Covid

Fauci Email: Engineered?

379 Comments

Someone FOI’d Fauci emails. Anyone who recognizes the actors in the “lab leak debate” will expect this to spawn quite a bit of discussion.

379 thoughts on “Fauci Email: Engineered?”

  1. Yes, but in May when Trump suggested the virus was released from a laboratory, Fauci et al were nowhere to be seen.
    .
    For Fauci to survive much longer in his job will be a miracle. It is a travesty that he has not been fired.

  2. I think people will want to know quite specifically
    (a) What features made Eddie, Bob, Doug and Kristian initially think the virus was inconsistent with evolution and
    (b) What specific later information made them decide it could be consistent with evolution.

    Rogr Pielke asked on twitter
    https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1399861090465419264

    Kristian Andersen gave what I would describe as a boilerplate uninformative answer, then gives a link to his nature paper. That paper doesn’t really answer these specific questions.

    Of course, Andersen isn’t required to answer and definitely doesn’t need to answer on Twitter. Still, people are going to continue to wonder and ask.

  3. Lucia,
    I suspect they saw all the odd things everyone else saw: remarkable similarity to RaTG13… RaTG13 having been sequenced and reported earlier by the Wuhan lab as a different virus with a different name, a Furin cleavage insertion of four amino acids, but with only scattered other single amino acid changes, and the publication history of the Wuhan lab, where they were doing exactly the kinds of experiments which could lead to something like covid 19 by trying to make bat viruses infect human cells or humanized mice.
    .
    Of course, if you are a virologist and it turns out your field created a virus that killed millions and cost tens of trillions in public expenditures, all due to foolish, dangerous experiments combined with a lab accident, you have a conflict of interest….. you sure wouldn’t want the entire field reviled and (yikes!) defunded. Safer to just say “probably jumped from an unidentified animal” knowing that nobody can prove you wrong.
    .
    BTW, this situation clearly calls for an investigation, but one that avoids the involvement of virologists and anyone else who has conflicts of interest. Like Fauci and others who have supported this crazy virus research.

  4. Lucia,
    “Kristian Andersen gave what I would describe as a boilerplate uninformative answer, then gives a link to his nature paper. That paper doesn’t really answer these specific question.”
    .
    Yup. His answer was: “We are the experts, so you have to trust us.”
    .
    That is not going to stop the questions. There is legitimate doubt about where the virus came from, With lab release clearly a plausible explanation. Virologists are not going to be able to keep the field from being held to account. The simple explanation of an accidental lab release makes perfect Ockham’s razor sense, and if no intermediate species can be found to conclusively support a jump to humans, then that razor should be used to cut funding for crazy virology research. The risk analysis is simple: If there is even a 5% chance the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab (and I think it is more like 50%!), then the entire field should be immediately defunded and research on infecting human cells with new viruses made illegal.

  5. SteveF
    I thought the funniest part of Andersen’s reply was

    What the email shows, is a clear example of the scientific process.

    That’s obviously not an answer to the question Roger asked, nor to the ones people are going to be asking. Everyone knows the scientific process does not include not explaining.
    .
    People, including scientists, do get to change their minds based on evidence or even further analysis of the evidence. They can also reserve an opinion. But he now has a problem and that is that he did advance an opinion held by, reportedly, 4 virologists after some investigation and discussion. There clearly was some basis for that opinion. And supposedly some particular evidence or analysis changed that. He doesn’t say.
    .
    The paper’s “reasons” are
    1.

    While the analyses above suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may bind human ACE2 with high affinity, computational analyses predict that the interaction is not ideal7 and that the RBD sequence is different from those shown in SARS-CoV to be optimal for receptor binding7,11.

    That’s not data about whether it’s engineered. It’s speculation about human motives and it doesn’t make any sense.
    The paper “7” actually has an example of scientists engineering a virus that is not optimal for receptor binding to humans. (It’s optimized for civets I think.) So we know they do create viruses that are not optimal for humans. And the motive could be “to test our computational models”. There could be other motives!

    2.

    Polybasic cleavage sites have not been observed in related ‘lineage B’ betacoronaviruses, although other human betacoronaviruses, including HKU1 (lineage A), have those sites and predicted O-linked glycans13. Given the level of genetic variation in the spike, it is likely that SARS-CoV-2-like viruses with partial or full polybasic cleavage sites will be discovered in other species.

    The first part is a discussion about what’s unusual about the virus. (It’s evidence for why one might think it’s engineered.) The “counter” evidence is a prediction we would discover this sort of thing in other animals. But its over a year later now and that hasn’t been found. Even though we’ve looked. This is speculation not “data”.

    3.

    It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone20.

    Here they repeat the ridiculous (1) as “evidence” and now add “systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used”. I’m sure the researchers would have used a something available to them. But there is no particular reason why they must use a “previously used backbone”. So the first underlined bit is based on speculation about choices one would make in a very specific case where we don’t know what they really might have been trying to do. As for the second underlined bit: Even if the scientists restricted themselves to “previously used” backbones, citation 20 is from 20freaking14 Covid popped up in 2019. How in the world could a paper from 20freakin14 tell prove irrefutably that anything was not derived from something used before 2019?! The have to at least tell us no backbones (reported or unreported) have been developed since 2014!

    And honestly, I can’t tell how reference 19 itself says virologists would “probably” have used on of several reverse-genetic systems available. So that is not a citation to someone else making that claim. There should be more reason given.

    (I mean, is Andersen claim they would probably used a previously published reverse-genetic systems reference based — citing 19– based on this?!

    Thus, future work should be focused on the biological properties of these viruses using virus isolation, reverse genetics and in vitro and in vivo infection assays. The resulting data would help the prevention and control of emerging SARS-like or MERS-like diseases in the future.

    That’s the only place where ‘reverse’ is used in the paper 19! And it doesn’t say “we recommend restricting ourselves to a previously published backbone.” It also doesn’t say “Oh, and we would never, ever, ever under any circumstances use whatever citation 20 refers to as “plasmid-based approaches”.
    Or is Andersens claim of what the WIV researches would “probably use” based on something else in ref 19? Beats me.)
    .
    I get this paper is in Nature. There’s lots of scientific sounding things in it. But the argument is extremely speculative with much based on what they think lab people would “probably do” and excluding what they might “possibly do”. You can’t estimate the probability of an event by only discussing what you consider the “most probable” path. You have to consider possible paths even if you gauge them somewhat less likely!

  6. I’ve used a plasmid based system to engineer adenoviruses for protein expression. Viruses make efficient vehicles for injection of DNA into hard to transfect cells. Split the virus up into pieces, place those pieces into a plasmid that when reconstituted into a cell will express the constituent parts and reassemble the full virus. Having the parts you want to manipulate in a plasmid makes mutation far more convenient. Sadly, I’m not au fait with using other viruses. While I was considering trying to use HSV to insert an entire gene into a cell, it never really got off the ground.

    Edit: I should add that the viruses were nerfed. They could inject DNA into cells, but could not replicate more.

  7. This other email at least reveals the point Andersen thinks his letter was making a bit better:

    So he think
    (a) those doing nefarious things would have used a SARS/MERS backbone and put in the optimal ACE binder and
    (b) those doing research would have used an existing backbone.

    Now, both of those things would be plausible, reasonable things to do. But that doesn’t mean they capture the entire universe of things that either group might do.

    In (a) those doing nefarious things might have been perfectly content to not use SARS/MERS backbones, but instead an unknown bat virus. And they also might want something less virulent. How virulent you want it to be depends on your specific goal.
    In (b) there are papers with people developing new backbones for reverse engineering. Researchers could develop new back bones and not have published yet. They might not want to use the SARS/MERS backbone or “existing” ones for some reason. And there still could be reasons researchers might do something else.
    .
    The argumen is basically trying to treat anything that is not the single most probable thing as having zero probability. That’s not the way you assess probability of accidents or even nefarious deeds.

  8. Lucia,

    How virulent you want it to be depends on your specific goal.

    Certainly.
    It’s also possible and maybe likely (if this was a lab leak) that there was an element of randomness to what got out. The lab could have been working with multiple variants for any number of reasons – to compare / contrast / control, etc. How does this variant with the standard backbone compare to this other variant without it by whatever measures.
    [Edit: Did the Twitter police come for Roger? I can’t view his tweet.]

  9. So it’s Gay Pride season and there’s all sorts of stuff about HIV/AIDS. For one, Fauci is still “cautiously optimistic” about the development of a vaccine. As far as I remember, before there were drug treatments, the IFR for HIV was 100%. Progression could take a decade or more, but it always progressed. Eventually, the CD4 titer would drop below a critical level and opportunistic infections and cancers would develop and kill the host. If the human immune system can’t develop immunity on its own, how are you supposed to invent a vaccine? Answer: you can’t. Fauci is deluded, in denial or something.

    For another thing, when HIV was ravaging the gay community in San Francisco, the city government refused to shut down the gay bath houses which were spreading the infection. Now we shut down the whole country for a respiratory virus with far less virulence than HIV.

  10. lucia,

    I believe what Daszak is using is what’s called a straw man argument. He invents a scenario and then argues that it wouldn’t happen rather than address other plausible scenarios.

  11. Even if the virus looks like it might be evolutionary, it might be engineered to look that way. I don’t know enough about it to understand if this can be done currently.
    .
    If you were doing this as an valid science experiment you might not care if you left clear engineering markers, if you were producing it as a bioweapon you might want to make it look like it evolved naturally. If you were doing dual use experiments you might be interested in both as a quest for knowledge and because someone wrote that into a project requirement. This way you know others could cover up their GOF bioweapons and make them undetectable as well.
    .
    Bottom line is a smoking gun is going to be needed to end speculation either way, and I don’t see anyone stating what that smoking gun is … up front now.
    .
    It would seem reasonable that if GOF experiments were to continue that it would be a requirement that clear biomarkers were left in all experiments so that if a lab escape did occur then it would be traceable.

  12. Lucia,
    That second email sounds exactly like it was written by an advocate climate scientists…… not a good thing. The case is obviously not clear, and the virus could have been the result of work at the lab, or simply released from the lab from samples collected were the 3 miners died back in 2013 after cleaning up bat guano.
    .
    The email’s expression of the need to present to the public a positive, air tight case, removing all uncertainty that the virus jumped from an animal, is the same as the climate scientist emails from the University of East Anglia. It smacks of the same arrogant advocacy and dismissal of the public’s right to hear the full truth…. including uncertainty. IMHO, the guy coms across like an utter asshole.

  13. The virologists appear to be going into bunker mode, a natural reaction. We need a cross science investigation into all things similar to GOF. Even if this one is natural this area needs a fresh review for * public * confidence. This might be an unnecessary panic but to fix that you need to open the books and take your lumps. At least climate scientists aren’t going to cause climate change, ha ha. Labs need to be locked down for a while until we know adults with safe protocols are running the establishments.
    .
    Team virology doesn’t need to like it, and “trust us” isn’t something I’m willing to accept. They need to earn the trust by being transparent.
    .
    They need to be talking about how to respond to the next pandemic in a better way. Look how long it took to figure out it was aerosolized, that surface contamination wasn’t important, etc. It took them approx. forever to characterize the most important viral outbreak in 100 years. How much funding do they get? Where is it being spent? “Wash your hands and stay 6 feet away from others” is the state of virology in 2020? I’d like some better confidence that the next outbreak will be handled more competently. They still don’t understand seasonality of the flu!

  14. Note the very careful language here:
    .
    NIH Director: We Need an Investigation Into the Wuhan Lab-Leak Theory
    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/francis-collins-nih/619065/
    .
    “Such (GOF) research, he explained, is different from enhancing viruses that affect people. “The gain of function that is of much greater concern, and for which the United States has in place stringent oversight guidelines (the US does do this!), relates to experiments that might make a human pathogen more transmissible or more virulent,” Collins said. “NIH has never supported such experiments on human coronaviruses (but on other viruses? and other agencies may have done it on coronaviruses?). The now-terminated subcontract to the WIV was to support the isolation and characterization of viruses from bats living in caves in China. Since we knew those were the original source of SARS and MERS, it would have been irresponsible not to try to learn more about them. But the terms of the grant were limited to bat viruses, and absolutely did not allow gain-of-function research in the sense of studying human pathogens.” (but did include it in other unspecified senses?)”

  15. mark bofill

    It’s also possible and maybe likely (if this was a lab leak) that there was an element of randomness to what got out. The lab could have been working with multiple variants for any number of reasons – to compare / contrast / control, etc.

    Multiple variants of various sorts are absolutely likely under the “nefarious” scenario. Because “nefarious” scenario opens the possibility of wanting a bunch of different “weapons” for different purposes (and some might need to look “not suspicious”.)
    .
    Suppose the nefarious “Dr Evil” types have brain storming session and come up with their “dream-team” of viruses. They want:
    1) A virus that is contagious enough that if you spray a lot into a room, most of those people will get sick, but not contagious enough to spread from an infected person to someone else. (Wasn’t legionaire’s like that?)
    2) Two related viruses. One that is like “vaccinia” and one that is like small pox. So you release the “vaccinia” one in populations you want to protect and small pox in the other.
    3) As much as possible, Dr. Evil’s team wants the virus to appear to be related to bat viruses. (To avoid having someone say: “Well, the would have used a SARS backbone, but this isn’t that!” And in case 1 have someone say “Well, all those people ate the local rare delicacy, Bat Soup!”)
    4) And so on.
    .
    The problem is that in the “nefarious” scenario it is very difficult to presuppose there can be one and only one goal. So you can’t either that they would have used a SARS/MERS backbone or that they would have made a strain thought to be maximally contagious!
    .
    It would be different if the experts were able to say that something was actually impossible rather than just decreeing that the nefarious would do things one specific way.
    .
    Of course, it’s worth mentioning that the “nefarious” scenario veers into “conspiracy theory”. But Andersen’s second email would suggest he claims to have actually considered the conspiracy theory. But at best they made a half-assed swipe at it and did not do a convincing job.
    .
    The other interesting thing is they don’t consider the possibility of an absolute cock-up in the lab. The range of scenarios for “cock-up” is generally amazing.

  16. Tom Scharf

    But the terms of the grant were limited to bat viruses, and absolutely did not allow gain-of-function research in the sense of studying human pathogens.”

    That only means those at WIV couldn’t do GOF research on those viruses under this NIH grant. I don’t think the WIV would forbidden from getting another contract from someone else that paid for GOF on the same bat viruses they’d been studying. Also, I don’t think the NIH could forbid them from using internal money to do GOF research.
    .
    Doesn’t mean they did GOF research on the viruses. But this language merely means the NIH didn’t fund a GOF component of research on those bat viruses. That’s nice and addresses Rand Paul’s accusation. But it doesn’t mean GOF research could not have been done on the same dang bat viruses.

  17. Lucia,
    Yeah. Except that the conspiracy theory dismissal is getting stale in my view. That militaries have used bioweapons as recently as WWII is a documented fact. As far as I’m concerned, it’s naive to think neither China nor the US conducts biological warfare R&D.
    It used to be a conspiracy theory that the virus could possibly have leaked from the lab in Wuhan. Used to be a conspiracy theory that the government reads our email too. UFO’s used to be a conspiracy theory.
    Conspiracy theory’s not what it used to be. Shrug.

  18. mark bofill,
    Yes. People use “conspiracy theory” both to mean “crackpot theory that couldnt happen” and one that involves a “conspiracy”. All conspiracy really means is a plan to do something unlawful or harmful. So these are different meanings.
    .
    That a theory involves a conspiracy doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I mean, I’m pretty sure the Bolsheviks conspired to overthrow the government. Castro conspired to overthrow a government. Some people conspired to kill Hitler at the end of the war. All acts were almost certainly unlawful under their legal systems. (Most people wouldn’t have considered killing Hitler harmful on the balance, but Hitler would have considered being killed harmful to himself!)
    .
    Countries (including our) have military intelligence, military tactics and try to develop military weapons. As you observe, it is naive to think China, the US or anyone else would never conduct experiments to conduct biological warfare. It’s also naive to think countries never violate treaties of agreements. And it’s naive to think all countries are 100% transparent. In some cases, doing these things is not illegal. Nearly all military operations are potentially harmful to someone.
    .
    So the notion of China funding military work to develop bioweapons is not a crackpot theory even if it is, in some sense, a “conspiracy”.
    .
    In the end: “That’s just a conspiracy theory” is not a convincing argument. It’s certainly not a scientific one. There is no scientific principle that says conspiracies do not occur!
    .
    You really do have to say why this conspiracy theory is unlikely to claim to debunk it.

  19. Tom Scharf,
    ““Such (GOF) research, he explained, is different from enhancing viruses that affect people.”
    .
    Really? “…enhancing viruses that affect people” sure sounds like gain of function to me. Maybe he should explain the difference…. clearly, with no weasel words.

  20. Mark,
    I was going to add something: The conspiracy part of the “nefarious” branch of the lab leak theory is also not one that can be falsified by virologists (or at least not by them alone.) The reason is that many motives, choices and so on fall in the domain of of the intelligence community and military intelligence in particular.

