So I was looking through the emails obtained by GOP members of Congress via FOIA and there is some not great stuff in there. Firstly here are a couple of virologists expressing serious doubt that the virus has a natural origin:
Farrar, Mr. 50/50 Lab Origin, put his name to this:
The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.
I donât at this point think that COVID came from a lab, but this does substantiate the idea that early in the pandemic, the lab leak theory was denounced as conspiracy for entirely political reasons.
What interested me in that paper was the section âEVIDENCE FROM GENOMIC STRUCTURE AND
ONGOING EVOLUTION OF SARS-CoV-2â.
If your response to any mainstream papers about the origin of the virus is âbut what about conflicts of interest thoâ weâre going to have a bad time. As I posted above, I agree that early in the pandemic the lab leak theory was unjustifiably dismissed for political reasons, but that doesnât make it true.
What you posted reads a lot like more âscientists keep an open mind while they figure stuff outâ while denouncing bad faith conspiratorial bullshit to me. We talked a bunch about those concerns early on, they were examined and didnât pan out⌠openly.
The assumption that the piece was written earlier or signed onto earlier is nonsense. Two weeks was a massive amount of time for new information then.
Youâre collecting a bunch of bat viruses and studying them, growing them in bats or mice or I donât know, doing all sorts of scientist shit. Then one of them infects you with covid. Debatable if thatâs âcreated in a labâ (depends on the experiment) but close enough. A lab accident.
collecting bats from the wild, bringing them into a lab, and finding out one of them has a virus that accidentally infects others and spreads is 100% not âcreating in a labâ
working on one thing and finding a different unexpected application is different than accidentally creating a virus. like you arenât going to be trying to transmute lead into gold and, whoops, whatâs this? a virus???
One theory that has floated around is that the virus was turned into something capable of causing a pandemic accidentally via serial passage in human cells while studying it.
I donât think itâs this really, since nobody mainstream has ever alleged that the virus was deliberately created. People are just wired to believe this sort of thing. This is a variation on what is called âproportionality biasâ, which is the tendency to believe that big events must have big causes. For example, in one study, people who were told that a plane crashed and everyone died were more likely to suppose that it was the result of a terrorist attack than if they were told that a plane crashed and there were many survivors. Likewise, people are uncomfortable with a global pandemic being kicked off by something as banal as incidental contact with a bat or someone in a lab screwing up. The cause has to be grander than that in order to be proportionate with the consequences.
A huge chunk of the right-wing derposphere has been pushing this theory. Thatâs the whole point of the âgain of functionâ hysteria Rand Paul has been chuffing over. Itâs been amplified all over social media.
