> Perhaps begin by entertaining ideas as possible until proven otherwise
You're assuming I didn't already do that. I'm just objecting to the exhortation to "do your own research". I'm not going to do that, because we live in a modern society with labor specialization.
> No scientists ever provided conclusive proof the virus didn’t originate in a lab.
Where the virus originated from is nice to know for later. But I really care about getting my life back right now. The scientists and experts can debate all the evidence, consider all the options, and report back their findings. "Doing my research" isn't going to help anyone.
> It is asserted that because the COVID pandemic had a huge impact that the cause must be investigated,
This is generally how we focus funds. If things are serious, they get serious funding. I'm not sure if you have seen how many people covid killed, but it was a lot. Plus, humans, despite being really bad at it, love causality.
> There seems to be a fundamental problem with the logic here.
> but if the origin was zoonotic then the origin may remain ambiguous and even if understood there may be no effective way to respond.
Most of science is wandering into the darkness. I'm not sure why you're just telling us to give up before we even start. There's plenty of scientific works that took well over a hundred years to solve. Giving up before you begin is the fundamental problem with logic here. It is better to improve our knowledge than sit by complicity. Your comment is fundamentally anti-scientific.
> Could you provide some data to support the assertion that the virus was engineered? I'm hoping something like a leaked paper, or a lab notebook, or maybe hand written data on a piece of scrap paper that somebody found in the garbage bin in china.. I mean, I'll take anything.
Where did I say it was engineered? We have no evidence of its natural origin either. Can you provide its natural reservoir? An animal sample? Another coronavirus with this furin cleavage site? Anything?
What we are trying to do is ascertain the likelihoods of various scenarios given the evidence we have. Not the evidence we wish we had. I do not believe, nor have I anywhere asserted, that we have proven the virus was unnatural in origin. I also do not believe we have proven that the virus was natural in origin.
What I believe is that the evidence is presently insufficient to determine, and fairly ambiguous. What is unambiguous is the extraordinarily shady and self serving behavior of Peter Daszak. Why it is that he's doing that, I don't know. It could be because he participated in the engineering of this virus, but it could be for entirely separate reasons that pertain to him. I do think we should at least make a serious effort to find out, though.
> And if those files are shared, and nothing is found, you'd just move the goalposts, and claim the data was doctored.
Really? That's what you're going for?
Would you be insulting me the same way if the suspicion was on, say, a private laboratory in the United States? Would you imply that I'm a conspiracy theorist nutjob if I were to demand an inquiry? Should we stop all trials because there's always some people who refuse to believe the verdict even it was reasonable when the trial was obviosly fair? How is this situation different?
It seems to me that you're the one who's exhibiting the same kind of denial and mental gymnastic as the average 911 or JFK truther.
I'm not a biologist, I'm an engineer with training in industrial safety and I've studied industrial accidents long before this happened. Industrial accidents happen. They happen less and are less deadly in industries where risk is taken seriously and where open access to information and public oversight is present. The debate on gain of function research that has been revealed to have happened before this pandemic, whether such research happened in Wuhan or not, shows to me that not only was risk not taken seriously enough by the virology community as whole, but that open debate and oversight was almost entirely absent.
> the last thing we need is science blamed for this virus.
I think this is the primary reason so many virologists are against the lab-leak idea. It's not because they think it's unlikely, but because if people were aware of how dangerous this research was the funding would dry up and it might even get banned.
> I think you are being incredibly naive to accept a single scientific paper on face value.
No one accepted that one paper at face value, it's just one of several examples of papers and research where actual evidence was presented and explored.
The fact that biolabs exist and leaks have happened in the past are not actual evidence. That lab still exists today and leaks have still happened in the past, does that mean a virus is leaking right now? It's just wild speculation. Wet markets also exist and have been linked to outbreaks of disease in the past. These are reasons for investigations, not for accusations and conspiracy theories.
Gradually, real evidence for the lab leak theory started to emerge. Your parking lot picture and the sick lab researchers are good examples of evidence, even though they're only circumstantial, but none of that evidence existed when people started spreading lab leak conspiracy theories. Those conspiracy theories had no evidence at all.
