Gain-of-function fearmongering and blame gets the glitzy NYT visual treatment as Republicans weaponize the lab leak theory again in attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci
Hi Phil, thanks for the interesting analysis. I'm curious about the methodology, in view of your "Stance View" explanation and your summarizing in which you state: "Centrist news media can somewhat be trusted in their scientific reporting, but not in their editorial stance, selection of what to cover, and endorsement." So take, for example, APNews in your listing, which rates as 1:8:1, about the same as the average overall for centrist outlets. It can't be you are counting editorializing content, correct, with APnews, since it is an almost purely wire news outlet? Isn't the better explanation here that there were simply more "pro-lab leak events" to report that would be of interest to the general public, than zoonotic events? And if that's the case for APnews, why may it not be the same skew with the NYTimes, etc?
Hi, great thinking! I am currently working on a paper that is looking into the robustness of the methodology and alternative explanations for some of these biased media coverage findings.
You are correct that wired news outlets are a bit of a special case and any voluminetric assessments are insufficient; in the analysis, wired content was usually de-duplicated.
As to your second point about "pro lab leak events", there is a different analysis I performed, but have not yet shown, that seems to suggest that peak coverage aligns closely with political events (e.g Bidens 90 day intelligence agency assessment, or the DoE/FBI lab leak assessment change of 2023), rather then for example new scientific discoveries or papers.
So that ask the question whether centrist news coverage is biased due to editorial stance, or just very gameable by politicians creating pseudo-events that news media thinks it needs to cover. That being said, how these partisan pseudo events are covered also portrays a certain lean; usually by adopting the frame of the partisan pseudo-event creator or lab leak accuser, the outlet sides with the accuser simply by transferring the frame of the story while reporting on it. Functionally, how these headlines come to propagate a specific origin theory is interesting but secondary to my main claim that media coverage bas is what is driving the lab leak theory and evidence-belief gap in public.
Thank you. Seems like we shouldn't be surprised that media coverage coalesces around non-scientific research paper events, given that mainstream outlets' business models are centered around easy-to-understand human events. Is it realistic to expect the NYTimes to cover the paper relating to zoonosis that comes out, rather than just the big couple (which they covered)? That seems to be more the job of the scientific journals. I also worry about how the LLM is treating factual stories that are about allegations of lab leak, like the intelligence agencies, the events in congress etc. It would be good to get some transparency on what kind of stories from center sources like apnews and NYTimes qualified as +2 or +3 (in either direction), and not only what the headlines are for those, but also the content. If they are just reporting what happened in a hearing, or what came from an intelligence agency, then how can that be media bias, especially if, as is often mentioned, there is expert disagreement with the lab leak narritive? Also, maybe it would be good to run the methodology on other test cases of prominence that run the course of years, such as "the Big Lie", to see if what's driving the numbers for center/mainstream outlets, is not editorial/reporting bias but, rather, newsworthy events. Seems like you have to find a way to control for #of events. Finally, wondering if you can separate out pure editorial writing from reported events stories to see how mainstream/center sources did over time. My sense is that your original thesis in your book that the vibe shifted in May '21 is a better way to see the editorials shifting over time . . . .
Wow, thank you. That's about as comprehensive an analysis as I've seen, not that I understood much of the science in any but the broadest terms. You'd have to be a geneticist to understand the technicalities, but I appreciate you including it. It gives creditability to your article as there will be people who do understand it and they can check the evidence for themselves.
One point I'd make for an alternative motive for the lab leak theory is that it's a ‘better story’. It's more dramatic, attention grabbing and will sell more papers. I hasten to add that I have no doubt that there is a right-wing, pro Trumplethinskin bias, at least editorially, even in so-called quality papers like the NYT and WaPo. You need look no further than their owners. And, while I've always thought the lab leak theory was a possibility, I never gave it much credence. It just didn't make much sense to me.
Anyway, thank you again for your considerable effort. I've restacked.
....where I talk about the asymmetry of narrative power:
"We humans are story-telling species. Stories is how we make sense of our world, we crave heroes and villains, the fight of good versus bad, we seek stories that we can relate to, that are easy and intuitive to understand, that engage us emotionally, entertain us, or make us feel good about ourselves.
Influencers are interested in creating and selling good stories for their bottom line, and this helps conspiracy myths more than science. After all, fictions can be optimized for audience engagement, facts can not.
