> A Norwegian virologist has made claims about the non-natural origins of the new coronavirus. These claims were, reportedly, in an earlier draft of the paper, and Dr Sørensen has since repeated them to Norwegian press. > The final version of the research paper, which has undergone peer review and been accepted for publication in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, doesn’t actually make any claims about whe…
> The scientific community widely agrees that the virus was not artificially engineered. Artificially engineered isn't really the question; the questions are 'is this a lab escape?' and 'if this is a lab escape, did the virus work so well on mammals pre-experiment?'. The scientists have a massive incentive not to believe that the virus is a lab escape until the evidence is overwhelming. This is a global disaster, if…
You can't look at the set of circumstances that lead up to this, factor in that a lab escape is likely, and make an honest attempt at projecting what additional controls may be rolled out on the field of virological research, and come away from that blind to the fundamental conflict of interest this may generate in people in the field.
Hell, I know researchers who can't even imagine why anyone would do the kind of work described in these documents in the first place, yet nevertheless we have the papers to show they did. We know the equipment and techniques to do the deed exist. That they were all in the same geographical and temporal location. If you don't suspect spooky action at a distance, or endorse magical thinking, you have to come to 2 very uncomfortable conclusions.
The first: technical know-how, tools, and people to wield them existed within the same space, at the same time. The outbreak started in close proximity to this potential causal nexus. This was paired with seemingly anomalous behavior in the initial response to said outbreak, and. It is politically intractable to get a good first person inspection of what was going on at the early stages of the pandemic response due to official acts of censure and destruction of evidence.
The second: Everyone who you'd defer to decide whether or not it's reasonable is also liable to place a variety of unpleasantly enhanced controls on their field as a consequence of giving an affirmative answer.
It'd be like asking the fox whether the lack of security measures on the coop may have had something to with the sudden sharp decline in the population of living chickens. We already know what that answer will look like.
We all look at each other and assume the best of intentions, but even history tells us the best of intentions have a way of finding their ways to very unpleasant outcomes in the presence of enough cogs without the full picture of what is going on, and those with enough of a picture to know what is going on are infrequently in that position due to a willingness to cut their own throats by admitting why they are really doing what they are. That's just the Machiavellian or politically inclined ones.
You've got Oppenheimer's and Teller's who did research just for the fundamental beauty they saw in the math, and understanding, and power conferred by the knowledge gained from their work.
I can't be so crazy as to be the only one to see the ridiculousness in taking the very people with the most lose as being perfectly impartial. I can't be the only candid or meta-cognitive enough to realize that at some level there needs to be a degree of salt taken to any assertion that a lab couldn't have been involved and we should all just stop even considering it.