ProPublica and Vanity Fair published a blockbuster story yesterday suggesting that COVID-19 originated with a lab leak in Wuhan, not from natural causes. I've read it, and I feel like I must be missing something.
The story is 10,000 words long, but almost all of that is a rehash of past arguments. The only thing new is a review of some documents by Toy Reid, an expert in Chinese bureaucratese who spent nine months working with the Republican staff in the Senate on a report about the origins of COVID. Reid says that if you interpret the pishi correctly, it turns out there was some kind of big emergency at the Wuhan lab toward the end of 2019—and the ProPublica/Vanity Fair team says it confirmed this with other China experts.
And that's about that. It's a new wrinkle, but there's not very much there. It's a bit of a Jenga tower of supposition based on marginalia, and even if it's all true there's no evidence the emergency had anything to do with a leak, or with COVID, or with bats, or with anything else specific. At the end, we're left at about the same place we started.
(UPDATE: Apparently even "Jenga tower of supposition" was too charitable. It appears that several of the passages in the article were just flatly mistranslated. See here and here. After accounting for this, there's really nothing left—and honestly, how likely was it that a public news release would confess to releasing dangerous pathogens in the first place?)
The strongest reason to believe the lab leak theory has always been simple and entirely speculative: It's a hell of a coincidence that COVID-19 originated precisely at the site of a major biolab facility that was widely known to be a little loosely managed. Aside from that, there's long been knowledge of a sick researcher, Chinese unwillingness to cooperate in an investigation, and a few other things that are suspicious if you have a suspicious mind.
Conversely, the case for a normal zoonotic origin of COVID has always been based on solid evidence that's only gotten stronger as more research is done. It remains the overwhelming consensus of virology experts who have looked into it.
There's not much more to say about this. Virologists are virtually unanimous in thinking that COVID-19 originated naturally. Non-virologists span the gamut, including a subset of conservatives who are seemingly desperate to find evidence of Chinese deceit lurking behind the scenes. There's a chance they're right, but their evidence remains thin, cherry picked, and always vaguely conspiratorial. Draw your own conclusions.
The chances that COVID was deliberately bioengineered in that lab are exactly zero.
The chances that COVID arose naturally, was being studied in that lab, and accidentally leaked, are very low but not zero.
There was an analysis of the outbreak in the city a while ago. It looks like two strains emerged initially, and both associated with the wet market, not the lab.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/07/covid-hot-spots-shift-studies-add-evidence-wuhan-market-origin
These are the the primary studies that are reffered from the link you gave:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
Both free access.
I don't see in eithe rof these any sign that they consider the possibility that the data they use is biased by the Chinese goverment (look for the "Limitation" section).
That is not serious science, and it is disappointing that "Science" agreed to publish this kind of thing.
There is always that problem. When Science publishes a picture from the Webb telescope, it relies on the researchers' integrity that the picture was actually taken, that it was enhanced not doctored, that it represents whatever the hell the researchers claim and so on. It's like the Moon landing. Not everyone believes it happened. After all, the US government isn't particularly trustworthy and the astronauts themselves were interested parties.
I have my own doubts about the Chinese government, but the reported cases are consistent with the genetic data. The Chinese government could have easily chosen to simply deny that there had been any cases rather than those implicating the wet market. It would have been hard to hide a lab accident that led to the wider epidemic. There would have been an early case cluster, most likely informally reported but likely leading to a few deaths, before anyone realized what was happening and before the authorities realized that it needed to be covered up.
Nothing of what you say justify publishing scientific papers completely ignoring a major factor that can quite eplausibly affect the results. They had to mention it and discuss its plausibility and its possible impacts on the results, or not publish.
You're ignoring that your major factor is entirely the result of you being a dishonorable liar.
