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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   32930 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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Scott had an extraordinarily in-depth lab leak post in 2024, I'm not sure there was anything more for him to say on the topic unless he'd changed his mind about it. Naturally, saying "everyone knows that gain of function research caused this" is putting it way too strongly: Scott isn't convinced and neither am I. But I think about this very often -

(…) for the first time [this debate] made me see the coronavirus as one of God’s biggest and funniest jokes. Think about it. Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market. Either way is one of the century’s biggest coincidences, designed by some cosmic joker who wanted to keep the debate acrimonious for years to come.

…and it does follow that we should probably treat gain-of-function research as if it had caused COVID, because "we can't ever know for certain if it caused COVID, but the two hypotheses are neck-to-neck" is bad enough if we're talking about future caution.

That argument is equivalent to noticing that airplane crashes almost always happen near air traffic control towers and considering eliminating the air traffic control towers as a possible solution.

Of course, a lab for studying zoonotic coronaviruses is located near where zoonotic coronavirus spillovers tend to happen. You'd need a really good reason to put it somewhere else. You should be slightly surprised if a spillover happens far away from such a lab, not the other way around.

Of course, a lab for studying zoonotic coronaviruses is located near where zoonotic coronavirus spillovers tend to happen.

[Citation needed] - where did previous coronavirus zoonoses happen, specifically?

The "geographic context" map from the Wikipedia "Zoonotic Origins of Covid-19" page shows SARS-CoV-2's emergence in Wuhan (Hubei province), its closest relative in Yunnan province (1000 miles away), and other close relatives in Thailand, Cambodia, and Zhejiang (1000 miles away or more, each). The only coronaviruses it shows native to Hubei are more-loosely-related pangolin viruses that are basically everywhere in China, also not specific to Hubei. The Origins of SARS-CoV-2 - Zoonosis section mentions that the most likely wild source was SE Asian bats, probably with "the wet market imported an intermediate host" as the necessary step for getting the bat virus so far from its original reservoir. None of this conflicts with my own recollections on the subject.

(…) for the first time [this debate] made me see the coronavirus as one of God’s biggest and funniest jokes. Think about it. Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market. Either way is one of the century’s biggest coincidences, designed by some cosmic joker who wanted to keep the debate acrimonious for years to come.

Even if it was a coincidence, it still means that lab leak theory should never have been considered a conspiracy theory. You can believe whatever you want, but the sheer coincidence of all this should always give some credence to lab leak at least enough not to outright mock or ban it as completely wacky thing to believe in.

Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market.

He can’t even into Bayes. There are many thousands of raccoon-dog stalls in China. There was exactly one BSL-3 lab in China. There was exactly one lab studying GoF on human coronaviruses.

I think this point makes it hard to lean definitively on the other side of this debate, but do I think there is a reasonable Bayesian counter to the lab leak:

  • SARS likely originated from a market
  • While wet markets do exist all over China, Wuhan is a massive transportation and population hub.
  • Wildlife trafficking into Wuhan from places where bat coronaviruses occur naturally was very common and very poorly regulated, meaning even though these bat species weren't local, the market supply chains were.
  • Studies from 2022 show early case clusters centering around the Huanan Seafood Market with positive environmental samples

This doesn't prove zoonosis, but the presence of illegal wildlife trade, specific species susceptibility to Covid, the crazy density of these environments, as well as the historical precedent all provide for a decent argument in favor of zoonotic spillover.

There are 45 thousand wet markets in China according to my google search. How likely it is, that novel coronavirus comes from the market literally only a few miles away from a lab studying novel coronaviruses? At least 1:10,000 let's say. Let's even say that Wuhan is a huge hub, not unlike another 113 large cities with population over 1 million in China. Again, how likely it is that a new virus appears in Wuhan and not in any other large city? And I am not even talking about other facts such as that China is notoriously opaque communist dictatorship falsifying uncomfortable data.

Nevertheless even if you are convinced that the virus is of zoonotic origin, the lab-leak could never have been anywhere close to conspiracy theory realm. In fact it would require some conspiracy to explain this away - such as bat > pangolin > human transmission in Wuhan chain of events to explain zoonotic origin. That one is more complex. Additionally even if we accept wet market theory, that one is is still compatible with lab leak - such as let's say infected bat carcass being sold on wet market for profit by some careless employee in charge of incineration inside famously corrupt Chinese environment.

The fact that even reasonable rationalists mocked and suppressed this theory is wild to me.

I'm not convinced of either, which is why I think it is so interesting. There was clearly a political angle that tried to suppress lab leak.

Wildlife trafficking into Wuhan from places where bat coronaviruses occur naturally was very common and very poorly regulated, meaning even though these bat species weren't local, the market supply chains were.

Last I heard, the closest relative of COVID was found in a bat cave in Laos. Unless new info came out since, I find it hard to believe that the bats made it all the way to Wuhan without sparking the pandemic anywhere else prior. Coincidentally, I believe I heard that bats from that area were studied in the laboratory, so one plausible way that could salvage the wet market theory, is that a lab assistant was making some extra money on the side, and sold the bats at the market. But that is still a lab leak.

Studies from 2022 show early case clusters centering around the Huanan Seafood Market with positive environmental samples

Chinese studies don't have a good reputation at the best of times, even on non-political issues. It's extremely naive to believe a study on something so controversial would be done by the book, and with no pressure to come to the politically correct conclusion.

The same geographical gap existed for SARS which originated in Guangdong, but whose origins were in Yunnan too.

Chinese studies don't have a good reputation at the best of times, even on non-political issues. It's extremely naive to believe a study on something so controversial would be done by the book, and with no pressure to come to the politically correct conclusion.

