The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.
....The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research. The Energy Department made its judgment with “low confidence,” according to people who have read the classified report.
This is from the Wall Street Journal, though I imagine other news outlets are already scurrying to get more details from their own sources. Without knowing more—and until that "low confidence" changes—I wouldn't put too much stock in this. Still, I suppose it ought to move your priors a little bit.
What is left unsaid here is that the CDC had people on the ground in China working in unison with the Chinese authorities to prevent virus outbreaks, BUT just prior to the Covid-19 outbreak the U.S. removed all of our CDC workers from China. As a consequence the Covid-19 virus was able to take off without a significant protection against it. If the energy department says they know the Covid-19 virus was a 'lab leak' then it seems highly likely they were the source of the leak and had to remove the U.S. people before they released it.
That happened after zombie JFK, jr became uncontrollable in the lab and had to be put down but then the Chinese did 'something' with the body and wouldn't say what, so it all fits.
Your tinfoil hat requires some adjustment, imho.
Those drawdowns of CDC personnel were being made by the Trump administration long before 2019 when the Covid outbreak occurred and focused mostly on people in Beijing, not Wuhan. (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-cdc-exclusiv/exclusive-u-s-slashed-cdc-staff-inside-china-prior-to-coronavirus-outbreak-idUSKBN21C3N5). The issue here was deteriorating relations with China under Trump, not some evacuation because we had released a bioweapon. Sheez.
2. They don't "know" -- what they reported was that, based on the very sketchy and poor intelligence they do have (hence, "low confidence"), it appears to have been a lab leak.
3. "Lab Leak" doesn't imply some intentional release of a contagion -- if it did come from the lab, it was most likely an accident. The Wuhan lab was already under scrutiny for its poor safety protocols.
"If the energy department says they know the Covid-19 virus was a 'lab leak' then it seems highly likely they were the source of the leak and had to remove the U.S. people before they released it."
Gadzooks! It all FITS! After all, the Department of Energy is best known for its immunological research. The "low confidence" assessment is of course the dead giveaway, for obvious reasons readily apparent to anybody versed in numerology and/or up to their eyeballs in the latest pile of qdrops.
The DOE has updated their position to "low confidence" of a "likely lab leak." They still have no evidence. But absence of evidence, amirite?
And apparently it was intentionally placed in orders of General Tso's chicken. In other words, your local Panda Express is a commie plot.
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Does low confidence mean that "curve-ball" is still operating?
If most likely has low confidence, then 'unlikely' probably has none, so are they saying it's a 50% certainty?
Assuming 'most likely' means less than likely. --or does it?
Regarding "low confidence", see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_confidence
That's confidence levels which WSJ, presumably, applies to a likeliness level.
If they had said medium confidence would that be medium likely?
The FBI gives the lableak theory medium confidence, while
Does that all balance out then to 50%?
If I were to guess, low confidence means >50%.
Energy Department has low confidence lab leak, the FBI has medium confidence lab leak.
National Intelligence Council + four others are low confidence animal.
Add in a fog of inherent fuzziness and the Energy Department having more recent data and it's easy to think it's within the margin of error to say the odds of it being one source or the other are 50%.
It's not a 50%-50% tossup. If it were, they would have said it was inconclusive, and that's what the DoE said prior to the recent intelligence report.
The report moved the needle from a 50%-50% tossup to >50% it was an accidental lab leak.
The confidence level doesn't inherently tell us that it's 51% or 91%; all it tells us is that they've moved the needle to >50% that it was an accidental lab leak.
I seriously doubt it.
“Low confidence means that intelligence analysts question the credibility or plausibility of the information, or that they're concerned about the sources.”
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16989979
I have low confidence in my ability to defeat LeBron James in a game of horse.
If a facility rarely uses its BSL4 and does most of its contagious research in BSL2, wouldn't you expect an accidental leak of some sort, eventually?
Or nah?
