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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.
Not just a political backlash - a personal backlash. Peter Daszak was heavily involved in both the cover-up efforts and the initial funding that lead to the GoF research performed in China. If the lab-leak theory became prominent and publicly accepted, those seven million deaths and all the liability can be pinned very squarely on a few people.
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698#ack
Here's the GoF research paper produced at the Wuhan institute of virology, where they had a look at bat coronaviruses and did some gain-of-function research to see if they'd be dangerous in humans. Now even at first glance this paper looks extremely bad for the natural origins crew - it looks like the Wuhan Institute was actually performing GoF research on bat coronaviruses, the exact type of research that could lead to the creation of COVID-19 if an accident happened. But while that's an interesting datapoint, the reason I bring it up is that if you have a look at the funding of this paper you're going to see some of the people who are directly responsible for COVID if the lab-leak theory is true.
So, contra to certain public statements under oath, the NIH actually did fund GoF research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan. You can look up the specific grant in question too, and what do you find? https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_R01AI110964_7529 It went through the Eco-Health alliance run by Peter Daszak, who was also credited in that paper for providing funding.
Remember when they put out a statement in the Lancet talking about how we need to stop talking about conspiracy theories related to the origin of the virus? https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext Great statement... but hang on a second, one of those names in the author list looks familiar - Peter Daszak! The person who was in charge of getting US government money spent on gain of function research on bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan institute of virology was a prominent figure letting everyone know that the idea that the US government funded GoF research on bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan institute of virology could have accidentally produced and leaked the exact kind of modified bat coronavirus they were studying is a baseless conspiracy theory.
I totally agree on that point - this doesn't fall into the category of research fraud. They didn't do a bad, fraudulent study to back up their claims, they just didn't do any study at all. But much like saying that I didn't commit perjury when I said that I was 12 feet tall because I wasn't under oath, making it clear that you didn't commit a specific type of deception doesn't mean that you were being 100% truthful. It wasn't research fraud, but there was absolutely deceptive behaviour taking place, the exact kind of which can't be figured out until the non-published conversations they had when they realised the conversations were being recorded are published.
They went looking for an excuse to avoid the obvious answer that was staring them in the face because that obvious answer meant that they had fucked up in a massive way. If you're one of the people who put your name on this research and made it happen, that means that a lab-leak is potentially your fault... and I think that people are willing to go to an awful lot of lengths to avoid considering themselves responsible for (and appearing responsible for to the public) a number of deaths that's on par with the holocaust. For the record, my view is that all of this cover-up and perfidy surrounding the origins of COVID constitutes the greatest piece of evidence for the lab-leak theory - where's the motivation for lying under oath and dragging the name and reputation of science as a field through the mud if natural origins was actually correct?
Few options here:
(semi-idealistic) If you are overconfident in your abilities and not especially aware of the burning-the-commons risk, you might think that ending the debate quicker on the right side is good even if that means you have to lie. This is related to the reasons behind police perjury.
(cynical) Even if natural origins is correct, that doesn't mean Daszak/others automatically know it's correct. Their incentives are only somewhat attenuated if they think there's e.g. a 20% chance lab-leak is correct.
(maximally uncharitable) It's not immediately obvious that doing this hurt the Blue Tribe overall; certainly it helped complete the purge of Wikipedia, which is a big deal and hard to undo, and certainly the MSM is pretty decent at memory-holing things like this. Also, it's not exactly like the people most pissed about this - the Red and Grey Tribes - have many levers to punish Daszak/others for this.
I don't actually believe #3 played a significant role; it's hard to reconcile that kind of analysis with actually believing the Blue Tribe narrative.
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