Just a quick reminder: There is no more evidence today in favor of the lab-leak theory than there ever has been. Which is to say, none. This isn't me taking sides one way or the other, it's just a fact. There's still zero direct evidence for the lab-leak theory and exactly the same amount of circumstantial evidence as always (first outbreak was in Wuhan, Chinese leaders have been extremely defensive, zoonotic origin still not proven, etc.).
The lab-leak theory is the journalistic shiny object of the day, but that's all. The actual evidence one way or the other hasn't changed a bit.
UPDATE: Cheryl Rofer notes here the yearlong effort to shop the lab-leak theory by Mike Pompeo and the Murdoch media empire. Apparently they've finally been successful.
That's not quite true.
The evidence for the zoonotic origin has deteriorated due to the passage of time without specific evidence in favor of it showing up. If the zoonotic origin is the correct theory, then eventually we expect to find the intermediate host(s). The more time passes without that, the weaker the case for the zoonotic theory is.
By contrast, the failure to find direct evidence for the lab leak origin is due mostly to the absence of an appropriate investigation (mainly due to obstruction by the Chinese government). Since that obstruction has continued unabated, the case for the lab-leak origin is not decaying.
Therefore, from a Bayesian reasoning perspective, whatever your prior, the likelihood ratio is shifting somewhat away from the zoonotic theory, so your posterior has to be shifting somewhat towards the lab-leak theory.
Quantitatively, at this point, the change may be small, but the direction of change is clear. If, let's say, 20 years go by and we still find no intermediate hosts, but there has still be no in-depth investigation of the Wuhan lab, the case for the zoonotic origin will have more or less completely collapsed, and we will be left to choose among the lab-leak theory and any other possibilities. (I'm not aware of any theories other than these two that have been mooted, but perhaps there are some.)
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The virus didn’t even exist that we knew of less than two years ago, and the expectation (based on what, exactly?) that definitive proof of a zoonotic origin should have emerged by now has pretty much been invented out of whole cloth. The main reason it’s even being discussed is its frantic repetition in right-wing media, and that very likely is due to their equally frantic desire to change the subject from Republicans’ massive and deliberate botch of our response, which already one (UK) study has estimated was responsible for at least 200,000 needless US deaths.
Put another way: the passage of less than two years without definitive evidence of an animal reservoir, during which time scientific efforts have been focused on CONTAINING the disease, should shift a prior very little or not at all. This is basically a slippery-slope argument beginning with nothing at all.
Put another way: the passage of less than two years without definitive evidence of an animal reservoir, during which time scientific efforts have been focused on CONTAINING the disease, should shift a prior very little or not at all. "
Agree strongly with very little, as I said in my post. Disagree strongly with not at all. There has been some search for intermediate hosts and none have been found. Two years is not a long time, but it's not no time, and if the zoonotic theory is true, then there is some non-zero probability we would have found that host by now. Not much, but some. So if you are a good Bayesian you must slightly shift your credences away from zoonotic.
So what’s the basis for judgmen
So what’s the basis for judgment? If it’s simply the “passage of time,” then two MINUTES should shift probabilities, if only infinitesimally. And why should they shift to the “lab leak” hypothesis rather than, say, to the “no zoonosis” hypothesis, as is the case for, eg, most flu viruses?
This is spinning something out of nothing.
Have you had your fill of salad yet?
No, it is not spinning out of nothing. Two years of effort are suggestive that
The problem is people like you, Rofer are having a political reaction to a fact set (and everyone is conflating Lab Leak with Engineering Virus, whereas Leak covers possibilities like naturally occuring virus accidentally leaking due to shitty protocols).
Of course it is perfectly true the media has flipped from being excessively black-and-white re virus origin to the Not Lab associated to over-playing Lab Leak.
But its political reaction, not as noted by Schechter real probability analysis that's driving the reaction to Lab Leak (on both Lefty over-denial and Trumpian-Foxian over-affirmation with combined conflation with Bioweapon implied).
Exactly. Bayesian nonsense. It took well over a decade to find the animal links to Ebola, SARS1, HIV. The lab escape is a Murdoch focus-group tested talking point to keep the MAGA pot boiling through 2022. BTW, unless we allow our bio (weapons) labs to be inspected, the Chinese cannot be expected to open up their Wuhan lab. This has Saddam's WMD or Iran's Bomb written all over it.
Actually, WHO is still not certain enough about the origin of ebola to make a strong statement. Their statement on origin says:
"It is THOUGHT that fruit bats of the Pteropodidae family are natural Ebola virus hosts. Ebola is introduced into the human population through close contact with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected animals such as fruit bats, chimpanzees, gorillas, monkeys, forest antelope or porcupines found ill or dead or in the rainforest."
(My emphasis.) The first outbreaks of ebola occurred in 1976! The CDC uses similar language on ebola origins and reservoirs.
Pseudointellectual bafflegab. The current evidence for zoonotic origin is what it is. It doesn't disappear over time. If we stop looking or the trail goes cold, that doesn't mean the data we do have "deteriorates."
