[guscost]

Same with anyone who was saying “it’s airborne” or “the case fatality rate is inflated” or “it could have leaked from that lab”.

And now, behold as the intellectual class attempts to delete these mistakes from our collective memory.

[avs733]

no one is deleteing anything...they are simply learning, as science does, and noting that prior knowledge was incorrect.

That is fundamentally different from people screaming without evidence. A broken clock is right twice a day, but it is not an accurate clock at any point.

[vadansky]

I'm sorry no, this is not "they are simply learning, as science does"

People were against this emotionally since Trump suggested it first and no one wanted to be seen agreeing with him on something, even though a broken clock can be right twice a day

[toast0]

> People were against this emotionally since Trump suggested it first and no one wanted to be seen agreeing with him on something, even though a broken clock can be right twice a day

Trump wanted to use some inappropriate names for the disease and wanted to ban travel for people holding PRC passports. Neither of those things make sense to do from a disease control standpoint. If you wanted to ban travel for people who had been in the area of exposure, that might make sense, but nation of passport isn't the way; and after not a whole lot of time, the disease had spread widely enough that there weren't really many places that should have been whitelisted.

[throwawaysea]

We very regularly associate things with their origin. We did so almost this entire last year when we talked about variants of COVID-19. And in the early days of COVID-19, in China, in their airports, the virus was called "Wuhan virus" on signage. Those names were also used in news reports regularly. I agree that something like "kung flu" is inappropriate, but I don't agree that "China virus" or "Wuhan virus" are inappropriate, and don't think they were controversial until they were deemed as such for what seems like political reasons.

> wanted to ban travel for people holding PRC passports

Banning by passport makes some sense. We can't prevent US citizens from returning to their homes. But we can prevent others from traveling to the US. It might make sense to ban all passports except the US for flights originating from China, but then you end up dragging in connecting flights through China from other countries. In terms of a quick, easy to implement measure, that will at least reduce the number of imported cases, banning travel based on PRC passports seems logical.

> the disease had spread widely enough that there weren't really many places that should have been whitelisted

Surely, given that we do care about just controlling the numbers even if it is not perfect (like with "flatten the curve"), it makes some sense to focus on the epicenter.

[jcranmer]

> We can't prevent US citizens from returning to their homes.

SCOTUS has ruled that the US does have quarantine powers for medical emergencies, even for its own citizens. Maybe a complete ban if poorly orchestrated might run afoul of the Constitution, but a policy like "all travelers [US citizen or not] from X region must present at <specific port of entry>, whereupon they will be transferred to a quarantine facility for 14 days" would totally be fine. Note, for example, the way that the quarantine on dogs because of rabies is being handled.

> But we can prevent others from traveling to the US. It might make sense to ban all passports except the US for flights originating from China, but then you end up dragging in connecting flights through China from other countries.

Why should you exempt people whose only presence was via connecting flights? This generally involves long layovers inside of airports, where a large enough fraction is potentially susceptible to already be concerned about (due to local people making their flights), and you're likely to be spending a decent period of time on the plane with such people as well, too.

[guscost]

In my opinion you are completely right, but calling this out makes a lot of people very mad.

[avs733]

I'm not mad, I just have been taught that retcon'ing evidence to fit a narrative is not the same thing as science. It doesn't matter how well it fits or evidence, it should be rejected because the base structure of the argument fails.

These people aren't 'right' in the sense that they figured something out, they screamed about something without evidence.

Whatever happens next cannot change that fact. Its notable that what is happening is the evidence is getting constantly substituted to fit an explanation not the explanation emerging from the available evidence.

It's the boy who cried wolf...

[whydoibother]

Stop trying to tie it to your politics. Some people want real evidence before they scream about things like you do. It had little to do with Trump.

[vadansky]

Wrong because the alternative had no real evidence either.

[throwawaysea]

It absolutely had everything to do with Trump. He was slated to be the clear winner until two events (COVID-19 and George Floyd) presented political opportunities. In an election year, everything becomes about the election. People wanted to attack Trump at every turn, even when he suggested reasonable measures like controlling travel, and equally they wanted to ensure all blame was directed at Trump rather than the Chinese government or state governments or elsewhere.

To address your claim more directly, there was never any justification to dismiss the lab leak theory, or claim it was debunked (as many news outlets did), or censor conversations about it online. This isn't about believing it is the only possibility, but that it is a likely possibility that deserves serious attention. The reason it was instead cloaked in dogmatic terms like "conspiracy theory" and shutdown outright, is purely because of politics. There was no "real evidence" to dismiss it as it was. And guess what - that dismissal also allowed the Chinese government to avoid a site visit for months, and even when the WHO visit happened, it was under the terms of the Chinese government with an untrustworthy outcome. Those who shutdown the lab leak theory and other such claims aren't interested in evidence. They're interested in political opportunism.

