Michael Shellenberger’s Public today released a blockbuster story, “First Person Sickened By COVID-19 Was Chinese Scientist Who Oversaw “Gain Of Function” Research That Created Virus,” which generously credits Racket. The story cites three government officials in naming scientist Ben Hu, who was in charge of “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the “patient zero” of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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The secrets of both the pandemic’s origin and the reason for America’s at-best-sluggish investigation of same have become the mother of all political footballs, and today’s news is likely to be just the first in a series of loud surprises.
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Numerous federal agencies appear to have designed their probes of Covid-19’s origins so as to discount the possibility of lab origin in advance.
We were told, for instance, that despite longstanding interest in the Wuhan Institute as a potential security concern, at least one intelligence agency overruled a majority of its in-house investigators to produce a report on the pandemic’s origin discounting the lab-leak hypothesis.
Two years ago I wrote on LessWrong that my likelihood for the lab leak hypothesis 99% hypothesis. Given that updating on evidence is important I think I’m warranted to update to 99.9%.
I was wrong when I expected that the truth comes out sooner because I underrate the extent to which the intelligence community will try to mislead the public. In retrospect, that seems like a stupid mistake. Nevertheless, we seem now at the point where the public evidence will force more organizations to change their assessments.
We might also come into the phase where the press will start to focus on how the lab leak theory was suppressed.
The seeming lack of widespread concern about the origins of COVID given that if it is of artificial origin it would be perhaps the worst technologically-created accidental disaster in history (unless I’m missing something) is really very disappointing.
To take some version of the opposite side: If we managed to figure out that, say, there was an X% chance per year of lab-leaking something like COVID, and a Y% chance per year of natural origin + wet market crossover producing something like COVID… that would determine the expected-value badness of lab practices and wet market practices, and the respective urgencies of doing something about them. It wouldn’t matter which specific thing happened in 2019. (For an analogy, if the brakes on your car stopped working for 30 seconds while you were on the highway, this would be extremely concerning and warrant fixing, regardless of whether you managed to avoid crashing in that particular incident.)
That said, it seems unlikely that we’ll get decent estimates on X and Y, and much more unlikely that there would be mainstream consensus on such estimates. More likely, if COVID is proven to have come from a lab leak, then people will do something serious about bio-lab safety, and if it’s proven not to have come from a lab leak, then people will do much less about bio-lab safety; this one data point will be taken as strong evidence about the danger. So, getting an answer is potentially useful for political purposes.
(Remember: SARS 1 leaked from a lab 4 times. That seems to me like plenty of evidence that lab leaks are a real danger, unless you think labs have substantially improved practices since then.)
I don’t get the downvotes, this post is just agreeing with the OP.
Thanks, I appreciate it—I didn’t really understand the downvotes either, my beliefs don’t even seem particularly controversial (to me). Just that I think it’s really important to understand where COVID came from (and the lab leak theory should be taken seriously) and try to prevent something similar from happening in the future. I’m not much interested in blaming any particular person or group of people.
The word “disappointing” suggests that the action taken to suppress widespread concern (like overruling the intelligence analysts) are bad. Why wouldn’t you want to blame those who are responsible for the disappointing state of affairs?
It’s a polarizing topic and some people seem to be emotionally attached to lab leak denial.
Some people are invested emotionally, politically, and career-ally in said denial. I am curious how many of them will have the humility to admit they were wrong. Sadly, this has become my only metric for the quality of public servants: Can they admit it when they are wrong? Do they offer to change, or do they just blame others for their failures? I assume none of them have this capacity until I see it. The “lab leak” story will offer an opportunity for us to observe a large number of public servants either admit their mistakes … or not.
I think the framing of focusing on public servants is one about obscuring responsibility for people on forums like this who went along with the disinformation campaign to suppress the lab leak theory.
Professionally?
Spoiler: Less than 1% will admit they were wrong. Straight denial, reasoning that it doesn’t actually matter, or pretending they knew the whole time lab origin was possible are all preferable alternatives. Admitting you were wrong is career suicide.
The political investments in natural origin are strong. Trump claiming a Chinese lab was responsible automatically put a large chunk of Americans in the opposite camp. My interest in the topic actually started with reading up to confirm why he was wrong, only to find the Daszak-orchestrated Lancet letter that miscited numerous articles and the Proximal Origins paper that might be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. The Lancet letter’s declaration that “lab origin theories = racist” influenced discourse in a way that cannot be understated. It also seems many view more deadly viruses as an adjoining component of climate change: a notion that civilizing more square footage of earth means we are inevitably bound to suffer nature’s increasing wrath in the form of increasingly virulent, deadly pathogens.
