I like that the official positions of the US Federal Government is somehow not the Kool Aid.
“Most likely” but “low confidence”
So… more likely than any other possibility but not really too certain?
Somehow I suspect the right-wing news outlets will focus on the “most likely” part and the left wing on the “low confidence” part.
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Yeah.
The current government tally is:
4 - natural origin, low confidence
2 - don’t know (CIA + another agency)
1 - lab origin, low confidence (DoE)
1 - lab origin, moderate confidence (FBI)
So I don’t consider it much of a shift. I’m curious what data they used. And I take it as a mild rejection of the 2022 reports? But that’s about it.
Right-wing newspapers will definitely take this as confirmation that they have been wrongly mistreated by liberals and all of their conspiracies are true.
And Chinese newspapers will take this as an act of aggression.
And nothing else will change.
Naw,
It’s
4 - natural origin, spread via non-lab sources, low confidence
2 - natural origin, don’t know how it spread (CIA + another agency)
1 - natural origin, spread via lab leak, low confidence (DoE)
1 - natural origin, spread via lab leak, moderate confidence (FBI)
There are zero experts who think it was created in the lab. The open question is whether it got to that market (where it certainly spread to the general population) via animals brought to sell in the market, or via a person who was accidentally infected at the lab before shopping in the market.
And it’s very unlikely we will ever know for sure because China destroyed most of the available evidence very early on.
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At the risk of asking a dumb question: how is this the purview of the Department of Energy? Why are they weighing in at all?
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Sorry for the poor wording, yes you are correct.
I think, all but two of the agencies have ‘low’ confidence that it was not created in a lab, and the other two do not know.
(and that’s assuming the DOE didn’t change their answer)
Yup.
That’s what Jimmy Kimmel said last night and was absolutely right.
Sounds like Ranger drank the koolaid instead.
They do have a lot of labs I guess? Including this super double top secret lab in California with a spooky name.
So half think it spread via non-lab sources, a quarter don’t know and a quarter think lab-leak.
Anyone know the 5 agencies not listed? Just curious.
And not to sound more tin-foil hatty, but I do think the opinion on whether “COVID was engineered” is driven by politics.
For most people, imo, it is too big of an accusation. And it cuts too close to “China used a bioweapon” and “Moderna created COVID” and “Bill Gates implanted a chip”, etc.
The lab leak is also quite an accusation, but it’s more digestible.
Eh, not really. Lab leaks are not all that rare, unfortunately. They don’t usually cause this level of global chaos, but they do happen.
Uh, yeah, lab accidents are all fun and games until millions of people die. Then it’s quite an accusation.
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Naw, we actually have evidence for that, unlike how it initially spread. The entire genome of the virus was published very early on. Bioengineering leaves characteristic tells. “Can we see evidence of bioengineering?” is something you can study with information that was NOT destroyed, and is still readily available to experts in the field.
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Maybe but I haven’t heard any expert convincingly claim that there is or isn’t any evidence in the genome.
When Covid hit, Andersen and Garry (I think?) published an article in Nature claiming that if people wanted to engineer Covid, they would have used a method that led to a different genome. This was initially picked up by people as solid evidence (the Lancet), and the mainstream media. But it was later dismissed by others as overly speculative. Mostly, I think went unexamined.
After the DARPA leak in 2021, I think that original argument can be completely rejected. The method actually proposed to DARPA was nothing like Andersen had suggested, and would have potentially created something genetically just like Covid.
There’s been further arguments from both teams, but I just haven’t seen anything remotely convincing. Last year, Worobey (and others) have made arguments about the wet markets, but not about genome. Also in 2022 Garry argued with Sachs about the genome, but Garry was not convincing, and Sachs is a friggin economist.
I do wish there were more experts/better experts weighing in on this, since of course I am not an expert.
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One i think potentially strong new argument towards natural origin, (and wet markets) is that they (Worobey, et. al.) think there were 2 separate virus lineages in Wuhan, from 2 seperate outbreaks.
I don’t know nearly enough how confident this idea is, but assuming its true, then it’s certainly more likely that it was 2 animals, than 2 seperate lab accidents.
This was, I think, the biggest thing to come out last year, but i guess not big enough for the DOE.
whether someone should be criticized for making early claims about covid coming from a lab leak does not depend on whether the claim is correct. It depends on the evidence justifying the claim at the time.
For example, a person who thinks it just be a lab leak because the chinese are a dirty incompetent people should be criticized for being racist or at least xenophobic. Whether it was actually a lab leak is irrelevant.
I don’t remember the justification for the early claims of a lab leak. At times it has seemed people favored that hypothesis because it would politically shift blame from trump to china, for example, or because it would make it easier to blame fauci for supposedly funding the lab leak in the first place. These are poor justifications for the claim, regardless.
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if deplorables can be reasoned with they wouldn’t be deplorables
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This is maybe the most frustrating thing.
For a pandemic that infects billions of people, with thousands of professional virologists studying it, there’s like 5 experts who express any opinion at all on where it came from.
Every single article on COVID has the same damn names.
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Despite the political interest, “where it came from” isn’t that important. Viruses jump from animals to humans all the time. Measles, ebola, covid, flu, … all from animals. Exactly which animal and exactly which pathway doesn’t really help us predict or prevent the next one. It doesn’t help us treat this one.