I wish they would share whatever this new evidence is with the public. There's not agreement about what it means among the agencies who have seen it, so maybe having more eyes on the problem can clarify the situation.
I think in alot of cases if your understanding of a topic is based purely on what you've heard in the media, then you are less informed than someone who has never heard of that topic.
That's not even possible. Even if you are misinformed or misunderstand something about an issue, simply having awareness of an issue makes you more informed on that subject than someone unaware that it exists.
Large chunks of the media assured us that it was not only impossible that the virus came from a lab but also racist and xenophobic to even suggest it. If you told the average person who didn't watch the news that a lab that studies corona viruses is in a city where a corona virus started many would just assume it came from the lab.
This is compared to the coronavirus which first appeared just down the road from a lab which studies coronaviruses.
> Large chunks of the media assured us that it was not only impossible that the virus came from a lab but also racist and xenophobic to even suggest it.
I don't think that's a fair assessment of "the media", at least not the mass media. When the lab leak theory started there was no evidence at all to support it beyond "A lab exists" and "We don't like China" which gave it status as a conspiracy theory.
As evidence grew suggesting that the virus wasn't engineered in a lab and could have jumped from animals to humans, the people who clung to, and very aggressively promoted, the lab leak theory were rightly called out for it. They were dismissing the evidence that we had which was increasingly suggesting it jumped to humans from animals, to support a fringe theory that had no evidence. Wild fantasies were popping up too, like how the virus was developed in the US or was a bio-weapon attack against China. This was all just conspiracy theory. Some of it was clearly borne from anti-Chinese sentiment. In fact it caused a huge spike in violence against innocent Asian Americans which did kind of spoil the lab leak theory and made people hesitate to consider it for fear of being lumped in with bigots and conspiracy theorists.
We kept investigating the possibility though, and gradually, we started to get evidence that China was hiding things. They hid early cases and pressured doctors to keep quiet about them. They denied investigators access to records and locations they needed. Researches at the lab had been hospitalized with covid-like symptoms. There was still zero direct evidence of a lab leak, everything was circumstantial, but it was suspicious enough that there were lots of people increasingly calling for more investigation. The mass media reported on all of these things.
At a certain point it became actually justified to support the lab leak theory, but people who were spouting off lab leak theories, even the more sensible theories, in the early months of the pandemic were not, and still are not, vindicated. Their suspicions were not based on evidence or reached through investigation of the facts we had.
Today we still have no real evidence for the lab leak theory. The department of energy says they have evidence that they won't share with us, and the other agencies they have shared it with were not impressed and haven't changed their views. At this point I'd say the lab leak theory is about as credible as a natural origin. We just don't have conclusive evidence either way. Because all the information we need is in China's hands, and they've been obstructing investigations, I suspect we might not ever never know the truth.
I agree we may never know the truth with certainty but we can be 100% certain that the media is garbage, pure and simple.
Not at all, because the evidence for a lab leak was non-existent and the people and sources spreading the conspiracy theory often admitted as much.
Tom Cotton, one of the first republicans to push the theory, said himself: "Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says"
when the washington times jumped into the game their own article included this admission: "In principle, outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility. This could have been the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but so far there isn’t evidence or indication for such incident." (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus...)
Meanwhile the evidence for not a lab leak was actual science like genome analysis. That work was published by scientists in preprints for the world to scrutinize unlike the politicians whose claims were based on suspicion alone. There was no science supporting the lab leak theory in January 2020, just speculation.
The problem is large chunk of the media didn't say, as you are saying, that there was no evidence, which would be fine to argue. They just said it didn't come from lab, period, full stop. There is a difference from saying there is no proof and that something didn't happen. They also labelled anybody who said it came from a lab a racist or xenophobe. There was no debate or discussion in the public sphere. People were literally banned off social media for saying it came from a lab.
I don't think any evidence that it spread from an animal to humans discounts the lab leak. The lab could have an animal which infected a human worked at the lab. There are also other potentials like an infected animal escaped the lab and infected somebody outside. Both of these would still be lab leaks.
We also knew pretty early on that China was hiding things. Suggesting it was gradual is wrong. There were a lot of conspiracy theories about the death of Dr. Li Wenliang in early February 2020, with the suggestion that China killed him to stop him from exposing China further. Dr. Li-Meng Yan has also been talking since April 2020 about China covering up things. Those are the earliest substantial claims about China covering up things that I am aware of, but there may be earlier cases I am forgetting.