The ‘lableak’ idea has many psychological, cultural and social advantages that make it a more powerful narrative than a zoonotic origin. First, it is very intuitive to understand; somebody fucked up. It plays into our cultural practice of blaming diseases on people outside our tribe, instead of our own failings and responsibilities. It plays into our tendencies to view world events as product of conspiracies rather than bad luck or randomness. Lastly, it offers us power. If only we can stop this minority of (in this case) “evil scientists”, we could prevent a pandemic from happening ever again. Pandemics have been with humanity for millennia, blaming them on others it is literally a story old as time for tribal beings such as us.
Compare this to the ‘zoonotic’ idea, where there are no concrete actors, but our collective ravaging of nature, farming practices, economic incentives and global transport hubs that are all somehow responsible for spillover risk. What about the distribution of bats all over South East Asia, the incredible diversity of hitherto unknown viruses in the wild, and how does zoonotic transmission even work? How can we understand all the interconnected layers to this problem? These issues are way harder to intuitively tackle, in fact, they leave the feeling that we might not be able to prevent the next pandemic, that we are somehow guilty but not in control. That we will see more and more horrible pandemics, and nobody knows what actions we even gotta take to stop it. Not the sexiest narrative to say the least.
Guess which story finds itself more likely shared and engaged with, and which narrative has more influencers willing to create content for it on social media?"
Well done Philipp, this is excellent. This whole situation is the starkest example of widespread denialism I've ever experienced. I never imagined it would come to this back in 2020. The legacy media have made it very difficult for me to accept that they do any due diligence at all.
Beautiful compilation! The (repeat) NYT elevation of Dr Chan’s opinion provided an especially egregious supplement to your data.
I think that, in addition to Facebook’s moderation decision, the conspiracy theory was augmented by publication of some early intramural discussions between scientists on the advisability of managing the narrative on public discussion of lab leak, was it not?
The problem is that the zoonotic origine has never been demonstrated which is unlikely since in general this is done quite rapidly. Thus, both hypotheses are still on the ground. One causal factor was also the hiding of information by the Chinese authorities. One could have written an article just the other way around.
The only proof we have that the Chinese lied was actually around the market, where they denied susceptible mammals being there.
This lie was exposed by a random study on tickborne diseases between 2017-2019 that sampled the Huanan market animals, photographic evidence of animals, plus genetic dispositions of animal DNA in market samples.
Why did they lie so vehemently about this, when it would certainly exhonerate the lab?
The idea that Chinese obfuscation is because of a lab leak is false.
Furthermore, there is extremely good evidence for zoonotic spillover, to the point it can not be scientifically disproven any longer.
You had susceptible animals, at the right place and time, in the stall of highest viral contamination where no human case was associated with it. You have evidence of viral RNA and animal DNA co-locating in thd same environmental sample. You have both lineage A and B in the market contradicting the idea of single superspreader, enforcing multiple spillover... etc etc
Zoonotic origin has been demonstrated, in the last six years every piece of new evidence has confirmed it. One Chinese scientist, Prof. Shi Zhengli specifically gave an account and with confirming data that there was nothing like SARS-CoV-2 at her lab. In my view some of us owe her an apology for dismissing her credible and it turned out true reports.
Nothing much is heard these days from her, possibly suffering a similar scapegoating by the 'authorities' that Tony Fauci is here? Any thoughts?
Zhengli is not blamed by Chinese authorities. They investigated her lab and cleared her ever since April 2020.
She is also not prosecuted last I heard.
However, there is pressure on her, and she would get in trouble if she spoke with foreigners because the Chinese government does not want her to talk about a zoonotic origin, certainly not at the market, as this would potentially implicate China.
As long as she keeps her head down, she is somewhat gine.
I am glad to hear that and it makes perfect sense. Given the culture of Omarta that so many American scientists seem to accept here, I give a kind of a pass. I suppose I consider being 'silenced' however that is done as a kind of punishment; whew! Thanks for that.
The Wuhan lab took their genomic database from offline in fall ‘19 and have never opened their books. We’ve also never found the intermediate host animal.
Wrong, server log records show the database was sporadically online until malicious hacking attempts brought it down in Feb. 2020, after the lab had been blamed on the global stage.
Do you guys never fact check anything and just eat up what propagandists serve you?