    So, for example, when Andersen is claiming that the “nefarious” actors would have used a SARS backbone and a mutation that is optimal for ACE, he is guessing at the motives and the range of military or political strategies the “nefarious” might have.
    .
    That’s assessment is not in the domain ofvirology. It’s not even science.

  22. SteveF,Tom

    “Such (GOF) research

    “Such” does the work here. He’s just described a particular application of GOF. That application “is different from enhancing viruses that affect people”. But there are other application of GOF are precisely to enhance viruses to affect people.
    .
    The organization is to make someone not reading carefully think he’s saying GOF is never (or cannot ever be) used to enhance viruses to affect people. But he doesn’t actually say it can’t be used for that purpose nor that using it for that purpose makes the research “not GOF”. It can be used for that purpose. If or when it is, it is still GOF.

  23. lucia,

    My reading is that “Such research” applies to GOF on viruses that already infect humans. There is, AFAICT, no such restriction on using GOF to alter, say, a bat virus to make it able to infect humans. WIV, like a lot of Chinese institutions, has connections to the Chinese Military. The WIV bat lady may not have known what the military was doing so could honestly say that the virus didn’t escape from her lab.

  25. DeWitt,
    That is also my reading: make a non-human pathogen able to infect humans? OK! Make an existing human pathogen worse? Not OK. The words seem chosen to confuse what the US agencies have and have not supported. Weasels would be proud were they so clever with words.
    .
    The simplest and most plausible explanation is that covid 19 escaped the Wuhan lab….. most likely by accident via sick lab workers. It is not clear if it was created by manipulation of related viruses, or if it was an existing pathogen which the lab was investigating, but that is a detail which doesn’t matter much. The lab was working with human pathogens, and one got out and killed several million people.

  27. Bioweapons were a very, very, big deal back in the Cold War days, and the USSR was very good at it. According to available evidence the US abided by the bioweapons ban treaty and the USSR did not. In interviews after the fall of Soviet Union the Soviet scientists said they just assumed the US would not abide by the ban either. Perhaps the US also secretly kept the research going, but no evidence here.
    .
    It should be stated that bioweapons are just a bad choice of a WMD for a lot of reasons, mostly because that disease is likely to come right back into your country eventually. It might make sense for the Norks or ISIS, but not for China, the US, or Russia. One can dream up scenarios where it works but ICBM’s are just a better choice.
    .
    What we don’t really want is for this biotech to become cheap and easy to use. You think ransomware is a problem? The price for not dispersing weaponized smallpox is going to be pretty high.

  28. Tom Scharf

    The price for not dispersing weaponized smallpox is going to be pretty high.

    I’m innoculated. But if they find someway around the vaccine, I’m screwed.

  29. Soviet biological weapons program
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_program
    .
    “Annualized production capacity for weaponized smallpox, for example, was 90 to 100 tons. In the 1980s and 1990s, many of these agents were genetically altered to resist heat, cold, and antibiotics.”
    .
    2002, Engineered monkeypox is vaccine evasive.
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1039129770495563833
    “What neither book can ignore is the most pressing question of all — which is what if somebody, somewhere, has developed a genetically-engineered form of smallpox that can “crash through” all the current vaccines, rendering them useless? A team of Australian researchers has demonstrated how it can be done with a monkey pox.”
    .
    Yeah, science!
    .
    Seriously scary read, won the Pulitzer Prize:
    https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Hand-Untold-Dangerous-Legacy/dp/0307387844

  30. Tom Scharf (Comment #202650): “It should be stated that bioweapons are just a bad choice of a WMD for a lot of reasons, mostly because that disease is likely to come right back into your country eventually.”
    .
    I think that is why anthrax was a popular choice. It does not usually spread person-to-person.
    .
    One could, of course, create a bioweapon and a vaccine, then vaccinate your people and release the virus.
    .
    Or one could engineer a weapon that would attack your enemy’s crops, if they are different from yours.
    .
    But the scariest possibility is some anti-human group getting a hold of something like weaponized monkey pox and releasing it in the hope of indiscriminately killing a few billion people.

  31. MikeM

    .
    I think that is why anthrax was a popular choice. It does not usually spread person-to-person.

    Which tells us that the military would not be looking for something that is optimumally infectious. Other factors matter. You want it to be controllable. (Covid isn’t. It’s to contagious. So it’s problem isn’t that it’s not controllable enough!)

  32. Lucia,
    “That only means those at WIV couldn’t do GOF research on those viruses under this NIH grant.” and “language merely means the NIH didn’t fund a GOF component of research on those bat viruses.”
    Even if WIV closely adhered to these restrictions in the grant, [I doubt that], the NIH money indirectly supported the prohibited research. The grant money paid for indirect costs and that acts as a multiplier for the other money they have. [It keeps their bats alive and pays their power bills.] It’s the same slight of hand chicanery Planned Parenthood uses to pretend to not use Federal money to pay for abortions.

  33. Russell,
    I’m not going to speculate whether the WIV complies. But Grants generally only restrict what you can do with the grant money. They don’t prevent you from getting another grant that pays for something else.
    .
    Of course grants also pay for overhead and so on. That’s not chicanery or sleight of hand.

    It’s also not chicanery when the dance studio where I take lessons charges me $95/lesson, but pays my dance teacher only a portion of that. The owner really does need to pay rent, heating, advertising and other things.

  34. In 2012, 6 workers in an inactive mine the Mojiang mine in Yunnan province became ill and 3 died. Symptoms a lot like the Wuhan virus. They were ill for months and the doctors treating them consulted with the top virologists in China and set blood samples to a number of research labs, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They tested positive for a coronavirus. Presumably, additional samples were collected during the autopsies of those who died. The incident triggered an enormous amount of effort by virologists collecting samples from the mine.
    .
    Then almost nothing. Identification of the genera of the viruses found in the cave. A few partial RNA sequences published. A Chinese language Masters thesis by a doctor who treated the victims and a Chinese language PhD thesis by a grad student who collected samples in the cave.
    .
    An informative discussion of the Masters thesis here:
    https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/a-proposed-origin-for-sars-cov-2-and-the-covid-19-pandemic/

    Same authors discussing the PhD thesis, mostly just confirmation:
    https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/a-chinese-phd-thesis-sheds-important-new-light-on-the-origin-of-the-covid-19-coronavirus/
    I am not endorsing the author’s theory that the virus evolved all the way from bat virus to Wuhan virus in a single infected individual.
    .
    According to Dr. Shi (bat lady) they mostly just stuck all the samples in a freezer. And the illness was caused by a fungus. If you’ll buy that, I have some real nice ocean front property for sale in Kansas.

  35. That’s interesting MikeM.
    .
    First it’s worth noting that this is a third category of “leak”. It is neither in the “nefarious” branch nor in the intentionally engineered branch. Which of course makes it an example of how you need to actually brain storm a lot of possible types of leaks before you can evaluate the probability. Andersen doesn’t seem to have done so.
    .
    I can’t begin to evaluate their speculation about the virus undergoing tons of serial passage and possibly recombination due to co-infection in the miners lungs. That seems like a key item in their speculation and is a scientific point that would be in the domain of virologists. . For me that particular speculation which seems key to this theory becomes a question: Can that happen? Yes? No? Dunno? Now maybe virologists will say this can’t happen and explain why. It might turn out to be blindingly obvious to them. But the theory is out there now, so they may have to do it.
    .
    Lots of the other stuff is in the domain of “politics” generally or whatever the word is for knowing “how things happen” in the world in general. It”s not virology. No one needs to be a virologist to know the answer to “Would scientists who study bat viruses specifically to understand the possibility they could jump to humans be interested in bat viruses that may have killed miners? ” The answer is obviously yes. “Did they get and store virus extracted from the thymus gland of a miner?” That’s sort of a “police work” or “auditing train” question. It’s not a ‘science’ or ‘virology’ question.
    .
    But really, you can’t discount the lab leak theory by trying to limit it to a very narrow theory that also specifies a whole bunch of other things. At it’s broadest the lab leak theory is merely that it leaked from a lab.

    (BTW: I just got blocked by the spam filter. Time for a new spam filter.)

  38. test?
    TEST
    links

    I know the voices aren’t real, but man… do they come up with some great ideas!

    Denier, fast food, crap, climate change, right wing, progressive, Trump, conspiracy theories, mercury, UFO.

  43. lucia (Comment #202658): “I can’t begin to evaluate their speculation about the virus undergoing tons of serial passage and possibly recombination due to co-infection in the miners lungs.”
    .
    Indeed. The same would apply to forced passage in cell culture or in humanized mice, although cell culture would not produce adaptions to avoid the immune system.
    .
    I can see how such things could greatly accelerate adaptive mutations, but not other kinds of mutations. I think there are four basic groups. One is “synonymous mutations” that change a codon to a different codon for the same amino acid. That usually has no effect at all on protein function. So such mutations would seem to provide a “clock” that is largely independent of environment (not that I really know). Non-synonymous mutations could be adaptive, neutral, or maladaptive. The last would get screened out and the first selected for.
    .
    So a virus in an environment for which it is well adapted should have almost entirely synonymous and neutral mutations. A virus in a new environment would be subject to intense evolutionary pressure and so should have a lot of adaptive mutations. So I think that would produce a higher ratio of non-synonymous to synonymous mutations. Then that might be a way of exploring the recent evolutionary history of the virus.

  44. lucia (Comment #202658): “No one needs to be a virologist to know the answer to “Would scientists who study bat viruses specifically to understand the possibility they could jump to humans be interested in bat viruses that may have killed miners? ” The answer is obviously yes.”
    .
    Exactly. Given the stated purpose of the work being done at WIV, it would have been professional malpractice to not exhaustively study the Mojiang virus, whether it was RaTG13 or something else. And given their reasons of doing gain of function research, they would have done gain of function research on that virus.
    .
    So what would that research have consisted of? Well, they have told us, in general. They were replacing the RBM with ones from other viruses, they were inserting furin cleavage groups, and they were doing passage through cell cultures and/or humanized mice.
    .
    That could explain the bit of RNA from a pangolin coronavirus. In 2017, a virus was isolated from pangolins with an unusual RBM. Just the sort of thing that would have caught the attention of people swapping RBMs between viruses.
    .
    So it would have been perfectly natural for the WIV scientists to take the Mojiang virus, replace the RBM with the pangolin version, insert a furin cleavage group, and passage it through cell culture or humanized mice. It strains credulity to claim that was not at least on their to do list. And then a virus with those properties happened to appear in the vicinity of the WIV. Not hard to figure out from whence it came.

  45. Kristian G. Andersen
    https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1399852467873927173?s=20
    .
    “As I have said many times, we seriously considered a lab leak a possibility.

    However, significant new data, extensive analyses, and many discussions led to the conclusions in our paper.

    What the email shows, is a clear example of the scientific process.”
    .
    The past tense in “considered” is noted.
    .
    Maybe, but this is just an argument from (self) authority. It looks like a changing judgment call. There is no way to evaluate the evidence that led to this conclusion without intimate knowledge of the subject. Once it becomes highly politicized then science judgments are less trustworthy. Another example of why ‘S’cience should have taken trust in institutions much more seriously as they let their activists run amok, especially in the social sciences.

  46. It seems clear that the WIV never published mist of the work they did on the viruses from the Mojiang mine. Why? It seems the WIV was engaged in both military and civilian research. So maybe the Chinese military thought the research might lead to something “useful”. That could lead to secrecy even if the military had no intention of making bioweapons; they might have just been concerned that some other country might use the results for nasty purposes.
    .
    Of course, if you want to go full conspiracy theory you might speculate that they developed the Wuhan virus some time ago, developed a vaccine, vaccinated most of their population (except for people in Wuhan who needed to be sacrificed for the greater good), then deliberately released the virus in Wuhan. Just saying.

  47. Tom,
    The tweet you quote is what I characterize as a totally uninformative answer.
    *new data: What new data?
    * extensive analyses: What analyses? Heck what sort of analyses?
    * many discussion: What was the content of these discussions.

    Yes, new data, extensive analyses and discussion is involved in science. But that doesn’t tell us what specifically looked like engineered at first sight nor what data or analyses made them change their minds. (Heck, the paper doesn’t even inform the reader they initially thought it appeared inconsistent with evolution! Not that they need to do so, but it would actually be useful if they addressed the features that look engineered and then explain why they think there is a low probability they were engineered.)

  48. MikeM,
    Preliminary work often doesn’t get published.
    Also, after the GOF civet work kicked off a brou-ha-ha leading to a moratorium on GOF work in 2013, Chinese labs may be careful about publishing. They may have internal secure type publications. I think we do.

  49. I assume the new data is in the paper he refers to. Too lazy to go read it and probably can’t evaluate it anyway. What seems likely is the paper is just an argument that it naturally evolved given existing evidence, and not anything definitive. The “lab leaked a naturally evolved virus because of unsafe behavior” theory is still maintained no matter what. They are probably arguing against an engineered virus, sometimes the conflation of these theories is intentional, they are very different.

  51. Long read on the lab leak theory, interesting. Very damning if true. These are potentially major revelations.
    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
    “In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.
    In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.””
    .
    This takes the illness report a step further, unclear how trustworthy it is:
    .
    “A small group within the State Department’s Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance bureau had been studying the Institute for months. The group had recently acquired classified intelligence suggesting that three WIV researchers conducting gain-of-function experiments on coronavirus samples had fallen ill in the autumn of 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak was known to have started.
    As officials at the meeting discussed what they could share with the public, they were advised by Christopher Park, the director of the State Department’s Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, not to say anything that would point to the U.S. government’s own role in gain-of-function research, according to documentation of the meeting obtained by Vanity Fair.
    Some of the attendees were “absolutely floored,” said an official familiar with the proceedings. That someone in the U.S. government could “make an argument that is so nakedly against transparency, in light of the unfolding catastrophe, was…shocking and disturbing.”

  52. lucia (Comment #202671): “Preliminary work often doesn’t get published.”
    .
    I think it clear that they did a lot more than “preliminary work”. For instance, sequencing the viruses they found, especially the one that infected the miners.
    .
    lucia: “Also, after the GOF civet work kicked off a brou-ha-ha leading to a moratorium on GOF work in 2013, Chinese labs may be careful about publishing. They may have internal secure type publications.”
    .
    Indeed. If you are up to no good, then you do not want others to know what you are doing. But there are lots of other reasons to keep your cards close to your chest. Avoiding unfair criticism is one. Another is to keep bad actors from learning stuff that they could put to nefarious use; an extreme example would be secrets related to making nuclear bombs. Yet another reason would be that you hope to gain an advantage from knowing what others do not; I imagine that lots of industrial research never gets published.
    .
    It seems to me that the important thing is that they clearly did a lot of work that they kept to themselves. So the absence of published gain of function work on the Mojiang virus, or related viruses, is not evidence that such work was not done.

  53. Tom

    As the NSC tracked these disparate clues, U.S. government virologists advising them flagged one study first submitted in April 2020. Eleven of its 23 coauthors worked for the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the Chinese army’s medical research institute. Using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs, then studied their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. As the NSC officials worked backward from the date of publication to establish a timeline for the study, it became clear that the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic even started. The NSC officials were left wondering: Had the Chinese military been running viruses through humanized mouse models, to see which might be infectious to humans?

  54. The Vanity Fair piece is meticulously documented and names a lot of names. This article is (or should be) a death knell for GOF even if it is only mostly true. The overriding theme is that the US government and virology downplayed a lab leak (really a pre-cover-up) in order to avoid having their own GOF research examined.
    “Ebright likened Daszak’s model of research—bringing samples from a remote area to an urban one, then sequencing and growing viruses and attempting to genetically modify them to make them more virulent—to “looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.” Moreover, Ebright believed that Daszak’s research had failed in its stated purpose of predicting and preventing pandemics through its global collaborations.”
    .
    Academic p***ing match to be sure, but Daszak’s behavior is looking rather self interested to the point of dangerously untrustworthy. I don’t want that guy anywhere near my taxpayer revenue. This guy should be fired. Only person from the US who made the cut on the WHO investigation into the covid origin was … Daszak.
    .
    “They paid one visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they met with Shi Zhengli, as recounted in an annex to the mission report. One obvious demand would have been access to the WIV’s database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, which had been taken offline. At an event convened by a London organization on March 10, Daszak was asked whether the group had made such a request. He said there was no need: Shi Zhengli had stated that the WIV took down the database due to hacking attempts during the pandemic. “Absolutely reasonable,” Daszak said. “And we did not ask to see the data…. As you know, a lot of this work has been conducted with EcoHealth Alliance…. We do basically know what’s in those databases. There is no evidence of viruses closer to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13 in those databases, simple as that.”
    In fact, the database had been taken offline on September 12, 2019, three months before the official start of the pandemic, a detail uncovered by Gilles Demaneuf and two of his DRASTIC colleagues.”

