Why would we trust data authored by the lab leader who would be severely punished by China if she were to release data implicating China and therefore contradicting the CCP?
It’s as though we would trust [athlete accused of doping] of publishing results from a blood test they performed on themselves to confirm the accusations.
3rd party lab inspectors were restricted from the lab for a significant time.
This and the fact that the initial WHO research team was closely regulated in their activities by the Chinese government, with the WHO later being denied access to data and further analysis. China has delayed and denied independent analysis. They burned trust when it was most important to the investigation. They are not to be trusted.
I don't know what the chances of a catastrophic viral outbreak being located next to a BSL-4 lab is, but it must be absolutely astronomical considering China has only 2 such labs in a country that spans 3.6 million square miles.
> I don't know what the chances of a catastrophic viral outbreak being located next to a BSL-4 lab is
Much higher than random. The location of the laboratory was close to the researched organisms, specifically bats. It also means that people had close contact with bats, on purpose, much more than in other areas.
This does not make any source more likely by itself. But there's a decent correlation why we see research on X right next to where we find X.
Do you know where you got this idea? I've seen it endlessly repeated, but I've been unable to trace it to any authoritative source.
In any case, it's completely wrong. Dr. Shi herself didn't expect natural spillover anywhere near Wuhan:
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
She could be wrong, but the idea that she chose her work location based on the natural abundance of sarbecoviruses is unequivocally false.
The BSL-4 also isn't very relevant. As described in the link above, the WIV worked at BSL-2, with correspondingly greater risk of an incident if one of their viruses turned out to infect humans. The point of extraordinary coincidence is their collection of novel sarbecoviruses, which was the biggest anywhere in the world.
Parent was asking about "catastrophic outbreak" not about COVID specifically. Other labs are not relevant in this calculation either. The question was about the likelihood of outbreak being colocated with a research facility and I stand by the answer - higher than random.
We're talking about SARS-CoV-2. We know that's a sarbecovirus, and we know the WIV had the world's largest collection of sarbecoviruses. That's the extraordinary coincidence that has prompted all of this debate. Your comment clearly implied that wasn't actually so surprising, because the WIV was located in a place where natural zoonosis was also believed to be more likely. That's completely false though, per the comments I've quoted from Dr. Shi herself.
It's certainly possible that other labs are deliberately located close to natural populations of the other organisms they're studying. That's not relevant in a discussion of the WIV and sarbecoviruses, though. There's no reason except obfuscation to shift focus to some broader question when we have facts specific to SARS-CoV-2.
In case you wish to clarify: Do you agree that specifically as to SARS-CoV-2, the probability of natural zoonosis near Wuhan was no higher than (and actually lower than, per Dr. Shi) random?
Wuhan has a BSL-4 lab since 2018, but it wasn't used for coronavirus research.
Most unversity cities have virology groups, and coronaviruses became a popular research subject after SARS, particularly in China. The probability of finding a coronavirus researcher group in any large Chinese city was probably fairly large in 2019.
This greatly understates the WIV's uniqueness here. Lots of groups study coronaviruses, but the WIV had the biggest collection of novel SARS-related viruses in the world. The proximal host of SARS-1 was found soon after the first outbreaks, but its origin in bats wasn't known until Dr. Shi discovered it.
The WIV had also proposed collaboration with UNC to engineer a virus structurally similar to SARS-CoV-2, a chimera of two novel sarbecoviruses with a human-designed FCS. This wasn't funded, but an unconfirmed leak claims the WIV continued this work alone:
> The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.
Yeah I’m afraid we may never find out the whole truth unless some whistleblower sneaks out with a bunch of evidence or some new genetic techniques come about that let us know without a doubt it was man-made rather than various credible sources saying “most likely it was engineered”
I think if you're at the point where the only thing you can say is "I don't believe you" or "you made up the data", you're at the point where you have nothing on which to base your suspicions. Just suspicions. And suspicions alone do not a good hypothesis make.
Dismissing suspicions just because they are suspicions is itself irrational. When the circumstances are suspicious and the event is already highly probable, those suspicions hold weight.
“These data provide no direct evidence to favor either a lab accident or a natural zoonosis,” said Bloom by email, with more explanation in a Twitter thread. “However, they do indicate the importance of continuing to seek new data about the origins and early spread of SARS-CoV-2.”