I did my own research (tm) on this some time ago and realized there is no convincing evidence either way. I read a lot of motivated reasoning, but nothing like proof. The best conclusion, I believed, is: we don’t know.
Haven’t read the new evidence yet, but here’s my view: I have low confidence in anyone who has high confidence that they know the answer.
It's not uncommon that scientists have high confidence that the universe revolves around Earth, only to be found wrong decades or centuries later. Newtonian Physics only works at certain macro levels. The Big Bang is not settled.
Are you going to tell us that all those folks who firmly came to conclusions before new evidence was presented, are idiots?
It was actually philosophers rather than scientists that had high confidence that the universe revolved around the Earth. By the time cosmology became a science, the heliocentric model was well established.
NASA: "An astronomer named Eudoxus created the first model of a geocentric universe around 380 B.C. Eudoxus designed his model of the universe as a series of cosmic spheres containing the stars, the sun, and the moon all built around the Earth at its center." -- https://bityl.co/HMMp
Eudoxus was a philosopher. Science hadn't been invented at that time.
Assuming you're referring to the scientific method, I would accept that understanding, but far be it to suggest that people weren't scientists in the informal sense, prior to a methodology of learning. It would be akin to you telling us that there were no structural engineers until the formal system of physics and structure were established.
Why haven't we graduated from the third grade level of "find the guy to blame".
Thank Glod the medical folks didn't spend most of their time looking for someone to blame. Thank Glod they got busy developing a vaccine.
"Why haven't we graduated from the third grade level of 'find the guy to blame'"
The total cost of the covid pandemic is in the many trillions of dollars (for example, in January 2022, the IMF calculated in excess of $12 trillions in global cost). That's a lot of reasons to not only have "got busy developing a vaccine" but also to devote a little energy to figuring out what happened.
FFS, there are 8 billion of us--we can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Because if we can conclusively prove China did it, we're going to bill them for the $12T, freeze them out of the world economy, and/or invade them to get retributive justice for the deaths they caused?
It doesn't much matter if the information you seek doesn't lead to any further action. But I guess haters need new material to continue hating on China.
jfc. The $12 trillion isn't a tort liability, it's an example of why there are lots and lots of humans very interested in figuring out as much as possible about the pandemic.
"It doesn't much matter if the information you seek doesn't lead to any further action."
Setting aside whether or not it's good to learn about reality for its own sake, your assumption is incorrect. Learning more precisely whence came covid-19 can help us design and implement systems to help reduce the likelihood of a similar catastrophe. For example, we might learn that there's value in having more transparent/internationalized communicable disease research protocols. Or, we might learn that the existing protocols worked just fine, and that more emphasis should be placed on rules for agriculture or animal sales or whatever. Or anything in between.
I totally get that there is a question of how much you can get out of looking into the exact circumstances of a very low-probability/high significance event (perhaps akin to looking into all the details of what a person ate and drank and where they recreated in the hours ahead of when they got struck by lightning), and that a lot of reforms that we'd want to do have support no matter what the exact cause of the pandemic was.
But, to stammer on about how it's pointless or wrong to investigate what is, again, one of the most significant events in human history since world war 2, simply b/c some asshole republicans might use the results in a news cycle is insane.
I'm bemused at the desperation so many people have to KNOW! Why is uncertainty so uncomfortable for them? I'm not talking about the people who have simply latched on to whatever possibility suits their priors and declared confidently that is what happened. Sure there are lots of them, but there are also people not trying to score partisan points frantically saying we MUST FIND OUT!
Why?
In this particular case, I would say that not only do we not know, there is no likelihood that we will ever find out.
It's a great conspiracy theory they will always be able to use to wow the gullible, like Bigfoot and Jesus.
"Why is uncertainty so uncomfortable for them?"
Conversely, why do you find it so objectionable/"bemus[ing]" that people want to know what happened?
