The lab leak addiction
Another check-in in on the unresolved origin mystery
Case not closed
Today I encountered a post by David Cole at Taki’s Magazine which offers a lean dissection of the hollow evidence that sustains the lab leak origin theory which now enjoys credential-haver consensus. (Who is David Cole, I asked, only to find that that the rule for 2023 seems to be “Scratch a lab leak sceptic, and you’ll find a ‘Holocaust Denier.’”) I recommend his post for anyone who cares whether the credential-haver consensus (that lab leak suddenly has overwhelming evidence) is totally off the rails at this point (it is):
Cole has followed the debate from the first months, unlike myself, and so he can offer a chronology of the lab leak origin theory that demonstrates just how faulty the evidence is. Every time there has been “new” evidence, he shows, it hasn’t been new at all; it is only a rediscovery of a previously dismissed talking point, or a reversal of position on the significance of ambiguous problems such as “Does the CCP saying X mean X or not X is more likely?”
Overall Cole’s post is a bit too dismissive, but much of what he dismisses can be justified by points he leaves out.1 The post is improved by this streamlining; no one is going to read the finer arguments on these points no matter how many excellent twitter threads Flo Débarre puts together. He also leaves out the restriction site paper, but even I (who embraced it as evidence immediately) quickly realized that it is a type of evidence that does not demand any particular conclusion, it is not proof.
Tldr; the problem of whether the “restriction site map” identified by Bruttel, et al. is “proof” of anything is thorny, because the “map” is already nearly present in background viruses related to SARS-CoV-2. It depends on understanding the likelihood that a bowl of alphabet soup which currently spells “WTUHANB” will, if gently stirred, spell either “WUHAN” or “TUHAB” (both will do; this likelihood is much higher than the likelihood of any bowl ever spelling “WUHAN;” beyond that fact I would say it is essentially not understandable).
With that aside, if I could ask that the reader either read Cole’s post in its entirety or accept that it convincingly argues that the lab leak theory is still just as flimsy as it has always been, I would like to spring from that summary into some meta-commentary.
The circumstantial evidence against natural origin has always been strongest (I already said this)
Summary
This section is important, and conveys a point which I will summarize as follows: The problems with the lab leak theory evidence are substantial, so much so that if the virus did not seemingly emerge in Wuhan there would really be no big reason to question a natural origin. Yet lab leak theorists speak as if natural origin is totally preposterous, at a break with the strength of their evidence.
As Cole reviews, nothing in the lab leak origin evidence-set is compelling or conclusive, no matter how many times it is rehashed as “new.” There really is no reason to dismiss natural origin of SARS-Cov-2, even though the intermediary host still has not been identified, if all you are told is “outbreak in a market that sells a bunch of live The Last Airbender animals.”
The problem is that the market was in Wuhan, and the illusion that Wuhan represents some global mega-center of illicit wildlife retailing. All of Wuhan’s 17 wildlife markets (7 of which are at Huanan Seafood) were surveyed in the two years before the outbreak, generating figures for monthly revenue. As I showed (here, I forgot to link in the original version of this post), the entire city of Wuhan only sold $35,260 in animals per month, representing .001% of the entire industry in China.
In other words, if SAR-CoV-2 was lurking in nature and imminently about to spring forth from a Chinese wet-market, there was only a 1 in 100,000 chance of Wuhan being the lucky city.
Thus, the circumstantial evidence argues that it’s extremely “funny” that the virus happened to emerge in a city that contains a lab that works on bat coronaviruses, genetically modifying them and having on-paper aspirations of eventually inserting furin cleavage sites into them. When the natural origin crew tilt at the windmills of spatial analysis to show how implausible it was for Huanan Seafood to be the first noticed outbreak of a WIV-origin virus given how far the WIV lab is from the same, the subject of Wuhan at large being an infinitesimal fraction of the billion-dollar Chinese wildlife industry is left out.
This “funny”-ness is ultimately what keeps me from going all-in for natural origin. Considering the substantial problems on the lab leak side (namely, that SARS-CoV-2 could not have come from any virus known to be toyed-with at WIV, and also that it is weird for a WIV-origin virus to break out across the city at Huanan), and the other “funny” coincidence of Wuhan having hosted the Military Games mere months beforehand, I have long vocally hewed to the intentional release theory advocated early on by Ron Unz.
