This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life. I'd ask everyone to please read it because it is incredible.

One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity."

Plus there's all the stuff about the miners shoveling bat poop for weeks and then dying of coronaviruses, and the Wuhan institute collecting and doing gain of function research on these similar-to-SARS samples. And then several of the lab's gain of function researchers became ill in late 2019. And there's the weird renaming of samples to hide the unmatched closeness of the mine samples and covid. This is just the absolute surface of the article. There's too much to list here

Edit: here's another amazement for the list: "Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories." And the article says "BSL-2 [is] roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office."

Take a look here for another shocking article: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

It gets worse - gain of function research was banned under Obama until the ban was lifted in 2017 under Trump - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

I can’t find sources for this right now but apparently Dr Anthony Fauci played a key role in getting the ban lifted. He’s also the head of the NIAID ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci ) which (apparently) is the ultimate source for all funding on gain of function research.

So the lead guy we’ve been listening to (and still are) for scientific advice on this pandemic is entangled in a massive conflict of interest.

Edit: I assume this is getting down-voted either because is sounds like conspiracy theory or just everyone has already heard it and it's not news. Fauci has already admitted having been involved in funding Wuhan - https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/fauci-admits-nih-funding-of-wu... - that on it's own should not have been something he first admitted to in May 2021, while holding such a responsible position. Looking for more sources right now...

Edit 2: In this article from December 2011 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-wor... - you have Fauci making the case for creating viruses in a lab;

"Given these uncertainties, important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory."

It doesn't explicitly mention gain of function but - while raising the concerns, it's arguing for research which would include gain of function. Meanwhile listening to this panel discussion which included Fauci from Nov 2017 - https://www.c-span.org/video/?437187-1/johns-hopkins-forum-e... ... again he's arguing for more aggressive types of research

You are getting downvoted because it's muckraking. There is nothing shady about NIAID giving a (verrrry small for this type of research) grant to a foreign research lab, which is doing research about a topic of interest. That's how you ensure the U.S. government gets a copy of the results.

I'm not saying it's shady to provide that funding. What I'm saying is it demonstrates conflict of interest. Last year in May 5 2020 Fauci dismissed the idea that the virus came from a lab that his own organisation was providing funds to - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthony-fauci-wuhan-lab-coronav...

Whether or not anything shady was happening, the conflict of interest is clear.

It's not a conflict of interest because Dr. Fauci wasn't gaining anything. The agency he is head of is specifically interested in infectious disease and has a large budget for grants. $120K per year pays for a couple plate of genetic samples and tech time to run them. Maybe in China you can run a few more for that cost, I don't know.

As head of that agency, it's also his job to share his professional opinion with the public. For this, his reward is a public servant's salary. Seriously, what's he getting here for his supposed "deception"?

It's not a conflict of interest because Dr. Fauci wasn't gaining anything. The agency he is head of is specifically interested in infectious disease and has a large budget for grants. $120K per year pays for a couple plate of genetic samples and tech time to run them. Maybe in China you can run a few more for that cost, I don't know.

So it is not a conflict of interest because of the sum of money? Someone doesn't need to gain anything to be in conflict, by definition: "a situation in which the concerns or aims of two different parties are incompatible."

Do you at least think he had a duty to disclose his involvement/investment in gain of function research? Specifically with the Wuhan lab at the center of this?

As head of that agency, it's also his job to share his professional opinion with the public. For this, his reward is a public servant's salary. Seriously, what's he getting here for his supposed "deception"?

Did you know he's the most highly paid government official? His measly public servant salary only paid him $417K. [0]

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-...

It's still not clear to me what the conflict of interest is. The amount of money is kind of important, because it gives you an idea of the level of involvement. As I said, $600K over 5 years is very little money, it basically makes sure you get the results of whatever research is already being done.

His measly public servant salary only paid him $417K.

The top scientist in the country, with several Ph.Ds, 50 years of experience in a both public leadership and an incredibly complicated branch of biology, is making roughly what a staff engineer at a FAANG company makes...and you are complaining? That's the bargain of the century. He's a sick fuck for actually sticking it out - he could have bailed and consulted on "return to the office" for all the big tech and entertainment companies. He is 80 years old, working insane hours, and probably would have made more money in 6 months than he has in his whole public career from a really nice beach. You will never convince me that THIS is the smoking gun that proves Dr. Fauci corrupt, finally, after 50 years in public service. It's too stupid.

It's still not clear to me what the conflict of interest is. The amount of money is kind of important, because it gives you an idea of the level of involvement. As I said, $600K over 5 years is very little money, it basically makes sure you get the results of whatever research is already being done.

Maybe he's covering his own ass? Maybe he's trying to protect gain of function research? He was, after all, the most vocal proponent that the risks with gain of function research were worth it. [0]

The top scientist in the country, with several Ph.Ds, 50 years of experience in a both public leadership and an incredibly complicated branch of biology, is making roughly what a staff engineer at a FAANG company makes...and you are complaining? That's the bargain of the century. He's a sick fuck for actually sticking it out - he could have bailed and consulted on "return to the office" for all the big tech and entertainment companies. He is 80 years old, working insane hours, and probably would have made more money in 6 months than he has in his whole public career from a really nice beach. You will never convince me that THIS is the smoking gun that proves Dr. Fauci corrupt, finally, after 50 years in public service. It's too stupid.

Oh, ok. So before his only reward was his "public servant salary", but now that you know he's the most highly paid government official (including the President) his salary is now being compared to FAANGs and he's underpaid. What a sacrifice.

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484390/

Edit: Fix typo.

Agree. Do not underplay the value of status and power for people like Faucci. He needed to downplay to keep his grip on both

But it could be perceived as a conflict of interest, and that of itself is the reason to at least declare it (for transparency). This is how it works in ethics.

Just playing devil's advocate, not convinced fauci had any malicious intentions, but he has one of the most highly public jobs in America, he gets to keep his job/power and maintain a future in politics. But he definitely does not seem like some power hungry egomaniacal player to me. His beliefs before and after and actions after the outbreak seemed to be consistent with someone that was trying to do the right thing for our country.

I don't know about malice, but covering up or downplaying the possibility of a global pandemic being caused by activities he was involved in or encouraged... shit can be corrupt even if a person is not trying to take advantage of a situation.

Placing blame isn't really all that important. Making sure none of this happens again for the same reasons is.

If I was placing a bet, I'd say Wuhan researchers regularly got a handle on patents zero for cross species infection. In the course of the research a virus infected workers because of lax, sloppy, or otherwise inadequate controls; then despite the threat in order to save face government did everything they could to hide the mistake until it was far too late for anything to really be done about it.

So you’re criticizing a scientist for expressing skepticism toward a scenario that had (especially at the time) very limited evidence, and then just placing your own bet on a far more extreme, also non-substantiated version?

For a measly $120k grant, I doubt Fauci was involved in the award whatsoever.

He has now been called in to testify in front of congress on it ... twice. However insignificant the dollar amount, knowing the details of it is his job.

On its face, That’s an absurd statement. NIH offers Very small grants for fellowships ... should he know about those too?

EcoHealth secured a NIAID grant of roughly $3.7 million, which it allocated in part to various entities engaged in collecting bat samples, building models, and performing gain-of-function experiments to see which animal viruses were able to jump to humans.

It was a $3.7million dollar grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which I wouldn't doubt he was involved with. $600,000 was sent from EcoHealth to Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Avoiding reputation and harm is certainly a major incentive, especially for a scientist, leading to a conflict of interest.

A conflict of interest does not depend on whether a person actually gains (or prevents himself from losing) anything, but whether he has some personal interest (such as fame, money, even gifts for a family member, etc.) that coexists with some duty-bound interest to some other party/society (e.g. fiduciary duty, professional ethical duties, etc.), and the person is entrusted with making a decision that implicated either interest depending on the outcome. Conflicts of interest are usually resolved either by disclosure or isolation from the adverse interest.