That is, recovered data from the deleted samples also show no close relation between strains from the lab and the COVID-19 outbreak.
I think you're confused about which samples you are talking about. The samples discussed in the article you linked to did not come from the lab. You can read your own link to see "They do not provide evidence either for or against either a natural animal origin for the virus or an accidental lab leak"
Pretty coincidental timing that they publish the article 4 days after the Committee On Oversight and Accountability released their two year investigation results which concluded "COVID-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China."
> OPERATION WARP SPEED: President-elect Trump’s Operation Warp Speed — which
> encouraged the rapid development and authorization of the COVID-19 vaccine
> — was highly successful and helped save millions of lives.
>
> RUSHED COVID-19 VACCINE APPROVAL: The FDA rushed approval of the COVID-19
> vaccine in order to meet the Biden Administration’s arbitrary mandate
> timeline. Two leading FDA scientists warned their colleagues about the
> dangers of rushing the vaccine approval process and the likelihood of
> adverse events. They were ignored, and days later, the Biden
> Administration mandated the vaccine.
One administration was applauded for reducing the amount of time and resources spent evaluating the possible negative outcomes of the vaccine.
One administration was harshly criticized for reducing the amount of time and resources spent evaluating the possible negative outcomes of the vaccine.
First point lauds rapid approval which it claims was successful and saved millions of lives. Second point criticizes a "rushed" and "dangerous" approval.
Not all of us agree and I say that with 3 covid vaccine shots coursing through my body.
I believe the two FDA scientists were concerned about the Biden admin demanding vaccine mandates around the vaccine booster where the FDA would normally have consultative influence and was intentionally excluded. By the time of the booster, there was active reports of adverse cardiac side effects in younger men. Exactly the demographic (military aged men) most affected by the mandate. Also, the original effectiveness of the vaccines were decreased due to the COVID mutations.
So the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive but certainly politics will spin the language in the report. The vaccines can and did help save lives and were rapidly created by Operation Warp Speed. Mandating the boosters for the military also put some lives at risk as well.
I’ve never seen any data that showed it was any more dangerous than any other vaccines that we’ve used for decades, and the “objections”always seen to come from the sorts that don’t trust the government at all for any reason or because it serves their political advancement.
The report spends 5 pages on COVID origins (re-hashing tired old arguments with zero hard evidence), and 46 pages on shit-talking Andrew Cuomo. Clearly, finding truth was never the objective.
From their list of the five strongest arguments for a lab leak:
> 4) Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.
> 5) By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced.
For #4, how do you tell that from an ordinary flu? Virus researchers get the flu about as much as everyone else does and WIV employed several hundred people. Having a few of them sick at any given time is not unusual.
For #5, they are overestimating how easy it is to find origins of viruses. SARS took 5 years. The 2013 Ebola outbreak origin still hasn't been found. It took until 2016 to track down the origins of the 2009 swine flu pandemic. For novel viruses the norm to finding where they came from is between "years" and "never".
> For #5, they are overestimating how easy it is to find origins of viruses. SARS took 5 years.
SARS-1 took about a year to find a proximal zoonotic host. The reservoir host took much longer, but the proximal host is the important part (and still hasn't been found for SARS-CoV-2).
You're right about Ebola and the 2009 flu. I think it's likely that SARS-CoV-2 arose from a research accident, but I don't think the COVID Select Subcommittee's arguments are very good.
Before you start promoting your opinion, there actually was a very interesting debate in order to test the lab-leak theory. Here is a review of this debate :
This was a terrible debate. The winner claimed that it was implausible that the WIV had unpublished viruses, so the absence of published sequences was strong evidence of their innocence.
The WIV just published 56 new sequences, proving him wrong (but still exonerating themselves per the headline). So I guess now it's implausible that they actually had 57?
The debate also relied heavily on Pekar's argument that the polytomy structure of SARS-CoV-2 proves it arose from multiple zoonotic introductions. The form of this argument was always suspect, since it's a high-dimensional model with no history of successful predictions; but beyond that, researchers replicating it found basic logic errors that greatly weaken the result:
The paper was eventually corrected, but the authors haven't changed their exaggerated claims to the popular press, which already went beyond the original claims of their peer-reviewed paper. It seems like no one on the other side of the debate had the mathematical background to raise these issues, with the unfortunate result you see above.
