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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5939 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Will we ever get the truth about the origins of Covid?

Venture investor Bill Gurley recently appeared at the All-In Summit to give a talk about how journalists and investigators uncovered the truth about various disasters like the Challenger Space Shuttle and the Boeing 737 Max. He talks about searchers, who look for the truth, and blockers, who try to keep people from finding it.

Then he talks about the origins of Covid.

While admitting he does not personally have a definitive explanation for the origins of Covid, he talks about how people who questioned the zoonosis hypothesis were repeatedly sidelined and ridiculed.

He gives one intriguing example of something which is not exactly a smoking gun, but still a giant blinking arrow pointing at the problem.

In 2018, there was a proposal made to DARPA called DEFUSE, in which bat coronaviruses would be studied. Human-specific cleavage sites would be added. Transmissability would be increased via gain-of-function. And this would happen in the United States in collaboration with, you guessed it, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. DARPA ultimately rejected the $14 million proposal.

In the word of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, please explain this to Fat Tony and tell him that Covid-19 wasn't a lab leak. Tell him that a bat (living in Laos) spread it to an animal (possibly a Pangolin!) and then from there to a wet market in Wuhan, the exact city where they (definitely weren't) doing the exact research that would allow Covid-19 to be created.

"But Fat Tony, I only had the exact idea for how to create Covid-19 in a lab. I didn't actually do it. It was the pangolins. Tony, no, please, not the blowtorch.... "

I'm also aware of the Root Claim debate which I've encountered as a wall of text and like 30 hours of videos. I'd love an explanation of why this debate matters, but my tendency is to dismiss it as a gish gallop.

In any case, I recommend giving the Bill Gurley talk a listen. He's got a nice drawl.

No. Like other good conspiracy theories, we already have more or less all the evidence we’re going to get. If that wasn’t enough to settle it there’s not going to be a smoking gun in 10 years.

He talks about searchers, who look for the truth, and blockers, who try to keep people from finding it.

This is conspiracy 101: partition everybody into free-thinkers and sheep. You, dear reader, must be intelligent and brave to have seen through the sidelining and even ridicule! Unfortunately, having critics does not actually mean that someone is right.

The difference between lab leak debates and the Challenger investigation comes from skin in the game. Remember that almost nobody arguing for or against lab leak had any expectation of consequences, moral or material. “I don’t want their blood on my hands” has different incentives than “I want to prove this asshole wrong.”

Fat Tony

Tell him somebody ate a diseased bat in west China. Epicycles about Laos and pangolins and steel beams are beside the point; Fat Tony don’t care.

rootclaim

I didn’t bother to watch this either. I read Scott’s summary and the followup. Do that if it sounds like fun, because it’s not likely to change your mind.

But I’d still say it’s the opposite of a Gish gallop. Both sides went in with the expectation of throwing a bunch of shit at the wall. Good for them.

Will we ever get the truth about the origins of Covid?

I've taken the time to review the below thread and am pretty sure the answer is "no".

I typically hesitate to say that people aren't seriously believing their claims but Lab leak theorists have a major missing mood problem going on.

If one very seriously believes that the world was attacked by an artificial bioweapon (even if unintentionally leaked) so dangerous that it was killing more than a 9/11 worth of Americans daily and that the evidence for it is overwhelming, then the reaction should be way different than what it is now! This is a matter of major national security now, and the most anyone wants to do is shitpost about it?

Where are the plans to counteract their next, possibly even more dangerous, bioweapon? Where's the plans to convince Americans to be ready for future lockdowns and masking? If you think "those are ineffective" then why aren't you trying to find effective countermeasures then? It should have you more worried if you don't think lockdowns/masking/etc work then you would believe we don't have an effective response to even more dangerous ones! It should be mass panic trying to find something.

And even more glaring where is the war? Lab leak theory proposes China killed almost 2 million people in the first year alone. Even if you don't think the option is full blown war from every country on Earth against China, why are they so content with the status quo? You would expect something in response, but seemingly no one gives a shit.

This isn't a bunch of rhetorical questions. If I truly believed that China had released a nearly holocaust amount of deaths onto the Earth I would be calling for flattening the country's leaders. You don't have to go that far but that no one takes it even a fraction as serious as a genuine belief makes it very hard to take the belief as genuine. It seems to just be shitpost based ritual circle jerking. If the cost benefit analysis says "war isn't worth it in response to a literal bioweapon" then fine, but there is literally nothing done in response by anyone.

The response to shrug and do literally nothing in response to nature makes sense because nature has been doing this since forever and we already have the response to natural viruses. The response to a lab bioweapon apparently also being nothing just boggles my mind, why do people not give a shit about the implications? People say they believe in lab leak, but they act like they believe in zoonosis instead.

If I truly believed that China had released a nearly holocaust amount of deaths onto the Earth I would be calling for flattening the country's leaders.

They have a nuclear arsenal. Ain't no one going to be "flattening" them.

If indeed COVID-19 was a lab leak, then it was funded by your tax dollars through EcoHealth Alliance. This kind of gain of function research is rightfully banned in the US. So EcoHealth Alliance did it in China. Out of control federal employees got a NIH grant and routed part of it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in order to perform banned gain of function research on bat coronaviruses. Snaking the ban on such research by performing it in China. Americans have just as much responsibility as the Chinese for this. We also have a nuclear arsenal so no foreigner will be allowed to flatten our leadership either.

At this point the Chinese government denies the wet market theory as not making sense. The earliest cases were not related to the wet market. The supposed bat that was the ultimate source doesn't exist anywhere remotely close to Wuhan. It is the wet market theory we should dismiss as extremely unlikely.

Choosing at random one of the many issues to respond to:

Lab leak theory proposes China killed almost 2 million people in the first year alone

... as does zoonosis. So, as you ask: where's the war? It seems like you have a missing mood.

I do think we should attack China over COVID due to them on accident releasing COVID that we helped engineer.

We did this because we are stupid.

We do not attack because we are weak, and stupid.

I do agree I’m of the minority on this.

If one very seriously believes that the world was attacked by an artificial bioweapon

You're engaging in a rhetorical sleight of hand that I've repeatedly decried in the past. A lab leak doesn't necessarily have to be a bioweapon, and immediately reaching for that term limits the discussion space in a lot of ways. It also doesn't imply there's an attack.

"Lab leak" could mean "accidental release of a natural virus"

"Lab leak" could mean "accidental release of an engineered research virus".

"Lab leak" could mean "accidental release of a weaponized virus strain".

"Lab leak" could mean "intentional release of any one of the three aforementioned categories".

"Intentional release of a weaponized virus strain" represents one sixth of the possible scenarios that can be described as a "lab leak".

The other five don't necessitate the kind of response you're describing, so why are you instantly privileging the one case that you can discard and not engaging with the others?

You're engaging in a rhetorical sleight of hand that I've repeatedly decried in the past. A lab leak doesn't necessarily have to be a bioweapon, and immediately reaching for that term limits the discussion space in a lot of ways. It also doesn't imply there's an attack.

The reason that gain of function research is relevant as an argument is if the claimaint is specifically arguing that it is artificial and created from the research.

