- The move was a public indication that his administration takes seriously the possibility that the virus was accidentally leaked from a lab...
Why wouldn’t they take that possibility seriously?
I think what that sentence shows is how media bias affects the consideration of what is believed to be possible. Serious People only consider natural origin a serious possibility, so anyone why suggests otherwise can't be a Serious Person. It's part anti-Trump and part-echo chamber, I think.
Interesting. I didn’t read it that way. But I see what you’re saying. I, for one, would be willing to bet it originated in a lab. Not with malice intent.
I'm not a biologist or immunologist or any -ologist at all. But I have read a few very detailed articles about the components of SARS-COV-2, and there are two key elements to the virus that make it particularly targeted toward humans. The thing is, we see these things in the wild first. Someone notices them, documents this weird variation in this one gene or protein or whatever, and later on someone finds it elsewhere, and suddenly there's a Patient 0 where it jumps from the original species and moves into its first human host. The problem is, there is no evidence for these two elements in the wild. And the only place they occur is in labs, when researchers are testing the limits of a specific biological function or element. So yes, it is possible that the virus existed, whole and transmissible, in a wild bat or pangolin population somewhere, and a person got infected. Statistics say it can happen, probability says it is extremely unlikely, and sometimes these two lines cross. But there is no Patient 0. There's no mapping of the virus in the wild prior to the outbreak. Personally, I've always been on the "wild variant, made jump to humans" side of this. But after reading these articles recently, where biologists and virologists point out how entirely unlikely it is for these two things to change spontaneously in the wild, simultaneously, to create exactly what we see in humans today......... well.... I think I need to step across the line into the "escaped from a lab" rather than "wild variant" school of thought.
Two things I learned from this Journal article (and I thought there was already plenty of damning evidence): 1. There were at least 3 Wuhan lab workers who became seriously ill in September 2019; 2. The Wuhan lab erased their entire online, open source catalog of virus sequences also in Sept 2019. Apparently the stated reason for the delisting was that it was prone to cyberattacks.But there is no Patient 0.
Let's be clear: For over a year now, every biologist on this site has been patiently and elaborately explaining the likelihood of an inadvertent leak While you've been enthusiastically posting Vox articles that are devoid of science. You're on the downslope. So that's something. But when you say You could do a quick headcount of -ologists in the conversation before adding ___________________________________ There's no Patient Zero for AIDS, either. No Patient Zero for Hep C, no Patient Zero for MERS, no Patient Zero for Ebola. What there is is a lot of circumstantial evidence that is being protected from investigation, which is not the case for Hep C, MERS or Ebola.
I'm not a biologist or immunologist or any -ologist at all.
But
I post the articles I read that I think have some merit, and I never post without comments. I want to learn. This type of feedback - and deeper reading - help me to mature my understanding of the problem space, and where the fulcrum points are in each argument. And I only do Hubski in my spare time when I need something other than work to focus on for a bit... a distraction to freshen up my mind. So nothing I post here is intended to be exhaustive or authoritative. (Although I do tend to have an "absolutist" way of writing that makes it seem I am much more married to a stance than I actually am.) Writing that way also assuages the pain from the marketing bullshit I spend much of my time writing... :-)
To take another beat on that: This move is going to piss China off so badly, that my guess is that the administration already has the evidence they need to make a reasonably certain conclusion. Trump, unfortunately, lacked credibility so nobody paid attention. Biden has no such problem.
The about-face on the lab leak theory felt very orchestrated to me. In particular the public finger pointing linking the scientists decrying the theory and their involvement in gain of function research and those that funded them also promoting a zoonotic cause. There is a juicy rumour floating around recently that a high level Chinese intelligence officer has defected. I can't find any reliable sources talking about it, but haven't looked very hard either. https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2021/06/17/breaking-chinese-defector-confirmed-as-top-counterintelligence-official-n398374 https://www.thedailybeast.com/rumors-of-us-secretly-harboring-top-china-official-dong-jingwei-swirl This move is going to piss China off so badly, that my guess is that the administration already has the evidence they need to make a reasonably certain conclusion.
It's an interesting angle, but I would be more confident were the source something other than Red State, a notorious right wing rag. They can't resist conjecturing that one of the main pieces of intel that the alleged defector has provided has to do with Hunter Biden's computer. Total lack of credibility.
The whole thing sounds too fanciful to me, I just remembered your comment when I read about it. I think it might be clumsy US disinformation - the dailybeast article mentions the rumours spreading through the anti-CCP Chinese media. Dong’s defection was raised by Chinese officials last March at the Sino-American summit in Alaska, according to Dr. Han Lianchao, a former Chinese foreign ministry official before defecting after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.