> The WIV just published 56 new sequences, proving him wrong (but still exonerating themselves per the headline)
You're picking out one point from a 15 hour debate. A much larger fraction of the debate was spent debunking false points made by the lab leak theory side.
But it's also not even clear whether the zoonosis guy was wrong. He argues that the WIV didn't secretly have BANAL-52, but not that they didn't have any unpublished or unsequenced viruses collected any time up to 2021.
I see two arguments based on published sequences, often presented without clear distinction between the two:
1. If the WIV had a progenitor, they would have published it pre-pandemic. That was always ridiculous, since any active research group in the world has unpublished work in progress. These new samples confirm that to be specifically false, since they were collected "between 2004 and 2021".
2. If the WIV had a progenitor, they would have published it post-pandemic. In other words, they would publish that sequence, knowing that it establishes the WIV's research as the most likely cause of the pandemic. I don't think many people, no matter how honorable, would wish to confess to ~7M deaths. Even if they did, it's likely that the PRC would impose terrible consequences on themselves and their loved ones, since that contradicts the PRC's preferred story of zoonotic origin outside China followed by import on frozen fish.
So I don't think the absence of published sequences means much. Do you disagree?
Or is there any other piece of evidence that you believe strongly establishes that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans by natural zoonosis, and you'd be willing to discuss? I understand you think the points I mentioned from that debate aren't the most important, but you didn't say which ones you think are.
I don’t really think basing your knowledge on a debate is a good place to start on anything that is a scientific matter like the origins of covid. I’ve read both sides and while I lean towards it being an escaped virus, the other side also has some pretty valid arguments and it’s not been a slam-dunk for any, especially those claiming that it is.
Huh, you don't think that me giving the link to a 15 hours debate that has been organized by people in the rationalist community in order that the best arguments of each side can be made with people having real money on the line is not a good place to start ? I don't see how people may get out anything else from the above link than each "side also has some pretty valid arguments and it’s not been a slam-dunk for any"
The fact that the debate was "won" (i.e. prize money attributed) is unimportant, the hours long debate where each case presents its best is.
And Zhang Yong-Zhen (who released the genome to the benefit of the world ) was interrogated by police and is now being persecuted (locked out of his lab, denied recognition, etc). Makes you wonder why
The Chinese government doesn't want public scientific criticism about anything, including its COVID response. But in 2020 Yong-Zhen was outspoken, complaining to journalists that the government wasn't listening to him back in January when he warned about an uncontrollable epidemic. He has continued to post on Weibo about fighting for the truth. Seems like standard authoritarianism to me, and there's nothing really to wonder about: China persecutes internal critics.
It is empty-brained to assume China must be hiding some deeper, darker secret. China spent six months hoping COVID was overblown and would just go away on its own. They do not want people on social media asking questions about this.
Maybe that's because you're attacking a dumb strawman instead of addressing my actual point. The comment I'm responding to said "makes you wonder why" Yong-Zhen was being persecuted and no it doesn't, we have a very good explanation as to why.
He released the genome, got on a plane, and upon landing he was immediately interrogated by police. That’s a fast and immediate response. This was before his social media posts.
Also, stop calling people empty brained. Shows immaturity.
Or alternatively Yong-Zhen was being targeted as part of a cover-up and he was shut-down much faster than typically happens in China.
And it's completely reasonable to wonder why that was.
Oh yeah...and your dumb etc.....
I think it's not exactly like that. There was a virus database that was taken offline a while before the outbreak and that they refuse to share to this day. After the outbreak the Chinese government asked for the destruction of covid samples. More recently Daszak said Shi Zhengli had a personal virus database but had deleted it.
Overall they have not been very cooperative with data. But it seems the lab does covert military bioweapons type research so they may have reason to be secretive about everything without actually having caused covid.
The lab-leak issue is missing the bigger picture. The question we should be contemplating is if, the next time a country like China becomes ground zero for the spread of a novel pathogen, they will be fully cooperative and transparent with other countries. I think the answer here is "NO". This answer is somewhat obvious given the nature of China's Communist government.
