>They also thought they were going to get away with it. “The truth is never going to come out ”, wrote Rambaut in one message.
This is really mischaracterizing what he's saying in that message. He wasn't celebrating getting away with a coverup, as you're saying, he was saying that IF it was a lab leak, absent concrete evidence (which was very unlikely to appear), that we'd never know that to be conclusively true.
And broadly, because a lab leak is necessarily accusatory, the evidentiary threshold is higher than the baseline, normal, zoonotical origin option. And I don't think that's really unreasonable?
I really don't have a dog in this hunt; I think both options are entirely plausible. But you really seem to be overplaying your hand on this, and the above sort of mischaracterization isn't something that I'd normally expect to see from you.
I really do think that there was a hard turn after Trump was elected by center-left media outlets to fight fire with fire, meaning if right wing media outlets were going to lie in order to push an agenda, then they are going to do it to. That's not to say it never happened, but Trump getting elected made it even more prominent. In this instance, because 'Trust The Science' was the motto being pushed, anything that might undermine that message wasn't reported on. Needless to say I think this is an extremely bad direction for mainstream media outlets to go.
It feels like the left, having been fairly defensibly the "party of science" for the past few decades, has learned the lesson that they don't actually have to have beliefs that align with science or even do science at all - they can just skip to the end, proclaim loudly that "the Science has spoken", and that any other position is a conspiracy theory not worthy of a moment's attention.
With Biden admin (finally) cutting funding to WIV, it seems the slow walk from "lab leak is a racist conspiracy theory" to "well, shoot, we don't know what happened" to "it was a lab leak but it would be impolite to say so" is well underway.
Kristian Andersen has stated many times publicly that (1) he initially believed that a lab leak was likely, (2) he subsequently changed that view based on the scientific considerations that are detailed in his scientific publications, and (3) he has always believed, and has always written, including in the Proximal Origins paper, that a lab-leak scenario is possible (though he now doesn't believe it's plausible). He explained this in detail in an all-day interview, half of which was conducted by a House Republican staffer, as well as in his prepared testimony:
Nothing in Nate's post or in the links contradicts Dr. Andersen's version of events. In fact, none of them of even attempt to. Nate quotes Dr. Andersen's February 1, 2020 email as if it were a smoking gun that Dr. Andersen was lying, without even addressing the fact that Dr. Andersen has repeatedly stated that he changed his mind between February 1, 2020 and the time of publication.
I mean it's obvious that Dr. Andersen did change his mind at some point! He has been publishing papers to the effect that the lab leak is unlikely continuously since early 2020. What is the argument here? That his initial impressions from February 1, 2020 were his true and final feelings and that everything he has said and published since then is disingenuous? That's absurd.
To be clear, Dr. Andersen could well be wrong. I take no position on how plausible the lab-leak hypothesis is, because I don't have the training necessary to evaluate the scientific evidence. Plenty of people who do have the training take different views of the evidence and that's fine.
But I do have the training to evaluate allegations of fraud. And I see no persuasive evidence of it here. Until I see a careful, good-faith assessment of the record that considers Dr. Andersen's detailed explanations and attempts to refute them, I consider the allegations of scandal completely unproven. And this post, which asserts that the facts are "simple and clear" without even engaging with Dr. Andersen's public statements on the issue, and mischaracterizes the statements that it does cite (see Chris C's comment) gives me zero confidence that Nate has made a good-faith effort to get to the truth.
Yes, the populist attack on science and education has blinded liberals to the truth about scientists. They are human beings like everyone else. They have their personal stakes, their preconceptions, their ambitions, and their blindnesses. This is not a new thing, it has always been thus. (If you doubt this, you ought to read Charles Mann's 1491 and follow the endless roadblocks scientists threw up along to the implications of archeological finds that shed light on the history human beings in the Americas.)