Why “serious” scientists do not buy lab leak
This is also the strongest argument against Cole’s dismissal of the unnatural origin. Either there’s a reason for the virus to emerge in Wuhan, setting off all these extraordinary controversies over Chinese lab practices and American “GOF” outsourcing (it could not have emerged in a more divisive and Rorschach-like location!), or it really did so just on a random 1 in 100,000 chance. Do we just live in a simulation, where someone can ask the computer for “extremely controversial virus origin that remodels human faith in expert reliability” and it pops out the perfect result? Pour a bowl of alphabet soup and see if it spells “Wuhan,” and get back to me.
Addicted to GOF
Cole’s review, as previously stated, is worthwhile for demonstrating how lab leak theory proponents flip-flop on epistemic positions constantly, frequently discovering “new” evidence that has already been established as unimpressive or false. This brought to mind an experience I once had with a pot-addicted roommate who, by means of threatening to stop paying my share of rent, I was attempting to expunge.
The obvious reason why I could not leave the apartment (I was essentially subsidizing it, which is not something you can find somebody else to take over) could be explained over and over, yet it was impossible for him to accept this reality, and instead necessary to understand my actions as stemming from incomprehensible malice. This dissonance with reality led to exactly what goes on with the lab leak origin believers — constantly cycling between the same previously dismissed, bargaining-mechanism arguments for why (given my threat to stop paying rent) it was not necessary to leave.2
A non-addictive argument for the lab leak origin would say,
“None of the published evidence from WIV actually points toward SARS-CoV-2, mostly because they were working on genetically different viruses, whereas these other, non-WIV viruses found in Laos are closer especially for the spike protein. So what I would suggest might have happened is there was a parallel arm of secret research at WIV, far more advanced than what was published. But I have no evidence, and can’t dismiss a natural origin.
“Regarding the conduct of the researchers who worked in tandem with Fauci to exculpate EcoHealth and WIV, in retrospect it is clear that they were knowingly or unknowlingly conflicted in interest, and as the investigation went on many should have been recused, so that the work would be less impeachable. But nothing is obviously faulty in their reasoning. More problematic was media credulity of their frankly unimpressive arguments for natural origin; but this plagues coverage regarding the lab leak theory as well. Of course, both the American and Chinese government inserted their own interests, but this stems from the nature of the topic, and is not necessarily illustrative of the quality of evidence for natural origin.
“Still, and to reemphasize, I think a secret program at WIV created the virus, but can offer no reasons why it couldn’t have instead been a secret program somewhere else that then took the virus to Wuhan.”
Instead, lab leak theory proponents over-hype previously discovered talking points over and over, demonize the frequently unimpressive but not obviously dishonest work of the Proximal Origin authors, and call for criminal investigations of any experts that supported natural origin. “Secret WIV program” and “US bioweapon” origins cycle through the discourse regularly as well, the coherent motte abandoned again and again for the less tinfoil but fatally flawed bailey of GOF and DEFUSE.
It’s a mess, but such go the thoughts of one who is addicted to a belief.
If evidence finally does emerge that SARS-CoV-2 was developed at WIV, it will turn out that the belief was true all along, yes. But this doesn’t change the nature of the belief at the present moment; it is exactly what drives the constant rediscovery of old arguments.
Making sense of the new and future GOF consensus
More mysterious is the sudden new consensus by experts less familiar with the subject matter, and by the media, that the lab leak is currently the most likely origin. The atmosphere that seemingly prevails now is that the in-the-know intelligence community has disclosed much new information (it hasn’t), bearing out all this other evidence (it was all the same evidence, and never impressive), and now we can be fairly confident that SARS-CoV-2 didn’t come from nature. Given that no new evidence may ever come out, this will just be the historical record of the case, presumably until everyone alive today is dead and the “Pandemic™” gets reexamined by future authors.
How can it be the case that, as Cole easily demonstrates in his chronology of the evidence, everyone is so wrong?
But one way of summing up all of my points above is that the virus’s emerging in the most controversial location possible, despite a 1 in 100,000 chance, seems to demand an explanation; and “lab leak” simply provides it in the manner that doesn’t require abandoning non-circumstantial evidence; the problem being of course that all of the non-circumstantial evidence in question actually doesn’t support a WIV origin. It is necessary to settle on a story that explains the event (possibly, it is necessary that the story has moral valence). “Someone asked the computer to start a controversy” is not satisfactory; nor is the idea of a successfully-pulled off frame-up of WIV by the US government or some rogue actor.