Similarly, the case for a lab leak, which is non-existent, isn't "decaying." Additional information affects the status of that case; absence of additional information leaves us the status quo.
You obviously know nothing about Bayesian reasoning or how research works.
I am not persuaded (yet) that the available information points mostly to a lab leak. Bur CS's description of a Bayseian evolution of our knowledge (based on a prior and updated as more information becomes available) seems fair to me.
LOL! So the evidence that the earth is round has not changed at least since it was first viewed from space, so that is deteriorating? The evidence that polio is caused by a virus hasn't changed in decades, so that is deteriorating?
The earth's spherical shape is a very robust prior because it is consistent with a minimum gravitational energy configuration, and with the shapes of other planetary bodies we observe around us. The existence of an intermediate host, unless and until one is identified, is not so.
Yeah, it was like 1% lab, 99% animal only and now it's closer to 3% lab 97% animal only.
Nate Silver: [laughs in sam wong's odds of El Jefe winning in 2016]
Those are not the only possibilities. Many viruses that infect humans aren’t zoonotic.
Silly hyperventilation.
This is one of the places where a technical understanding of statistics is important. The statement, "Yeah, it was like 1% lab, 99% animal only and now it's closer to 3% lab 97% animal only," is statistical nonsense. The probability of either origin is either 0 or 1, but it cannot be anything in between. It's an event that already happened, and cannot be repeated.
The question isn't what the probabilities are. It's what proportion of an infinite number of trials would result in discovering one origin or the other given that we had, at any point, an set of data identical to what we have now. But not only are we limited to a single trial with SARS-CoV-2, we will never have another disease that produces an identical set of intermediate data, either.
This is important, because throwing around terms like "Bayesian priors" means that you are trying to do something that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't matter what your priors are. The underlying probabilities remain 1 or 0. Any changes in them are purely in your own imagination.
Saying, "The probability of the virus being zoonotic is x," is fine for casual discussion. But it becomes useless as soon as you start trying to do anything technical.
Uh huh. You don't say. Do you even know what the Bayesian viewpoint is? Hint: It has something to do with knowledge. You sound as if you know just enough to be dangerous.
I have a degree in statistics. Yes, I know what Bayesian statistics is.
Sure you do. That's why you conflated a garbled version of Frequentism with actual Bayesian philosophy. And why you didn't, you know, actually expound on the Bayesian viewpoint. Telling instead of showing doesn't go over well here, son.
Absolutely statistical nonsense. I do not have a statistical degree and often statistical reasoning actually seems backwards to me. I am not throwing around a term like Bayesian anything.
But as I was trained in the law, let me say that it is slightly more likely because the animal origin is slightly less likely in terms of burden of proof.
Sorry. I kind of mixed multiple responses together.
I do préfère anchovies in my Caesar, thank you
If I recall correctly, and I do, the original SARS, which has a proven zoonotic origin, took 14 years to find the origin and pathway from the original host animals into the human species. Same for MERS, many years between discovery of the virus and the identification of the origin species of animal hosts.
So anyone pushing the lab escape theory, which has zero evidence, or less, is falling into the RWNJ Hoax pushed by Trump and his minions. Which doesn't really help Trump look better, no matter how SARS-Covid-19 came to be, Trump's response was a total failure from every viewpoint.
We still have a huge population of un-vaccinated people who compose a population capable of hosting new mutations of Covid-19, which may become more able to spread and cause worse infections than currently existing varieties. This unwilllingness to become vaccinated is almost completely because of Trump and his minions lying about the disease, its causes and ability to spread, and its severity.
You do yourself no favors by spreading disinformation and malicious propaganda like this -- it shows your ignorance, unwillingness to research, and lack of ability to think logically. Throwing in $0.50 words you don't really understand doesn't help either!
The evidence for the zoonotic origin has deteriorated due to the passage of time without specific evidence in favor of it showing up.
That strikes me as a wholly unsupported claim because it implies the elapsed time is "unreasonable" or an "outlier." Do you have any data as to how long it has generally taken the scientific community to identify the origins of viruses? If the vast bulk of cases get solved in a couple of months, you might have a point. If, on the other hand, it quite often takes years for the origin of a virus to be correctly ascertained, then the situation you describe would simply be "evidence" of the mundane.
Amen!
The virus had to come from somewhere. Where?
Hypothesis A: zoonotic origin
Hypothesis B: the lab in Wuhan, which had a leak
Both A and B lack any proof. But there's not a lot of evidence for one or the other either. The case for each possibility right now is mostly conjecture. Some people are debating the competing hypotheses based on which they think better fits the facts that we know (i.e., which is more plausible). Others are debating based on politically motivated reasoning -- a desire to prove a particular party right or wrong (e.g., Trump, health officials, the media, China).
I'd be happy to wait and see where the evidence leads, but I doubt we're going to see much more. The safest thing you can say about the origin of the virus: we don't know. There's a good chance we never will.
