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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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It's hardly a wild hypothetical - we know the closest biological origin was a bat in Laos. We know Wuhan Lab was bringing sick bats from Laos back to Wuhan, where they were interested in putting furin cleavage sites inside bat coronaviruses. The key difference between COVID and its precursor was the introduction of a furin cleavage site. It was also unusually good at infecting humans, almost as though it was bred on humanized mice - another thing Wuhan lab was doing.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-covid-lab-leak-theory-just-got-even-stronger/

How does a sick bat from Laos travel 1000 miles to Wuhan market and infect a pangolin or some other animal there, before adeptly spreading to humans? Why not some city in Southern China or Laos itself? Of all the myriad wet markets in China, it has to be the one right next to the primary bat coronavirus-studying BSL-4 biolab? This is a bit too convenient of a theory.

I'm afraid I can't access any counterarguments from your video since it's nearly 2 hours long. Furthermore, there's a huge bias from the medical community against a lab leak. If it's a lab leak, they'll endure massive public hatred, crippling regulations and endless legal hearings about who knew what when. They have every incentive to suppress the lab-leak story, that's why Daszak from Ecohealth (at the center of it all) was organizing a letter in the Lancet denouncing it as a 'conspiracy theory'.

I'm afraid I can't access any counterarguments from your video since it's nearly 2 hours long.

BTW, the show notes point to the research papers discussed on the podcast if you would rather see the arguments in that format (providing quote from the internet archive because the TWiV website appears to be down for me at the moment):

The podcast is an interview with the lead author on the papers going over the arguments, although presumably in less detail than the papers themselves.

My understanding is that the first paper shows that the cases show a pattern that strongly suggests the first human cases occurred at the market and not at the lab. And the second paper shows there were multiple spillovers both at the market, which is also inconsistent with the source being the lab.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-covid-lab-leak-theory-just-got-even-stronger/

This link predates the publication of those papers by a few months. I acknowledge that the lab leak theory wasn't a total nonsense conspiracy theory, but the accumulated evidence points pretty strongly against it at the moment. And, more importantly, whether or not it's right, it's a distraction from actions we already know we should be taking (but aren't) to prevent future pandemics.

And, more importantly, whether or not it's right, it's a distraction from actions we already know we should be taking (but aren't) to prevent future pandemics.

What does this mean? Nobody here is making policy based on our discussions, what actions should we be taking instead of talking about things we want to talk about? And if lab leak turned out to be true - which you acknowledge is not outside the realm of possibility - why would that not be an important thing to investigate, never mind so unimportant as to be a distraction?