Whether or not it was intended as an attack or a bioweapon still suggests some sort of greater response would be needed. It became one after all, regardless of intent.

Where is the planning for the next genetically engineered virus to escape? What about potential bioweapons terrorism?

How will we deal with those? If we believe that lockdowns and masking are effective, then we already have the answer. But that anti lockdown/masking beliefs correlate so heavily with lab leak theory, I should expect a significant amount of people freaking out trying to figure out some sort of solution to a major issue.

"I believe we have major issue X" directly suggests the line of action "let's try to counteract X". Where is that?

"I believe we have major issue X" directly suggests the line of action "let's try to counteract X". Where is that?

Everywhere you're refusing to look? Plenty of people are vocally against gain-of-function research entirely because of covid.

You have an incentive to pretend that this isn't happening, because you've constructed it as this bizarre presuppositionalist argument that lab leak proponents actually deeply believe in zoonosis. That isn't the same as it not actually happening.

I should expect a significant amount of people freaking out trying to figure out some sort of solution to a major issue.

Go through the archives here and on /r/themotte and you can find precisely that.

I also think it's notable that "lab leak" covers intentional release in China by anyone.

I typically hesitate to say that people aren't seriously believing their claims but Lab leak theorists have a major missing mood problem going on.

The best versions of both theories imply similar levels of culpability on the part of the Chinese. Zoonosis implies that the Chinese continue to allow an unsanitary practice (the sale of live-caught wild animals in wet markets) that is banned in most western countries, had already caused at least one pandemic (OG SARS) and had been called out as likely to cause others in the future. Lab leak implies that the Chinese were doing a type of dangerous research that was controversial but not banned in the west with grossly inadequate containment practices.

The claim that COVID-19 was deliberately developed as a bioweapon, as opposed to being the result of civilian gain-of-function research of the type proposed in the DEFUSE grant and promoted by Fauci, does not make sense. SARS-like coronaviruses make shitty bioweapons for reasons which should by now be all too obvious, and nukes (which China has) work better than sci-fi doomsday viruses as credible MAD.

The research was at least partially US-funded. The release was not on purpose; it needn't have been a bioweapon either. You can think of legitimate reasons for gain-of-function research. A war with China would be devastating anyway. It isn't in anyone's interest. It's in nobody's best interest to whip up such a mood either, and in the absence of that, people would rather move on.

The worst thing you can really blame the Chinese government for is the initial coverup attempt that allowed it to get out of control as badly as it did. Even that's not worth an actual war, surely.

I have the opposite opinion: I don't understand why people keep talking about the lab leak because I don't understand how it changes anything.

China is already an enemy of the US who can probably conduct whatever research they want. Even if the US makes a deal and threatens sanctions, they can agree and conduct it in secret. And declaring war on them is almost certain to cause millions if not billions of causalities (MAD), while shady research merely has the potential.

Gain of Function research is already a bad idea, and we can take (and are taking) steps to prevent the next manmade pandemic, regardless of whether or not COVID was manmade.

Prosecuting Fauci and other American scientists involves more than proving the lab leak, they must also be involved, and it's an uphill battle when people who we know committed crimes (like O.J. Simpson, Bill Cosby), let alone did something unethical-but-maybe-technically-legal (like Mark Zuckerberg), avoid justice. My philosophy is that it's more important to prevent future crimes, which in this case means making laws against shoddy or unmonitored wet lab research; but again, we can and should do this without proving COVID was artificial.

Censoring the lab-leak hypothesis - we should already not be censoring even "misinformation", and COVID shows how that fails, including that some of the censored claims may have been correct (such as masks not as effective as stated). The fact that now even leftist media says the lab leak is plausible makes its censorship especially egregious, even if it eventually gets disproven.

COVID provides many lessons on how to prevent and handle future pandemics. In particular, the plausible explanations on how it may have originated from the lab provide lessons on the former. But it doesn't technically matter whether they happened, just whether they're still plausible after scrutiny, and even that doesn't really matter, because the regulations can and probably should cover other hypotheticals.

The simplest explanation is that arguing lab leak makes one a principled free thinker, which is usually a coveted niche. Once the MAGA movement gave lab leak a bit of status, it worked as a tribal signal, too.

I think this dynamic applies because the lab leak discourse mostly occurred via social media. It wasn’t like the Rogers Commission or a criminal trial. Even the people who insisted that it merits war with China had no expectation of getting that outcome. Thus the debates revolved around status games.

Now this is the type of argument I actually find matching the mood. "It might be a lab leak but it's not worth the costs of caring" is exactly what we do with a lot of zoonosis already. We could stop eating meat, but no one wants to enough.

But it would be good then if people would say that, that our cost benefit analysis has decided on this not really being a big deal and we don't really care.

Prosecuting Fauci and other American scientists involves more than proving the lab leak, they must also be involved, and it's an uphill battle when people who we know committed crimes (like O.J. Simpson, Bill Cosby), let alone did something unethical-but-maybe-technically-legal (like Mark Zuckerberg), avoid justice.

What sort of argument is this? O.J. Simpson was, in fact, prosecuted, even though it was an uphill battle, and he ultimately got away with it. If we routinely go after individual murderers even when some of them get away, it seems reasonable to go after someone who's responsible for shutting down half of the world.

Censoring the lab-leak hypothesis - we should already not be censoring even for the excuse of "misinformation"

Yeah, but we are. People who did it (and are still doing it) should be made to answer for it, and a specific example where in their crusade against misinformation they ended up promoting it, and protecting liars, seems like something useful.

If one very seriously believes that the world was attacked by an artificial bioweapon (even if unintentionally leaked)

There's also "non-engineered lab leak theory," that the place that actively collects coronaviruses and has had safety issues in the past accidentally leaked (another?) one. I find this much more plausible than the sheer volume of coincidences that require it to be wet market a few blocks away or the actively engineered version.

Wet market theory strikes me as motivated reasoning by people too smart for their own good.

This is a matter of major national security now, and the most anyone wants to do is shitpost about it?

well tbf for a few years talking about it would get you banned from most social media and possibly get you fired, getting the government to care now is no easier than it was then, AI has sucked all the doomer-energy up, etc.

Shitposting and buying a UVC light are a reasonable stopping point for fighting a massively uphill battle that most people just want to forget and ignore.

edit: the fight about the origin is largely nerd-sniping at this point, and it is interesting/depressing that more people haven't latched on to "the specific origin doesn't matter; GoF is dangerous and should be banned anyways."

there's also "non-engineered lab leak theory," that the place that actively collects coronaviruses and has had safety issues in the past accidentally leaked (another?) one. I find this much more plausible than the sheer volume of coincidences that require it to be wet market a few blocks away or the actively engineered version.

That one is far better except for as the rootclaim debate and Scott Alexander pointed out, an accidental release just happening to point to the wet market is incredibly odd too.

Of the many many more crowded and indoor areas for a leaked virus to spread, it happened to be the one place, and only the one place, where natural origin makes the most sense? Not a researchers apartment complex, or nearby stores, or movie theaters, or their children's school, or anything else?