There is also C: no zoonotic origin. Not all infectious diseases are either zoonotic or artificial. Many flu viruses, for example, arise within the human population.
Isn't there indication that the corona virus found in bats needs to mutate in an intermediate host to be able to propagate in and harm humans?
C, D, E, F ... and so on. Lacking any conclusive evidence (or enough to build a consensus), there may be no end to the hypothesizing.
There is a fundamental difference there. You get different mutations of the flu virus that arise in humans, but you do not get entirely new flu viruses that arise solely within humans. Similarly, we are getting lots of variants of the original SARS-CoV-2 that evolve within the human population, but that is in no way the same thing as saying that the original virus arose within the human population.
A new virus cannot just spontaneously appear; it has to evolve from something. There is no virus in humans that it could have evolved from.
Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by "new" virus. But certainly the process of bits of genetic material from different things combining in novel ways to yield something with a novel combination of properties can occur in any animal species; there's nothing about, say, bats, such that a "new" virus can arise in them but absolutely cannot in humans.
Now, if you're saying something like, there are specific codons present in SARS-CoV-2 that neither exist in any extant human virus nor could have come from some other source and been combined within a human into an extant virus, then I'm out of my depth technically.
(&btw I'm not saying I think it arose in humans. My prior on that is extremely low indeed. But the mere existence of such a hypothesis shows the fallacy of the purported Bayesian "reasoning" of the first comment.)
Such things are vastly more likely to happen in bats, because their immune system works in a completely different way than pretty any other creature. They just tolerate almost all pathogens rather than eliminating anything anything that looks unusual. So there are a ton of viruses floating around in their systems that can mutate. That's why, "Bats," is usually the first answer given to any iteration of the question, "Where did this virus come from?"
I am also unaware of anything new developing from "bits of genetic material from different things combining in novel ways to yield something with a novel combination of properties." What does happen is that segments from closely related viruses can get swapped around to produce novel variants of that virus with novel properties. This happens with Influenza A, which is formed from eight different segments. But this is not the same thing as random bits of genetic material from entirely different organisms floating around and getting together to form something quite different from any of the precursors. Do you have any citations for this happening?
Yeah but that one didn't happen here. That's why it's a novel coronavirus.
That's not it at all. The accidental release theory became front and center because Trump was no longer in office and his antagonistic, racist rhetoric was no longer getting in the way of an open discussion.
As Rofer noted in the last paragraph, "Does the dishonesty of Pompeo and his minions disqualify the idea that SARS-CoV-2 might have entered the human population through laboratory escape? Of course not." Politics makes it difficult for most people to see most things clearly without bias. Put someone like Trump into the middle and people are understandably reflexively opposed to everything he says.
It's not that the circumstantial evidence remains the same (it hasn't), but that you've decided to apply your skills of punditry to judge the circumstantial evidence to be unsatisfactory.
The lab leak theory works for me. Nuke China!
Spoken like someone who wants to see Japan get it good & hard. Again.
Works for me, too. Plus, given America's unapparelled ability to manage largescale crises, there is zero doubt we will have stockpiled the decade's worth of food necessary to get us through the nuclear winter.
Doomsday preppers will have their day.
I guess that my main issue with all of the attention being lavished on the lab leak/bioweapon posturing is that it's really just a way to obscure the various catastrophic Trump related failure regarding Covid-19. What possible difference does it make to anything if the virus escaped from a lab or it didn't?
Either way, we should've been prepared since this was hardly an unexpected event. But we weren't. Trump knew from January onwards everything he needed to know about how to prepare. He actively obstructed and disrupted every effort to ready the country to deal with the pandemic and, indeed, he went out of his way to create the chaotic conditions in airports and other places that guaranteed that we would be facing a disaster like nothing else in living memory.
What would Trump have done differently had he "known" that the virus escaped from the lab? Answer: nothing. What would a president Hillary have done different from following the carefully and intellentently formulated playbook that the Bush II and Obama administrations had put together to prepare for dealing with a pandemic (a playbook which Trump discarded)? Answer: Nothing.
Why is this something that anyone outside of the Fox News universe should be promoting?
You're right. Trump's response was a disaster and nothing about the origin changes that.
That said, there is an interest in knowing where the virus came from since that could lead to precautions to take for the future. I doubt we'll get a conclusive answer to that question.
Then there is the right-wing noise machine, which has promoted one absurdity after another for many years. Their interest is not to find out the true origin but to create an enemy. For them, the lab-leak theory doesn't stop at a sloppy accident at a lab but an intentionally developed bioweapon that China unleashed on the world. They want China to pay. That's a far different matter than where the virus came from, but they would like to conflate the two issues. We can't let them do that.
I would somewhat disagree that this anything that can be meaningfully learned. It seems to me that we’re agreed that, regardless of the virus’s origins, nothing could have or would have been done better to improve the situation as long as Trump was president and the Republican Party was the ruling party. But, realistically, there’s also nothing that a hypothetical president Hillary would’ve done different, either. Whether the virus developed in the wild and infected humans in Wuhan wet markets or escaped because the Wuhan lab had inferior and poorly followed safety practices, doesn’t change the responses of countries like the United States.