How so? To the first point
At this point we know they were doing gain of function research on COVID-like viruses. Maybe that’s not what you meant by deliberately bioengineered, since they obviously weren’t planning to leak it. But if we suppose that it made it out of the lab somehow, I don’t know how we can rule out an engineered strain
If I had to put my money on one or the other, I’d probably bet it came from the lab. As for whether it was bioengineered? Not sure
One thing to consider is that the viral research lab was located in Wuhan for a reason. It was a good place to find bats and other viral carriers. The area is full of limestone caves and bats love limestone caves. It's a smaller city by Chinese standards, so the countryside is more accessible than from cities closer to the coast.
There's no need to assume gain of function research. The natural world is full of viruses exploring their functional envelopes, and the early COVID strains look just like lots of other strains out there in the wild. Gain of function experiments usually involve entire segments, the idea being that one wants to make a change that one can understand. Just randomly banging on a few codons isn't going to tell a human researcher much.
Yeah, it's bizarre to me that people (including kevin) talk about the "coincidence" COVID-19 originated in the same area as a lab without noting that the lab is located in that areas BECAUSE of the prevalence of just such viruses. It's like saying "it's quite a coincidence that people keep drowning right where all the lifeguards are" without mentioning the ocean.
The research was not gain of function, and the viruses they were working with were about as close to the SARS2 virus as an elephant is to a mouse. (It was not gain of function research because they were researching the ability of coronaviruses to bind to a specific receptor and enter cells and the virus they were manipulating already had this ability. You can't gain what you already have). You are simply ignoring the fact that the viruses they were working with just weren't genetically close to the one that causes covid19. "I don’t know how we can rule out an engineered strain". There is universal consensus that the science precovid would have predicted this virus wouldn't be infectious and that there would be no reason to create a virus that looked like this.
I’m not sure what the difference is. Why does it matter?
If the Chinese knew right away and kept it secret, it’s a bad look. Could’ve gotten the vaccine out quicker maybe if they had been honest, or at least started making tons of masks and ventilators. If they knew it was a lab leak right away, they probably would’ve had tons of info about it
Makes their lack of transparency even worse in my mind
What can we do to change any of that? How can that help us going forward?
And I seriously doubt knowing how it was released into the world would have gotten the vaccine out quicker.
If it were absolutely proven tomorrow that it came from a lab leak, what do you think we should do?
So if the CCP knew in November that a dangerous virus leaked out of a lab, and given that, still hid the severity of their outbreak and let their citizens leave the country and start a global pandemic, that doesn’t annoy you at all?
And let’s do the math. We took 10 months to make the vaccine, Feb-Dec. If the Chinese told us right away and we started Nov 2019, we’d have had one by Sept 2020. And maybe we block international travel and it takes a couple extra months to get here
Big difference there. Maybe we tamp it down before Delta arrives? Maybe it’s even another SARS without a big presence outside East Asia?
As for what we should do if we found out for sure, I don’t know. To me, knowing the truth of COVID is almost a separate question from how we handle the Chinese. More of a realpolitik guy, but I really don’t trust them as far as I can throw them. I think it would prove correct the sentiment of a lot of China hawks, that they really can’t be trusted, but I can’t say which concrete actions we should take in response
The fact that there’s nothing we can do about it is my main point. How it occurred is something that I think should be investigated by scientists who know what they are doing in hopes of mitigating any possibility of reoccurrence if possible. But it seems to me that the reason this is a “story” is an attempt to assess blame. There are many who will never believe this wasn’t minimally something due to carelessness by the Chinese with many believing it was an act of deliberation. And the Chinese will never admit wrong doing and there is nothing we can do about it.
Even if they agreed it came from their labs what could be done? Make them pay reparations? Does that sound plausible? Make them be more careful? If what happened doesn’t do that nothing will.
I haven’t trusted the Chinese government since Melamine, and I’ve been pretty upset with them buying American corporations like Smithfield. I certainly don’t trust them with products relating to information technology.
But this country is currently in a very weird space. When my dog was sickened because Chinese companies put melamine in wheat gluten it didn’t cross my mind that I should punch some random Asian looking person on the street. But that’s where this country is right now. I’m sure you’ve seen Bannon’s threats against Fauci and his family.