Scientific inquiry is an incredibly powerful way to seek the truth of many matters. It has shed light on myriad things, and will continue to do so. But it is always a work in progress, and can never be personified as the final word. To do so is to treat science as your religion -- which is exactly what many people do. Further scientific inquiry will upend a fair portion of what appears true now, and it will update and adjust a great deal more. And that would be true, even if individual scientists didn't have all the personal weaknesses shared by the rest of our species.
As a physician who has followed your work across domains for about 15 years I’m astounded by the how wrong have gotten this Nate. Sad to see your name behind this weak, conspiratorial to be point of being delusional “reporting”. 538 is worse off without you but you seem to be missing your edge now too. Unsubscribing but maybe will circle back in a year or two.
It's difficult to overstate the damage done over the past three years to "trust the science" and "trust the experts" by these people. Before COVID I was firmly in the camp that thought the scientific consensus was usually correct, or at the very least had some merit. The climate change debate had weakened that trust somewhat already, but a lot of the problems there I had blamed on an overzealous media addicted to sensationalism and pushing an agenda. Now? That willingness to give experts the benefit of the doubt is gone.
One should not forget that Trump's correct statement that the Wuhan virus came from Wuhan was used as a stick to beat him by the media:
ABC:
“Trump's 'Chinese Virus' tweet helped lead to rise in racist anti-Asian violence”
Mar 18, 2021 — "Anti-Asian sentiment depicted in the tweets containing the term 'Chinese Virus' likely perpetuated racist attitudes and parallels the anti- ...
UCSF:
Trump's 'Chinese Virus' Tweet Linked to Rise of Anti-Asian Violence
Mar 19, 2021 — A group of researchers found Twitter users published more anti-Asian hashtags the week after he first tweeted about the “Chinese virus.”
As a scientist myself I'm kind of of two minds here. I think one major issue is that most of us are used to writing for other scientists to read, and so because we're all humans, I think a lot of scientists are trained to sort of correct for those sorts of biases that we know exist. That's not to say that the authors acted ethically--they obviously didn't--but I read a lot of papers that I think are crap but we just sort of say "I think that's crap" and then move on, or if we're really motivated, write a paper refuting it. We're trained very well for that, so writing a crappy paper isn't usually seen as a big scandal, it's just seen as sloppy work. What we're not trained for is talking to the general public. And for most of us, that's fine. In my situation, the chance of there ever being a global emergency relating to non-classical nanocrystal growth is rather low, so it's unlikely that there will aver be any sort of public policy or what have you based on my work. But it seems like for people in public-facing fields, that should be emphasized. I realize it can be difficult to determine sometimes what constitutes a public-facing field, but I feel like something like "public health" where "public" is in the name might fall into that category. So from that standpoint, even with as charitable as possible an explanation for their shoddy work, as public health professionals they need to understand that the general public is not trained to critically analyze science papers but is constantly primed to think about politics, so they need to be extra careful about controlling for political bias in their work if they know that the work is going to be of public interest.
I think there's also something to be said from the other direction as well--the media is absolute crap at reporting science. Before COVID that was sort of just something that was irritating but since COVID it's really exposed how much of a problem that is. The reality is that interpreting science is hard and those of us whose job it is to do that go to school for a very long time to be able to have the technical skills for that. Ultimately due to media biases they'll often just report on the things they already wanted to report on and pick scientific studies to cite that support what they already believe. The secret is that scientists do that too. We're all human and even though we try to control for our own biases, we do get excited about our own work and want to find references that agree with us. The hope is that if something bad was missed, that will get sorted out in peer review, and then if it doesn't the people who read the paper will read it critically. One thing I wonder about is that in the early days of COVID, a lot of journals instituted policies that would fast-track COVID-related papers for review, which was a policy that obviously made a ton of sense at the time but also likely led to overworked reviewers who likely had COVID-related research of their own and their lives, like everyone else's, were uprooted and all that, so I wonder if a lot of these reviews got kicked to postdocs and grad students who haven't reviewed a lot of papers before and let more slip through the cracks, and then what slipped through the cracks made it to the media, and then Pandora's box was open. As you pointed out, early COVID was a hard time for everyone, but I think that for those people whose job it was to provide and disseminate the best and most current information, including the public health scientists, the journal reviewers, and the media, there were a lot of failures that compounded and led to serious problems such as this one.
