Not only did the NY Times publish a lab leak piece by Alina Chan, David Fucking Leonhardt–the same genius who predicted the pandemic would wind down just as we were getting slammed by Delta and then Omicron–also published a piece in which he concludes there’s reasonable evidence for the lab leak hypothesis (the article is an exercise in not weighting various pieces of evidence). Anyway, I’ve put together a collection of some articles and blogposts explaining why the lab leak hypothesis is incredibly weak:
- The Emergence and Evolution of SARS-CoV-2: This, by Eddie Holmes, makes the case for zoonotic origins.
- Treacherous ancestry: An extraordinary hunt for the ghosts of SARS-CoV-2: This has a very nice explanation of how viruses evolve via recombination, and why that matters for the lab leak hypothesis.
- No, gain of function research did not cause COVID-19: The title pretty much says it all.
- The New York Times goes all in on “lab leak”: David Gorski takes down the Chan article, and simultaneously epitomizes Brandolini’s Law.
- A Critical Analysis of the Evidence for the SARS-CoV-2 Origin Hypotheses: a more technical treatment, but still accessible to non-specialists.
Anyway, these might be useful for people, and are worth reading in their own rights.
mikethemadbiologist
How did you miss the entire March 2023 chaos of “the missing genome coincidence” ??? Atleast I didn’t see any ref to all the stuff that went down around that ~ 2 week period from March 4ish – March 19ish? French virologist alledgedly finding swab result and genome data in GISAID alledgedly , attached to a recent and completely diff subject chinese cdc research paper. She fords on to the “dream team” Holden, worobrey, Andersen… same week , before they received it from her, they appeared on 3 diff podcasts: defeating the gurus, bad boy of science, and TWIV (this week in virolog. Week of March 10-14, articles comes out n the Atlantic, and sciencE, hinting that this randomn find “is the biggest supporting factor of a natural origin so far!!” The 3 try to access the data from the Chinese cdc however Now the data, swabs, virus genomes have been removed by the Chinese! Nonetheless less, The dream team publishes a paper on March 11 ish, not 3 days after receiving the special data from the French chicks. Then they take their new findings to the WHO. After review, the dream team and the WHO heads schedule an emergency telephone meeting with Chinese cdc, George gau? They report their “updated findings” to Chinese reps on that call, and demand what the alledgedly is “withheld” info and demand China reposts or shares with WHO and the 3 members of the dream team. China says dudes u r ridic, you had this data many times before AND what you are treating as the smoking gun of evidence is simply a mixture of the dna of many species, AND the virus as the sample was swabs taken form sewage or drainage water from market wash outs. So one would expect to see virus dna mixed with animals and humans, all in one batch. Then, nothing ever happens and the dream team gets to act like their word was the last spoken and therefore all likelihood has swung to natural origin.