The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

Full disclosure: I do not think this virus was engineered I do not think this was deliberately released

I do think the Chinese were studying this virus in the lab, not engineering it, but studying it. I do think it was the result of a lab accident, a technician tried to cover up an accident/carelessness in order to avoid getting punished or fired, normal human behavior.

HOW DID THE CHINESE KNOW THEY HAD A NEW VIRUS WHEN THEY ONLY HAD A HANDFUL OF CASES????????

Covid-19 presents like the flu, without a test you don't can't know if it's the flu or Covid-19, but the Chinese knew they had a new virus in late Nov, early Dec when there were only a handful of cases. HOW DID THEY KNOW???

The only way to tell if you've got something new is because: a) unique symptoms b) a statistically significant increase in cases c) a statistically significant number of deaths

In the early day of Covid-19 you had none of these present, with only a handful of cases NOBODY WOULD HAVE SUSPECTED ANYTHING WAS AMISS.

I can see it now, "Hey, I'm thinking that we have these flu cases, in flu season, and there isn't anything remarkable about the cases but I think they are the result of a new virus, so we should raise a red flag and swing the government into action." Highly unlikely.

There is one other way that you know you've got something new: d) you know something that no one else knows, like there was a lab accident.

How did the Chinese know they had something new, when they had no evidence or indication that something new was circulating?

This is the only question that needs to be answered. Nothing else. If there isn't a reasonable and logical answer to how the Chinese knew they had a new virus with only a few cases that looked just like the flu, and no other information, then it stands to reason they knew something else.

What I think happened.

A lab tech had an accident or was careless, and exposed themselves to the virus they were studying in the lab. The tech didn't report the incident because they didn't want to be punished or fired. The tech incorrectly assumed that everything was fine, but then got sick. Then when some other lab workers got sick, the safety people at the lab got involved and they learned what really happened, and they pushed the panic button, quietly. The rest is history.

As a blame-free explanation of why SARS-CoV-2 become so widespread, I think the parent comment is basically correct. From [0], "SARS, caused by a respiratory-tract virus, also failed [to become a pandemic], although it came close to causing a pandemic after its emergence in late 2002. It killed almost 800 people worldwide, but was rapidly stopped mainly because infected people developed symptoms quickly." In contrast, Covid-19 spreads pre-symptomatically, and infections are frequently mild or asymptomatic. The test-trace-isolate containment strategy, such that it was, relied on people acting in response to symptoms. People without symptoms can't do that, and if someone has what feels like a normal cold they're just not very likely to take special precautions, at least early on when the disease is rare and there's still a chance of containment. The pandemic response we prepare for next time needs to compensate for this, such as by adopting proactive disease surveillance or increasing efforts in other areas.

As for the pandemic not being that bad, we did get lucky in a couple ways: it was possible to rapidly develop many vaccines, and the mortality rate was relatively low. Covid, disturbingly, was sort of the least bad version of a global pandemic, at least compared to the alternative scenarios outlined in warnings (e.g., [0]) over the past several decades.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2002527/

>The next time someone asks us to trust the science, our response should be "okay, but can I trust the scientists?"

Originally, trust in scientists was not required. Because anyone could have repeated the experiment and should see results consistent with what the scientists were saying.

This is where the credibility of science come from and it made people's trust in science grow to a kind of blind faith. But then some point, experiments became too large to be attempted by anyone. This along with entities like "consensus" and "reputation", that can reject any conflicting results, enabled entities that control all of these to have a veto power on scientific truth.

This is our current situation. And I am not sure people recognise the true danger of this situation. This is the kind of power that in holy men held in ancient times, where you could make people to do mass murders and other atrocities in the name of god. So I think it is very dangerous. It might not be that bad as of now, but we are in that path.

One solution to this problem is to recognise and reduce the trust in "science" that is a result such collaboration.

May be we can do it by using a measure of how easily verifiable a result is. For example, if something is verifiable by anyone in this planet, it should have a measure of 1. And if it is only verifiable by a single entity, then it should have a measure of zero. If it is verifiable by a few entities, then it should be somewhere between.

>The bottom line is that the evidence we have at this time points to nature as the most probable origin..

Some scientists think otherwise, quite strongly in the opposite direction, it seems..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeW5sI-R1Qg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbbJaaMG7Bs

I do think many people who write on this topic have a conscious or unconscious bias in favor of the natural origin hypotehsis. You provided one example of such bias. Here's a couple more:

- Chinese nationalists (although they rarely author publications outside of China) - people who expressed strong opinion on this matter a year ago (based on the information they had then), and now don't like to admit they were wrong even in the face of new evidence. - people who think the lab origin hypothesis is an example of anti-Chinese racism, and therefore take the opposite the side to fight racism.

On the other hand, I would argue that even more people who write on this topic outside of China are biased in favor of the lab origin hypothesis. This is because many groups of people would (consciously or subconsciously) like to use this opportunity to blame the Beijing government for this huge disaster. Examples:

- those who dislike the communist ideology (e.g., those whose loved ones died to wars with the communists, or those who just dislike authoritarianism on general principles) - those of China's neighbors who dislike the Beijing government's aggressive policy towards them (India, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam) - those who dislike the Chinese in general, for racist reasons - Americans who don't want to see China surpass the US in global power

These biases are present even among journalists and scientists, since many of them cannot (or don't even bother trying to) separate their feelings as regular people from their role as unbiased reporters or researchers.

Overall, this means it's very hard to take seriously anything written on this topic. Perhaps I would tend to trust:

- An expert who has been consistently friendly to Bejing but argues in favor of the lab origin hypothesis; or - An expert who has been consistently unfriendly to Beijing but argues in favor the natural origin hypothesis.

One of the rare examples of such people is Jeffrey Sachs, who chairs the Lancet Covid-19 origins commission. He has been at least somewhat friendly to Beijing (well as friendly as you can be in the West without committing a professional suicide). And yet, he says that there's at least enough evidence that both hypotheses are worth pursuing (that is, that it's not 100% obvious that it was a natural origin). Unfortunately, he's not an expert on this topic (he's an economist). Still, I would follow his comments with interest. https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/finding-the-origin...