Another important question is if most major Western countries are going to handle any future nascent pandemics with competence and due caution. All this finger-pointing over COVID's origins is a disappointing signal that nothing has been or will be learned regarding preparedness, so personally I think the answer here is also "NO".
Responsible individuals and organizations should plan and act accordingly.
Maybe not for certain but the probabilities for various scenarios go up and down.
I used to feel like that but now feel the odds are about 99% it was a Wuhan lab doing research similar to that proposed by Ralph Baric which is close enough to certain to me. Although more detail would be interesting.
If you're going to take into account prior probability you should consider the fact that every single pandemic and disease that has ever infected humans did not leak from a lab and instead evolved in nature, usually in animals. In other words:
The 1977 flu killed about 700k people, and is uncontroversially accepted to have arisen from a failed vaccine trial. I've seen legalistic attempts to define that as something other than a lab accident, but there's no question that the virus spent 1957 to 1976 in a lab freezer.
No prior pandemic is known to have arisen from a genetically engineered virus, but the technology for that has only recently come to exist. No one had ever died in a plane crash before the Wright brothers, but the risk was obviously still there.
The 1977 virus was already circulating in the population, hence why it ended up as a vaccine. Therefore, it was not a lab leak (or any human-driven mechanism; nobody's certain) that first caused humans to be infected with the virus but good, old fashioned, zoonotic transmission.
>> No prior pandemic is known to have arisen from a genetically engineered virus, but the technology for that has only recently come to exist. No one had ever died in a plane crash before the Wright brothers, but the risk was obviously still there.
Unlike plane accidents, diseases and pandemics happened way before labs that could leak them.
We're talking about prior probabilities here, yes? "How often has something happened in the past". Whether the probability of lab leaks increases now that there's a possibility of a lab leak is a conditional probability: "given that a lab leak is now possible, what is its probability?".
And btw that will remain very low because of the infinitesimally low prior probability of a lab leak.
> The 1977 virus was already circulating in the population, hence why it ended up as a vaccine.
The 1957 flu evolved naturally, but it went extinct in the wild. By 1976, it wasn't known to be circulating anywhere. It then reappeared in 1977 with an almost identical genome, without the mutations it should have picked up in 20 years of cryptic spread. This is consistent with storage in a laboratory freezer, and very little else. The exact site of reintroduction isn't known, but it's generally believed to be a vaccine challenge trial in China:
> Although there is no hard evidence available, the introduction of this 1977 H1N1 virus is now thought to be the result of vaccine trials in the Far East involving the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus (C.M. Chu, personal communication).
So the scientists who undertook that trial (or whatever the activity was) caused that pandemic. If not for their actions, those 700k people wouldn't have died. Of course a different flu virus would have circulated, but 700k was much worse than an average season.
Does that not concern you? The reckless trial caused those influenza deaths, just as surely as the leak at Bhopal caused those poisoning deaths. The long chain of transmission between the site of reintroduction and the site of the deaths doesn't change the causality--if those researchers hadn't reintroduced the virus, then those patients wouldn't have died.
> Unlike plane accidents, diseases and pandemics happened way before labs that could leak them.
That's not a meaningful statement. Cancer happened way before radiological accidents that could induce them, and most cancer is natural; but Edison's X-ray tube nonetheless killed his assistant. When a new technology creates a new way to die, a period will exist in which it hasn't killed anyone yet; but someone can still be first.
The correct guide is therefore the most similar pre-existing technologies, which in this case have already killed 700k people. It's possible that by failing to take any lesson from that, researchers at the WIV have now killed an additional 7M. If that's the case, then I hate to think what comes next.
This was a discussion about "prior probability", according to the terminology that you introduced. I pointed out that if you really want to use "prior probability" then you have to take into account the, well, prior. probability. Of the two events you're considering.
Even if you insisted on the 1977 virus being an instance of a lab escape causing a pandemic, the prior probability of that kind of event would stay zero, maybe with a desultory and lonely 1 after three or four decimal zeroes. So, zero.
Are you using "prior probability" in a figurative sense? Are you saying that we should set our priors according to personal preference rather than observed frequency of real-world events? If so, well I guess you're a true Bayesian then and I salute you, but please make that clear.