And this entire effort does nothing to better prepare us for the next pandemic: President Hillary, or even GW Bush, would have followed the same playbook regardless——as would any future president who didn’t emerge from the Fox News multiverse. We already knew how to fight the pandemic and be New Zealand, Australia, Korea, or Taiwan. We simply chose not to.
The origins of the virus simply makes no practical difference to anything. Even if it is absolutely positively determined that the virus escaped from the lab, we don’t have any control laboratory safety standards in China. What we do have control of is our level of preparation and how we respond.
It seems to me that this is simply a way of avoiding confronting the appalling inadequacy of our response. All of the energy spent by non-Republicans on this red herring is just wasted. We need to focus on our present disaster and prepare for the next time, not fall victim to this pointless waste of precious time.
True to a point. Once the virus is out there, where it came from is of little importance to how the response to the pandemic is run. We can look back and see what worked and what didn't. The past year and a half offered many lessons. We should learn something from our experience.
The origin doesn't change the public health response but it actually can help to prevent the next outbreak. E.g., if sloppy health protocols at the Wuhan lab were in part responsible for a leak of the virus, that is very useful information. China could clean up procedures at its facility. The international community could work on standards and enforcement to lower the risk of a similar event happening again. If the origin is not from the lab, efforts could be targeted elsewhere. We may never get a definitive answer to the origin of the virus, but that information should be useful to have.
In the abstract, what you say makes perfect sense. But the reality is that we seem to have a binary choice between introspection and going down a rabbit hole in order to avoid introspection and assessments of blame.
If there's something to be learned by discovering whether the virus leaked from a lab or naturally jumped into humans, it can only matter to the Chinese and the antics of the Republican clowns (and their centrist and center-left useful idiots) are far more likely to cause China to very defensively resist self-reflection on its own failures (to everyone's detriment).
Similarly, the focus on external factors can only serve to allow us to pretend that what happened was somehow inevitable or that our mistakes were really China's mistakes. We will be no better prepared or capable of handling future pandemics than we were able to handle this one because we are not isolating the root causes of our failure.
"We already knew how to fight the pandemic and be New Zealand, Australia, Korea, or Taiwan. We simply chose not to."
Exactly!
Why wasn't Germany or France, well run countries, in that list?
Hint: both because of the amount of international travel the US hosts and the selfishness of our population, it was actually literally impossible for us to do what New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, or Taiwan did. Those are three island states and one peninsula with the hardest land border in the world. And none of them are big international travel hubs- NZ and Aus. are particularly isolated.
Compare us to Germany. Germany did better on the distancing and suppression, worse on the vaccine. And it has a competent leader. Germany couldn't be New Zealand, and neither could we.
limitholdemblog - SARS-CoV-1 was more deadly, and for a time early this century threatened to cause many deaths in the Asia/Pacific region. It was never a significant threat in Europe or North America. A/P nations got the message, and prepared for the next pandemic, the one we are currently enduring. We and the Europeans were complacent.
About the ‘but they’re islands!’ argument: nobody walked her from China. We have lots of international travelers, but we also have a large population from which we could have trained and hired more public-health workers to screen, test, contact-trace, monitor quarantines, etc.
By the way, international tourism is a ignificant component of the economy of New Zealand.
The issue isn't one of percentages. New Zealand has a small economy and a small population, and may be dependent on tourism. But the question is absolute numbers.
The US not only hosts a ton of tourists, but also has a ton of internal travel AND airports that are gigantic international hubs. Compared to us, New Zealand's airports are a rounding error.
Plus, because New Zealand is irrelevant to the larger picture of international air travel and does not have a land border, they were able to shut down immigration and travel immediately. We couldn't do that, and no nation that COULD do that escaped the coronavirus. That was the single biggest determinant and all these hot takes about what a great job the NZ government did ignore that.
FWIW I am completely with you on this. Since I can’t upvote you I just thought I’d let you know.
The only reason the GQP is interested in this at all is to advance their conspiracy theories and accusations and to legitimize Trump and his racist followers.
I would somewhat disagree that this anything that can be meaningfully learned.
Agreed. Would we learn that humans need to be very, very, very careful when it comes to researching dangerous viruses and managing labs? It seems clear we knew this already. And it's doubtful we'd learn novel information regarding the specifics of lab leaks (or how to prevent them) because lab leaks have happened multiple time before.
Yes, I think that’s right. If the virus escaped from the lab it’s wasn’t because the Chinese lacked the technical knowledge or failed to understand the importance of lab safety. Their failures were more akin to the human and organizational failures that caused the Italian tram disaster we discussed a while ago.
"... What possible difference does it make to anything if the virus escaped from a lab or it didn't?"
This is absurd. Why do we carefully investigate plane crashes that kill a couple of hundred people? We do so in order to reduce the chances of them happening again. Here the virus has killed millions of people. If it came from a lab, it is very important to take measures to vastly reduce the chances of such deadly lab leaks in the future. Even if it didn't come from a lab it may be pointing out that lab safety regulations are far too lax and need to be beefed up before there is a deadly lab leak.