Here we find something that suggests explanation for the weird overlap between myself, Ron Unz, and now (in my order of discovery) David Cole (“Scratch a lab leak skeptic, and you’ll find a ‘Holocaust Denier’”3). Another parallel is between the forgetting and then remembering of the Holocaust in the West (and immediate forgetting of the forgetting), and the censoring and then embrace of the lab leak origin theory by the mainstream media.
At a certain point, one begins to consider seriously whether any collective memory of the past that we have is accurate; which for most people would be an unacceptable question to hold. So it would seem to take a certain kind.
If you derived value from this post, please drop a few coins in your fact-barista’s tip jar.
For example, there is a certain need to justify the furin cleavage site’s 12 nucleotides, as the phylogenetic comparison with RatG13 and BANAL52 prove that SARS-CoV-2 inserted these 12 c’s and g’s out of nowhere. But the explanation is that avian influenza sometimes does the same thing, and there may be cryptic genetic promoters that prompt “random” insertion of Arginine.
Also, regarding the three WIV workers who fell ill, it is helpful to point out that after the virus was widely recognized it was examined whether any WIV researchers had antibodies. None did. If three workers fell ill with SARS-CoV-2, there should also have been some number of asymptomatic cases and generally the virus should have left a “footprint” in the form of antibodies at WIV. It didn’t, so these workers probably were sick with something else.
It was like trying to issue an ultimatum to a houseplant, really.
I have not yet read what Cole has written on the subject; as for myself, the use of “Denier” in quotes is meant to be understood as one who makes any attempt to research or discuss the Holocaust in a realistic and grounded fashion, and as such could be said to include all of mainstream serious literature on it (Hilberg, Arendt, Goldhagen) — anything that is more nuanced than the “Comic Book” version of the Holocaust that serves as a setting in Hollywood films. My full treatment of the topic is here.
I am belatedly encountering the David Quammen NYT recap of the controversy, which certainly lacks the virtue of leanness but otherwise repeats the gist of Cole's post. Once again the Wuhan coincidence is assigned no value in interpreting the problem. A funny bit about Shi's learning of the virus:
"Shi was in Shanghai for a conference on the night of Dec. 30, 2019, as she explained it to me, when word reached her about a mysterious respiratory illness spreading dangerously among people back in Wuhan. Preliminary lab results suggested a coronavirus — not SARS virus, but something similar — might be the cause. She was asked to help identify the thing. She put her lab team to work on that immediately and took a train back to Wuhan the next day. Within hours, her lab had received a partial sequence from another lab. Her first instinct was to compare it with sequences of viruses they had worked on themselves, “and we found it’s different,” she told me. “So, the afternoon of Dec. 31, I already know it’s nothing related to what we have done in our laboratory.”"
Imagine the odds of a novel coronavirus emerging next door to the person you would call about a novel coronavirus...
As we saw with Marco Rubio's "groundbreaking" report on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, pretty much all of the extant evidence is, ultimately, circumstantial. There are reasons for suspecting--and even presuming--that the virus emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but very little of the extant evidence can even pretend to be of the "smoking gun" variety.
https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/rubio-reports-on-the-origins-of-covid
This was one of the problems with the earliest iterations of the lab leak hypotheses which emerged almost immediately after the virus spread beyond China. There were legitimate questions to ask, and no legitimate answers forthcoming, but initially all anyone had were suspicions.
https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/covid-19-as-a-bioweapon
Perhaps the biggest problem with most iterations of the lab leak hypothesis is the insistence by so many that it has to be a deliberately constructed bioweapon. The possibility that the crossover from bat to human (directly or via an intermediary host) simply took place in a lab with known safety problems gets rather rudely pushed aside.
However, the biggest problem with the zoonotic hypothesis is the litany of devious and deceitful steps--all documented--China took to weaponize the spread of the virus even if it hadn't deliberately developed the virus as a bioweapon.
https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/ccpvirus-yes-it-is-bioweaponhtml
In the end, we do not have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There is significant circumstantial evidence, however, and I do believe the preponderance of that evidence points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the place that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as an infectious respiratory pathogen capable of infecting humans.