Wife and I were talking about that this morning, in this context and as it pertains to medical research with respect to nutrition.
I have no time or patience for physicians and scientists who bemoan the public’s lack of trust in science. Do they think we’re blind to the influence of money on what they call “science”? They work for institutions that whore them out to political and commercial interests in exchange for money and political credit, publish their work in journals that whore themselves out for money and political credit, grant their blessing to others’ shoddy work and attack work that challenges the mainstream narrative, again for money and political credit.
Having whored themselves out, they stand in front of the world and try to present themselves as “impartial scientists”? And bemoan our “lack of faith” or “lack of trust”? Faith and trust have no place in the scientific method, nor has the scientific community conducted themselves in a manner worthy of trust and faith in their collective integrity.
At the very least, Andersen, et.al. went into their investigation with a definite preference for the preferred outcome. They expended a great deal of effort looking for evidence that would support a plausible rationale for natural evolution, but did they work as hard to establish a plausible rationale for laboratory evolution? The content of their Slack channel suggests not. They wanted to prove one hypothesis, and disprove the other. I don’t believe they accomplished either goal.
The truthful conclusion of their investigation, such as it was, would have been “we simply can’t reach a definitive conclusion”. But that wasn’t the outcome they wanted, so they wrote the conclusion they and their patrons wanted and massaged their paper to support it. It wasn’t honest science, but it was very much in line with “science” as we see it conducted in the public sphere today.
Can I suggest that folks read the documents for themselves. Very clearly shows that they revised their paper to be more skeptical of lab leak after new data came to light in March. Prior to that, some were personally leaning towards lab leak without hard evidence for it, and being careful to distinguish publicly between what they reckon and what they can scientifically conclude. Very surprised to see Nate Silver swallowing the misleading framing.
Here's brief partial list of observed features that contribute substantial likelihood ratios to update the prior odds that favored Zoo. All the updates favor LL.
1. location: P(Wuhan|L, FCS) ~1, P(Wuhan|Z, FCS) <0.01 ratio >100
2. Intermediate hosts found: P(Vero cells but no wildlife|L)/P(Vero cells but no wildlife|Z) = big
3. FCS sequence: P(2xCGG|L)/P(2xCGG|Z) ~100
4. FCS neighborhood: P(3 synonymous SNPs|L)/P(3 synonymous SNPs|Z)= fairly big
5. restriction enzyme sites: P(few but no long stretches|L)/P(few but no long stretches|Z) >10
its called lying. They lied and they know they lied. They lied because Fauci told them to lie otherwise he would destroy their careers. I have zero compassion for these liars. Justice needs to be swift and final. Jail time and fines are not justice in this case.
Nate you are such an unbearable sucker and dimwit it would be hilarious if your stupidity and falsehoods would not mislead people who come across your posts.
So while you are a hard, fucking, hopeless dimwit, I do not believe all of your followers are, so I will leave at least the corrections below, about the real background story behind the proximal origins paper and how exactly it came about.
But what do I know, only having interviewed the participants and cross-checked their stories and emails and asked their students etc...
>They also thought they were going to get away with it. “The truth is never going to come out ”, wrote Rambaut in one message.
This is really mischaracterizing what he's saying in that message. He wasn't celebrating getting away with a coverup, as you're saying, he was saying that IF it was a lab leak, absent concrete evidence (which was very unlikely to appear), that we'd never know that to be conclusively true.
And broadly, because a lab leak is necessarily accusatory, the evidentiary threshold is higher than the baseline, normal, zoonotical origin option. And I don't think that's really unreasonable?
I really don't have a dog in this hunt; I think both options are entirely plausible. But you really seem to be overplaying your hand on this, and the above sort of mischaracterization isn't something that I'd normally expect to see from you.
