Excellent write up by Vanity Fair.
I don't remember dismissing the lab leak theory per se, but rather, taking it in as one of a massive spew of crackpot theories all coming from more or less one source. I'm reminded of the children's story, "The boy who cried wolf."
Looking back in hindsight, I wonder how we could have picked out the lab leak theory as being worthy of consideration, given the context. And whether a more scientifically minded public and government would have faced that dilemma.
That doesn't mean it cannot be true. It does mean that after 3 years and several thousand fully documented outright lies, the presumption of truth was no longer being granted.
And this differs from "new media" how? You don't like what certain social media and "old media orgs" did? Fine, no problem. There's no media on the planet that doesn't do this to some extent, least of all contemporary conservative US media outlets.
Whether you consider what was done to Trump and others regarding their posts/speeches about COVID and cures for it as censorship depends a lot on how you see the world. Your mileage may vary (because mine certainly does).
Even so, in the intervening period, even when Trump was still president, several US agency reports concluded that the virus likely did not originate from a lab, and one assumes that they had more information than anybody else.
Whatever your recollection of "rank-and-file scientists" attitudes is, the narrative on record is to the contrary.
I used these three pieces of evidence to come to this conclusion for myself last year.
1. Wuhan is the epicenter of the outbreak.
2. Wuhan has a lab that works with bat covid.
3. China initally tooks steps to hide the virus from the world until that was no longer possible.
>several US agency reports concluded that the virus likely did not originate from a lab.
Keep that in mind next time.
It being engineered as a bioweapon is in the realm of a crackpot theory, but it being just a poorly contained natural research project was fairly reasonable. Some prominent people mixed the two up on purpose and eventually the whole thing - both ideas - got labeled a crackpot theory by people who just saw some headlines.
Here's some good science sources:
- Comprehensive reddit post [0] from a virologist (table of contents, also linked as a 34 page pdf), referencing over 150 sources, with several sections going into the details of the genetic evidence, also interesting to read the comments.
- Here's an article [1] talking about different origin theories and the related genetic evidence, having a section I was interested in about the cleavage site and o-linked glycan, something apparently that has to develop in an animal with an immune system (this is something I haven't seen any lab-made proponents speak to yet).
- Lastly, here is an article [2], much more scientific than the Vanify Fair article, in favor of a lab connection (unfortunately, for me, this article doesn't mention the o-linked glycan, nor the genetic evidence that covid-19 may have originated hundreds of miles from Wuhan [3])
That's as far as I've gotten so far following the science. I'm hoping there will be more virologist commentary as more data comes out, perhaps something based on the full WHO report/data that I heard was released last week. I'd like to think that science will give us more definite answers eventually. It could take years.
I'm not so much interested in conjecture from politicians and journalists. I'm really taken back by all the inaccuracies, half-truth's, innuendo, and conspiracy theories floating around. Are we all led so easily by the headlines they feed us?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
[1] https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3
[2] https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
[3] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
Or the idea that when COVID first hit it was the conspiracy theorists screaming the loudest about the lab leak origin and given the sudden interest of the US in xenophobia and specifically the anti-Chinese sentiment(hint: it’s not that sudden), it would have potentially resulted in violence against Asian people. And at the same time the crossover theory was pretty much as likely if not more based on what we knew then. Now that more info has been gathered everyone is doing an about-face on covering this issue since it’s become a serious conversation and not a crackpot fringe theory shared with the intent to spread hate.
Maybe what had happened was that initially we knew little and everyone was a bit panicked. Then the crackpots started spreading FUD via the most convenient COVID origin theory to their message. The old media mostly ignored this, dismissing it swiftly without giving it more airtime. Social media was too busy with conspiracy theorist and right wing activists spreading the lab leak theory so they viewed it as false (if 99% of the time what a person says is a lie, why would this particular thing be true?). Then articles like these revived that theory with new information. Most people took in the information as just “hey new data” and left it at that. A few people who were spreading the conspiracy theory version of this story felt vindicated while simultaneously upset because their low quality memes were not really allowed while new the WSJ, the NYT, and Vanity Faire is getting front page treatment because of course excellent writing is more compelling than some guy on YouTube angrily vaping in his mother’s basement.