In this case, Fauci has sort of a small, debatable conflict. His personal stake is not money per se, but his reputation and clear preference for gain-of-function research. If it came out that gain-of-function research caused the pandemic, and Fauci was one of the leading cheerleaders for that since the early aughts AND Fauci may have provided some of the funding for this particular research, then Fauci would stand to lose quite a bit of reputation and standing. That's a real adverse incentive to determine that lab leak of a gain-of-function virus is not possible.

If his job is to share his opinion to the public, then he has a conflict of interest with respect to that decision, since the public doesn't know if Fauci-the-expert is talking or Fauci-the-reputation-seeking-bureaucrat. If he had merely disclosed any of his involvement with restarting funding of gain-of-function research in 2017 or his past advocacy for gain-of-function research, that would significantly resolve the conflict.

In my opinion, Fauci is simply an opportunistic bureaucrat and a liar (I repeat myself), and the conflict of interest claim against him is weak. Peter Daszam has much, much more problematic conflicts of interest. This is a guy who (1) discredited fellow scientists in the Lancet for considering an alternative hypothesis and (2) led a sham WHO investigation into the WIV lab, all while funneling NIH grant money to WIV, not complying with disclosure and review requirements and standing to lose his career if gain-of-function were to be seriously discredited. It would be hard for him to be more conflicted.

Also, for what it's worth, Fauci is the highest paid federal employee. He makes more than the president. Most "public servants" make $150k/year or less. Not to mention, Fauci had also made a book deal as a result of his celebrity.

By these standards, everyone (in such a position) is always in some "conflict of interest". Had Fauci blamed that lab, he certainly would have been, as his organization also funds its competitors, and of course because he works for the US administration.

The ideology behind throwing around this kind of allegations is: all facts are fabricated by somebody, nobody can be trusted (they all have a conflict of interest), so we can as well make up our own "alternative facts" that fit our ideology best. In the end, it's just "us against them", so arguments and facts don't matter any more.

As a side-note: I doubt that Fauci just spontaneously pushes out his personal opinion about this kind of affairs, so I suppose his organization largely agrees with him. All corrupt and in a "conflict of interest"? And I think his position should definitely be paid better than the president. Why not?

None of this says anything about Fauci as a person. He might be opportunistic, a bureaucrat, and whatnot, but that is hardly relevant in this context (other than discrediting everything he says).

By these standards, everyone (in such a position) is always in some "conflict of interest".

Yes. But not everyone becomes the leading figure in a global pandemic which has killed 3.7 million people and thrown the world into complete disarray. At the point where you realise you're in that position, the correct, ethical thing to do is put all your cards on the table.

The ideology behind throwing around this kind of allegations is: all facts are fabricated by somebody, nobody can be trusted (they all have a conflict of interest), so we can as well make up our own "alternative facts" that fit our ideology best. In the end, it's just "us against them", so arguments and facts don't matter any more.

That isn't true at all. Mere disclosure (e.g. "Full disclosure: I ran gain of function research for years at NIH, a couple years ago got a ban on gain-of-function research lifted at the White House and our team is currently looking into whether WIV received our funding") is sufficient to mitigate most conflicts of interests. Conflicts of interest exist all the time, but they're fairly easy to disclose (as long as someone has an ethical backbone), and in extreme cases can be mitigated with things like divestment or blind trusts (in the case of financial conflicts of interest).

Suppose your doctor was also a paid consultant for a pharmaceutical company, advising them on their new drug X. One day, your doctor starts telling you all of the benefits of drug X for certain medical issues you have, and she's very enthusiastic about it. If she simply disclosed, "full disclosure: I'm consulting with the manufacturer on the effects of this drug; that said, I really believe in it," wouldn't that entirely change the ethical dynamic vis-a-vis nondisclosure? If she disclosed, you could get a (non-conflicted) second opinion, or maybe you implicitly trust your doctor and go along with her recommendation as is. But if she didn't disclose and you later learned some other way that she has this conflict, you would lose trust.

This is what happened with Fauci and the gain-of-function crowd. They stood on the pedestal of unbiased scientific expertise, failing to disclose their conflicts, and then enabled the browbeating of anyone with alternative hypotheses (literally anyone: scientists had their professional reputations and research funding threatened; social media users had their accounts suspended or posts deleted). Without alternative hypotheses, science entirely falters. Full disclosure on the part of Fauci and especially Daszak would have gone lightyears in evaluating their credibility.

I should note that conflicts of interest do not change facts or true scientific conclusions themselves; that would be ad hominem. But conclusions are typically dependent on myriad facts, and experts have a much better idea about the universe of discourse around these facts than laypeople. A conflicted expert may thus present cherry-picked facts that support his conclusions, ignoring those that cut against them. To be fair, non-conflicted scientists may do this as well, but their credibility is only harmed insofar as they should have addressed countervailing evidence when presenting conclusions. Having a non-disclosed conflict of interest undermines a scientist's credibility and a commitment to ethical inquiry.

In my opinion, the scientific community has severely undermined their ethical and persuasive capital over the past year and even longer. If disclosure were a normal part of scientific discourse where it impacted policy, we likely would have more people who believe that vaccines work, that climate change is a threat (though likely not an apocalyptic one) and that the scientific process generally works. Instead, we have this browbeating culture where not trusting the "experts" is like some sort of scarlet letter, at least until we learn the experts were looking out for their own interests and suddenly they lose their luster. I love science, so I wish the scientific community would get its fucking act together so that large segments of the population on my "side" start to believe in the scientific method again.

Finally, lost in all of this is the fact that gain-of-function was supposed to produce vaccines more rapidly. As far as I can tell, this never happened. The vaccines we received had been researched for a decade through a different program not funded by NIH, and did not depend on gain-of-function research, but instead used unmolested SARS viruses.

Fauci is clearly dismissing the notion that it was engineered. He says pretty clearly that if a natural virus escaped the lab it would still be a natural virus and hence not a useful topic when it comes to treating it. I don't think he ever said it wasn't possible just that there's no reason to believe it. And it's understandably not his primary concern to figure out.

I think this whole thing is a great example of why you don't ban alternative viewpoints, even if considered "conspiracy theories".

Zerohedge was reporting this early on, and Twitter banned them for "misinformation".

That newspaper scene from Men in Black. I’ve relived it a number of times over the past year particularly.

Local mainstream “fact checkers” have even called Covid-19 a “right-wing conspiracy theory” in early 2020.

People were dying of covid in hospital beds, still believing the virus is fake narrative.

Local mainstream “fact checkers” have even called Covid-19 a “right-wing conspiracy theory” in early 2020.

Would love a citation or two. I remember the right-wing administration saying it would disappear as if by magic and Fox News saying "0 deaths" and that playing up covid was a left wing invention at least up to april or so.

Separate from the article, the damming thing in his email release is the strong suggestion that he knew it was engineered early on and may have participated in hiding this fact.

er, who has shown any evidence at all that covid-19 was "engineered"? this whole discussion is about the unproven possibility that it leaked from a lab.

That emails he received early 2020 from fellow scientists stating covid-19 had identifiable traits of being engineered.

The article mentions the state department had Steven Quay present an analysis of the origin of the virus: https://zenodo.org/record/4642956#.YIa66ehKhPY

The “engineered” component is about the Furin cleavage site on the sars-cov-2 spike protein.

The virus shares 92% genetic similarity to bat coronaviruses, except the spike protein, which is nearly identical to a pangolin coronavirus(which is otherwise only ~38% similar) with one key exception: The Furin cleavage site using “lab standard” sequences.

  The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that are rarely  used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair.  For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.

Would Fauci have even known? Budget numbers say NIAID clears around $5 billion in grant funding per year and this grant was more at the $100k per year level. Another source shows that NIAID receives around 3,000 grant applications per year and that's just in two of their multiple grant types. It seems most likely to me that the grant was approved and funded by a subject-area committee without Fauci being involved at all. I would guess that when he "admitted to it" was probably the first time he knew.

What's been highlighted of the FOIA released emails so far suggests he didn't know if his NIAID was funding Wuhan Institute of Virology SARS type coronavirus gain of function experiments, but he was quite concerned that might be the case. Look for the one where he tells someone to keep his cell phone on.

