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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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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. But the lab leak at least has the proof of tens of thousands of animals in cages living for decade+ a few miles down the road being provably infected by coronavirus infections and experimnented on. Nothing even close to such a proof exists for zoonotic origin, there is no animal reservoir, no causal link, no breeder farm identified. There is nothing.
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 provably produced 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. In fact they provably slaughtered and removed all animals on the market, bleached the whole area and never presented any animal sample from lab to the public, scrubbed the WIV database and more. How is that an allegation? You yourself agree by saying that:
So yes, Red Chinese authorities are purposefully obtuse and dishonest. You say that nobody coming forth from the lab is implausible, which makes you discount Lab Leak angle as unlikely conspiracy - so again absence of evidence is evidence of absence. But I can do the same for zoonotic origin: out of the whole conspiracy chain of wildlife smugglers, breeders, market employees and customers - not one person was overcome by conscience to say that they in fact had smuggled a bat from Laos together in cage with a racoon dog which created the pandemic? In fact this chain was broken by Chinese Authorities who could have tested animals, focused on specific stall and investigate the whole supply chain, but this time they scrubbed all the evidence. This is not what happened in the past outbreaks where zoonotic origin was proven to an animal held in a specific hotel room in Hong Kong in SARS outbreak in 2002-3 or camel virus reservoir for MERS 2012. Additionally, unlike Lab personnel who are all vetted and gagged by contracts and career or criminal charges, the zoonotic origin this is an operation of ordinary people and we do not have a single peep about this massive smuggling/breeding operation delivering dangerous infected animals for 1000 miles over to Wuhan. Not even somebody talking to his sister who talked to her boyfriend to leak it? Why is that absence of evidence not a kill shot against zoonotic origin?
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