The lab leak theory can either say "that's how well it was covered up" in which case okay you can just do that endlessly there is no beating an argument that lack of proof doesn't matter or say "it was intentionally released there to look natural" in which case it's no longer accidental leak theory.

Of the many many more crowded and indoor areas for a leaked virus to spread, it happened to be the one place, and only the one place, where natural origin makes the most sense?

The wet market is not the one and only place where zoonosis makes sense.

The zoonosis theory is that bats spread it to an intermediary animal (like a raccoon dog, civet, or pangolin) and from there to humans. So anywhere that one of these animals were handled or sold could spread it to humans, literally thousands of places. People have some of these animals as pets even. And the zoonosis people still have no idea which animal is the missing link. No animal sold at the market had a natural reservoir of the Covid-19 virus in its native population.

an accidental release just happening to point to the wet market is incredibly odd too.

It's not even odd, let alone "incredibly odd". I hope Scott didn't say those exact words; it's foolish.

Does it really need explaining why a wet market is better for spreading a virus than an apartment complex?

In what apartment complex do you get:

  • Thousands of people constantly brushing past each other
  • Bodily fluids from many different animals, exposed to air and skin contact
  • Organic materials passing between strangers
  • Animals and animal products kept in close proximity with each other and humans

You're a virus, intent on spreading as much as possible. Do you want to spawn in (a) a wet market, or (b) an apartment complex?

It's utterly absurd to suggest that it just "happened" to be a wet market, pretty much the optimal place for a virus to spread. You know this, obviously.

The lab leak theory can either say "that's how well it was covered up" in which case okay you can just do that endlessly there is no beating an argument that lack of proof doesn't matter

Not an argument, which is why you gloss over it. And if "lack of proof" doesn't matter, your comment doesn't matter. Evidence is what matters, and that's a little more complicated than just scoffing at people.

The American public - like all publics - now cares about everything equally due to knowing and hearing about everything.

If this were post wwii but pre Vietnam we would be at war.

This is a matter of major national security now, and the most anyone wants to do is shitpost about it?

Welcome to the real world, Neo.

Both potential belligerent superpowers are implicated. And the most likely scenario isn’t intentional release, but accidental.

If it was 1993 and the US and Russia were collaborating on getting control of the Russian nuclear arsenal and jointly accidentally set one off, they’re not going to war over it.

Hm. You could argue a similar version about zoonosis.

Not only should the world force China with sanctions to forbid wet markets, the west should move away from poultry to prevent the next bird flu dangerous to humans. In fact to lower (eliminate!) risk of zoonosis we must embrace veganism! Instead I encounter that only as a minor talking point in vegan activism (if at all).

It is true though:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8319869/

The production, distribution and consumption of animal-based products (such as meat, dairy and eggs) is a major risk for zoonotic transmission. Therefore, our perspective is that promoting sustainability, particularly by reducing unsustainable animal-based consumption, must be part of the broader response to reduce the risk of future pandemics.

Instead people shrug. Eh, nothing to be done by Asians eating crazy animals. And vegans much rather want to talk about other stuff like ethics.

Hm. You could argue a similar version about zoonosis

The dangers and risk factors of zoonotic viruses have already been largely hashed out given that we live in the world of natire's laboratory since all of human existence. There is simply not that much left to discuss. We've already as a society decided "stop eating meat" is too much of an ask.

If we had that conversation about lab created viruses and decided "doing anything is too much, just let people experiment with whatever and we'll deal with the consequences" then fine. That's an answer at least.

There are no "wet markets" selling exotic animals in Wuhan.

They've cleaned the practice up substantially since COVID (which was generally a stepchange where a bunch of antisocial behaviors got curtailed) but there definitely were wet markets with what'd be very-exotic animals by Western equivalents in Wuhan at the time, and such things continue to exist in more fringe parts of China.

There is no missing mood, plenty of people were this level of mad.

I am still pretty mad. But I'm not gonna blow up my life for ineffective revenge. And the worst thing about COVID wasn't the disease it was the insane response to it, which is not something that can be blamed exclusively on China. The wuhan lab also wasn't exclusively run by the Chinese.

I'd still be very happy to see Fauci or other American scientists prosecuted. Short of that, him being dragged through the mud and multiple senate hearings by Rand Paul is kinda nice.

In another thread someone mentions anthropic giving their AI access to a wetlab. I consider this equal levels of stupid and insane. I can't wait to discover what novel viruses they create while stress testing the security and bio hacking capabilities of their latest AI.

What exactly am I supposed to do?

The world is pretty fucked up and people do things that I think are incredibly stupid/evil all the time. I try not to run up the numbers on my blood pressure by feeling mad about all these things.

Shitposting is stress relief. At least if I can't do anything to the people that have done measureable harm to my life I'll make sure to keep bringing it up online.

Wait. The same damn logic applies for zoonosis. Why aren’t you demanding that every wet market in the world be shut down? Why aren’t you demanding massive sanctions until countries stop wet markets / trade in exotic animals? Why aren’t you sending in Seal Team Six to take out owners of wet markets?

Edit — most lab leak proponents believe China did this—with the U.S.’s help— accidentally. Making a mistake is not causes for war.

This is that same argument that comes up with abortion.

"If they are really killing millions of babies every year shouldn't there be terrorists trying to bomb abortion clinics?"

I mean, yeah, there were. It just made pro-choice stronger and then the perpetrators went to jail, solving nothing. Lashing out like a retard doesn't help anyone.

If I truly believed that China had released a nearly holocaust amount of deaths onto the Earth I would be calling for flattening the country's leaders.

You would? You would start a likely nuclear war that would kill many times more people than Covid? That's deeply insane. In any case, China didn't try to start Covid, and the US is far from blameless.

You would? You would start a likely nuclear war that would kill many times more people than Covid? That's deeply insane.

I mean, retaliation that costs you more than what you're retaliating for is just politics 101. If you're not insane enough to retaliate despite the costs, you get trampled.

You actually don’t have to act in demonstrably stupid ways. Consider, again, the abortion bombers who accomplished nothing vs the patient legal process which eventually overturned Roe. Consider the Leftist street riots of the 1960s that put Nixon in charge vs the patient march through the institutions that radically reshaped America along leftist lines.

You don’t start a nuclear war because China did an oopsy. You figure out a way to make yourself less reliant on them.

The only way a lab leak will be “officially confirmed” is by the CCP / Chinese government since it would have happened at a CCP-sanctioned facility and they stringently deny it.

Since this will never happen (for both liability and national pride reasons) this (‘almost certainly a leak’) is as good as it will get. It seems to me that most intelligent people, even on the libleft, have now updated to this.

I wish they would also update that it wasn't just bad protocol at Chinese labs, it was also irresponsible behavior by people like Dr. Fauci who were pushing gain of function research in the first place. Even though everyone knows it's a lab leak now, no one is acting like it. People on the left still treat Dr. Fauci like a hero.