Did Kevin Drum say otherwise?
There were a lot of threads to pull, and some of us were following it. For example, this video was posted in April 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU
I understand not taking his word for anything. But it's such an important issue. To just dismiss it and not try to investigate it, even at the highest levels of our government and public health bureaucracies, strikes me as negligent at best.
But this is the opposite of what's happened.
“The WIV, and Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi’s lab group, are extremely well-respected in the virology community. As well respected as many US scientists.”
In fact this person does jackshit to methodologically prove that this lab was not run sloppily, just throws pedigree and “trust us we know she’s legit” crap. Let me tell you the majority of scientists anywhere should not be trusted in their ability maintain sterile techniques or keeping their lab secure. You can look at the vials that floated out of Galveston utmb in a flood, or the cdc shipping precontaminated Covid test kits because their techs didn’t use filter tips.
This is not just this PhD, it’s basically 97% of all scientists. Any statement that undermines the image that they don’t know what they are doing is taken personally with great prejudice.
The Reddit resource is great to suggest that no one deliberately engineered or even grew this virus. But it does nothing to disprove that they just leaked a sample they excavated in a cave and brought to the lab. And by combining both and collectively arguing against any malice or stupidity from these researchers they are not doing anyone a favor in trusting them. Also a real scientist would never categorically disregard a hypothesis without incontrovertible proof, which this and every other kiss-ass scientist does defending this wuhan cabal.
These same people ridicule the Space Force, for example, despite it being a reorganization of US Space Command that had bipartisan approval years before Trump even ran for office.
A broken clock is still right twice a day.
This is kind of how I remember things too I think, I feel like I'm being gaslit by the internet lately reading how certain some people are.
I guess I don't quite follow with how people would think that it being a weapon that spread intentionally or unintentionally is the base case.
I’ve always said, focusing on the origins of “who was responsible” rather than dealing with containment first is counterproductive.
By actually considering the idea based on the information available, rather than judging solely on the messenger. Things we've known for most of the past year now:
* The wet-market was likely not the origin of the outbreak. Earliest identified positive cases predate the market outbreak and have no connection with it.
* The lab in question was very near to the wet market where the largest outbreak occurred.
* The lab in question specifically researched coronaviruses in bats.
* The closest match to the SARS-COV-2 virus we've found in bats in nature are bats that live over a 1000 kilometers away from Wuhan. However, these bats are among those being researched at the virology lab there.
* The lab in question was the subject of concern among international inspectors years before the outbreak, who stated that they believed the lab didn't meet necessary safety and containment protocols, and didn't have the staff to do so.
* US intelligence agencies have been signalling that the Chinese government has been covering up the origins of the lab.
* The CCP themselves have demonstrated that they are actively working against the discovery of the origins of the disease. Soon after the wet-market outbreak, they closed the wet-market, prevented any international scientists and experts from examining it, and over their objections, purged all animals there and sanitized the entire place, making it impossible to determine what might have led to an outbreak at the market. They also cracked down internally on whistleblowers who said the situation in Wuhan early in the pandemic was much worse than being broadcasted. Finally, they have simultaneously insisted on the natural origin of the virus, while also pushing theories that it originated from non-Chinese sources, such as China, South Asian pangolin black market traders, and the US Army.
* The CCP prevented WHO investigators from actually entering the country to look for origins of the virus for nearly a year, didn't give them full access when they arrived, and the resulting report was declared largely useless by the international community immediately upon its release.
* All people claiming that the lab-leak theory had been "debunked" were actually referring to the theory that it was genetically engineered, which is not the same thing at all.