  55. I noticed a method to get around some paywalls BTW. Just using “open link in incognito window” works many times, assuming you closed your existing incognito windows. It can be hit or miss. There is an arms race between site developers and Google in detecting incognito windows versus showing a few articles for free for new users.
    .
    But the top secret extension to that method is to open the link the same way, and then quickly hit the “X” to stop the page load which prevents the page from running the paywall check at some sites. YMMV.

  56. Tom Scharf,

    Also from your linked article:

    And yet, in the wake of the Lancet statement and under the cloud of Donald Trump’s toxic racism, which contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S., one possible answer to this all-important question remained largely off-limits until the spring of 2021.

    Toxic racism? Contributed to anti-Asian violence? Oh, puhleeze. I guess they had to put something like that in the article to assign a lot of blame to Trump so their regular subscribers wouldn’t revolt, but still. The problem wasn’t Trump, the problem was toxic TDS which caused those affected to believe the opposite of anything Trump said. It’s still rampant in the Biden administration.

  57. “The 2019 novel coronavirus is a punishment from nature for humanity’s uncivilized habits,” she wrote in a February 2 post on WeChat, a popular social media app in China. “I, Shi Zhengli, guarantee on my life that it has nothing to do with our lab. May I offer some advice to those people who believe and spread bad media rumors: shut your dirty mouths.”

    A punishment from nature. Very scientific! /sarc.

  58. A punishment from nature. Very scientific!

    I thought she was a climate scientist for a second there…

  59. Hummm….
    ““I, Shi Zhengli, guarantee on my life that it has nothing to do with our lab.”
    .
    I note that most murderers claim innocence, no matter the evidence. Claims of innocence mean nothing.
    .
    If you are innocent, act like you are innocent. Show us all the data. Right now. Publish every file and every database. Describe every experiment done on bat coronaviruses over the past 10 years. Describe in detail every genetic manipulation of every virus worked on in the last 8 years. Give us samples from the miners who died in 2012.

  60. SteveF,
    In any investigation, one must keep open the possibilities that
    (a) someone might lie and
    (b) someone might be mistaken.

    A fair amount of the “lab leak” is “rebutted” links to something that merely shows someone in authority denied something.

  61. Lucia wrote: “A fair amount of the “lab leak” is “rebutted” links to something that merely shows someone in authority denied something.”
    .
    Not to worry. The Washington Post, knows how to deal with this:
    .
    2020: Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked
    2021: Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed
    .
    Poof! The WP never considered the lab leak “rebutted”.

  64. Lucia (Comment #202654)
    “”June 2nd, 2021 at 9:07 pm
    Which tells us that the military would not be looking for something that is optimumally infectious. Other factors matter. You want it to be controllable. (Covid isn’t. It’s to contagious. So it’s problem isn’t that it’s not controllable enough!).”
    –
    Wish it were true
    The point is that one would like something optimally infectious, best military results.
    Control is something that can be done with vaccines.
    I.e. develop your buf, develop your control. Immunize your side and bingo.
    –
    By the way how did they develop their vaccine and their testing kits so quickly?

  65. Tracking down a man made virus in another country with a terribly good secret service and records in Chinese would seem difficult enough but there are some hopes.
    .
    How would I do it?
    Genome sequence the original virus [done].
    Cross match with all the non secret corona virus strains being tested in the world and find the closest matches.
    Attempt to get the records of the coronaviruses being worked on in Wuhan.
    Crosscheck all scientific articles by the doctors and scientists involved that indicate they have been working on such strains.
    There may be legitimate published papers in America or China on exactly these matters with linking of the scientists involved.
    Where are and were those other scientists working, what labs?
    –
    Military and secret agency protocols might cover up the darkest deeds but there will be smoke somewhere
    .
    Hope for a whistleblower or 2 , they would have to be incredibly stupid or brave but heh.
    –
    The other area is the pathogenic part of the virus that may have been spliced in. Can we recognise a SARS or other framework. Are there animal experiments showing extra clotting and virulence?.
    All the attention should not be on the simple corona virus itself.
    –
    Why put the 4 amino acid gaps in?
    Is it a recognised technique?
    This could be a recognized technique to join features or it could be a marking code by the labs to say this is human/lab created.
    I would if I was creating things, patent rights and all. Ours not theirs ideas.
    A bit like leaking a document with alterations to different people to see who the spy is.
    –
    Any other suggestions?

  66. angech,
    I have no doubt that the kind of investigation you describe can generate a ‘preponderance of evidence’ of where the virus came from. But I doubt the possibility of whistleblower coming forward unless the are suicidal.
    .
    I think it likely we will never know for certain.

  67. Angech,
    It is very difficult to generalize about what militaries want. The U.S. Air Force flies 39 distinct type of aircraft, as opposed to something ‘optimally deadly’ in one context. Different contexts (different missions) have different objectives and require different tools. What’s useful for close air support is unlikely to be useful for long range stealth bombing. What makes sense for point interceptor makes little sense for reconnaissance, so on. Our Navy sails at least 16 different classes of ship. We shoot over 30 different types of missiles. We drive over 140 different types of land vehicles. Etc.
    .
    The point is, it’s not useful to try to deduce what militaries want or make sweeping assumptions about that. Militaries generally strive to be ready for every imaginable situation.

  68. angech

    The point is that one would like something optimally infectious, best military results.

    And yet they are eager to use anthrax to the point of developing military strains. Which is strong evidence that “your point” is simply untrue. The military might want something optimally infectious in some unknown situation. But we darn well know they want stuff that is not contagious because they spend tons of money developing that. The effort is spent on features other than infectivity. (Ability to disperse and so on.)

  69. angech

    How would I do it?
    Genome sequence the original virus [done].

    Cross match with all the non secret corona virus strains being tested in the world and find the closest matches.

    I think many strains in Wuhan were destroyed.

    Attempt to get the records of the coronaviruses being worked on in Wuhan.

    Database in Wuhan is gone. According to the Atlantic article Shi says it was deleted (or moved elsewhere) after break out of Covid but they think it was really moved sometime earlier in the fall of 2020 before the market outbreak. ( (sept? Nov?) I’d have to look at date to see.)

    Crosscheck all scientific articles by the doctors and scientists involved that indicate they have been working on such strains.

    DRASTIC the informal group seems to have been doing this. Intelligence may also. Not a peep out of people like Dazac or Andersen.

    There is also some confusion because some viruses were renamed for “reasons”.

    There may be legitimate published papers in America or China on exactly these matters with linking of the scientists involved.
    Where are and were those other scientists working, what labs?

    Some of them are writing papers saying it couldn’t have been engineered without discussing whether they have done the steps you mention nor what the outcome was.

  70. Russell Klier,

    Pompeo article:

    NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, an Obama appointee, recently said on Fox News’ “The Story” that he never ruled out a lab leak, but that it matched astrobiologist Carl Sagan’s mantra of “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

    Collins is either suffering from rectocranial inversion or he’s being disingenuous. We’re not talking about Grays, Little Green Men, UFO’s or space aliens building the Egyptian pyramids. Lab leaks of human pathogens are known to have happened multiple times so the claim that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab is hardly extraordinary.

  71. Dewitt,
    Yes. The lab leak claim (and even the nefarious motives one) is not extraordinary.

    * Lab leaks of pathogenic viruses have happened multiple times.
    * Viruses of various sorts were stored in WIV.
    Those two are enough, to make a generic lab leak theory not extraordinary. It’s not enough to prove it happened, but it’s not “extraordinary”.

    On top of it, with respect to other ‘branches’ including the nefarious one:
    * Genetic engineering of the various sorts was happening at WIV.
    * Mouse models with humanized lungs (evidently existed at WIV.)
    * Other animals were used at WIV.
    * Skilled virologists had tools to make changes.

    None of this proves the lab leak. But it’s not “extraordinary”.
    .
    The zoonotic theory is also not close to ‘proven’. It’s circumstantial, and some of the evidence is pretty iffy or at least disputed.

  72. DeWitt,
    Collins is being disingenuous. He is not so dumb as to believe a lab escape is improbable…. or extraordinary.

  73. Angech, Lucia,

    Yes. One easy way to know if something is of interest to a military is — has that military actually pursued that thing. The Soviets did so with anthrax. Anthrax is not contagious..
    Wikipedia has a page which lists twelve different bioagents or pathogens that were part of the Soviet biological weapons program. Different missions (use cases) for anthrax, plague, and staph, different desirable characteristics depending on what the military is trying to accomplish.

  74. lucia (Comment #202694): “The zoonotic theory is also not close to ‘proven’. It’s circumstantial, and some of the evidence is pretty iffy or at least disputed.”
    .
    Is there any evidence for the zoonotic theory? I am not aware of any that rises to the level of iffy or disputed.

    Yes, viruses have jumped species. That is evidence that a zoonotic source is not impossible. But other than that, is there evidence that *this* virus jumped species?

  75. In a military conflict you generally want to destroy the other side’s ability to make war back against you, thus the destruction of the other side’s infrastructure. Biowarfare leaves that structure intact, we managed to keep essential services going just fine during the pandemic. We also had a neutron bomb that Carter vetoed which killed all the citizens but left the infrastructure intact. A bioweapon does has some amount of plausible deniability though, one could pretend they weren’t responsible and it is certainly an effective terror weapon.
    .
    Overall though I just think it is mostly useless given the other offensive weapons on the menu. There was some discussion about “defensive bioweapons” which is basically a superset of GOF in which we develop the counter agents to the other side’s anticipated bioweapons. Stockpiling smallpox vaccines and such.
    .
    I think it is very unlikely this is an intentional bioweapon release, and also unlikely it is an accidental bioweapon release. China’s trajectory is already upward and it just doesn’t have any reason to do this in a sane world. A few decades from now they will potentially be economically and industrially dominant without any silly moves like that.

  76. The evidence for zoonotic theory is also circumstantial. Past releases of similar viruses (SARS, MERS). They have about a 96% DNA match to existing viruses in nature. The breakout occurred in a country where similar natural breakouts have occurred. There are caves full of bats with similar viruses. It’s not a stretch to say this was natural in origin.
    .
    What makes things not so simple is that the breakout occurred 1000 miles from bat caves right next door to coronavirus test labs. We all know this.
    .
    I have been around enough “science” for the past several decades to know that the image of well disciplined intellectuals running around in white lab coats adhering to bullet proof lab safety protocols is a fantasy. These people are just as varied, sloppy, and undisciplined as everyone else.
    .
    A lab leak of a zoonotic virus stored in one of the labs would be the least surprising answer to this investigation IMO. Since we may never know, after we die we can ask God where it came from right after we ask whether OJ really did it.

  77. Tom,

    and also unlikely it is an accidental bioweapon release.

    Do you think this because
    a) You believe it is unlikely that the origin of the pandemic was a leak from the Wuhan lab?
    b) You believe that the virus had nothing to do with CCP military research?
    There is no particular evidence I am aware of that the virus was of military interest. In general though, it can be difficult to know when China’s military is involved with something. Take Huawei for example. Documented evidence of collaboration, abundant official denial. Who can say what’s going on there for sure, other than the CCP.

  78. In a military conflict you generally want to destroy the other side’s ability to make war back against you, thus the destruction of the other side’s infrastructure.

    We wouldn’t say that ‘because a chief military goal is the destruction of the other side’s infrastructure, the US military wouldn’t develop a portable nuclear reactor, since a portable nuclear reactor has little directly to do with destroying infrastructure.’
    So I don’t understand why we would say ‘the Chinese military wouldn’t develop a coronavirus bioweapon, since a coronavirus bioweapon has little to do with destroying infrastructure.’

  79. New cases are down 48% over the past two weeks. They were trending down 30% when the CDC announced no masks necessary for the vaccinated 3 weeks ago which has resulted in a distinct behavior change in my area.
    .
    So less masking has resulted in an acceleration of the downward trend of cases in the US. … crickets …
    .
    One can postulate many things, masks still have high efficacy but other factors are dominant, etc. My point here is this is where science and media selection bias come into play as they just simply ignore clear and important data that refutes their preferred narrative.
    .
    I think masks likely help some, maybe not much, but other factors are much more dominant in the disease spread.
    .
    Also the “we will never reach herd immunity” crowd has gone silent, as well as any discussion on where that inflection point might be. Everyone who claimed at least 80% of the population needed to be vaccinated to get into herd immunity have stopped talking. It sure seems once about 50% of the population receives at least one dose cases start to collapse (Israel, UK, US).

  80. Accidental bioweapon release.
    .
    The coronavirus doesn’t seem to be a very good bioweapon, the fatality rate is too low. One could opine this was an interim accident of an ongoing project that was going to also increase the fatality rate but I just think that other viruses are probably better bases for a bioweapon.
    .
    Accidental release of civilian GOF experiments seems more likely for the nefarious engineered virus theory. Maybe the military funded such things to increase their base virology knowledge base for the truly scary stuff.
    .
    I’m certainly no expert in biowarfare.

  81. Sometimes weapons aren’t very good or useful. They still get developed. My go to example for this, the Mark 14 torpedo. There are lots of other examples though.

  82. MikeM

    Is there any evidence for the zoonotic theory? I am not aware of any that rises to the level of iffy or disputed.

    It depends what you count as evidence.

    * The first major outbreak was “near animals”. That’s circumstantial. It may also be that the first cases was that guy in November or even the three researchers who may or may not have gotten sick.

    * zoonotic jumps can and have happened.

    * whether evolution of the sort that we’ve seen is in favor of zoonotic or lab leak appears to be disputed.

    * Zoonotic supporters seem to think this supposedly having to undergo “serial passage” is evidence for natural. But they don’t seem to fill in the gaps in the argument this points to “natural”. It appears that’ could have happened a couple of ways. The one guy now claims it could have happened in miners. So we need an argument that he’s wrong. Others claim that humanized mice exists.So wee need an argument that they don’t exist or WIV couldn’t have had the early enough.

    To me, arguments for both sound circumstantial. Mostly the “zoontic” one seems to be based on “it’s happened that way lots of times” and “it’s not impossible this time”.

  83. Huh. There is this though.
    https://nypost.com/2021/06/04/chinese-scientist-filed-covid-vaccine-patent-after-contagion-emerged-report/

    A Chinese Communist Party military scientist who got funding from the National Institutes of Health filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine in February last year — raising fears the shot was being studied even before the pandemic became public, according to a new report.

    The guy died under ‘mysterious circumstances.’ I am honestly starting to wonder about PLA involvement.
    .
    [Edit: Has this just not been reported, or has all this been in the news and I just had my head up my butt? Nevermind, rhetorical..

    3. Secret military activity at the WIV:
    …
    Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.

    link here.]

  85. lucia,

    What is wrong with circumstantial evidence? That is pretty much the only evidence possible in this case.
    .
    I must admit that I only just now learned how broad the definition of “circumstantial evidence” is:

    Other examples of circumstantial evidence are fingerprint analysis, blood analysis or DNA analysis of the evidence found at the scene of a crime.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstantial_evidence#Forensic_evidence

    the common metaphor for the strongest possible evidence in any case—the “smoking gun”—is an example of proof based on circumstantial evidence

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstantial_evidence#Validity_of_circumstantial_evidence

  86. mark,

    Military involvement at WIV has been in the news. At least if you watch Fox.

  87. MikeM

    lucia,

    What is wrong with circumstantial evidence?

    Nothing. But you asked if there was evidence. I knew the evidence was going to be circumstancial. I know some people come back and say that’s not really evidence. Or whatever.
    .
    Lots of people seem to count circumstantial evidence in favor of their preferred theory but call it “not evidence” when given in favor of a theory they don’t like. So I prefer to label it.
    .
    A smoking gun is not as strongest possible evidence. Stronger evidence: video of the act accompanied by eyewitness testimony from multiple observers.

  88. Tom Scharf,
    “I think masks likely help some, maybe not much, but other factors are much more dominant in the disease spread.”
    .
    Seeing as that there isn’t a pinch of difference between mask-mandate states and non-mask mandate states, if masks have any effect at all, it has to be miniscule compared to all those other factors. Masks just made some people feel better…. like they were somehow contributing to ‘stopping’ the pandemic. They weren’t, they were making themselves feel better.
    .
    After the Massachusetts mask mandates were removed, there were a few days were 10% to 20% continued using masks. I’d guess it is more like 1% to 2% today. Oddly enough, a few commercial establishments continue to require employees to wear masks, but not customers.

  90. Phone test
    Hmm. Having problems posting. No post from my workstation gets through, but my phone works.

  91. Clearly the PLA is waging cyberwarfare on the Blackboard! Not..

    But seriously. After reading about the goings on at a Canadian high security viral research lab, I feel like the weight of coincidence is becoming a bit much.
    I’ll never get the links right on my phone, Google ‘infectious disease scientists at Canada’s high-security lab collaborated with China’. Unlike COVID discussions, the facts in that story appear to be undisputed.
    I think WIV was doing bio weapons research.

