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The guys who authored the paper testified before a maximally hostile Congress last week. I was ready for them to get torn apart and surprisingly it left me less convinced of the criticisms against them.
The pangolin thing, as covered by the Public Substack and other places I've seen it repeated, seems to be misframed. The scientists never claimed that it was the actual origin of Covid; they explicitly says it's a different virus, just similar in structure. The argument is that no one (including any of the lab leak proponents, to my knowledge) seems to think the pangolin coronavirus variant, 600 miles away from the Wuhan lab, was also man-made, which raises the odds that a virus very similar to Covid-19 could arise naturally.
The distance in time between the scientists saying they weren't certain about how something like the Receptor Binding Domain in Covid-19 could manifest in nature, and them changing their minds and publicly supporting a natural origin theory, wasn't an abrupt turn around of a few days, as alleged, but rather forty five days. During that timeframe the pangolin samples with similar RBDs were discovered, raising odds that this kind of thing could be naturally evolved. In contrast, the site being studied in the EcoHealth proposal was genuinely different than that in Covid-19.
Beyond that, the main thrust of their argument is that the first samples were found in the Hanan market and the first cases in the area surrounding the market, not in the areas surrounding the Wuhan Virology Center. As far as I know nobody has contradicted this, though I don't really follow it and could be wrong.
I think the concerns about how the process was politicized, especially by bueaucrats worried about conflict with China, are still valid - welcome to government though. Claims of a vast Orwellian conspiracy on part of our neoliberal overlords I think are a little unconvincing given that our government has also argued that it probably was a lab leak. In fact, right now six agencies have weighed in and none agree - the DOE and FBI think a lab leak was most plausible, four other agencies plus the NSC suspect natural origins. Almost all of them have framed their results with "low confidence," but you can pick whichever result you like and still say the government agrees with you.
I personally consider the lab leak somewhere between possible and likely, but don't really care where Covid came from. Even if it was caused by research conducted by China and America, the two most powerful countries on earth are obviously not going to pay any kind of penalty.
I think the issue is the effect the politicization has on scientists. Just saying 'welcome to the government' sidesteps the whole point.
OK, but any other theory was called a conspiracy theory (at best). So they put forth one possibility and suppressed anything else... You don't see a problem here? It's the theory version of 'You can have a model T in any color, as long as it's black'.
The world is a big place, 45 days isn't slow. And again, look at how other ideas were treated. Look at how youtube and twitter reacted to people floating different ideas. It's very easy to focus on the people shooting at 5G towers but that ignores actual doctors and scientists who were labeled racists for saying it might of come from a lab.
The claim on the part of the skeptics is that the scientist made an abrupt 180 on their views in only a few days because of pressure from the NIH. Instead they had a month and half during which relevant research was published that overturned the main cited uncertainty.
This is what the scientists had to say about the lab leak theory vs the market:
Pretty reasonable imo. Anyone is welcome to dispute their scientific claims. Again, the same government you're accusing of supressing the lab leak has also repeatedly endorsed the lab leak. Seems like a pretty sloppy coverup imo.
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The thing that frustrates me about the pangolin argument is that it is like reverse zebra with hooves.
As one of the scientist put it before, he was worried about the recombination as he hadn’t seen that before but then he found out it happened once in a pangolin so it is logical to assume it happened here. Sure, that raises the odds slightly. But if I studied horses and many times when I hear hooves I see horses but once I see a zebra doesn’t mean it is likely that on the 101th time I hear hooves I should suspect a zebra; especially when I am located in a place that is painting horses black and white.
Imo it's more like if we had only seen horses, then one day we saw a Zebra and were like "woah, what gives, the only explanation is some crazy guy must have painted that horse."
But then later we went to Kenya and saw a bunch of Zebras and were like "huh, I guess that is possible by the laws of evolution and doesn't require man-made intervention".
I don’t disagree with your conclusion. But at the same time, the existence of zebras in Kenya doesn’t mean zebras are super likely elsewhere which is what the scientist inferred.
Is this case we're not in a totally random elsewhere though. They haven't only demonstrated that zebras are a natural thing, and that the stripes don't look like human paintbrushes, they've also isolated the original zebra sightings to a safari/wet market, not the paint store/lab. Given this context, we would want some active evidence or rationale to consider that it's actually paint. Even so, in their paper they clearly note normal scientific limitations:
They didnt isolate the findings to a specific wet market. They are relying primarily on the PRC’s claims regarding the spread which is highly dubious. They are basically taking at face value the claim of the paintbrushers about where the zebras started. This despite there is decent evidence that is not where zebras were first seen.