I really do think that there was a hard turn after Trump was elected by center-left media outlets to fight fire with fire, meaning if right wing media outlets were going to lie in order to push an agenda, then they are going to do it to. That's not to say it never happened, but Trump getting elected made it even more prominent. In this instance, because 'Trust The Science' was the motto being pushed, anything that might undermine that message wasn't reported on. Needless to say I think this is an extremely bad direction for mainstream media outlets to go.
It feels like the left, having been fairly defensibly the "party of science" for the past few decades, has learned the lesson that they don't actually have to have beliefs that align with science or even do science at all - they can just skip to the end, proclaim loudly that "the Science has spoken", and that any other position is a conspiracy theory not worthy of a moment's attention.
With Biden admin (finally) cutting funding to WIV, it seems the slow walk from "lab leak is a racist conspiracy theory" to "well, shoot, we don't know what happened" to "it was a lab leak but it would be impolite to say so" is well underway.
Kristian Andersen has stated many times publicly that (1) he initially believed that a lab leak was likely, (2) he subsequently changed that view based on the scientific considerations that are detailed in his scientific publications, and (3) he has always believed, and has always written, including in the Proximal Origins paper, that a lab-leak scenario is possible (though he now doesn't believe it's plausible). He explained this in detail in an all-day interview, half of which was conducted by a House Republican staffer, as well as in his prepared testimony:
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/2023.06.16-Andersen-Transcript.pdf
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Testimony-of-Dr.-Kristian-Andersen.pdf
Nothing in Nate's post or in the links contradicts Dr. Andersen's version of events. In fact, none of them of even attempt to. Nate quotes Dr. Andersen's February 1, 2020 email as if it were a smoking gun that Dr. Andersen was lying, without even addressing the fact that Dr. Andersen has repeatedly stated that he changed his mind between February 1, 2020 and the time of publication.
I mean it's obvious that Dr. Andersen did change his mind at some point! He has been publishing papers to the effect that the lab leak is unlikely continuously since early 2020. What is the argument here? That his initial impressions from February 1, 2020 were his true and final feelings and that everything he has said and published since then is disingenuous? That's absurd.
To be clear, Dr. Andersen could well be wrong. I take no position on how plausible the lab-leak hypothesis is, because I don't have the training necessary to evaluate the scientific evidence. Plenty of people who do have the training take different views of the evidence and that's fine.
But I do have the training to evaluate allegations of fraud. And I see no persuasive evidence of it here. Until I see a careful, good-faith assessment of the record that considers Dr. Andersen's detailed explanations and attempts to refute them, I consider the allegations of scandal completely unproven. And this post, which asserts that the facts are "simple and clear" without even engaging with Dr. Andersen's public statements on the issue, and mischaracterizes the statements that it does cite (see Chris C's comment) gives me zero confidence that Nate has made a good-faith effort to get to the truth.
Yes, the populist attack on science and education has blinded liberals to the truth about scientists. They are human beings like everyone else. They have their personal stakes, their preconceptions, their ambitions, and their blindnesses. This is not a new thing, it has always been thus. (If you doubt this, you ought to read Charles Mann's 1491 and follow the endless roadblocks scientists threw up along to the implications of archeological finds that shed light on the history human beings in the Americas.)
Scientific inquiry is an incredibly powerful way to seek the truth of many matters. It has shed light on myriad things, and will continue to do so. But it is always a work in progress, and can never be personified as the final word. To do so is to treat science as your religion -- which is exactly what many people do. Further scientific inquiry will upend a fair portion of what appears true now, and it will update and adjust a great deal more. And that would be true, even if individual scientists didn't have all the personal weaknesses shared by the rest of our species.
As a physician who has followed your work across domains for about 15 years I’m astounded by the how wrong have gotten this Nate. Sad to see your name behind this weak, conspiratorial to be point of being delusional “reporting”. 538 is worse off without you but you seem to be missing your edge now too. Unsubscribing but maybe will circle back in a year or two.
