn't surprise if that was the case, but why would the US even bother with a cover-up at all if we're in such an adversarial relationship with them? It seems at this point we may never know the truth and the rumors will just perpetuate for years/decades to come.
The biggest problem with most conspiracy theories is they can't really explain who benefits and why.
Like with fast earth. Who benefits from hiding that knowledge? No one.
In this case, how would the U.S. government benefit from covering this up? They simply wouldn't.
Conversely, you can ask them why people would choose not to benefit from these conspiracies.
If it were true, why would someone NOT make the edge of the world a tourist destination with stunt shows, slingshot rides and the like based around it?
If it were true, why would the omnipresent "they" not use the Chinese Lab scandal to make more money off dividing the US and China or everyone else and China?
Not just the US. The entire scientific medical community. Europe, at the minimum, also has little interest in putting pressure on independent labs to push a narrative
Yeah, the only semi-plausible reason I can think of is that the US Govt wouldn't want to destabilize trade relations with China "too much", like maybe the whole Trade War thing is really just a behind-the-scenes agreement between the countries to try to decouple their economies from each other and the whole Trade War is just sort of political theatre. However, that's just some off-the-cuff idea I wrote up in 5 minutes with no basis in reality, just grasping at straws. It's just sort of magical thinking that assumes ulterior motives behind anything and everything happening in the world. There's been alot of effort on the US side to try to contain China and to weaken them, I think if there had been even a shred of truth to the Covid Lab Leak that we would've already been all over it, even just making the accusation to try to alienate China from the rest of the world. Though given how much the US probably contributed to the spread, I guess we don't have much room to point the fingers at others anyways.
There's a huge range of conspiracy theories out there, but for this particular one I'd have to disagree with you.
Lots of people benefitted from COVID. Pfizer made mountains of money. China was able to justify a severe clampdown on their population just as a series of protests were getting serious. The US was able to implement contact tracing and a whole suite of tracking tools with little to no pushback.
Generally I lump conspiracy theories into two groups: "The world is not what we thought" and "People are doing something bad." Any conspiracy theory that falls in the second group usually has very well defined sets of people who are benefiting from whatever the theory is about.
I think there's a massive difference regarding paranoia in being able to understand a person or group leveraging a situation to their advantage and investing in the idea that the person or group had a hand in creating that exact situation.
My old boss benefitted from the pandemic business stimulus. I can confidently say my old boss did not manufacture and release COVID-19 in China to cause the situation they benefitted from. I think Moms for liberty and a ton of other far right lunatic groups benefitted from donations and membership due to lockdown pushback, but I don't think they created covid. Spread it, maybe, but accidentally.
Oh, absolutely agree - COVID was a time for opportunists everywhere.
But generally "follow the money" has gotten me very good answers to what's going on in the world around me.
Ok, but who benefits from hiding that covid was a Chinese lab leak? If the U.S. Government knew China was responsible wouldn't it be in their interest to broadcast that as much as possible? The conspiracy is that they knew and didn't.
My personal opinion is that it was an attempt to save face politically. The lab leak hypothesis was initially put out by fringe groups, and the scientific community probably wanted to avoid all appearance of supporting them.
I'm not really concerned about any possible coverup, what bothered me were the spaces in the media where you were not allowed to question the "official narrative". That concerns the hell out of me.
I think too many people were dying and too many members of the scientific and medical community were receiving death threats for it to just be a simple difference of opinion. I suppose that's the issue, is that it was treated as a difference in opinion like they were equal but opposite perspectives instead of being scientifically founded vs. made up. People were getting riled up over conspiracies during a dire moment of human history. We needed to work together and humoring rugged individualists in their fantasies had direct and dire consequences.
This was the galling part for me as well.
I'm happy to deal with wingnuts in discussion spaces - even a significant number of wacky theories is preferable to the authoritarian "correct story" being enforced.
For what it's worth, I only saw comments being suppressed or tagged as misinformation when they were making direct unfounded claims. It was always fine to discuss the evidence and ask questions, even if they didn't support a Zoonotic explanation.
