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Since my 'don't trust Science' threads were already toeing the line between 'Pepe Silvia!' and schizophrenic (fair!) (I didn't even touch the four-part follow-up), Nate Silver summarizes better than I can :
((Silver's links carry the touchstones of conspiracy paranoia, like an emphasis on coverups and literally-by-the-minute analysis of claimed coordinated action, which would normally discourage me from pointing to them, except they also happen to be reasonable factual descriptions.))
To be clear, this isn't a case of some barely-related scientists from nearby offices in slightly-related fields being somewhat more open-minded. These documents demonstrate each and every single author of the paper held some of the exact same concerns about the proposed wet market origin as piles of shitposters and too-online dogs, often pointing to the exact same evidence... privately. In public, they named opponents giving these possibilities conspiracy theorists for naming options they were accepting privately, or drawing out a web that actually existed. Jeremy Farrar would send e-mails giving 50:50 odds on natural (and non-natural, mostly serial passage) origins at the same day he was shopping around early drafts of the paper; while he isn't on the author list, that's its own mess. To be fair, they do change positions in private, as information comes around and as debate occurred. But they remain far from as convinced as they pretended in public, not just during publication but months later, and it's exceptionally clear that the political and pragmatic ramifications drive that.
Nor was this filled with caveats and used or intended to be used solely as a small opinion piece. It contains a few limited cautions about available data's ability to discriminate from evolution at the wet market from cryptic adaptation among humans, but serial passage was actively dismissed by an incoherent mush that steps from animal models to purely in vitro considerations. The paper's authors and 'unrelated' academics (who had been heavily involved in discussions with the paper's authors behind closed doors) cited this not-a-paper at length to justify treating anyone even considering the possibility of just serial passage or an accidental lab leak to be a conspiracy theory that must be shut down, all the way from casual shitposters to federal politicians, including those who advocated specifically serial passage or a purely transport-focused accident. These private messages make clear that wasn't some unintentional side effect, but a if not the specific goal.
Nor was this limited to the broadest strokes: at best, these otherwise closely-knit scientists did mention important information not widely available to random shitposters to each other, such as the rarity of live pangolin trafficking, or the animal makeup of the wet market's official shipments, or a variety of information about possible serial passage techniques, all of which were carefully excluded from the final paper. Some writers received confidential notice of discovery of RmYNO2, and after finding that it wasn't itself more helpful to their point than other already-known genomes, decided to instead obliquely reference it as possible to make a 'prediction', because the Texas Sharpshooter's approach would have been too on the nose.
And that's the stuff that came through FOIA-able emails or broad and leakable Slack channels. The messages show many people involved transitioning to private e-mails, to phone calls, to unrecorded Zoom meetings, often dropping to very clipped wording during that transition: they knew this could eventually be public, and they knew other conversations would not.
None of this amounts, as many COVID skeptics are calling it, to research fraud; I'm not even sure it fits most definitions of academic misconduct. But that's mostly because the publication didn't have enough numbers or analysis to need to actively lie: this paper has no pixels to check for signs of photoshopping, nor specific population numbers to hit with GRIM. Silver has joined calls to retract the paper, but Nature's staff have already said that "Neither previous out-of-context remarks by the authors nor disagreements with the authors’ stated views, are, on their own, grounds for retraction." It ain't happening.
Silver proposes that the scientists were motivated by some combination of :
These aren't exactly the most charitable framings for each possibility, if perhaps more charitable than focusing on Anderson's certainty this paper got him tenure. But with a more forgiving description, I get something along the lines of :
Perhaps @Chrisprattalpharaptor can do better. But even if these somewhat earnest reasons that business or political tribe might have controlled what these scientists were willing to say publicly, or if there was some more noble cause that they held above providing an accurate model of the world, it's still something other than providing an accurate model of the world. Which is what, supposedly, was their job.
Worse, few of these matters stop here. Trivially, a lot of academics and casual observers are saying that even if the Nature op-ed authors were playing fast-and-loose with the facts at the time, we since have a ton of evidence in favor the wet market/natural origin side and very little recently published in favor of serial passage or any intentional manipulation, and normally drawing big charts claiming almost all the experts in a field were conspiracy to hide The Truth would be the sorta thing you do shortly before the nice men give you a coat with extra-long sleeves and take you to get some anti-psychotics. Except all of the above.
The guys who authored the paper testified before a maximally hostile Congress last week. I was ready for them to get torn apart and surprisingly it left me less convinced of the criticisms against them.
The pangolin thing, as covered by the Public Substack and other places I've seen it repeated, seems to be misframed. The scientists never claimed that it was the actual origin of Covid; they explicitly says it's a different virus, just similar in structure. The argument is that no one (including any of the lab leak proponents, to my knowledge) seems to think the pangolin coronavirus variant, 600 miles away from the Wuhan lab, was also man-made, which raises the odds that a virus very similar to Covid-19 could arise naturally.