It's difficult to overstate the damage done over the past three years to "trust the science" and "trust the experts" by these people. Before COVID I was firmly in the camp that thought the scientific consensus was usually correct, or at the very least had some merit. The climate change debate had weakened that trust somewhat already, but a lot of the problems there I had blamed on an overzealous media addicted to sensationalism and pushing an agenda. Now? That willingness to give experts the benefit of the doubt is gone.
One should not forget that Trump's correct statement that the Wuhan virus came from Wuhan was used as a stick to beat him by the media:
ABC:
“Trump's 'Chinese Virus' tweet helped lead to rise in racist anti-Asian violence”
Mar 18, 2021 — "Anti-Asian sentiment depicted in the tweets containing the term 'Chinese Virus' likely perpetuated racist attitudes and parallels the anti- ...
UCSF:
Trump's 'Chinese Virus' Tweet Linked to Rise of Anti-Asian Violence
UC San Francisco
https://www.ucsf.edu › news › 2021/03 › trumps-chinese...
Mar 18, 2021 — In the week after former President Donald J. Trump tweeted about “the Chinese virus,” the number of coronavirus-related tweets with ...
Trump's 'Chinese Virus' Tweet Helped Fuel Anti-Asian Hate ...
Forbes
https://www.forbes.com › roberthart › 2021/03/19 › tr...
Mar 19, 2021 — Amid an uptick in anti-Asian violence, Trump's rhetoric has been singled out as particularly damaging.
How Trump Fueled Anti-Asian Violence in America
The Diplomat
https://thediplomat.com › 2021/06 › how-trump-fuele...
Jun 8, 2021 — Trump's encouragement of white supremacy and his strident anti-China rhetoric proved a toxic combination for Asian Americans.
Racist anti-Asian hashtags spiked after Trump first tweeted ...
Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com › nation › 2021/03/19
Mar 19, 2021 — A group of researchers found Twitter users published more anti-Asian hashtags the week after he first tweeted about the “Chinese virus.”
As a scientist myself I'm kind of of two minds here. I think one major issue is that most of us are used to writing for other scientists to read, and so because we're all humans, I think a lot of scientists are trained to sort of correct for those sorts of biases that we know exist. That's not to say that the authors acted ethically--they obviously didn't--but I read a lot of papers that I think are crap but we just sort of say "I think that's crap" and then move on, or if we're really motivated, write a paper refuting it. We're trained very well for that, so writing a crappy paper isn't usually seen as a big scandal, it's just seen as sloppy work. What we're not trained for is talking to the general public. And for most of us, that's fine. In my situation, the chance of there ever being a global emergency relating to non-classical nanocrystal growth is rather low, so it's unlikely that there will aver be any sort of public policy or what have you based on my work. But it seems like for people in public-facing fields, that should be emphasized. I realize it can be difficult to determine sometimes what constitutes a public-facing field, but I feel like something like "public health" where "public" is in the name might fall into that category. So from that standpoint, even with as charitable as possible an explanation for their shoddy work, as public health professionals they need to understand that the general public is not trained to critically analyze science papers but is constantly primed to think about politics, so they need to be extra careful about controlling for political bias in their work if they know that the work is going to be of public interest.
