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The deadline set by the Covid Origin Act of 2023 (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619/text) to release names, symptoms, hospital visits, and roles of WIV researchers who had Covid-like symptoms in fall 2019 has come and gone. A Google News search for "Covid Origin Act" results in a single article released over the weekend:
https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/covid-was-not-developed-as-a-bioweapon-dni-finds/
This source is not mainstream. It suggests that the legally mandated report has been released, but puts a spin on the results of the report (Covid not likely an intentional bioweapon) without revealing the full text. Most importantly, it doesn't name any of the names that the Act required. So I went to the website of the Office of the Director for National Intelligence. Crickets. Twitter? There has been a post, but it is about Juneteenth.
Edit: I suppose it is possible that the DNI has made their mandated report to Congress, and that no congresspeople have leaked it yet. In which case one would expect articles in a few hours to days?
As an aside, when I mentioned I was excited about this disclosure to a deeply Blue family member, they suggested I've shifted right. I wonder how the disclosure of Covid origins information became right-coded.
Does this answer any of your questions?
(From here and here)
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This is revolting to me. I could see myself telling a family member "Hey, it's cool you're interested in that, but note that people may perceive that as a Party X aligned topic." I couldn't see myself going "hey, being interested in that makes you party X aligned." To a family member? Do I trust them that little?
The world is full of contradictions and ambiguities. Sometimes one catches your interest and you go off to investigate it. It makes me sick that this good, healthy, praiseworthy act is apparently inseparable from political affiliation.
I wouldn’t take it so seriously. Not unless rationaleist is getting uninvited to family dinners.
There’s a whole realm of “lol, you sound just like your father” and other passive ways to comment on political valence.
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It looks as though that article has since been taken down, or at least the link doesn't work for me. I think it was almost inevitable that the lab leak or other non-natural origin theory for covid would become right-coded because it strikes at several key aspects of modern liberal orthodoxy: believing in the credibility and good intentions of technocratic experts, believing in "science," assuming the best of non-western foreigners for fear of being labeled racist, and more fundamentally the conceit that modern technological advances and research are the solution to our problems rather than a potential cause of them.
It would be one thing if covid turned out to be a nothingburger, and back in early January 2020 when we didn't expect it to spread worldwide it was more or less the consensus among biological researchers I knew that it was a lab leak, but given where it ended up it's simply a bridge too far nowadays for many of them to admit that the system could have failed so catastrophically (although as far as I can tell many of them still privately believe it; they just either think the public couldn't handle the truth or they are afraid of speaking out). Considering that even the 1977 Russian Flu has not been conclusively accepted as a lab leak by the general public I doubt we will ever get closure on this issue.
My expectations for bio-security for gain of function research go like this:
Use two small remote islands: Research Island and Quarantine Island. Researchers parachute into Research Island. At the end of their six month tour of duty they sail to Quarantine Island. After a month, a plane lands on Quarantine Island to collect them.
In reality Biosafety level four, the top level, is still situated in a building in a city. It seems odd that we site nuclear power stations in remote locations, or at least, outside cities, yet the much more dangerous, create-a-lethal-plague technology, is conveniently sited so that researchers can go to the theater or the food market after work. Is there a consensus among biological researchers about this?
The main issue here is cost. No funding agency would ever agree to build a BSL-4 facility on a remote island when the cost of upgrading a lab at an existing research institution is so much lower unless there was sufficient public and internal pressure to do so. The only options for gain of function research that have been widely discussed are either no restrictions or a complete moratorium like the one between 2014 and 2017 in the US, and pretty much all debate among biologists is between those two positions alone.
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The Left committed early to the "bat soup" theory and declared anybody who doubts it racist, and instituted a censorship blockade of any opposition (or even critical discussion) to this. While they were forced to roll it back a little because dissent went high and wide enough in scientific circles that it wasn't possible any more to block, the initial commitment still weights heavily on the topic, and was not acknowledged as wrong even at "mistakes were made" level, and this colors every critique of this position as attacking the Party Line.