Why should I take your word that that’s what happened? What’s your source? Your gullibility is astonishing - the Wuhan lab was doing GoF on Bat coronaviruses. Some of their staff got sick in fall ‘19. And we’ve never found the intermediate host. I’m agnostic because the Chinese have never been transparent, but it’s silly to have your certainty (which looking at your feed seems to be political)..
Do you find it not curious that you are provided with a correction and rather than accept it, you become very defensive in defending propaganda you swallowed?
The Chinese not being transparent is unfortunately much stronger evidence of a cover-up of a wetmarket origin than a lab origin.
Here is what i am quoted in by bigthink on this topic:
"b) Secretive Chinese behavior: China controls information flows and pushes its official narrative, which is that the virus did not come from China. The only verified evidence of cover-ups from China we do have all surround the market origin theory, which is a big embarrassment for them after SARS in 2002/2003, where they promised to clean up their act. Instead, they now lied about wild mammals being at the market, they actively suppressed any investigation into market suppliers, got rid of animals without testing them, they prohibited bat researchers from searching for SARS-CoV-2 relatives in China and punished them when they did; they incentivized/required Chinese researchers to conduct studies about “cold chain” products and influenced their publications to push this narrative in the scientific literature and for the WHO mission. On top of that, the (illegal) wildlife trade is often done by what some call the black/red alliance (criminal syndicates and Chinese Communist Party members looking the other way for a cut), and the owner of the Huanan market is reportedly entangled with the Xi family. Chinese researchers also have been muffled, are not allowed to speak up for a market origin, and their publications are getting vetted and approved by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and politicians. Social media censors also reportedly remove content claiming the Huanan market was the origin of the pandemic, something that does not happen about lab speculations, at least based on some Chinese sources. So yeah, have fun arguing that their secrecy clearly points to the lab."
Slideshow version: bit.ly/3nF01M9 (slightly more up to date). On the 12th Sep 2019, the main database of samples and viral sequences of the Wuhan Institute of Virology went offline. Eventually every single of the 16 virus databases managed by the WIV was taken offline. Here we show how these databases may provide essential clues at to the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and review the circumstances in which they were taken offline.
On the 12th Sep 2019, the main database of samples and viral sequences of the Wuhan Institute of Virology went offline. Eventually every single of the 16 virus databases managed by the WIV was taken offline. Here we show how these databases may provide essential clues at to the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and review the circumstances in which they were taken offline.
First, your source is not scientific paper, not peer reviewed; not verified. It is just a word document upload that anybody can do if motivated to do so.
Second, the people who uploaded it are twitter conspiracy theorists, not researchers.
They are one of the most motivated actors and propagandists for a lab leak that have advanced many mutually contradictory and false claims on the topic and do so until this day, which a simple background check would have shown you.
Third,
Journalists for MIT tech review already cleaned up the database falsehood:
"In February 2020, for example, it took its virus databases offline, and they remain unavailable to outsiders—prompting some to suggest that they might contain information critical to covid-19’s origins. Shi told me that the part of the databases that had been publicly available before the pandemic contained only published information; the Wuhan institute, like research organizations in other parts of the world, had unpublished data that could be shared upon request via portals for academic collaborations. The institute, she says, took the databases offline because of security concerns; there had been thousands of hacking attempts since the beginning of the pandemic. “The IT managers were really worried somebody might sabotage the databases or, worse, implant virus sequences for malicious intent,” she said."
I know it’s a pre-print. Why not cite the source for your claim about the database? I don’t see how your first cite does that. Shi denies any wrongdoing; shocker! Can’t open the link to the second.
You do not know how journalistic fact checking works.
It is not Zhengli saying that the database went down in Feb 2020, is MIT tech review stating this as fact, then giving Zhengli the space to explain why.
As why you can not open the link to the second, I dont know, works fine for me.
It features the monitoring website (msis.csdb.cn) that was still accessible in early 2022. It showed that the database was still available until February 2020.
You will also find the website activity graph in that link.
The lab leak myth is upheld by propaganda and journalists never fact checking claims thoroughly.
The database story is just one of many such examples.
If you really want to get the definitive account of what happened around this origin controversy, and all the disinformation campaigns surrounding, it do recommend you read the book; it is free access here: https://www.protagonist-science.com/p/lab-leak-fever-serialized
Even if that were true, February 2020 is very early in the pandemic. Why was it taken down then if the lab had nothing to hide. (I assume available until then means not available after).