I think there's also something to be said from the other direction as well--the media is absolute crap at reporting science. Before COVID that was sort of just something that was irritating but since COVID it's really exposed how much of a problem that is. The reality is that interpreting science is hard and those of us whose job it is to do that go to school for a very long time to be able to have the technical skills for that. Ultimately due to media biases they'll often just report on the things they already wanted to report on and pick scientific studies to cite that support what they already believe. The secret is that scientists do that too. We're all human and even though we try to control for our own biases, we do get excited about our own work and want to find references that agree with us. The hope is that if something bad was missed, that will get sorted out in peer review, and then if it doesn't the people who read the paper will read it critically. One thing I wonder about is that in the early days of COVID, a lot of journals instituted policies that would fast-track COVID-related papers for review, which was a policy that obviously made a ton of sense at the time but also likely led to overworked reviewers who likely had COVID-related research of their own and their lives, like everyone else's, were uprooted and all that, so I wonder if a lot of these reviews got kicked to postdocs and grad students who haven't reviewed a lot of papers before and let more slip through the cracks, and then what slipped through the cracks made it to the media, and then Pandora's box was open. As you pointed out, early COVID was a hard time for everyone, but I think that for those people whose job it was to provide and disseminate the best and most current information, including the public health scientists, the journal reviewers, and the media, there were a lot of failures that compounded and led to serious problems such as this one.
Wife and I were talking about that this morning, in this context and as it pertains to medical research with respect to nutrition.
I have no time or patience for physicians and scientists who bemoan the public’s lack of trust in science. Do they think we’re blind to the influence of money on what they call “science”? They work for institutions that whore them out to political and commercial interests in exchange for money and political credit, publish their work in journals that whore themselves out for money and political credit, grant their blessing to others’ shoddy work and attack work that challenges the mainstream narrative, again for money and political credit.
Having whored themselves out, they stand in front of the world and try to present themselves as “impartial scientists”? And bemoan our “lack of faith” or “lack of trust”? Faith and trust have no place in the scientific method, nor has the scientific community conducted themselves in a manner worthy of trust and faith in their collective integrity.
At the very least, Andersen, et.al. went into their investigation with a definite preference for the preferred outcome. They expended a great deal of effort looking for evidence that would support a plausible rationale for natural evolution, but did they work as hard to establish a plausible rationale for laboratory evolution? The content of their Slack channel suggests not. They wanted to prove one hypothesis, and disprove the other. I don’t believe they accomplished either goal.
The truthful conclusion of their investigation, such as it was, would have been “we simply can’t reach a definitive conclusion”. But that wasn’t the outcome they wanted, so they wrote the conclusion they and their patrons wanted and massaged their paper to support it. It wasn’t honest science, but it was very much in line with “science” as we see it conducted in the public sphere today.
Can I suggest that folks read the documents for themselves. Very clearly shows that they revised their paper to be more skeptical of lab leak after new data came to light in March. Prior to that, some were personally leaning towards lab leak without hard evidence for it, and being careful to distinguish publicly between what they reckon and what they can scientifically conclude. Very surprised to see Nate Silver swallowing the misleading framing.
Here's brief partial list of observed features that contribute substantial likelihood ratios to update the prior odds that favored Zoo. All the updates favor LL.
1. location: P(Wuhan|L, FCS) ~1, P(Wuhan|Z, FCS) <0.01 ratio >100
2. Intermediate hosts found: P(Vero cells but no wildlife|L)/P(Vero cells but no wildlife|Z) = big
3. FCS sequence: P(2xCGG|L)/P(2xCGG|Z) ~100
4. FCS neighborhood: P(3 synonymous SNPs|L)/P(3 synonymous SNPs|Z)= fairly big
5. restriction enzyme sites: P(few but no long stretches|L)/P(few but no long stretches|Z) >10
etc.
its called lying. They lied and they know they lied. They lied because Fauci told them to lie otherwise he would destroy their careers. I have zero compassion for these liars. Justice needs to be swift and final. Jail time and fines are not justice in this case.
Lab guys really didn't want it to come from a lab. No real surprise there.
Nate you are such an unbearable sucker and dimwit it would be hilarious if your stupidity and falsehoods would not mislead people who come across your posts.
So while you are a hard, fucking, hopeless dimwit, I do not believe all of your followers are, so I will leave at least the corrections below, about the real background story behind the proximal origins paper and how exactly it came about.
But what do I know, only having interviewed the participants and cross-checked their stories and emails and asked their students etc...
Anybody interested in facts, read here:
https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/a-proximal-witch-hunt