It's something he'd likely be concerned about, because he's been a big booster of gain of function research, and the Institute famously houses China's first BSL-4 lab, although the article claims the Bat Lady said prior to the pandemic they were only using BSL-2 and -3 labs for their coronavirus research. This assumes she'd know about all that was going on the Institute.

The email trail is damning. Fauci knew that the possibility was there. Instead of pushing for discovery and transparency of what actually happened, he publicly and vehemently denied the possibility and gave fuel to those who wanted to call the "lab leak theory" people "conspiracy nuts".

Fauci's elevation to sainthood was way too premature. His constant media appearances where he hasn't been questioned on any of this should be an object lesson to the public on media bias and the subsequent narrative bubbles that impact our society.

It's not surprising that the same people pushing Michael Avenatti as the next great politician have been the same people promoting Fauci.

I don't think anyone thought Avenatti had any substance to him.

Nice try and trying to equate Fauci with Avenatti - please return to the cable Fox hole which you emerged from.

This is an issue for sure. The core reason though, IMO, was the contrast - for example, you have the president calling for injecting bleach, publicly. Any reasonable person is going to drift away from that, and towards someone who seems more reasonable, and thoughtful. Now that there is less extreme rhetoric, the seams in this particular leadership are starting to show. Can't say the same for Michael Avenatti, who seemed unhinged from the beginning although again just my opinion.

Would Fauci have known that gain of function research was now legal again?! Of course he would. Whether or not to fund that sort of risky research that has gone back and forth in legality is precisely the kind of thing that his job required him to know, isn't it?

According to Wade's article it's actually even murkier than that. Only Fauci or one other person could have actually overridden the ban to keep the money flowing and prevent oversight of it:

The moratorium, referred to officially as a “pause,” specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. It defined gain-of-function very simply and broadly as “research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.”

But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”

This seemed to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the exemption in order to keep the money flowing to Dr. Shi’s gain-of-function research, and later to avoid notifying the Federal reporting system of her research.

Pretty sure if I ran an organization that funds a bunch of labs that do virus research, and a global pandemic started in the neighborhood of a lab doing virus research, and people started floating the theory that the virus leaked from that lab, one of the first things I'd do is call my grant-funding team and ask them if we funded that lab. If Fauci didn't do that, he's a strange dude.

100K from a 5B budget is peanuts and you couldn't reasonably expect the person at the top to know the details of what each recipient of 100K is doing exactly.

If all of the 5B is spent on coronavirus research then it's a different story. Most likely it's spent on an incredibly wide array of topics.

This is the difference between responsibility and accountability.

The person at the top might not know what each recipient is doing, but is still accountable for the funding decisions that were made (and oversaw the people and process that made those decisions on the organisations behalf).

Just take your excel sheet of funded project, filter by country then filter by city....

to expand on just how small comparatively that number is... 100,000 seconds is a little over 1 day worth of seconds... 5 billion seconds is a little bit over 158 years of seconds.

Or maybe he just knew enough about his field to know that this theory is lala land and catnip for conspiracy nutheads.

Does it really matter though ? The fist thing I would do is find how to keep people from my country safe, not worry about where did my funding go (especially since the lab's funding has absolutely nothing to do with how we can find a cure or a vaccine).

It matters for stopping this happening again.

Yes, because you need to keep up the appearance of neutrality. If there is a conflict of interest, then you need to be careful to ensure that everyone knows you are ensuring those conflicts don't happen. That means you need to know and admit a lot of things that don't happen.

My company wants to know if my brother in law works for a competitor. It won't change my job, but they will be careful to ensure that I don't work on things that it would matter if I let something slip over dinner.

Would Fauci have even known?

So maybe he finds out before making statements?

I've lost faith in Fauci when he admitted he lied about the efficacy of masks early on in the pandemic. He literally came out and stated he lied in order to make sure frontline healthcare workers had enough PPE. That was the most insane statement I've ever heard a public health leader make - lying about healthcare to the public that may result in more infections. That is how you destroy public trust.

What's sad is that the population would understand if you just told them the truth, namely that masks help, but our frontline works desperately need them so getting them masks and PPE is a priority.

What's sad is that the population would understand if you just told them the truth, namely that masks help, but our frontline works desperately need them so getting them masks and PPE is a priority.

Maybe elsewhere, but not in America. This is one of the most selfish/individualist countries on earth.

And in case there was any doubt he also came out and said he intentionally lied about the required level of vaccination needed to achieve herd immunity [0] so that people don’t get too discouraged. He seems to be squarely in the “ends justify the means” camp. While the effectiveness of that is debatable, I find it hard to believe anything he says at this point.

[0] “In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...

the population would understand

I don't like these "strategic" lies either. And I agree the population in general would understand, but I think there'd still have been plenty of people that would've hoarded every mask possible, and at the time they had to make decisions based on possible scenarios, whereas now we have hindsight. Especially if things were handled differently in the beginning and the mask vs non-mask polarization manifested differently, who knows.

For conflict of interest, please see Fauci's wife.

Fauci was responsible for the work of large swathes of the US medical research establishment, and was questioned on that work on a daily basis. Does it make any sense to say he can't comment on the work of an organisation he runs because he runs it?

In this case the lab didn't even work for him, it just got some small amount of funding from his organisation's budget but he had no say in it's operations. So he can comment on the work of his organisation, but not about the work of an organisation he partly funded?

We know perfectly well he is not an external observer. That's not the capacity in which he's commenting, any more than a president is commenting in an external or impartial capacity about the work of the executive branches, or e.g. UN agencies partly funded by the US.

Why is disclosure of potential conflict of interest made out to be such a high bar? And why do you put arguments forth that did not exist in what you replied to?

Does it make any sense to say he can't comment on the work of an organisation he runs because he runs it?

Is a straw man argument, because what was said was that the conflict of interest should have been disclosed. And, not that he cannot make a comment.

Plain Jane American here: my gut sense is something is off : you do not give funding to the Chinese (that's government to government) for research in this area. Something does not sit right. In the recent 25 years the US outsourced too much ... There's no implied or explicit coequal on this kind of R&D.

Why wouldn't you? All the research is (supposed to be) shared with the world anyway. If you're interested in a topic, and some other country is also interested, and they have a lab ready to go - why not throw some money at them to study your thing? Cheaper than building your own lab - especially when the phenomenon is regional.

How could you ever expect the CCP to be even remotely honest in any “share this with the world” R/D scenario?

At the height of the Cold War, when the U.S. and Soviet Union governments were sworn enemies and on the verge of shooting nuclear weapons at each other, U.S. and Soviet scientists collaborated openly and productively on a wide variety of subjects. Even with government funding.

It’s not unusual to expect scientists to collaborate openly across national borders despite political winds, and in fact it is desirable.

Because we're talking about research of biological weapons of mass destruction.

One simply don't give funding to an openly racist state that runs concentration camps. That's insanity!

It isn't muckraking. Fauci has a clear conflict of interest. Further he argued in favor of GoF research while acknowledging it could lead to a pandemic. He literally wrote that in an academic paper. https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fauci-argued-benefits-of...

So it sounds like Fauci is saying they didn't fund gain of function research in the Wuhan lab.

If they did doesn't that really mean Trump is either more responsible for Covid or equally as responsible as China?

Trump allowed the ban to be lifted after the Obama whitehouse explicitly shut down this kind of research. Fauci just worked for Trump. It was ultimately on Trump, not an employee of his.

So the lead guy we’ve been listening to (and still are) for scientific advice on this pandemic is entangled in a massive conflict of interest.

How does any role he might (or might not have) played in GOF research create a conflict of interest in terms of his advice about the pandemic?

Last year in May 5 2020 Fauci dismissed the idea that the virus came from a lab that his own organisation was providing funds to - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthony-fauci-wuhan-lab-coronav...

The conflict of interest is: was this statement actually what he believed to be true at the time, or was it to draw attention away from the Wuhan lab, so there wouldn't be ugly questions about why his organisation provided funding to it?

To me it seems like the right thing for Fauci to have done at the time was draw attention to the potential conflict of interest but that admission only became public last month - https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/fauci-admits-nih-funding-of-wu...

