Thread by @JoshRosenau

This by @KatzOnEarth makes a crucial point that gets glossed over in 99% of #OriginsOfCovid discourse. There’s no unitary “lab leak theory.” There’s nothing that generates testable predictions (a necessity for something to be science). theracket.news/p/there-is-no-…

The Trump/Pompeo State Department had a whole special stovepiped team dedicated to claiming COVID was a Chinese government bioweapon released on purpose. Or maybe by accident. But probably at the World Military Games.

This was bizarre and stupid and had no relationship to anything in biology or human behavior or the epidemiology of the virus. But it got the old Iraq-WMD team together and almost led to a formal diplomatic protest claiming bioweapon treaty violations.

It also meant that the significant resources of the State Departments hackiest minds were set to finding or concocting evidence to justify that foregone conclusions. Which amounted to “some people got sick! (during flu season) and the parking lots were empty! (on a holiday).”

So that’s one lab leak theory. 100% bogus, but touted by the US President and Secretary of State, picked up by Senators and run through the right wing media wringer to extract any stray memetic energy.

It also pulled Twitter’s top lab leak advocate into those circles. Alina Chan was a paid consultant to that effort to gun up proof that COVID (was intentionally) leaked from a Chinese (government bioweapons) lab. She doesn’t endorse the parenthetical, but didn’t decry it either.

Chan has carefully not endorsed any specific claim about COVID’s origin, while angrily fighting back against any effort to dismiss any of the mutually incompatible claims that circulate in the goofily-acronymed groups of COVID leak conspiracists.

Those claims include: COVID is a bioweapon; COVID was intentionally engineered by nefarious virologists/underpants gnomes; COVID accidentally evolved from pointless research; COVID spilled over zoonotically…but to a scientist (so IT STILL COUNTS!!!1!!!).

Indeed the only theory on the origin of COVID she finds intolerable is that it spilled over to a farmer or market-goer, the path followed by most emerging diseases in history.

One strike against any of those lab scenarios is that they all rely on COVID ever having been inside a lab, and there’s zero evidence for that, or indeed that there was ever a plausible precursor in any lab. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Another strike is that each scenario makes different predictions, sometimes *opposite* predictions, about SARS-CoV-2’s sequence and epidemiology. In other words, there’s no “lab leak” prediction, and no way to test or falsify the claim. It’s like trying to nail jello to a wall.

We see this with the FBI and Dept. of Energy (DOE) announcements this week. FBI agents (who aren’t lab scientists, and whose forensic science is notoriously shitty) concluded that a lab leak is most likely because the sort of lab manipulation done at WIV is too risky.

They do not claim evidence that such lab manipulation ever was conducted *on SARS-CoV-2,* nor that SARS-CoV-2 was ever in a lab. But still, purported GOFROC at Wuhan Institute of Virology is what gives them moderate confidence in a lab scenario.

DOE apparently disagrees. Their low confidence assessment is based on the idea that an entirely separate lab in Wuhan, the Chinese CDC, was conducting field work — but not lab manipulation — on bat viruses and a researcher might’ve gotten sick in the field and spread the virus.

This is 100% non-overlapping with the FBI’s claim. DOE and FBI’s claims are also 100% non-overlapping with the Pompeo/Asher process that kicked off all this nonsense. If FBI is right, DOE is wrong, and vice versa (Pompeo is definitely wrong, everyone agrees).

Again, DOE’s assessment does not seem to entail any — literally one iota — of evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was ever inside any lab, including CCDC. It’s just they think it’s kinda possible. And if true, it would mean SARS-CoV-2 evolved 100% naturally. No lab manipulation.

90% of lab leak discourse centers on trying to prove that SARS-CoV-2’s genome has some fingerprint of manipulation, or that it has features which would be impossible (or vanishingly likely) to evolve naturally. DOE’s claim is 100% incompatible with any of that!

The other 10% largely consists of efforts to tie the outbreak specifically to WIV. Again, the DOE assessment requires all of that stuff to be completely wrong. They point a doubtful finger at an entirely different lab!

So of course everyone who has spent years insisting that COVID came from GOFROC at WIV is now claiming validation from the DOE assessment which endorses no such thing.

DOE’s take is NOT EVEN A LAB ESCAPE! It’s a natural spillover, just to a researcher rather than a miner or farmer. Which is a point for zoonosis, not lab scenarios. And it still doesn’t explain what we know about COVID’s early epidemiology and evolutionary history.