I think we all agree that the Chinese government isn’t to be trusted.
But there is a wide gap between shouldn’t be trusted, and should be mistrusted.
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Also, because entity A is not trustworthy and appears to be hiding something does not necessarily mean the claim X is what they are hiding.
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Right. I am not considering a lab escape unlikely because the Chinese government says that it’s unlikely, but because everything, but especially the appearance pattern of cases, point to the market as being the point where is started spreading.
This opinion piece masquerading as a scientific article commits the cardinal sin of this type of article. It sets out to prove that it was a leak. The entire article is based on the premise that it was a lab leak, and every piece of evidence is evaluated based on “how can I fit this into my forgone conclusion that there was a lab leak?”
That is not how science works, unless, evidently, somebody has buddies in NYT.
Every bit of “evidence” that the article presents has been debunked a dozen times and shame on NYT for publishing it.
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First how do you know she’s “unable to get it published in any peer/reviewed venue"? What is YOUR evidence for this affirmative statement?
Second, I read this as a deductive piece of reasoning --which is necessary since the Chinese government has shut down all reasonable inquiries into the evidence.
Why do you want to shut down any discussion of this topic with ad hominem attacks based on speculation-- for example your statement that “[it] also tells me that it is more important for her to get public fame than to actually figure out what is going on” ?
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This is admittedly negative evidence, but a database search for articles published by Alina Chan on covid produces some stuff that is purely editorial and not peer reviewed, plus an article in eLife (a journal with a, let us say, unique review process) describing a database that can be used to track covid genome variation. (ETA: I am not a researcher in the life sciences. I sincerely hope anyone here who is will conduct a more informed search to see if I’ve missed something.)
Given that she’s currently a postdoc, and the usual purpose of a postdoc position is to publish peer reviewed research to position oneself for career advancement, the lack of reviewed research on this topic is pretty glaring, especially since she’s been publicly talking about the topic since early 2020, and that’s plenty of time to publish something.
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The role of the virologist / scientist in this investigation ends with “the lab leak theory is plausible.”
Most crimes are proven with circumstantial evidence, of which there is a mountain in this case, including a lot that the NYT guest opinion piece didn’t mention. Trying to guard the verdict here with the sanctity of “science” would be like lawyers dismissing all circumstantial evidence and saying that only lawyers can make an assessment of innocence or guilt.
Multiple polls show 2 out of 3 people believe the lab leak theory, so this isn’t some kind of fringe conspiracy theory confined to one political party, or the extreme of one political party. A lot of people smell something fishy here, and rightly so.
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I don’t say the lab leak hypothesis is completely implausible but 1) I think it would be impossible to hide that the earliest cases were associated with the lab (unless literally NONE of those people got sick enough to need medical attention) and 2) I think there would have been whistleblowers by now. Yeah I get that it’s China and the govt will do anything to cover up and punish those who provide unauthorized info. That said, it generally happens in cases like this - even if anonymously. Until one of those two very simple things occur I tend to believe the natural spillover hypothesis - which has happened many, many times before. Again, I don’t discount the lab hypothesis completely but I think some very simple proofs haven’t been given while the entire theory right now hinges on very complicated pieces of evidence. Occam’s razor still applies and there are some really simple proofs that would make this whole scenario way more likely.
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No. Another example of people thinking they know more than scientists because they don’t know what they don’t know.
In the case of viruses, it is possible to trace the origins and subsequent movements of the virus using genetic mutations.
Most would agree that type of painstaking research is best left to scientists.
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In science one really doesn’t “believe” in anything, you accept or reject hypotheses based on evidence, evidence—not gut feelings, not uninformed opinions, not sketchy facebook posts.
For example I would tell my students that I did not “believe” in evolution, that I “accepted” evolution as the most plausible explanation of how species change over time based on the EVIDENCE.
Scientific theories change and evolve over time, as the evidence changes. Many still think atoms are mini-solar systems, based on the evidence from the 1910’s. Scientists have moved on from that theory, based on quantum physics.
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Lots of things are, from a scientific point of view, “plausible”.