You write this as if NIH is a privately run foundation with Fauci at the head. He's not even head of the NIH, and while I have no doubt that he was directly involved in decisions to fund research at the Wuhan lab, this is a government agency, which as we're told over and over (when it's convenient to say so) means layers upon layers of bureaucracy and red tape , particularly when handing out money.

Is it your position that he was able to run it as some personal fiefdom?

Suppose that Fauci had known for a fact in May 2020 that SARS-COV-2 originated in that lab. How would that have changed the advice he (attempted to) offer regarding public health and safety?

When I do incident command at my workplace, there are two goals in dealing with an incident: solving the problem, and preventing it from happening again. They are both extremely important, but they happen in order.

While the incident is ongoing, any attempts to prevent the problem from happening in the future are a complete distraction. Write down notes and ideas somewhere so we don't forget, but the priority is on solving the incident that actually happened and is causing problems. If you say "What if we fixed this longstanding piece of tech debt that led up to the incident," however reasonable it is to fix it in light of the fact that it caused an incident, it's useless to bring it up now if you can't fix the tech debt immediately to resolve the incident. Along the same lines, attribution is interesting if it will help you deal with what is going on (e.g., there's high load on a low-level system and you want to know if anyone deployed anything recently, so that you can ask them to roll back); it's not really interesting if you know what's broken (e.g., a machine is powered off and needs to be turned back on... figuring out who pressed the power button isn't yet relevant).

Similarly, "We should stop funding gain-of-function research" may (or may not) be a valid conclusion, but it wouldn't have dealt with COVID-19 in particular. It might be worth doing it to make sure there's no COVID-22.

Even if it turns out to be true that COVID-19 came directly from research that would not have happened if it were not for Fauci, absent a reason to believe that anyone's response to COVID-19 specifically would have been different if they knew that, I don't see any reason it was improper not to draw attention to it at the time, and quite a few reasons why it was proper to focus attention on the problem at hand.

His comments in that May 2020 article are spot-on. If we knew that it was engineered, then yes, publicizing the lab notes that were used to build it could perhaps speed up the process of a vaccine or other countermeasure (but COVID-19 had already been sequenced by January 2020 and the sequence published, and vaccines were already in development then). But theories like "what if the researchers brought it in from the wild, and then it escaped their lab" should just have prompted the response "yes, so what." It's interesting now to prevent the next COVID; it's irrelevant re COVID-19.

And I certainly don't see the conflict of interest - what was Fauci gaining? His continued role? Again, at the time, the role was not determining whether to fund gain-of-function research, the role was figuring out how to get rid of COVID-19.

You could say that the NIH should have paused all funding for new virus research projects (unless they specifically related to dealing with COVID-19 in the short term), but that would have been a good idea regardless of the NIH's previous role in funding.

And I certainly don't see the conflict of interest - what was Fauci gaining? His continued role?

Yes. Obviously you don't put an arsonist in charge of fighting fires, so if this information had come out early last year then he would have lost not only his role much sooner, but also his social status and career. If what's coming out now came out last year, Trump's replacement of him with Scott Atlas would have been more widely supported (maybe), and Biden may not have dared to put him back in his post.

That would have been a huge financial hit. Fauci does very well out of his position. "Very well" might even be an understatement. He is the highest paid federal employee [1], earning more in 2019 alone than the US President. Despite this fact, he has deflected questions about conflicts of interest by laughing it off and saying he has a "government salary", creating the impression he is paid far less than he really is.

Fauci charges between $50,000 and $100,000 per hour for motivational speeches [2].

Despite being theoretically in charge of a crisis situation in which nobody has time to ask how it started, Fauci has found time to write a book called, "Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward". He has also appeared on TV more than 300 times [3].

This is not a man who is too busy to investigate basic questions that may have direct relevance to developing treatments for the virus. And given that knowing where it came from would be of immense scientific value yet he has every incentive to cover it up, he is also not a man who should be running things.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-...

[2] https://leadingmotivationalspeakers.com/speakers/anthony-fau...

[3] https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-has-chalked-up-300-media-...

This is a global pandemic that came out of China. In the worst possible case, Fauci hid the fact that an org he's involved in donated a minuscule portion of its budget to the lab from where the virus leaked due to incompetence.

It's not like he took the vial home for lulz and dropped it on the subway. His role in the origin of this thing is so small it's irrelevant.

The only thing that's up for discussion is that he may not have been 100% correct during one of his many public statements, hardly something that can be held against him considering the shitcreek the whole world is in.

Personally I'd give the guy some credit for everything he's done right, I mean he's been at it since 1968.

What is there to gain by nailing him to the cross, or pointing out his income and book deals?

This is a global pandemic that came out of China. In the worst possible case, Fauci hid the fact that an org he's involved in donated a minuscule portion of its budget to the lab from where the virus leaked due to incompetence.

It's not like he took the vial home for lulz and dropped it on the subway. His role in the origin of this thing is so small it's irrelevant.

By dissuading an investigation into the cause at the time, he might have shot down our only chance of ever knowing for sure. I sure as hell don't trust China to be truthful about it. There's no incentive on their part.

The only thing that's up for discussion is that he may not have been 100% correct during one of his many public statements, hardly something that can be held against him considering the shitcreek the whole world is in.

He's been spreading mixed and misinformation for months and possibly lying to Congress. Many give him the benefit of the doubt by saying that he either did not know or he did it in the interests of the public as a whole (ex: We need the N95 masks so let's lie and say nobody else does). Neither is acceptable to some of us.

Personally I'd give the guy some credit for everything he's done right, I mean he's been at it since 1968.

Past good behavior doesn't get you out of a trial. At best it's a factor during sentencing.

What is there to gain by nailing him to the cross, or pointing out his income and book deals?

The book deal looks like a last minute cash grab before he gets sacked.

Yes. Obviously you don't put an arsonist in charge of fighting fires

Sure, but to go back to my analogy, you absolutely do put the guy who hit the power button by mistake in charge of pressing it again - they know exactly where it is and they're already in the datacenter. You put the team that deployed a new service that's DoSing your infrastructure in charge of rolling it back. You don't say "You broke the system, so we're finding someone else to do the rollback."

If the allegation is that Fauci intentionally funded a lab in Wuhan to work on gain-of-function research with the express purpose of having the virus escape and cause a global pandemic because Fauci is a murderer rivaling Hitler, that's a very different (and much harder to substantiate) claim than that he merely was causally involved in an accident and like anyone else wants the accident to not have happened.

And if that is the claim, the "conflict of interest" argument becomes clearer: Fauci is on the side of COVID-19 and in charge of stopping it. It's the same conflict of interest as putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires.

Short of that, the idea that he had a conflict of interest is like the idea that the team that accidentally DoS'd the infrastructure has a conflict of interest because they each get Fauci-scale salaries and they might be fired. Technically yes, but we all know that firing them wouldn't help solve the problem and losing their expertise would make other things work, so it's not even on the table unless we suspect malice is involved.

(And if it is on the table, either at my workplace or in Fauci's case, so is criminal prosecution. Loss of salary is the least of your worries.)

They indirectly gave WIV funding to support research into Pig SARS -- Swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus (SADS-CoV).

There is exactly fuckoff zero evidence that funding wound up supporting gain of function research for anything.

And giving China money to study diseases in pigs happening in China that are closely related to a human disease that we were worried about it (or maybe a close relative) spilling over into humans only makes sense.

There is exactly fuckoff zero evidence that funding wound up supporting gain of function research for anything.

From the Fauci e-mails: People Fauci directly worked with seemed surprised and shocked to learn otherwise, and could not even instantly say if their funding had made it abroad.

There are papers resulting from GoF research of concern at the WIV. There are grant proposals, which specify the exact modifications they will do to Bat SARS to increase infectivity on mice with humanized lungs. How can you speak so certain, if you are unaware of this?

And giving China money to study diseases in pigs happening in China that are closely related to a human disease that we were worried about it (or maybe a close relative) spilling over into humans only makes sense.