Right now the consensus seems to be that it started like all other viruses started. The “coincidence” of the location doesn’t seem much more to me than there being a earthquake research station in an area where lots of earthquakes occurred and then blaming the next earthquake on the researchers. What if the scientific community has the same amount of consensus that Covid crossed over from animals with no relation to the Wuhan research facility as they do with global warming? Would Trumpians accept that? Are there not scientists who say global warming is a hoax?
I’d like the Chinese government to be more transparent and for our government to not be filled with conspiracy theory lunatics. I don’t think either of those things are going to happen any time soon.
The US used to have scientists based in China doing disease surveillance work--basically looking for new flu strains. Indeed, the US had/has maintained outposts all over the world.
The Trump administration cut funding:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-cdc-exclusiv/exclusive-u-s-slashed-cdc-staff-inside-china-prior-to-coronavirus-outbreak-idUSKBN21C3N5
There was a chance we could have picked this up, even if Chinese authorities were stalling.
I have appreciated your comments on this subject. I regret there is no like button to so indicate. I consider you an educated voice of reason.
The world is not static. We do things in the future, not just the past.
If we have evidence that China is even less to be trusted with dangerous toys than eg the US or Russia, then we should be working a lot harder to prevent them from access to dangerous toys, rather than collaborating with them.
Should we be shutting down all collaboration with China on transmissible diseases? On nuclear power? On AI? On geo-engineering and weather?
Perhaps so?
I'm not much interest in blame and anger; but I am interested in running the world better.
“ Should we be shutting down all collaboration with China on transmissible diseases? On nuclear power? On AI? On geo-engineering and weather?””
Doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. Do you think they will stop working in those fields if we don’t collaborate with them?
"If we have evidence that China is even less to be trusted with dangerous toys than eg the US or Russia, then we should be working a lot harder to prevent them from access to dangerous toys..."
OK. How exactly are we going to do this? At this point, the toothpaste is already out of the tube. Even if we knew 100% for a fact that China created covid, there is no plausible way to prevent Chinese "access to dangerous toys" anymore, now that they are relatively rich and technologically advanced. Like even if we tried to wall them off from our universities and technology and whatnot, North Korea style... China has its own capabilities to create its own weapons and stuff.
The science is telling us that the virus jumped from animals to humans in very late october or early december. Given that the chinese alerted the world on january 1st, that is about as fast as could possibly have occurred. Compare that to when the swine flu arose in 2009 in the US. We are still waiting for the US to alert us. Instead, Mexico announced its arrival after their first death. At that time there had been multiple deaths in the US and it was fairly wide spread in the US. Or when spanish influeza arose in kansas. The US knowingly transported sick US soldiers to Europe without alerting even their closest allies.
If a lab leak, it may have been from a worker infected outside the lab and then infects others inside the lab. If that's a 1 on your amp dial then a 10 or 11 is an accidental release from a bio-weapon. In either case the Chinese government stonewalls any inquiry.
Whatever the source, it’s worked out great for the Chinese cult of Xi Jingping. He’s used the pandemic to oppress his citizens and secure control over the whole country while wreaking havoc among his enemies in the west. He might not have organized this catastrophe, but he’s taken full advantage. I’d say this version of biological warfare has been a big win for him.
I've heard there's an article on a pre-print server stating that their analysis points to man-made insertions into the viral genome.
The critics have pointed out that it's just a poor analysis--a general lack of understanding of statistics, viral recombination events, and hoe modifications are done in the lab.
Don't know if this went into the decision to publish the ProPublica article--but it sounds like a researcher may have caught Covid in the city--which was picked up by the labs safety measures. That would trigger an "emergency" because the lab would initially assume there was a leak. That confusion may have delayed announcement of the outbreak--but bureaucrats covering their asses doesn't mean the lab was the source of the outbreak.
Like +5. CYA is strong in humans. Probably animals, too.
