Thread by @Ayjchan

Ooh @cbcradio Sunday Magazine @davidcommon interview of @nicholsonbaker8 on the lab leak hypothesis in @NYMag

For US people, listen on @Spotify

cbc.ca/radio/sunday/t…

One point I disagree with @nicholsonbaker8 is that, if covid came from a lab, this is the result of US interest in gain-of-function research. There is global interest in gain-of-function research - has been for years. Even if the US cut off funding, it wouldn't stop.

There's a type of American hubris that imagines that if you cut off some millions of dollars of funding to "gain-of-function" research in other countries and implement some kind of moratorium, that it would grind to a halt.

That doesn't work.

And I know that some scientists think the answer to this problem is machine learning (a different kind of hubris).

This is at least 10 things down the list of items that is needed to address this global problem.

We live in a world now where a large number of labs can synthesize pathogens of any kind seamlessly. Not to mention, there are private collections of pathogen sequences and private military research.

Unless the most suspicious labs are consistently popping out artificial pathogen sequences that you can train your ML model on, how would you even be able to predict if a novel pathogen is natural or has undergone artificial processing?

To provide an analogy (I know some people loathe these), pathogen synthesis has gotten as good as plastic surgery.

Sometimes, you can tell immediately that work was done.

But sometimes, you just can't tell. And the scientific consensus: no signs of artificial process.

So these declarations: "no evidence pointing to lab origins or lab engineering"

Should be considered similarly to "no evidence point to plastic surgery or botox"