It makes sense, but you'll see through studying the records that it was the cover for military funding. What was the Defense Threat Reduction Agency funding doing at the WIV where military researchers shared floors with civilian researchers working on the same animals? Making sense to research spillover?

- There was GOF research done on US soil at UNC Chapel Hill which collaborated with WIV. They took a SARS-CoV-1 backbone and splied in a surface protein from another coronavirus and ran it through mice to produce a mouse coronavirus.

- There's no papers out of WIV indicating GOF research

but you'll see through studying the records that it was the cover for military funding.

You're offering a blatant conspiracy theory now with no substantiation.

The funding to WIV had nothing to do with GoF and there's no evidence of anything else. But it HAD to be GoF research. Circular, evidence-free logic.

Article gave me the impression that the Obama ban wasn't real. It included an "unless its important" exception and everyone just kept on doing it anyway.

Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO framework was largely met with shrugs and eye rolls, said a longtime agency official: “If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research anyway.”

Fauci in2017:

Fauci said the Trump administration will not only be challenged by ongoing global health threats such as influenza and HIV, but also a surprise disease outbreak.

https://www.healio.com/news/infectious-disease/20170111/fauc...

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/29/fact...

In retrospect, and knowing what we know now, do you think his advice and direction has been inadequate?

"Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity."

The interesting part of this - and I'm curious about the personal experience of others here - is that the scientists I know have been the strongest questioners of the wet market theory from the get-go.

I don't think anything resembling scientific unanimity ever emerged, or even appeared to emerge.

Heck, here on HN we've been talking about this consistently at least since the PNAS letter, and probably since the beginning of the pandemic.

There was an episode of TWIV last year where they mocked anyone taking the lab leak hypothesis seriously

There was a pretty recent one that continues to dismiss the idea this came from a lab completely.

The calculation is simple and could have been made in early 2020. What's the joint probability of occurrence given everything you know about the origins of SARS-CoV-2?

There is _very_ high probability that this is just a human error.

Was every other emerging virus also created in a lab? SARS? MERS? Influenza? Polio?

The highest probability is this virus originated like every other virus in history.

Did any of them originate a few miles from a pathogen research lab that handled such pathogen that caused those outbreaks?

These labs are in major cities. Epidemics are likely to be detected in Major cities. The chance of an outbreak being near a research lab aren't as long as you seem to think.

If an outbreak were to happen in the United states just about everywhere would be near a CDC location: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&tbs=lf:1,lf...]

As pointed out in the article, there were exactly 3 cities in the world working on gain-of-function research related to bat-originated coronaviruses. Galveston, Texas, Chapel Hill N.C, and Wuhan. It’s way more narrow than just being near a biological laboratory.

At that point you've subtly moved from lab leak theory to engineered virus theory which is much higher up the conspiracy theory chain.

Why? Im not passing judgement on whether it was engineered as a bioweapon. But there was a lab that was actively engaged in research of viruses that are exactly what COVID is. They were conducting research on making said viruses more infectious. I’m not sure why the more likely thing is that it was just a virus sitting in a lab that spilled out, as opposed to a virus that was actively being worked on using the techniques the lab was known to be studying.

That's not what the person you are responding to said at all. Please stop dishonestly conflating the two theories. You can believe that a coronavirus accidentally leaked from a lab that was studying coronaviruses without believing that it was intentional, or that the disease was a bioweapon.

Honestly, this is not a difficult distinction to understand. You have to wonder why people are so eager to conflate the two.

I don’t dispute it is one point of suspicion, but Wuhan is also one of the 10 biggest cities in China. It isn’t a surprise the first US outbreak was in the biggest city. The first cases could have been anywhere.

If there were more evidence that it was lab made then the location would be another point, not to me without further evidence it doesn’t mean all that much.

And there have been 2 emerging coronavirus outbreaks in the last 20 years due to natural origin. Why is it so hard to believe there would be another one.

If there were more evidence that it was lab made

Have you actually read any of these articles? The location of the lab is like the tip of the iceberg.

I don’t dispute it is one point of suspicion, but Wuhan is also one of the 10 biggest cities in China. It isn’t a surprise the first US outbreak was in the biggest city. The first cases could have been anywhere.

Is that really so for animal-borne viruses though? I thought they came from place with lots of animals, hence the focus on the market. If it just showed up on some random high-rise employee downtown that would be hard to believe.

And after it starts, of course a highly-infectious virus shows up at densely populated places quickly. But for the same reason, I would also think it's hard for the first cases to travel to dense areas and spread the disease there without leaving a trail of cases along the trip. Ultimately they should point back to the animals they came from and testing can confirm it. Or at least rule various places out, if the govt was accommodating.

Plus wasn't the first US case somewhere in Washington state.

The first death in the U.S. was only discovered at least a month later, and this is long after we knew about the existence of the virus.

In China before there was a huge outbreak there is absolutely no way you can expect a small number of cases of a virus that nobody knows exists to be picked up. By the time of the big Wuhan outbreak there are already different variations in the virus. It had been in some population for a while before it broke out.

So the first outbreak in NYC is analogous to Wuhan. It could have started in Wuhan or it could have started anywhere else and then Wuhan had the right combination of factors for the outbreak to surge. We don’t know for sure.

We do know for sure that it started in Wuhan. The viral phylogeny is extremely clear. We have hundreds of thousands of viral sequences that describe a tree that is rooted in Wuhan around October 2019. That's incontrovertible. No evidence has arisen to contradict this despite an extensive search by thousands of scientists.

Other pertinent data point, how many epidemics have been positively traced to a lab leak since virology has been widely studied? The Wuhan lab was founded in the 1950s. You can say the likelihood that a virus would one day escape from one of these labs is pretty high. The likelihood that a given virus would be from a lab is very low. All of which brings us back to where we were at the start. It's plausible and possible but not really likely.

There's no other credible explanation for the return of influenza H1N1 in 1976-7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu

For an epidemic to occur, you need not just a lab leak, but a population sufficiently naive to the pathogen. H1N1 was displaced by H2N2 in the late 1950's pandemic, which in turn was displaced by H3N2 in the late 1960s pandemic. Thus it hit the cohort of people aged 25-6 or less who'd never been exposed to H1N1.

That article doesn't support your argument. It just says it was suspected.

I found an NIH article that says the likelier origin is that the 1950 virus was used to produce a weakened live virus vaccine candidate that lead to the reemergence and not an accidental leak. It also concludes by saying there has never been a likely lab leak epidemic ever observed.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/

That article's definition of "lab accident" seems narrow and legalistic to me. In either case, the virus spent 1950-1977 in a lab freezer. It ended up in the wild, with ~700k people dead. The only question is whether it escaped in an infected researcher (or in infectious lab waste, or in whatever else you'd consider a proper lab accident) vs. in that failed vaccine candidate.

Those details do inform some details of the correct policy response. For example, they determine the relative importance of better PPE at the bench vs. better QA before allowing the vaccine to leave the lab. They don't change the overall question of whether scientific research has ever caused a pandemic, though. That causality is what matters, not whether the sign on the door said "lab" vs. "experimental vaccine nurse".

For example, if the pandemic originated from a WIV researcher who became infected in the field (during their many expeditions to remote bat caves that no other humans would routinely enter), was that a "lab leak"? Literally no, since they weren't in the lab. The causality would still be the same, though--if not for that scientific research, that virus would likely have never left the cave.

To avoid such confusion, it's probably better to say something like "unnatural origin", or "origin arising from scientific research". A much bigger mouthful than "lab leak", though.

A 2007 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (an important virus affecting cattle) was traced to effluent released from a laboratory in the UK [1].

A small number of SARS infections in 2003-2004 are also believed to have been due to laboratory accidents [2].

This article [3] gives an introduction to the subject from the perspective of a journalist who has reported on laboratory safety in the US.

This article [4] published in Nature in January 2012 by members of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity reviews the risk of a release of an engineered form of H5N1 influenza. It includes some alarming remarks such as:

'We found the potential risk of public harm to be of unusually high magnitude' and;

'A pandemic, or the deliberate release of a transmissible highly pathogenic influenza A/H5N1 virus, would be an unimaginable catastrophe for which the world is currently inadequately prepared'

The authors take the possibility of release of a dangerous pathogen from a laboratory seriously, though the article is prospective rather than retrospective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

[3] https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2021/03/22/why-covi...