The pre-print article golack mentions is by a mathematical biologist named Alex Washburne. You could read about his outsider take here: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2022/10/22/a-new-paper-claims-sars-cov-2-bears-signs-of-genetic-engineering
Here's a non-paywall write up that goes into the problems that pre-print has.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/10/26/23425272/covid-origins-lab-leak-sars-cov-2-washburne-wuhan-virology
Here's a key quote:
"Obviously, it’s frustrating to be a scientist when a flawed preprint is released and circulates widely, including a skeptical but serious treatment in the Economist, while the details of why it’s unconvincing are hard to explain. It’s understandably exasperating to scientists that it takes far more effort to refute work than to put it out there in the first place, and it’s shocking how far a piece can travel by the time researchers look into it more closely. "
Also, "sunlight really is the best disinfectant." Good reading.
That's a very good point.
There are no known early cases of the disease in people working at the lab. The one claim of a sick lab worker in early november was from a hong kong based publication that hates the CCP and all it said was someone in early novemeber was sick with symptoms common to all of the cold/flu/covid. Note there are 300 people who work at WIV including several austrailians and europeans. It seems the likelihood that one of them would come down with the cold in early fall would be close to 100%.
Call me partisan (I certainly do), but "working with the Republican staff in the Senate " automatically puts me on guard. Just watch: next year, the "Republican staff" will produce (heh! literally) evidence that Hillary Clinton's emails on Hunter Biden's laptop caused the Chinese gene-splicing machines to turn out COVID alpha and are still churning out variations each month.
And it will be worse if they take either house of Congress .. or both.
The "business community" is desperate for this to be some Chinese evil rather than a huge downside of globalization that we should prepare for through taxes on global corporate profits and spending on public health. As I read somewhere recently, consider the defense budget, and consider how many people were killed by covid. Where should we be spending more resources to protect ourselves?
Thanks for that link about the "overwhelming consensus". The linked article chips away at the credibility of that consensus, though. The "consensus" is represented by a report this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, written by former members of a Lancet-sponsored covid origin task force.
There are concerns that authors of the report have had professional connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In fact that's the reason they are "former members" of the task force: the task force was disbanded last year after the Lancet Covid-19 Commission's chair began to doubt their objectivity. It may be that that chairperson, who is not a virologist, was himself not a fair judge of the task force's work. I don't know.
“…hell of a coincidence that COVID-19 originated precisely at the site of a major biolab facility that was widely known to be a little loosely managed…”
And known to be specifically doing “gain of function” experiments on coronaviruses, I thought.
I don’t know what happened, don’t know enough to form a good opinion. I haven’t read the scientific analysis, but if the genetic viral evolution geniuses really do believe the lab leak origin is impossible, I guess I believe them.
But I absolutely do not believe that public health pronouncements are free from political influence. Dig into it just a little bit and you see strong statements based in weak data, all over the place.
I obviously don’t trust anything Republicans say, but neither do readily accept public health messages coming from OUR team - the good guys - that us good little liberals are supposed to fall in line and broadcast/amplify.
Dig into it just a little bit and you see strong statements based in weak data, all over the place.
But not from the scientists themselves.
"And known to be specifically doing “gain of function” experiments on coronaviruses, I thought." Except they didn't do gain of function research. And most of the genetic manipulations in the coronavirus research they did do occurred in N. Carolina.
The important part for the Trump cons is not that the virus came from a Chinese lab but that the Dems are helping the Chinese cover up a bioweapons incident, possibly a bio weapons attack. The Trump cons have already shown that they don’t care about the virus itself or how many people it kills, just that the Dems are involved in an attack on the American people, yada yada .
They are currently threatening Dr Fauci and his family.
In the course of human history, is a fact that all viruses that have created pandemics mutated from nature. Why is it so hard to believe that this one didn’t. The answer of course is Trump, nothing else needs to be said.
I think this moves the needle a little bit so I put the odds at:
90% all natural
10% lab leak
The Wuhan lab leak conspiracy theory has become the 21st century's JFK assassination conspiracy theory. It will never die.
