Peter Miller
@tgof137
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Joined January 2018
@C_Kavanagh I found a way to figure out what large language models think about this question.
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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.
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I don't think that scientists lost public trust in science. I think podcasters, politicians, pandemic grifters, and journalists damaged it.
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🧵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.
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That doesn't look like a nation losing trust in science because of inconsistent public health statements. That looks like one party convincing their base that scientists are wrong.
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The weird part is that someone at the NYT is now piling on -- criticizing scientists but simultaneously saying the scientists are to blame for any criticism directed their way. "Look what you made me do" is a favorite phrase of gaslighters and narcissists.
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But I know people who've fallen for conspiracy theories and this is just never the reason. When I ask why they're afraid of vaccines, it's never, "I used to listen to scientists but I lost trust". It's more like:."I saw a Youtube video"."I heard a podcast"."I read it on Substack".
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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:.
🚨FINAL REPORT🚨. The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic’s final report is the most thorough review of the pandemic conducted to date. This report ensures COVID-19 accountability and serves as a roadmap for the U.S. to prepare for and respond to future pandemics.
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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:.
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It sounds like there's been some new research showing that animals at Huanan market were sick with Covid. The article in nature is short, here are some screenshots:.
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Zeynep starts her article by talking about how smart she was early in the pandemic, by expecting that covid would be big and then telling people that masks work. Those are good calls, but some of this looks like revisionist history. Here's what she actually wrote in February:
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It's easy to see that "trust in science" has become heavily politicized by just looking at the numbers. Democrats' levels of trust are only slightly below the pre-pandemic level, Republicans have dropped far below that:.
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That's an ongoing process, as GOP politicians continue to drag scientists before congress to smear their reputations.
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That sure sounds like someone that's worried about hand washing and droplet transmission, not advocating for masks or worried about aerosols.
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The most convincing papers arguing for a natural origin of covid weren't even published until 2022. In the time it took for scientists to confirm how covid started, conspiracy theorists had already had 2 years to make up their own theories and spread them online.
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Lots of Americans don't believe in evolution. 40% think that man was created by God in his current form, another 40% believe in some more limited version of creationism. Must be easy to sell that crowd on a lab creation theory, and hard to explain to them how viruses evolve.
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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.
@tgof137 @RobTownley6 @mbw61567742 @Ticklicker56 @stevenemassey @abhishek_s_1 @BiophysicsFL @nizzaneela @OrionJohnston @Biorealism @PatrickSSte @StevanBolton @gdemaneuf @NateSilver538 @natesilver @jbloom_lab Lyra11 is a PLA virus. Why should we trust it? Temmam's own sequences are dubious, showing signs of some really weird recombination. Pasteur has been working with the PLA and WIV since 2003 on SARS. They're not overly cautious about choosing their friends.
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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.
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@Bryce_Nickels @jonatanpallesen While responding to you, I literally just got 2 responses from people trying to sell ivermectin online. That concerns me. Peter Hotez does not.
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Thread on proCov2. This argument comes up a lot in covid origins discussions -- which covid strain came first?.
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Obviously there's no "exactly 6 feet" rule for covid transmission. But any reasonable person hears that and just thinks "avoid crowding". They don't walk around with a 6 foot ruler.
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But, more than anything, if you want to understand science, I'd recommend following scientists, reading their papers, and seeing what they think, rather than relying on reporters as gatekeepers.
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I wasn't "mislead by scientists". I barely even heard from the scientists. I heard about lab leak on lots of podcasts. I didn't know about "This week in virology". Some scientists were active on Twitter but their views never made it into my echo chamber.
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This is normal human behavior. There are lab leak theories for every new disease. HIV had at least 4 different theories for "how it was caused by science". There was even a lab leak theory for lyme disease.
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It's also normal for people to blame a pandemic on their political opponents. Just as most people in the US blame a Chinese lab, most people in China blame a US lab.
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If the science wasn't clear, on all of these questions, I think it's hardly fair to fault the scientists for not giving clear answers. Perhaps public health authorities and journalists could have done a better job at communicating this stuff. But it's going to involve guesses.
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The current Republican stance is that Trump won the debate, he did so well that he doesn't need to debate again, but also that the debate was rigged because it was 3 on 1, and Kamala got the questions in advance, and Kamala also cheated by wearing earrings with a speaker in them.
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Did the Wuhan lab have a secret virus that they could have used to create SARS-CoV-2? 🧵.
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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?.
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So, part of the problem is that I was ignorant and following bad sources. Part of the problem might have been a lack of good science journalism. And part of the problem is that scientists have to wait for facts, they can't just make things up.
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Do you need a mask outdoors or not?. I basically never wore one outside. But I stepped aside on trails, to be polite, when people passed by. And I was worried about large outdoor crowds spreading covid at protests and political rallies.
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It was also never clear what the best strategy was, for controlling covid. It's clear that the US had very little plan. But that was also a political problem, not a scientific problem.
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But those things were pretty obvious:.A novel virus growing exponentially is bad. Breathing in less of that virus is good.