[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/482153a

Ebola Reston did.

Labs may be built in areas relevant to their research.

They may be, but the WIV wasn't. In the words of Dr. Shi herself:

We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.

https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli...

The closest animal virus to SARS-CoV-2 was found in nature about 900 miles from Wuhan (RaTG13, in Mojiang), closer to Chongqing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, or HK.

So when we find Anthrax outside its normal "range" but close to a lab we can just say, yeah, no, while it's not endemic to this location it is 1000 miles away, so nothing to worry about? Oh, and never mind the lab.

Or you know, 2 days drive depending on road conditions and trucking shipment along the route to a major metropolis.

This is an argument from incredulity.

Doesn’t it seem likelier that zoonotic transmission from an animal in Yunnan would infect a local and result in an initial local outbreak, which we have no evidence of? What do you think the ratio of locals in Yunnan are to visitors from Wuhan or potential visitors to Wuhan are at any given time? 100 to 1, 1000 to 1? I have no idea, but excuse the incredulity. It’s less likely that a virus from Yunnan would break out somewhere other than Yunnan, perhaps by a couple of orders of magnitude or more.

I mean sure, anything’s possible, but we have only circumstantial evidence right now and this observation isn’t a smoking gun, but it ain’t worth nothing.

This presumes COVID-19 had to evolve in the place people are looking for possible coronaviruses and had to jump directly from bats to people, and not in surrounding or isolated areas where the bats might roam. Or that their wasn't - as is suspected now - one or several interim species.

SARS after all was found in civets, and then later several other species as well despite originating in bats.

We found Novichok very close to Porton Down. However it actually came from Russia.

You're taking this the wrong way. You have to update your priors and calculate a joint probability knowing everything we know about the origins of this particular virus.

Except that we still don't actually know very much about the origins of this virus.

We know enough to calculate a joint probability. Just update your estimate with new information. This should be pretty non-controversial. Everybody does this every day especially in the face of uncertainty.

Perhaps you should do the work yourself, rather than requiring others to do it for you?

The lab leak theory doesn’t imply that the virus was created, or gain of functioned, in the lab, merely that it was studied there and escaped. The lab leak theory doesn’t imply unnatural origins.

The other astonishing things is the sudden about face by the media. I'm glad they allowed themselves the liberty of looking at alternative origins. But... they were SO adamant and complicit in any discussion about alternative theories being shut down under the guise of conspiracy, Trumpism, anti-China, etc. (These are the same people who have no qualms about attributing anything to Russia even if evidence is thin, so it's clear there is hypocrisy involved).

Edit: It looks like Twitter is suspending the account of the Fauci email leaker(s). So the MoT is still on it.

IMHO, we were in the middle of the problem. The important part to was to figure out how to get out of it. The investigation at that point would not be helpful as it may make cooperation more difficult. Even if the result is that is natural origin and it escaped from a Wet Market. It was China's responsibility and the whole world must make sure to force China to ban wet markets. But as I said before, it will come a time for that.

It was China's responsibility and the whole world must make sure to force China to ban wet markets.

lol, have you ever been to a wet market? Are you sure you even know what they are? It’s a typical Asian stall market that they hose off every night.

I’ve been to “dry” markets that they’re still cutting the faces off hogs and slaughtering chickens next to fruit vendors. That’s not particularly better.

I’m not sure if you think “banning wet markets” is a thing, but it’s definitely not.

Essentially banning all slaughtering on place and relegating it to specialty businesses which would be no better regulated than any slaughterhouse anywhere.

Meaning, you'd change nothing besides forcing Chinese to use more transport and freezer cars.

It’s almost as if we learned new information that contradicts old information and the media is doing its job publishing articles about it. How weird.

China supported this in a psyop. Remember when they tried repeatedly to push the origin of the virus to Italy? I'm ethnically Chinese, so I'm in contact with a lot of mainlanders. The brainwashing is very effective. Even if most mainlanders know that their state media is bogus, and that Xi is a dictator, they'll take it deeply personally when you say anything that threatens the whole China # 1 narrative. All they had to do was hire a few shitposters, feed a few media narratives and the US fights with itself over stuff like anti-china, racists etc, while the CCP takes over Hong Kong.

Does no one else remember the videos out of China with people laying dead in the streets, falling over as they walked, convulsing behind the steering wheels of cars? Who paid for all that acting, scenes, and filming and then have it presented as “news”?

CCP owns Hong Kong, that was over in 1997, the only surprising thing about HK is that China waited this long to make it better known. Now... The country of Taiwan on the other hand, it’s going to be a bit more tense there for some time.

EDIT: Added links from Jan, most videos have been removed but the articles and screenshots are there. The one I specifically wanted was removed from YouTube and I can’t find it, showed a guy being checked by a PPE marshmallow then nearly immediately going into spasms in his car.

EDIT2: To whoever might have been upset at my thoughts on Taiwan; I updated it with some italics for you.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7923981/Coronavirus...

https://www.ibtimes.sg/china-virusnew-videos-wuhan-show-coro...

Here is snopes with an eye roll worthy fact check https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/people-collapsing-coronavi... “Unproven” ok, thanks for that guys.

Does no one else remember the videos out of China with people laying dead in the streets, falling over as they walked, convulsing behind the steering wheels of cars?

Could you provide a link? I never saw such video on YouTube.

I can confirm the videos existed. Saw them when they were posted, back in Jan 2020. They were never on youtube, though, that I'm aware of.

I saw these too, mostly on Twitter. I shorted Boeing based on them and made some nice money. My friends didn't believe me that this was looking real bad.

didn't believe me that this was looking real bad

I think the problem was the world also didn't believe it. Perhaps if every other country had had the balls to just shut down travel in/out of China for a month or so back at the very start it might never have been so bad. I remember when the very first reports of a novel Coronavirus in Wuhan were making the news that it had the potential to be really bad, but also had some wishful thinking that it was probably just a storm in a teacup.

There is a guy on r/China I think who archived a bunch of disturbing videos from last January /February. I think I saved them or links, but I'm away from my computer. Will update if I find it.

Please share

Well, this is genuinely irritating. I'm pretty sure I saved the post on reddit, saved a link, or saved some videos, but I cannot find anything. I must not have wanted to have a bunch of videos of people dying, so I think I might have just saved the post on reddit... Other reddit posts with a link to the archive had been deleted, so I should have taken more care.

Even if most mainlanders know that their state media is bogus, and that Xi is a dictator

I am an ethnic Chinese, I don't see this impression at all.

Disclaimer: this is quite normal, China is huge with 1.4b people, there are a lot of social bubbles. And the readers should read this comment and the parent of proving that. Not that this comment or the parent is true.

Well its turtles all the way isnt it, "And the readers should read this comment and the parent of proving that. Not that this comment or the parent is true.".

The same standard would apply to your comment.

Or all the effort to not call it China Virus/Wuhan flu because that's racist and we don't name viruses after places anymore.

Virus variants named after places on the other hand are apparently perfectly fine. So we don't have the Chinese virus but we do have British, Brazilian and Indian variants.

This is incorrect given the new WHO guidelines https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/01/covid-19-varia...

I guess it's good that they realized that, but I don't really understand why this time it took half a year. We'll see if the newspapers follow it.

It's good, but it's not exactly easy to remember. Hence why the papers here in the UK now tend to say something like 'the Delta variant, which was first seen in India' - that's only marginally better than 'the Indian variant' tbh.

Except it is TVs and newspapers that were lecturing us that it was racist to call it the chinese flu and that are now happily using the xx-variant designation. It is the obvious bad faith that I find appalling.

Because there was no other name they could use. Blame the WHO for moving at the speed of molasses on this issue.

By the time it is deemed a variant, it has been sequenced number of times across the country and the health authorities always have a code or name to refer to this particular strain.

Nobody in the world except the US right called it that, and it is indeed uncommon to name viruses after its place of origin.

