Coronavirus: Lab Leak Part 6 -- The Blowback

With a growing drum beat that COVID-19 might had emerged due to a lab leak, there is a growing blowback.

Wired (May 28) has just such an article:

The evidence hasn’t changed since spring of 2020. That evidence was always incomplete, and may never be complete. History and science suggest the animal-jump is way more likely than the lab-leak/cover-up thing. So now what we’re talking about is how people frame their views around the crummy evidence we have.

. . . This is an old playbook. Religious conservatives did it on evolution and education—“teach the controversy!” Snake-oil marketers did it on the nonexistent link between vaccines and autism. Tobacco companies and their lobbyists did it on the very real link between tobacco, second-hand smoke, and cancer. Car companies and their lobbyists did it on safety technologies in automobiles. Chemical and agricultural companies did it on agricultural chemicals from DDT to dicamba. Carbon emitting industries—mostly the oil business—are still doing it on climate change. Find uncertainty, fan it like tinder, and then use it for political gain.

To me, the basic argument in the article is that the lab leak is unlikely, but was always a possibility. Now that people are paying more attention to it, we should view it as something being pushed by charlatans.

To me, some of his assumptions that he uses seem to be false, which makes me think his whole argument is flawed.

. . . Wuhan has “wet markets,” places where live wild animals are sometimes sold alongside domestic ones for human consumption. These can be places where viruses evolve as they move from animal to animal.

He's stating that the "wet markets" is the stronger possibility for how this pandemic started. Yet Dr. Scott Gottlieb on Face the Nation (May 30) had this comment:

We've also fully disproven the market, the food market that was initially implicated in the original outbreak as the source of the outbreak.

Okay, so maybe it came from one of the other markets. Who knows how many markets there are in and around Wuhan. I would assume this would have been mentioned by Dr. Gottlieb though if he thought that attention had been turned to another market as the source.

The Wired has this argument that indicates that the WHO did consider the lab leak in their recent report.

. . . A few days later, 18 big-shot virologists and epidemiologists wrote an article in the eminent journal Science called “Investigate the Origins of Covid-19.” They pointed out that a report from the World Health Organization had looked at the two hypotheses—natural origin or lab leak—and, despite concluding that a natural origin was far more likely, had given short shrift to the other.

In my sarcastic take on the lab leak hypothesis, I point out that the cold / food chain possibility was listed as possible while the laboratory incident was listed as extremely unlikely. Let's just notice that the Wired author used the wording "short shift." We're talking about a situation where the WHO listed cold / food chain as having more of a likelihood than a lab leak. The WHO basically just blows off the lab leak hypothesis -- what else can you think when the words "extremely unlikely" are used.

NPR (May 28) had a similar article that came out of the very same day as the Wired article. (Coordinated effort?):

But not much has changed for Robert Garry, a microbiologist at Tulane University who has analyzed the genome of the coronavirus. "Nothing's really tipped me or made me flip-flop or anything about it," he says. "I'm more convinced than ever that this is a natural virus."

. . . Most of the first reported cases of this virus were in wet markets in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Wet markets were also central to the outbreak of the original SARS virus, which began spreading in the early 2000s.

So again, the NPR article also talks about the wet markets. This appears to be the exact opposite of what Dr. Gottlieb believes.