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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.
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.
Because an unintentional leak is entirely different then an attack and in most of the lab leak theories America is also heavily implicated so both America and China decided to cover it up. Also what "atrocities" get ginned up is often just left up to political expediency. Indonesia carried out a genocide of Chinese in recent memory yet since the Chinese government doesn't make a big deal about it it's fallen by the wayside.
Also you keep using the word bioweapon and attack which yes if China attacked America with a bioweapon there might be a war, but if China let a US funded research virus escape from a lab through sloppy protocol that's an entirely different thing.
I love how we're all responding to the worst comment of all time. It's almost like "it's bad on purpose to make you click".
While it's somewhat gratifying to have strawmen for opponents, I should prefer instead to get high quality pushback that punches real holes in my arguments. Reminder to myself to only respond to comments I would upvote.
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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.
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Choosing at random one of the many issues to respond to:
... as does zoonosis. So, as you ask: where's the war? It seems like you have a missing mood.
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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.
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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?
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?
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.
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Go through the archives here and on /r/themotte and you can find precisely that.
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I also think it's notable that "lab leak" covers intentional release in China by anyone.
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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.
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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.
And even that coverup was the Wuhan local government who were all dismissed from their posts and disciplined. China fired the Wuhan leaders and placed the city and province under the direct control of the health ministry for a while.
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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.
Where do I go to cash in these "principled free thinker" points or claim my elevated status in said status games? Because all I got in real life was accusations of being a conspiracy theorist. And I'm sure if I brought it up now, I'd be greeted with classic Hillary-style "What difference, at this point, does it make?" responses, just like people are doing in this thread.
Because it seems like all I got for being a principled free thinker was having to quit my job and move states to avoid a vaccine mandate. Somewhere the elevated status and MAGA babes got lost, and Peter Thiel won't send me a check or return my calls (granted, I'm probably too old and hairy for him).
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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."
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.
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.
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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:
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.
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.
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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.
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Welcome to the real world, Neo.
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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.
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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/
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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