Frustratingly, unless your primary concern is assigning blame (which seems likely to fall on both China and the US, and nobody is practically going to be paying out for this), the final assessment of origin isn't even that meaningful. If your goal is to avoid a similar recurrence, the fact that it seems plausible to have been a lab leak should be sufficient for enacting the same set of rule changes as if we knew it was. We can just make sure the next one is not a lab leak, and it costs us relatively little. For what it's worth, we can try to avoid future zoonosis too.

Just as public health authorities did themselves no favors by being misleading and overly restricting, COVID skeptics do themselves no favors by overstating the case - both explanations make sense and are plausible, and any conclusive evidence is likely gone. Focus on patching the vulnerabilities over assigning blame and asserting informational superiority.

People are giving AIs access to a wetlab. Nothing has been learned. Nothing has been patched.

Assigning blame serves an important function for vulnerability patching. If no one involved is ever responsible than why would they spend the effort to fix anything?

Assigning blame serves an important function for vulnerability patching. If no one involved is ever responsible than why would they spend the effort to fix anything?

Given the existence of two plausible origin theories, both of which involve large-scale idiocy rather than individual criminality (which is not to say that nobody committed a crime - just that under both theories there is no criminality needed to end up with a pandemic), attempting to assign blame makes vulnerability patching harder because it creates high-powered incentives to hide the root causes. In practice, it also makes it harder to create common knowledge about root causes and appropriate responses because you require a higher standard of proof to assign blame to individuals than to identify patchable vulnerabilities.

In fact this is a more general point. If a disaster requires systemic vulnerabilities (whether in place of or in addition to individual culpability) then attempting to identify culpable individuals after the fact makes root cause identification, and therefore vulnerability patching, harder. There is a reason why both medicine and aviation try as far as possible to have blame-free accident investigation processes.

At some point you boil up the responsibility to a nation state. China should be paying reparations. The reparations should be based on how unsafely they acted.

If they don't allow foreign investigators full access to an immediate investigation then they are assumed to be maximally guilty.

Individual nations can then set punishments for their people internally for fucking up.

Given the existence of two plausible origin theories, both of which involve large-scale idiocy rather than individual criminality (which is not to say that nobody committed a crime - just that under both theories there is no criminality needed to end up with a pandemic), attempting to assign blame makes vulnerability patching harder because it creates high-powered incentives to hide the root causes.

Going after people who tried to censor one of these theories, coordinated to attack anyone who came out to say it actually is plausible, and to hide relevant information, sounds like a pretty good approach to vulnerability patching. No matter which theory is ultimately true, you do not want anyone like that in any sort of position of responsibility.

Man, after punching you in the face, "Really when you think about it, there is no reason for us to fight. I was mad before. You are mad now. Suffice to say we both experienced madness and it's time to bury the hatchet."

I agree that we should patch the vulnerabilities. But the people patching the vulnerabilities should not be the same people who shut the world down and tried to create a global censorship regime. It matters.

You are never going to know who punched you in the face. You can take steps to avoid getting punched in the face again, regardless of who did it, or you can obsess over who punched you in the face and get punched in the face again and again.

I'd love to know who punched you in the face. I'd love for you to never get punched in the face again, and I'd love to never get punched in the face.

No amount of pressure from the West or anyone else is going to make China stop being sketchy as fuck, it's unlikely we will ever know.

Improving wet market and lab safety is an increasing existential threat.

Don't focus on the former at the expense of the latter.

I think we're broadly in agreement, but it's imperative that we don't put the same people in charge of the cleanup that caused the problem in the first place.

I'm not even talking about China. I'm talking about the gain of function researchers in the US. I'm talking about Anthropic setting up a biolab. I'm talking about the people whose bungled response caused an order of magnitude more damage than the virus itself. Nothing was learned. Putting Fauci in prison would at least "encourager les autres".

I think in a just world you might be right but the reality of the situation is that things have become wrapped up in comorbid political problems and a focus on say, jailing Fauci just firmly distracts from getting any useful done.

No, but the surface evidence is strong enough for lab leak to use that as the base assumption. Zoonosis is fifty steps of unlikely shit, lab leak is just their published intentions and known research/funding + one entirely banal human accident.

At the level of handwaving where lab leak is "one entirely banal human accident", zoonosis requires exactly one step of unlikely shit, namely that the next big zoonotic virus coincidentally showed up in the city that hosts the WIV.

I'm also aware of the Root Claim debate which I've encountered as a wall of text and like 30 hours of videos. I'd love an explanation of why this debate matters, but my tendency is to dismiss it as a gish gallop.

A Gish gallop is a performative one-sided dump of low-quality arguments which is designed to be superficially convincing if unrebutted and to be a lot harder to rebut than it is to generate.

The Rootclaim debate was adversarial, with both sides bringing their best. Multiple observers who found it worth their time to read the wall of text on ACX (I have done) or watch the multiple hours of video (I have not) have confirmed that the arguments being made are persuasive, and that most of them stand up to well-informed, well-resourced attempts at rebuttal. The vast majority of the people who have spent time engaging with it (including me) have come away with the conclusion that the zoonosis hypothesis is at least plausible given the publicly available information, and most (not including me, probably because a lot of the receipts are buried in the 30 hours of video or the documents cited in an already-long wall of text) have come away accepting the argument that zoonosis is orders of magnitude more likely than lab leak.

The Rootclaim debate matters because it involved two smart people with the resources and incentives to produce the best possible arguments based on the publicly available information, and a group of more-or-less neutral smart observers who precommitted to reading a wall of text and watching 30 hours of video, meaning that the debate would not be easily won with cheap debate tricks like Gish gallops (or "spreading", which is the equivalent technique used in actual competitive debate). It represents by far the largest concentration of IQ-point hours applied to the question of "Based on the publicly available information, what is the most likely COVID-19 origin story?"

Not every valid argument can be made comprehensible to Fat Tony. For an uncontroversial example, Fat Tony can't understand Bell's Inequality. That doesn't make hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics correct.

In 2018, there was a proposal made to DARPA called DEFUSE, in which bat coronaviruses would be studied. Human-specific cleavage sites would be added. Transmissability would be increased via gain-of-function. And this would happen in the United States in collaboration with, you guessed it, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. DARPA ultimately rejected the $14 million proposal.

FWIW, an entirely Fat Tony-comprehensible rebuttal of this argument is included in the ACX post summarising the Rootclaim debate. Understanding it might take as long as several minutes, which you apparently consider to constitute a Gish gallop. But the short answer is that a proposal that was not funded, to do research at a lab that was not the WIV, on viruses that the WIV did not have in its collection, is not smoking gun evidence that a modified virus leaked from WIV.