None of this proves a lab leak, but its strong enough circumstantial evidence that it is at least as plausible as any other origin. Virtually the only new information to have come out is that some of the workers in the lab got sick with Covid-like symptoms in November.
If you swapped China with the US and this lab with the CDC, people would have taken it far more seriously. Imagine a worldwide pandemic started down the street from the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, AND no one could find the origin of the virus but the closest match was in an animal native to Northern Ohio, AND that animal also happened to be at the CDC for studying the type of virus in question, AND whistleblowers had mentioned concerns about procedures there previously, AND the US government did everything in their power to prevent people from investigating. People would have zeroed in on the theory from day 1.
There was always plenty of reason to see it as worthy of consideration, and for those who weren't judging solely based on "Does Trump think this is true or not", they did. The biggest reason it wasn't was solely due to the fact that our media/social media can't function outside the scope of our current political/cultural wars. Information is being judged less and less on its own merits, and more and more on who is providing it.
Nothing was revived with any new information. The Venn diagram that includes the circle of people who were following and investigating this, and the circle of conspiracy theorist Trump supporters, did not ever overlap.
One of these circles was about some bill gates funded bioweapon to implant 5G or some nonsense which they suspected was being done in WIV.
The other was scientists who have known about the work at WIV for years, not based on suspicion, but based on the papers they kept releasing, media interviews, sequencing the genome, and doing science.
But you all TDS’d so hard that you wrote the latter off as the former, and the media went along with it.
It isn’t even a conspiracy theory. It had nothing to do with collusion by tech giants. Their hyper partisan employees just fell into the same TDS trap and decided “lab = conspiracy misinformation, no ifs ands or buts” and started purging people talking about it.
The Vanity Fair article is actually quite poorly researched and written, and misattributes much of the source and timeline, but at least people are snapping out of their partisan blindness on this issue now.
Some folks who never supported Trump had their own reasons to examine this. They talked about it, and everyone assumed they got the idea from Trump, and therefore not only did they deserve no attention, but they also deserve no respect, and outright career sabotage by folks like Peter Daszak and to a lesser extent, Anthony Fauci. Many had to work on this in secret because the hyper partisans wouldn’t listen to them, and instead tried to attack them just for talking about it. Take a look at Yuri Deigin and Alina Chan on twitter and go back in their timelines to see how long they have been digging into this.
My hope is not that anyone acknowledges that Trump was correct, although I would view it as a sign of integrity if they did. But whether he was or wasn’t, and whether he got lucky or actually knew something, I don’t care. The real issue comes not from Trump, but their own prejudice, which many are still trying to make excuses for, made them so blind to what, in hindsight, is actually extremely obvious as the most likely explanation. Then they took it further and let their blind hate for Trump also caused them to hate half of their fellow citizens, and they extended that hate to anyone who they even perceived as having thoughts tangentially related to something Trump said.
I could easily come up with probably 5 more examples of something very similar that happened in his orbit that people who only follow left leaning mainstream news have no idea about, or that were spun into complete anti-trump lies by the media and are still believed by people today.
The media are absolutely full of shit. All of them. Real journalism died, hyper partisan “woke” activists have been graduating and taking writing jobs, groupthink and cult-like behavior has amplified, and the executives loved the sky high ratings and revenue they got for being anti-trump. Cancel culture further reinforced this culty groupthink and forced moderate voices out. Hell, people actually try to say Glenn Greenwald went right-wing crazy. Glenn Greenwald! They don’t even realize that it wasn’t him who changed, it was them.
It’s pervasive in tech. People are actually pro-censorship now. And they have convinced themselves that they are the good guys. It’s hard to believe how far we have fallen from rationality in such a short time.
The question of whether one of their viruses leaked out again (yes, again!) that was a bat coronavirus found right by the bat coronavirus lab, or whether it was a remarkable cascade of coincidences that still has no viable complete hypothesis (the “modified” virus doesn’t infect bats anymore), is not one of “conspiracy”.