I called for more research on the COVID ‘lab leak theory.’ Here’s what I found out BY MICHAEL WOROBEY MARCH 8, 2023 1:31 PM PT Recent reports that Department of Energy and FBI officials think the COVID-19 pandemic originated with a so-called lab leak appear to have provided all the “evidence” many require. As a scientist who has led or contributed to several peer-reviewed studies that tell a very different story, I’ve looked on with amazement at the growing divide between what the science shows and what much of the public — and a minority of the intelligence community — believe. But I’ve also watched with understanding for those who still suspect a lab leak because I started there myself. The nucleus of all lab leak conjectures — they are not a single hypothesis but a wide range of sometimes mutually exclusive speculations — was famously captured by the comedian Jon Stewart. “Oh, my God, there’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China — what do we do?” Stewart said during a June 2021 appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” “Oh, you know who we could ask: the Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. The disease is the same name as the lab!” Stewart didn’t have the name right, but he was referring to the work of the Chinese scientist Shi Zhengli, whose lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology does indeed study SARS-related coronaviruses from horseshoe bats, the ultimate reservoir of both the original SARS virus and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The month before Stewart’s tirade, Science published a letter by me and several other scientists arguing that lab leak hypotheses must not be prematurely dismissed. The letter dramatically shifted the debate about where COVID came from; two weeks later, the Biden administration announced a 90-day intelligence community review of the pandemic’s origins. While the intelligence community did its work, I set about my own. Though I considered a lab leak plausible, I nevertheless thought a zoonotic origin — a jump from animal to human — to be considerably more likely. Around the same time, the likelihood of a natural origin was bolstered by a paper from scientists in China and Britain proving that live specimens of mammal species previously found to harbor SARS viruses had been sold at markets in Wuhan just before the onset of the pandemic. A scientist’s job is to kick the tires of a hypothesis — to try to falsify it. I tabled all my other research to try to falsify the hypothesis that the pandemic began at one of those markets, the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where many of the earliest known COVID patients worked. ... Michael Worobey is a professor and the head of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.
A lab leak is possible, as has been almost universally acknowledged for a couple years now. But anyone who is convinced that it must be a lab leak is probably engaging in motivated reasoning.
It is possible, but in a sense that science doesn't rule out anything and is always welcoming of new data. It has almost fully circled back to being a conspiracy theory. A hypothesis needs to be falsifiable, otherwise, it's simply speculative at best. "Lab leak" started as speculation, had some semblance of moving toward a hypothesis, and is now, after two years, back to being a bunch of speculations, some exclusive to each other.
My understanding is that the vast majority of scientists who study this believe pretty firmly that it resulted from zoonotic transfer, and other data we have access to points to strong likelihood that it originated in the Wuhan meat markets. On the other hand, confidence can’t be too high given the lengths China would likely go to obscure or falsify data that could indicate a lab leak as the origin. But it’s a clear mistake of logic, indicative of the conspiratorial mindset that is so rampant on the political right these days, that China’s well established opaqueness and truth-hiding is strong evidence in itself that the lab leak hypothesis is true.
It's exactly because of China's censorship that a lab leak shouldn't have been ruled out, still can't be ruled out, and may never be. But Science has a way of working through even censorship. The evidence for a zoonotic spillover has grown much stronger over the past 2 years. There is strong confidence in it now by scientists who have worked on that hypothesis. I've posted a few articles on those evidence in this thread.
It's fascinating to observe someone whose perception of reality is so completely dominated by their ideology.
The d&d doesn’t believe drugs come from Mexico either @Commodore @SuraGotMadHops But they believe Lia Thomas is a girl
So the guy who talks about how we need to protect our borders is going to smuggle an illegal alien into the country.
The alien would only be "illegal" because of a rule that makes no sense whatsoever. He would certainly not be a burden on the US social security system. A lot of US citizens want to see him in the country.
