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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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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).
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