The covid 19 pandemic is the biggest thing any of us are likely to have ever lived through or (god willing) ever will live through. The fact that there are some people somewhere investigating--as best as possible--what happened is a *good* thing. Figuring out what went wrong can help ensure it doesn't happen again, or that we're better prepared if it does.
>> Figuring out what went wrong can help ensure it doesn't happen again, or that we're better prepared if it does.<<
Whether or not it came from a lab link should have no effect on being “better prepared” next time. Ensuring it doesn’t happen again first assumes it didn’t come from the wild. So if it was the result of a lab leak how do we show that conclusively without the cooperation of the Chinese Government? How do you get that cooperation?
There is a wide difference in finding out what happened to ensure that it doesnt happen again and finding someone to blame for reasons that have nothing to do with preventing future occurances.
They might sound and appear to be similar, but they are quite different. Best to be aware.....
Its also not always necessary to know what happened in a particular situation to undertsand the risks and develop prevention meaures.
We dont need to know if an elevated blood alcohol content, elevated speed or defective brakes were responsible for a particular crash in order to develop standards and best practices for each....but if we need someone to blame for the accident.....
"We dont need to know if an elevated blood alcohol content, elevated speed or defective brakes were responsible for a particular crash"
Of course not--cars crash all the freaking time, and thus we have a huge body of information about how car crashes work, and how to engineer cars and roadways to reduce car crashes to a socially tolerable level. If it ever happens that a car crashes and it kills millions of people, I guarantee there would and should be in-depth research into how it happened.
Because that’s a great way to learn and improve.
Finding the source of a disease is a crucial component in understanding it. There is a lot more at stake than stupid political parlor games.
You wouldn't want to know what potential risks (to the survival of humankind) could be attenuated?
Let's say it was the wet market from wild animals. If we knew what species it came from, the scientific community could target that species around the world, not just China, for additional variants, then use that knowledge to test against genetically modified mice carrying the ACE2 gene. From there, we could understand its virulence and hone in on better targets for vaccines. China would also be able to ban that species from wet markets.
If on the other hand it came from an accidental lab leak and the lab source can be ascertained, it would make it clear that until protocols were updated and workers re-qualified, that facility should be decertified and work should not be allowed there.
If it turns out that this specific variant came from gain of function research, we'll have to have a discussion about limiting such research around the world to facilities that are open to international inspection and adhere to the highest levels of safety within BSL4.
Sure, that sounds great.
But only if we assume that the investigation is done and the results are used good faith and we assume that the investigators have enough information to draw highly certain conclusions.
In our reality, it appears that those assumptions are not borne out.
Without those assumptions, the investigations are likely useless theater and might do more harm than good.
Do we really need certainty on the cause to draw good conclusions as to the risk at both the lab and the market and design best practices? I dont think we do.
"In our reality, it appears that those assumptions are not borne out.
Without those assumptions, the investigations are likely useless theater and might do more harm than good."
Indeed! We should all just give up trying to learn things, because the results might be politicized!
I have high confidence that the results will be politicized.
Yeah, but declining to research something because you're afraid the results will be politicized is preemptively ceding the field to the biggest crybabies/assholes out there. They ain't waiting for your facts to begin with.
You all but put 'just' before 'because' there, didn't you? Yeah, I saw what you did. Let's check the record:
One guess why I bolded that part ... and why you left that part out. No thank you, I decline to be a part of the quest to flood the zone with shit.
Cause only one species is able to carry viruses that can spread to humans.
Cause the US and other entities are going to be able to order a lab in China to cease all work be done there.
Cause the US and other entities are going to be able to limit gain of function research to facilities open to international inspection and adherence to BSL4.
There's a lot of wishful thinking going on with regards to the complexity of keeping all viruses from jumping from one species to another and outside entities' ability to order China to do anything it doesn't want to do.
If it's low confidence, why call it a conclusion.
I guess Kevin, like the rest of the world, knows how to draw clicks.
Why do Republicans think it's so important to say it was a lab leak? Does it have something to do with Hunter Biden? Or Hillary Clinton?
