A Wuhan wet market is ground zero of the pandemic;
COVID-19 could not have originated in a Wuhan laboratory.
At least, so say many “science reporters” commenting on recent research about the origin of the virus. Former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade begs to differ.
Wade (whom we’ve cited before) says it’s possible that the virus jumped from an animal host or that it originated in a Wuhan lab. Although both can’t be true, “so far, no direct evidence exists for either.”*
He expounds:
- The cited research papers, still un-peer-reviewed, do not contradict circumstantial evidence of a lab origin.
- Nor do they show that the virus originated in the wet market. Even if the earliest known case were of a person attending the market, one can’t know whether he got infected there or brought the infection with him from a lab.
- One paper looks only at data from December 2019 and later. Yet the epidemic had been underway for weeks.
- The same paper claims that the distribution of cases with no overt connection to the wet market is so similar to that of the market-related cases that the former cases must also be connected to the market.
But the outside-the-market cases selected for study by Chinese authorities — by Xi Jinping himself for all we know — were not randomly selected. One criterion was proximity to the wet market.
So: massive selection bias.
And a pandemic of unscientific reporting.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Wade does not consider some of the smoking-gun type evidence for gain-of-function we’ve mentioned in the past, like the Moderna patent.
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4 replies on “Lab Leak Not Disproved”
The Chinese have been eating bats for over a thousand years. Suddenly, we’re supposed to believe that bat-eating caused a virus, particularly since that virus contains elements not found in nature.
Nah! The virus was lab created, the only question is whether it was intentionally or unintentionally released.
Fact: The virus originated in China. So, what can you do to China to find out the source? NOTHING!!!
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I don’t know and I don’t care. Same with the virus. Pick your source and give us your solution. China will never admit anything and science will be inconclusive!
Time to give it a rest!
In the absence of evidence (for an actual lab leak or release, not for possible precursor events), all we really have to go on is Occam’s Razor:
The hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions is the more likely one to be correct.
The vast majority of human infectious diseases are zoonotic. They jump from animals to humans.
And China seems to be the best environment for this — nearly every flu strain seems to start there.
On the other hand, we know of precisely one case in which humans were likely infected with a weaponized pathogen developed in a lab (the post-9/11 “anthrax attacks,” which seem to have used a strain of anthrax developed at the US military’s Fort Detrick facility).
So, which is more likely: What usually happens, and has happened over and over throughout history, or what has happened once?
Such probabilities are not properly inferred outside of appropriate context. For most of history, the only sustained nuclear chain reactions were natural, but that didn’t mean that what happened in Alamogordo were probably so.