Thread by @phl43

It's been really painful to watch the reactions to this story, which as this thread notes has all the usual red flags (people never learn), but the worse part may be that, depending on the details, *even if the story is true*, it could be totally uninteresting.

https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/1396577153232379904

As I noted previously, more than 1,000 people work at the WIV, so even if 3 people got symptoms compatible with COVID-19 in November, that would be less than 0.3% of the staff. Would that be surprising? Well, it depends on details the story doesn't give. necpluribusimpar.net/did-china-lie-…

In the US, the CDC estimates that ~8% of the population gets sick because they are infected by the flu each year on average. For influenza-like illnesses (ILI) in general it must be significantly more. It's probably about the same in China. cdc.gov/flu/about/keyf…

If we assume that the probability of developing an ILI is equally distributed throughout the year, this means we'd expect *at least* 6 people working at the WIV to have developed that kind of symptoms in November.

The real figure is probably *much* higher because 1) this figure is based on using the 8% prevalence estimate but again that's just for illness caused by the flu specifically and not ILI in general and 2) the probability of developing an ILI is concentrated over a few months.

So the fact that 3 people working at the WIV developed an ILI in November, even if that's a fact, would be totally unsurprising. We'd expect way more even in the absence of SARS-CoV-2.

A lot of people will probably reply to this that, while this may be true, those 3 people reportedly went to the hospital, so it was not any ILI symptoms but severe ones and surely the probability of developing that kind of symptoms is significantly less than for any ILI symptoms.

Except that we don't know the symptoms were severe. In fact we don't know anything about them except that they were allegedly consistent with covid. In particular we don't know they were hospitalized. All we know is that 3 people allegedly sought hospital care for those symptoms.

In fact, further into the piece, even the WSJ acknowledges that it's not unusual for people in China to go to the hospital when they're sick.

As often with those intelligence leaks, the real questions you should ask yourself is not about what they say, but about what they *don't* say.

Here the question is: why didn't the leak say whether those 3 people went to the hospital to get regular health care for mild ILI symptoms or because they became severely ill and required hospitalization?

One possibility is that the evidence only showed they went to the hospital for ILI symptoms, but nothing more. In that case, it's pretty uninteresting, since again there is nothing surprising per se about the fact that 3 people went to the hospital for ILI symptoms in November.

However, if that intelligence really were "of exquisite quality" (as one of the sources the WSJ spoke to put it), it presumably included that information.

But if the evidence showed that those 3 people not only sought hospital care, but were severely ill and required hospitalization, then the leakers would surely have told that to the WSJ, because it makes the case for the lab escape theory stronger.

So the fact that the leakers apparently *didn't* claim that very strongly suggests that those 3 people were *not* severely ill, but since this undermines the conclusion the leakers wanted people to draw from that, they just decided to omit this little detail 🤷‍♂️

If the authors protest that I'm speculating, by all means, let them show us the primary documents, but until they do I will treat this story in the same way I treated the garbage Five Eyes dossier story, which as @pwnallthethings noted might actually have the same source.

Let me add a few words on the more general issue of how this whole controversy has played out in the discourse, because to me it's really fascinating.

One thing that makes this painful for me is that, as @pwnallthethings noted, the issues we're raising about this story are very similar to issues *many people who uncritically accept the conclusion we are supposed to draw from those leaks* previously made about similar stories.

The only difference is that, in this case, vague leaks that don't show anything and, if you pay attention to what they *don't* say, actually suggest the opposite of what the leakers want you to conclude are used to tarnish people they don't like, i. e. the CCP.

When the same kind of vague, misleading leaks were used to peddle Russiagate nonsense, the *same people* pointed out the same kind of things I just did, but in this case they fall for it hook, line and sinker. Not really surprising, but still very depressing.

Another thing I find fascinating is how the lab escape theory controversy illustrates how little evidence and arguments matter for the discourse.

As I have noted previously, we haven't learned anything fundamentally new about this theory. You could have made, and many people did make, basically the same arguments in favor of the lab escape theory a year ago. What changed is who make them, but it changed *everything*.