Republicans want to blame Dr. Fauci. If it was a lab leak that would mean he deliberately went to China, got a vile of it out, and dumped in in strategic places so that big pharma could “invent” a cure and make lots of money.
Either that or it’s a hoax.
Why do Republicans think it's so important to say it was a lab leak?
The same as pretty much the answer to any question involving Republicans: they always do whatever they believe is consistent with their political self-interest. Normally these days that means heading off primary challenges (a bigger concern for most of them than general elections), and that, in turn, requires maximalist anti-China hawkery.
I'm going to ask once again that "prior" be discontinued as a noun. It's an adjective, stick an actual noun in there if you want people to know what you're actually talking about.
We all know what this means because we're not pedants, and we realize language evolves. The use of adjectives as nouns (to the point where the newly minted noun becomes common, standard usage) happens frequently in English.
Using 'prior' and 'posterior' as nouns is quite standard in Bayesian statistics, which is presumably what Kevin is trying to reference here. 'Trying', because if you're doing Bayesian statistics and are updating your assessment of the probability, what you're updating is the posterior probability, not the prior.
And that's a battle that you've already lost. Prior as a noun is absolutely common in statistics and the sciences. I would expect any math or science undergraduate at Junior level or above to be perfectly comfortable with using it as a noun. I would not be surprised to find a lot of sophomores and freshmen who also understand how to use it as a noun.
And I'm going to disagree slightly with glipsnort. You can have "informative" or "non-informative" or "weakly informative" priors, so you can update your priors. Updating the posterior probability based upon actual data is a specific thing, too. But you can also update your priors in a looser fashion based upon data. So Kevin's use of "update your priors" is also pretty common.
The terms "probably" and "low confidence" usually don't go together.
Good call on the abuse of language.
The one and only reason why I acknowledge a ~1% chance that COVID came from a lab leak rather than natural channels is the fact that the Chinese are acting guilty. They have stonewalled every attempt to investigate COVID's origins. That's probably just their knee-jerk response, but it still looks shifty.
When JFK was assassinated, the CIA closed ranks. They were not involved, but some of the upper management thought there could have been a rogue operation--so were running scared.
I'm sure the management at the Wuhan lab were in full CYA mode--not that they were the source of COVID, but because they might have been. And the city's management did not want there to be any outbreak on their watch, so tried to hide it.
With everyone in CYA mode, getting to the truth will be hard. But the DNA evidence points to two "original" strains, both centered around the wet market--not the lab. That doesn't completely rule out a version of a lab leak. And a "lab leak" doesn't have to mean that they made a virus and it escaped--but could just be they brought in animals to examine who carried the virus.
Someone could have picked up COVID, brought it into the lab, and inadvertently spread it to other people inside the lab. That's a 1 on the dial. Turn it up to 10 or 11 and COVID was a bio weapon that leaked out. In either case the government stonewalls.
I did a fair amount of reading on this maybe a year ago and came to the conclusion that it was most likely a lab leak. Same thing with regard to whether wearing masks would help protect against exposure to Covid. When Fauci and others said that masks wouldn’t help, my personal reaction was that was clearly wrong. And it was wrong.
The fact that the outbreak occurred in Wuhan should be taken as either a warning flag or a major coincidence. When Fauci and others said it wasn’t a lab leak, it was clear they were specifically talking about the leak of a weaponized virus, which doesn’t include the lab leak of a virus which was mutated as part of a program to study and be able to counter viral contagion.
Most likely, it was an unintentional leak from the lab in Wuhan which was known to have poor safety protocols. I think eventually we will be able to say that with a near certainty.
Wuhan was (is) the perfect location for a zoonotic spillover event to occur. It has a large, dense population; it's in the south of the country within easy transport distance to areas where there are huge bat populations; it's in a region (or downriver from a region) where bushmeat and exotic animal trade is common; and it is home to multiple large, open air markets (so-called "wet" markets). By my reckoning it's probably one of the five or six most likely cities in China for such an outbreak to occur (along with Guangzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu, Kunming and Changsha). People are acting like the presence of the virology lab is a smoking gun, but it sure doesn't seem that way: cities without such labs are perfectly capable of birthing epidemics, as the example of SARS and MERS show. And again, Wuhan's attributes are well-suited for such an event irrespective of the lab.