  92. test from my laptop.
    Canada link
    Other canada link
    I’m sure our intelligence people know the story Hadju isn’t telling, I expect it has bearing on the reported suspicion about the Wuhan lab. But even without that, it’s enough to shift my estimate of probability that PLA and WIV are up to something they wanted secret at WIV involving viruses. What else besides bioweapons.
    Shrug.

  93. The spam filter doesn’t admit to having blocked anything from your two most recent IP addresses. It doesn’t admit to denying a comment from anyone named “mark”. (It doesn’t have a feature that shows me the content of comments that were denied.)

  95. Tom Scharf (Comment #202699)

    “”I have been around enough “science” for the past several decades to know that the image of well disciplined intellectuals running around in white lab coats adhering to bullet proof lab safety protocols is a fantasy. These people are just as varied, sloppy, and undisciplined as everyone else.”

    Well said

  96. mark bofill (Comment #202714)
    “Clearly the PLA is waging cyberwarfare on the Blackboard! Not..”
    –
    Google [Bing] and Mozilla do
    –
    The easiest way for me to get to the Blackboard is via WUWT list of contacts and click.
    WUWT is only marginally blocked or tainted by Google.
    –
    On the other hand when I type in Lucia or the Blackboard it does not come up in a readily accessible source.. I might get 3 pages of reference to Blackboards , a grudging note that Lucia or her site exists but no easily accessible link to Lucia’s site.
    –
    [I could save it to the Bookmark Toolbar but that would involve work.
    It also does not help those casually trying to access this site.
    –
    JC at Climate etc has in between problems access to the site but a lot of misleading links to avoid.

  97. I can easily imagine the Chinese PLA infiltrating Canada’s most secure biolab, it’s a bit strange that they knowingly allow it to happen. Canada can of course choose to do this. I think that it is crazy naïve. The Chinese steal everything they find, everything. It’s their ideology of communal intellectual property, it’s why they disrespect patents and copyrights. They don’t even think it is wrong.

  98. With regard to my first comment angech (Comment #202687)
    June 4th, 2021 at 12:54
    –
    “By the way how did they develop their vaccine and their testing kits so quickly?”

    Thanks to mark bofill (Comment #202706)
    June 4th, 2021 at 11:34 am
    https://nypost.com/2021/06/04/chinese-scientist-filed-covid-vaccine-patent-after-contagion-emerged-report/
    The guy died under ‘mysterious circumstances.’

    There you are Steve F
    –
    Only a day after saying it the proof pops up.

    SteveF (Comment #202689)

    ” But I doubt the possibility of whistleblower coming forward unless they are suicidal.”
    .-
    I think I agreed with you

    “Hope for a whistleblower or 2 , they would have to be incredibly stupid or brave.”
    –
    We are ahead of the curve.

  99. MB – Militaries generally strive to be ready for every imaginable situation.
    –
    The German field marshal, known as Moltke the Elder, believed in developing a series of options for battle instead of a single plan, saying “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.” Today, “no plan survives contact with the enemy” is the popular …
    No battle plan escapes the first contact with the enemy

  100. lucia (Comment #202692)

    Thanks for discussing those points.

    I am wracking my brain to think of extra support or proof.
    If it exists it will be like those nefarious FBI e mails that went nowhere.
    That is all modern systems work on computers. All data has to be backed up in case of Cyber attack.
    Doubly or triply so where it is highly confidential.
    Working on a need to know basis is fine until you end up shooting guys on the same side due to lack of information.
    –
    The corollary of this is that if you want to hide what you have
    done when it exists in a thousand blockchain type links [cross referenced published papers] [years of research at these medical /viral Fauci supported places] you will end up having to wipe out decades of vital research.
    –
    Who pays if a US supported Chinese military developed infectious bio weopon accidentally escapes from a Lab?
    USA ?
    China?
    WHO?
    –
    Sad answer no one
    Lots of blame
    Lots of demands for reparation.
    Too big to fail.
    –
    Since no one wants the blame it will be covered up, swept under the carpet with Elvis.
    The only loose ends are people.
    Scientists and reporters.
    The guy died under ‘mysterious circumstances.’
    Look out for a rash of a new rare covid side effect. People involved with it will tend to die much earlier than others.
    Particularly Journalists and scientists.

  102. Angech,
    One could just type ‘rankexploits.com/musings’ in; that gets me here straightaway anyway.

    [Edit: Sorry for the trouble Lucia, but thank you. I can post from my workstation again.]

  103. angech,
    I have the same trouble trying to get to The Blackboard via google. I also just google WUWT and use the link.

  105. Mark,
    Thanks for letting me know.
    The spam plugs are “download and activate”. Yes, one could plow through the code and try to figure out how each works. But I’m not going to even try (and likely would not succeed if I did.)
    .
    I’d like an option that first checks if a name/email combination has had more than “n” comments approved. If yes: let it through. If no, then do all the other checks. This might seem pointless but it would basically just reduce the number of requests for approval I get for “first” comments. It might sometimes get a ‘real’ first commenter, but regulars would get through.

  106. This business about Zhou Yusen and a patent application in Feb. 2020 does not look meaningful. There appears to be just one report on it, so the story is not even confirmed. Even if he applied for a vaccine related patent, that does not mean he had a vaccine. It might be that he had an idea that he thought might be useful in making a vaccine, so he filed in the hope that someone would pay him for it.
    .
    I did find what appears to be an independent report that he has died. It happens. So far as I know, “died under mysterious circumstances” means exactly the same thing as “died” unless the circumstances are specified.
    .
    So without more details, I can’t give any credence to the story. It appears to have originated in The Australian and seems to be pay walled. So maybe the original includes details that have not made it into stories about the story.

  108. Browsers have these things called bookmarks for frequently, or not so frequently, visited web sites. Unless you’ve turned it off or clear it every time you close the browser, there’s also a feature called ‘history’ too.

  109. Let’s try this again after having been bit by the latest spam plugin.

    In a WSJ opinion piece on why Biden is meeting with Putin (he doesn’t really answer the question) there’s this:

    Notice what complicates the world’s search for Covid’s origins: the likelihood that China would cover up even a purely natural emergence of the virus. As implausible as it seems to us, authoritarian regimes as a general matter cannot allow the existence of any unflattering fact that can’t be blamed on outside forces. Doing so creates a vulnerability that opens the door to regime change. [emphasis added]

  110. The new plugin was much too aggressive on “spam words”. It blocked DeWitt for use of the word “promise”. I turned that feature off. I’m looking to see what other people got blocked for.

  112. Yeah. It seemed to have gotten you, MikeM and Dewitt for “bad words”. Their list is ridiculously long and over-restrictive. Yes “promise” does appear in lots of ads. But it’s used to frequently by normal people to be used to flag spam.

    It looks like once blocked, people tend to try again which makes this spam blocker think you must be bad.

    I cleared out their “bad words”. I’ll be watching other things.

  114. Mike M, fair enough. I don’t think Zhou changes much of anything anyway.

  115. Mark,
    The list of “bad words” also includes “Bargain”, “Cash”, “Claims”, “Cures”, “Deal”, “Miracle”, “Obligation”, “Search engine”, “winner”, “urgent”, “undisclosed”, “unlimited” along with other words.
    .
    I do recognize many of those do appear frequently in “spammy” emails. The problem is they also appear in lots of discussions.
    .
    I just took them all out. I do have my own list. But in my opinion, most “bad words” should have an option of going to moderation unless accompanied by some additional suspicious factor.

  116. The Chinese vaccines are stinking it up:
    .
    Early adopters of Chinese vaccines see case surges; China plows ahead anyway
    China is now giving 20 million doses a day despite low efficacy.
    https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/china-ramps-up-vaccinations-as-other-countries-back-away-from-its-vaccines/
    .
    It is striking how little criticism the Chinese government gets in the American media. The Chinese basically don’t answer questions and throw out any journalists who question their official narrative. Maybe the US media think this narrative is already built in and no need to repeat a criticism everyone already knows is true. This never stopped the US media from repeating other narratives they like ad nauseum though.

  117. Tom Scharf,
    “It is striking how little criticism the Chinese government gets in the American media.”

    Wait, what? The “American media” is dominated/controlled by pretty extreme leftists. It would be striking if the Chinese government received any criticism at all from USA MSM. When reporters are dedicated leftists, every story is distorted to support a leftist agenda. The CCP is the darling of those on the left in the USA. This is not going to change any time soon.

  118. I think a surge in new case rate is far more indicative of lack of effectiveness than antibody titer. Many people who have tested positive for the virus have low initial antibody titer or it declines to low levels in a few months. However, there is still little evidence that convalescent immunity is not effective long after antibody levels decline.

    So one thing Biden may want from Putin is cooperation on climate change. However, fossil fuels represent Russia’s major source of foreign exchange and, given the Nord Stream II project, they are not likely to give it up soon. Given German consumer electric power costs, we aren’t likely to see them give up household use of methane either. And that’s not to mention that Russia would likely benefit from a warming planet, what with Siberia and the potential for a longer, if not year round, shipping season in the Arctic Ocean.

  119. I did not try to post twice. It just happened.
    .
    Now things are really strange. The site host informed me of a double post….. which was subsequently disappeared. No idea what is happening.

  121. I don’t see a note indicating you were blocked. But this one at least has an “allow” list based on emails. So I’ve added you to that. If that prevents you being blocked I can subsequently find everyone who has commented in the past year and white list them.
    .
    That’s feature exists for this plugin but not others.

  123. DeWitt,
    Putin holds Biden in contempt, and not without reason…. Biden is a babbling early Alzheimer’s patient, and Putin knows it. Nothing of substance will come out of it.

  124. SteveF,

    Biden’s puppeteers should be aware of this, so the question is still, why did they set this up in the first place. Putin appears to be the one who benefits from a summit, not Biden or the US. Yet the TDS sufferers still insist that Putin was manipulating Trump, apparently because Trump did not make personal attacks on Putin. Yet under Trump, Ukraine received lethal weapons instead of Obama’s blankets and MRE’s and Trump tried to block Nord Stream II while Biden effectively approved it.

  125. Being a Democrat inoculates you from Russia disinformation, so its OK to do a Russian reset now. Only morons fall for clumsy Russian attempts at political misinformation, not intellectually sophisticated people.
    .
    It’s not like one could get about 5 people posing as Trumpsters to state that China had a lab leak and that would result in that hypothesis being rejected by the entirety of the media for over a year. Intellectually sophisticated people would never fall for such a simpleton plan, they can’t be manipulated that easily. They are rational seekers of truth, following the evidence. If you need evidence of this, just ask them, they will say they are very wise and just. They make sure and tell everyone this all the time to make sure we all understand.

  126. WP: We may never know where the virus came from. But evidence still suggests nature.
    Labs like the one in Wuhan are essential to preparing for future pandemics
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/virus-origins-nature-lab/2021/06/03/dd50eb62-c4a9-11eb-93f5-ee9558eecf4b_story.html
    .
    This article from a couple virologists is both better than most and really terrible at the same time. On the good side they make actually arguments with evidence of a natural origin instead of assertions and appeals to self authority. This is mostly about an engineered virus which they claim would be designed differently, they barely touch on a lab escape of a natural virus. At least they make a technical argument instead of immediate dismissal based on messenger.
    .
    On the bad side is they make some extremely tenuous arguments that gain of function types of research somehow resulted in mRNA vaccines, with Olympic level hand waving. Line up the strawman and knock them down.
    .
    “…it’s unclear that we’ll ever identify a theory that satisfies everyone as to how SARS-CoV-2 emerged. Ironically, given the recent prominence of the lab escape theory, the questions the world wants answered about the virus — and the astonishingly fast development of the vaccines that can quash the pandemic — depend entirely on research conducted in labs like the Wuhan Institute of Virology and across the world over the past several decades.”
    .
    If someone is arguing for the elimination of virology, please raise your hand.

  127. The covid anti-lottery.
    .
    Jon Rahm, one of the world’s best golfers, chooses not get vaccinated, tests positive yesterday for covid (asymptomatic) when leading by 6 strokes, has to withdrawal from the tournament, and forfeits a likely $1.7M payday. Ouch.
    .
    https://www.espn.com/golf/story/_/id/31573312/jon-rahm-forced-withdraw-memorial-tournament-6-shot-lead-positive-covid-19-test
    “Levinson would not disclose whether Rahm had received the COVID-19 vaccine. But under tour protocols that align with CDC guidelines, players who are fully vaccinated are no longer subject to weekly testing. Levinson also said that vaccinated players would not be subject to the contact tracing that Rahm was part of this week.”
    “Levinson said that the PGA Tour membership is slightly above 50% fully vaccinated.”

  128. Tom Scharf (Comment #202755): “they make actually arguments with evidence of a natural origin instead of assertions and appeals to self authority. This is mostly about an engineered virus which they claim would be designed differently”
    .
    That sounds like the bogus arguments put forward by Daszak and company to stomp on the lab leak theory in early 2020.
    .
    Tom Scharf: “On the bad side is they make some extremely tenuous arguments that gain of function types of research somehow resulted in mRNA vaccines, with Olympic level hand waving. Line up the strawman and knock them down.”
    .
    In other words, they made arguments that were obviously garbage and other that were less obvious.

    But I am just guessing. I don’t subscribe to the WaPo, so I can’t read the article. Or maybe it is that I refuse to bend the knee to Google.

  133. Dueling articles. At least the arguments are getting more refined and are forcing the discussion.
    .
    The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak
    The Covid-19 pathogen has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus.
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-science-suggests-a-wuhan-lab-leak-11622995184
    .
    “In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus.
    Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.

    Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?”
    .
    “There is additional scientific evidence that points to CoV-2’s gain-of-function origin. The most compelling is the dramatic differences in the genetic diversity of CoV-2, compared with the coronaviruses responsible for SARS and MERS.

    Both of those were confirmed to have a natural origin; the viruses evolved rapidly as they spread through the human population, until the most contagious forms dominated. Covid-19 didn’t work that way. It appeared in humans already adapted into an extremely contagious version.”
    ‘
    “The presence of the double CGG sequence is strong evidence of gene splicing, and the absence of diversity in the public outbreak suggests gain-of-function acceleration. The scientific evidence points to the conclusion that the virus was developed in a laboratory.”

  134. Mr. Manchin, a Democrat, wrote: “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act. Furthermore, I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster.”
    .
    This guy is the real thing, an actual moderate. He does vote left most of the time, but he isn’t going to let party line crazy get through. He deserves some credit because the usual suspects are already crapping all over him.
    .
    NYT: “The bill, which all the other Senate Democrats had supported and the party had portrayed as an urgent effort to preserve American democracy”
    .
    I am so sick and tired of this “preserving democracy” gibberish, it is moronic. In this case the left is selling a party line vote to override the states constitutional ability to set their own voting laws as “preserving democracy”. This narrative is like some kind of religious chant by a sycophantic choir at this point. What a bunch of self indulgent dolts.

  135. Tom Scharf,

    It’s not about preserving democracy, it’s about creating one. The federal republic as created by the Constitution is anathema to progressives. Hence their opposition to the Electoral College. They want the US to be more like New York where upstate New York is irrelevant to state government thanks to the Supreme Court’s questionable application of the one man, one vote rule to both houses of a bicameral state legislatures.

  136. Tom Scharf (Comment #202764): “The presence of the double CGG sequence is strong evidence of gene splicing”
    .
    CGG would be one of the codons for arginine. The double CGG would be the double arginine in the furin cleavage group. The furin cleavage group is not found in bat coronaviruses, appears to have been inserted into the genetic code of the virus, and it is known that the WIV people were doing such insertions.

    That is not just a smoking gun. It is fingerprints on the bullets. The central evidence in the Nicholas Wade piece.
    .
    Tom Scharf: “the absence of diversity in the public outbreak suggests gain-of-function acceleration”.
    .
    That was pointed out over a year ago by Alina Chan. As far as I am aware, It was the first scientific evidence to lift the lab leak theory above the level of plausible speculation.

  137. We follow the science (unless it conflicts with an important narrative like lockdowns and mask mandates). If we don’t like the science because it conflicts with something we want to do, we attack the messengers, create straw men and other logical fallacies which the press swallow whole.

  138. The thing about the CGG sequence issue is that it’s a probabalistic statement that doesn’t involve speculating about human research motives. In contrast the “Andersen” like speculation about what virologists “would have done” is based on speculating on human research motives.
    .
    Now, virologists might be able to be informed about what virologists might prefer doing if they were the only ones dictating what happens. Even that has some risks because even virologists can’t necessarily know what will be SOP 5 years from now. That’s partly because some methods under development or being used will not be reported yet.
    .
    We know that virologists were supposedly shocked when some GOF work was reported in 201x. That lead to debate and a moratorium on certain work.
    .
    But even if they were perfect at reading the minds of other virologists, not all decisions about what to do are made by virologists. Virologists are funded by someone else. That can be politicians of various sorts who have military and economic motives. Governments have intelligence branches, actual militaries and so on.

