It is absolutely INSANE that Alina Chan and the NYT Opinion team are claiming this as evidence for a lab origin for the pandemic when it has been thoroughly discredited for years. In 2020, contractors within Trump's State Department working for Tom DiNanno were given permission to dig up any & everything they could throw at China to blame them for the pandemic. In late 2020 Mike Pease found mention of non-COVID illnesses on an interagency classified system

I am not a virologist or epidemiologist. I listen to them & they have pointed out numerous errors in the NYT piece. However I am incredibly familiar with how pseudoscience & conspiracy theory pushers argue after dealing with hordes of them on climate, and it's the same dynamics.

https://twitter.com/hypoautonomic/status/1797797478550614200

Lab Leakers have been pushing a dog's breakfast of conflicting claims that fail to contend with consilience of evidence and aren't even internally coherent for years. When their claims are shown to be wrong they add epicycles to dodge falsifiability or pretend it never happened.

We should tell people that available evidence indicates SARS-CoV-2 was a mundane zoonosis, that after four years there's zero evidence it was engineered or was inside a lab prior to its discovery in December 2019, and that Lab Leaker claims are overwhelmingly wrong & conspiracist Preemptively tapping the sign:

https://twitter.com/past_is_future/status/1752497114230202409

Genuine question:

is there some sort of journalistic purpose being served by not disclosing that it's David Asher & the same other people who have been promoting this story for years, when they have said the same things non-anonymously elsewhere? Genuine question:

is there some sort of journalistic purpose being served by not pointing out that this story is completely absent from the information these folks were spreading around internally, then across the interagency, then to media before a certain period in time?

this is an excellent question!

https://twitter.com/angrysoba/status/1670208614022414336

as with so many things David Asher has been involved with promoting in the media, there's not one single clear answer. I can try to summarize what is known from memory here & hopefully circle back at some point with links.

media coverage on SARS-CoV-2 origins is terrible because the *specifics* of incredibly dumb lab leak claims are rarely communicated, nor is how these claims completely fail to offer superior explanatory power over the actual scientific experts' assessment of available evidence. in the information vacuum at the start of the pandemic it might be reasonable to wonder whether or not the virus came from a lab.

in 2023 lab scenarios can't just gesture vaguely at info gaps or 'China bad'. they need to explain the evidence *better* than mainstream science can.

there are people who think we're being visited by nonhuman entities, the government backwards engineered their tech — all this hidden from the masses — who act incensed when skeptics criticize UFO silliness, and point to defense, IC, Congressionals talking seriously about UAPs. empirical questions with uncertainties, inconsistencies, & unknowns have potential explanations ranging from the mundane to the incredibly exotic. gaps in understanding invariably fuel belief in or speculation about exotic claims that necessitate extraordinary evidence.

in Feb 2020, Tom Cotton absolutely said SARS-CoV-2 might be a secret Chinese bioweapon and WENT EVEN FURTHER suggesting that the scenario of China DELIBERATELY RELEASING said bioweapon might not be as likely but was still possible & actual experts were wrong to suggest otherwise: Far from being a strawman, bad faith attempt to smear proponents of Lab Leak rhetoric with fringe views of social media randos, the most recent (Dec '22) GOP House Intelligence Committee report whined about people not taking bioweapons claims seriously 🥴

in the US, Lab Leak rhetoric broke into the mainstream in Spring 2021, with a huge media blitz from goobers formerly at State + Congressional Republicans feeding credulous journalists comically stupid "intelligence" stuff with zero regard to consilience of evidence. for the past two years, the actual scientific experts have been contending w/ the available evidence, slowly but surely constraining the solution space for the origin of SARS-CoV-2. And almost everything claimed in favor of lab origin at the start of the pandemic has been refuted

Richard Ebright has not only been publicly accusing the actual experts scientifically investigating the start of the pandemic of fraudulently hoaxing the world about what happened to hide their own culpability suggesting repeatedly they are responsible for millions of deaths...⤵️ when people have protested this, pointing out that his disgusting, baseless, completely irresponsible conspiracy nonsense is putting scientists in danger — including just recently multiple people he's targeted being singled out by name for a To Kill list — this is how he reacts:

people like Ebright, or his sycophants like Justin Kinney, Bryce Nickels et al., traffick in this dumb conspiracism & attempt to tear down the genuine experts doing the actual scientific investigation into SARS-CoV-2 because these guys genuinely can't do that science themselves. if they actually could add any scientific value to the question of SARS-CoV-2 origins, they would not be reduced to endorsing absurd, unphysical nonsense conspiracy theories.

they'd do the work. but they won't.

an incomplete collection of Richard Ebright suggesting real experts on the topic, of which he is absolutely not one, are covering up the origin of the pandemic at the behest of the government bc they are to blame and have the blood of millions & millions of deaths on their hands:

@JamieMetzl This Paris Group consists of twerps who not only accuse real experts on SC2 of working at the behest of Fauci to hoax the world about the origin of COVID-19, but has members who falsely blame some of those same scientists for causing a 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa 🥴 @JamieMetzl when people in this Paris Group nod sagely in agreement about how Chinese scientists allegedly tried to "hide" a feature of a virus whose genome was fully public because an extended figure was created just like similar figures had been for years what do you call that?

Struggling to think of anything around 2016-on that would have resulted in a subsequent change in sentiment for Facebook coverage...

wsj.com/articles/adver… Struggling to think of anything around 2016-on that would have resulted in a subsequent change in sentiment for Facebook coverage...

bbc.com/news/world-asi…

Megyn Kelly’s Anti-Vax Lies Are a Threat to Public Health thedailybeast.com/megyn-kellys-a… "Megyn Kelly Interviews RFK, Jr.: How Pfizer Killed the Vaccine Safety Commission"

so much of this idiocy is just "fine, maybe our latest claims about a lab origin of COVID-19 turned out to be utter nonsense, just like all of our past claims, but the important thing is that they *could* have been true" over & over, ignoring the science done by genuine experts. it might not be possible to preclude the entire set of infinite hypothetical lab scenarios with the extant evidence, but it's certainly possible — indeed the state of affairs — that *actual, specific* lab leak scenarios that get put forward can be & have been by the real experts.

"lab accidents with transmissible pathogens are common ACKSHUALLY!" k. yet lab accidents aren't repeatedly causing global pandemics? almost like most infection chains — even of transmissible pathogens — fizzle out, necessitating a sustained interface with a pathogen reservoir? 🤔 It really seems like there are a whole lot of Lab Leakers, even scientists, who think it's a perfectly plausible idea that some WIV worker got a needlestick and singlehandedly kicked off this global plague.

A little more than a year ago, @stuartjdneil & I tried to ask @joshrogin about claims he made in his reporting as well as things he oddly didn't inform his readers about. Rogin dodged, claiming he answered all in his book he was promoting at the time. Unfortunately this was false Rogin and his WaPo colleague David Ignatius had an interesting role to play in the pivot by the Trump administration's messaging on China's blame for the pandemic & the virus's origin, & ultimately the broader media coverage of it. Certain folks at State bragged about it (😉).

"Ah well, nevertheless..." "Ah well, nevertheless..."

Eban & Kao finally reaching out to qualified Chinese speakers *after* their story — which they claim to have spent five months(!) vetting — was published. thing is even if you gave Eban 10 months, or 15 months, she'd still have written something absurd bc that's her lens on this.

https://twitter.com/maxwelltani/status/1587167162845765632

you could have given Eban an unlimited budget & all the time in the world and she would have still written something that turned on some dipshit from Pompeo's run at State plus Matt Pottinger and either Jesse Bloom or Richard Ebright or both.

this is just what you get from her.