[ajross]

> Say mr X was

The problem is that none of the circumstantial evidence for a lab leak is remotely as convincing as your hypothetical.

And most of it tends to be spun. Read the linked thread and note how many times the author throws out terms like "much more likely to be lab-generated" without evidence. We don't know any of that. We have very limited understanding of wild pathogen evolution in general. Likewise the "1000 miles from bat viruses" thing is spun. We don't know that either! We just know what we measured, not what we didn't.

And you can spin it the other way, anyway: we know that the presumptive covid ancestor was at least as close as 1000 miles, on the same continent and within easy travel distance of a migratory flying species. It's true, that if the closest relative was in Argentina, that getting it to Wuhan would require a lot of weird argument. But from Yunnan? Seems not unreasonable.

People continue to bang this hypothesis, and... it's not a bad hypothesis really. But the reason consensus among experts is behind natural evolution is that natural evolution remains a clearly better hypothesis. I know that's upsetting to people who want to believe the lab theory for whatever reason, but it is and remains the truth. Until someone finds better evidence, the lab leak is going to remain a popular conspiracy theory only.

[lock-the-spock]

You are confusing or conflating the lab-leak and lab-made theories.

[ajross]

Then you'll need to educate me on the what you think distinction is. The linked tweet thread asserts both: that the virus was manufactured in the WIV and that it leaked by accident. There are stronger (and even less well grounded) ideas in the broader conspiracist community asserting that it was the result of bioweapons research, and sometimes even that it was deliberately released. Ebright himself doesn't truck with any of that nonsense.

[pizza234]

Distinction:

- lab leak: researchers catch infected bat; at the laboratory, bat bites researcher; researcher gets COVID

- lab made: researchers modify a virus, and produce SARS-CoV-2; the latter escapes the laborary (in one way or another)

The importance of the lab leak hypothesis is that it doesn't need any conspiracy (a researcher being bitten is nothing strange in itself), but still implies unsafe practices and bad faith by the institutions involved.

[wk_end]

> Likewise the "1000 miles from bat viruses" thing is spun. We don't know that either! We just know what we measured, not what we didn't.

That's not "spun", that's science. You're positing a COVID teapot that we have no evidence for. In a scientific context, it's not spin to omit stating "based on all available empirical evidence" after every assertion.

[ajross]

> In a scientific context, it's not spin to omit stating "based on all available empirical evidence" after every assertion.

No, that's a fallacy. If I find an apple on the ground at the supermarket, it is evidence that there are apples at the supermarket. It is not evidence that there are no apples at my friend's home where I found no apples. I just didn't check the refrigerator.

The linked thread says, precisely, "Wuhan--a city 1,000 miles from nearest wild bats with SARS-like coronaviruses". And that is not correct.

[wk_end]

If I were saying "bats in southern China with SARS-like viruses are evidence that there are no bats closer to Wuhan with SARS-like coronaviruses", I would be committing the fallacy that you're accusing me of. But that's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying that there's no evidence of any bats closer to Wuhan with SARS-like coronaviruses. And I'm saying that, while it's indeed possible that these hypothetical bats exist - just as it's "possible" that COVID was transmitted to Wuhan via a teapot halfway between here and Mars; that COVID unicorns exist on an undiscovered island somewhere and one sneezed particularly hard and its germs ended up in Wuhan; or that COVID spontaneously formed one day on the apples in your friend's refrigerator in Wuhan - it's, again, not spin for a scientist to refrain from couching everything in uncertainty because of the infinite evidenceless hypotheticals that might disprove it; this is how every single positive statement in science functions. It is indeed correct, scientifically speaking, that there are no apples at your friend's home where you found no apples [based on all available empirical evidence]. And it is indeed correct, scientifically speaking, that Wuhan is 1,000 miles away from the nearest wild bats with SARS-like coronaviruses [based on all available empirical evidence].

[ajross]

> I'm saying that there's no evidence of any bats closer to Wuhan with SARS-like coronaviruses

That's not all you're saying, though. You're extrapolating from that fact to argue that bats closer to Wuhan with SARS-like coronaviruses are therefore unlikely to be present.[1] And no, that's not correct. Viruses span continent-wide gaps all the time, we don't need any special evidence to cite that as a possibility.

[1] Or more specifically, that they're less likely to be present than a man-made descendent. This is how you can spot a poorly justified argument. You're skipping a step and inserting an assumption in exactly the way you need to address a hole in your argument. Again, I pointed out upthread how I can spin exactly the same facts in the opposite direction (IMHO more convincingly, though logically no more sound).

[wk_end]

No, I'm not saying that. Please don't put words in my mouth. I haven't said a single thing here about "a man-made descendent", or whether those bats are "likely" to be present or not. I haven't even said that I agree with Ebright or believe in any kind of lab-leak scenario. All I've said is that your accusation of "spin" - because Ebright simply stated what all existing evidence points to, that the closest candidate bats are 1000 miles away, is the case without qualification - is based on a misunderstanding of how science works. Until there is evidence to the contrary - and there currently is not - it is entirely normal, conventional, and scientific - and not spin! - to state the facts as demonstrated by all the available evidence as facts. In particular, when you say, "we just know what we measured, not what we didn't" - yes, that is science, not intellectual dishonesty.

That said, I'll bite: if there are bats with SARS-like coronaviruses closer to Wuhan, I suspect that the folks in Wuhan who've spent the past 15-20 years studying SARS-like bat coronaviruses, "sampling thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across China" [0], probably would have discovered the ones right on their doorstep, more probably than ones further afield. So sure, yes, I'd wager they're not all that likely (though not impossible)! But, again, that's neither here nor there to my overall point, which is that your accusation of spin on Ebright's part is unfounded and scientifically illiterate.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#SA...

[ajross]

> Ebright simply stated what all existing evidence points to, that the closest candidate bats are 1000 miles away

You added the word "candidate". I agree with what you wrote. Your framing doesn't imply an incorrect conclusion, though it also lacks any rhetorical punch (probably the reason Ebright skipped it) since we don't have any "candidate" leak evidence either. Good job.

[xyzzy123]

Sorry, where are the unsampled bats within 1000km of Wuhan?

This stuff has been sampled extensively.

Or are you merely stating it's possible there's a bat cave no one's heard of that hasn't been sampled?

[ajross]

> This stuff has been sampled extensively.

I don't think that's correct, for the simple reason that if those papers existed the (sigh) pro-leak folks would be linking them everywhere. Virology isn't exactly a trillion dollar field, we're not going out and sequencing every virus in every species. The Yunnan cave made news and was well-studied because someone stumbled on a SARS-related virus there, that says nothing about where that virus went later.

[xyzzy123]

> if those papers existed

Those papers don't exist for the simple reason that "interesting" bats don't live there.

You might want to consider that while R H Ebright can be offensive and distateful, he has been banging this drum for 20 years and is generally very careful when he makes a factual statement.

[igouy]

> That's not "spun", that's science

As-if the only alternative to transported-to-labs was bat migration?

1,000 miles seems less ridiculous when it's animals in cages on trucks going to market — just a tiny part of the live animal trade.

(How many thousands of miles did Burmese Pythons travel to reach the Florida Everglades.)

[igouy]

> Likewise the "1000 miles from bat viruses" thing is spun.

1000 miles just doesn't take long by truck.

"… Mengla county, Yunnan province…"

"… identification of four SARS-CoV-2 related coronaviruses in bats…"

https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00709-1.pdf

Google says that 1400 miles to Wuhan is just 24 hours driving.