  140. lucia,

    I thought the wet market(s) had been ruled out as the source some time ago. There were too many early cases that couldn’t be connected to it. It’s possible some people hung onto that scenario long after it became untenable because it fit the zoonotic narrative.

    But it is another nail in the coffin.

  141. The lack of bats at the wet market has been known since shortly after it was suggested as the point of origin.
    .
    From what I have been able to find, the Chinese mostly do not regard bats as food. When they are on the menu, it is megabats not microbats. And Hubei is not one of the provinces where bats are on the menu.
    .
    The fact that people are still talking about the wet market is indicative of the massive disinformation campaign that has been implemented. That theory has been thoroughly discredited since early 2020.

  142. DeWitt,

    I thought the wet market(s) had been ruled out as the source some time ago.

    The wet market is still pushed as evidence for “natural” by many.
    .
    MikeM,
    I think many people said the doubted there were many bats at the market. But this is an actual inventory based on people who were studying a disease and looking for paths at precisely the time that Covid would be supposedly springing at the wet market.
    .

    That theory has been thoroughly discredited since early 2020.

    Rest assured there are plenty of people who disagree with our diagnoses of “thoroughly discredited”.

  143. lucia,

    The wet market is still pushed as evidence for “natural” by many.

    Many people (apparently) believe the QAnon garbage.

    As I said somewhere above, ‘following the science’ only applies if it supports the narrative. The zoonotic source narrative requires a wet market source, so any evidence that wet markets could not be the source, no matter how solid, is ignored. See also closing elementary school in-person teaching and teachers unions refusing to go back to work until children can be vaccinated.

  144. Not that this necessarily means anything, but.
    Andersen has deleted his twitter account after deleting a bunch of his tweets.

  145. mark,
    I think many people were asking Andersen to explain what precisely he and three others thought meant it was engineered in the first place, and what precisely made them change their minds.
    .
    There is nothing wrong with having a preliminary interpretation you later think is incorrect. There is nothing wrong with changing your mind. But if this is truly based on science, he ought to be able to explain what features change his mind. Linking to that paper just doesn’t do it. Among other things, that paper definitely never discusses why some features might seem engineered initially and why you would decide they weren’t.
    .
    I mean, he did think they looked engineered initially. Why?

  146. Oh. On Andersen, I also wonder if people are asking me about the WSJ article discussing the rarety of CGG-CGG

    In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally.

    I have no idea if it is rare or if that is a smoking gun. But I’m betting
    Andersen is getting asked.

  147. There are probably a lot of people in science who are very naïve about the poison of social media. They decide they like their day job better than being a defender of progressive ‘S’cience on Twitter. He’s one tweet away from ruining his career at this point. Probably a wise decision.

  148. Lucia,

    But if this is truly based on science, he ought to be able to explain what features change his mind.

    Yup.

  149. Mark,
    Admittedly, explaining on twitter is difficult. But he could put together a blog post somewhere. Or create a letter to put up on his academic site. Then he could limit his response on twitter to “I’m putting together a coherent response which I will post within the week.”
    Yeah. It might be annoying. But he really can’t escape these questions now and the non-answer is pretty obvious.

  150. Vox explains the lab leak:
    https://www.vox.com/22453571/lab-leak-covid-19-coronavirus-hypothesis-wuhan-virology-china
    .
    “US officials have been adamant that US funding did not support any gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute, or anywhere in the world. NIH Director Francis Collins said in a May statement that US federal health research agencies have never “approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.”
    .
    The.next.paragraph.
    .
    “Scientists at the Wuhan lab were known to be working with an international team on creating chimeric versions of different coronaviruses to study the potential of a human outbreak, though they say that these chimeric viruses did not increase in pathogenicity and therefore do not constitute gain of function. The chimeras in the experiment were also created in the US, not China. Wuhan Institute researchers also published a paper in 2017 reporting on a bat coronavirus that could be transmitted directly to humans, with researchers creating chimeras of the wild virus to see if they could infect human cells. That study had funding from the US National Institutes of Health.”
    .
    The proverbial can of worms. I cannot believe the media is not going full Trump-Russian-Collusion conspiracy on this. How could they possibly know their chimeras wouldn’t increase transmissibility? Isn’t the ability to infect human cells a definition of increased transmissibility from zero? These are credulous statements.
    .
    “Maybe a few people think that there could’ve been some gain-of-function research, but I’d say that a lot of scientists who are asking for an investigation say that this was a lab accident of a mostly natural, or completely natural, virus,” Chan said.
    .
    Mostly natural virus, mostly peaceful protests. Got it.

  151. Though I surely be mocked for saying this, Ezra Klein leaving Vox did nothing beneficial for the average IQ around that place. I disagree with Klein’s ideology almost diametrically, but that aside the man occasionally wrote political analysis I thought was worth reading.
    .
    Mostly natural… Lord have mercy.
    .
    [Edit: Here Vox originally dismissed the conspiracy theory about the lab leak. *shrug*]

  152. In a Freedom of Information disclosure of Fauci’s emails obtained by Buzzfeed last month, Daszak thanked the White House doctor for pushing back on the theory that covid-19 was man made.

    ‘I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,’ Daszak wrote in April 2020.
    Halso sposored an influential letter to the Lancet

    The Pentagon gave $39 MILLION to Dr. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance – the charity that funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab accused of being the source of the outbreak, federal data reveals

    Federal data seen by DailyMail.com astralia reveals The Pentagon gave $39 million to EcoHealth Alliance, which funded a lab in Wuhan, China, between 2013 and 2020

  153. Andersen is probably bailing out because his “change of mind” was likely motivated more by political considerations than science, and he doesn’t want that brought to light. He probably is deleting email messages as well, although that may be very difficult, since there are likely many copies not under his control. If it turns out that political considerations actually caused him to change his story, then his career may be over.
    .
    Any virologist looking at the covid-19 calamity would likely conclude that if the virus was an existing natural strain that escaped from a lab, then virology as a field would be damaged, but if the virus was created in a lab and escaped, then virology as a field of study would be destroyed. Conflicts of interest often cause people to do bad things, and scientists are no more saints than the rest of humanity. The head of the US non-profit that worked closely with and funded the WIV became part of the ‘investigative team’ sent to Wuhan, and organized a published letter declaring covin-19 could only have jumped from an animal. Nobody in virology seemed to care about that blatant conflict of interest, which tells me all I need to know about those working in virology.
    .
    Fauci splitting hairs over what constitutes ‘gain of function’ is symptomatic of his dishonesty. Modifying a known pathogen is gain of function, but creating completely new strains, and making them infect human cells (or humanized cells)….thus creating completely new pathogens…. is not gain of function? One can only roll their eyes at his mendacity. I hope he is questioned again by Congress, but the Biden administration may not allow that to happen.

  154. The 7-day trailing average of confirmed covid-19 cases in Florida is the lowest since March 29, 2020, and the 7-day trailing average of deaths is now at 18. For the USA, cases have dropped to 14,000 and deaths are at 400. The fat lady is warming up to sing by the 4th of July.

  155. SteveF

    He probably is deleting email messages as well, although that may be very difficult, since there are likely many copies not under his control.

    His whole account may not have been scraped. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t some automatic archiving of conversations by some people.
    .
    Also, once people noticed him deleting, someone may have scraped the remaining stuff. Some people do that.

  156. SteveF,
    We know enough of the emails was political to suspect off-email discussion also included political stuff. On the one hand, Dazac thanking Fauci for countering the lab-leak story isn’t wrong but it leans more political than science. That thank you was by email.
    .
    There are other elements of reported discussion that were political. I think we can be pretty sure that some private conversation over drinks brought up the danger to virology should the lab-leak story be given credence. That could both consciously and unconsciously affect views. Scientists are people. Even if they don’t do it entirely for the money, they still have mortgage payments, kids to send to college and from time to time alimony, child support to pay. Some may even have ‘trophy wives’ or ‘boy toys’ to spend on. 🙂
    .
    This is, of course, no different from lawyers, doctors, engineers, builders, plumbers and so on. At least to some extent people do their jobs “for the money” and that’s true even if there are some lines they won’t go past. Most people in all these jobs think their conflict of interest doesn’t influence their views, but it generally does at least a little.
    .
    In the case of Daszak even if people thought he could set his conflict of interest aside, those who were aware of his collaborations and funding streams should have recognized the strong appearance of a conflict of interest existed. That was sure to cast doubt on objectivity. (And it did. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4119101 ) Surely they should have know to have taken him off the list of inspectors.

  158. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory produced a classified report in May of last year saying that a lab origin was plausible and should be investigated.

    U.S. Report Found It Plausible Covid-19 Leaked From Wuhan Lab
    The 2020 lab report was used by the State Department in its own inquiry during Trump administration

    WASHINGTON—A report on the origins of Covid-19 by a U.S. government national laboratory concluded that the hypothesis claiming the virus leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is plausible and deserves further investigation, according to people familiar with the classified document.

    The study was prepared in May 2020 by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and was drawn on by the State Department when it conducted an inquiry into the pandemic’s origins during the final months of the Trump administration.

    This was at the same time when ‘experts’ were saying that a lab origin was not at all credible, see Lancet and Nature letters, and was a wild conspiracy theory. That resulted in censorship on social media.

  159. I agree [and there may be more!]
    “We know China is hiding something. What we don’t know is what it is hiding and why.
    Beijing could be hiding that a natural virus escaped from the lab.
    Beijing could be hiding that the escaped virus was artificially enhanced, made more contagious and lethal (called “gain of function”).
    Beijing could be hiding the fact that China’s military was involved in this gain-of-function project, or at least in some aspects of the lab’s research.
    Beijing could be hiding that Chinese political leaders knew, early on, that the virus spread from human to human and that it kept this crucial finding secret for months. During that period, Beijing and the WHO were falsely telling the world that the virus could not spread from human to human.
    Beijing could be hiding that Chinese leaders not only knew the virus was contagious, but that they acted on that knowledge by allowing Chinese nationals to travel freely around the world, spreading the disease, while sharply restricting travel within China from Wuhan. And, finally,
    Beijing could be hiding anything and everything simply because that’s how totalitarian regimes operate. They always hide information, control the flow, and prevent outside inspections.”
    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/08/who_loses_when_the_china_bat_cave_implodes.html

  160. Russell,
    Yes. China could be hiding anything. Adding to the list:
    China could be hiding
    * that they have less expertise than people think.
    * they had very little in their database.
    * they have less control and knowledge over what is going on in their labs than they would like the world to think.

  161. Russell Klier (Comment #202800): “Beijing could be hiding that a natural virus escaped from the lab.”
    .
    I don’t believe that one. If it were true, they would know just what the natural virus was and where it was collected. And they would have long since announced the “discovery” of the virus in nature, providing a perfect coverup.

  162. And the whole world accepts China’s silence on the issue. There have been a series of opinions from Team Science that states we shouldn’t make China mad by pressuring them on this issue, or they might not cooperate in the future. Pretty self serving, many of them are no doubt concerned it might affect the level of hero worship going on for science. The conflict of interests do appear to be a problem, so we need some independence. Daszak needs to be as far away as possible.

  163. A natural virus escape from the lab would potentially be covered up, not a discovery in nature. If they knew it was present in the Wuhan lab (or the other lab in China CDC lab in Wuhan which nobody looks at) then they would likely clamp down on all information.
    .
    I still submit that corrupt regimes like this are scared to look even if they are potentially innocent because they can’t be sure their own minions didn’t cover it up for self protection from the regime.
    .
    There will also be legions of conspiracy theorists no matter what information is found (aha, the date on that document looks wrong!, .etc). Any good defense lawyer knows the best defense is public silence.

  164. Tom Scharf,

    I still submit that corrupt regimes like this are scared to look even if they are potentially innocent because they can’t be sure their own minions didn’t cover it up for self protection from the regime.

    And we know that local officials did engage in a cover up, as they always do. See the treatment of Doctor Li Wenliang who went public about a novel viral infection in December, 2019, for example.

  167. Lucia,
    I found the paper poorly written and too long. Protecting the mink industry? The authors are bonkers.

  169. It would appear the P.1 (Brazil) and the newly renamed Delta variant (India, B.1.617.2) are more transmissive than the B117 UK variant. They are gaining in market share over time in US, but not at a super fast rate. It’s a tight race but eventually B117 will be squeezed out even in the US by these variants.
    https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions
    .
    The vaccines (particularly the mRNA) are effective against both, but a lot of effectiveness apparently occurs after the second shot, so keep that in mind.
    .
    It also appears the US is starting to reach a lowish plateau after a long decline, not sure yet, but see some leveling out.

  171. Vaccines highly effective against B.1.617.2 variant after 2 doses
    https://www.gov.uk/government/news/vaccines-highly-effective-against-b-1-617-2-variant-after-2-doses
    .
    “The study found that, for the period from 5 April to 16 May:

    The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 88% effective against symptomatic disease from the B.1.617.2 variant 2 weeks after the second dose, compared to 93% effectiveness against the B.1.1.7 variant

    2 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were 60% effective against symptomatic disease from the B.1.617.2 variant compared to 66% effectiveness against the B.1.1.7 variant

    Both vaccines were 33% effective against symptomatic disease from B.1.617.2, 3 weeks after the first dose compared to around 50% effectiveness against the B.1.1.7 variant”
    .
    No info for J&J, but I think it has been more or less near AstraZeneca in the past.

  172. Tom,
    My first dose was Covishield, the Astra Zeneca clone from India. I chose the Pfizer one (I has a choice) for the second shot on the 28th. Makes sense.

  173. As the pandemic falls in places with lots of vaccinations (and/or cases), I expect reporting of cases and deaths to become less prompt and less accurate. It is almost inevitable. A normal end to a pandemic.
    .
    The headlines in the left/progressive MSM have already shifted away from covid-19, mostly ignoring the now ‘acceptable’ notion that it came from a laboratory in Wuhan China, and instead focusing on how horribly racist is anyone who disagrees with the ‘progressive’ view of the world, and how horrible a country the USA is.
    .
    The left will lose control of both Houses in 2022, and Biden’s puppet masters will become irrelevant.

  175. Steve,

    The left will lose control of both Houses in 2022, and Biden’s puppet masters will become irrelevant.

    Some of the early signs looks promising. I sure hope so. Also looks like Machin and Sinema are holding the line against filibuster repeal [Probably not the right word, repeal. Filibuster getting nuked]. We may see another big reconciliation taxpayer cash giveaway before the Dems lose Congress. I can live with that, been bracing for inflation anyway.

  176. They keep telling us there’s no significant inflation. Of course they don’t count food and fuel, even on a year-over-year basis. Case in point: I bought a hot fudge sundae at McDonald’s today, $2.18 with tax. That’s a big jump from the last time I had one. Of course back in the day you could get a hamburger, fries and a drink there for $0.99 before tax.

  177. I don’t know. New York Times even thinks it’s ‘real enough’. I’ve read the claims that it’s just increased demand from the end of the pandemic, or production delays and shortages from the pandemic. Maybe there’s some truth there. Not sure.

  178. DeWitt,
    “Of course back in the day you could get a hamburger, fries and a drink there for $0.99 before tax.”
    .
    Back in my day, it was $0.15 for a McDonald’s hamburger. Add fries and a beverage, and it came to half a dollar. Even if you take 7X price increase from inflation, it was pretty cheap. No more.
    .
    Inflation is insidious… it corrupts priorities for spending/savings, and makes accumulation of capital via savings extremely difficult. That is obviouslyp a feature for the Fed, not a bug.

  179. My inflation metric over the years has been really simple. A box of Saltines cost $1 around 15 years ago when I was shopping for a young family. Now that box of Saltines is $2.49. Nothing has changed technology wise or any other metric other than my older family eats more Saltines. Milk doesn’t work that way, not sure why.

  180. mark bofill,
    “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary effect.”. Milton Friedman (Nobel prize winner in economics)
    .
    There are behavioral effects involved (eg the Japanese save even when they are losing value) but mainly it is too much money relative to consumable production. It inhibits savings and promotes accumulation of debt. Debt which will be grossly devalued before it is repaid. With rapid expansion of the money supply, rising inflation is almost inevitable.

  181. mark bofill (Comment #202819): “I’ve read the claims that it’s just increased demand from the end of the pandemic, or production delays and shortages from the pandemic. Maybe there’s some truth there. Not sure.”
    .
    I think there is no question that most, if not all, the dramatic price increases (lumber, beef …) are shortages due to the pandemic. Those prices should go down as the economy comes back into a reasonable degree of equilibrium. Gasoline has gone up almost 50% in the last six months, but most of that is recovery from the huge drop at the start of lockdowns. Gasoline is only a little more expensive now than it was two years ago.
    .
    SteveF quotes Milton Friedman: “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary effect.”. I think that is true, but only if you define inflation as a decrease in the value of money rather than a rise in prices. As such it drives up all prices, but an increase in the CPI due to the rise of just *some* prices does not fit that definition of inflation.
    .
    So we have inflation and we have price increases, presumably temporary, due to specific supply/demand imbalances. The question is how much of each do we have? My guess is that so far, it is mostly the latter; but plenty of the former is on the way.

