Senator Cotton's comments were a paraphrase of coronavirus expert Dr. Ralph Baric, a scientist with direct research collaboration experience at the lab in question.

Blocked! LOL...like usual. It's comical how this minority position buries it's head in the sand. I wouldn't mind so much but this tribe has most of the press with it and keeps our society from progressing on the issue. Biosafety ranks up there with climate change in regards to risk.

Oh... and it just so happens the closest artifical reservoir to covid happens to be right in the city.

Epidemiology 101!

That attitude is like doing a ride along with private investigators and dismissing everything they do as a conspiracy. Yes... the other hypothesis involves a conspiracy and....????

Natural spillover needs a natural reservoir.

Not even their faulty poll showed there is consensus. This is the only poll there is and it used snowball sampling which is prone to showing bias by following networked beliefs. You can't guage opinion of a politicized & taboo hypothesis with snowball sampling.

“Every data point” pardon, that was too strong

You can’t dismiss Wuhan being well-seeded using early sampling data and doubling times. That science relies on limited initial data and too many variables to be stable. There’s also a psychological bias within the field that favors the market narrative

An infection like COVID, with a low hospitalization rate and rapid spread, doesn’t leave clear origin trails. Their story is too good to be true and aligns with a diversion. Every data point from the early search fits an orchestrated diversion in a city that was already well-seeded.

SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading in France in late December 2019 - PubMed The COVID-19 epidemic is believed to have started in late January 2020 in France. Here we report a case of a patient hospitalised in December 2019 in an intensive care unit in a hospital in the north of Paris for haemoptysis with no aetiological diagnosis. RT-PCR was performed retrospectively on the …

It was visually obvious that Wuhan’s healthcare system was overwhelmed at the outbreak’s onset. Unexplained pneumonia is common in hospitals, making diversion simple. Many healthcare workers, myself included, observed that it was already global by December.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32371096/

Waiting for the truth: is reluctance in accepting an early origin hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 delaying our understanding of viral emergence? Two years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, key questions about the emergence of its aetiological agent (SARS-CoV-2) remain a matter of considerable debate. Identifying when SARS-CoV-2 began s...

Tons of data hint that Wuhan was already well-seeded in December. It’s actually the norm to find an infection further along, and this paper discusses some of that evidence while noting there seems to be a psychological hang-up about investigating what’s normal.
gh.bmj.com/content/7/3/...

The only things that decrease the probability of a lab leak are finding the natural reservoir and a path to Wuhan, along with the strength of that evidence and the WIV becoming transparent.

Even if they find a sarbecovirus with an FCS, it won’t be a logical end to the “artificially inserted FCS” theory, simply because they proposed doing it. I often see findings like this in nature overstated.

If we steelman the hypothesis, that wasn't really the main issue. I believe there was some small discussion about the FCS evolving naturally in bats but it wasn't central to the debate.

Many of them spin every little thing they find, rather than act like good scientists.

This field isn’t set up to treat China’s data as suspect, and paired with their strong desire to rule out this undesirable hypothesis, they aren’t equipped to deal with origins in a thorough, objective manner.

That’s how you know the field is FUBAR on this topic. A natural virus leaking from the lab should still be a leading possibility, yet it’s rarely mentioned. COVID wouldn’t be expected to leave easy origin trails

Interestingly, the scientists who still think like scientists haven’t r/o’d engineering

JFC... your misinformation is keeping me busy.

We have an undesirable hypothesis where it will always be hard to get the truth from the field.

bsky.app/profile/quis...

That's mischaracterization of the argument.

I believe when they’ve found what’s implied here, they’ll have a documented alternate hypothesis to artificial insertion. Though artificial insertion would still be a possibility. Over my head though.

But this also highlights that the FCS remains a relevant argument regarding COVID origins, and why we should be skeptical of those who hand-wave it away.

Also ⬇️

Even then, the virus matching the WIV’s documented research keeps a bio-accident as a persistent, likely possibility. Its probability only falls based on how well a strong reservoir and natural pathway are demonstrated and whether the WIV becomes fully transparent.

Point 3: A Bayes factor of around 4 is weak (and disputed) and still depends on assumptions like when the pandemic began.

Everything cited for zoonosis would also be present with a lab leak. Natural spillover requires an animal host carrying the precursor virus and a plausible route to Wuhan.

Point 2: See point 1. They wouldn’t pick a stupid diversion; animals potentially infected at the market don’t strengthen the zoonosis case because that would naturally be part of any convincing diversion.

Those points are weak to non-existent.
Point 1: Both hypotheses can point to the market — a lab leak through diversion would look identical, and much of the data aligns with that scenario.

When you’ve got two hypotheses and both could point to a market — the lab leak via diversion — you need an animal host to make the market significant. Especially when the search fits a ruse perfectly and the virus looks uniquely like their research interests outlined in a grant the year before.

People really need to understand how politics screws up this assessment. This is the kind of thing that takes a long time before everyone admits the truth.

We actually don’t know how many scientists believe it was an accident. A hypothesis assessing whether your own field killed millions of people tends to create a FUBAR situation.

You’ve got it reversed, natural spillover needs an animal host; until then, the virus uniquely matches their research.

Blocked.

Nvm — the field showed it couldn’t objectively assess the issue from the start.

He’s become emotionally attached to a failed hypothesis, and this is his way of coping with being wrong. Being wrong on something this consequential can be emotionally exhausting.

This is precisely why true objectivity requires the involvement of the public and scientists from adjacent fields.

No field can be trusted to objectively investigate its own potential blame for a disaster that killed millions. The conflict of interest is too great. We saw this bias in action when the 'likely accident' theory was improperly falsified from day one.