In what way would know whether the virus escaped from a lab or came from a wet market make any difference in the future? We suffered because we didn’t do what was necessary to prepare. We suffered because we squandered significant advance notice. We suffered because our society chose a course of action which greatly enhanced the spread of the disease and overwhelmed our health care system.
So my question is still what would we have done better? What would knowing whether the virus came from we a lab enable us to do in the future that was unknown or unavailable to to us absent that knowledge?
"In what way would know whether the virus escaped from a lab or came from a wet market make any difference in the future? .."
Again this is absurd. It makes a difference whether a plane exploded because of a bomb on board or because a faulty fuel pump sparked and ignited vapors in an almost empty fuel tank. Society properly gives higher priority to mitigating hazards that are known to have caused serious accidents.
It only makes a difference if anyone in authority has the interest and ability to deal intelligently with hazards to aviation or actually cares more about preventing planes from blowing up than about weaponizing planes crashes as a culture war issue.
I have repeatedly asked you to say what difference it would make in our approach to the current pandemic or to preventing or preparing for future pandemics but you can’t offer a single thing. Regardless of it’s origins, the crucial thing was to prepare but we didn’t. Escaped from a lab or not, the crucial thing was to use the advance warning productively but instead we squandered it. The crucial thing was to fight the virus but instead we actively promoted it as government policy.
We knew what to do but it would have been hard so we didn’t do it. Again, how would knowledge about whether the virus escaped have made a difference? Why would we change our approach in the future?
"... but you can’t offer a single thing. .."
I said improve lab safety an obvious response to a serious lab accident (if in fact that is what this was).
James B. Shearer - What is a reasonable goal for a worldwide reduction in the probability of a dangerous virus escaping from a lab? If it’s less than a 99.75% reduction, it would still leave us at risk of suffering more deaths per capita (on an expected-value basis) than has New Zealand by executing a well-prepared public-health response. Which appears more achievable? Which also effectively reduces deaths from diseases of zoönotic origin?
"James B. Shearer - What is a reasonable goal for a worldwide reduction in the probability of a dangerous virus escaping from a lab? .."
I would say 90% is reasonable initial goal. Note even a 50% reduction achieves half the total benefit.
"... If it’s less than a 99.75% reduction, it would still leave us at risk of suffering more deaths per capita (on an expected-value basis) than has New Zealand by executing a well-prepared public-health response. Which appears more achievable? .."
I would say a 90% reduction in lab leak probability is far more achievable than a 99.75% worldwide improvement (in terms of expected deaths) in the public health response. The later being essentially impossible.
"... Which also effectively reduces deaths from diseases of zoönotic origin?"
Improving the public health response (which I also support) of course. But it doesn't have to be one or the other.
90% reduction still leaves the US with 60,000 dead. Note that the public-health measures don’t have to be worldwide. A/P nations are doing well despite Europe, Brazil, the US, etc. Also note that public-health measures have eradicated smallpox worldwide - that’s 100% effectiveness.
"90% reduction still leaves the US with 60,000 dead."
60000 expected dead which means 0 dead 90% of the time (when a lab leak is successfully prevented) and 600000 dead 10% of the time when a lab leaks occurs despite increased precautions.
An improvement in the public health response to the Canadian level is about 200000 dead. The combination would be about 20000 expected dead.
"... Also note that public-health measures have eradicated smallpox worldwide - that’s 100% effectiveness."
100% except for the possibility of a lab leak (including deliberate release).
Yes. I certainly agree that effort should be put into both better lab-safety protocols and technology, and public-health resources.
The difference here is that for plane crashes what is investigated are private companies (either airlines or plane manufacturers), neither of which can refuse the involvement of authorities from the nations involved in the investigation, nor can they refuse to adopt whatever sanctions, changes, etc., are recommended/mandated even if they didn't want to.
Here no other nation has any authority to investigate a Chinese government facility, nor is there really any way (other than basically going to war) for them to force them to it, or to force the adoption of any changes (assuming their protocols failed). Trying to conclusively prove it was a lab leak is likely to be impossible because the Chinese government will never allow any nation such investigative power, nor will it never accept any kind of error if that were the case based on their own investigation (and for the record I think the US or any western world power would behave exactly the same had the potential leak be located in a lab in their nation).
Taiwan, New Zealand, and a number of other nations in the Asia/Pacific region had fewer deaths by several orders of magnitude. The clear lesson is that standing up a robust public-health system, preparing countermeasures, stockpiling protective equipment, planning, and managing the national response, have the best chance of preventing millions of deaths.
Taiwan and New Zealand are islands and do not see a ton of international travel.
Taipei is an extremely busy destination. Pre-pandemic it was getting many dozens of flights a day from abroad. Auckland's also an important destination (not as busy as Taipei, but surely several hundred international flights weekly). And mainland China is home to myriad very busy airports that collectively were getting several thousand international flights weekly. Similar claims can be made about Australia, which is home to at least a half dozen airports that receive international arrivals.
