So the FBI now says the virus came from a lab leak

It wasn’t a virus that ‘inconvenienced’ people in the vein of destroying their jobs, deprived their children of close education, fellowship, taken for granted joys of living, separated them from ailing loved ones and even killed them via the effects of panic and despair. Aside from that, I can tell you’re an empathetic type.

 

Quite a bit of profit. Mostly, you get tons of attention, which, as others have pointed out, you seem to be seeking. Second, there is the supreme confidence that you have developed in thinking that you have outsmarted just about every expert in the world because a website told you something. Finally, you appear to have cast yourself as the heroic person standing against the tide of the world for truth. There is substantial psychological value to this personal narrative. The truth of the narrative is rather secondary to the existence of the narrative in value.

 

Psycho-babble on top of modern demonology. My supreme confidence is pretty much restricted to my dismissal of the preposterous field of virology. Don’t ask me to paint the bedroom. Saudi.

 

You asked what value there is. I provided some (attention, confidence, and a personal narrative that is attractive to you). And the fact that a person lacks confidence in other contexts actually tends to cause people to find something on which they can feel confident.

 

Red herring by China.
This info about a raccoon dog comes out now?

 

We should wear Herseys kisses?

 

No, but you should eat them in abundance. Just make sure they’re unwrapped properly. Ever bitten into aluminum foil ? YEOW!

 

Are you also going to ask me about life with Mother or can we get back to whether Killer Unicorns jumped the fence or bred in a lab ?

 

Did you read the article? This raccoon dog theory is being put forth by an international team of scientists none of whom are Chinese.

“The report noted that after the international team came across the new data, it reached out to Chinese researchers who had uploaded the files with an offer to collaborate. However, after that, the sequences disappeared from GISAID (Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data), it said.”


“The international team included an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona Michael Worobey; a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in California Kristian Andersen and a biologist at the University of Sydney Dr Edward Holmes. They started mining the new genetic data last week.”

 

If you listen to the link I posted above, the interview with Dr. Holmes, he talks about how this data was posted in early 2020, but then taken down and Chinese researchers were punished for posting data that embarrassed the government.

Further, Racoon Dogs, because of their history as a carrier of SARS, were highlighted early on as a potential source in the Proximal Origins paper. The timing of this being re-released to the world might be dubious, but the data is the data.

Further, there are apparently unanalyzed samples from the same wet market in Huanan that the Wuhan CDC has had in freezers dating back to 2016 that would be interesting to take out and analyze to see which animals, if any, had been infected with this virus prior to the major zoonotic event.

 

I think we have two related -but different- issues in the existence of viruses vs the appropriate political responses to epidemics.

For the existence issue, we have evidence and our interpretation of evidence. If I find myself attracted to a minority position, I put myself though the same round of questioning as I asked you. How is it I can see something that the field of experts cannot? This is a troubling question.

We have many lines of evidence for the existence of viruses that are satisfactory to the people most knowledgeable in this area and many of the rest of us. So what we need is some kind of inside knowledge, a broken leg effect, where we can know something that all could clearly grasp but haven’t yet been able to. If we cannot recover this, our best argument for overturning the majority view is that it is subjective, but this would immediately turn our own view into a subjective one as well. At that point, the most rational course of action would seem to be uncertainty, rather than certainty of the negative.

As for the separate issue of how best to handle an epidemic (assuming viral existence), clearly this issue is going to be laden with values and never will all agree on a single national response. But this disagreement need not bother us, as it won’t disturb our central problem. While uncertainty about the virus clearly should impact our thoughts about the response, uncertainty about the response should have no impact on our beliefs about the virus.

Finally, even if we accept that virology will be one day completely overturned, I think your attitude toward the current believers is inappropriate. They seem to be acting rationally, even if they are wrong. If viruses don’t exist, then viewing yourself as normal and all of us as small minded twits seems to be taking an odd point of view. Instead, we should be viewed as normal and you as a genius, like Galileo or Darwin. As an alternative to portraying us as wearing tinfoil hats, you should see us more like a group of kindergarteners who, through no fault of our own, lack your sophisticated rationality. After all, even you were a believer just a couple years ago.

 

As I have the occasion to enter into discussions, about viruses, I do generally approach in gingerly fashion. As you fairly point out, I too believed.

Here ? Here, I’ll admit to my penchant for returning snark for snark. THAT, returning snark *as outsider* is what gets me in hot water over here. I don’t pay homage to the herd and the herd bellows.

I see you as centering in on my demeanor, more so than my argument, albeit in a subtler manner. Or will you surprise me and tell me you’ve availed yourself to a handful of the many references I’ve posted on my no virus thread ?

Ah well, what should I expect ? I am the atheist in Saudi Arabia. And I did come to my views obliquely, and on my own initiative, without someone in my face about it.

The ‘broken leg’ is the findings of virologists, the basis for their belief in viruses. As belief in viruses may be stronger than all the world’s religions combined (how else to explain contagion ?) it is small wonder that their claims are scarcely challenged. Certainly I never thought to take a closer look.