However, lots of those plausible things are entirely wrong. Really, most of those plausible things are entirely wrong. So I don’t get why that’s even worth raising.
It would be nice, though perhaps too much to ask, that the vociferous opponents to the lab leak hypothesis actually address substance rather than attack the bona fides of the author and the NYTimes. As to that, I was under the impression that the Times went in for rigorous fact-checking, and if ever there was a piece that was going to get that treatment, it would be this one. I’m assuming that some of the commenters on this board have scientific chops of their own. If so, I would invite from them an actual substantive response to the following factual assertions:
–that the viruses most similar to the covid virus are to be found only in a specific species of bat found in habitats roughly 1,000 miles from Wuhan
–that scientists from the Wuhan lab had within two years of the outbreak travelled specifically to those sites to collect specimens and were known to be performing research in enhancing those specimens for infection of humans
–that bat corona spillover into humans is in itself rare
–that covid is the “only known virus to possess a furin cleavage site in its spike”
–that “not a single infected animal has ever been confirmed at the [Wuhan] market or in its supply chain” and that this is unlike the SARS outbreak of 2002 and the MERS outbreak of 2012
–that the safety procedures at the Wuhan lab were lax
There are other assertions, including the failure of the Chinese to cooperate in international investigation, but these are the ones that seemed to me to be especially telling. They are either right or wrong. The scientists on this board can adjudicate their accuracy. If the assertions are true, the case, while not proven, is powerful for a lab leak, as summarized toward the end of the article:
“The pandemic could have been caused by any of hundreds of virus species, at any of tens of thousands of wildlife markets, in any of thousands of cities, and in any year. But it was a SARS-like virus with a unique form of cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working with inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.”
The author doesn’t say the case is proved. Indeed, she calls for more study. She does make a case that deserves more than mockery.
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Her entire article is so riddled with logical fallacies that it wouldn’t make it past the first reviewer, much less the dreaded second reviewer. From strawman arguments to false dichotomies, this article is a showcase of logical fallacies. I have been a reviewer and I have peer-reviewed articles published. I am pretty familiar with the peer review system, and I don’t see any reputable peer-reviewed journal looking at her arguments as saying “these are sound arguments in favor of her claims”.
THAT is reason #1 why I’m saying that she couldn’t get it published, because it is full of logical fallacies.
Reason #2: there is literally nothing new in this opinion piece that wasn’t already in the February article in the WSJ and other such pieces, including her own book. It also suffers from the same weaknesses that every single one of those articles suffers from.
The article is unpublishable because every point has been posted on non-peer reviewed sites for months and even years.
For an article to be published it has to be novel results, not repeating the arguments of the same five people again and again, and again, and again. Repeating the same claims every six months doesn’t magically make them new and irrefutable. Nor does it magically make the article publishable.
Reason #3: Every point has been dealt with, every point has PEER REVIEWED articles which refute it.
So the article also isn’t publishable because every point has already been refuted.
For example - the Furin Cleavage site. It was answered MONTHS ago:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(23)00144-1/fulltext
By this point, it seems that she is just trying to drum up sales for her book, which may be lagging. WHo knows?
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What are your reasons to say that “lots of things” are wrong
Reread what I wrote. I was saying that lots of plausible things are wrong. This is trivially true. It is plausible that the saying “It’s raining cats and dogs” came from animals sliding off of rain-slicked thatched roofs in the medieval English countryside, and that’s why the claim is occasionally repeated online—but it’s entirely false, it predates the medieval period and actually (most likely) comes from ancient Germanic animal symbolism.
My further point is that most plausible claims are, in fact, wrong. Saying that the lab leak theory is plausible does not make a claim about factuality, but rather about whether it could be perceived as explanatory (but, crucially, not whether it actually is explanatory).
This is getting ridiculous.
Every six months or so, the same exact tired, disproved sets of “proof” will be trotted out under clickbait headlines.
“Definitive proof that the Chinese created SARS-CoV-2 in the lab in Wuhan!!!”