I don't disagree squelching covid is a heavy lift (very few countries have managed it). But a few have. They accomplished this not because of advantages unavailable to other countries, but because of the actions they've taken and the strategies they've followed. Mostly these involve: strict lockdowns and/or widely adhered to voluntary social distancing; widespread use of masks; strict isolation/quarantining of infected persons; robust testing/tracing (sometimes automated as in China); careful screening and quarantine of international arrivals, and -- critically -- following these steps until community spread is diminishing and not letting up until community spread has vanished. That's it. That's what you've got to do. By my count a grand total of four countries, Iceland, China, Australia and New Zealand have pulled it off. Taiwan and Singapore may re-join their ranks.
Tourism is at 20% the largest single sector of New Zealand’s ‘export’ economy (classed as such because it brings income from other countries). Foreign trade is over 60% of Taiwan’s economy.
It actually does matter that it be acknowledged as a real possibility not so much proved or disproved because there needs to be a real conversation on scientific research.
"....we’ll need to understand that the next major threat to public health could come from something else in biology—something that destroys crops, or changes the ocean, or changes the atmosphere."
We already knew a lot about what the next pandemic was going to look like during the Obama administration and we had structures and plans in place to allow a quick and effective response. So our problem wasn’t lack of scientific knowledge. Our problem was that the Trump administration dismantled the structures, trashed the plan, and went out of its way to make the pandemic worse.
All of the time and resources being put into this silly quest by well meaning people isn’t simply wasted, it’s actually counterproductive since it allows us to gloss over the catastrophic failures that killed or permanently damaged hundreds of thousands of Americans.
We knew the precautions to take and we chose not to take them. We knew exactly what New Zealand, Korea, Australia, and others knew. The difference in outcomes past, present, and future has nothing to do with science debate. It’s has everything to do with our failure as a society.
Right
The tRump administration started destroying the US' ability to deal with an epidemic/pandemic from it's first year in office. Getting rid of the NSC pandemic preparedness group, cutting the CDC's overseas outpost budget by 80% from 50 outposts to 10. Then they kept at it. By late March of 2020, the number of CDC personnel in China had been cut from 47 to 14 (3 from the US, 11 local hires), and the CDC web page on China doesn't mention ANY office locations, so I can't tell if the Wuhan office is still in place or if they are all working out of Beijing.
I think that even if China were cooperating fully it's not clear that there's enough people left in the CDC in China with good enough connections to their Chinese counterparts to DO much deep tracing and detective work. They are supposed to be supporting a Field Epidemiology Training Program covering "13 under-served provinces of China – remote areas more vulnerable to novel infections and with increasing transport corridors". Sounds kind of thin on the ground to me.
Despite the best efforts of the Trumpies to blame "China" so as to get themselves off the hook for killing 500k Americans, the answer to the question posed at the top of this post, "Where Did the SARS-CoV-2 Virus Come From?" is: globalization.
If you put your factory in China in order to increase the profits going to your executives, but you don't prepare for the health risks of providing a quick-and-easy route for China's pathogens to the rest of the world through increased travel (by the businesspeople managing those factories; by the workers in China, newly flush with cash, traveling to Italy as tourists, etc), then all you've done is push your costs off on the rest of the world, what economists call externalities.
It's just like a factory dumping its waste in the river and expecting taxpayers to pay for cleaning up that river. You just don't want to pay for the costs of what's making you rich. Of course you're gonna blame the village by the river, or the people who manage the river, or the trans bathrooms, or Ilhan Omar, or whoever.
That's exactly what big business is doing in pushing this lab-leak theory (through its usual right-wing media outlets). Getting us to pay for their mistakes.
Circumstantial evidence is still evidence. You can convict on circumstances one.
So you mentioning circumstantial evidence while earlier saying none is a contradiction.
OT: If Harry Enten's analysis is right (and he's pretty damn good at it) that +0.85 correlation is just too high to be ignored. Going back to your original post several months ago on the matter, yes, I finally agree with you that (sadly) politics is driving vaccination rates.
It would be ironic if a breakout in a red state drove people to rush to get a vaccine, seeing as none of the vaccines would confer immediate protection, but nonetheless got a red state to vaccinate.
The GQP is hoping that Alabama variant or Wyoming variant doesn't happen, but once the De Santis-Tim Scott regime or Hawley-Gabbard national unity administration is installed in 2024, the GQP faithful will rush to get vaxxx'd, to glorify the leadership.
It will be known as the SEC Variant, and it will spread like wildfire right around Sept, pausing for a bit at the start of Dec, but coming roaring back in the first week of Jan for about two weeks.
KKKlay Travis doesn't have a response to this.
...once the De Santis-Tim Scott regime or Hawley-Gabbard national unity administration is installed in 2024, the GQP faithful will rush to get vaxxx'd, to glorify the leadership.