>> That's not a meaningful statement.
Yeah, thanks a lot for the respectful debate there. You should read again the bit where I point out the difference between prior and conditional probabilities and if you really want to use the terminology "prior probability" make yourself more familiar with it.
It came from the first article that I linked, by a medical doctor and professor of epidemiology. From that article:
> Over the ensuing years, after its emergence in 1977, the virus went on to infect a significant portion of the worldwide population, killing roughly 700,000 people.
I'm not aware of any controversy over that number. It seems like people don't quite believe it, as if it's impossible that researchers would kill 700k people with no consequence, so it must be wrong or fake somehow. They're just as dead as from any other cause though, and the failed challenge trial (or whatever it was) caused the deaths.
And no one cares, and I don't really understand why. It may partially be the delayed discovery, since research-related origin was denied at the time. (Quite familiarly, the WHO wrote in 1978 that "laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time".) It may also be the long distance between the initial cause and the death, in the same way as for pollution, climate change, etc.
> Even if you insisted on the 1977 virus being an instance of a lab escape causing a pandemic, the prior probability of that kind of event would stay zero, maybe with a desultory and lonely 1 after three or four decimal zeroes. So, zero.
The flu vaccine was invented about 80 years ago, so a pandemic arising from it couldn't have occurred before that. We obviously haven't had 10,000 to 100,000 pandemics since then.
The definition is loose, but counting introductions of pathogens into humans with a combination of novelty and mortality sufficient to get scientific attention over that period, I get maybe a couple dozen. If we count only pandemics with deaths comparable to the 1977 flu's 700k then it's fewer; but I think it makes sense to include SARS-1, MERS, etc.
If I had to guess knowing only that such a novel pathogen had just been introduced, I'd thus bet with p ~ 5% that it was a research accident. If I had to bet knowing only that a novel pathogen had been introduced sometime in the past million years, then my estimate would of course be lower; but I don't see how that's relevant here. For SARS-CoV-2 I believe additional evidence significantly increases the probability, as discussed in other comments.
>> It came from the first article that I linked, by a medical doctor and professor of epidemiology. From that article:
>>> Over the ensuing years, after its emergence in 1977, the virus went on to infect a significant portion of the worldwide population, killing roughly 700,000 people.
That estimate is not referenced in the paper you link. I looked for a different source estimating the number of deaths. I found this article [1] that reports an earlier estimate of a mortality rate of less than 5/100,000. "Mortality rate" is taken over the total of a population (not infections). With a mortality rate of less than 5/100,000, for the virus to kill 700,000 people, as in the claim in the article you link, it would have to circulate in a population of 14,000,000,000 (see rule of three).
That's not possible.
>> If I had to guess knowing only that such a novel pathogen had just been introduced, I'd thus bet with p ~ 5% that it was a research accident.
Does that mean you believe every recent pandemic has a ~5% chance to be a "research accident"? SARS, MERS, HIV, Ebola, mpox, Zika, etc, all had a ~5% chance to be research accidents or is Covid-19 special?
What happens to this 5% number as we see more pandemics? Does it go up or down? Can you say?
>> In 1977, an H1N1 influenza virus appeared and circled the globe. Colloquially referred to as the “Russian flu,” as the USSR was the first to report the outbreak to the World Health Organization (WHO), the 1977 strain was actually isolated in Tientsin, Liaoning, and Jilin, China, almost simultaneously in May of that year (1). It was atypically mild for a new epidemic strain; the influenza mortality rate (IMR) of the 1977 flu was calculated to be <5 out of 100,000, less than typical seasonal influenza infections (IMR of 6/100,000 people) (2). In addition, the 1977 strain appeared to affect only those 26 years of age and younger (3). These odd characteristics turned out to have a simple scientific explanation: the virus was not novel. The 1977 strain was virtually identical to an H1N1 influenza strain that was prevalent in the 1950s but had since dropped out of circulation (4).
> That estimate is not referenced in the paper you link.
I linked two papers, and that quote appears in the first. Perhaps you were looking at the second? Here's the link again, with the text that I quoted highlighted:
Influenza statistics are noisy, since most patients are never tested. We could compare the methodologies of those estimates, and try to decide which is better; but I don't think that's a productive use of our time, unless you think 700k deaths are worthy of concern but 200k deaths (or whatever the right number would be) are not.