By Feb 2020, Zhengli Shi and her lab had already received death threats, because for weeks, conspiracy theorists claimed she created the virus as a bioweapon. Some silly Indian reseachers claimed SARS-CoV-2 containted HIV inserts, which was of course false but added to the furor. There were many hacking attempts, and the IT guys were worried that somebody would malociously implant sequences of SC2 to make it look like they created it.
Either way, we have independent evidence that Zhengli did not have SARS-COV-2 or any virus that could have become a progenitor. First, we have a draft of a paper that contained all her sequences, she published it in summer 2020; but the draft was already with collaborators pre-pandemic, and no changes have been made since that time and final publication. Second, we have a paper from a student that had embargoed sequences that came online in 2022 that also proved that Zhengli was, as she claimed, studying SARS-CpV-1 related viruses even in late 2018. So not a long time to secretly cook up SARS-CoV-2.
There is a lot of propaganda around the origins topic, and all of it is largely decontextualized, false, made up or irrelevant to the origin question. You should read or listen to some of the links I provided.
When high-dimensional empirical data enters an un-gated media architecture, signal integrity collapses. Markolin's media audit lays bare a striking truth. The scientific consensus on SARS-CoV-2 origin triangulated years ago through genomic mosaic structures, furin cleavage site evolution, and Huanan market spatial epidemiology. Yet, public media space ran in the exact opposite direction.
This isn't a simple mistake. It's a structural phase slip. Public information channels lack hardware-attested verification gates. Without physical anchors, multi-variate empirical data degrades into low-entropy political noise. Algorithms and performative media neutrality reward loudest-path assertions over multi-line scientific triangulation. The data shows pro-lab-leak claims dominated 41% of YouTube view volume while factual zoonotic analyses captured barely 2%. Media outlets didn't suppress the narrative. They amplified it because un-anchored systems naturally decay toward high-drama, low-information states.
Truth requires physical triangulation. When editorial desks replace empirical rigour with performative 'both-sidesing', they introduce systematic representation drift. We see this across every complex domain, from climate physics to microarchitecture. When the baseline truth loses its physical anchor, the noise floor takes over.
If public communication channels systematically decay complex empirical proof into low-entropy narrative noise, how do we build deterministic verification outboxes that force media algorithms to respect physical truth before state corruption occurs? 🧬🛰️⚡
For me and my media consumption habits, the breakout of the faulty lab leak narrative occurred with (nonscientist author of fiction and nonfiction) Nicholson Baker's 'what if...?" article in New York Magazine in Jan 2021. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html
The magazine still says this about it online:
"When Nicholson Baker published “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis” in January 2021, the subject was still deeply taboo across the American political and journalistic landscape. Since then, the hypothesis has been revived and reconsidered not just by major investigations by the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic but also by the WHO and the U.S. intelligence community. Nearly every point that would later serve as the basis for the public reconsideration of pandemic origins was contained in Baker’s original story, the first of its kind."
The 'major investigations since then' that it cites are things I read too...and all of them were without the dispositive evidence their claims required.
<<Did I do this?>> is a normal and scientific thought…
Did another lab do this was ZLShi’s second thought.
Despite this second thought…which has occurred to almost all the scientists involved, instead of handing over the data sets that they had to public scrutiny; data has been withheld.
Withholding data has been a norm for various reasons for sometime…it becomes a type of institutional habit.
I wonder when these crucial data sets we all know about are finally open to scientific and forensic discussion, how you will see this topic?
Even ECH admits that new data will mean new assessments will be made.
This is normal scientific thinking that preoccupies many involved in dual use research of concern…and it should.
Hi Phil, thanks for the interesting analysis. I'm curious about the methodology, in view of your "Stance View" explanation and your summarizing in which you state: "Centrist news media can somewhat be trusted in their scientific reporting, but not in their editorial stance, selection of what to cover, and endorsement." So take, for example, APNews in your listing, which rates as 1:8:1, about the same as the average overall for centrist outlets. It can't be you are counting editorializing content, correct, with APnews, since it is an almost purely wire news outlet? Isn't the better explanation here that there were simply more "pro-lab leak events" to report that would be of interest to the general public, than zoonotic events? And if that's the case for APnews, why may it not be the same skew with the NYTimes, etc?