“Absolute, irrefutable proof that the SARS-CoV-2 was created by the Chinese in the Wuhan lab!!!”,
“12 True, Factual Reasons That The SARS-CoV-2 Was Created In The Wuhan Lab, And Wait Until You Read #7!!!”
Each and every one will present the exact same arguments, and the same voices will tout these old refuted arguments as New And Improved Proof.
Maybe they believe that repetition increases the truthfulness of the arguments.
More likely, it will be to sell a book (or to increase sales of an older book), to distract people from the failures of their government to respond to the pandemic (multiple governments in multiple countries failed), or to drum up anti-China or anti-Chinese sentiments.
Please wake me up when somebody actually has proof of a lab escape that hasn’t been refuted half-a-dozen times.
The preponderance of evidence is that it was a jump to humans among people who hunted or raised animals like raccoon dogs, and they started infecting people when they came to the wet market, because that was where the people who hunted and kept these animals congregated. It could also have made the leap in the wet market.
It is also clear that the Chinese government is trying to hide the incompetence of local, provincial and central governments in dealing with the pandemic throughout its early stages by making it difficult to collect any useful data.
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In any traditional newspaper, stuff on the Opinion page is much less rigorously fact-checked than non-opinion news articles.
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@ucbalumnus , I quite agree that opinion pieces would not be vetted for the correctness of their opinions, but assertions of fact within them would surely be checked for accuracy. Do you disagree? That process would seem especially likely in a piece like this, which would not only be very controversial but bound to irritate many, perhaps most, of the paper’s readers. The facts would be checked especially closely, probably over many weeks before publication. The Times is the paper of record, after all, and it values its reputation. Do you disagree? --Of course none of this means that the Times is coming out for the lab leak theory.
@MWolf , I get it that you don’t think there’s anything new here. I expect you’re right about that and about its unpublishability in a peer-reviewed journal. Audience is everything. It is making its case for readers of the country’s national newspaper. You seem to believe that’s illegitimate in a scientist, a descent into the contemptible bog of addressing in intelligible terms one’s fellow citizens.
I also get it that you aren’t convinced that there’s anything even to look at here - not three years agon, not now, not ever. I suppose it must be for that reason that you address none of the substantive assertions made in the paper or in my own summary of the salient facts. You say that they are “riddled with fallacies”? Would it be beneath you to enumerate some of these? The facts asserted, if they are accurate, add up to an argument, a quite good one. Not a “smoking gun,” but a prima facie case, one that needs to be answered. Peremptorily ruling all discussion out of bounds doesn’t do the trick.
The closest you get to substance is your citation of Whittaker’s paper regarding the furin-cleavage site on the covid spike protein. You say that it refutes Chan’s assertion that “out of the hundreds of SARS-like virurses catalogued by scientists, [the covid virus] is the only one known to possess a furin cleavage site on its spike.” (This is important because that was the peculiar characteristic that makes covid so transmissible and was the very thing the Wuhan lab was attempting to achieve.) But Whittaker’s paper in my reading doesn’t say this at all. I am open to being corrected on this if you are able to direct me to such an assertion. However, I take the article as asserting that because of the dynamic nature of FCS natural selection could be and most probably was “the driving factor” in its evolution to the spike. “The spike is adaptable and the FCS clearly makes a difference, but - in the end - it is no smoking gun.” That is, FCS is on the spike, and it makes a difference, but it could have got their naturally. That isn’t far from Alina Chan’s own conclusion, which acknowledges that “it is possible that the furin cleavage site could have evolved naturally.” However, she also believes we need to consider that the Wuhan lab was working in the two years prior to the pandemic in putting that essential element in place on the spike. You don’t deny any of this. Perhaps you will say that drawing any conclusion from it is a “logical fallacy.” I say only that the coincidence is too great to be ignored. Ignoring inconvenient facts is not science.
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The above is the kind of speculative assertion that may or may not be true (but is not an explicit lie that would fail a fact check if such were done), and is common among opinion writers who want to lead (or mislead) the reader toward the opinion writer’s desired conclusion. Selective inclusion of some facts and omission of others is also common. I.e. an opinion writer can mislead the readers without having to explicitly lie.
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