The 2022 study Worobey study was an international collab that involved western scientists and that was also peer-reviewed. I'm not oblivious to the fact that people have political leanings, but this isn't just about China. If it is a lab leak, America has a hand in it too. Bottom line is that Bayesian analysis works for both sides.

Raccoon-dogs aren't even that special when it comes to being covid-susceptible. For a while blaming pangolins was all the rage!

…and it does follow that we should probably treat gain-of-function research as if it had caused COVID, because "we can't ever know for certain if it caused COVID, but the two hypotheses are neck-to-neck" is bad enough if we're talking about future caution.

That's a fair conclusion, but not really Scott's conclusion, and I have to wonder what the underlying motivation is to be so committed that lab leak is wrong when there's more interesting topics to discuss around COVID.

It's unfortunate that this is rarely stated clearly, but I figure the crux is that COVID was a watershed moment for governments, with the backing of a technocratic expert caste, imposing novel restrictions on personal and social freedoms. The narrative the globalist-technocratic complex and its supporters want to prevail is that this was good and necessary - the freedoms are a relic of a more innocent age, somewhere in the class of letting gentlemen scientists enrich uranium in their bedrooms, and in our age of global networks and megacities it is important to endow experts and elected representatives with emergency powers to restrict them according to their superior judgement to protect the people from danger.

This narrative is a lot more compelling if COVID was a natural catastrophe and the official response at least constituted a reasonable attempt to minimise the risk of bad outcomes, than if COVID was a result of irresponsible actions by the same technocrat clique that wants to arrogate itself emergency powers to immanentize its "superior judgement". (See: the old pattern of creating a problem and selling the solution)

Underlying this all is a quiet disagreement about what was even the "problem" - one group of people sees a dangerous disease that society was worryingly incompetent in containing and wonders why it even matters where exactly it came from, while the other sees "free" societies happily going on the North Korea spectrum overnight over a cold and wonders why it even matters how bad the cold was.

China wants the "lab leak or not" debate because it draws attention away from the post-SARS rules that China instituted on wet markets that would have prevented a spillover at the market if China had continued to enforce them.

I thought the general consensus was that it was a lab leak, even if it can't be proved due to much of the evidence mysteriously disappearing (which is itself a certain signal). This seems to be the position of the US intelligence apparatus. Frankly it should've been obvious back in March of 2020 given the proximity of the lab, the nature of its COVID research and all the anomalous activity going on there.

Anyway, I also agree with your second point.

I thought the general consensus was that it was a lab leak

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over at the market (twice), but that determining that with certainty is impossible without more evidence that likely can never be collected (i.e., too much time has passed and SARS-CoV-2 is everywhere).

Lab leak is the general consensus, despite great efforts from certain parts of the scientific community to bury it. "Scientists find that scientists (often them specifically) were not responsible" isn't credible at this point, not after a frankly staggering amount of active deception from those who claimed to speak for the scientific community: https://archive.md/8Fsv2#selection-5159.0-5163.1

Lab leak has a few things going for it, but these are always presented in isolation and no pushback. It is worth to read through Scotts Lab-Leak-Megapost, which is itself only a summary/review of the 15 hours of Lab-Leak-debate videos. I wouldn't rule out Lab-Leak completely, but I downgraded its probability.

His post continued to ignore the fact that governments seem to have info that they buried that supports the lab leak (eg Germany).

From the linked post:

Suppose we accept the judges’ decision that COVID arose via zoonosis. Does that mean lab leak was a “conspiracy theory” and we should be embarrassed to have ever believed it? The term “conspiracy theory” is awkward here because there were definitely at least two conspiracies - one by China to hide the evidence, one by western virologists to convince everyone that lab leak was stupid and they shouldn’t think about it. Saar cited some leaked internal conversations among expert virologists. Back in the earliest stage of the pandemic, they said to each other that it seemed like COVID could have come from a lab leak - their specific odds were 50-50 - but that they should try to obfuscate this to prevent people from turning against them and their labs. So the best we can say here is that maybe the conspiracies got lucky on their 50-50 bet, and the thing they were trying to cover up wasn’t even true.

I don't know what more you'd want. He knows perfectly well that disingenuous actors in China and in the west conspired to cover up anything that could have pointed at a lab leak. Given the nature of the leaked evidence, however, he thinks the bad actors did this in case it turned out to be a lab leak, without themselves being certain.

Well, I would say the more you had separate groups with apparent intelligence that was buried (eg Germans), the more you look foolish for saying they did solely prophylactically.

What intelligence did the Germans have and bury? I see the BND performed a 2020 analysis that came to pro-lab-leak conclusions and only got revealed in 2025, but (at least at the "why do we trust reporters with the first draft of history, exactly?" level of perfunctory research) I'm not seeing that their analysis was founded on any information that only they knew.

Nor do I see what their motive for a coverup would be. They were contemptuous of and butting heads with President Trump, and their most recent big interaction with China was signing on to a condemnation of the treatment of the Uyghurs. I can see why some people in China and the US might want a coverup, but it's hard to see how a revelation of "A Chinese lab working with Americans leaked the pandemic" would cause German intelligence any suffering worse than an overdose of schadenfreude. Does the German secret service publish many of their analyses openly, such that this one was an exception?

What intelligence did the Germans have and bury?

The report you cite yourself? The point being made isn't that there was some evidence hidden from the public, it's that the available evidence favors the lab leak theory, which was dismissed as an insane conspiracy theory by the entire establishment.

Nor do I see what their motive for a coverup would be

Why does that matter? We know for a fact that it was not revealed to the public until 2025, as you say yourself.

I don't know what more you'd want.

He told you: an acknowledgment that lab leak was the likely origin of COVID according to various western governments' own assesments. We're not talking about virologist speculations in the early stages of the pandemic. The passage you quoted is a perfect example of Scott doing exactly of what he's being accused of.

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