Even still, investigations were carried out to see if the the virus really was a bioweapon, to determine if it came from the lab, and to see if it came from the market. As evidence that it came from the market grew, the people spouting lab leak conspiracy theories ignored all the evidence for everything else and continued to spread their conspiracies even though the evidence for a natural origin was much stronger.
Any time actual evidence that supported the lab leak theory emerged the media reported on it, and when enough evidence existed to justify the lab leak theory the media took it seriously.
> your a crazy person to believe there COULD have been a lab leak
I'm not really bothered about the true origin of the virus, except inasmuchas scientists lying about their true beliefs is incredibly damaging to public confidence, and energises conspiranoids. Lying about the benefits of mask-wearing was bloody stupid.
I no longer pay attention to statistics about infection rates and fatality rates. They are presented in the press without context (e.g. "It's a Monday, so results are skewed because some clinics report numbers for the whole weekend"). We get numbers with spurious precision. How can they know it's 251 cases, and not 249? Where are the error-bars?
It's really annoying; if you want to understand what's happening, you really do have to "do your own research". I feel ashamed to have just typed that, because that's a phrase mainly used by antivaxxers and QAnon conspiraloons, people who generally don't have the critical-thinking capacity to distinguish their left hand from their right, let alone evaluate research.
> And educated people are supposed to believe a disease spread that naturally impossible.
Are you a virologist? Can you take a minute and think about something you say before you jump into conspiracy theories? This is a tragedy, not an opportunity to spin your silly ideas.
> if you say if came from the lab you are a conspiracy theorist and lose your grant and job.
And, absent actual hard physical evidence, not the slightest amount of which exists, you should be labeled a conspiracy theorist, because that is exactly what you are.
Further if your job is in direct virology / epidemiology and you’re such a theorist — which, again, pretty much does not exist, hence precisely why the actually qualified write letters trying to counter the not-actually qualified — then you absolutely should lose your grant and your job. Science is about discovering the consensus on what the truth is… the truth is SARS-CoV-2 had animal origins in the wet market where all the original cases arose, full stop.
But please, go on believing your conspiracy theory.
I feel maybe you've got some expectations that don't make sense?
If you have symptoms and go to the doctor, she doesn't know the truth of your ills and the sure guaranteed way to cure you. She'll simply apply a vast knowledge set to the possibility of what it could be you have, and what has sometimes work to cure it in the past.
If your expectations are such, then I feel the media, companies and governments institutions have done pretty well.
I don't know where you get your information from, but it's not like the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis is new, it's been reported on plenty of times, so did the wet market hypothetisis, so did the bat one, and even the lab leak from an American base was reported.
Now which one is true, well, again tone your expectations, when have we known the lineage of anything to 100% accuracy? We constantly send people to jail who were innocent even with a full trial. We still have no clue where we come from. There are still people who don't know who their parents are, or even when they were born.
If the virus comes from nature, it'll be pretty hard to be sure where it originated, you could maybe trace the earliest known sighting, but that's it.
If it comes from a man made lab, there's clearly very powerful actors hiding the evidence, so again, that'll be pretty hard to prove unless people just all came clean unambiguously, but even now, it's become so political, would they be forced too, scape goated, or coerced? We'll never know.
I feel people want truths, but the world is made of "best guesses".
So I think we should look at our institutions methodologies instead, could they have guessed better? If so, why they failed to do so? Did they ignore sources of data, did they make assumptions they forgot to attach a confidence against? Were they politically biased? Etc.
> It is perfectly reasonable that some lab somewhere would collect and study the COVID virus. What is unreasonable is that the lab or a lab worker just got sloppy and accidently released that virus out to the world.
Is this still true? It is unfortunate that it took an event like this to prove what we already knew: lab workers, who are of course fallible humans, will make mistakes.
Given that Covid was released upon the world likely due to a lab accident and all of the damage it did over a span of years, it would seem reasonable to rethink whether unlimited experimentation and especially enhancement with viruses should be allowed. This in itself has proven to be a source of denial by the very virus experts (like Fauci) that do not want their area of science to be restricted.
Not really. We can build vinegar and baking soda volcanoes in our kitchens, but we can't build particle accelerators.