The professional motivations are stark and gross. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Thoughts on the origin are frequently dismissed if you’re not a virologist. But all the money in virology is in gain of function. Oops!
I think the motivation to suppress the lab leak theory was to avoid compounding the crisis at the time with anti-Chinese sentiment, including racist attacks on Chinese Americans. Emotions were running really high.
I think we’ll now see little energy for continuing that bias, and more energy for correctly identifying the source to prevent future pandemics from similar origins.
TBF, I predict that the public debate will still resemble a dumpster fire, as do most complex human affairs. Humans are cute, not smart.
Was “avoiding anti-Chinese sentiment” really a motivation? The official explanation is that some Chinese person ate like a barbecued bat or got bit by a pangolin or something. I don’t see how a lab leak would make people any more racist or hateful towards the Chinese than the official explanation did.
I suppose that it probably was a motivation even though it did not make much rational sense to me. I just wonder if that concern was more of a matter of political identity rather than a considered response.
This was probably a factor but also:
IIRC research at WIV was done in collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance and/or other similar US-based orgs. Granting WIV BSL4 necessary for this kind of gain-of-function research was in part based on their assessments. US establishment had a reason to cover it up because it was in part their own fuckup.
The WIV did not do any work on Coronaviruses under BSL4. They did gain-of-function experiments under BSL2 and BSL3.
Isn’t 99.9% confident in this pretty extreme? If a thousand randomly selected similar cases came out, 999 of them would be lab leaks and only one would involve investigators missing something?
Investigators always miss something and we are likely going to find more information in the future.
That doesn’t change the fact that we have overwhelming evidence.
If you look at the article in Public, it makes the case: We know that the people at the WIV put a Furin cleavage side via gain-of-function modification into a Coronaviruses and we know that they did their research without the safety precautions that you would need and we know that one of the first patients was one of the people working with Coronaviruses at the WIV.
That’s already a quite good argument and I can see why it alone isn’t enough for 99.9% confidence but we are not limited to it.
Huh. Yeah, this definitely causes me to update my P(lab leak) from ~0.2 to ~0.75.
I favor a lab origin, but I don’t have confidence in these latest alleged details. These issues (like UFOs and Iraqi WMDs) that involve interplay between intelligence, politics, and technical expertise, are polluted by spy rumors, agitators with a factional agenda, and self-made “experts”.
Meta question: If you think there is a 1 in 1000 chance that you are wrong, why would I spend any amount of time trying to change your mind? I am 99.9 percent confident in very few propositions outside of arithmetic.
Like, what are the odds that the anonymous sources are members of the intelligence community who are saying it now as part of the [CIA’s, NSA’s, whatever’s] current political strategy relative to China? I don’t trust Seymour Hersh’s anonymous sources more than 70⁄30, even when The New Yorker publishes his pieces.
I don’t think that credence is well thought of that way. Attempts to change my mind might change my credence even if they don’t change it to me thinking that a natural origin would be the most likely.
My own beliefs don’t rest on a single piece. I don’t think that anyone should hold credence that is as high as mine just because they read this article.
Is that’s the CIA position they could have just changed the official CIA position and say “We uncovered new evidence and now believe that the lab leak theory is more likely” there would have been no reason to tell a story about how they overruled their own analysts to hide the lab leak theory. The story as it stands damages the reputation of those agencies and I think “The CIA does what’s good for the CIA” is a good heuristic to think about their actions.
What are some of the real-world consequences to this?
Will China ever admit it? I honestly don’t expect the CCP to ever cop to this.
If so, what could the response be? I don’t expect any kind of apology or mea culpa, much less any form of reparation.
I don’t even expect gain of function research to stop.
Sarcastically: Some uptick in the betting markets on Ron DeSantis …
But actually? I doubt any consequences. I agree that we’ll continue with “gain of function.” I’m more worried that secret labs developing biological weapons will be (re)started based on “gain of function” given that there was such a successful demonstration. A lab leak from someplace like that is even more likely to be a civilization killer than anything bats and pangolins were ever going to do to us.
It seems that Fauci and Collins already saw the writing on the wall when the Republicans got the majority in Congress and decided to end their careers. That means they can’t be fired for it.
After misleading the public in the Iraqi WMD case, there was some accounting in the media and an attempt to improve structures to avoid getting lied to by authorities. It’s possible that our media institutions aren’t completely lost and will do some accounting of why they failed to inform us.
This is quite a story.
I don’t think my odds of lab origin are 99% yet, but I think after this article I’d move my odds from 80%->90%. I’d like to see confirmation by more sources before I move any higher. But the evidence looks pretty compelling with this point; the narrative is coherent, the counterarguments (of those I’ve read) seem weak. Though it’s possible I’ve missed some stronger ones since most of the people in my information sphere seem to believe the lab leak hypothesis.
