Here's yet another article blaming scientists for the popularity of the lab leak theory, this time from Jane Qiu:
theguardian.com/commentisfree/… I'm kind of surprised by this one because, unlike most other journalists, @janeqiuchina has actually done some good investigative journalism about covid origins and has talked to primary sources:
technologyreview.com/2022/02/09/104…

Matt Ridley is calling for "peer review" of a blog post about Covid origins.

I'll volunteer to help!

https://x.com/mattwridley/status/1925100526640713873

I should clarify that I'm not sure I'm his peer -- Ridley has done many things I haven't.

He was a banker who helped crash the world economy in the great financial crisis.

I have never cost taxpayers millions.

A common argument for the lab leak theory is that Wuhan is 1,000 miles from the bat viruses most similar to SARS-CoV-2, therefore the virus must be unnatural.

The big problem with this argument is both SARS1 and MERS were found similarly far away from the closest bat viruses.
🧵 The first known SARS case happened in November 2002, in Foshan.

The closest known bat virus to SARS was found 11 years later, in a Yunnan province cave.

Yunnan is over 1,000 kilometers away from where SARS was first found in humans.

Who's to blame for starting the Covid pandemic?

Views differ, around the world.

A lot of countries blame the United States. 🧵 In a 2021 poll in China, 53% of people answered that Covid came from the US:
mdpi.com/2075-4698/13/2…

A few people asked me about Nod's preprint about 2 spillovers.

He makes two arguments criticizing Pekar et al 2022.

A proper analysis of his 1st argument actually points in the opposite direction and strengthens Pekar's conclusions.

His 2nd argument is not well defined.
🧵 Nod's preprint is here:


Let me walk you through his mistakes.arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20076

When did the covid outbreak begin in Italy?

Can that tell us anything about when it started in Wuhan?
🧵 Covid case numbers in Wuhan grew exponentially, up until the city was locked down on January 23rd:

🧵on where covid started.

Early covid cases in Wuhan were centered on the Huanan market.

Is that because the pandemic started there?

Or were those cases just found with a biased search? The 2021 WHO report mapped out the home addresses of covid cases from December 2019. China reported 174 cases in December 2019. 1/3 of them were linked to the Huanan market, the other 2/3 were not.

Economist Andrew Levin has produced something we certainly don't need more of: another Bayesian analysis of covid origins.

He concludes 1 in 15,000 odds that covid is a lab leak.

On a quick first read through, I see so many problems with this... maybe it's interesting to see how and why he gets the wrong answer, and how this differs from other Bayesian analyses?
nber.org/system/files/w…

I said the CIA, FBI, and DoE haven't shared why they think covid is a lab leak.

We can infer they don't have much evidence, because they can't even agree on which lab it leaked from:


But there is actually one article with details about the FBI's logic.

https://x.com/tgof137/status/1883941046486487448

This WSJ article interviews former FBI scientist Jason Bannan and talks through some of his reasoning.
archive.is/eESVG

🧵on the CIA announcement endorsing the lab leak theory.

I don't think this moves the needle much on the covid origins debate.

But I do think there are some interesting things to be learned from looking into the details. There are 2 big reasons to not update on this announcement:

1. No evidence was presented, as to why the CIA changed their view.

2. It happened immediately after John Ratcliffe was appointed as the new head of the CIA, and he has been supporting the lab leak theory for years.

Interesting post from Scott Alexander about H5N1, which tries to estimate the odds of a pandemic happening next year:
astralcodexten.com/p/h5n1-much-mo… Some prediction markets have an H5N1 pandemic about about 35%.

Scott argued that the odds of it happening next year are probably closer to 5%.

The final report is out from the Congressional Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Here's a thread looking at what they discovered about covid origins and how this compares to other government reports:

https://x.com/COVIDSelect/status/1863637368261021849

To put this in context, this is not the opinion of the whole US government, it's the opinion of some house Republicans.

There have already been several house and senate GOP reports that claimed that covid is a lab leak.

A thread on the raccoon dog DNA found at the Huanan market, and what those samples can and can not prove about covid's origins: The story of how the raccoon dog DNA data came to light is almost as interesting as the data itself.

Did the Wuhan lab have a secret virus that they could have used to create SARS-CoV-2? 🧵 Last week's lab leak controversy claimed that the WIV had 15,000 secret samples and 700 undisclosed viruses.

Lab leak supporters aren't very good at understanding science or data, but they are really good at creating controversy.

The latest manufactured controversy involves a diagram I used in the Rootclaim debate which ended up in Scott Alexander's blog post:

https://twitter.com/nizzaneela/status/1777989261817508165

The diagram I used is not the same as the original in Pekar 2021's paper. That looks like this:

I tried simulating the early covid epidemic in Wuhan to better understand a few questions:

When did covid start?

Did it start with 2 introductions of the virus, or only one? During the early covid epidemic in Wuhan, there were 2 separate strains of the virus floating around: Lineages A and B.

These viruses were only 2 mutations apart, so it's not obvious whether they are separate, or one mutated into the other.

A thread on intermediate genomes, prompted by this new study.

Did covid start from one introduction or two?

What was the original strain of the virus?

https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1765163319814684901

I think this is probably not very interesting, scientifically, but more of an interesting case study in how people create narratives.

I'll explain that at the end.

But first, a long explanation of the science of Lineage A/B, intermediates, and what info the new study provides.

Thread on proCov2.

This argument comes up a lot in covid origins discussions -- which covid strain came first? All the early covid genomes can be divided up into Lineage A and Lineage B.

This is my favorite visualization of the early genomes (up to mid February), from @acritschristoph.

A is the cluster in the upper left, B is the larger cluster, on the lower right:

There's a progression of every lab leak argument -- because the evidence for lab leak is bad, the conspiracy has to grow.

I pointed out a flaw in the lab leak theory, by referencing a natural virus, Lyra11, found way back in 2011. So the theory changed to say that virus is fake.

https://twitter.com/breakfast_dogs/status/1756977388779643109

Then, every virus ever found in China is fake:

https://twitter.com/breakfast_dogs/status/1756978749055332668

Here's a mistake I made in the 2nd Rootclaim debate. I presented this slide, to establish that previous FCS experiments tended to use efficient furin cleavage sites, like RRKR or RRSRR: The mistake is that I wrote that researchers "inserted" these cleavage sites. That's not correct, all these scientists actually mutated existing amino acids to make an FCS, rather than inserting one. The 2006 study (Follis et al), tried a few, all were mutations not insertions:

I'm going to try to do some commentary on the Robert Malone episode of Joe Rogan. Fact-checking is tedious, I can't get to it all in a day, I'll start with the first hour. Here are some timestamps and comments: 1:15 Malone says he was kicked off Twitter the day before the interview. Him and Joe complain about this egregious act of censorship. Malone had steadily gained 500,000 followers, I've been well aware of his existence for 6 months now.