  182. Mike, Steve,
    I agree.

    So we have inflation and we have price increases, presumably temporary, due to specific supply/demand imbalances. The question is how much of each do we have? My guess is that so far, it is mostly the latter; but plenty of the former is on the way.

    Yes. This pretty much sums up the way I view it as well.

  183. Don’t worry, it’s “mostly” not inflation, it’s just rising prices across the board. We also don’t have an immigration crisis on the border or record homicide increases. All is well, Biden is in charge, democracy is safe from those who endanger it. It’s safe as long as we can stop people from expressing their thoughts, allow them to set their own voting rules, teach their children CRT without a referendum, and control the press and social media discussions. All is well.

  184. Personally I think it should be a criminal offense for newspapers to publish citizen’s tax returns, I don’t care how they got them.

  185. Tom,
    I take it you disagree with the temporary imbalance idea driving the current inflation. I won’t argue – I really don’t know. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, sort of sums up my attitude regarding it.

  186. Tom Scharf (Comment #202825): “Don’t worry, it’s “mostly” not inflation, it’s just rising prices across the board.”
    .
    Do you have any evidence of “rising prices across the board”? Real question; I have not delved into the data. Rising prices across the board would be an indicator of inflation and no doubt there is some of that. But I have no idea how much.

  187. Mike M,
    “I think there is no question that most, if not all, the dramatic price increases (lumber, beef …) are shortages due to the pandemic.”
    .
    There can be shortages, of course, but when the price of gasoline rises, then people have less to spend on other things, which puts downward pressure on the prices of those other things. So price spikes in some things should be at least in part compensated by dropping prices for other things. Of course, that doesn’t happen very often because there is a constant inflationary trend save for a perhaps a few months during a recession.
    .
    I believe that a significant part of the relatively low inflation of the past 20 years is the growth in importation of products from low labor cost countries….. leading to a drastic decline in manufacturing in the States, and the well known devastation that has brought to blue collar workers. Those who’s work is not (or can’t be) “off-shored” have benefited from cheaper manufactured goods. The real cost of inexpensive manufactured goods has been helping keep inflation in check.

  188. SteveF,

    Automation has also played a role in keeping prices down and eliminating manufacturing jobs too. Even if we return manufacturing capacity to the US from, say, China, there will be fewer jobs created than were eliminated by the move to China and many of those jobs will be high skilled.

  189. I see the greens are all crowing over the end of the Keystone XL pipeline project. What they apparently don’t understand is that it won’t stop Canadian oil from reaching the US. It will be shipped in rail cars instead.

    Note also that China has delayed implementation of carbon emissions policies.

  190. DeWitt,
    Yes. More fossil fuel will burn to bring the fossil fuel to market, at greater cost.
    A great environmental victory indeed. [ SARC ]

  191. All prices are up about 5% year over year in May. This isn’t too scary as compared to the Carter years but we shall see what the future holds.
    .
    My only point is the media seems to be avoiding using the word inflation like they were avoiding the term riot during mostly peaceful protests. They are obviously worried about the political implications for the home team. Printing craploads of money in an inflationary economy may not be so wise, perhaps there is causation here they don’t want people to connect the dots on.

  192. Milton Friedman defined inflation as based on the supply of money.
    The demand for money is also a factor. An overall recession with less economic activity would require less money to be flowing.

  193. The rate of inflation depends not only on the supply of money, but also on the rate of turnover, called velocity. The velocity of money declined a lot during the pandemic, but may well be increasing now.

  194. Tom Scharf,
    “Printing craploads of money in an inflationary economy may not be so wise, perhaps there is causation here they don’t want people to connect the dots on.”
    .
    Sure, if people connect financial damage from inflation to financing of gigantic deficits, that will be bad for democrats. It will be interesting to see what Janet Yellen does if inflation continues at well above the “desired” 1.5%-2% per year. She will be under tremendous pressure from the Biden administration to continue expanding the money supply (keeping effective interest rates very near zero), even though she knows that will only increase the potential economic damage in the long run. The dollar has already started falling relative to other currencies as fear of the pandemic declines (~10% drop against the Euro since April 2020, and likely to continue). That will only complicate Yellen’s problems. Should interest rates rise, financing the existing debt will become much more difficult, and that doesn’t count the trillions of dollars in annual “entitlement” deficits the Democrats are trying to pass and make effectively permanent so long at they control either the White house or one house of Congress. I should add that the Biden administration has already suggested huge tax increases to help reduce (not eliminate!) the gigantic deficits they insist upon. Nothing new here… they want the government taking the majority of economic output and re-distributing it, a la Denmark.
    .
    As Herbert Stein noted: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” The only question now is when the financing of huge deficits will bring on unacceptable inflation.

  195. DeWitt,
    “Automation has also played a role in keeping prices down and eliminating manufacturing jobs too.”
    .
    For sure. But I note there are two motivations involved in the tendency toward automation: one is simply to reduce labor cost (and increase profit), but the other is to maintain a competitive position relative to lower labor cost countries (that is, keep the business from folding). Nobody is going to assemble iPhones in the USA unless the assembly process can be almost 100% automated.
    .
    I once saw a video of the assembly process for a Nikon digital SLR camera…. hundreds of tiny parts and an almost unbelievably complex assembly process. Nikon has closed nearly all its production facilities in Japan, and now produces mainly in low labor cost countries like Thailand.

  196. Tom Scharf (Comment #202835): “All prices are up about 5% year over year in May.”
    .
    I don’t believe you.

    The CPI is up 5% in May. But that is not “all prices”, it is the average of a market basket of goods. That is mostly due to energy being up 28.5%, largely because energy prices were strongly depressed a year ago. Food is up 2.2%. Everything other than food and energy is up 3.8%.
    https://www.bls.gov/cpi/
    Drilling down in that last category:
    5.6% for apparel
    29.7% for used cars and trucks
    3.3% for new vehicles
    1.6% for alcoholic beverages
    -1.9% for medical commodities
    1.5% for medical services
    7.3% for smoking products
    2.2% for shelter
    11.2% for transportation
    .
    So it is really uneven. Some things are up a lot, indicating supply chain issues. But medical prices are holding increases down. I’m thinking that food and shelter are likely the best indicators of the underlying inflation rate. 2.2%. And probably rising.
    .
    Addition: “Food at home” (I think that means groceries) is up just 0.7% and “food away from home” is up 4.0%. The last probably due to the government induced labor shortage.

  197. I am pretty sure that the CPI does not measure inflation. It is an estimate of inflation, subject to many assumptions. At present, the validity of those assumptions is probably worse than normal.
    .
    Average price increases over the previous year and two years:
    May 2021 5.0% 5.1%
    May 2020 0.1% 1.9%
    May 2019 1.8% 4.6%
    May 2018 2.8% 4.7%
    May 2017 1.9% 2.9%
    May 2016 1.0% 1.0%
    May 2015 0.0% 2.1%
    May 2014 2.1% 3.5%
    https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-by-category-line-chart.htm
    .
    So it looks like the 5.1% increase over the last two years is somewhat higher than normal. But since we are not yet back to normal, it is hard to say where it will end up.
    .
    Of course, even if we don’t have much inflation yet, that does not means it is not on the way.

  198. Mike M,
    “29.7% for used cars and trucks”
    .
    An indication of relatively fewer new cars being purchased, so fewer used cars available. Perhaps that is due to loss of income from the pandemic.

  199. “An indication of relatively fewer new cars being purchased, so fewer used cars available. Perhaps that is due to loss of income from the pandemic.”
    Have you been to a car lot lately? There’s a real new car supply problem in the auto industry due to chip shortages.

  200. Of course price increases are going to be different in different places. I was generalizing from this article.
    .
    U.S. Inflation Is Highest in 13 Years as Prices Surge 5%
    The rapid rise in consumer prices in May reflected a surge in demand and shortages of labor and materials
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/us-inflation-consumer-price-index-may-2021-11623288303
    “The U.S. economy’s rebound from the pandemic is driving the biggest surge in inflation in nearly 13 years, with consumer prices rising in May by 5% from a year ago.

    The Labor Department said last month’s increase in the consumer-price index was the largest since August 2008, when the reading rose 5.4%. The core-price index, which excludes the often-volatile categories of food and energy, jumped 3.8% in May from the year before—the largest increase for that reading since June 1992.
    Consumers are seeing higher prices for many of their purchases, particularly big-ticket items such as vehicles. Prices for used cars and trucks leapt 7.3% from the previous month, driving one-third of the rise in the overall index. The indexes for furniture, airline fares and apparel also rose sharply in May.”
    .
    Inflation is always caused be something, there being an explanation for it doesn’t mean it isn’t inflation in the general sense. We started a house renovation right before the pandemic hit, and had to requote it recently. I believe there has been some broad based inflation, ha ha. Maybe it will come down, maybe it won’t. What I definitely believe is that predicting the economic future is a fool’s errand. The stock market survived a global pandemic just fine which was not necessarily expected, etc. A finer grained technical analysis of monetary policy and macro-economics is above my pay grade.

  201. Andrew P,

    At my local Ford dealer, their lot, which is usually full of new and used cars, is barely half full.

  202. NYT coverage of the mayoral NYC race:
    “An NY1-Ipsos poll released on Monday found that 46 percent of likely Democratic voters viewed crime and public safety as the top priority for the next mayor. A staggering 72 percent said they somewhat or strongly agreed that the Police Department should put more officers on the street.”
    .
    Staggering? Interesting word choice. Defund the Police has been DOA since the beginning except in the fervent imagination of the “ascendant” left wing and their acolytes in the media.

  203. Tom Scharf,
    “Staggering? Interesting word choice.”
    .
    I don’t doubt it is staggering to NYT reporters who imagine everyone is a crazy woke as they are.

  204. A month into the lifting of the mask mandate in New Mexico (technically only for the vaccinated) and there is a slow but steady rise in the number of nekkid people. I had been hoping that masklessness would go viral, but that has not been the case.
    .
    Of course, it depends on where you are. Very few masks in parks or on bicycle riders. More faces on display in Walmart than in Sprouts. I have been tempted to walk into Whole Foods just to see if I start a commotion.

  205. SteveF,
    I think 76% agreeing on any political question is unusual. Perhaps unusual enough to be “staggering”. But yes, I think a more neutral source might have picked a different adjective.

  206. Lucia,
    72% agreement not 76%, but yes, it is not common. OTOH, there are multiple issues were public opinion at similar levels supports policies which are exactly opposite what the woke left wants. They live in bubbles, were everyone they know agrees with them; it is not healthy for the MSM nor for “progressive” politicians. It’s like the old story about an upper west side NYC liberal wondering how Ronald Reagan won the presidency… “I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”.

  207. lucia (Comment #202852): “I think 76% agreeing on any political question is unusual.”
    .
    But it is not so unusual. This is from three years ago:
    https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/30/where-the-public-stands-on-key-issues-that-could-come-before-the-supreme-court/

    Questions with support of at least 2/3 of those polled:
    69% opposed to overturning Roe v Wade
    67% very important that no ineligible voters be permitted to vote
    72% very important that congressional districts be fairly drawn
    83% very important that no eligible voters be denied the vote
    77% support limits on campaign spending

    That is just scratching the surface.

  208. If one examined the media coverage, one would expect that a large majority of people supported defunding the police. Anytime someone had a protest with more than 5 people, media crews would come running because it was a preferred narrative, in spite of poll after poll after poll showing it wasn’t real. They show the protests and don’t report on the polls.
    .
    This is how the media pushes their own internal narratives and is not representative of the public’s views. They then start believing their own propaganda (their “facts”), or believe they can change the public’s views with their propaganda by restricting coverage.
    .
    The only reason the NYT is covering the polls now is it has become a political liability to the home team and this requires action. Otherwise they would just keep pushing the same tired narrative, all the while wondering why trust in the media from the rubes is collapsing.

  209. SteveF,

    It was Nixon, not Reagan and the person who made the statement was Pauline Kael, the film critic for the New Yorker magazine. According to the magazine, the actual quote was this:

    I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.

    See:

    https://www.commentarymagazine.com/john-podhoretz/the-actual-pauline-kael-quote%E2%80%94not-as-bad-and-worse/

  210. DeWitt,
    I had not seen the actual quote, just an abridged version. I do like the way she describes feeling opposition voters in a theater; reminds me of a text message about smelling Trump supporters at a Wallmart.

  211. Novavax vaccine 90% effective in 30K trial. This vaccine is basically injected manufactured spike proteins directly into the subject. Apparently they are having manufacturing issues as they say they are months away from production. Since they have had a lot of time already I suspect they might have major production issues.
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/novavax-covid-19-vaccine-is-90-effective-in-key-study-11623664800
    .
    “One challenge conducting the study, Novavax said, was the availability of authorized vaccines. Study subjects, particularly older adults, who received a placebo began to drop out to get one of the authorized vaccines.

    To stem the tide of dropouts, Novavax in April began to provide its vaccine to those who had received a placebo in the study.”

  212. SteveF, writer Ken Levine, who wrote for Mash, Cheers, & Frasier, said he couldn’t enjoy Three Billboards because all the characters were likely Trump supporters.

  213. MikeN,
    The woke left holds everyone who disagrees with them in utter distain. The arrogance would be humorous were it not so damaging. They are assholes.

  214. Tom Scharf,
    Most of the covid vaccine developers are going to fail… too much competition and known good vaccines already at full production rates. I guess a few that can be made dirt cheap will get sold, but most are doomed to failure.

  215. If you can’t produce tens of millions of doses per month, you’re definitely going to fail.

    I keep hearing confident statements that booster shots will be necessary by the end of 2021. No one knows that. But that hasn’t stopped anyone from making unproven but confident assertions about COVID-19 so far. The ones that have been definitely shown to be false have gone down the memory hole.

  216. DeWitt,
    We don’t know if we’ll need boosters. I’m glad Moderna is working on making them just in case!

  217. We will need boosters if immunity gets weaker over time, and nobody has a clue when and if that will happen, or if a variant breaks through enough to warrant another type of shot. So far that is not necessary either, as the (renaming of the week) alpha (UK) and delta (Indian) are handled well by the vaccines according to data released today. About 96% effective against hospitalization against these variants. The variant trend is definitely toward weaker vaccine protection, but not significant enough yet to warrant a run for boosters. My guess is they will have a booster soon enough that handles these a bit better and it will replace the original vaccines as an update for the globe.
    .
    Vaccines Offer Significant Protection Against Covid-19 Delta Variant, U.K. Analysis Shows
    Public Health England says Pfizer shot 96% effective against hospitalization, and AstraZeneca shot 92% effective
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/vaccines-offer-significant-protection-against-covid-19-delta-variant-u-k-analysis-shows-11623690999

  218. Tom Scharf,
    “Public Health England says Pfizer shot 96% effective against hospitalization, and AstraZeneca shot 92% effective”
    .
    I think it will turn out to be more complicated that those numbers suggest. There are two effects of the vaccines: 1) they reduce the rate and severity of illness, and 2) they reduce the probability of transmission from the unfortunate few who do become infected following vaccination to others. Disentangling these two effects will not be easy. My guess is that once a large majority of people become vaccinated, we will see a greater than expected drop in cases…. sort of like a square function of (1-fraction vaccinated) rather than a linear function of (1-fraction vaccinated).
    .
    It is almost over for the USA. Thanks to Trump for pushing the rapid vaccine development and to Biden for not screwing up the distribution of those vaccines to promote ‘social justice’.

  219. Rapid Spread of Delta Coronavirus Variant Delays U.K.’s Full Reopening
    Four-week holdup will allow time to assess whether rising caseloads will translate into higher hospitalizations and deaths

    ————————-

    Modeling by teams at three universities published by a panel of scientific advisors pointed to another wave of infections and hospitalizations over the summer if the planned relaxation went ahead. The wave could plausibly push peak hospital occupancy above the 20,000 level it reached in spring last year, the panel said, though deaths would likely stay much lower. Delaying by four weeks would likely reduce hospital admissions by between a third to a half, the panel said.

    *sigh*

    Unfortunately, this is a new article and doesn’t have a comment section. Some news articles do, but most don’t. I’ve emailed the author pointing out that university models have been rather unreliable, to say the least, and three models are, if anything, even less reliable.

    The problem in the UK is that they don’t have as much acquired immunity as in the US as measured by the population fraction of confirmed cases, 6.7% in the UK vs. 10.3% in the US. That means that even with a higher fraction of the population vaccinated in the UK, there is still a significant fraction of the population that is susceptible and the apparently more contagious Delta variant is going to burn through them whether the lockdown is maintained or not. We saw this in the US in mid-March through April. We might have some local outbreaks in the US, but I will be very surprised if we get anything like what they are getting in the UK now.