In fact, most of the arguments on either side of the Rootclaim debate are ones that Fat Tony could understand if he wanted to spend the time to do so. The basic lab leak argument is as @porkpiehat gives it. The first-round rebuttal is that the unnatural-looking furin cleavage site doesn't look human-designed either, and that the bat virus from which SARS-CoV-2 doesn't appear to have been at WIV at the time the alleged GoF research was being done (it wasn't found in the wild until after the pandemic). The basic zoonosis argument is that SARS-CoV-2 is awfully similar to OG SARS (which is known to be zoonotic) and that we found the origins of the pandemic in the very wet market stall which a western virologist visiting WIV had called out 5 years previously as high-risk for zoonotic virus transmission, with the first-round rebuttal being that nobody ever found the intermediate host. What Fat Tony struggles with is evaluating the relative strengths of the arguments (and the COVID-19 origins debate is very unusual for straightforward factual disputes in that there are still strong arguments on both sides after this much expenditure of IQ-point hours). In the context of the debate, it is actually the lab leakers who end up falling back on a Fat Tony-incomprehensible argument about why "A lab leak virus that looks plausibly zoonotic just happened to have its first superspreader event at a wet market 10km from the lab" is not an unlikely coincidence - see Rootclaim's post-debate rebuttal.

I'm not going to blame Fat Tony for falling back on "I distrust the clowns who think that vaccines cause autism less than the clowns who think men can cut their dicks off and become women" but the whole point of the Motte is to aspire to be more rational than Fat Tony.

In the Roomclaim debate, Peter Miller, arguing for zoonosis, assigned 1 in 50 septillion odds to a lab leak being the cause of pandemic.

If this is "rationalism", I'm going to go with Fat Tony.

A guy said something silly amongst walls of text and 40 hours of video so therefore I am going to throw out all the other arguments and evidence to point and laugh Nelson style and stick to my priors despite rather a lot of evidence to the contrary.

Would you care to engage with the thoughts and arguments presented here? Or are you just looking for a fun slam dunk and people who agree with you?

A guy said something silly amongst walls of text and 40 hours of video

If you need reams of rigorous argument to make your point, that's fine. Some assertions are hard to make: in math some proofs are just long. But you'd better have rigorous argument, because otherwise you just have a sophisticated gish gallop. Waving your hands and making specious points in the middle of a long argument is a sophomoric approach to get the grad student TA to pass your essay, not a professional one.

He didn't "say something silly" in the course of his walls of text. His conclusion distilled from those walls of text was ridiculous: 1 in 50 septillion.

Would you care to engage with the thoughts and arguments presented here? Or are you just looking for a fun slam dunk and people who agree with you?

I think we can do better than this.

The basic problem is it relies on accepting info from PRC (who wants to lie) and from US government (who through Fauci also lied). The rootclaim debate didn’t have the benefit of the Paul data dump that was pretty damning.

What was the Paul data dump?

There were a lot of emails from Fauci etc suggesting a concerted cover up. Of course we knew some but not all of this before.

Do you have a source for that?

NPR article

In his posts on X, Paul highlights a few select excerpts from Fauci's notes. For instance, he points to an entry on Jan. 26, 2020, not quite two months before the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, where Fauci writes, "the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. … Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier."

Paul notes in his post, "The wet market was already off the table in [Fauci's] own private notes."

But in that same journal entry, Fauci adds, "Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans."

Not quite a week later, in an entry penned on Feb. 1, 2020, Fauci listed the dozen researchers who participated in a conference call debating the origins of COVID-19. Specifically, they were talking about the plausibility that a key part of the SARS-CoV-2 genome could have evolved naturally.

According to his notes, only two of the scientists voiced support for a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. "The rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible," he wrote, referring to the hypothesis that the virus was engineered in a lab.

In response to that passage, Paul wrote on X, "This was never a 50/50 room," suggesting that early scientific consensus considered a lab leak possible.

But Goodrum says that this meeting took place very early on, when scientists did not have as much data as they would later. The virologist points out that science is iterative and takes time to play out. What some of those scientists believed at the start gave way to a different consensus as more evidence emerged.

"We make the best conclusions we have with the data we have at the time, but then you're going to keep working," she says. "And then you're going to ultimately revise the original conclusions that you made. You will change your mind. That's absolutely fundamental to the way science is done. And it's something that Fauci wasn't really given any latitude to do."

Goodrum adds that it's possible that Fauci may have been less certain in private with his colleagues as they were racing to learn about the new virus than he was in public, where he had to assure a public panicking over the rapidly emerging pandemic.

Rand Paul press release

U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), Chairman of the Senate HomelandSecurity and Governmental Affairs Committee, today released internal Slack messages exchanged among the authors of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”—Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Eddie Holmes, and Andrew Rambaut. The messages, obtained as part of his ongoing COVID-19 origins investigation, are now available in The Reading Room at paul.senate.gov/readingroom.

The Proximal Origin paper, published in Nature Medicine in March 2020, was widely cited by public health officials and the media as the scientific authority for ruling out a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. The newly released messages show that behind closed doors, the paper’s own authors were far less certain than their public conclusions suggested.

In the messages, Andersen assigned a 30% probability to a lab origin. Holmes gave an estimate of 20%, later revising it down to 10%. Both numbers stand in direct contrast to the paper’s public assertion that there was no way the virus had been manipulated.

The documents also reveal extensive internal debate over the furin cleavage site, the genetic feature at the heart of the lab-leak question, with Andersen at one point telling colleagues that “some smoking(ish) guns” had emerged that made him “not comfortable,” and that he had “less confidence… at this stage.”

Separately, the messages show the authors coordinating directly with the U.S. intelligence community and NIH leadership during the same period they were publicly defending their conclusions. Andersen told his co-authors he expected to “have a handler” beginning that week as the intelligence community’s 90-day review was underway. Holmes repeatedly referenced a source in China he called “my spy.” Following the leak of the DARPA DEFUSE proposal, which detailed a plan to insert furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses, the group discussed the need to “stay off email” and to “carefully curate” their correspondence “for the FOI records,” while also noting the need to “get something back to Tony [Fauci]’s team at NIH.”

The release is part of Chairman Paul’s broader effort to make the underlying record of the COVID-19 origins investigation publicly available.

Thanks!

"A lab leak virus that looks plausibly zoonotic just happened to have its first superspreader event at a wet market 10km from the lab" is not an unlikely coincidence - see Rootclaim's post-debate rebuttal."

I can revert it. Is it plausible that one of the hundreds of provably infected animals held in cages in lab down the road was the source? What kind of false dialectic was presented in the debate - if the source of infection was the market or the lab - and if it was the market it automatically was zoonotic, meaning no lab leak?

Based on the publicly-available information, none of the animals in the lab were infected with SARS-CoV-2 or any virus closely related enough to it to be the starting point for a gain-of-function experiment. And the timing of the required cover-up to make this true but not publicly-available information is not particularly plausible. (Again, the argument is on the ACX debate page, and is Fat Tony intelligible but not short enough that I can make you read it and check the receipts as a condition of debating with me on the Motte).

False dialectic exactly according to the lack of evidence formula. Also we lack evidence exactly because Chinese communist institutions refused to cooperate in independent investigation and actively acted against it - they destroyed data, slaughtered animals on the market, bleached residual evidence and gagged researchers. So it is doubly ignorant to use lack of public evidence as evidence of absence.