But again, the mass-hysteria was the catalyst for me, but evidently for far too few to make a difference.

And I feel like I’ve already explained why existence/non-existence is THE root issue. Or how do you calibrate a ‘measured’ response, to an alleged pathogen, in the context of the pervasive belief that people are deadly disease vectors ?

 

Eyes —> Ball ...

 

Clearly, snark is a common attitude on here and by no means unique to you. But my appraisal of your attitude wasn’t so much arguing that snark is wrong as much as reconceiving your model of the virus believers. A snarky comment may deserve a like response, but following the scientific consensus on a topic is just normal behavior, even if ultimately wrong.

I confess that I haven’t visited the why viruses don’t exist thread. At least not the new one. It is unlikely that I personally would be converted to this stance. If I did find these resources convincing, I would guess you would think rade got it right. If I was not convinced, you would probably think I am not opening my eyes. So in the end, my views really don’t hold any sway. I actually view myself the same way. If I adopt a personal stance, I don’t view it as evidence for the rectitude of that stance - though I have to admit that the stance must at least be reasonable. In the end, I am just one very imperfect consciousness whose views deserve no great deference. In the words of CS Peirce that I’ve quoted to you before: “Especially one man’s experience is nothing. If he sees what others cannot, we call it hallucination.”

The challenge with a true broken leg -and why they are so rare- is that it must be so clear that learning of it acts to change the minds of virtually all who encounter it. The findings of virology cannot count in this category, as those findings seem to have only acted to strengthen the views of the virologists themselves.

I like your Hitchens quote above, but I think it equally applies to you. While you see virologists as the only ones making a strong claim (that viruses exist), I see you also making a strong claim (that virtually all biologists have been blinded about an empirical result). This is of course possible, but it is a big claim that requires big evidence. When was the last time a discipline in the natural sciences was so duped? It’s not easy to find a good example of this. Even phlogiston wasn’t as widely accepted. We could cite Newtonian mechanics, but that theory still well predicts outcomes of slow moving objects.

Anyway, I won’t say your claim is impossible. All scientists should be ready for future surprises, but picking in advance these scientific surprises has proved a tall task for our forebears.

 

“I saw your wife today and she was kissing another man!”

Me: “I can tell you without fear of contradiction that that was not my wife. We’ve been together the whole day.”

“Well, if it wasn’t your wife I saw, who was it ?”

Me: “I’m sure I don’t know. I just know it wasn’t my wife you saw.”

And I note that you continue to grapple with how billions of Muslims and all their many scholars could possibly be wrong.

Faith, meaning, purpose, understanding, community, all are powerful adhesives. Plus, there is a steep price for heresy.

Are you going to continue to retrench to wondering about my special sagacity ?

I have no such gift. I’m just the little boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes.

 

ALSO bear in mind that virology is not an old field.

Contagion is an old belief.

Virology is a comparatively new explanation of contagion.

 

Just my opinion. The investigation would happen regardless of my thinking the report is garbage. Don’t know why it’s so difficult to tell the difference between my personal opinion and the duty of someone conducting an investigation

 

I listened to this episode in its entirety. I agree, fascinating. This is by far the most informative podcast on the issue. The guy was literally there.

- They were taking samples of people who walked into hospitals in Wuhan years before Covid came about. They took samples of some of the first to walk in with Covid. all of the people who were infected worked in the wet market. It was immediately obvious it was an airborne virus.

- He worked directly with one other person in China doing that and he pushed his Chinese partner to release the genome which China had prohibited doing.

- He had worked with somebody in Wuhan lab who was trying to write a paper on Covid lab samples in 2018. It never got published due to technical reasons - they didn’t want to publish without complete genomes. So basically he had access to what are likely all of the Covid strains in 2018. All but one of them were strains of SARS1. The one strain that wasn’t isn’t anything close to Covid 19. There would be no motivation in 2018 to have other strains hidden because Covid 19 didn’t exist yet.

- This podcast was in September 2022. My eyes opened wide when he started talking at great length about racoon dogs, how he saw them being sold at wet markets, and he said he even took pictures of them. Overlay this 6 month old conversation with test results about Racoon dogs he last couple of days is enlightening.

- From his knowledge of the people at Wuhan, what they were doing, the strains that existed, where the first cases came from, he seems to think a lab leak is highly unlikely.

- He was in a much villainized conference early call re early reports about lab early on with Fauci. He said Fauci was mostly silent and only indicated we needed to follow the science and didn’t advocate for any particular theory.

- He addressed supposed reports of sick lab workers going to hospitals in fall of 2019. His said from overall what they had been sampling there were all kinds of infections running around, and what we don’t understand here is that when they get sick with a virus they go to a hospital first. That doesn’t mean they are admitted. So sick people going hospitals is not a thing at all.


TWiV 940: Eddie Holmes in on viral origins

 

It wasn't going to be solved overnight....sheesh. It might still not be solved.

 

The info came form “Chinese researchers”…
Who posted it and then took it down, now as the lab leak theory gains traction again the raccoon dog data pops back up… Okay

Consider the source.