Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

That was really interesting. Thanks. Reading Communist Party tea leaves is not exactly a science, and I have no idea what to make of it.

 

If you are looking for a scientific answer to where the virus came from in that ProPublica / Vanity Fair thing, you are going to be disappointed. It's a little beside the point, though, because the interesting thing about what they did was to forensically go through the documents and communicaton with Beijing from the virology lab in late 2019 and early 2020 that they pulled off of its server, and then have someone who supposedly understood "cover your ass, communist party communications" parse it to try to read between the lines about what was happening.

There, you have to trust that they can read those tea leaves correctly, and who knows if the guy behind their analysis can?

But anything worth reading in that piece had nothing to do with the nonsensical scientific attempts to establish that the virus is either 100 percent a zoonotic event or 100 percent due to passaging in a lab (which nobody has done). Don't trust any scientist that is saying they conclusively can tell you where the virus came from, especially Michael Worobey, who created a chronology that may or may not have been the reality of what happened and has since been invested in shouting down anyone who doesn't accept his chronology with "science!"

 

No one should be emotionally invested in anything except trying to get at what is factual.

It's sad that it has been politicized that way, pretty much from the get go because Trump was invested in Chiiiiiina BS and skapegoating because the reality of the problem was going to put a crimp in his presidency.

The other half of it is that there was a scientific community that very quickly got in line, almost defensively, trying to establish that it was a zoonatic jump. When it couldn't be proven. The problem is that the evidence consistent with a zoonatic jump is no more conclusive than the evidence that the virus could have derived from serial passaging in a lab.

Relatively early on during the pandemic, New York magazine did sort of a "what if" article asking, "What if the virology lab in Wuhan was doing that kind of passaging without good safety or precautions and accidentally unleashed the virus?"

There were a few people on here who immediately started "Science has disproven that!" (which is / was not true), and they lost their heads when I challenged what they were saying. Their fervor sounded to me a lot like the Trump idiots who were so eager to create an evil China narrative.

It's entirely plausible -- and consistent with some of the genomic sequence of the virus -- that the virus originated in that virology institute. It's consistent with what we know about the work they were doing with coronaviruses. There is no conclusive proof that it happened that way, though.

We all have a stake in wanting to know, though, just in terms of trying to prevent future pandemics if there is a "carelessness" explanation. For that reason, I think it is really important that the world keeps pushing China for answers rather than everyone throwing up their hands because of the lack of transparency and honesty. I found that ProPublica piece interesting because of the work that guy did in going through all of the communications from that lab around the time of the first cases, and if he is right that they were acting like something had happened and everyone was trying to cover their asses, it would be damning. Where it lost me was that you or I couldn't read those things and come to the same conclusions, because the analysis was, "I am an expert in reading between the lines of the communist bureaucracy, and this is what they were really saying." My question is, "Were they really or is this a hack job disguised as analysis?"

 

What you are saying is what complicates it. ... The Chinese have been so non-transparent -- about everything -- that it's made it difficult for anyone to try to investigate. Their behavior lends itself to "What are they hiding?" conclusions, regardless of the preconceived narrative someone is coming at it from.