Hi, great thinking! I am currently working on a paper that is looking into the robustness of the methodology and alternative explanations for some of these biased media coverage findings.
You are correct that wired news outlets are a bit of a special case and any voluminetric assessments are insufficient; in the analysis, wired content was usually de-duplicated.
As to your second point about "pro lab leak events", there is a different analysis I performed, but have not yet shown, that seems to suggest that peak coverage aligns closely with political events (e.g Bidens 90 day intelligence agency assessment, or the DoE/FBI lab leak assessment change of 2023), rather then for example new scientific discoveries or papers.
So that ask the question whether centrist news coverage is biased due to editorial stance, or just very gameable by politicians creating pseudo-events that news media thinks it needs to cover. That being said, how these partisan pseudo events are covered also portrays a certain lean; usually by adopting the frame of the partisan pseudo-event creator or lab leak accuser, the outlet sides with the accuser simply by transferring the frame of the story while reporting on it. Functionally, how these headlines come to propagate a specific origin theory is interesting but secondary to my main claim that media coverage bas is what is driving the lab leak theory and evidence-belief gap in public.
Thank you. Seems like we shouldn't be surprised that media coverage coalesces around non-scientific research paper events, given that mainstream outlets' business models are centered around easy-to-understand human events. Is it realistic to expect the NYTimes to cover the paper relating to zoonosis that comes out, rather than just the big couple (which they covered)? That seems to be more the job of the scientific journals. I also worry about how the LLM is treating factual stories that are about allegations of lab leak, like the intelligence agencies, the events in congress etc. It would be good to get some transparency on what kind of stories from center sources like apnews and NYTimes qualified as +2 or +3 (in either direction), and not only what the headlines are for those, but also the content. If they are just reporting what happened in a hearing, or what came from an intelligence agency, then how can that be media bias, especially if, as is often mentioned, there is expert disagreement with the lab leak narritive? Also, maybe it would be good to run the methodology on other test cases of prominence that run the course of years, such as "the Big Lie", to see if what's driving the numbers for center/mainstream outlets, is not editorial/reporting bias but, rather, newsworthy events. Seems like you have to find a way to control for #of events. Finally, wondering if you can separate out pure editorial writing from reported events stories to see how mainstream/center sources did over time. My sense is that your original thesis in your book that the vibe shifted in May '21 is a better way to see the editorials shifting over time . . . .
Wow, thank you. That's about as comprehensive an analysis as I've seen, not that I understood much of the science in any but the broadest terms. You'd have to be a geneticist to understand the technicalities, but I appreciate you including it. It gives creditability to your article as there will be people who do understand it and they can check the evidence for themselves.
One point I'd make for an alternative motive for the lab leak theory is that it's a ‘better story’. It's more dramatic, attention grabbing and will sell more papers. I hasten to add that I have no doubt that there is a right-wing, pro Trumplethinskin bias, at least editorially, even in so-called quality papers like the NYT and WaPo. You need look no further than their owners. And, while I've always thought the lab leak theory was a possibility, I never gave it much credence. It just didn't make much sense to me.
Anyway, thank you again for your considerable effort. I've restacked.
You might enjoy this article here:
https://www.protagonist-science.com/p/a-tale-of-two-pandemic-origins
....where I talk about the asymmetry of narrative power:
"We humans are story-telling species. Stories is how we make sense of our world, we crave heroes and villains, the fight of good versus bad, we seek stories that we can relate to, that are easy and intuitive to understand, that engage us emotionally, entertain us, or make us feel good about ourselves.
Influencers are interested in creating and selling good stories for their bottom line, and this helps conspiracy myths more than science. After all, fictions can be optimized for audience engagement, facts can not.
The ‘lableak’ idea has many psychological, cultural and social advantages that make it a more powerful narrative than a zoonotic origin. First, it is very intuitive to understand; somebody fucked up. It plays into our cultural practice of blaming diseases on people outside our tribe, instead of our own failings and responsibilities. It plays into our tendencies to view world events as product of conspiracies rather than bad luck or randomness. Lastly, it offers us power. If only we can stop this minority of (in this case) “evil scientists”, we could prevent a pandemic from happening ever again. Pandemics have been with humanity for millennia, blaming them on others it is literally a story old as time for tribal beings such as us.
