Thread by @PhilippMarkolin

The Brownstone institute is a fracking-billionaire funded anti-science #disinformation outlet

I just highlight some passages to show that the #lableak conspiracy myth would always have happened, no matter where COVID first broke out

If not the WIV, then 🔽

A master thread:
1/

Many amplifiers, including some science journalists, believe that a legitimate scientific uncertainty & geographic coincidence underneath the #originofcovid controversy is the root cause and driver for the conspiracy myth.

This is false
Yes, the inital uncertainties were real
2/

but no matter where the virus initially broke out, there would always be some lab or some scientists that could be made to associate with.

All pandemics were followed by #conspiracy theories about their origins. The 1918 flu was blamed on the Germans and their aspirin, ffs.

3/

These 'coincidences' do not matter scientifically, they are not the reasons why these #conspiracy myths exist & they can not be used to justify or legitimize them continuing to persist.

Any world-shaking event will have some apparently unexplicable coincidences found post-hoc
4/

The reasons are manifold, but the largest junk comes down to our #cognitive processes, first our flaws to understand "survivorship bias", and second, a behavior called "anomaly hunting".

These two processes often cause us to misunderstand the real nature of the 'coincidence'
5/

For example, every year, scientific studies suggest we have tens of thousands of CoV spillover into humans. Yet most of these viruses can not cause human to human transmission, and even of those few which do, 99,8% of them die out by themselves because they happen in villages.
6/

Only situations where CoVs get the change to jump multiple time in immune-naive & host-dense cities is there a chance of a self-sustaining outbreak; therefore, SARS-CoV-2 would have only taken of in a dense city with multiple spillovers (this is what the science now shows, btw)
7

Dense cities like Wuhan however have research institutes, and many of them. As we have seen above, if not for the WIV, there are many other virology labs to chose from. Hospitals, Universities, Agricultural institutes, Wuhan CDC and other public health institutions etc..
8/

The #anomaly that the WIV worked on CoVs is to a certain extend artificial, because it is post-hoc.
It is being sold as this super-weird coincidence, when in fact, other anomalies could have been made up to sound just as damning.

Consider the Sino-German hospital lab above
9/

affiliated with the (now famous) virologist C. Drosten, who in 2003 identified the first SARS virus.
You think this anomaly (now pushed by the above disinformation outlet) would not just as easily have been milked for a slightly different #lableak myth?
10/

(Drosten was also part of the 'Fauci teleconference', so there we go again)

Or consider a different #anomaly, for example how the Wuhan CDC moved into new offices somewhat near the Huanan market in Dez 2019.

If the WIV was not there, you bet they'd be taken more to task.
11/

Imagine the political ties the Wuhan CDC has with the Chinese communist party...even more anomalies to exploit.
It would be an endless #conspiratorial zergfest of who-is-who & secret bioweapons & Chinese schemes etc...

My point is:
There are never shortages of anomalies.
12/

Me even mentioning the few anomalies above will prompt some conspiratorially-prone #believers to 'exploring' alternative conspiracy myths; not realizing that all these are mutually exclusive scenarios when it comes to the #originofcovid.

You can't have them all be true.
13/

Anomaly hunting & survivorship bias might be understandable human processes, but they do not magically #legitimize an hypothesis that has zero scientific #evidence, especially when an alternative hypothesis has a lot of supportive evidence that directly contradicts it
14/

So TL;DR:
Journalists and other #amplifiers would do well to understand their role in creating a #false #equivalency between #baseless speculations juiced up by anomalies or biases versus reporting actual #scientific evidence and theories.

/end