I doubt it. They were zealously pro-covid/pro-death during the last GOP administration. I don't see why they'd change their tune for the MAGA restoration. Besides, it's an honor to die for a noble cause such as owning the libs. THAT is how real patriots glorify the leadership.
"To die to assert ownership of the libs... what a beautiful way to die...."
A woman with HIV had the coronavirus for 216 days. The virus mutated at least 30 times inside her,
https://www.businessinsider.com/woman-hiv-had-coronavirus-216-days-virus-mutated-2021-6
This is suggesting there need not be an animal intermediary.
There are *many* coronaviruses circulating in the world. One of them causes the common cold. Others are more lethal. They're also common in cats, and apparently spread rapidly in shelters, etc.
The ordinarily harmless coronavirus that cats carry can sometimes mutate into a lethal version that attacks, among other things, the nervous system. It's around 99 percent fatal, and there is no treatment.
I know this because a young cat I adopted from a very responsible shelter developed it. I'll spare everyone the long and depressing story, but bottom line was she had all sorts of odd symptoms for several months until her legs couldn't hold her up anymore. This mutated coronavirus variant is so rare, it wasn't seriously considered by the vets until lab work on her blood sample showed just a massive load of the virus. (We put her down.)
There's been virtually no research done on this, and no way to identify the variant separate from your garden variety coronavirus in cats except for the gigantic viral load in the cat's blood because, after all, who cares? It's just cats.
Point being there are coronaviruses all over our world, and sometimes they mutate into deadly forms.
Yes, but there aren't any coronaviruses in humans that are similar enough to SARS-CoV-2 that they are remotely plausible as candidates from which it could have evolved. Just because something is a coronavirus does not mean that it can be an immediate precursor for any other coronavirus.
For reasons that are fairly obvious, there has been a lot more research on the coronaviruses that you can find in humans than of the ones you find in cats. And, even so, they have identified what the variant of FCoV that causes FIP mutates from, namely the regular FCoV.
I had been thinking dogs were a good candidate after a dog in (Myanmar?) was found to have the bat virus, and that some Chinese do still enjoy taking Bowser out for lunch, but this, if this is found to be an ordinary condition of people with compromised immune systems, seems like a much better candidate.
I like my crazy assed conspiracy theory besets of all!!
Remember we had people inside the Woman Lab.
One of them was a CIA plant and per instructions leaked the virus as the team was pulled out.
Wait, so it’s a plant virus? Well now that’s really weird …
The withdrawal method inevitably leads to unanticipated difficulties.
That this is just shopping a message is right. That it's an excuse to let Trump, however, is, IMHO, wrong. It's much worse.
The subtext they're trying to sell is that "Trump woulda won if it wasn't for the Chinavirus." This is part of a coordinated plan to delegitimize the 2020 election and won't die as a talking point until after November 2024.
You telling me no coronavirus wouldn't have flipped 65k votes in PA, WI, AZ?
As a general rule, I don't indulge in counterfactuals. But these people certainly do.
There's a case to be made that the economy was possibly going to descend into a garden variety recession in any event at some point in 2020 (we were overdue, I'd argue), mainly because of accumulated uncertainties involving global trade, lower corporate profits, and a consequent drop off in capital spending.
In that parallel (no pandemic) universe, Trump might have done more poorly with a fair number of working class voters of all stripes, because he and the GOP wouldn't have possessed an issue that turned out to be (I believe) a fairly potent one for them last November. Namely, the idea that they were trying to "open up the economy" and "protect jobs" against the nefarious efforts of the socialist Democrats and their lockdowns. I don't think the fact that so many voters of color depend on sectors greatly affected by the pandemic is unrelated to Biden's weakness among these groups.
Oh, and Cheese & Crackers, can we stop obfuscating with statistics and just say we don't know? Anyone saying there's an x percent chance this thing originated in a lab (or in the wild) just makes them look like a fool trying to bafflegab with numbers.
Mr. PECOTA says, "Never!"
AAAARGH! You got me! You know some pretty obscure stuff.
Are animal origin and lab leak exclusive alternatives? Wuhan has a virology lab. It studies viruses. Human viruses, or animal ones too?
To study a virus, you have to keep it alive (in the relevant sense); this gives it chances to mutate spontaneously. There are also hairy research methods that encourage mutation. There are several ways the Wuhan virus lab could have played a part in the emergence of covid-19, with different degrees of culpability.
One we can rule out is deliberate design of a bioweapon. Biological warfare makes no military sense, even to Dr. Strangelove, and this particular virus is especially useless.
"Are animal origin and lab leak exclusive alternatives?"
This is the key problem with the whole discussion. The "lab leak" alternative tells you nothing useful anyway. It must be a stalking horse or ruse to revive a "lab created" theory. Or just noise.
Really useful is finding the virus' wild reservoir. Finding the real patient zero is interesting but the utility is identifying that wild reservoir. It's not easy - as far as I know the wild reservoir of Ebola remains unknown.