Compare this to the ‘zoonotic’ idea, where there are no concrete actors, but our collective ravaging of nature, farming practices, economic incentives and global transport hubs that are all somehow responsible for spillover risk. What about the distribution of bats all over South East Asia, the incredible diversity of hitherto unknown viruses in the wild, and how does zoonotic transmission even work? How can we understand all the interconnected layers to this problem? These issues are way harder to intuitively tackle, in fact, they leave the feeling that we might not be able to prevent the next pandemic, that we are somehow guilty but not in control. That we will see more and more horrible pandemics, and nobody knows what actions we even gotta take to stop it. Not the sexiest narrative to say the least.
Guess which story finds itself more likely shared and engaged with, and which narrative has more influencers willing to create content for it on social media?"
https://bsky.app/profile/solidevidence.bsky.social/post/3mrulckvzts2w
Well done Philipp, this is excellent. This whole situation is the starkest example of widespread denialism I've ever experienced. I never imagined it would come to this back in 2020. The legacy media have made it very difficult for me to accept that they do any due diligence at all.
Beautiful compilation! The (repeat) NYT elevation of Dr Chan’s opinion provided an especially egregious supplement to your data.
I think that, in addition to Facebook’s moderation decision, the conspiracy theory was augmented by publication of some early intramural discussions between scientists on the advisability of managing the narrative on public discussion of lab leak, was it not?
Amazing, and desperately needed. Sharing this widely.
It's all a cover up!
(With the help of also being a business for many online)
The problem is that the zoonotic origine has never been demonstrated which is unlikely since in general this is done quite rapidly. Thus, both hypotheses are still on the ground. One causal factor was also the hiding of information by the Chinese authorities. One could have written an article just the other way around.
Just no.
The only proof we have that the Chinese lied was actually around the market, where they denied susceptible mammals being there.
This lie was exposed by a random study on tickborne diseases between 2017-2019 that sampled the Huanan market animals, photographic evidence of animals, plus genetic dispositions of animal DNA in market samples.
Why did they lie so vehemently about this, when it would certainly exhonerate the lab?
The idea that Chinese obfuscation is because of a lab leak is false.
Furthermore, there is extremely good evidence for zoonotic spillover, to the point it can not be scientifically disproven any longer.
You had susceptible animals, at the right place and time, in the stall of highest viral contamination where no human case was associated with it. You have evidence of viral RNA and animal DNA co-locating in thd same environmental sample. You have both lineage A and B in the market contradicting the idea of single superspreader, enforcing multiple spillover... etc etc
Zoonotic origin has been demonstrated, in the last six years every piece of new evidence has confirmed it. One Chinese scientist, Prof. Shi Zhengli specifically gave an account and with confirming data that there was nothing like SARS-CoV-2 at her lab. In my view some of us owe her an apology for dismissing her credible and it turned out true reports.
Nothing much is heard these days from her, possibly suffering a similar scapegoating by the 'authorities' that Tony Fauci is here? Any thoughts?
Zhengli is not blamed by Chinese authorities. They investigated her lab and cleared her ever since April 2020.
She is also not prosecuted last I heard.
However, there is pressure on her, and she would get in trouble if she spoke with foreigners because the Chinese government does not want her to talk about a zoonotic origin, certainly not at the market, as this would potentially implicate China.
As long as she keeps her head down, she is somewhat gine.
I am glad to hear that and it makes perfect sense. Given the culture of Omarta that so many American scientists seem to accept here, I give a kind of a pass. I suppose I consider being 'silenced' however that is done as a kind of punishment; whew! Thanks for that.
The Wuhan lab took their genomic database from offline in fall ‘19 and have never opened their books. We’ve also never found the intermediate host animal.
Wrong, server log records show the database was sporadically online until malicious hacking attempts brought it down in Feb. 2020, after the lab had been blamed on the global stage.
Do you guys never fact check anything and just eat up what propagandists serve you?
Why should I take your word that that’s what happened? What’s your source? Your gullibility is astonishing - the Wuhan lab was doing GoF on Bat coronaviruses. Some of their staff got sick in fall ‘19. And we’ve never found the intermediate host. I’m agnostic because the Chinese have never been transparent, but it’s silly to have your certainty (which looking at your feed seems to be political)..
Do you find it not curious that you are provided with a correction and rather than accept it, you become very defensive in defending propaganda you swallowed?