Literally any new variant has been called by its origin in the last year: -kent/brit variant -indian variant -california variant

What are you on about?

Except for the Spanish flu, the Brazilian flu, almost every single mammarenavirus strain...

The Spanish Flu most probably originated in the US, not Spain. Spain just had a pretty free press and published much about it. Never heard about the Brazilian Flu and couldn't find out when and where this was supposed to be, so can't comment here.

The question wasn't historically if the place-of-origin names were accurate. The question was if they were historically common.

I think naming diseases after places is a bad practice we should probably do away with, but it certainly has precedent. Offhand, there's also the Marburg virus. My understanding is also that it was unusual to name the Ebola virus after the nearby river instead of the nearby town.

Context matters. The trump administration used those phrases to stir up anti-Chinese and racist sentiments.

Context matters, but consistency too. If it's racist too call it the Wuhan flu (which I can agree with) then the Indian variant is too.

I'm curious with Wikipedia which is normally neutral but was very anti lab leak in this case, whether China directly had people work as editors there.

An alternative explanation is that the other COVID-19 narrative - that vaccines work, but those who are hesitant are essentially beyond convincing, and this is going to be both a long and boring years long slog to control globally and longer to find the origin - makes for exceedingly boring news.

On the other hand, talking about "If X is true, then..." and spending the rest of the section talking about the lab leak hypothesis as if it was true" is much more exciting.

Especially given there are now three "lab leak" camps - Bioweapon, GoF Gone Wrong, and Genuine Accidental Release of a Natural Virus all of whom claim they have the smoking gun for three mutually exclusive theories.

Where has ANYONE suggested lab leak is the 'truth' or they have a smoking gun. The news does not exclusively report on COVID either.

This is the Iraq war situation all over again, by which I mean the same people (literally) are pushing the same angle through the same media outlets in the same way.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-w... : Michael R. Gordon, WSJ on the "lab leak"

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-i... : Michael R. Gordon, NYT on "Iraq WMD"

The media are, in these cases, bad, but only because they've not adequately defended against the internal psyop by the US security agencies.

I don't think lab workers getting sick is really a useful data point. People get sick all the time. Could have very easily been seasonal flu or whatever.

It also seems The Lancet letter doesn't actual address the question of lab leak. Only that it wasn't engineered. That was a pretty hot conspiracy theory at the time and one that remains far fetched. They didn't positively say it couldn't be a naturally occurring virus that leaked. I don't know enough to comment on gain of function leaves any hallmarks but I'm guessing it doesn't since it tries to replicate evolution.

It's so far fetched to think a lab with known safety issues could be responsible for leaking a virus. We all know that humans are infallible and never make mistakes and accidents rarely occur in place with poor safety standards. Its just so crazy....

Lab workers getting sick should be a starting point to begin analyzing archived blood samples for instance. Also, you don't usually visit a hospital for seasonal flu. And three people from the same lab at the same time suggests a wider outbreak in the lab. Even if it were the seasonal flu, it would have warranted a wider investigation, given what that lab was working on.

Plenty of people visit hospitals for seasonal flu, fyi. They shouldn't, but they do.

3/6 fatality rate of researchers dying should be absolutely chilling evidence of something that’s gone wrong.

Those are miners, not researchers. And it was in 2012.

I quoted this bit in another comment, but Steven Quay (interviewed by the US gov as mentioned in tfa)

The “engineered” comments refer to common amino acid sequences from lab practices, they leave a signature because ordinary biology is more random.

  The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that arerarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair.  For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.

Perspective on the rarity of the CGG pair:

https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1391507272887455746

Basically, it's somewhat rare but not wildly so. FCoV has an RR pair, the first is coded as CGG, and the second as CGA, a difference of one base pair.

If this is the most shocking article you have ever read in your life, I feel you haven't read many articles in your life.

There is absolutely no evidence in it. Just a pile of conjecture. It is absolutely the stuff of conspiracy theories.

The truly shocking thing is that world does not hold China liable for this disaster. It really doesn't matter if it started in a lab or in one of their wet markets; it was incompetence and negligence on China's part in either case. China should pay reparations to the world for turning it off for what looks to be like multiple years, and killing millions of people.

When China started welding doors on high rises to keep people in, that was the signal to take it seriously-despite what the WHO was saying

They never welded people in, it was to funnel them through common exits where they could be disinfected.

This did not happen as far as I can discover - there were stringent lock down measures in Wuhan, but they came very late. In fact six weeks into the outbreak the Wuhan authorities held a party for 40k people. So - in fact it was the opposite, they treated it recklessly, which makes me think that they didn't have much to hide (until they realised that they had recklessly let it, whereever it came from, get out of control).

There is absolutely no evidence in it. Just a pile of conjecture

There is much more evidence in the article for a lab leak than there was for the wet market story which was uncritically parroted in the media for over a year.

There is much more evidence in the article for a lab leak than there was for the wet market story which was uncritically parroted in the media for over a year.

There was zero evidence of a lab leak in the article, only conjecture. So the bar of "same amount of evidence as the article for lab leak" is pathetically easy to reach. The fact you are throwing the "parroting" term around is ridiculously ironic as well, the "lab leak" has been parroted around the world since day one.

More importantly, who gives a shit even if *was* a lab leak? It's literally the less evil/worse of the two possibilities (wet market vs lab leak). Since that means it was "only" a lapse in lab security (one which will probably be learned from and not repeated) rather than the result of negligence in keeping open these markets despite being told over and over again that they are going to cause outbreaks just like this one, and these markets are still open!

The origin does matter.

If it evolved in a lab, it is highly likely that the virus is better at infecting people in lab conditions, for example that would mean inside.

Which, coincidentally is exactly what we're seeing. People with masks on get infected inside buildings. Outside the risk is much much lower.

"This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life."

Dare we inquire how long you have lived. :)

But seriously, I am not sure that the scientific community, nor all national governments, have reached a clear consensus on gain of function research. It is still a developing issue. Welcome to be corrected on that. Such research could potentially help to prevent pandemics as well as accidentally start them. The idea that scientists in the US might have been working with scientists in other countries, including China, on GoF research is not shocking to me. Here is a paper from 2016 on the ethics of GoF research:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4996883/

Perhaps the old saying about mistakingly attributing malice to incompetence applies here.

As for the cover-up, it is difficult to imagine that David Baltimore is wrong. I used a textbook he co-authored when I was in school; he is one of the pioneers of the biotech industry. It seems unlikely this was not created in a lab. Then again, it is probably easier to prove someone in a lab made a mistake than to prove soemthing exists in nature.

Gain of function research outside of hyper-secure settings is, frankly, idiotic. It’s massively more dangerous than criticality experiments because of the potential for exponential spread.

From the beginning gain of function research has been done at levels as low as BSL-2, and this article claims the Bat Lady said that all their coronavirus research prior to the pandemic was done at BSL-2 or -3 levels. The Wuhan Institute of Virology's BSL-4 lab would likely be booked up for research known to be very dangerous, and as you go up in levels it's more and more inconvenient to get anything done from the physical protections (there are also supposed to be biological ones).

The WaPo article where I first read about the theory said most of this stuff. I didn’t understand then why people were so quick to dismiss it - it is eerily plausible, and we just don’t have much other data to go on. But it’s like having an opinion one way or the other is a political dog whistle that puts you into one of two bins, neither of which I fit into comfortably. This article makes a decent point of that: now that Trump’s racism is out of the way, maybe we can more critically examine the facts. I still think the lab leak theory is less likely than evolution, but it’s at least a bit compelling.

We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. Scientists are human and have human motivations and flaws. They are political, they cover their ass, they suffer from results oriented thinking.

“Science” should be trusted within its domain, but it’s not a replacement for all of the processes western society has developed to address the reality that nobody can be trusted with power. Everyone needs to perform their roles. Reporters still need to be skeptical and question scientists’ motivations and investigate the story. And politicians still need to be in charge of translating scientists’ judgments as to various scenarios and probabilities into the political decisions of figuring out what to do accounting for the entire universe of economic and social considerations that are within their ambit.