I can also reverse it and say that based on the publicly available information none of the animals was proven NOT to be infected with SARS-CoV-2. It is just Chinese government communication that none of the staff or animals tested positive, none of the live samples or anything like that remains. Which is highly suspicious as it seems unlikely that none of the hundreds of staff were tested positive in the middle of supposedly zoonotic outbreak inside Wuhan in March-April of 2020. But this is not even the main point, it is possible that the leaked animal was from some earlier batch of research that leaked on the market in 2019. Testing animals in March 2020 would not be proof of absence of a virus in animals in 2019. But again, we do not even have that as Chinese government refused to cooperate.

I can also say that there is no publicly available information that would provide evidence of any actual zoonotic link. Zoonotic origin is all circumstantial, there is no "animal zero" proven, there is no cluster of infected animals or any physical link of infection and mutation from bat to human. There is no hard evidence of zoonotic origin, so it is pure speculation and fantasy story bordering on conspiracy.

And I literally mean it - it presupposes that some breeders traded various animals including bats in some hidden breeding stations where the virus spread between animals until it reached Wuhan market and jumped on a human. There is no proof for any of that - there is no evidence of any breeding farms with the final virus strain or any of its its precursors, there is no link leading from bats to any other animal virus reservoir or anything like that. It is a literal conspiracy theory inventing invisible wildlife smugglers, underhanded breeders and unscrupulous sellers in complex supply chain who delivered deadly virus to Wuhan and killed millions of people on Earth without leaving a shred of evidence. In past zoonotic outbreaks, we were able to trace animal reservoirs and vectors easily such as SARS-1 in 2002-3 or MERS 2012. How is such a preposterous hypothesis more plausible than a another lab leak that happens all the time.

Also we lack evidence exactly because Chinese communist institutions refused to cooperate in independent investigation and actively acted against it - they destroyed data, slaughtered animals on the market, bleached residual evidence and gagged researches. So it is doubly ignorant to use lack of public evidence as evidence of absence.

As you point out, the Red Chinese were destroying both potential evidence that could have supported wet market zoonotic spread and potential evidence that could have supported lab leak. This is not surprising, as the official Chicom position at the time the evidence was destroyed (being enforced inside China with the usual Chicom techniques of truth suppression) was that the virus originated outside China. There is no revealed preference on the part of the Chinese authorities for people to believe zoonosis over lab leak (which is unsurprising - both theories make China look bad, but only lab leak lets them absolve the leadership by throwing a small number of people under the bus). The campaign to suppress the lab leak hypothesis came from the US medical establishment, which did not get access to Wuhan unfiltered by the local Chicom authorities or Chicom-aligned WHO leadership until after any evidence had been destroyed.

I can also reverse it and say that based on the publicly available information none of the animals was proven NOT to be infected with SARS-CoV-2.

You said "provably infected" (in your earlier post), not me. I'm happy to stipulate that any evidence that could prove the infection status of the lab animals at WIV (in either direction) has been lost.

As I said in my first post, the specific cover-up required is implausible (not impossible, but all I have ever claimed is that it is at least as implausible as a zoonosis coincidentally showing up in the home of WIV). The only way WIV can have had access to a suitable starting point virus (i.e. BANAL-52, or some other bat virus more closely related to BANAL-52 than to any bat virus known to exist in 2019) is that a civilian lab which was openly and notoriously conducting gain-of-function research, and seeking to collaborate with UNC and get research funding from NIH on that basis, and which had a financial incentive to boast about and was in fact boasting about their virus-collection programme and large published virus database, was running a separate parallel secret gain-of-function lab with a separate parallel secret virus-collection programme which didn't contribute to the database and that was using separate secret furin cleavage sites that shouldn't work according to the pre-2019 public literature, confirmed in the general case (obviously not specifically for SARS-CoV-2) by post-2019 AI-enabled simulations.

Your response is isolated demands for rigour and (entirely plausibly) slinging allegations of dishonesty at the Red Chinese authorities. But this cover-up would have required dishonesty maintained over several years by academics who did not have an obvious incentive to be dishonest. And from the point of view of the academics, the cover-up failed, and predictably so. If COVID-19 was provably a lab leak, then the Chinese authorities, who are the ones in a position to punish the academics, already have the proof.

You said "provably infected" (in your earlier post), not me. I'm happy to stipulate that any evidence that could prove the infection status of the lab animals at WIV (in either direction) has been lost.

They were "provably infected" by coronavirus and it is proven by loads of research on that published by WIV. You shifted the goalpost that there is no proof of animals in the lab being infected by this specific SARS-CoV-2 strain. I agree, there is no proof mostly due to purposeful destruction of data and samples. On the other hand there is also no proof of any animal infected by any coronavirus in some mystical smuggler/breeder supply chain leading to Wuhan needed for zoonotic origin.

Your response is isolated demands for rigour and (entirely plausibly) slinging allegations of dishonesty at the Red Chinese authorities.

Quite to the contrary. The zoonotic origin story has the same problem that you presented - there is no direct ancestor found anywhere in the wild. It was not found near Wuhan or anywhere else. The distance toward COVID-19 strains require quite a leap. So this fact does not save zoonotic origin. So you require rigorous proof of plausible research in biolab that could produce the exact SARS-CoV-2 strain of the virus. And lack of evidence is evidence of absence. But you do not require the same evidence for zoonotic origin, which should leave massive trail up until it reached Wuhan market from either Laos or Yunnan or some other unknown bat cave thousand miles and decades of natural mutations away from what was produced in form of two lineages of SARS-CoV-2. That is isolated demand for rigor.

Also I am not slinging "allegations" but facts about Red Chinese authorities. They refused to cooperate, provide data, samples or anything. How is that an allegation? You yourself agree by saying that:

As you point out, the Red Chinese were destroying both potential evidence that could have supported wet market zoonotic spread and potential evidence that could have supported lab leak. This is not surprising, as the official Chicom position at the time the evidence was destroyed (being enforced inside China with the usual Chicom techniques of truth suppression) was that the virus originated outside China.

So yes, Red Chinese authorities are purposefully obtuse and dishonest.

I don't think there ever was a real disagreement of null hypothesis of the origin of COVID. The situation is as follows. We have the only biolab with Biosafety level 4 certification in China that studies bat coronaviruses related to SARS for decades, that biolab is Wuhan Institute of Virology. They produce papers where they admit that they engineer specific bat coronaviruses such as this one from 2016 named Bat Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Like Coronavirus ORF_X Modulates the Host Immune Response in Journal of Virology. And now mysteriously in a country of 1.4 billion people with 100 cities with population of over 1 million people and out of almost 40,000 wet markets in China we see a new strain of bat coronavirus turning into COVID-19. And this event happens a few miles from the institute. By this fact alone the likelihood is overwhelming on human origin of the virus.

Add to the opaque nature of Chinese communist institutions. We have precedents for this such as in Soviet Union, where they wanted to bury even catastrophes like Chernobyl, which only had to be confirmed by outside sources - two days later in Sweden where they detected increased radiation. This is nothing new. We have proof of Chinese scrubbing data from the lab - they literally deleted their database of tens of thousands of tested animals in September 2019 due to "hacking". They bleached everything in the market destroying biological data. We also have circulation of claims and counterclaims of Wuhan employees being hospitalized for alergies or cold. By the way, to this day we do not have any confirmed deaths from COVID of any of the hundreds of staff of the institute, including any old goats and administrators - despite the supposed zoonotic origin of the Virus and catastrophic situation in Wuhan. And now some people just say we lack evidence for lab leak hypothesis. No shit, but we also lack evidence for zoonotic origin, it is all just circumstantial.