The Chinese not being transparent is unfortunately much stronger evidence of a cover-up of a wetmarket origin than a lab origin.
Here is what i am quoted in by bigthink on this topic:
"b) Secretive Chinese behavior: China controls information flows and pushes its official narrative, which is that the virus did not come from China. The only verified evidence of cover-ups from China we do have all surround the market origin theory, which is a big embarrassment for them after SARS in 2002/2003, where they promised to clean up their act. Instead, they now lied about wild mammals being at the market, they actively suppressed any investigation into market suppliers, got rid of animals without testing them, they prohibited bat researchers from searching for SARS-CoV-2 relatives in China and punished them when they did; they incentivized/required Chinese researchers to conduct studies about “cold chain” products and influenced their publications to push this narrative in the scientific literature and for the WHO mission. On top of that, the (illegal) wildlife trade is often done by what some call the black/red alliance (criminal syndicates and Chinese Communist Party members looking the other way for a cut), and the owner of the Huanan market is reportedly entangled with the Xi family. Chinese researchers also have been muffled, are not allowed to speak up for a market origin, and their publications are getting vetted and approved by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and politicians. Social media censors also reportedly remove content claiming the Huanan market was the origin of the pandemic, something that does not happen about lab speculations, at least based on some Chinese sources. So yeah, have fun arguing that their secrecy clearly points to the lab."
See:
bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/covid-19-origin-chinese-lab/
You provided no source for your correction.
Slideshow version: bit.ly/3nF01M9 (slightly more up to date). On the 12th Sep 2019, the main database of samples and viral sequences of the Wuhan Institute of Virology went offline. Eventually every single of the 16 virus databases managed by the WIV was taken offline. Here we show how these databases may provide essential clues at to the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and review the circumstances in which they were taken offline.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349073738_An_investigation_into_the_WIV_databases_that_were_taken_offline
Don’t call me a propagandist. I’m just saying what people with more expertise than you have been saying for years.
On the 12th Sep 2019, the main database of samples and viral sequences of the Wuhan Institute of Virology went offline. Eventually every single of the 16 virus databases managed by the WIV was taken offline. Here we show how these databases may provide essential clues at to the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and review the circumstances in which they were taken offline.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349073738_An_investigation_into_the_WIV_databases_that_were_taken_offline
Again, this is false.
First, your source is not scientific paper, not peer reviewed; not verified. It is just a word document upload that anybody can do if motivated to do so.
Second, the people who uploaded it are twitter conspiracy theorists, not researchers.
They are one of the most motivated actors and propagandists for a lab leak that have advanced many mutually contradictory and false claims on the topic and do so until this day, which a simple background check would have shown you.
Third,
Journalists for MIT tech review already cleaned up the database falsehood:
"In February 2020, for example, it took its virus databases offline, and they remain unavailable to outsiders—prompting some to suggest that they might contain information critical to covid-19’s origins. Shi told me that the part of the databases that had been publicly available before the pandemic contained only published information; the Wuhan institute, like research organizations in other parts of the world, had unpublished data that could be shared upon request via portals for academic collaborations. The institute, she says, took the databases offline because of security concerns; there had been thousands of hacking attempts since the beginning of the pandemic. “The IT managers were really worried somebody might sabotage the databases or, worse, implant virus sequences for malicious intent,” she said."
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/09/1044985/shi-zhengli-covid-lab-leak-wuhan/
Fourth:
And this has again be independently verified by server logs. Ful sttory here: https://pandemonium.hypotheses.org/650
I know it’s a pre-print. Why not cite the source for your claim about the database? I don’t see how your first cite does that. Shi denies any wrongdoing; shocker! Can’t open the link to the second.
You do not know how journalistic fact checking works.
It is not Zhengli saying that the database went down in Feb 2020, is MIT tech review stating this as fact, then giving Zhengli the space to explain why.
As why you can not open the link to the second, I dont know, works fine for me.
You can try this archive version as well: https://archive.ph/Uced1
It features the monitoring website (msis.csdb.cn) that was still accessible in early 2022. It showed that the database was still available until February 2020.
You will also find the website activity graph in that link.
The lab leak myth is upheld by propaganda and journalists never fact checking claims thoroughly.
The database story is just one of many such examples.