This is a response to James B. Shearer (June 12th at11:07 pm)
"... but you can’t offer a single thing. ..”
I said improve lab safety an obvious response to a serious lab accident (if in fact that is what this was).
I think the reason why were going around in circles is that we making two very different arguments. My argument is that the failures in the West, and particularly in this country, had nothing to do with inadequate knowledge and everything to do with how our society has fragmented and deteriorated. When we shift out attention (either deliberately or because we’ve been manipulated by Republicans) from confronting the uncomfortable root causes of our poor performance to a distant and pointless search for the origins of the virus we are diverting precious time and energy from reforming our society in such a way that it would once again be capable of handling a pandemic.
Specifically, knowing whether the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab wouldn’t improve our ability to improve the safety at that lab. The deficiencies in safety protocols and systems at the Wuhan lab have been known for years both to the Chinese government and to ourselves. Neither government could see it’s way clear to leave the path leading to an obvious disaster; we couldn’t muster the political will to increase funding for the lab in return for upgrades in safety and China couldn’t find the political will to require better standards (just as it couldn’t find the political will to halt the trade in exotic animal meats).
But the key thing is that we and they already knew how to improve lab safety. Everyone knew the correct level of technological and procedural safeguards but the Chinese government simply chose not to require them. And, given the limited capabilities of authoritarian governments in the area of good government, proving that the virus escaped from their lab would likely make them become even less forthcoming and even more intransigent.
We in the West, and especially in this country, need to explore the social strictures that caused our responses to go off of the rails. Anything else is a distraction that will allow us to avoid confronting our problems and will leave us vulnerable to the next pandemic.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/
https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/China-up-close/China-knew-of-lab-safety-concerns-from-last-year
"But the key thing is that we and they already knew how to improve lab safety. .."
This is just ignoring how things actually work. Airplane regulations are sometimes said to be "written in blood" because known problems often don't get addressed until they cause a serious accident. Similarly mine safety regulations are often enacted after a major mine disaster, fire safety regulations after something like the triangle shirtwaist fire and so on.
If the origin of the virus was proven to be from a lab, lab safety would get much more attention than it has in the recent past.
I don’t see why that would be the case in terms of public pressure since the lab in question is in China (where they knew of the deficiencies but chose to ignore them). Which is what has lead many on this site to argue that this “debate” about lab safety is merely a stalking horse for proponents of a new Cold War with China.
"I don’t see why that would be the case in terms of public pressure since the lab in question is in China (where they knew of the deficiencies but chose to ignore them). .."
The lab may have been in China but COVID has killed millions around the world. If a nuclear power plant accident in China had killed millions worldwide the public scrutiny of nuclear power plants would not be limited to those in China.
For another thing the Wuhan lab received funding from the US. If it was known to be more sloppy than most labs perhaps it (and any other bad labs) should not be receiving US funding.
And I have descriptions (perhaps biased) of experiments in the US which seem dangerous and basically pointless. Perhaps we should not be conducting such experiments.
To begin with, I don’t think you’re right about the additional scrutiny. The Chinese government has committed and is still committing numerous atrocities but remains impervious to outside pressure.
But, again, the goal here seems to be to relieve pressure on our government by shifting the pressure to the Chinese. Unless the next pandemic is an exact repeat of COVID-19, that would leave us dangerously vulnerable to making the same mistakes and experiencing an even more catastrophic result. We need to focus all of our attention and energy on learning about what went wrong in COVID-19 and rebuilding the social conventions that will allow us to effectively respond to a public health emergency.
"To begin with, I don’t think you’re right about the additional scrutiny. The Chinese government has committed and is still committing numerous atrocities but remains impervious to outside pressure."
I am talking about additional scrutiny of labs worldwide not just those in China. And there is no particular reason for China to want to continue conducting dangerous pointless experiments (if that is what they have been doing along with other labs worldwide).
"But, again, the goal here seems to be to relieve pressure on our government by shifting the pressure to the Chinese. .."
How is critically examining lab safety in the US (my goal) shifting pressure to the Chinese?
Useful opinion note from Washington Post from April 2020 - I had missed that.
In reading it it would seem that really we are more or less in the same level of knowledge as over a year ago although given the content evoked relative to the US diplo cables the idea of an accidental leak (and indeed it wouldn't be an either/or natural versus lab) from studies on the bat coronavirus pool seems perfectly plausible. Of course as most journos are both innumerate and uneducated in science, this is going to be lost in semi-hysteric articles.
"As many have pointed out, there is no evidence that the virus now plaguing the world was engineered; scientists largely agree it came from animals. But that is not the same as saying it didn’t come from the lab, which spent years testing bat coronaviruses in animals, said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley."
Interesting...
Talking heads approve: review lab safety protocols, just to be prudent.
Of course the feeds the weaponizing the uncertainty mission of the lab leak brigade...and means we are not discussing what we should have done. Nor are we preparing for the next pandemic. But the "lab leak" gets the headlines. The hard work of good governance, not so much.
AAAARGH! You got me! You know some pretty obscure stuff.
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