[whydoibother]

> there was never any justification to dismiss the lab leak theory

that isn't how this works. extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. there is zero evidence of a lab leak besides circumstantial.

> censor conversations about it online

they did a poor job of that then, considering all the very vocal people I had to hear keep talking about it for the last year.

>He was slated to be the clear winner until two events (COVID-19 and George Floyd)

weird how that works, huh? when you handle crises poorly -- or downright negligently -- people will hate you and not vote for you. strange.

[acidbaseextract]

> there is zero evidence of a lab leak besides circumstantial.

First, there are credible, credentialed virologists saying that the lab leak hypothesis has not been ruled out, and that it has been inadequately investigated [1].

Second, there are real anomalies in the Covid genome [2] that seem unlikely to have occurred naturally:

however, several characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 taken together are not easily explained by a natural zoonotic origin hypothesis. These include a low rate of evolution in the early phase of transmission; the lack of evidence for recombination events; a high pre-existing binding to human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2); a novel furin cleavage site (FCS) insert; a flat ganglioside-binding domain (GBD) of the spike protein which conflicts with host evasion survival patterns exhibited by other coronaviruses; and high human and mouse peptide mimicry.

In particular, the furin cleavage site is extremely interesting because it's exactly the type of genetic manipulation done in gain of function research that was ongoing at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. More on the FCS:

Because the presence and coding sequence of a FCS is important for pathogenesis, host range, and cell tropism (Nagai et al. 1993; Millet et al. 2015), the addition of a FCS into viruses has been an active area of gain-of-function research. A FCS can be easily inserted using seamless technology (Yount et al. 2002; Sirotkin and Sirotkin 2020) without any need for cell passage, as previously performed in experiments on virulence and host tropism (Cheng et al. 2019). Insertions to change the properties of SARS-r CoV viruses are documented by Ren et al. (2008) and Wang et al. (2008). Considering that natural mutations have a very low probability to result in a stretch of 12 amino acids coding for an optimized FCS without any known intermediate form in Sarbecovirus, an artificial insertion of the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 may provide a more parsimonious explanation for its presence than natural evolution.

In summary, the FCS confers SARS-CoV-2 enhanced human pathogenicity and has never been identified in another Sarbecovirus. At the same time, FCSs have been routinely inserted into coronaviruses in gain-of-function experiments, and we provide a hypothesis through which the specific amino acid sequence of SARS-CoV-2′s FCS may have been generated through cell culture.

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0

[throwawaysea]

> extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. there is zero evidence of a lab leak besides circumstantial.

The claim is not exactly extraordinary - you have a lab with a history of poor controls, performing gain of function research relating to SARS-like viruses, knowing that SARS (the first one) had broken out of labs multiple times. That's not hard evidence, but it is a strong set of priors that makes the lab leak theory an obvious candidate for an origin story. It shouldn't be surprising that there isn't hard evidence when the world hasn't been allowed a timely and transparent investigation. And why would China allow such an investigation when there's no pressure to do so, when people are rushing to their defense to dismiss the valid lab leak theory as a "conspiracy theory"? Their work was done for them by news media and tech giants who institutionalized that dismissive attitude, again motivated by their own political biases. You can't have evidence until you take the speculation seriously and perform the necessary investigation properly, so I'm not sure how you could for "extraordinary evidence".

> weird how that works, huh?

You're ignoring the point I was making, which was that the people opposed to Trump were desperate for any way to attack him, given that he was on a clear path to re-election. Since this was the only crisis at the time that they could leverage, they did so (and did so viciously). That included dismissing any scrutiny directed at China, even though it was valid.

[avs733]

I would argue, philosophically, the broken clock isn't right twice a day. That clock is simply saying the same thing as people who are right. It's claim about what time it is has no credibility.

I have a friend who's Toddler knows that things have colors but only knows one color - Blue. If the child calls everything Blue it isn't showing understanding of the concept, even if the kid responds 'Blue' when asked what color the sky is. To claim that is 'right' is projecting my beliefs and knowledge onto the childs.

[guscost]

It was a bit tongue-in-cheek, and note the word “attempts”. This one is much too big/high profile to delete, thankfully.

The “this is just how to do science” defense is cute, but a lot people died and will die over it, and in general the conduct we have seen from formerly-trusted authorities is inexcusable. Most people are not going to let that gang of narrow-minded bullies “do science” to them ever again.

[avs733]

a gang of narrow minded bullies?

This is what we are calling the field that ended polio and smallpox.

[guscost]

Sure it is still the same field, but far too many “experts” today are charlatans operating on inherited credibility, in all the fields.

[whydoibother]

Case fatality rate wasn't inflated, it was deflated if anything.

And there is still no real evidence of a lab leak, despite western intelligence continually lying about it.