To me, the only really horrible thing is the way that anything other than the mainstream version of events was treated. I think there are different plausible theories, and I'm not surprised they have different adherents that are mostly all motivated by something other than a pure quest for the truth. That's life. If this was e.g. a civil or criminal trial, you'd see the same thing.

The only difference is, in a trial, nobody would try and brand the other side as a conspiracy theorist, racist, denier, anti-xer, whatever the most popular inflammatory term is. Nobody would try and block dissent from all mainstream communication forums.

To me, that's the only thing that's new, is the institutional suppression of any suggestions outside of an orthodox version. And it's honestly way scarier than the idea that government labs are doing biological research, or that diseases can jump from animals to people.

That’s another symptom of the same disease. People have an idea that “trust the experts” can replace all the messy, gross, and often wrong processes we have developed to deal with the fact nobody can be trusted. Trusting scientists involved in gain of function research will neutrally investigate the origins of the pandemic is one manifestation of that conceit. So is trusting fact checkers and review panels to decide what’s “misinformation” and what’s factual.

The marketplace of ideas is better than trusting gatekeepers of knowledge. That’s one of the huge lessons of the enlightenment that we have somehow forgot. We think “it’s different this time.”

The marketplace of ideas is better than trusting gatekeepers of knowledge.

That's such a simplification of the real situation that it's harmful to apply as an axiom.

There are many levels of the marketplace of ideas. Ideally, the gatekeepers of knowledge also create a marketplace of ideas so that expert opinion is varied and shifts as new information come in. This is in inline with what we're seeing here.

The marketplace of ideas with no experts to guide discussion often results in crank ideas that seem plausible but heavily influenced by our biases bubbling to the top. That's how things like the Anti-vax movement gained a foothold.

No one argued that it should be applied as an axiom. You're responding to an argument that wasn't made.

Also, the "gatekeepers of knowledge" have a mostly.....negative past when you look at the sum of recorded human history. Are you arguing that humans today are just way better and far more trustworthy than the rest of history?

Let's be sure to use the same definition of "gatekeepers" for the past and present knowledge. What I see is, people look at the past examples of politicians and religious leaders telling people what to believe, and try to use those to dismiss opinions of present-day domain specialists. Which is a nasty case of motte-and-bailey fallacy.

There is a problem though. Without access to source material of any real journalist (not a reporter) you have no way of knowing whether whatever they're saying is true.

Marketplace of ideas is just measuring the average of views at best and fringe views may on occasion be valid, or not. It is also gameable by promoting "truthy" or plausible explanations with no data behind them.

In this case, it is irrelevant what the source of the pandemic was, securing the labs doing viral research to BSL-4 is prudent. The only issue faced is one of funding, which is vastly insufficient to maintain these facilities. Or at least placement in remote locations with quarantine in place to prevent leaks.

Data only weakly suggests a composite and does not categorically exclude natural origin. Leak of a natural or modified virus would be just as bad. Same if it's from consumption of rare animals sent from remote places or research on the samples from them. In either case, only different degree of luck is required for a pandemic.

This "Marketplace of ideas" is run by English speakers, in our case, and completely ignores the idea that we or our allies may have been involved in a biological attack on China. Very convenient, in my opinion, since history says NATO countries are the most likely to deploy biological weapons.

involved in a biological attack on China.

It's very unlikely anyone was doing any research on directly using SARS-CoV2 as a weapon. It kills or maims too low a percentage of people to have tactical value, and it's too difficult to contain. (The most effective weapons severely handicap their victims and allow them to live into old age, taking fighters off the field, and turning them into long-term liabilities and living reminders for anyone who might think about fighting you in the future.)

I'm not saying SARS-CoV2 leaked from a lab, but if it did, it was probably more of a basic science/weapons background research rather than an engineered weapon itself. You might want to add some SARS-CoV2 characteristics to a bioweapon, but you'd want to start out with something with greater morbidity and more easily quarantined as a starting point for a weapon.

The most effective weapons severely handicap their victims and allow them to live into old age, taking fighters off the field, and turning them into long-term liabilities and living reminders for anyone who might think about fighting you in the future

I do not believe that covid was intentionally designed and released as a bio weapon.

That being said, have you heard of long covid?

North Carolina lab was shipping covid around the world. Wouldn't be surprised if the lab in Fort Detrick was doing similar research.

You seem to assume a bio-weapon has to cause mass death to be effective and meet the deployer's objectives...you are wrong in the case of economic attacks.

Nonsense. What a foolish weapon it would be. Both for its lack of virulence and imprecise targeting. This is (a rather bad) conspiracy theory

The point is to disrupt, not mass murder, and in that sense, mission accomplished.

This scenario is just as plausible as the lab leak theory, and probably has just as much evidence.

Ridiculous to think that it was deployed by NATO because NATO countries were affected by it just as much if not more. That would be the most idiotic weapon used ever. It literally makes no sense.

Sorry, but the idea of NATO deploying the most idiotic weapon imaginable on the entire world vs. the idea of an accidental escape from a lab are NOT equally plausible at all. In fact, this entire article goes thru evidence that it was not NATO because of all of the internal investigations and such.

What you are suggesting is tin foil hat conspiracy theory crazy.

"In this case, it is irrelevant what the source of the pandemic was ..."

...

"Leak of a natural or modified virus would be just as bad. Same if it's from consumption of rare animals sent from remote places or research on the samples from them."

I disagree.

I actually think "lab leak" is better and more optimistic news than a natural outgrowth or animal consumption, etc.

Lab leaks are a problem we can fix - probably without too much trouble. They don't represent a fundamental problem with accelerating globalization, urbanization and travel.

On the other hand, a natural origin or a human-animal crossing due to animal husbandry in or near urban areas ... or "bush meat" consumption ... those vectors could indicate that globalization, urbanization and travel have crossed a threshold where events such as this become likely and will recur regularly.

Given the relatively recent emergence of SARS and MERS, I have been fearful that our very connected, urbanized and globalized world (which I enjoy greatly) is at risk.

The problem with this is that the American public discourse is broken.

The Republicans (I can't tapdance around the direct call out with weasel words) and the right-wing media have lost all credibility because they often DO behave as racist, selfish, inconsistent conspiracy theorists. On those rare occasions when they are right or properly play the role of opposition rather than pushing an absurd agenda alongside their media manipulation, their prior behavior causes an automatic immune-like response. You can't trust anything they say or their intentions, and they are experts at the Gish Gallop (constantly coming up with new bs you have to respond to, when response takes far more effort) - why would this particular action be any different? Also, this seems more of a case of "a broken clock is right twice a day" than an indication that the right should be taken seriously as a general rule.

Non-credible actors that are known to be untrustworthy should never be the people who put forth any hypotheses if you want them to be taken seriously. The American far-right politicians/media and 4chan are not credible actors, and any idea associated with them will face an uphill battle.

Unfortunate, the "left media" also faces massive credibility problems due to their willingness to uncritically publish anything they could spin as negative for Trump, regardless of veracity or verifiability.

Partisanship is a disease that is destroying our democracy.

The silly thing to me is that there were plenty of factual things to criticize, they just weren't as sensational and headline grabbing.

This New York mag article [1] published eons ago already made it clear to any sane biologist that all you mentioned are important things to consider. However the issue is sane biologists or scientists in general are actually in extreme short supply, the vast majority are often under the delusion that they “understand the system” better than they actually do. They also are often knowingly and unknowingly more interested in persevering their personal agenda (for eg. Gain of function research in the general sense in this case) than the overall good of humanity or scientific rigor.

Take Fauci for example, is he a good scientist? Yes. But it’s also clear that he too subconsciously has pushed for the method of approaching pandemics that coincidentally he was good at, and now we are left with this mess. I doubt him or anyone in between is going to acknowledge it even if they realize it. I was downvoted here to oblivion for pointing this out weeks back but doesn’t matter. I threw away a decade of my life’s experience because I didn’t believe in this cult of an academic system, downvotes don’t hurt nearly as much.

1. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...

Trump didn't exactly follow Fauci's advice, so it's odd that you'd blame Fauci's "method of approaching pandemics" for "this mess."

Was there some other, better, established method?