While I think that the arguments for this theory are unconvincing, and in fact I think most of them are so bad that it's almost physically painful for me to read them, whether you agree or not your opinion shouldn't have changed since last year if you have followed this story.

But many people who had previously been dismissing *the very same arguments* now accept them, just because now the "right" people are making those arguments, so it has become socially acceptable for educated people to take them seriously. It has really been amazing.

In the process, we are totally forgetting that people who are claiming victory over this story, which again is nonsense since it doesn't show shit, have their own, not hypothetical but indisputable skeletons in their closet.

https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1396808753991888899

I know many people think that if I stayed relatively quiet despite my previous writing on this issue, it's because recent revelations have shown I was wrong, but that's not at all the reason. Like I said, whether I'm right or wrong, the evidence has remained basically the same.

And this is the main reason why I haven't revisited this issue, although — God help me — I am extremely tempted to write a response to Wade's essay, i. e. because except for details my arguments haven't changed.

Another reason why I'm trying to refrain from chiming in again, clearly not very successfully, is that I already spent way too much time on this topic and I'm really *sick* of it.

I also know that every time I do talk about it, I end up wasting a lot of time because most people aren't really interested in looking at the evidence rationally but have already made up their mind and will just use anything they can to bolster the LET. necpluribusimpar.net/did-china-lie-…

So if you want to know what I think, you can read my 4-part essay on Quillette (quillette.com/category/covid…), which is actually about a lot more than the lab escape theory but I think other claims about China’s alleged lies feed into the LET.

For more technical details, you can also check the version on my blog. Again, except on details (like the pangolin recombination hypothesis but as I said at the time - see below - it really wasn’t essential to my argument), my position hasn’t changed. necpluribusimpar.net/did-china-lie-…

Unless something really new surfaces, it won’t change, so if against my better judgment I write again on this topic it will just be to address new arguments for the same — in my opinion — flawed conclusion.

https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1396754200718151683

No it won’t, because as I noted previously, that’s exactly what we’d expect for a virus that emerged naturally but 1) only gives mild or no symptoms to 90% of people it infects and 2) has a very low dispersion factor 🤷‍♂️

https://twitter.com/oconick1/status/1396829408875499521

Of course, strictly speaking the fact that we still haven't traced it back to its animal source does speak against the zoonotic spillover hypothesis (ZSH) to some extent, but in practice I don't think it makes a meaningful difference.

https://twitter.com/2_trenchcoat/status/1396848406551830528

Let's just work through an example. First we need to think about what it means to "trace SARS-CoV-2 back to its animal source". If we take this to refer to something that would rule out the lab escape theory (LET), it can't be just finding a very closely related virus in the

wild, because the wild ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 could have been harvested and later escaped from the WIV. So it has to mean something like "trace back the outbreak in Wuhan to patient zero and find the animal source from which he got infected". Suppose that, if the ZSH is true, the

probability that we could trace SARS-CoV-2 back to its animal source is only 10%. (For what it's worth I think it's *way* less than that.) Furthermore suppose that before we have any evidence we assign a probability of 80% to ZSH. How does the fact that we haven't been able to

trace back SARS-CoV-2 to its animal source change that? Well, on those assumptions, Bayes's theorem tells us that we should lower the probability we assign to ZSH to ~78.3%. Does anybody think it's a meaningful difference? I don't think so and the real change is even less than

that because again I think the probability of tracing back SARS-CoV-2 to its origin conditional on ZSH is way less than 10%. Note that, as I have set things up, there is an asymmetry here: if on the other hand we did trace back SARS-CoV-2 to its animal source, then we should

assign a probability of 1 to ZSH. This will never happen of course because in reality "tracing SARS-CoV-2 back to its animal source" will never be the kind of clean cut event I have been supposing. The bottom line is that, in practice, the fact that we haven't done so makes no

meaningful difference because even if ZSH is true that's what you would expect, so what really matters is your priors. This whole thing is about people's priors and nothing we have learned recently should change much to your priors.