Bingo.
I'm not a virologist, biologist, etc., but my understanding of viruses is that we are still at the infant stage of bioengineering viruses genetically to make them deadly a la The Stand. That book is a great page-turning read, but even if you design a virus and release it into the wild, it will likely be outcompeted by all the existing viruses that have already interacted with human and other animal immune systems. A virus in the wild that we actually can contract has been battle tested by all those immune systems it passed through on its way to infecting us whereas a lab-created virus will not have the genetic heritage of having had to compete in the wild. Covid is a tragic story that emerged by natural evolution plus our haphazard, slipshod response in trying to contain it.
The TL;DR version is bioengineering a successful virus that can replicate in the wild and beat out other viruses is hard because we have only just begun that sort of work and research.
The general public doesn't get how easy it was to progress in the physical sciences and how hard it is to progress in the biological ones.
Lots of unlikely things happen. Odds being low doesn't mean it didn't
The purpose of the Republican investigation was presumably to provide more ammunition for the sustained attacks they hope to make on Anthony Fauci and the CDC next year. "We've rounded up every bit of circumstantial evidence we could find and still can't make a definite finding" will quickly become "An independent report found the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab where Fauci was funding gain-of-function research".
Sounds right, but instead of "ammunition" maybe we can use "pretext" because all it takes is a weak one (plus they can always recycle the ones they have now; repetition doesn't seem to bother them).
It's the same pattern as the 2020 election lying, which now goes "we absolutely know you cheated, we just haven't figured out how you did it." Evidence isn't a factor, in this case because they "absolutely know" about the supposed fraud because everybody they ever talked to was four-square for trump and who would vote for Biden anyway, that stiff.
Chinese responsibility for covid (and D complicity) are givens in just the same way. Starting with the conclusions makes things way easier, they've found.
In this case, they hired a republican hack to 'interpret' chinese bureaucrat speak, i.e. he was allowed to start with the conclusion and then engineer the data to support it.
MERS, SARS, Covid--all corona viruses that jumped from animals to humans.
Studying viral evolution can help explain how the leap (or leaps) happen--important if we want to try to predict outbreaks and/or determine if a given jump might fizzle out or blow up. That is not "gain of function" research, but may end up with a "gain of function". Conflating those is just meant to scare people.
There are not tons of labs looking at the SARS virus, esp. those looking at how it jumps species--especially pre-pandemic. In the US, there would be a bump up in funding after the previous outbreaks--that would fade after a few years. What that means is that the labs doing this work will interact with each other, and that includes the Wuhan Institute. If you put together a group of experts to study the origin of Covid, you will probably have some people on it who have worked directly or indirectly with people at the Wuhan Institute. That means almost any committee could be criticized for not having the needed expertise or having a conflict of interest.
I think it is good having non-virologists on committees looking at Covid, both spread and response, if not essential. But you can not have the perfect be the detriment of the good.
As for the the lab leak theory, it is hard to prove a negative. It will never go away. As for why is happened in Wuhan, there is a lot of evidence of viruses from bats infecting humans in the rural areas, and there is a lot of trade between the rural areas and the city. That's why the lab was located there. That a pandemic originated there was sort of expected, independent of any labs. It's not the only place in the world where this could happen, but it is one of the world's hot spots. Successful (for the virus) crossover is rare, unlike flu variants. Of course, now that Covid is pandemic in the human population, has no trouble mutating into new variants within the human population. And now it's going from humans to animals.
This is a crude summary of many articles on Covid. I'm not a virologist, so I have to read a lot--especially reports on reports.
I agree with what you say, in fact go further in saying these researchers get very close to the reservoirs and with what we know of how SARS-COV-2 works it came home with those them in an unsymptomatic way and well, life finds a way.
There was probably a lot more interactions between the reservoirs and people in the wildlife trade than with people doing field work from the lab. Of course they researchers could go to the wet market, for work or food, and picked it up there. Apparently it was in the city for a while before it was noticed--and longer still before it was taken seriously.