I agree that today we have seen no real evidence and that we probably will never know the truth. China did that to themselves by covering up evidence and having shills in the WHO instead of letting all the evidence come out.
I can't speak to all of media everywhere, but the mass media did repeatedly say there was no evidence and that the origin of the virus was still uncertain/unclear
CNN - "But the lack of evidence to back up claims that the outbreak began in a Chinese lab has not stopped top administration officials, including Pompeo, and some Republican allies of the President from raising the possibility in public comments...Meanwhile, the uncertainty over the virus’ origins extends to the closest intelligence partners of the US. The US evidence shared with the allied intelligence-sharing group known as Five Eyes doesn’t rule one theory in or out, according to a foreign official in regular contact with the Trump administration. " (https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/politics/trump-intelligence-c...)
YAHOO - "he scientific evidence has remained unchanged, according to interviews with five virologists who have experience in microbiology, infectious disease ecology and viral evolution. The researchers offered near-uniform summations that few conclusions can be drawn based on the available scientific evidence, but they noted that the context and circumstances of the origin debate have changed, particularly as critics point out that China hasn't been fully transparent about the earliest days of the pandemic." (https://news.yahoo.com/science-around-lab-leak-theory-204525...)
The DailyMail - "The Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory is located about 20 miles away from the Huanan Seafood Market and some have wondered if the outbreak's epicentre is coincidental, but the scientific community currently believes that the virus mutated through and jumped to people through animal-human contact at the market. But, 'at this point there's no reason to harbour suspicions' that the facility had anything to do with the outbreak, besides being responsible for the crucial genome sequencing that lets doctors diagnose it, Rutgers University microbiologist Dr Richard Ebright told DailyMail.com." (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7922379/Chinas-la...)
The New York Post - "Many health experts believe the coronavirus began circulating in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in November 2019. Authorities in Beijing date the first confirmed case to Dec. 8 of that year. The theory that the coronavirus accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology into the wider population has gained credence as a viable explanation in recent weeks, following a World Health Organization-led investigation and report — compiled with the help of the Chinese government — that left many other nations dissatisfied." (https://nypost.com/2021/05/23/three-wuhan-lab-workers-were-h...)
The Washington Post - "How do you cover unfounded and specious allegations lodged not from some random Internet commenter, but from the most powerful man in the world? You can fact-check, but do you in the process inadvertently lend them credence? Do you call the claims “baseless” or “conspiracy theories?” Do you call them “lies,” even if you can’t 100 percent disprove them, or even if you don’t know for sure that the person promoting them actually knows better? It has become evident that some corners of the mainstream media overcorrected when it came to one particular theory from Trump and his allies: that the coronavirus emanated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, rather than naturally. It’s also true that many criticisms of the coverage are overwrought and that Trump’s and his allies’ claims invited and deserved skepticism." (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/24/fix-china...)
The Guardian - “As things currently stand, the evidence strongly suggests that Covid-19 arose after a natural spillover event, but nobody is yet in a position to rule out an alternative,” he said." (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/22/the-wuhan-lab-...)
Even sites I'd hesitate to call mainstream media got in on it:
The Daily Beast - "There is no evidence that the novel coronavirus was engineered, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that it may have originated in the lab, which spent years testing bat coronaviruses in animals."(https://www.thedailybeast.com/leaked-cable-shows-us-official...)
> People were literally banned off social media for saying it came from a lab.
I would argue that if people were spreading conspiracy theories by making accusations or claims without evidence those bans may have been justified, but I know enough about moderation on social media to be sure that they overstepped at times too. Remember, the spread of these conspiracy theories resulted in Asian people being beaten in the streets for no reason. It's no surprise that some people didn't have a lot of tolerance for those repeating unsupported accusations.
What I can say, is that as evidence for the lab leak theory grew, even when it was very weak and purely circumstantial, the media reported on that evidence and their tone shifted dramatically. Once it stopped being wild accusations they were perfectly willing to talk about it.