> Does that mean you believe every recent pandemic has a ~5% chance to be a "research accident"? SARS, MERS, HIV, Ebola, mpox, Zika, etc, all had a ~5% chance to be research accidents or is Covid-19 special?
If I knew nothing else about the pandemic, I'd bet with p ~ 5% that it was research-origin--that's my prior, knowing only that it just emerged. For real, I of course know more. For e.g. MERS, the proximal animal host was found, and genomic evidence shows repeated spillover; so that additional evidence makes me effectively certain it was natural (p ~ 0%). For the 1977 flu, I'm very confident it was unnatural (p ~ 99%). Those average to something close to 5%.
If we get strong confirmation that SARS-CoV-2 (or any other new pandemic) arose unnaturally, then my prior would go up. If we get many more natural pandemics without any unnatural ones, then my prior would go down.
I would also incorporate other information. For example, if many more scientists undertake high-risk research on enhanced potential pandemic pathogens, then my prior would go up. If such projects are restricted and become less common, then my prior would go down. I think that's fairly normal reasoning?
>> I linked two papers, and that quote appears in the first. Perhaps you were looking at the second?
Yes, that's the paper I looked at. "Not referenced" means that the 700k number given in the paper has no reference. The author seems to have pulled it out of thin air. Here I'm copying the text from your link with the highlight:
>> By comparison, the 1977 "Russian flu" virus produced a milder illness in most people (Gregg, Hinman, and Craven 1978). Over the ensuing years, after its emergence in 1977, the virus went on to infect a significant portion of the worldwide population, killing roughly 700,000 people. But this particular pandemic isn't important only because of its impact on disease and death: it also reveals uncomfortable truths about the complex relationship between viruses and humans. The 1977 pandemic is a cautionary tale, one that—hopefully—we can learn from.
Note there's no citation next to the 700k number. So where does it come from? Nowhere. The author just made it up. Perhaps that's the reason for the lack of concern at the 700k deaths: they didn't happen.
And where did your 200k number come from? Can you show your work?
>> If we get strong confirmation that SARS-CoV-2 (or any other new pandemic) arose unnaturally, then my prior would go up.
That's not a prior, it's a posterior: it's the probability of an event given the evidence. We're interested in a prior probability when we don't have enough evidence to calculate a posterior. Like with Covid-19.
Once more I suggest to try and get the terminology right so you don't confuse yourself and everyone else. It will also help you to find better ways to reason under uncertainty.
So the author didn't just make it up. Peer review isn't magic, but it does tend to catch such a blatant level of fraud; so it's odd that was your first assumption. He should have included the reference, but it's not uncommon to get sloppy when a result is widely reported.
I haven't yet traced this number back to the epidemiological methodology. As noted, I fully accept that it might wrong, since influenza numbers tend to be calculated from excess mortality and not directly counted. Until we've reviewed that methodology, I agree that it's reasonable to question the exact number. I believe that uncertainty applies to most epidemiological estimates, including but not limited to the 1977 flu.
But I've explicitly acknowledged the uncertainty, so I'm not sure why you're continuing to focus on this. There is no significant question that the 1977 flu was reintroduced into humans due to a research accident, and no question that it went on to infect a large fraction of the world. There's no question that many people died, even if the exact number is uncertain. Are you proposing that it's few enough that there's no reason to care? If so, what's your cutoff?
The 200k was an arbitrary placeholder. I thought the phrase "or whatever the right number would be" following it would make that clear, but maybe not.
> That's not a prior, it's a posterior: it's the probability of an event given the evidence. We're interested in a prior probability when we don't have enough evidence to calculate a posterior. Like with Covid-19.
I mean that if SARS-CoV-2 were proven to have arisen unnaturally, then my prior that a different future pandemic was unnatural would go up. That again seems very normal to me, since humans predict the future using the past. As I noted, I would adjust my prior based on factors other than a simple count of past research-origin pandemics too; but the count is obviously relevant information. Your updated prior of p ~ 0.0001 to 0.00001 seems to also be derived from a past count, just reaching into prehistory to inflate the denominator.
