CROTON'S MICHAEL BALTER---DON'T BET MONEY ON THE MARKET SPILLOVER HYPOTHESIS FOR COVID ORIGINS........BAYESIAN ANALYSIS CONCLUDES THE ODDS ARE HEAVY YOU WILL LOSE
When the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in the Chinese city of Wuhan, a lot of eyebrows were raised—and not just among scientists. Wuhan, as many knew, was the home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had gained fame after the SARS outbreaks of 2002-2004. Researchers in Wuhan, including virologist Shi Zhengli—who would become internationally known as the “Bat Woman” for her forays into bat caves in southwestern China—had established Wuhan as a world center for coronavirus research.
While the general public probably had only a dim inkling of what kind of research went on at the WIV, experts in the field knew that it included years of creating chimeric SARS-like viruses, mixing and matching segments of viral genomes to see what mutations would make them more infectious to humans. Much of this work had been done in collaboration with scientists in the United States, Australia, and other countries. And while the goal of the work was supposedly to help prevent a pandemic of the kind that SARS had threatened to become twenty years ago, some scientists—including WIV collaborator Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina—had begun warning of the potential risks of this so-called “gain-of-function” a number of years ago.
Indeed, their knowledge of what kinds of research was going on at WIV would lead a group of scientists to alert Anthony Fauci about a possible lab origin for the emerging pandemic as early as January 2020. While this same group would go on to author the infamous “Proximal Origin” letter in Nature Medicine just a few months later, arguing that a lab origin was “not plausible,” they privately continued to tell each other just the opposite—as recently revealed by documents subpoenaed by Congressional investigators.
But while many scientists, along with science journalists who dutifully repeated what they said, tried early on to put the kibosh on any suspicions that the pandemic virus SARS-CoV-2 had emerged from a lab or other research-related activity, other researchers and many members of the public refused to believe that the so-called “lab leak” hypothesis was just a “conspiracy theory.” One big reason is what might be called good old common sense.....READ THE REST AT Don’t bet money on the market spillover hypothesis for Covid-19 origins. Bayesian analysis concludes the odds are heavy you will lose. [Updated] (substack.com)
While the general public probably had only a dim inkling of what kind of research went on at the WIV, experts in the field knew that it included years of creating chimeric SARS-like viruses, mixing and matching segments of viral genomes to see what mutations would make them more infectious to humans. Much of this work had been done in collaboration with scientists in the United States, Australia, and other countries. And while the goal of the work was supposedly to help prevent a pandemic of the kind that SARS had threatened to become twenty years ago, some scientists—including WIV collaborator Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina—had begun warning of the potential risks of this so-called “gain-of-function” a number of years ago.
Indeed, their knowledge of what kinds of research was going on at WIV would lead a group of scientists to alert Anthony Fauci about a possible lab origin for the emerging pandemic as early as January 2020. While this same group would go on to author the infamous “Proximal Origin” letter in Nature Medicine just a few months later, arguing that a lab origin was “not plausible,” they privately continued to tell each other just the opposite—as recently revealed by documents subpoenaed by Congressional investigators.
But while many scientists, along with science journalists who dutifully repeated what they said, tried early on to put the kibosh on any suspicions that the pandemic virus SARS-CoV-2 had emerged from a lab or other research-related activity, other researchers and many members of the public refused to believe that the so-called “lab leak” hypothesis was just a “conspiracy theory.” One big reason is what might be called good old common sense.....READ THE REST AT Don’t bet money on the market spillover hypothesis for Covid-19 origins. Bayesian analysis concludes the odds are heavy you will lose. [Updated] (substack.com)
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