  221. DeWitt,
    At least they make a falsifiable prediction, which is grand step above most doom and gloomers. Now if only there would be the next step in the process of holding people accountable for their failed predictions and not according them any power to control events until they have a proven track record. Nobody has a good track record for predicting outbreaks, their peaks, and their declines. Definitely combining many bad models does not make a good model.

  223. DeWitt,
    “We might have some local outbreaks in the US, but I will be very surprised if we get anything like what they are getting in the UK now.”
    .
    Yes, but hospitalizations and deaths also depend on the age profile people who have been vaccinated (or had the illness). For example, Florida is only approaching 50% of the eligible population vaccinated, but it looks like the rate will be north of 85% among those over 65 within a month or so. And that 85% does not include immunity in the non-vaccinated over 65 group from a past covid infection (symptomatic or not). Such high rates of resistance makes a surge in severe cases and deaths automatically smaller relative to total cases, even if a more transmissible strain does ‘burn through’ the un-vaccinated population.
    .
    I think the more important issues are 1) if the more transmissible strains are more pathogenic as well, and especially 2) if they are more able to ‘break through’ existing immunity. So far it does not look like the new strains do those things. Let’s hope it stays that way.

  224. This I find kind of funny:
    .
    China Repackages Its History in Support of Xi’s National Vision
    Propaganda campaign to promote Communist Party history is largest mass-education drive since Mao era
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-repackages-history-xi-propaganda-communist-party-centenary-11623767590
    “In April, China’s cyberspace regulator launched an online platform and a telephone hotline for the public to denounce instances of “historical nihilism,” such as statements that criticize party leaders and policies or deny “advanced socialist culture.” Such violations can be punished under legislation that includes a 2018 law protecting the reputations of heroes and martyrs.”
    .
    What I find funny is that now in the US we try to rewrite our history to make ourselves look bad, not good, ha ha.

  226. SteveF (Comment #202874): “For example, Florida is only approaching 50% of the eligible population vaccinated, but it looks like the rate will be north of 85% among those over 65 within a month or so. And that 85% does not include immunity in the non-vaccinated over 65 group from a past covid infection (symptomatic or not). Such high rates of resistance makes a surge in severe cases and deaths automatically smaller relative to total cases”
    .
    But deaths have not dropped much relative to total cases. The reason seems to be that the people most at risk of dying have very weak immune systems. So they do not get much benefit from the vaccine.

  227. The second funniest thing I read today courtesy of National Review:

    “The Austin American-Statesman, the local daily, refused to publish that (police) description (of a mass shooting suspect). Instead, it put this editor’s note at the end of its report:

    Editor’s note: Police have only released a vague description of the suspected shooter as of Saturday morning. The American-Statesman is not including the description as it is too vague at this time to be useful in identifying the shooter and such publication could be harmful in perpetuating stereotypes. If more detailed information is released, we will update our reporting.”
    .
    That useless description eliminated 97% of the population. This has been a rather apparent ongoing issue with the media as it wrestles with its unwritten purity guidelines. Only the super deft will be able to read through this clever obscuration of the case to determine what this police description might possibly be.
    Thankfully there is no security video to further harmful stereotypes. We were lucky back in the Jessie Smollet days when it was OK to state descriptions of suspects.
    https://www.nationalreview.com/the-tuesday/hiding-the-facts-from-readers-is-the-opposite-of-a-journalists-job/

  228. Mike M,
    “The reason seems to be that the people most at risk of dying have very weak immune systems. So they do not get much benefit from the vaccine.”
    .
    Which is exactly contrary to the results of placebo controlled studies, which showed the vaccines effective across all age groups. So either the placebo controlled studies were mistaken, or (more likely) other factors are influencing the ratio. Like, say, un-vaccinated elderly people figure the much lower case rates mean they don’t have to worry about catching the virus. I am willing to bet that those dying are nearly all unvaccinated…. or became ill very shortly after vaccination (prior to full immune response).
    .
    https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2021/05/24/unvaccinated-cases-rates
    .
    https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-vaccinated-people/fact-check-unvaccinated-people-are-much-more-susceptible-to-catching-covid-19-than-those-who-have-been-vaccinated-idUSL2N2NX14B
    .
    Rates of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are unchanged for the unvaccinated.
    .

  229. SteveF,

    IMO, the people who get reinfected after recovery from an infection or who get infected after having been fully vaccinated probably have some immune system anomaly. In which case, their being vaccinated after recovering from an infection probably won’t help either.

    Tom Scharf,

    After reading your linked NR article, I was browsing on the NR site and found an article about CRT supposedly invading law schools. The author of that piece is clearly living in la-la land and not paying attention to history. CRT evolved from CLT, Critical Legal Theory, not the other way around. And, of course, CLT evolved from Marxist dialectic via Derridian deconstruction. Or possibly deconstruction was a different offshoot of Marxist dialectic.

  230. SteveF (Comment #202879): “Which is exactly contrary to the results of placebo controlled studies, which showed the vaccines effective across all age groups.”
    .
    What’s age got to do with it? Yes, older people are more likely to die, but that does not mean that age is relevant. Correlation is not causation. Most likely, what is relevant is being health and immune system status.
    .
    So how many people in the vaccine studies had DNR’s on file? I am guessing very few, if any. I saw data from Minnesota that showed far more deaths than hospitalizations among the very elderly. Explain that.

  231. “At least they make a falsifiable prediction,”

    Not really. The prediction is: “If you open up as planned, then x bad things will happen”. The UK government has sufficient confidence in predictions, that they are delaying opening up. ergo, no way to test that prediction. However, ignoring model predictions hasnt worked out too well for government in past either.

  232. Mike M,
    “Most likely, what is relevant is being health and immune system status.”
    .
    Sure, but those depend mainly on age. Sadly, time diminishes everyone’s health and immune system. There are some differences between individuals of course; some people are ‘old’ at 70 while others are ‘old’ only at 80. But you need only consider that just about everyone dies before 5 score to understand clearly the limits of human life expectancy. The single strongest predictor of probability of death…. from covid-19 or most any other ailment…. is age. Dust to dust as they say. Covid is nothing exceptional, and if I remember correctly, the average age at death for covid-19 victims in the USA is over 80, and not far from the average age at death from all causes. There is no avoiding father time.

  233. One assumes they could model with and without opening, and the only question is how wrong will they be against reality? Having had a year to tune the model against actual behavior as best as they can measure said behavior should allow them to be at least more accurate than a year ago.
    .
    Getting exponential models just a little wrong over a long period means pretty bad results, so I would give them a little slack in interpretation. However I think that the “lock them suckers down for their own good” forcing in academia models is probably too strong to overcome. If model results don’t fit that mold, then we need to twiddle some internal parameters.
    .
    A serious discussion would include how much government mandates actually change citizen behavior as pandemic fatigue is a big factor now. The UK, EU, and the US have widespread transmission so the virus will be with us for a long time at some level. Unless the UK delay results in significant more vaccination to take place I don’t really see much point to delaying opening up when transmission levels are low. I doubt very much that the healthcare system will be overwhelmed at this point.

  234. Tom Scharf,
    “Unless the UK delay results in significant more vaccination to take place I don’t really see much point to delaying opening up when transmission levels are low.”
    .
    They are politicians, and they don’t want to be blamed for “killing granny”.
    .
    Except for some on the unhinged left…. and not many of those….. choices for politicians are focused mainly on what is best for political survival.

  235. “One assumes they could model with and without opening”

    A difficult problem. I havent seen the model in question, but looking at Annan’s model, it would seem you can make some estimate of how quickly the virus is spreading with current average contact rates. And the numbers arent great with existing measures.

    You can reasonably confident that if existing numbers are not good then opening up more will make it worse. However, when you have only crude proxies for contact rate and even cruder estimates of how that will change when opening up, I find it hard to have much confidence in the predicted case load. Estimates for transmissivity of Delta strain relative to Alpha (UK) strain range from 40 – 70% for starters let alone trying to guess what opening up will do. However, I would guess they have reasonable handle on how many more will be vaccinated in 4 weeks so could make a plug on that just using existing infection rate.

    And I am with SteveF, politicians are interested in political survival, and while we deride that, it is the cornerstone of democracy. Given the flak Johnson got over delayed action in December and what that cost, I am not surprised at the delay.

  236. The current blip in the UK, it doesn’t qualify as a surge IMO, is not accelerating. New cases yesterday were slightly lower than the day before, 7,673 vs 7,742. And the last four days were all less than the recent high of 8,125 on 6/11.

    More FUD on US news. ‘The Delta variant is going to be the dominant strain and we may have a new surge this summer.’ BS. The fraction of new cases that can be attributed to the Delta variant is indeed increasing, but the new case rate is still decreasing. No mention of that, of course. And also, they only talk about vaccination with no mention of acquired immunity and the certainty that the number of people with acquired immunity is much higher than the number of confirmed cases.

  237. And for the supposed received wisdom that vaccination is better than acquired immunity because antibody titer is higher after vaccination:

    AstraZeneca Covid-19 Antibody Treatment Suffers Setback
    Drug’s efficacy as post-infection therapy falls short in clinical trial, but potential preventative use is still undergoing testing

    It’s somewhat effective in preventing infection, 73% in a small trial, but not as good as the best vaccines or acquired immunity, which apparently produce T and B cell responses as well as circulating antibodies.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/astrazeneca-covid-19-antibody-treatment-suffers-setback-11623755934?mod=djemHL_t

  238. DeWitt Payne (Comment #202887): “The current blip in the UK, it doesn’t qualify as a surge IMO, is not accelerating.”
    .
    Huh? Cases up by a factor of 3.5 from four weeks ago and more than a factor of 2 from two weeks ago. That is definitely a surge.
    .
    DeWitt: “New cases yesterday were slightly lower than the day before, 7,673 vs 7,742. And the last four days were all less than the recent high of 8,125 on 6/11.”
    .
    Those are all different days of the week, so comparing them does not mean anything.
    .
    The UK has vaccinated a larger fraction of population than the US and has given more first doses per capita than Israel.
    https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker/?areas=gbr&areas=isr&areas=usa&cumulative=1&doses=first&populationAdjusted=1

    They have been consistently ahead of the US in first doses, but only just caught up in fully vaccinated, because that is what they chose to do. So the surge is puzzling. And disturbing.
    .
    Addition: Canada, following the same strategy as the UK, has had the opposite result.

  239. Mike M,
    “So the surge is puzzling. And disturbing.”
    .
    Why? These are almost all people who chose to NOT get vaccinated. It would be puzzling and disturbing if it were vaccinated people.

  240. The biggest change in the UK/India variants is that they do break through a one shot vaccine much more effectively. The numbers I saw showed that effectiveness is down to around 30% for just one shot, where with the original coronavirus one shot could get you to 80%. There is some overlap between time after shot and a two shot regimen that muddies this analysis though.
    .
    My point though is that if you aren’t going to go for China style virus eradication, and you have peaked in vaccinations with a certain set of the population simply refusing, then I don’t see a point in closing down. It’s delaying the inevitable. Staying closed is always safer than being open. What’s going to change in the future to allow you to reopen?
    .
    Is there really a significant difference in allowing the delta variant to burn through the unvaccinated slowly or quickly? I’m just not seeing this as an obvious discriminator in government policy. There is also a secondary consideration that protecting your unvaccinated population with a shutdown could actually endanger them with a future more deadly/transmissive variant. As it sits now countries like India may have been better off by allowing the original coronavirus to rage through the population instead of waiting for delta to do the same more efficiently. Nobody wants to talk about that.
    .
    The original plan to holdout in lock downs until vaccination was available made logical sense (and to not overwhelm the medical system). Those are both non-factors now and I think there needs to be explained what the logic for a lock down now is.

  241. SteveF (Comment #202890): “Why? These are almost all people who chose to NOT get vaccinated.”
    .
    Any evidence of that? Have you heard of herd immunity?

  242. Mike M,

    Have you heard of herd immunity?

    That’s irrelevant to what Steve F said. Herd immunity wouldn’t cause vaccinated people to get sick.
    .
    It probably is only the unvaccinated getting sick. Otherwise we’d be reading about vaccine breakthroughs and which variant is breaking through. That’s being closely monitored.
    .
    The unvaccinated will continue to get sick even after we are passed the herd immunity threshold. Case numbers would be expected to start declining. But in a classic SEIR model, 1/2 the total infected get infected after the Herd Immunity Threshold is reached.

  243. Mike M,
    Herd immunity? What the heck is that? /sarc
    .
    Behavior is changing; even here in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, mask wearing and social distancing are mainly gone. That facilitates spread, especially if the unvaccinated see the falling total cases and behave like they are protected via herd immunity. Clearly they are not. I gave you a couple of links yesterday pointing out that it is mostly the unvaccinated who are getting serious illness and/or dying. The potential for a ‘micro-surge’ seems to me dependent on how many people have already gotten the illness and/or vaccinated. In NJ, the number of cases is now so high that new cases have fallen (quite suddenly) to near zero. In other places, the number of cases is not as high, so some potential for spread among the unvaccinated.

  244. In other places, the number of cases is not as high, so some potential for spread among the unvaccinated.

    The number of new cases in he US right now is the same as it was last March. If a person without immunity is exposed, they can get just as sick now as if they were exposed last year. “Herd immunity” doesn’t make them less susceptible.
    .
    I’m not for forcing anyone to get vaccinated. But of course new cases aren’t going to go to zero immediately. And with people coming out of their homes, circulating and so on, and with more transmissible variants we might see rises.
    .
    I’m not going to be “alarmed” until I hear the variants are breaking through vaccines.

  245. Since we’re sort of on the subject,
    My understanding of herd immunity is just this – when a bunch of people are not susceptible to some contagion (be it because of vaccination or antibodies from already having had the illness or whatever reason) it makes it harder for an illness to spread from person to person.
    As the number of people who are immune increases, the odds of a non immune encounter with another non immune decrease – therefore the odds of the disease spreading from person to person decrease.
    Do I have the gist of this right / am I overlooking anything important here?
    Thanks!

  246. Kristian Andersen answers questions for the NYT.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/science/covid-lab-leak-fauci-kristian-andersen.html
    .
    These are mostly assertions without pointing to specific evidence. such as: “The scenario in which the virus was found in nature, brought to the lab and then accidentally release[d] is similarly unlikely, based on current evidence.” I think he really means lack of evidence. He doesn’t talk about judgment calls and uncertainty and then pleads climate science like victimhood. He wants to have a public profile, be worshipped by the adherents of scientism, and not have people criticize his wonderfulness.

  247. MB
    “herd immunity is just this – when a bunch of people are not susceptible to some contagion (be it because of vaccination or antibodies from already having had the illness or whatever reason) it makes it harder for an illness to spread from person to person.”
    –
    “Simply explained, R0 represents the average number of people infected by one infectious individual. If R0 is larger than 1, the number of infected people will likely increase exponentially, and an epidemic could ensue.”
    –
    If the population to be infected now has immune people in it the Ro for the virus decreases.
    Not because it is harder to spread an illness from person to person per se just that the number of infectable contacts has diminished.
    I.e. it is harder to spread through the community

  248. mark,
    Pretty much.
    The “herd immunity threshold” is when the expected value of the number of people infected by a specific infected person is equal to 1 (i.e. Reff=1). If it is, for example point 0.9, and 100 people are currently infected, you expect in the next “generation” for 90 people to be infected. Those 90 will subsequently infect 81. So in each “generation” of infection there are fewer and fewer infected. Eventually the infection dies out.
    .
    The “herd” had immunity because infections die out rather than grow. But notice that even though Reff<1, if it’s near 1, a lot of people can get infected before the the infections really die out.
    .
    I think right now we are hovering near 1, which is great compared to being 2. As Reff is affected by behavior, but also variants, and a fair number of people aren’t getting vaccines, it’s staying near 1 sometimes rising, sometimes falling. The unvaccinated shouldn’t consider themselves safe until there are very, very, very few case out there.

  249. Tom Scharf

    You also said you found the virus’s genome to be “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
    .
    This was a reference to the features of SARS-CoV-2 that we identified based on early analyses that didn’t appear to have an obvious immediate evolutionary precursor. We hadn’t yet performed more in-depth analyses to reach a conclusion, rather were sharing our preliminary observations.

    I’m under the impression they still haven’t found an “an obvious immediate evolutionary precursor” despite later analysis.
    .

    The features in SARS-CoV-2 that initially suggested possible engineering were identified in related coronaviruses, meaning that features that initially looked unusual to us weren’t.

    My impression is they are still “unusual”. (Well, of course, that depends on the definition of “usual” vs “unusual”. )
    .

    that first appeared unique to SARS-CoV-2 were in fact found in other, related viruses.

    I see what he is doing here. “Unusual” has been escalated to “unique”.
    .
    Under the engineered branch of the ‘lab-leak’ theory it probably would not be ‘unique’. So this is reasoning would exclude nearly all actually engineered viruses as “probably not engineered”, because they all share a feature we expect them to have!
    .
    Now, the lack of uniqueness might not be strongly in favor of engineering, but it also isn’t in the “against” bin! (Some evidence is sometimes simply not very informative.)
    .