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Reason #2:. Some people endorse every conspiracy theory, even contradictory ones. While 60+% of Americans think covid came from a lab, you can hardly say they all support a "lab leak" -- the majority of those people also claim the virus was deliberately released!
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@Davidliberty002 @BretWeinstein @waitbutwhy Pornography gets less blurry, making it vastly more dangerous to them.
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That sounds crazy from an American perspective, but it works as propaganda in China. Just as most people in the US think Covid came from a Chinese lab, a majority of people in China think that Covid started in the US, perhaps as a leak from one of our labs.
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So, why is lab leak a popular opinion, today?. I don't think it's because "scientists lost the public trust". I can think of at least 4 better reasons than that.
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I didn't think that because of something Daszak or Fauci said. I didn't read Proximal Origins in 2020. I first learned about lab leak from a podcast: Yuri Deigin on Bret Weinstein's show. At the time, I didn't understand enough about virology to know why they were wrong.
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But that information was just made up by a guy in Trump's state department!.
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I also remember that the truth about other things was not obvious. Is covid transmitted on surfaces?. That wasn't clear, at first. I washed my groceries for the first few months of the pandemic.
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And the WSJ reporter just happens to be the guy who first said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
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@tracewoodgrains @Steve_Sailer @know_tru @whstancil The overton window shifted over time. Scott Alexander was willing to talk about it by 2022:. Noah Smith made a weak mea culpa by late 2022:. Matt Yglesias by late 2023:.
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I remember reading about an early patient in Italy catching covid while running a race. I remember articles like this one:.
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The lab leak story is exciting. It's got intrigue. There are claims about lying scientists and covered up crimes. There's an endless stream of FOIA'ed emails, which can be creatively misquoted. It gives people someone to blame.
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I also made some reasonably good predictions at the beginning of the pandemic:
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I went on Robert Wright's podcast to talk about covid origins. We discussed the wet market evidence, the defuse grant, Kristian Andersen's slack messages, politicization of the issue, H5N1, and what kind of regulations could help prevent future pandemics.
The case against lab leak | Peter Miller (@tgof137), winner of the @Rootclaim debate on the origins of Covid-19, gives @robertwrighter his argument for why zoonotic transfer is a better theory than lab leak.
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The few zoonosis articles I read were confusing. the pandemic was started by a bat? or a pangolin? But the market sold neither?. I didn't find a good discussion about plausible intermediate host animals, or understand how most pandemics start via intermediates, not from bats.
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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?.
Over 4 yrs after being first to publicly release SARS-CoV-2 genome, Yong-Zhen Zhang just published large set of viral seqs from first stage of COVID-19 outbreak in China. He uses data to suggest scenarios re early outbreak & root of viral phylogenetic tree
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@yashkaf @Rootclaim My calculation was basically, "if you can multiply 10 things for the lab side to make it 1 in 700 million, I can multiply 20 things for zoonosis". And I spent a lot of the debate saying that the world isn't that simple, both politely and not so politely:
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If you think China should pay reparations for a lab leak, you could also argue that China should pay reparations if a virus started in their poorly regulated wet markets. So China has a strong incentive to deny responsibility for the pandemic, and not confirm either theory.
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In a 2020 poll, 25% of people said that the pandemic was "intentionally planned by powerful people", with rates much higher among less educated groups:.
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I can't entirely disagree, because I've previously written similar things about people losing trust in the news.
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Some reporters have written great articles on covid origins, or have done honest investigative journalism in China. Off the top of my head, I'd recommend Michael Standaert, Jane Qiu, Dake Kang, and Jon Cohen.
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I wasn't sure about covid origins, in 2020. I actually fell for the lab leak theory. I was never 100% convinced by it, but for a while I thought it was 50/50, and I sometimes said that lab leak is more likely.
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Conspiracy theories in Russia and Iran also blamed the pandemic on the US:.
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Regardless of what scientists said, you were always going to have something like 40% support for a theory saying that covid is unnatural. The only surprising part is that we're sitting at more like 60% today, with a lot of educated people supporting the idea.
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So, where do you look for truth in a world where social media fragments reality, fiction is more entertaining than fact, and most reporters suck at their jobs?. It's hard. For me it's an ongoing process to curate a list of people who do good work and don't lie.
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There's always more room for reporting because the details keep changing -- the lab leak theorists keep making up different versions of the theory. Any reporter that wants to get a few clicks can repeat the latest version of the lab leak story.
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Ratcliffe supported lab leak as DNI under the last Trump administration, and continued to do in the years since. In 2024, Ratcliffe wrote a piece for the Heritage foundation, demanding that China pay 18 trillion dollars in reparations for the pandemic:.
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They don't have to do any fact checking or investigative journalism -- they can just quote DRASTIC or some made up claims from the Trump administration. And many journalists are lazy enough that they'll do just that.
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What happened at that time?. Someone at the Wall Street Journal wrote about "3 researchers getting sick at the Wuhan institute of virology".
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Notice that China did not say, "Covid is not a lab leak because the virus spilled over naturally at Huanan market". They said, "why won't the US release information from their labs?".