Excellent response though you are understating that the lab was a significant distance from large bat populations.
Yes. Wuhan is a regional hub--so there is a lot of interaction between the rural areas and the city. With the wet market, you now have live wild animals, which may serve as intermediaries for Covid, being brought into the city. There has been a lot of conjecture, but no firm evidence of what animal may have served an intermediary role in the transfer of Covid from bats to humans--if one was needed. There was a recent report that rodents can serve as a reservoir--but that plays more to the now endemic nature of covid.
Michael Worobey signed the "we need to investigate the lab leak theory" letter. Then he continued his research. This paper is the result...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
TL;DR, the outbreak almost certainly originated in the wet market.
That was quite the re-interpretation of what that article's focus was. Granted, the article was unnecessarily verbose with the inclusion of many unimportant details. But, here's what the article actually said:
- WIV officials wrote dispatches to party officials noting errors in handling equipment, a lack of safety protocols, a series of accidents.
- Prior to 2020, WIV conducted infectious disease experiments, such as gain-of-function research, in BSL2 and BSL3 facilities, despite warnings.
- WIV officials lacked expertise on disinfection and had to reach out after discovering the stainless-steel lining of the walls of their containment facilities were disintegrating from the use of corrosive disinfectants.
- WIV officials applied for a patent in Dec 2019 detailing animal transport devices that would be able to contain hazardous gases/infectious agents, and in Nov 2020 a separate patent detailing the use of non-corrosive gases for such devices. Both of which, Chinese experts suggest were indications of actual recent failures experienced at WIV, requiring solutions.
On the balance, there is nothing dispositive. However, there is clarity that WIV has specifically had many issues with safety and have tried to cover them up. They are sloppy, lack expertise, and lied. They operate in a system that pushes them to break the rules in order to produce results -- eg published papers, breakthroughs -- and the means to do that was to ignore safety.
This prioritization of results over safety means that even if D614G wasn't recombinant and accidentally released, the WIV will eventually fuck the world over.
"WIV officials wrote dispatches to party officials noting errors in handling equipment, a lack of safety protocols, a series of accidents." That's not actually true. The authors want you to believe that but if you read the article carefully, you would see that the WIV officials were talking that in general, biolabs need to be worried about those issues. There are no claims that this worry was tied to specific incidents at Wuhan or were any different that what needs to concern people at every biolab in the world. The republican hack hired to produce this report just took the standard pablum about safety that must be included in any report from a high level biolab and interpreted it as meaning there must have been a security incident for them to be talking about it.
"WIV officials applied for a patent in Dec 2019 detailing animal transport devices that would be able to contain hazardous gases/infectious agents, and in Nov 2020 a separate patent detailing the use of non-corrosive gases for such devices. Both of which, Chinese experts suggest were indications of actual recent failures experienced at WIV, requiring solutions." In reality, the chinese are no different than anyone else on the planet, most patents are 1-2% improvements on existing technology that exist solely to extend the life of otherwise expiring actually valuable patents.
Kevin certainly must know that phrases like, "There's a chance they're right" and "Draw your own conclusions" are enough for right-wingers to overrule virtually unanimous virologists & stick with their politically useful theory. Cf. Climate change, trickle down economics, mandatory sentencing, etc.
Somebody famous (Franklin, Lincoln, Twain, Einstein, H.L. Mencken?) said you can't talk someone out of a position with facts & logic when they did not arrive at that position with facts & logic.
It's a hell of a coincidence that COVID-19 originated precisely at the site of a major biolab facility that was widely known to be a little loosely managed.
It's not really a "hell of" a coincidence, no.
Wuhan is a major city on the Yangtze river. It's a regional trade and distribution center and as such it's a destination for sellers of produce, fish, meat and live animals from all over the region. It's exactly the kind of place (others would include Chongqing, Chengdu, Changsha, Guangzhou, Nanjing, etc) where one would expect a zoonotic spillover event might occur.
