A new article by Zeynep claims that scientists lost the public's trust, enabling covid conspiracy theories to form.

I think it's a bad take, and it's mostly missing the story.
archive.is/UZSwC I can't entirely disagree, because I've previously written similar things about people losing trust in the news.

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.

I keep seeing people post this clip of nobel laureate Kary Mullis calling Dr Fauci a liar, way back in 1996:

People use it to say that Fauci has always been a liar. I decided to watch the full interview.

The main response I had was: "everything old is new again".

Every single logical fallacy that's being used to doubt covid was previously used to doubt HIV.