I was always surprised and a little confused that the "bat soup" theory was labelled the non-racist theory.
I will attempt to steelman this distinction.
Zoonotic/'bat soup' hypothesis: "Chinese people are, at the deepest level, no different from us. If we had wet markets selling live bats/pangolins/&c., we would be at the same risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks; if they didn't, they wouldn't."
Lab-leak hypothesis: "The Chinese were doing the same kind of research we were. Are you saying Chinese people can't be trusted with advanced technology?"
If one has these reactions, 'bat soup' seems less racist than 'lab leak', in the same way that Rudyard Kipling might
seemsseem less racist than Alexander Stephens.Still doesn't hold for me. In one situation you are implying that their culture eats unclean and diseased animals. To me, there are a few very common major insults for other races/cultures:
Denigrating their intelligence.
Saying they are prone to violence.
Saying they are dirty and unclean.
I guess the lab leak denigrates their intelligence a little bit. But the eating diseased creatures is clearly an example of calling them dirty and unclean.
And a nitpick on the lab-leak. They were specifically doing research that the US does not allow. Gain of function research was banned in the US, and was being carried out in other countries by US researchers to get around these restrictions.
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I think it's closer to:
Zoonotic: It's no one's fault really. (since there isn't actually a human origin, just a transfer to humans)
Lab-leak: People were creating dangerous viruses, and accidentally released one.
The latter seems to lay more blame.
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It's whether these reactions make any sense that is in question. Why does making a slip in complicated research result in "are you saying Chinese people can't be trusted with advanced technology?" but pointing at the widespread popularity of wet markets does not result in "are you saying Chinese people can't be trusted with distributing food?". The latter is literally invoking a racist stereotype against Asians.
Because the latter can be explained as being from differing rates of adoption of universal culture (see comments below on western farmers' markets), whereas the former places the issue in one of the aspects of universal culture which the Chinese have already adopted.
This might raise uncomfortable questions regarding whether all peoples are equally capable of practising universal culture.
The former also links to racist tropes in that the 'lab leak' hypothesis is adjacent to, and often conflated with, a 'deliberate bio-weapon' hypothesis, which pattern-matches to the history of 'yellow peril' rhetoric involving underhanded tactics by Asians.
However, given a slightly different fall of the dice, I could see the 'wet market' hypothesis being the one denounced as racist, and all the (pre-Musk)* bluechecks endorsing the 'lab accident' hypothesis.
(*Or could Mr Musk's purchase of Twitter also be butterflied away...?)
I'm not seeing it. You can just as easily say the former shows they haven't adopted "universal culture" fully yet, or that it was an honest mistake that could have happened anywhere (and did! someone had a list of pan-/epidemics originating from a lab leak), while the latter raises uncomfortable questions about whether all peoples are equally capable of practising universal culture ("they can't even do something basic as running a food market in hygienic conditions").
Yeah, but it only makes sense if you conflate it with the bio-weapon hypothesis. Without it the whole idea falls apart.
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It sounds weird to me too, how "they are dirty people that eat weird disgusting shit and live in anti-sanitary conditions, and that's where the diseases come from" is non-racist, but "they conducted a high-risk high-technology cutting edge research in collaboration with US government and made a mistake" is racist. But then, very little that the wokes say makes sense to me, so that's just one more thing...
@cjet79 as well,
I'm not really sympathetic to the impulse but one of those theories implies that there are poor and exotic acting people in a foreign country which engenders perhaps sympathy and the other one implies something like civilizational threat and may engender fear or anger. They think hey, we have some peculiar livestock practices of our own that may end up creating bugs, I can totally defend Chinese people for this where as "they have labs that are intentionally producing pathogens that killed my grandfather" is the kind of sentiment they fear may inspire hatred or at least greater culpability.
It should also be noted that the people against the lab leak don't refer to it as "bat soup" or denigrate what to us are weird diets.
Maybe it is just different cultural stigmas.
To me, saying that some people or culture eat unclean or diseased food is a big insult. Its a mix of implying they are closer to animals/scavengers, implying they are too stupid to properly clean/prepare their food, and weird in a negative way that they choose to eat gross things.