They privately noted serial passage was an easy way to make it look like humans and Wuhan knew of those techniques. So they knew the paintbrushers could’ve used technique A but publicly claim no.
This of course ignores all of the other evidence (including the furin cleavage site which was unknown to this particular family of coronaviruses but happened to be found in this coronavirus along with the only found in a pangolin sequence). Yet despite all of that they say lab leak isn’t plausible despite saying differently in private?
No, the wet market samples are from two different international team of western scientists who went to Hanan market and found Covid samples on multiple different animals:
This was later matched with data reported by the Chinese CDC, as part of a study that specifically did not endorsed the market as the origin of the pandemic but rather just as a vector. Once the American scientists noticed a closer look suggested different conclusions, rather than signal boost this information the Chinese took the data down:
For the case spread, what we consider the first cases are from their hospital system and were before anyone understood what Covid was, including the Chinese, and before the Chinese government claimed that the wet market was the origin. The bulk of it comes from WHO backdated assessments of patients that China explicitly did not report as "Covid cases" in their system, but that outside scientists have categorized by retroactively assessing symptoms.
It goes on to list other ways they approached the data, non-Covid social media check ins to control for population density, downloads of Covid apps, etc.
Perhaps China was so ahead of the curve they before they recognized they had a viral disease and took any steps to respond to its containment they preemptively censored a bunch of hospital records from nearby to the lab and carefully left lists of symptoms concentrated around certain areas such that they would produce statistical signifigance across a variety of tests in order to lead researchers down the wrong path, but combined with finding the samples at the Hanan market it seems less likely.
To be clear though, this paper does not even say that Covid originated from the market. The point of the paper is to show that what were considered non-natural characteristics of Covid requiring human-intervention-based explanations actually do have examples occuring in nature. This is the sum total of what they have to say on the market:
Back to you:
What evidence?
Nobody, especially including the authors, argues that it is outside the realm of literal scientific capability for Covid to be man-made. I think your comment is blurring two things though:
Are we able to 100% determine whether it Covid was natural or man-made? The answer is of course no, which is why our research has focused on determining whether covid's human-binding characteristics (the RBD and polybasic furbin cleavage site) are novel characteristics that would suggest human creation, or whether they appear naturally which suggests a more parsimonious explanation.
Do the things we can observe about Covid show signs that would suggest human intervention or natural evolution? The answer seems to be the latter:
Back to you:
They did indeed cite research demonstrating that polybasic furin cleavage sites can arise naturally. They also point out that polybasic furin cleavage sites are unlikely to come about via laborotory cultures without being inculated in living hosts. Is there other evidence you're thinking of?
You're responding to my parent comment where I pointed out that their main uncertainty was that they had never seen an RBD site like Covid-19's in nature, then more research emerged showing exactly that, then a month and a half later they came with a stronger stance incorporating the new relevant evidence.
I honestly don’t have time to respond to you in full right now but the basic problem is you are talking about data from early 2020 after covid had been spreading in Wuhan for at least one month. That doesn’t show anything re origination.
Intelligence communities seem to believe the leak occurred in perhaps October near Wuhan.
As for China being ahead of the curve, remember all of this videos of a seemingly healthy person walking in the street and then collapsing from covid? That suggests the Chinese government was aware and started bullshiting.
With respect to furin cleavages, read what Wuhan lab were proposing! It was what occurred.
Finally, the whole recombinant point was according to one author of the paper when he appeared on the Megyn Kelley podcast something that cane out after he spoke with Fauci (well before the paper was finalized). That was, it was a matter of a few days. Maybe you are right but that means there was yet another lie in the timeline.
This would be true of samples but not of our case tracking. It's fine to say all data should be taken with a grain of salt, but you overstate our reliance on China given we are not using their reported cases. Saying "everything is a lie" does not bring us closer to having evidence for a lab-oriented origin.
It wasn't what occured though right? EcoHealth has multiple coronavirus grant proposals; the only one to my knowledge that proposed a furin cleavage site was rejected, and was supposed to have happened not in Wuhan but North Carolina.
