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Nothing in this article is going to come as news to anyone who's been active in centrist and center-right-leaning media spaces for the last two years but the origin of it might.
What really went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted
Long story short the UK Sunday Times, the Newspaper to which the New York Times' name is an hommage, and as I gather from other british media the de facto voice of the establishment in the UK has endorsed the Lab Leak theory and I'm kind of surprised that no one's seems to be talking about.
The article doesn't mention Fauci by name but his ties to EcoHealth Alliance have been well documented elsewhere, and the article does acknowledge the existence of US health officials desire to bypass US safety and reporting regulations. The article also notes that while release was likely accidental, the Chinese military and intelligence services had expressed interest in using it as a weapon and had begun working on developing an inoculation for the virus over a month before it first appeared in "the wild".
I personally don't have a whole lot to add to the article itself, but I do find myself wondering what now? I expect the US media to try and bury this. After all Fauci is their golden boy, the poster-child "trust the experts". At the same time, he his, along with the behavior of many within the media itself (looking at you Yglesias) the reason that experts are not to be trusted.
If a singular person (small group of people) is revealed to have been responsible for all the death, of all the suffering, of all the economic disruption and all the curtailment of simple human livelihood that resulted from Covid 19 and the associated panic, what crime can you charge them with? Assuming you could find a court even able to try it, what punishment can even approach being proportional?
I read that article and I'm not clear on what they're claiming is the new information. The Wuhan lab for studying coronaviruses was studying coronaviruses isn't news; of course they were working with SARS-CoV-1-like viruses and how to make vaccines for them, that's their job. Nor is the fact that China actively covered up any research into the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
The article makes no attempt to engage with the evidence for the market hypothesis (link is to a podcast discussing the papers, but there's also links to the papers): (1) the market is epicenter of the early cases and (2) there were two separate introductions to the market weeks apart of two separate lineages of SARS-CoV-2. It's certainly possible that SARS-CoV-2 was twice introduced to the market and nowhere else via two separate lab leaks that coincidentally happened near the specific stalls where the animals hypothesized to be most likely the source of a spillover were sold (maybe someone at the lab sold an infected animal to someone who then sold it at the market? Maybe the market is just the busiest place the accidentally infected people from the lab went, and they quickly realized they should isolate so the market spread swamped any other spread, and the position within the market was coincidence?), but that requires more evidence than "look over there: scary virus lab with military funding".
And, as I've mentioned before on this topic, China desperately wants the cause of the pandemic to be anything but a market spillover because the market hypothesis puts the blame squarely on China for stopping enforcement of the post-SARS measures they had in place to prevent exactly that from happening.
anything?
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Doesn't this make the argument that the outbreak started with a spillover from animals at the market much less likely rather than more? That there was a distribution of covid within wild animals that split into two lineages before being transferred to humans? Fine enough. That both those lineages happened to transfer over to humans at the same place a few weeks apart, instead of literally anywhere else in the country? That seems spectacularly improbable. A far simpler hypothesis for why this could happen is that both lineages were circling in humans prior to the market and that the market being the epicentre is what caused the detection of the second at the market too. It also makes the lab leak hypothesis more likely, as a lab leak being repeated due to the same undetected problem with safety causing two distinct leaks is more probable than two outbreaks starting in close proximity by sheer random chance.
The reasoning for that supporting the market hypothesis is that it suggests the virus was spreading among animals within a farm that sold its animals to the market. It's exactly what you'd expect a zoonotic spillover event to look like. But it could also be explained by other theories, for instance the lab repeatedly selling infected animals to the market.
That's not supported by the data. In order for this to be true, either (1) the data has been manipulated to omit cases not linked to the market, (2) all of those humans were closely linked to the market, or (3) all of those humans were very careful (or coincidentally happened to) not spread the virus except at the market.
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This shows spread occurred at the market; it does not show the disease originated there. If you look at the early cases it looks rather like a population map, which is not surprising.
Even if true, this is not evidence which distinguishes a lab leak from a market event. I see no reason to believe that "two lab leaks" is less likely than "two separate natural zoonotic events at the market".
This is ridiculous. A leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology puts even greater blame squarely on China. There is no way they prefer a lab leak hypothesis (at least not a leak from a Chinese lab; they already tried to blame the US Army) to a market hypothesis.