A honest question from an outsider (to American politics): isn’t it now convenient for the current political establishment to go with the the lab leak hypothesis and so the change should not be taken into account when updating priors?
It’s highly inconvenient for the establishment because it means that the establishment was wrong to censor the lab leak theory.
It’s also highly inconvenient for all those inside of the establishment who want to to gain of function research or cover up past gain of function research.
Matt Taibbi’s reporting suggests that it was inconvenient enough that a three-letter agency decided to overrule their analysts.
Thanks for the clarification. I was more thinking about the attitude towards China.
Pushing back against this being evidence at all, this claim has been repeated since 2020, so I don’t know how it being restated again changes evidence much.
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/06/scicheck-no-bombshell-on-covid-19-origins-u-s-intelligence-rebuts-claims-about-sick-lab-workers/
The names of the WIV employees are new information. The WIV actually putting Furin cleavage sites into Coronoviruses in 2019 is new information. An US intelligence agency overruling their own analysts is new information.
The article you links to says:
Interestingly, the article leaves out the fact that they IC is in violation of the law by not naming the individuals given that they have been tasked with declassifying all the information.
I see no reason to leave out that crucial fact if your intention is not to misinform the reader. The fact that the IC is willing to violate the law and does not declassify the information is indiscriminating evidence.
If they would have nothing to hide, why would they violate the law?
I can’t read your linked article due to access restrictions.
Interesting that the law required them to name the researchers, but they did not. Maybe they don’t have the researcher’s names? Maybe there wasn’t enough confidence in naming the researchers, but the anonymous sources gave out speculative names as fact? Maybe the anonymous sources are lying?
There’s a new article/interview going on with an apparent WIV worker who claims to have engineered SARS-CoV2 as a bioweapon and was ordered to release it, so at least some sources are lying about some things.
At this point I need verification of sources to believe any claims at all.
edit: It seems like at least two of the named Chinese researchers deny being sick at the time. Whether you trust their word or the word of anonymous alleged government sources says more about you than reality.
So it’s about whether you are the kind of person who believes free speech exists in China or whether you believe that it doesn’t really exist and that researchers will say what the CCP wants them to say when it comes to issues that are very important to the CCP.
It’s about whether when you put someone on trial for murder and they say “I didn’t do it” you believe them or whether you find other people more believable.
That’s fair and my high confidence comes from actually reading a lot of the primary sources and not just media reports.
When it comes to this claim in particular, let’s look at the primary sources.
The bill requires them to:
The report that they released says:
You can tell for yourself whether you believe they reported here what the law required them. I think it’s very clear that they didn’t follow the law and withheld information.
If the person that fact check employed would have been half decent at their job, they should know that not including the details that the law asked for was a violation in the law but they failed to inform their readers about that fact.
And given the previous reporting of the IC leadership overruling their analysts when the analysts believed in the lab leak the fact that the IC leadership is illegally withholding information matters.
And yet your confidence is updated to 99.9% by an unverified anonymous second hand source.
I read both statements, thank you very much for reposting them here for clarity.
I do not believe the report is following the bill to the letter of the law. That being said, I do not believe this is evidence of malfeasance. It’s possible this is all the information they have, and they do not have specific evidence on researcher names, hospital admittance dates, or other such details.
Honestly, if they provided such details, that would reveal how thoroughly they’ve infiltrated Chinese intelligence. Even if it was all provided and blacked out, that would still be revealing about their intelligence capabilities.
Even now I’m suspicious in how they knew researchers were sick. I know there were some social media reports going around, but how would they be able to confirm that? Did they even confirm the social media reports, or just trusted it was true because it’s likely people are sick during flu season?
My best explanation would be they have a dragnet on Chinese social media and caught some of the researchers posting flu symptoms.
This story is not the only new information that I have seen since I had my public likelihood two years ago at 99%.
I wouldn’t call a source that Matt Taibbi interviewed unverified. I have a lot of trust built up in Matt over the 15 years. The article also does not say that anything in it rests on a single source.
Why do you think the NSA exists? To only read social media reports? The NSA can easily hack hospitals to get relevant data. They can hack individual researchers. There are other sources as well that they could hack. They might access location data about when the researcher stayed home and when they went to the hospital.
They were not tasked with sharing how they know what they know, but just sharing what they knew.
One letter that the NIH send to the EcoHealth alliance back in 2020 said:
That statement reveals much more about intelligence capabilities than listing a bunch of names of researchers and their symptoms would.
One important point here is that according to the WIV itself they were facing a hacking attack back then which was their excuse for taking down the database of coronavirus sequences. The most likely source for that hacking attack seems to me to be a Western intelligence service.