The argument - not just from Andersen et all but most scientists I've seen weigh in - is that human molecular engineering has some established, effective ways to create a cleavage site. If the goal is to intentionally create a virus that can latch on to humans then you use one of the most effective ways to do that. Instead Covid has a distinctly suboptimal cleavage site that is more likely to have evolved randomly rather than have been used by a University of North Carolina scientist with better tools at their disposal, and furthermore that it would be hard to sustain a laborotory environment. I cited them writing on that in the study but here's from the Congressional testimony:
Given that argument for the lab origin seems to rest on cleavage insertion that wasn't funded and wasn't going to happen in Wuhan, probably we stick with the simpler explanation.
No idea what you mean. The email expressing uncertainty is from Feb 1st, the finalized paper was released March 17th. They testified under oath to that timeline and a panel of politicians trying to embarass them couldn't find anything closer in time that would reflect significant doubts.
Throughout all this I've said that I fully consider politicization of this study to be a concern and that I personally consider a lab leak possible. But the arguments people are making against this study are pretty weak.
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The "Proximal Origin" official release was March 17th, but the preprint was publicly released February 17th and was heavily used at that time, including by a Lancet Feb 19th paper (see popsci coverage here) and by individual relevant experts. So it's a pretty fast turn-around, and before some of the stuff they've since cited as cause was known for internal discussions.
I think this would be reasonable if the takeaway from "Proximal Origin", either the February or March versions, was merely to say that in-pangolin or in-human or in-some-unknown-species evolution of the necessary genome was possible, and that was it. It's even somewhat fair to use Occam's Razor and say that, if both the natural origin and a lab leak were both possible, favor the natural origin one simply out of priors. But that's not really how the paper was written, nor was read. Even the February version starts with the claim that "this analysis provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated virus." Meanwhile, Andersen specifically worried about serial passage in private into April!
For the most part, the more conspiracy-minded people tend to focus on some chain of custody and data reliability issues for RmYN02 et all, but I think the more immediate problem's that the 600-miles criticism goes the other direction.
Raising the odds a highly similar virus could have evolved nearer Wuhan or from an animal species that was being brought to the wet market, assuming another species with similar environmental conditions to provides the same RCBs were available, still has to face the counterfactual of some guy from the building devoted to collecting viruses from 600+ miles away picked up samples and did some testing with it without sufficient caution. Sure, that's the sorta thing that rests so heavily on priors that I'd not be certain much one way or the other. But I'm not the guy who called any possibility a conspiracy theory that shouldn't even be entertained.
Even that on its own would just be a systems-level problem, except it's not just that Andersen et all were incorrectly calibrated. After all, I was incorrectly calibrated, even if I didn't go on national television about it. The problem's that these texts make incredibly clear that he and the other researchers weren't so clearly certain in private; they just clearly went into the publication wanting to have a specific answer, and doing so for pretty overtly pragmatic reasons.
Here's the timeline as I understand it:
On February 1 the scientists email Fauci saying they're uncertain if the RBD could be emerge naturally from evolution. Then, supposedly, he calls a conference where pressure is applied to them to change their results.
Both scientists testified under oath that this characterization of the conference is a misrepresentation - neither Fauci nor Dr. Collins organized or requested the conference, neither really spoke, and no pressure was applied to change results or push for any outcome. Maybe they lied under oath, but it seems like a silly thing to risk prison for.
On February 17 the preprint comes out with a less definitive thesis, not arguing they've disproven the lab leak but that "this analysis provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated virus." - which it does.
On February 19 the latest data on coronavirus in pangolins gets released, demonstrating that this particular human binding characteristic can emerge naturally. This removes the uncertainty they mentioned on the 1st. They incorporate it into their research.
On March 17 the final version is released and comes out with a stronger position: "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," because the main lab leak argument seems pretty disproven.
In between the time they were uncertain and the time they have claimed a strong final analysis, over a month and a half have passed and new, directly applicable research has emerged. I do assume that politicization is baked into this stuff, and this study is certainly no exception, but there's nothing highly suspicious about getting new evidence and updating your position.
Also, as Nate Silver grudgingly points out, even in their final report they do not write off the possibility of the lab leak, only say that present evidence offers it no support: “More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another”.
The scenario here would be that Covid came from a scientist driving out 600 miles (or maybe up to 3000 miles, because these are imports from Malaysia) to find pangolins to test, took them back another 600-3000 miles, studied their RBD, and tried to make something similar? All I can say is it's not an argument I've heard anyone make before. Either way this scenario would still remove the skeptics' main argument that we should assume Covid is man-made because its RBD can't happen in nature; clearly it can.
Edit - removed post because of a misinterpretation. Rewording and posting elsewhere.
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