Thread by @Ayjchan

Journalists have been asking what it's like to propose lab origins hypothesis & consistently present the circumstantial evidence for it.

I thought about this and think the analogy of the boy who cried wolf is the best way to explain it to non-scientists.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_W…

The story: "a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his town's flock. When a wolf actually does appear and the boy again calls for help, the villagers believe that it is another false alarm and the sheep are eaten by the wolf."

At the very beginning of this pandemic, there were people who cried wolf. These included scientists who said that it could be possible that SARS-CoV-2 had come from a lab.
sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/m…

world-class.simplecast.com/episodes/what-…

img-prod.tgcom24.mediaset.it/images/2020/02…

Other scientists said a wolf attack could be ruled out.

Sheep go missing all the time. Precedents show that a wolf has never eaten the sheep before; a pandemic has never resulted from a lab accident.

thelancet.com/journals/lance…

scripps.edu/news-and-event…

cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspecti…

Soon, people appeared, who not only said a wolf was responsible for the missing sheep, but that a werewolf (a bioweapon) was responsible (for the pandemic).

This only provided ammunition to the scientists who had ruled out a wolf (lab origins).

The scientists and people who had said a wolf attack should be investigated, suddenly found themselves grouped with the people who cried WEREWOLF.

Even though we had been saying all along that this was an accident (if from a lab) and not a bioweapon.

This prompted the other side that ruled out wolf attacks to go further, saying there is zero evidence for a wolf attack (even though there is also zero evidence of the sheep just wandering off) and even so far as wolves don't exist (lab safety too good for accidents to occur).

After some time, as evidence failed to emerge that the sheep had just wandered off, folks who thought a wolf attack was simply ludicrous (conspiracy theory) started to soften their stance and say that they had considered a wolf attack (lab leak) plausible all along.

But even though they had begun to endorse the same questions/venues of investigation, they misrepresented the people who had cried wolf (accidental lab leak) earlier - saying that they were in the same bunch as the conspiracy theorists who had cried werewolf (bioweapon).

People in the middle, who have been asking for lab leak hypothesis to be investigated, find themselves between extremes.

The folks who cry werewolf over every single thing.

And folks who said wolf attacks were not plausible in early 2020 but now think should be investigated.

And because of how the media and publishing is set up, only the extremes get published.

It's freaking difficult to get a moderate POV published because it doesn't get all the clicks and it doesn't support either extreme narrative.

The problem, is how to get people (leaders, really) to actually take steps to investigate whether a lab leak was the origin of the covid-19 pandemic, without falling into the trap of being cast as a chaos-monger or misinformation spreader who fuels werewolf(bioweapons)-criers.

We've got people who think it's case closed: sheep wandered off. People who think it's clear an unrestricted werewolf devoured the sheep. People who think it's already so clear that it was a wolf attack that they're only concerned with claiming that they were first to cry wolf...

What this collectively means = no one is actually investigating whether a wolf attack occurred. No one is tracking the wolves.

We're all busy tearing each other apart, over zero evidence for anything.

If we don't get a hold of ourselves, we cannot prevent the next pandemic.