This thread started when you asserted that "every single pandemic and disease that has ever infected humans did not leak from a lab". Exact numbers for the death toll and prior aside, do you at least agree that's false?
Table 1 in the other paper you cite also has no reference to the number. That's because the number is made up, hearsay, someone's back-of-the-napkin calculation etc.
I'm "continuing to focus on this" because it's obvious the numbers you quoted, and on which you based your entire argument about the 1977 flu, are completely made up and I want you to understand that.
>> That again seems very normal to me, since humans predict the future using the past.
Humans predict the future? That sounds like magic. Are you sure that's true? Are we talking about prior probabilities or palmistry?
Note that it doesn't make sense for a prior to be "your prior" or "my prior". I think that's a turn of phrase that's common in EA circles, where people really have no clue about probabilities or statistics. My advise is to not copy their mannerisms and try to learn about probabilities from a good source, like a textbook or an online course. There used to be a good course on Udcity presented by Sebastian Thrun, based on his course at Stanford IIRC. If you can find it, have a go at it, it's really good.
>> This thread started when you asserted that "every single pandemic and disease that has ever infected humans did not leak from a lab". Exact numbers for the death toll and prior aside, do you at least agree that's false?
Not at all. Besides which the thread started when you used the term "prior probability" without understanding what it means.
Table 1 actually does have a reference in the text, but it doesn't seem to be helpful. I think the major point of unclear methodology is the period over which those deaths are summed, since the lineage has continued to circulate since reintroduction:
> The human H1N1 lineage caused pandemic and endemic influenza from 1918 to 1956, then disappeared entirely around 1957 only to reappear in relatively low-level pandemic form in 1977. It has continued to circulate endemically in humans up to the present time (2009).
Michaelis's Table 1 says "1977-1979", but 700k seems too high for that; so the table seems misleading or wrong to me. Perhaps they're actually counting deaths from descendant lineages up to present--if a terrorist reintroduced smallpox, would you not blame them for every death until it was re-eradicated, even if that took many years? That might be what Burke meant by "over the ensuing years", though in that case it should have increased since 2009. That seems more plausible to me, if anything low.
It seems most likely to me that no one has calculated very rigorously, and the reviewers did back-of-the-napkin calculations similar to those I've just done and decided it was close enough, within the usual uncertainty (rigorous estimates in countries with good statistics are often ranges over 5:1 or more). I agree their failure to explain their methodology is bad, and I won't provide numbers in future without this context.
The calculation you provided earlier seems to be only for the period immediately around 1977, not including descendant lineages in subsequent years. I'd guess that's the reason for the apparent inconsistency, since almost all the death comes later.
So after all this, do you at least agree that (a) many people died, (b) the research accident caused those deaths, and (c) that's bad? I absolutely agree it's (almost surely) not 700.000k; but can you agree it's not zero?
> Humans predict the future? That sounds like magic. Are you sure that's true? Are we talking about prior probabilities or palmistry?
I assume you don't think weather forecasters are magicians? Or almost any human activity involves aspects of prediction--I cross the street because I predict that the barking pit bull might attack me, or I choose an item from the restaurant menu that I predict I'll enjoy eating.
So I don't see what's abnormal here. I don't think this dorm-room epistemology serves much purpose beyond distracting from the practical and serious topic at hand.
> Note that it doesn't make sense for a prior to be "your prior" or "my prior".
I think the possessive is just an acknowledgement that the right answer is disputable, and reasonable people may end up with different numbers. I'd tend to agree there's an EA-adjacent tendency towards misleading quantification, but the concept of a prior here seems fine to me.
> Not at all. Besides which the thread started when you used the term "prior probability" without understanding what it means.
So are you saying the 1977 flu doesn't infect humans, or that it didn't leak from a lab? I'm not sure what you mean here. I also think you've confused me with user
rich_sasha, since I didn't mention prior probability until you did.
Yes, I confused you with rich_sasha, that's right. My aplogies.
As you say 700k people over two years is an impossibly high number so we can disregard this number and any other number that someone makes up just because they want to make a point. That's not the way to make a point with numbers.
>> So after all this, do you at least agree that (a) many people died, (b) the research accident caused those deaths, and (c) that's bad?
Not at all. Note that my initial point, quoting from my initial comment, was that "every single pandemic and disease that has ever infected humans did not leak from a lab and instead evolved in nature, usually in animals".