If you really want to get the definitive account of what happened around this origin controversy, and all the disinformation campaigns surrounding, it do recommend you read the book; it is free access here: https://www.protagonist-science.com/p/lab-leak-fever-serialized
If you first want to have a shorter look into what this is about, you can also listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrsVerGGmYs
If you are in dire need of aguments that relate to scientific evidence and publication, this here is on offer as well: https://www.protagonist-science.com/p/treacherous-ancestry
Even if that were true, February 2020 is very early in the pandemic. Why was it taken down then if the lab had nothing to hide. (I assume available until then means not available after).
By Feb 2020, Zhengli Shi and her lab had already received death threats, because for weeks, conspiracy theorists claimed she created the virus as a bioweapon. Some silly Indian reseachers claimed SARS-CoV-2 containted HIV inserts, which was of course false but added to the furor. There were many hacking attempts, and the IT guys were worried that somebody would malociously implant sequences of SC2 to make it look like they created it.
Either way, we have independent evidence that Zhengli did not have SARS-COV-2 or any virus that could have become a progenitor. First, we have a draft of a paper that contained all her sequences, she published it in summer 2020; but the draft was already with collaborators pre-pandemic, and no changes have been made since that time and final publication. Second, we have a paper from a student that had embargoed sequences that came online in 2022 that also proved that Zhengli was, as she claimed, studying SARS-CpV-1 related viruses even in late 2018. So not a long time to secretly cook up SARS-CoV-2.
There is a lot of propaganda around the origins topic, and all of it is largely decontextualized, false, made up or irrelevant to the origin question. You should read or listen to some of the links I provided.
When high-dimensional empirical data enters an un-gated media architecture, signal integrity collapses. Markolin's media audit lays bare a striking truth. The scientific consensus on SARS-CoV-2 origin triangulated years ago through genomic mosaic structures, furin cleavage site evolution, and Huanan market spatial epidemiology. Yet, public media space ran in the exact opposite direction.
This isn't a simple mistake. It's a structural phase slip. Public information channels lack hardware-attested verification gates. Without physical anchors, multi-variate empirical data degrades into low-entropy political noise. Algorithms and performative media neutrality reward loudest-path assertions over multi-line scientific triangulation. The data shows pro-lab-leak claims dominated 41% of YouTube view volume while factual zoonotic analyses captured barely 2%. Media outlets didn't suppress the narrative. They amplified it because un-anchored systems naturally decay toward high-drama, low-information states.
Truth requires physical triangulation. When editorial desks replace empirical rigour with performative 'both-sidesing', they introduce systematic representation drift. We see this across every complex domain, from climate physics to microarchitecture. When the baseline truth loses its physical anchor, the noise floor takes over.
If public communication channels systematically decay complex empirical proof into low-entropy narrative noise, how do we build deterministic verification outboxes that force media algorithms to respect physical truth before state corruption occurs? 🧬🛰️⚡
( ͡° ┌͜ʖ┐ ͡°)
For me and my media consumption habits, the breakout of the faulty lab leak narrative occurred with (nonscientist author of fiction and nonfiction) Nicholson Baker's 'what if...?" article in New York Magazine in Jan 2021. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html
The magazine still says this about it online:
"When Nicholson Baker published “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis” in January 2021, the subject was still deeply taboo across the American political and journalistic landscape. Since then, the hypothesis has been revived and reconsidered not just by major investigations by the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic but also by the WHO and the U.S. intelligence community. Nearly every point that would later serve as the basis for the public reconsideration of pandemic origins was contained in Baker’s original story, the first of its kind."
The 'major investigations since then' that it cites are things I read too...and all of them were without the dispositive evidence their claims required.
Lab leak was ZLShi’s idea.
Her first idea.
A scientist…working on CoV.
<<Did I do this?>> is a normal and scientific thought…
Did another lab do this was ZLShi’s second thought.
Despite this second thought…which has occurred to almost all the scientists involved, instead of handing over the data sets that they had to public scrutiny; data has been withheld.
Withholding data has been a norm for various reasons for sometime…it becomes a type of institutional habit.
I wonder when these crucial data sets we all know about are finally open to scientific and forensic discussion, how you will see this topic?
Even ECH admits that new data will mean new assessments will be made.
This is normal scientific thinking that preoccupies many involved in dual use research of concern…and it should.
Have you read Quay’s book?
Code as Witness.
https://www.amazon.com.au/Code-Witness-Reveals-Origins-Outbreaks/dp/1641774711