The thing is there is no evidence that the virus spread from animals to humans. Of all the animals tested in the market zero tested positive for the virus. And none of the environmental samples showed any signs that an infected animals was present, all the environmental samples were deposited by humans. Since these animals habitats encompass all of southern China and South East asia you'd expect to have found a direct ancestrial strain to be circulating within these animal populations. I mean there are teams going around all of the Wet Markets in Laos and Thailand actively sampling the animals there, and nothing has come up. This is in direct contrast to both SARS and MERS which they initially noticed non human environmental strains not from humans, tested the animals and found anti bodies leading to discover MERS in camels within a year (when total infections worldwide were a couple hundred). And a civet cat in 2003 a few months after the SARS outbreak infected with SARS that matched patient zero with a extra 29-nucleotide sequence unique to civet cats. https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs.
With SARS2 we have not found ANYTHING! No environmental samples different than the human derived samples. No market animal in China or anywhere else with a variant circulating unique to their species. You'd think if the progenitor to SARS2 was circulating within a species we would have some SOME ANY evidence.
These guys would disagree with you. There was never any direct link found pointing to an origin at the market, but there was plenty of evidence including evidence for spillover.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6525/120.summary
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337
https://zenodo.org/record/6291628/files/Pekar_Zoonosis.pdf?d...
Given labs obviously keep a library of natural viruses for research purposes, how does "actual science like genome analysis" prove it wasn't a lab leak? This argument is just bs put forward by scientists highly motivated to discredit the lab leak hypothesis.
Using the same level of analysis there was zero evidence for the wet market transmission either (other than the massive levels of obsfucation, misdirection and disinformation that a nation state like China is able to inject into the discussion).
That isn't obvious at all. Culturing sarbecoviruses is very difficult. They have libraries of samples but they're dead and they just sequence the genomic material which is in the samples. Recovering viable virus is hard, culturing it is even more difficult.
You're right, it doesn't, I was just using your own phrasing. What the science did do was provide verifiable evidence which supported the theory that the virus could have came from animals. Having actual research that can be repeated and verified will always win out over vague accusations or suspicions made without evidence, such as your claim that it all came from "scientists highly motivated to discredit the lab leak hypothesis."
On one hand we have wild speculation, on the other we have "SARS-CoV-2 emergence very likely resulted from at least two zoonotic events" (https://zenodo.org/record/6291628/files/Pekar_Zoonosis.pdf?d...) Neither of the two have to be correct, and neither offers definitive proof of how the virus spread, but if you can honestly look at those two things and say neither one offers any evidence or that that they provide an equal level of analysis I don't know what to tell you.
https://zenodo.org/record/7169296#.Y0RCpkPP02y
https://changingtimes.media/2022/10/12/investigators-challen...
So which is right? You don't know, I don't know...so maybe we need to also consider other scenarios too.
And contemplating the possibility of a lab leak, when a coronavirus outbreak randomly appears just down the road from a laboratory that studies coronaviruses (of all places in the world) is about as far from "wild speculation" as you can get. It's just simple commonsense, unless you have an agenda.
Here's some other examples where "wild speculation" must have been involved:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
And I havent mentioned all the other kinds of intelligence data used to analyse such an event, like satellite photos of the Wuhan lab carpark, or peaks in mobile phone activity in the area, or there are some indications that 3 scientists at the Wuhan lab came down with an "unknown" respiratory disease a month before the first appearance of Covid.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-w...
No one accepted that one paper at face value, it's just one of several examples of papers and research where actual evidence was presented and explored.
The fact that biolabs exist and leaks have happened in the past are not actual evidence. That lab still exists today and leaks have still happened in the past, does that mean a virus is leaking right now? It's just wild speculation. Wet markets also exist and have been linked to outbreaks of disease in the past. These are reasons for investigations, not for accusations and conspiracy theories.
Gradually, real evidence for the lab leak theory started to emerge. Your parking lot picture and the sick lab researchers are good examples of evidence, even though they're only circumstantial, but none of that evidence existed when people started spreading lab leak conspiracy theories. Those conspiracy theories had no evidence at all.
Even still, investigations were carried out to see if the the virus really was a bioweapon, to determine if it came from the lab, and to see if it came from the market. As evidence that it came from the market grew, the people spouting lab leak conspiracy theories ignored all the evidence for everything else and continued to spread their conspiracies even though the evidence for a natural origin was much stronger.
Any time actual evidence that supported the lab leak theory emerged the media reported on it, and when enough evidence existed to justify the lab leak theory the media took it seriously.
Which was the problem with all the studies early in 2020 finding SARS-CoV-2 mRNA on surfaces after X hours.
Also the problem with high cycle count rtPCR results long after symptoms have abated.
You can study genomes without ever having to deal with infectious virus, which is vastly simpler.