There's a chance they're right, but their evidence remains thin, cherry picked, and always vaguely conspiratorial. Draw your own conclusions.
Yes. My conclusion is that a lab leak cannot be ruled out. And that a natural zoonotic event can also not be ruled out. But that the evidence for the latter is a lot stronger than for the former, which has happened countless times to our species.
bingo
Science is messy, because scientists make it messy.
When a group of scientists proposed a giant asteroid being the cause of the dinosaur extinction, they were ridiculed, but now the theory is mainstream.
When physicists proposed some experiments into quantum entanglement, they weren't given the time of day - "the science was settled" I believe the phrase goes. They persisted, and those experiments got them the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Covid origin research is going to be like that, if not worse. Firstly, "lab leak" remains tied to Trump, and nobody wants to admit he could have been right. Secondly, China has been anything but transparent, and they have their claws into a great many researchers inside and outside the WHO. That the hypothesis isn't still being canceled as "misinformation" is a huge win for the "lab leak" guys.
I personally don't see the big deal. So, Covid might have come from a dirty, unsanitary meat market with third world regulations "protecting" its customer base. Or, lab researchers with USA funding but insufficient safety measures screwed up big-time. Either way, it looks like incompetence to me. Not everybody is going to be fully professional in their jobs, and even if that percentage is low, the Chinese population is high enough that it was always highly likely to start there.
So, give this time. If "lab leak" turns out to be true, we'll find out eventually (unless China gets its way of course). But either way, life goes on.
Oh dear lord. You make it gainfully obvious that you know nothing about the history of physics, let alone any pyhsics to speak of.
"Firstly, "lab leak" remains tied to Trump, " Which is unfortunate because what Trump tweated was about the intentional release of a bio weapon, not a lab leak. Conservatives love to target the first papers disputing Trump's theory of a deliberately designed theory and how they don't prove there wasn't a lab leak when the papers didn't even mention lab leak.
Reid says that if you interpret the pishi correctly, it turns out there was some kind of big emergency at the Wuhan lab toward the end of 2019—and the ProPublica/Vanity Fair team says it confirmed this with other China experts.
And then there are other people who say that it's close to being a wilful mistranslation of the document that starts from a biased premise and draws conclusions based on that biased premise.
(Consider, for instance, Michael Worobey as cited elsewhere. He began with a similar biased premise but then followed the evidence and changed his mind after realising that it was a biased premise.)
In passing, I remember there being something of a fuss about some research labs in Ukraine that were seized upon as 'proof' that the US was creating bioweapons and that therefore China must be doing the same thing at Wuhan. Whatever happened to that nonsense?
Offtopic, but, according to this,
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-29/paul-pelosi-attacker-police-hammer-nancy-pelosi-san-francisco
the lunatic who attacked Paul Pelosi is being charged with, among other things, 'injuring a wireless device'.
That's really a crime?
I mean, I would go along with the lab leak theory if it actually got conservatives to treat this as an attack from the PRC and take appropriate precautions.
So much energy wasted on discussing whether covid was created by the Chinese. As if it matters at this point? As iamr4man said above: if we knew for a fact that the Chinese were to blame, what exactly would we do about it? Launch a war with them? Cut them off from the global economy? Ban their people from visiting our country? Stop cooperating with them academically? Talk shit about them at parties? Shake our fists impotently at them? If there are no consequences of significance that can be realistically imposed, there is really no point in assigning blame. So fine, I'm willing to 100% blame the Chinese... cause I know absolutely nothing will be done with that blame.
(This btw is also why I'm totally meh about religion. It seems to exist as a way to assign blame to people for things so that other people can feel good - cause it feels great to feel morally superior - but has absolutely no practical effect in the real world. "You're going to hell for being a slut" or whatever. Whoopty-do, no skin off my nose, even as I know the churchy people really get off on passing those kinds of judgments.)
We would do the same as the world did when they found out the spanish influenza virus jumped from pigs to humans in kansas and the US knowingly transported infected people throughout the world without giving anyone warning. Nothing.