You will never personally prove where COVID-19 originated, so if you don't want to rely on trusting other accounts, you'll need to permanently abstain from holding an opinion either way.
> Serious people all agree about this, only cranks disagree with us
Mostly joking but if the shoe fits... As one example, one of the authors of the famous 'Viral' book pointing to a Lab Leak is a coal baron GW denier who chaired a bank that failed due to subprime loans and who previously claimed that HIV was a man-made virus derived from failed polio vaccination experiments[1]. How much credence should we give someone like that? How many hours of time should be spent debunking every new theory he promotes rather than just casting him aside and looking for non-morons to engage with?
It's just a smattering of grievances and debunked conspiracy theories. How would virologists begin to respond to that?
I mean I said it above, and I'll just copy/paste it here;
> Admitting that Covid19 was very likely a spillover of a natural virus doesn't mean that you trust China, that you think their labs are run well or are incapable of accidents, that they've been transparent or helpful with the investigations, or that the possibility of new evidence pointing to a lab origin is foreclosed -- just that the actual physical evidence we have today about this virus and this pandemic overwhelmingly points to a natural origin.
There are well-intentioned scientists testing theories that could point to a lab origin of Covid, it would be extremely interesting and important if they find something to indicate that's the case. Unfortunately to the casual observer of the actual state of science here, they'd be led to believe that there's consensus about a lab leak or at least a strong likelihood backed by evidence when that's not remotely true.
> It was misinformation to say that the virus COULD have come from a lab.
No, and in my experience this is not how things were presented. It _is_ misinformation to suggest that that is the likeliest explanation or to imply that we have a good reason to think so.
At a higher level, there's also the question of context, and the question of what the appropriate forum for such discussion is, and what is productive or non-productive geopolitically.
But it's not misinformation to float the idea and explore the possibility.
If you really want to know, check out https://www.VirusTruth.NET (obviously verifying everything for yourself, just a starting point).
>> Nature or lab leak.
These two options present a possibly false dichotomy. There is a strong argument that neither nature nor lab leak is correct.
Anyone of average intelligence can learn to read the virology papers and looking at the fundamental published science. The conclusion rational agents have to draw may be surprising at first, but is not so surprising in context. And it's actually really good news.
> You disagree with someone's off-handed remark on social media, so you want to remove their funding source?
No, what I was getting at is that they might have a financial incentive to discredit the lab escape theory. For instance, some of this researcher's funding or his institution's funding might be from CCP-backed entities.
> We have to clean up this colossal mess regardless of whether it was man-made or not, and we have to reckon with the millions that died and will never come back. Finding someone to blame is just a distraction, and I imagine that many people want to move past that distraction and eradicate the disease. The learning can come later when we're collectively more calm.
This, trying to push the idea that fighting the virus or investigating the outbreak theory are mutually exclusive, is also a rhetoric I would expect to be pushed from the party responsible for the outbreak.
Truth is, why obstruct investigation efforts and try to hide the facts if the origin of the virus is natural?
> This, is damning evidence regardless of any of that. Nothing remotely like this was being presented by mainstream newsmedia, perhaps because nothing remotely like it was being presented to them by the scientists they talked to. There was no version of a lab origin theory that was being presented as worthy of consideration.
You have to acknowledge this is incredibly weak logic. “A thing is possible, therefore it happened.” Is this molecular evidence the Furin Cleavage Site? Cause that was peddled basically as a lie - they occur in nature just fine, it’s also used in research.
I’m unaware of any compelling evidence for the lab leak theory, but I will acknowledge it’s basically impossible to disprove. We don’t know where most diseases arose (or where they came from) - it’s just we mostly don’t care, unlike with COVID.
You're assuming I didn't already do that. I'm just objecting to the exhortation to "do your own research". I'm not going to do that, because we live in a modern society with labor specialization.
> No scientists ever provided conclusive proof the virus didn’t originate in a lab.
Where the virus originated from is nice to know for later. But I really care about getting my life back right now. The scientists and experts can debate all the evidence, consider all the options, and report back their findings. "Doing my research" isn't going to help anyone.
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