The 1977 flu did not start in a lab but instead jumped from animals to humans, just like any other disease that has ever bothered us. This happened in the 1950's. In the 1970's an earlier strain of the virus re-emerged but we don't know where it came from and it did not cause a pandemic.
The Covid-19 virus instead is said to have first come from a lab, and some people even think it was a human-made virus, possibly as a result of gain-of-function research. Nothing to do with the 1977 flu.
Have you looked for the Udacity course I recommended, on probabilities? It is really good and it will help you a lot.
> As you say 700k people over two years is an impossibly high number so we can disregard this number
I agree it wasn't over two years. I never said it was over two years, though, and neither did Burke. Michaelis might imply that, and I criticized them for that.
Do you not think it's plausible that all the deaths tracing back to that reintroduction sum to 700k? It's a big chunk of global flu mortality over almost fifty years now. If you think 700k is too high, what's a better estimate? I asked before if you could agree that it was greater than zero, and you didn't answer. If you're still unwilling to, can you at least explain why not?
Perhaps it's misleading to attribute the deaths to the "1977 flu" when our count isn't limited to that one year. I don't think it's that unusual, though. We often say ~7M people died from COVID-19, even though very few of those were in 2019. In any case, I believe the period in question should be clear now.
> The 1977 flu did not start in a lab but instead jumped from animals to humans, just like any other disease that has ever bothered us.
You've changed your terminology here, from "leaked" to "started". There's no question that the 1977 flu, SARS-CoV-2, or any other virus traces back to nature--the technology doesn't yet exist to create a functioning viral genome de novo. All laboratory viruses are derived from natural viruses, whether in simple ways (like freezing for twenty years) or complex ones (like the genetic engineering proposed in DEFUSE).
All viruses trace back to natural evolution. The question is whether their path to humans involved a trip through a lab, and for the 1977 flu the answer seems to be yes. Do you disagree? Even the paper you linked yourself--written by a longtime proponent of high-risk virological research--opens with "The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event".
> and it did not cause a pandemic.
Can you explain why you don't think it was a pandemic? Even if you're (bizarrely) unwilling to admit that anyone died, pandemics are defined in terms of cases or infections, not deaths. There's no question that the 1977 flu spread unusually quickly to infect a large fraction of the world. It's widely referred to as a pandemic. What do you know that all these professors don't?
> Have you looked for the Udacity course I recommended, on probabilities? It is really good and it will help you a lot.
It sounds like a good course and I might take a look. My own professors did give me passing grades, though? I don't think introductory statistics is the major point of disagreement here.
is incorrect, since it falsely implies the 700k was just from one season. The 1977-78 season did show excess mortality in some estimates, though it's not clear whether that was from the H1N1 or the co-circulating H3N2 (which was probably a minority of the infections, but a majority of the infections in older people at highest risk of death, due to their prior immunity from 1957 and earlier). Mortality in the <19 age group reached its all-time high, around 2.4x average; that's a tiny share of the total (just 234 deaths), but perhaps an interesting gauge of the H1N1 spread.
Unless I'm missing something, I do believe the 700k has travelled remarkably far with remarkably weak provenance, and I appreciate the push to investigate that. Perhaps there's just no one with any incentive to correct it--for authors opposing high-risk virological research it's impressively large enough, while authors supporting such research don't wish to draw attention to this mortality at all. I don't think the exact number changes much practically, but I'd still rather not perpetuate that carelessness.
Very good discussion in a sibling comment. From my side, surely the lab leak prior probability is not 0. It is possible so must have a positive probability.
Not is it, a priori, a crackpot theory. The crackpot bit is when people are totally convinced of it with no or shaky evidence.
The proximal animal hosts of SARS-1 and MERS were both discovered within about a year of the first human infections. This provides strong evidence of their natural zoonotic origin.
Such a host for SARS-CoV-2 would falsify theories of research-related origin. None has been found, despite the much greater effort to search. That doesn't mean it's certainly unnatural, but it's surprising.
It’s as though we would trust [athlete accused of doping] of publishing results from a blood test they performed on themselves to confirm the accusations.
3rd party lab inspectors were restricted from the lab for a significant time.