Lab leak is the most parsimonious and likely explanation of the whole thing and any other explanation such as some mysterious transmission from bat to pangolin to thousand of miles travel to Wuhan is the real conspiracy theory. Also it is not without precedent, there were two documented leaks of SARS just in 2004 in Bejing biolevel 3 lab investigating SARS. Back then it was concluded that the lab was hugely negligent and did not apply the safety level to proper standards. By the way the ascendancy of Wuhan lab to study viruses was exactly in the aftermath of Beijng catastrophe and by 2010 the Wuhan became the crown jewel of Chinese research into SARS and other coronavirus infections. In fact this Beijing-Wuhan rivalry was fueled by different commie institutional players inside the Chinese power structures (Ministry of Health vs Army/Academy of Sciences) and could potentially be one of the reasons and motivations for cutting the corners when it comes to safety, including conducting part of the research in Biolevel 2 and 3 facilities.

Anyways, I do not care if it was some sort of breach of containment, a bioweapon research or even age old communist corruption where some janitor sold infected animals scheduled for incineration to the Wuhan wet market for $10 profit as it is usual in communist countries. Which by the way shows the false dialectic of "Market Origin" vs "Lab Leak" - these are not mutually exclusive, it is not impossible that an infected personnel or even infected animals leaked from the Lab into the market few miles from said lab. Both theories have plausible explanation of "infected animals at the market", just competing source of said animals. And even in this scenario - what is the most likely source of said infected animals. A bat cave thousand of miles away transmitting it to to pangolin or racoon or dog or civet that ended up in said market? Or that the source was literal hundreds of provably infected animals in cages a few miles down the road. That the virus leaked from the lab is still the most ready explanation of the situation especially by virtue of opaqueness of communist regime.

Imagine that you had the same standard for any other thing. Let's say that a local corrupt politician who had provable ties to local mafia suddenly won $1 million in a lottery. What would be the most plausible explanation:

  • He was just a lucky winner
  • He was gifted the winning lottery ticket from local mafia, who purchased or even robbed it from some anonymous local lottery winner

And now it seems that all journalists and academia are for some reason going for "nothing to see here", or "lottery ticket is valid and not counterfeit" and any other number of explanations. And moreover they would claim that the mafia tie is a "conspiracy theory" and an offence, for which you will be depersoned and cancelled. In the past no respectable journalist would drop this story, and the corruption angle would never be declared as "conspiracy theory" using strawman story of how the lottery ticket is not fake etc.

Lab leak is the most parsimonious and likely explanation of the whole thing

I tend to agree with this. If someone gave me $100k and I was required to bet all the money one way or another, of course I would bet it was a lab leak.

The other thing is that this is a little bit a culture war issue. Evidently, a few years back one of the progressive system updates indicated that one shouldn't blame China for the Coronavirus. How does this affect my thinking? Well for starters I can't help but notice that progressives lie about everything and everything. My impression is not simply that they say whatever BS is convenient without regards to the truth. But rather, dishonesty with respect to certain things is a badge of honor for them. So the fact that the progressive party line is against the lab leak hypothesis makes me more likely to believe it's true.

On the other hand, I admit that I really hate progressives and possibly this is coloring my judgment. The fact that they are (somewhat) against the lab leak hypothesis makes me want to believe in it.

The other thing that I find interesting is that if the lab leak hypothesis is correct (and it does seem to be correct) it suggests that the CCP has a great deal of influence over western progressives. I'm not thrilled about going down the road of conspiracy theories, and undisclosed foreign agents, but on the other hand, is it really so outrageous to hypothesize that China is trying to covertly influence Western political discourse?

I get that you really, really really hate progressives, but I feel obligated to remind you.

Reversed stupidity is still not intelligence.

Reversed stupidity is still not intelligence.

In general, I agree but I think there are exceptions to this principle.

For example, suppose you are taking a standardized college entrance exam like the SAT; you come to one of the last questions in a particular section; and you observe that a couple of the answer choices would be really appealing to a stupid person.

For example, the question is this:

In the figure below, what is the most number of non-overlapping unit squares which can be fit into triangle ABC?

(a) 3 (b) 4 (c) 5 (d) 6

Suppose that you see a really simple and obvious way to fit 4 squares into the triangle. In that case, you can safely eliminate choice (b), because stupid people are going to pick (b) and the test makers CAN'T have a test where stupid people get one of the hardest questions correct. Such a question would be thrown out. Similarly, you can eliminate choice (d) because a really stupid person will see the phrase "most" and just choose the highest answer. Choice (a) can be eliminated as well -- if choice (b) is incorrect, it follows that choice (a) must be incorrect as well.

So the net effect is that you can make a pretty good guess at the correct answer by reversing stupidity.

Ok, so what does this have to do with progressives? Well, progressives are constantly competing with each other for social status within the community. So arguably there is constant pressure to demonstrate one's belonging and allegiance to the progressive cause. Which is more effective at doing so? Making a true statement which anyone could honestly say or agree with? Or, to borrow from the Chinese fable, to pretend that a deer is actually a horse?

So arguably, progressives have incentive to twist, spin, fabricate, and outright lie, not only to advance their agenda but also just for the sake of lying.

Anyway, I can't prove that this actually happens, but it does make me think that factual claims made by progressives should be given negative weight.

I haven't seen this myself as I don't use Tiktok, but afaik, Tiktok was early and intense in pushing the "Free Palestine/Israel are committing genocide" meme complex among Western teens.

Precisely. Added to that, the Taiwanese managed to leak COVID from one of their labs, during the pandemic (a mouse bit a researcher who caught COVID). Lab leaks are entirely plausible, they happen all the time.

This seemed improbable to me but it's documented.

I'm also aware of the Root Claim debate which I've encountered as a wall of text and like 30 hours of videos. I'd love an explanation of why this debate matters, but my tendency is to dismiss it as a gish gallop.

I think the reason it matters is because COVID origin skeptics find stories that sound good to them and they stop there, while the guy who won that first root claim debate didn't suffer from Too Good to Check and exhaustively investigated them and found they were nothingburgers.

(I'm saying why they matter, not that I've weighed the arguments. I'm too burnt out on COVID to read about it anymore)

But his results (1 in 50 septillion odds for a lab leak) are so ridiculous they should be rejected outright. I know that RootClaim couldn't just say "um, no" because they had this big important debate that was supposed to set the standard for debates. But they ended up with this ridiculous result and no one is convinced.

Once again we've proven that rationalists have wisdom as a dump stat. It's very concerning that these same people could end up with outsized power in an AI regulatory regime.

But they ended up with this ridiculous result and no one is convinced.

I thought he convinced a panel of judges?

