Happy Friday!
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A few beers here as itâs my son Tomâs birthday (no offence meant by my posting)
good to see we all survived covid (thanks to my excellent poasts offering early information)
rest assured I shall be here for bird flu
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the diffusion model looks to have different distribution than that of a process which would characterize as intra-mamalian.
Good critique of the two on the recent Decoding the Gurus podcast. Itâs hid in the middle of a long discussion of Bill Maher but I found it useful to counter the Harris podcast.
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WSJ:
The Energy Department joined the FBI in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other U.S. agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.
The Energy Department made its judgment with âlow confidence,â according to people who have read the classified report.
Despite the agenciesâ differing analyses, the update reaffirmed an existing consensus between them that Covid-19 wasnât the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program, the people who have read the classified report said.
Low confidence is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Nate is already dunking on science.
https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1629876115480141824?s=46&t=LFh-Q7UgkiDUcDa-wPTs0w
Itâs more than that. Actual government position is not lab leak, the wsj just frames it as if the doe is special here⌠and itâs not. Complete nothing burger
Ok, low confidence plus the wsj doing the final lift.
Big if true
Nate is somehow both the Jamie Gold of politics and stats âmodelingâ. Impressive.
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He could also be up more in poker for his lifetime than Jamie Gold.
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As I said, I am no expert but my take is that natural origin is a favourite but not a huge one. It doesnât seem like lab leak is only relegated to the nutty fringe although some of its strongest defenders do fit in the nutty category.
https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1629938461498064896
The whole thread is good, but thatâs the crux. No progenitor virus has ever been identified in the WIV lab or any lab. The people ranting about âgain of functionâ research or whatever as a way this could have been made have basically no idea how viral research gets done. No one is creating viruses ex nihilo. Seldom is more than a single thing changed at a time, except perhaps by random mutagenesis. Covid was more than a few edits away from anything anyone was working with anywhere. Maybe some day someone will find a virus someone was working on that was similar enough to covid that itâs plausible enough that someone could have edited it into covid, but that hasnât been found. The lab leak hypothesis isnât likely until that happens.
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It would be nice if the DoE/FBI/State Department/Mike Pompeo and associated national intelligence agencies would share like any bit of this bombshell evidence with the scientific community.
Not only has no progenitor virus been identified, but they traced covid back genetically among the earliest sick people and still had two lineages, which strongly suggests multiple animal crossovers.
It may not be fringe, but it remains unsupported
Nate is still dunking today.
Nate needs to stick to the only thing he has expertise in:
Burrito Brackets
Department of Energy: Climate change is definitely 100% real.
Lotsa People: Oh, fuck you.
Department of Energy: With low confidence we think COVID may have been caused by a lab leak.
The same people: SCOREBOARD SUCK IT LIBS
For me personally, Iâm not a science-talkinâ guy. So I tend to defer to the experts on things like climate change, vaccines, etc. In the case of the origins of COVID, it seems that there are credible people who believe different things, is that correct? Not all the lab leak people are crackpots right? So based on that I am prepared to make the bold statement: I donât know about the origins of COVID.
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