If some disease started in the US because a minority had unique food preferences. I can't imagine a scenario where people are not called racist for suggesting that 'hey, maybe this minority shouldn't eat weird foods that cause disease'.
Meanwhile the location of a lab doesn't seem to matter a whole lot to me. If it happened in the US would we blame the state where the lab-leak happened? If the research was technically allowed anywhere in the US, I don't think we would. However, if the State specifically allowed shadier research practices then other states, I think we would rightfully blame that state. Like when an oil spill happens in a state that is very pro-oil drilling, there is a bit of a sense that "hey you caused this shit".
Overall I understand why the Chinese government would be happy to promote a Zoonotic origin story. I just don't get why the US government would care to go along with that story. (which is a point in favor of the Zoonotic origin story)
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While I agree it's not the mainstream narrative, I have definitely seen pushback on the framing of Chinese "wet markets" being the source of pandemics being racist with the clarification that
"Wet market" is defined by Wikipedia as being the Singapore government invented term for what in the US we would call a farmer's market or public market. By using the Asian term for it that we don't use, it artificially sounds more distant and exotic. And ignores the actually important part: live animal markets without proper health and safety protocols, letting us pretend we don't need to ask whether our handling of live animals carries pandemic risk.
Related, there's no particular reason to think that there's anything special about China here other than China being really big so an outbreak at a completely random market across the world has a good chance of being in China. That said, the specific animals and local viruses in the local ecosystem may also have more pandemic potential in that region (coronaviruses seem to come from bats in Asia... but maybe that's just where we've been looking for them post-SARS)... although currently scientists are keeping an eye on H5N1 avian flu and live animal sales of chickens happen everywhere and sound a lot less exotic to a US audience.
Monitoring live animal sales everywhere (and which probably extends to keeping up with surveillance of pandemic-potiential viruses in wild animals), and making sure they're conducted safely is a massive, expensive project. Which means there's a massive demand for thought-stopping narratives for why we don't need to do it.
I don't think that in American society and American public discourse the question of "whether we need better regulation of live animal markets" even exists, let alone has any prominent placement. Thus, I do not think there's any discernable demand to skew any existing discourse (such as one about Covid origins) to one or other side of the question. I'm sure there are people for whom these questions are of supreme importance, but they do not have any way to influence the Covid discourse in any form.
Statistical arguments have never worked as "get out of literally Hitler free" card when it concerns racism accusations. If drawing attention to China or Chinese wet markets as source of infection were declared racist, then it'd be racist regardless of any statistical justification you could provide.
Not markets specifically. But I do certainly hear people talk about the disease potential of cramming animals too close together and overusing antibiotics. Which was in the news recently due to the avian flu outbreak spiking egg prices, which has the potential to lead to an avian flu pandemic. To be fair, part of why egg prices went up is because the US was aggressive about culling birds suspected to be infected.
I'm not proposing some active conspiracy, just the natural tendency (along the lines of fundamental attribution error) to think of problems as only able to happen to other people.
I think you're agreeing with me.
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It doesn't just sound distant and exotic, it sounds impossible to maintain hygiene in. "So this is our wet market, it's like a farmer's market except there are live animals and bits of dead animals everywhere, all crammed in together and all of it is wet, perpetually wet." No wonder a new disease appeared, I'm surprised the whole place didn't come to life in a lightning storm and terrorise Tokyo!
Although re Western handling of animals, that is regulated as shit. In Australia, even in rural areas, you can buy chickens and ducks without government intervention and that's about it. You can't buy them from a farmer's market though, live animal sales are not allowed in the same market as open produce stalls. It's a bit more lax in the US, especially in rural areas, but they still try to maintain livestock census and if say we had a spontaneous outbreak of BSE it wouldn't take them long (within the day) to track it to the source.
So it's not live animal tracking they want to distract from.