At the same time, a lot of people were making claims for which there was no evidence, stoking prejudices, and posting bad medical advice that endangered others during the peak of a pandemic. Think people unnecessarily taking hydroxychloroquine, a drug for treating malaria, which largely exhausted its supply for those who really needed it.
I do understand the concern about social platforms overstepping boundaries, and I think that's something we should be careful about. However I also recognize that these platforms bear some responsibility in not endangering their users by allowing misinformation to spread.
I think the majority found a good balance by allowing discussion of the issues, but not allowing false claims (as understood by the latest science recommendations), or by tagging them as unverified.
In short, head-on geopolitical confrontation between the US and China would be a disaster that nobody benefits from. There would likely be a Great Depression-level economic collapse if the US and a coalition of western allies fully axed all trade with China, and that's what public pressure would demand if the US dropped hard evidence that the virus was a lab leak.
Granted, I don't think the US intelligence community has any such evidence, and I'm mostly agnostic on the origins of COVID (Segreto/Deigin's writing probably best sums up my views). But that being said, IMO there's clearly a political motive to not stoke the flames of great power conflict on the side of the US.
Maybe international embarrassment. Maybe country governments didn't want people to lose faith in their own government if their country is responsible for causing a global pandemic due to a serious accident, or maybe countries didn't want their citizens to get irrationally mad at citizens of another nationality. Some people in America were already being blatantly racist to Asian Americans during COVID when we were told it was not a lab accident, I can't imagine how much worse it might have been if governments did announce it was a lab accident. I feel like that'd drive general citizen paranoia even worse than telling them the virus came from an illegal wet market.
Of course, telling a white lie is still telling a lie. When people find out someone has told them a lie, even if it was "for their own good," people feel betrayed. Also if someone is told a lie "for their own good," they may also feel insulted, as the implication is the person who is lying to them basically thinks the person they are lying to cannot handle truth. It is a disingenuous interaction from the start, which is not a good way to build trust in any sort of relationship.
After having read through a better part of the Slack messages, I came away with the same argument I've been making since virus broke the pandemic barrier:
...which means ultimately that the decisions to communicate it as a definitively naturally-occurring virus was done so because
a. it is the vector easiest to explain to a very wide public (read: the entire world)
b. it is the vector that puts the least onus back on scientific community to explain
c. it is the vector that has the lowest risk of damaging the reputation of virologists/national health research institutions
So then ask yourself: if there's no way to prove it, then does it matter in which way it happened? If it doesn't, then does it matter what was communicated? At the end of the day, control and prevention measures all failed on a long enough timeline everywhere in the world, so communication on the source is, to me at least, the least interesting part of it. The utter failure of societies of all stripes to handle it cleanly is the most interesting bit, burning away the veneer of control they actually have in such a scenario.
At the end of the day, it appears these entities communicated things pragmatically to keep faith in their institutions - I'll leave it up to anyone else to decide if that morally gray choice was the best. I'm personally indifferent, but I understand.
Isn't this conflating two things? There were at least three possibilities
I only saw scientists denying the last one, saying that there was no sign that it was man made, and that was also what the criticized paper from March 2020 said as it was analyzing the virus' RNA.
Edit: here's the paper's conclusion:
I really like how this is used to manipulate politically by relying that most people won't verify anything.
Tried to search to see if this has been posted, sorry if this is a repeat. Seemed like quite a big story.
For what it’s worth I think their decision was likely the correct one from a cultural relations POV, but I also think it’s good to know about it now. Will be interesting to see if further papers are published or whether any part of this one is retracted.
Can we leave the misinformation on Reddit? Please?
Personally I appreciate the thoughtful answers and discussion that were provided to OP.
I’m thinking about deleting this because my purpose for posting it was lost in the comments. What I thought was interesting was that it seemed to me pressure may have come down to side on the natural theory more heavily to protect cultural relations. This is an interesting aspect of public health to me. I don’t think many saw/read my comment before posting their own, though