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Lab leak didn't really become mainstream until 2021. We can see exactly when that happened, in Google search trends. It was around May 23rd:
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The details aren't going to change much, over time. After 2 years we realized that animals probably infected 2 people, at the wet market. After 3 years, we found some DNA evidence suggesting which animal it might have been.
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Quillette wrote a great article:. I think that might be because Quillette has a history of reporting on controversial issues, not pandering to an audience.
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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.
2 other agencies, the FBI and the DoE, also think that covid is probably a lab leak. But FBI thinks covid leaked from the WIV, while the DoE thinks it leaked from the Wuhan CDC, a different lab across town which did not do gain of function research.
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@BretWeinstein @clairlemon @mtaibbi Bret, there's a lot you have to explain to make this convincing. 1. Why is the vaccine more dangerous than natural infection, with regards to ADE? Seems like reinfection should be similarly dangerous in either case.
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As long as this political impasse remains, we are unlikely to get more data from China about covid origins. We do have enough data that most scientists think Covid started naturally at the Huanan market.
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They got a "whistleblower scientist" to go on Fox News and say that Covid is a bioweapon:.
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Markolin and Sam Gregson did a series of interviews with many of the scientists studying covid origins:.
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That's been the situation for 5 years now -- In early 2020, the Trump administration started saying that Covid leaked from a Chinese lab, and China responded by saying Covid came from an American lab.
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Philipp Markolin has written a good summary of some of the science:.
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That Yuri Deigin/Bret Weinstein podcast that I first heard?. Here are some of the politicians that planned Brexit, talking about getting Yuri on that show.
@Samuel_Gregson @sophie_e_hill @ComputerWeekly @BylineTimes They really think they can get Bret to promote their story (there are dozens of emails between them). they pull in the Foreign Affairs editor at Sky News to apply pressure to Nature and then have a backup plan to promote via Bret & Rogan
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Astral Codex Ten wrote a great article summarizing the lab leak debate:. I think Scott Alexander is just kind of autistic and writes what's true, not what people want to hear.
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There's something about cope that's easy to recognize -- it's not coherent, this is just people throwing many different excuses at a problem and hoping that one of them sticks.
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Robert Wright did another covid origins podcast, this time talking to Yuri Deigin. It's a good conversation:.
Had a great conversation with @ydeigin about the evidence for lab leak. You can watch here or listen on @NonzeroPods.
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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:.
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I've been confused why 538's election model has Biden winning, even as he drops further behind in the polls. I see a lot of other people asking the same question. Here's a thread on what the model is doing, and how it compares to other models.
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Kinda weird that Zeynep is calling Philipp Markolin a misogynistic rando but thinks Florin is a reliable source. I think she might have that backwards.
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But where does the 700 viruses number come from?. I thought this one would take a lot of effort to track down, but it turns out that Daszak already had a thread up 4 years ago, describing the same 700 sequences!.
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Last week's lab leak controversy claimed that the WIV had 15,000 secret samples and 700 undisclosed viruses.
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The party line in China today is that the pandemic did not start in China. Maybe it started in a US lab. Maybe it came to China on frozen food from another country:.
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A recent paper claimed that SARS-CoV-2 has unique features that aren't shared by other natural viruses, but are shared by one other virus processed in a lab. Guy Gadboit wrote a good thread explaining why it's not very convincing:.
Thread on this paper implying that SARS2 might have been passaged in genetically humanized mice because it apparently shares some features that only one other betacoronavirus has, and that one was. I find it wholly unconvincing. There are three features the author is drawing.
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But we don't have quite enough that everyone is convinced -- the consensus is more like 80/20 in favor of zoonosis:. It's not as strong as, say, the 97% scientific consensus in anthropogenic global warming. And it might be hard to push the needle further, without more evidence.
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You also have to wonder why this information isn't being reported by some government agency, it's being reported by Michael Shellenberger on substack. A week before writing that, Shellenberger informed his audience that the US government was hiding 12 or more alien spacecraft.
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@dr_handler @MJnanostretch @Rebecca21951651 @_everythingism @Engineer2The @RobTownley6 @jbloom_lab I don't think increased biosafety is bad. But since I think it's highly likely this pandemic was natural and future pandemics will be, I think selling the public on a false lab leak theory will reduce the emphasis on more important efforts to stop the next natural pandemic.
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One of the things I've emphasized about covid origins is that the lab leak theory is the same kind of cope. There's a clear theory of how covid started naturally -- animals at the Huanan market got people sick, most likely in late Nov 2019, subsequent cases spread from there.
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So. if there's actually intelligence saying that 3 people at the Wuhan institute of virology got sick, why are these other agencies struggling to decide which lab the virus came from?. Wouldn't it just be the lab where the workers got sick?.
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@BretWeinstein @clairlemon @mtaibbi 6. To eradicate covid, you need to get most of the US taking pills. Do you expect people who won't get 2 shots or even wear masks to all diligently take pills every week until the virus is gone? To give the pills to their kids?.
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Most scientists think that the 1977 Russian flu came from a research accident. How should that inform the debate on lab leaks and gain of function research?. 🧵.
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Understanding the science can get complicated, but I think it can be easier to recognize patterns in how people tell stories. Those patterns can often help you guess the right answer.
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