I think you're missing my point. According to that Wikipedia article, "wet market" doesn't mean anything different from "farmer's market"; it's just the term used for the concept in that region. So you get the message of "the stupid foreigners have this weird exotic type of market that's a bad idea" instead of "China has laxer health and safety regulations on their farmers markets; they should enforce regulations more like the ones in the US/Australia." (and, related, a reminder that those regulations in the US/etc. are doing something useful).
Yeah man, sorry I wasn't clear - that's what people think when they hear wet market, it's like a farmer's market but they think "it's like a farmer's market except revolting". And you say "not really, hygiene standards are laxer but they are at Western farmer's markets too" and they say "but there's exotic meat and live animals for sale" and you say "yeah but it's from local butchers and farmers selling their goods, like markets in the sixties and seventies before we got such stringent standards", but in their heads they still imagine people wandering around grabbing livers out of buckets and putting them in baskets next to fish heads they got from another bucket and bat brains from the bargain bin. Or they think there's a flower stall, and then a stall selling cannolis, and then a store selling lettuces, and then a fucking nightmare of blood and flesh, and then a guy selling avocados...
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I have been to farmer's markets in the US and in Europe, and at precisely none have I seen live or dead wild animals for sale. No one breeds bats (I think, maybe in China) so the market was selling wild animals - dead I presume, which is pretty weird.
The eating of weird wild animals is as traditional as Chinese medicine. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao invented both:
China banned bushmeat in 2020, so obviously, they agree with me, and you are the only one left defending the indefensible. Don't buy roadkill from a roadside stall.
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I think this was simply cemented by May 2020, but it is pretty interesting how that worked out. Circa January 2020, it seemed like a pretty open conversation, but once we entered the full "trust the science" phase of things and "the science" was that it was zoonotic, asking follow-up questions became a distinctly right-coded thing to do. At some point, it even became "racist", which thoroughly closed this off as official badthink.
As I remember it it was after Trump mentioned it. At that point it stopped being a point of legitimate query and started being a matter of acknowledging Trump's query as legitimate. It became tribal. Once Trump was out of the picture it began losing that valence and started becoming legitimate again.
OP's family member "suggested that they've shifted right". Right-coded is still assessing the subject in tribal terms but it's an attenuation from being Trump-coded. And I'm not sure it's grossly off target. Is OP excited about the report because he has a material interest in whether covid came from a lab, an academic interest in "the science", or because he has a political axe to grind? He may well be a pure intellectual, but his family member can have justifiable reasons for assuming otherwise. How many people were excited about virology before covid made it cool and the Trump era made it tribal.
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The statute requires only that the report be submitted to Congress, so it is hardly surprising that it has not been posted to the DNI website.
Note also that quite often when a statutory deadline falls on a Sunday or federal holiday, the deadline is extended to the next business day. I don't know if that is the default rule, but if so, the actual deadline is tomorrow.
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The CIA has impressive capabilities, but intelligence on the ground in China is extremely limited after the very damaging leak in 2013 when China disappeared pretty much all their assets. (Foreign Policy article)
Since then, the West has had very little human intelligence in China. It’s a big contrast to Russia where the US and especially UK have cultivated senior sources very successfully, or to Iran, where the same is true. While the CIA can certainly identify information about who worked for the WIV in 2019 (this information was public anyway, researchers at the WIV were part of a global community of researchers doing GoF work including at similar labs in the US, Europe etc), it’s less likely that they have the ability to answer most of these questions. If the leak of Covid was some kind of secret bioweapons project only somewhat related to the public facing work done by the WIV, the CIA might well not know about it. I think most private analysts are of the opinion that Western intelligence knows very little about the inner workings of the CCP or PLA.
It’s also unclear that the CIA ever invested many resources into identifying the origins of Covid. There wouldn’t be any valuable intelligence data to leverage, and the decision to confront China geopolitically was made before and has very little to do with the pandemic. More honestly, the US can or can not accuse China of being behind it, and China can deny it, with or without any evidence. That someone in Langley knows “the truth” doesn’t make much difference. It’s not going to help the US compete with China and, as I said above, US labs are doing the same kind of research.
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