If I’m understanding @token_progressive’s point correctly, shouldn’t we expect “two separate lab leaks that spread directly to the same market” to be less likely than “two separate natural zoonotic events at the market”.
The latter only encodes information regarding origin, while former encodes information regarding origin and spread.
As we add more stipulations, the probability must fall, no?
I don't see why. We don't know any of the probabilities involved. Most particularly we do not know that the "probability of two separate natural zoonotic events" is less than or equal to the "probability of two lab-created zoonotic events".
Then I recommend following up on the sources I linked. I am not a scientist with expertise in this area; I am just doing my best to link to them and summarize their arguments.
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Like I said, it's not new. What's new is that the voice of the UK Government Establishment is endorsing what 12 months ago the vast majority of users here would have dismissed as an absurd conspiracy theory. And that their various shills are trying to play it off as NBD.
Who's "engaging in misinformation" now.
Are you serious? Source that.
Example.
Grandparent : blames gof research, 20 upvotes. Parent : calls the mainstream belief 'bat psyop', 11 upvotes. Child : thinks genomics shows it's 80% not gof, 3 upvotes.
Lol with all the reddit talk here recently I forgot we moved off site and assumed he was talking about redditors - maybe he was doing the same?
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Hlynka needs to feel he's somehow different from the rest of us.
That said, there were several high-profile users pushing the mainstream line.
It’s bizarre how he manages to conflate one of the most reflexively contrarian groups with the mainstream they constantly bitch about.
Does the mainstream think we’re mainstream? We were forced to flee our home more than once because the mainstream started encroaching. Neither them nor us think we're mainstream. What does it mean if enemies agree on a particular point? The argument's also valid for his usual claim that we're all progressives or something.
At least give us an example, the mythical group that is appropriately skeptical of the mainstream.
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Would you even disagree with that?
Of course. The most flak he gets is for pretending his unremarkable, motte-popular opinions make him the lone, brave prole telling us over-educated sheep what’s what. Case in point : Airing some standard anti-mainstream talking point we all love while assigning the opinion of a guy called "token_progressive" to the sub as a whole.
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Yeah. He has a few differences of opinion (as do I, BTW), but I think he fits right in. His antagonism towards educated city-dwelling alt-right left-wing progressives seems a bit forced.
'Fit in' isn't the same as 'different from,' which seems a bit of a motte and bailey. Who, specifically, is like Hylenka in nature and style, including his defining experiences that he regularly admits to, his personality and style, and his willingness to be direct to the point of offense?
Hlynka's never claimed to be a unique opinion, to my knowledge.
Everybody's different in nature and style from everybody else here. When I originally said "different from", I meant a fundamental worldview difference (by which I don't even mean a difference of opinion, but a huge difference in how he looks at, and understands the world). At least I thought that's what he's getting at with his inferential distance series, but every time he posts one of those I'm left scratching my head as to where is the distance suppose to be.
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I see. And that along with the US Dept. of Energy's "low confidence" assessment of it being a lab leak does suggest there's some classified information that hints in the direction of a lab leak that can't be made public.
I'm pretty conformable pinning that one the newspaper publishing a detailed article doing lots of hinting at facts they can't support that contradict published research they ignore. Maybe they know something they can't share, but they haven't provided much reason to believe them in that article.
I think that you are acting very naive, if not outright stupid.
I'm just asking you to actually make an argument. I can think of plenty of (not mutually exclusive) steelmans for the lab leak theory:
Strong priors for lab leak, so evidence for market hypothesis not updating you very far in that direction. I'm guessing this is the one you mean by calling me "outright stupid"?
The scientists saying the evidence points towards the market hypothesis are intentionally misrepresenting the data, presumably because the concept of lab leaks make scientists as a whole look bad, although maybe also the specific scientists are under pressure from various governments or institutions to help cover up a lab leak.
The scientists saying the evidence points towards the market hypothesis are being misled and credulous. e.g., China's cover-up included releasing data that points in that direction and omitting the data that doesn't.
Some form of "both": i.e., lab leak via the market, either by animals or humans infected at the lab spreading via the market, so the market spread science is all true, but not indicative of spread from a wild animal.
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More light, less heat, please.
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What is the anti-molecular biology wing of the Motte? Genuinely confused here.
At least the proximal origins paper seems to finally be falling out of favour, about 3 years and 3 months after Fauci appeared to have laundered it through proxies.
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