And it remains the case that the bulk of the scientific opinion globally is that a lab leak (while it can't be ruled out) is a far less likely source of the covid pandemic than a natural event.
I also put absolutely zero stock in the "paranoia" of CCP officials. In general they're prickly about foreign interference (side note: can you imagine the reaction the US right at the specter of Chinese officials traipsing about the USA doing a scientific investigation?), and there are probably a great many things they'd prefer to keep hidden that have nothing at all do to with covid.
Regardless of the facts, this one headline will drive the wing nuts into a tizzy. Now we’ll never hear the end of it.
(I agree, that from my reading the scientific opinion has been that this is of natural origin.)
Here’s a decent article explaining the case for an accidental lab leak.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/where-did-covid-come-from-the-case-for-a-leak-of-a-virus-engineered-in-a-wuhan-lab-20210526-p57vgt.html
Here’s a decent article explaining the case for an accidental lab leak.
Decent article? LOL. It's an opinion piece by a humanities professor (professor of ethics). Here's a peer-reviewed article by actual scientists, which, like the vast majority of peer-reviewed research pieces, holds that zoonotic spillover likely explains the pandemic:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add8384
The thing about that article is that the whole wet market theory is built on (a) sampling strictly from the wet market and (b) geographic association of the earliest known cases to the wet market.
None of that precludes the possibility that the actual source was from workers at a facility researching SARS who could have been infected one generation of mutations prior to the variant tracked in the wet market samples. Without access to the species and specific reservoir, this scenario cannot be excluded.
If the wet market and wildlife trade is key, then it's curious why "the supply chain for these susceptible animals to the Huanan Market has not been investigated" according to that paper. Why wouldn't Chinese authorities want to chase down those avenues of zoonosis?
Meanwhile, why is it that in late 2019 the Chinese were furiously attempting to figure out how to properly clean a BSL4 facility?
It is human nature to want to want to address the immediate threat in front of you.
Your opinion has been duly noted and given the consideration it deserves.
It’s a tough call… either the Chinese are incompetent for letting it leak or they are creepy for eating cats!
In past disease outbreaks, lab leaks have tended to be pretty obvious, while natural animal to human transmission has been much harder to pinpoint. That has always made a natural cause seem more likely to me.
Unfortunately, China seems so sensitive to outside criticism of wet markets, agricultural practices, and lab safety that any source of outbreak would result in denials and hiding of evidence.
Until I see some new evidence from the DOE, I'm not going to change my assessment of the likely source at all. The scientific evidence to date is strongly in favor of a zoonotic spillover at the market.
TFG got rid of the NSC pandemic response team (didn't fire them all, but definitely disbanded the team and a lot of them got reassigned) and cut the budget for the CDC's overseas personnel by 80%. Those overseas people were involved with training people in other countries to detect infectious disease emergences - kind of like a DEW line for disease. Definitely not a very smart thing to do.
TFG was also instrumental in screwing up the response to COVID-19 as it spread to the US. So I'm not concerned with lab or market origin - TFG unilaterally disarmed.
-minor edit
Pingback: COVID lab-leak followup: Nobody else buys the new DOE intelligence – Kevin Drum
There is only one piece of hard evidence in this investigation: The sequence of the virus. There are only a handful of people knowledgeable enough to interpret this evidence (and they are not in the DOE!). These people concluded early on that the origin of the virus was most likely natural, not lab related. They have stayed with this conclusion.
Any other evidence is circumstantial, suggesting things b ut never proving them. One piece of hard evidence can collapse a whole complex circumstantial case. S long as the expert community does not change their minds I keep listening to them.