I’m no expert on virology, but I have a pretty good bullshit detector. You won’t see this blog promoting theories that the CIA killed Kennedy, or that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered, or that the government is hiding UFOs in a secret airplane hanger, or that vaccines cause autism, or that GMOs and cell phones cause cancer.
One way of spotting a phony conspiracy theory is that the proponents engage in an endless whack-a-mole, putting forth one unverifiable hypothesis after another—often mutually inconsistent. They are “just asking questions”.
Over the past few months, one side of the Covid origin debate has been claiming that the US intelligence services would soon release evidence that lab workers had Covid-19 in November 2019. These same people claimed that there was evidence of a safety emergency at the Wuhan lab in the fall of 2019.
Note that these were not just theories about what happened, they were claims about the evidence that would soon be released. Even respected press outlets like the WSJ, The Times, and Reason were swept up in the hysteria.
I recently came across a podcast with Eddie Holmes, made immediately before the report was released. He was aware of rumors regarding what was in the report, but was skeptical. He predicted that the expected evidence would not materialize. (Start around 21:30, if you wish to save time.)
Again, this was not only a claim about what happened in 2019, it was a prediction about what evidence would be disclosed.
In the end, our intelligence services found no evidence that any lab workers had Covid. They found no evidence of any emergency in the fall of 2019 (a point I made here months ago.) There is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically modified in the lab.
Here’s a suggestion. When you discover that certain media outlets have been lying to you, stop trusting them. After Fox News admits under oath that they’ve been making up lies to please their audience, just stop watching.
And when you are fed mutually inconsistent conspiracy theories, don’t assume that “the evidence is adding up”. There cannot have been a cover-up in September 2019 for an outbreak that affected lab workers in November 2019.
PS. The LA Times is one of the few papers to have provided sane coverage of this issue:
The lab-leak conspiracists were certain that the report would validate their contentions, for which there has never been any valid scientific evidence.
Instead it did just the opposite.
PPS. The Telegraph is also worth reading:
But it is not just the overall assessment, largely unchanged, that has startled the horses. The report, as the law under which it was published requires, also makes plain where intelligence does not exist – and this contradicts much of what has been briefed to newspapers, including the Wall St Journal and The Sunday Times over the last few years.
PPPS. An even better article appears at MSNBC, where they point out that the recent shift of opinion toward lab leak at the Department of Energy is based on a theory that the virus came from the CDC, not the WIV. If so, then I would have been right about virtually all the issues raised in this dispute. If the CDC theory were true, then nearly 100% of the evidence cited by lab leakers over the past three years would have been false.
They also make a point that should interest Tyler Cowen:
As Worobey told The Associated Press for a story published in February, “The scientific literature contains essentially nothing but original research articles that support a natural origin of this virus pandemic.”
On the other hand, the lab leak theory is built not on hard evidence, but on circumstantial stuff. It’s a theory based wholly on questions, not actual findings.
For example, lab leakers ask, if Covid was natural in origin, why haven’t scientists yet discovered the exact animal from which the virus crossed into humans?
Forgive me but, so what that they haven’t? As a January article in Slate pointed out, “It took 29 years to definitively identify the source of Ebola, 26 years for HIV/AIDS, and 15 years for SARS.” So the lack of an identifiable source, especially this soon, does not suggest a lab leak.
Tyler’s been telling Doomsters on the AI issue to start publishing scientific papers. (In fairness, the lab leakers have published a few very low quality items.)
PPPPS. Jonathan Katz also has an excellent piece:
I am sympathetic to that worldview because in many ways I share it. I’ve lived it — having personally caught the CDC, WHO, United Nations — and U.S. government — covering up their agency and complicity in a deadly epidemic. But in that case, I had positive, material evidence to go on, including the findings of public health experts and epidemiologists. By contrast, all the lab leak has going for it — and I really mean all it has going for it — is negative inference: that we can all sense that China is covering something up. And they are! But that means nothing — the current Chinese government covers up everything, always, as a matter of course. They covered up the wildlife trade and anything that might lead to a market origin as well. (Beijing’s preferred conspiracy theory is that the U.S. cooked up the virus in a bioweapons lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland.)
For nigh on three years now, we have all been entertaining a theory that was plausible on its face but has never had a lick of evidence beyond the merest supposition to back it up. We asked the spies, and the spies came back with nothing. Maybe some secret evidence is still out there. Maybe the journalists, bloggers, and anonymous (dare I say Deep State) sources who have gotten this story wrong over and over again will, in the end, find a way to make their case. But, for now, I think it’s time to end this. The lab leakers tried. They failed. On to the next thing.