Fat Tony is a heuristic. If you have no ability to ask any other questions or investigate yourself or don't have the time to check, it's pretty good. But it's not an irrefutable argument.

It is the judges who produced the ridiculous result. I mean, these two delightful young women won a judged debate. Should we just accept they are skilled debaters because of argument from authority? Or are the judges just as bad as the debaters?

No one who matters was convinced, even though some rationalist made noises like "this updates me towards zoonosis".

I agree that Fat Tony is only a heuristic, but it's a mode of thinking that most rationalists are deficient in. This is where the quokka meme comes from. And I also think, in the real world, the quokka's weaknesses are more severe. I'd much rather have Fat Tony than Scott Aaronson at the head of my army.

Hey I don't want to begrudge you your beliefs but I think you'd find the LessWrong umbrella of subcultures to be much more receptive to Fat Tony arguments than most intellectual communities. It's almost our defining feature.

Disclaimer, I haven't looked into this topic at all. I just think there's a point that's often missed in these discussions:

When we're thinking about the likelihood of a novel virus emerging, we need to be anchored on a distribution according to population, not time, because each new human being is a new opportunity for a virus to take form. The relevant figure is: What percentage of the people who have ever lived are alive today? Seems like it's about 7%. So, the number of novel human viruses we should expect to see arise in our lifetime is about 7% of however many have arisen in all of history. Those are some good odds, if you're a virus!

But (more speculatively) it's worse than that, because viruses emerge from the interaction of more than one organism, not necessarily of the same species. A plasmid might emerge from a bat, land in a pangolin, then later escape with a mixture of bat and pangolin DNA, etc. Therefore, depending on how many steps it takes, the number of opportunities for viruses to arise will increase as the Nth power of population, with an extra bonus for the density of humans and animals all crammed into one small place. I would venture to say that the amount of genetic material being shuffled around nowadays in places like Wuhan is a situation without precedent in the whole history of life on Earth.

That's an interesting thought. But then, naively, wouldn't we expect diseases to form almost exclusively in places like India or Africa where density is high and medical treatment is poor? Why haven't we seen more diseases?

One possible explanation: Even though today's humans represent 7% of all the humans the have ever existed, we represent a tiny fraction of all the mammals that have ever existed.

A plasmid might emerge from a bat, land in a pangolin, then later escape with a mixture of bat and pangolin DNA, etc.

This would seem to contradict the previous idea as there aren't that many pangolins. Bats seem pretty good at serving as disease reservoirs, being numerous and close together. If Covid-19 emerged close to a population of bats known to harbor coronaviruses, the zoonosis case would make more sense. Sure wet markets an all that, but now we're chaining together multiple things that have to "go right" to create Covid. The lab leak theory on the other hand seems quite straightforward.

wouldn't we expect diseases to form almost exclusively in places like India or Africa where density is high and medical treatment is poor?

India did give us NDM-1, but from antibiotic overuse.

But then, naively, wouldn't we expect diseases to form almost exclusively in places like India or Africa where density is high and medical treatment is poor? Why haven't we seen more diseases?

Haven't you watched the news in like the last decade or few at all?

Ebola, Zika, Mpox, plain old HIV.

Diseases form all the damn time in Africa.

And HIV too of course. But these viruses have been around since at least the 1970s, realistically much longer. Africa today has a population far greater than when these diseases developed. Why aren't we seeing like 10x the number of new diseases?

And why not India which even today has the same population as Africa and historically was much more populated.

Clearly there is more to disease formation than just raw human population.

I don't think HIV was well-known until well into the 80s, even if it was recorded earlier. There are plausibly a dozen or two documented-but-small-scale diseases today that will blow up in the next decade or two. Mpox wasn't new, but the mutation that was spreading was, AFAIK.

True though that also raises the question how modern air-travel hasn't led to way more random diseases surging around than actually have. You can get from Bumfuck Africa to an international hub in like 24 hours now. I'm pretty sure even in Africa the majority of the population could get to Dubai within 2 days if they really needed to.

Sure wet markets an all that, but now we're chaining together multiple things that have to "go right" to create Covid. The lab leak theory on the other hand seems quite straightforward.

I think this is a statistical fallacy of the same sort as "John Q Public just won the lottery! But the odds of that happening without him cheating were only 1 in a billion. Therefore we know with p<10^-9 that John Q Public must have cheated." This only makes sense if we had some prior reason to focus on John Q Public; but if he was just the person that happened to win the lottery of the millions who played, then this cancels out the p-value, leaving us with no particular reason to believe that he cheated.

Similarly, if we assume natural origin, whatever sequence of events ends up creating a successful virus is going to seem fantastically unlikely, but we also have to consider all the plasmids that didn't go viral (i.e. the losing lottery tickets). We had no prior reason to focus on any particular combination of human/animal interactions; that was just the ticket that happened to win.

(I don't actually know where the idea that pangolins were involved came from. Maybe they weren't. But if the reason for the scarcity of pangolins is because they're all being hunted for sale at the Wuhan wet market, well...)

But then, naively, wouldn't we expect diseases to form almost exclusively in places like India or Africa where density is high and medical treatment is poor? Why haven't we seen more diseases?

Off the top of my head, Africa gave us HIV and Ebola. Can't think of any from India - maybe it's because people in India are vegetarians and so they don't have markets where hundreds of different animal species are all concentrated in close proximity? (I'm really just spitballing here to be honest.) But China has very high population and density as well, with mediocre health and sanitation, so a virus coming from there is no big surprise.

Here's a better analogy.

  1. John Q and the lottery director conspire to create a way for John Q to win the lottery that spells out in exact detail how they will do it.

  2. The lottery directory says, "no, we won't actually do that" but John Q continues researching lottery hacks anyway

  3. John Q wins the lottery

  4. Anyone who questions John Q winning is a conspiracy theorist

But if you know John is a criminal involved in fraud that changes your calculus

The only reason we "know" that WIV was doing gain of function research on-site is that a virus leaked and caused a pandemic. There is weak circumstantial evidence that they were doing gain of function, but officially they were only collecting the virus samples and the dangerous work was happening elsewhere.

If John is known to hang out with fraudsters, this is Bayesian evidence that his lottery win is fraudulent, but it is much weaker evidence than knowing that John is a criminal himself. The lottery operator would need something better than "While not a known criminal, John hangs out with fraudsters, so his lottery win is probably fraudulent" to deny a payout.

That’s just not true. We have the bat lady at WIV along with Barrick talking about doing GoF there. Fauci in his own emails stated they were doing GoF at WIV.

This became a political football because Fauci perjured himself. But even Fauci’s definition was GoF (ie they were doing things to viruses to see what would happen but weren’t sure it would gain function).

No, it's worse than that. The DEFUSE plan from 2018 explicitly proposed gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses modified with human-specific cleavage sites and that this research was to be conducted in part at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The whole plan is spelled out.

This is more than "hanging around with fraudsters". This is "making a specific plan to defraud the lottery".

Can't think of any from India

Cholera originates in India. That the most famous Indian disease is a water-borne bowel disease whereas the most famous Chinese diseases are respiratory may say something about the difference between the two countries.

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