OK, so it isn’t dumb or racist to think that the lab leak is a reasonable enough possibility to warrant a comprehensive investigation. But it is dumb and racist to think that the lab leak is the most likely cause? What’s the threshold? Is 40% lab leak still racist? 30%?
In any case, as a practical matter it doesn’t make any difference at all – Tedros and I want the exact same thing: an exhaustive and transparent investigation into all the possibilities. I assume everyone else ITT wants the same thing? I’m honestly not sure what the fuss is all about.
Yeah, comparing the results in the WHO report to the SARS outbreak is very instructive. In SARS, 40% of the animal traders tested had SARS antibodies, and they found SARS in a couple of different animals. At the Huanan market, no vendor that sold semi-domesticated animals tested positive for Covid (I think they only tested 15 because there weren’t very many of those vendors at that market). Then around 5% of the other vendors tested positive, with vegetable and poultry vendors having the highest incidence. Not really the pattern you’d expect to see if that’s where the jump took place.
Projecting no answer to this question, by the way, because either answer puts this guy in a tough spot. If no, then he disagrees with Tedros and the WHO that it needs to be carefully looked at. If yes, then what the hell is all this fuss over? We would want the same thing, what the heck difference does it make if I think it’s a bit more likely? And all these probability assignments are totally trash anyway because there’s so little good information. And that’s the important thing, we need a lot more information and study of all these possibilities so we can actually figure out what happened.
I figured you were talking about the ownable digital whatevers that people are talking about. I can’t afford a fancy image like that though. Maybe someday.
I mean, you didn’t actually answer the question. Is the lab leak hypothesis a reasonable enough possibility that there needs to be a comprehensive and transparent investigation into it?
You do get that there is a difference between being in favor of investigating all possibilities, and arguing without evidence that one possibility, involving a conspiracy by the Chinese, is likely? Like, you do see the difference, right?
I honestly don’t get it. Like if you and CN both want a rigorous investigation into the lab leak hypothesis, then that’s exactly what I want. Most of why I think the lab leak is pretty likely (besides coming up with nothing after extensive animal testing) is China’s reticence to allowing such an independent investigation to happen. And surely you don’t dispute that if there was a lab accident, this is exactly what China would do: stonewall any attempt at that type of investigation. But who knows, maybe that investigation will happen. I have my doubts though.
And, interestingly enough, China allowing that sort of independent investigation would drastically lower the probability that it was a lab accident, even before the results of the investigation were in.
I did answer it, and it’s hard to believe that you don’t understand. A comprehensive and transparent investigation into covid looks into various lab hypotheses. No reasonable investigation starts off with eliminating hypotheses without looking into them.
That notably isn’t an admission that a lab leak is ‘likely’ in any way. There’s also a fair amount of evidence in this area, and it does not support the lab leak hypothesis.
Work will continue on the origin of covid, but it’s a far harder question to answer definitively than you’re willing to consider. For example, it took over a decade (not a few months), to definitively determine the source of SARS. It’s going to take time.
It was 3 January 2020, and Supaporn Wacharapluesadee was standing by, awaiting a delivery. Word had spread that there was some kind of respiratory disease affecting people in Wuhan, China, and with the Lunar New Year approaching, many Chinese tourists were headed to neighbouring Thailand to celebrate. Cautiously, the Thai government began screening passengers arriving from Wuhan at the airport, and a few select labs – including Wacharapluesadee’s – were chosen to process the samples to try to detect the problem.
Wacharapluesadee is an expert virus hunter. She runs the Thai Red Cross Emerging Infectious Disease-Health Science Centre in Bangkok. Over the past 10 years, she’s been part of Predict, a worldwide effort to detect and stop diseases that can jump from non-human animals to humans.
She and her team have sampled many species. But their main focus has been on bats, which are known to harbour many coronaviruses.
You keep repeating this, but it’s obviously wrong. Or rather, it’s half true and irrelevant. They found SARS-infected animals and SARS-infected animal traders in a few months. That was extremely strong evidence that one of those animals was the intermediate animal and that the animal trade was the path into the population. The outbreak started in November 2002 and that paper was written, peer reviewed, and published by September 2003. The original reservoir was not identified, but that’s irrelevant. If that same sort of evidence was found in the Wuhan markets – infected animals and animal traders, but no idea where the natural reservoir was – no one would be talking about a lab leak. Because that would be extremely compelling evidence of a natural spillover event.