The distance in time between the scientists saying they weren't certain about how something like the Receptor Binding Domain in Covid-19 could manifest in nature, and them changing their minds and publicly supporting a natural origin theory, wasn't an abrupt turn around of a few days, as alleged, but rather forty five days. During that timeframe the pangolin samples with similar RBDs were discovered, raising odds that this kind of thing could be naturally evolved. In contrast, the site being studied in the EcoHealth proposal was genuinely different than that in Covid-19.
Beyond that, the main thrust of their argument is that the first samples were found in the Hanan market and the first cases in the area surrounding the market, not in the areas surrounding the Wuhan Virology Center. As far as I know nobody has contradicted this, though I don't really follow it and could be wrong.
I think the concerns about how the process was politicized, especially by bueaucrats worried about conflict with China, are still valid - welcome to government though. Claims of a vast Orwellian conspiracy on part of our neoliberal overlords I think are a little unconvincing given that our government has also argued that it probably was a lab leak. In fact, right now six agencies have weighed in and none agree - the DOE and FBI think a lab leak was most plausible, four other agencies plus the NSC suspect natural origins. Almost all of them have framed their results with "low confidence," but you can pick whichever result you like and still say the government agrees with you.
I personally consider the lab leak somewhere between possible and likely, but don't really care where Covid came from. Even if it was caused by research conducted by China and America, the two most powerful countries on earth are obviously not going to pay any kind of penalty.
The "Proximal Origin" official release was March 17th, but the preprint was publicly released February 17th and was heavily used at that time, including by a Lancet Feb 19th paper (see popsci coverage here) and by individual relevant experts. So it's a pretty fast turn-around, and before some of the stuff they've since cited as cause was known for internal discussions.
I think this would be reasonable if the takeaway from "Proximal Origin", either the February or March versions, was merely to say that in-pangolin or in-human or in-some-unknown-species evolution of the necessary genome was possible, and that was it. It's even somewhat fair to use Occam's Razor and say that, if both the natural origin and a lab leak were both possible, favor the natural origin one simply out of priors. But that's not really how the paper was written, nor was read. Even the February version starts with the claim that "this analysis provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated virus." Meanwhile, Andersen specifically worried about serial passage in private into April!
For the most part, the more conspiracy-minded people tend to focus on some chain of custody and data reliability issues for RmYN02 et all, but I think the more immediate problem's that the 600-miles criticism goes the other direction.
Raising the odds a highly similar virus could have evolved nearer Wuhan or from an animal species that was being brought to the wet market, assuming another species with similar environmental conditions to provides the same RCBs were available, still has to face the counterfactual of some guy from the building devoted to collecting viruses from 600+ miles away picked up samples and did some testing with it without sufficient caution. Sure, that's the sorta thing that rests so heavily on priors that I'd not be certain much one way or the other. But I'm not the guy who called any possibility a conspiracy theory that shouldn't even be entertained.
Even that on its own would just be a systems-level problem, except it's not just that Andersen et all were incorrectly calibrated. After all, I was incorrectly calibrated, even if I didn't go on national television about it. The problem's that these texts make incredibly clear that he and the other researchers weren't so clearly certain in private; they just clearly went into the publication wanting to have a specific answer, and doing so for pretty overtly pragmatic reasons.
Here's the timeline as I understand it:
On February 1 the scientists email Fauci saying they're uncertain if the RBD could be emerge naturally from evolution. Then, supposedly, he calls a conference where pressure is applied to them to change their results.
Both scientists testified under oath that this characterization of the conference is a misrepresentation - neither Fauci nor Dr. Collins organized or requested the conference, neither really spoke, and no pressure was applied to change results or push for any outcome. Maybe they lied under oath, but it seems like a silly thing to risk prison for.
On February 17 the preprint comes out with a less definitive thesis, not arguing they've disproven the lab leak but that "this analysis provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated virus." - which it does.
On February 19 the latest data on coronavirus in pangolins gets released, demonstrating that this particular human binding characteristic can emerge naturally. This removes the uncertainty they mentioned on the 1st. They incorporate it into their research.
On March 17 the final version is released and comes out with a stronger position: "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," because the main lab leak argument seems pretty disproven.
In between the time they were uncertain and the time they have claimed a strong final analysis, over a month and a half have passed and new, directly applicable research has emerged. I do assume that politicization is baked into this stuff, and this study is certainly no exception, but there's nothing highly suspicious about getting new evidence and updating your position.
Also, as Nate Silver grudgingly points out, even in their final report they do not write off the possibility of the lab leak, only say that present evidence offers it no support: “More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another”.
The scenario here would be that Covid came from a scientist driving out 600 miles (or maybe up to 3000 miles, because these are imports from Malaysia) to find pangolins to test, took them back another 600-3000 miles, studied their RBD, and tried to make something similar? All I can say is it's not an argument I've heard anyone make before. Either way this scenario would still remove the skeptics' main argument that we should assume Covid is man-made because its RBD can't happen in nature; clearly it can.
Edit - removed post because of a misinterpretation. Rewording and posting elsewhere.
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