    These findings, together with many other technical features of the site, strongly suggest that it evolved naturally and there is very little chance somebody engineered it.

    Wrong. The situation is: CGG does happen in nature, but rarely. On the other hand, it is a common choice in labs. The most you can say is it could happen under both scenarios. The presence of this alone doesn’t tell us much one way or the other.
    .
    (Worth nothing, he addresses single CGG but the argument is about a double — CGG- CGG. The argument may still hold, but that’s just sloppy.
    .

    precedence, data and other evidence strongly favor natural emergence as a highly likely scientific theory for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, while the lab leak remains a speculative hypothesis based on conjecture.

    They haven’t done any “likelihood” analysis. (I’m not sure it can be done.)
    .

    In contrast, the scientific theory about the natural emergence of SARS-CoV-2 presents a far simpler and more likely scenario.

    Simpler? They are both simple scenarios.

    The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 is very similar to that of SARS-CoV-1, including its seasonal timing, location and association with the human food chain.

    The association with the food chain appears stupendously weak.
    .

    My comments and conclusions are strictly driven by scientific inquiry, and I strongly believe that careful, well-supported public messaging around complex topics is paramount.

    One problem here is his stress of “scientific”. The likelihood of scenarios depends on lots of non scientific information. That is military and intelligence info.
    .

    Other evidence, were it to emerge, could lend further weight to the natural origin hypothesis. That includes the identification of an intermediate [animal] host (if one exists). Also, now that we know that live animals were sold at markets across Wuhan, further understanding of the flow of animals and connected supply lines could lend additional credence to natural emergence.

    We now know there were no bats or civets at the market. And it seems very likely some people were infected before the market outbreak!!!
    .
    It certainly might be natural. But Andersen is far from convincing about what the likelihood is especially for a specific instance that occurred!

  250. You know, if Andersen just said “I favor the natural origin theory.” I’d have no problem with that. But there really is no “likelihood” weighing here. He simply appears to have the standard that natural origin is the “default” position and so he favors it unless there is very strong evidence to the contrary. He doesn’t actually advance positive evidence in favor of natural origin. He merely points out that some evidence doesn’t exclude it. And on that basis, he decrees it is “more likely”.
    .
    But all we really have is him sticking to his strong prior. His “prior” is not “evidence” scientific or otherwise.

  251. Ansersen strikes me as someone with severe conflicts of interest. He never actually addresses the technical issues with substantive data, only arm waves and opinion. There are plenty of established facts supporting a plausible release of the virus from a laboratory, and he simply does not address those. Nor will the CCP allow a real investigation. His argument is little more than “Who you gonna believe, me and the CCP, or your lyin’ eyes ?”
    .
    The guy should be ignored.

  253. A hostile interviewer would take Andersen to the cleaners. But that’s not going to happen with a reporter from the NYT on this issue and Andersen likely knew it. The problem with the wet market origin hypothesis is that there seem to be too many early patients with no direct or indirect connection to any wet market.

  254. So now the greens are making excuses for the failure of wind and solar to generate sufficient power when it’s hot in TX and CA.

    The California and Texas Greenouts
    Renewables show again that they aren’t reliable to power the grid.

    In March, wind made up a larger share of Texas’s power generation than gas. Ercot expects wind capacity could increase by more than a third this year. Nuclear and fossil fuel-powered plants are struggling to compete with wind, which can make money even when wholesale prices go negative. Many have shut down or are skimping on maintenance.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-california-and-texas-greenouts-11623883231?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

    The problem lies mainly with the bean counters who don’t correctly account for the true costs of power from intermittent generating sources, i.e. the cost of backup systems. That means fossil plants are not being paid enough because consumers demand cheap electricity and the regulators and politicians bow before them.

    Fossil fuel and nuclear plants need to be be paid a stipend whether they are supplying electricity or not because they are the backup, at least until we have battery systems inexpensive enough to supply several days of power, not just a few hours. Either that or wind and solar should have the lowest priority for supplying electricity instead of utilities being forced to take it first. I’m not holding my breath.

  255. DeWitt,
    So far Andersen has also not appeared on a show with someone who advocates for lab leak being plausible. That allows the weakness of the logic to be concealed.
    .
    He can be perfectly “right” on some scientific fact (like CGG is not “unique”) but entirely wrong on how he puts that into a logical argument. Yes: CGG is not unique to Covid. (No one claims it is.) But that doesn’t provide evidence for natural.
    .
    And lets face it: We know CGG is unusual enough that he initially thought he couldn’t see how it could be natural. Presumably, he wouldn’t have thought it that if it was even as common as naturally blond hair. No one considered blond hair inconsistent with “natural”. Yet it’s actually rare in the entire human population.

  256. Andersen responded to a list of questions from the NYT, so there wasn’t any back and forth as far as a I can tell. The list of questions was reasonable.
    .
    I agree with Lucia’s analysis. It’s not like he is going to provide footnotes for his * arguments *, and this is what this is, an argument for an uncertain position. What he fails to do is give much new information as to why anyone should feel his argument is anything but speculation beyond his hand waving argument to Team Science authority. All things equal he should know more than the public, but all things aren’t equal once science becomes political. I’ll give him some credit for sticking his neck out here, it is really not wise to do so. It didn’t hurt Mann much though, ha ha.
    .
    There are two engineered virus scenarios. An engineered virus is accidentally released in which case obvious engineering fingerprints might be readily detectable, and an engineered virus is intentionally designed to look like a natural occurrence such as a bioweapon or gain of experiments that duplicate natural processes. Nobody asks these virologists whether they could make an engineered version that looked natural to others in the field (which is why I think at a minimum GOF experiments should be engineered with explicit biomarkers).

  257. Tom Scharf

    All things equal he should know more than the public, but all things aren’t equal once science becomes political.

    He should know more about things that (a) Have to do with virology per se and (b) Have to do with Standard Operation where he works.
    But he doesn’t “know” anymore than the public does about whether the virus really first broke out at the Wuhan wet market. (It appears it may not have.)
    He doesn’t “know” very much more about what happened inside much of the WIV. This is true even if he knew people and collaborted with them.Heck, even “bat lady” may not know somethings going on at WIV.

    He doesn’t know more about pressure by the PRC government on workers at WIV to lie. And so on.
    .
    When assessing probability of lab leak all these non-science issues are important.

  258. Well he certainly acted like he knew more about these things, and
    doesn’t state exactly how this was so, and this is the weakest part of his argument. It’s not clear at all that his judgment on these uncertainties are better than anyone else, and he did not make that case very well.

  259. lucia (Comment #202912): “But he doesn’t “know” anymore than the public does about whether the virus really first broke out at the Wuhan wet market. (It appears it may not have.)”
    .
    We also don’t know whether the virus first broke out at the White House. (It appears it may not have.)
    .
    If the virus did break out at the wet market, then it did so in November, 2019 or earlier. Because that is when the first *confirmed* case is from, in someone who had no connection to the wet market.
    https://www.livescience.com/first-case-coronavirus-found.html
    .
    In December 2019, there was a cluster of cases associated with the Wuhan wet market. Extensive sampling was done and none of the animals were found to be infected. A few percent of surface swabs gave evidence of the virus. I think that is what we would expect if we did a lot of sampling in a meat packing plant right after a superspread event. Probably the same animals carrying the virus in both cases.

  261. Jason Riley’s Best of the Web column recently was on the subject of COVID rules and their loosening.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-covid-rules-ever-end-11623964156?mod=opinion_minor_pos1

    Will Covid Rules Ever End?
    Politicians aren’t the only ones who enjoy telling us what to do.

    And in a discussion you won’t see on Twitter about vaccination by Harvard Medical School’s Martin Kulldorff and Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya there’s this:

    There’s an important debate to be had about pending rules from businesses and schools. Perhaps social media companies will allow it to occur on their platforms. Harvard Medical School’s Martin Kulldorff announces today on Twitter:

    Our COVID vaccine op-ed was just published by @thehill. Twitter does not allow vaccine scientists to freely discuss vaccines, but you can find it on my LinkedIn and Gab accounts.

    But the two professors warn against mandating a Covid vaccine for children who face little risk from the virus, because even a relatively safe vaccine carries some small risk of an adverse event, and in this case it may be greater than the small risk young people face from Covid.

    In the op-ed which Silicon Valley firms may or may not be willing to show to consumers, the Harvard prof and Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya write that the “idea that everyone must be vaccinated against COVID-19 is as misguided as the anti-vax idea that no one should.”

    The academics also take aim at the idea of mandating vaccines for those who have already had the virus. The Harvard and Stanford profs note that “recovered COVID patients have strong long-lasting protection against severe disease if reinfected, and evidence about protective immunity after natural infection is at least as good as from the vaccines. Hence, it makes no sense to require vaccines for recovered patients. For them, it simply adds a risk, however small, without any benefit.” The authors add:

    During the pandemic, the professional laptop class protected themselves by working from home while exposing the working class that brought them food and other goods. It is now the height of hypocrisy to recognize immunity from vaccinations but not immunity from those exposed while serving the laptop class.

    Especially when it comes to children who have already recovered from Covid, institutions requiring vaccination should show their work demonstrating that patient benefits outweigh the risks.

  262. And wrt my post above: Hello LA Teachers Union. Are you really serious about risking the health of your students by forcing them to be vaccinated so you may be slightly safer? My guess would be yes.

  264. Tom Scharf (Comment #202923): “There’s a heavy dose of “Trump made us be stupid” here. This is probably signaling to NPR’s audience that it is OK to keep listening.”
    .
    Or just signaling “I am not an idiot Trump supporter”. Like the Lefties who are afraid to stop wearing masks, lest they get mistaken for a Republican.

  265. Mike M,
    “Like the Lefties who are afraid to stop wearing masks, lest they get mistaken for a Republican.”
    .
    Ya well, if someone is even mildly aware of the data from vaccine trials, they know that masks are pretty much irrelevant for those already vaccinated. Masks are now, more than ever, performative accessories, and not expected to do anything more than signal one’s virtue.

  266. The “Trump made us do it” argument doesn’t even make sense. In the worst case Trump saying it means nothing and it requires an independent analysis and review of the data. Trump made or established priors to believe the opposite is nonsensical. Is it really that easy to control a media narrative? Say the opposite of what you want the media to push? Apparently so when TDS rules. Trump said it, we don’t like the narrative, therefore we say the opposite, do no further investigation, sell it really hard, and ostracize anyone who does differently as aiding and abetting the evil Trump and his minions.
    .
    Trump made a lot of true and false statements, he just didn’t have much credibility. It became a circus in the end for the media to dream up any angle to state something Trump said was a “lie”. They were way too emotionally invested in it, and charitable interpretations were non-existent. I had to stop listening to all the love and tolerance after it became so repetitive.

  267. Tom Scharf,
    I have no doubt time will provide some perspective on Trump, but only if he manages to keep (reasonably) quiet for a while.
    .
    I think the left/progressives and the right establishment types were all so put off by Trump’s histrionics, bragging, and exaggerations that they simply lost contact with reality, and so could not/would not address the legitimate ‘populist’ issues that got Trump elected. Even now it is very difficult for them to accept Trump won election in 2016, or admit that anything Trump did was good. Hence the instantaneous, mindless rejection of everything Trump said…. even when what he said was perfectly sensible.
    .
    OF COURSE, a virology lab doing gain of function research on coronaviruses from bats is a plausible (even likely) source for a novel pathogenic coronavirus closely related to bat coronaviruses. OF COURSE, it is bizarrely coincidental that the pandemic arose in one of a few cities in the world where that kind of research is done. We will never be able to prove it, of course, (the CCP will see to that), but any thinking person is only being rational when they suspect a lab release in Wuhan. Trump was being reasonable, and his political opponents were not. Had Trump been better able to control himself (and his endless tweets) he would have been more effective in office. He couldn’t.

  268. Giving a talk on Time [and space] on Monday to my Uni of third age fellow seniors.
    Had an astra- zeneca due to herd pressure recently.
    May help the herd immunity.

  269. angech,
    Avoid discussion of dark matter as something real…. it is based on an ad-hoc conjecture which can’t be disproven, with zero evidence of physical existence.

  270. SteveF (Comment #202927):”I think the left/progressives and the right establishment types were all so put off by Trump’s histrionics, bragging, and exaggerations that they simply lost contact with reality, and so could not/would not address the legitimate ‘populist’ issues that got Trump elected.”
    .
    It is more than that. Trump’s populist policies are antithetical to the goals and world view of the ruling class. They are against the people and are determined to have their way. Trump stood up for the people, and so Trump had to be destroyed. If his behavior had been more conventional, they would have attacked him just as viciously; only the details would have been different.
    .
    Just watch what they do to DeSantis in 2024 if he still has a shot at the Presidency. It will be just as vicious.

  271. SteveF,

    There is strong physical evidence that something exists to cause the anomalies in galactic rotation curves, galactic cluster dynamics and the flatness of the universe. Dark matter/dark energy is a reasonable hypothesis to explain this as well as the acceleration of the expansion rate with distance. No one has come up with a gravitational scaling hypothesis that explains the data at all scales. As the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, i.e. it’s the fallacy of argument from ignorance. There is zero physical evidence that dark matter doesn’t exist either.

  272. Mike M.,

    Just watch what they do to DeSantis in 2024 if he still has a shot at the Presidency. It will be just as vicious.

    No, it will be worse. Remember what they did to Bob Dole in 1995 or Mitt Romney pushing the wheelchair off the cliff? It will be more vicious because it is less deserved.

  273. DeWitt Payne (Comment #202932): “No, it will be worse. Remember what they did to Bob Dole in 1995 or Mitt Romney pushing the wheelchair off the cliff? It will be more vicious because it is less deserved.”
    .
    You don’t get it. Viciousness has nothing to do with deserved, other than that people are more willing to accept viciousness if the target is seen as deserving.
    .
    Dole and Romney, like McCain and Bush, are establishment Republicans. There were nasty attacks on them, but Dems would argue, with at least some justification, that they were no worse than Willie Horton or Swift Boating. Disgraceful, but roughly within the accepted bounds of political attack ads.
    .
    The attacks on Trump were on a whole different level. Yes, he was an easy target. If the Republicans are so stupid as to nominate an establishment type, there will be nasty attacks on the candidate, but within the “normal” bounds. But if they nominate a populist, the attacks will be on the same level as Trump.
    .
    I am inclined to hope for a Trump run in 2024 on the grounds that any decent candidate will be slimed just as hard and at least we know Trump can take it. But I am increasingly leaning toward DeSantis. It looks like he has the required backbone. But he seems so mild mannered and wonkish that when the Democrats sling mud at him, they might not get away with it.

  274. DeWitt,
    “There is strong physical evidence that something exists to cause the anomalies in galactic rotation curves, galactic cluster dynamics and the flatness of the universe.”
    .
    Yes there are glaring unexplained observations. But “dark matter” and “dark energy” seem to me nothing but arm-waves: unproven, ad-hoc, and worse, impossible to disprove. When that becomes the operating theory of a science, that science has become nothing more than belief in either magic or religion. I think a very different understanding of physical reality at large scales of distance and time is needed to simultaneously explain both the cosmic red shift/expansion and non-Newtonian gravitational behaviors at galactic scales…. a unification and explanation of apparently unrelated observations is as good a description as I can give you.
    .
    Just ‘makin’ shit up’ is what cosmology seems to me to be doing, and I doubt that improves the understanding of anything.

  275. Stephen Fitzpatrick (Comment #202934): “Yes there are glaring unexplained observations. But “dark matter” and “dark energy” seem to me nothing but arm-waves: unproven, ad-hoc, and worse, impossible to disprove.”
    .
    My impression is that astronomers do not actually regard “dark matter” and “dark energy” as answers. They are placeholders that serve to describe the observations until an explanation is available.

  276. They did eventually destroy Trump, but Trump helped a lot along the way. DeSantis is my current definition of the “Sane Trump”. There will be endless hysterical accusations that he is Trump 2.0, but that will happen no matter who runs. DeSantis needs to conserve energy because most early frontrunners don’t make it. He has been a reasonable governor in Florida so far, but he is getting distracted by national ambitions.

  277. Dark energy / dark matter is an arm wave, I don’t think that is a secret. It is simply the name for the unexplained phenomenon. A Nobel Prize awaits whoever explains it eventually. I haven’t looked into it very much, but it seems that there might be a chance it is a problem with observations, not a physical phenomenon. If the universe is expanding as they say it is going to get pretty dark and lonely.

  278. Tom Scharf,
    “If the universe is expanding as they say it is going to get pretty dark and lonely.”
    .
    I’m not convinced the observations actually mean physical expansion. But in any case, the stellar main sequence data suggests that many billions of stars that are smaller than the sun, in each of millions of galaxies, will be around for at lease hundreds of billions of years. We (as individuals and as a race of intelligent creatures) don’t have to worry too much about dark and lonely, at least for a while. 😉

  279. SteveF,

    I’m not convinced the observations actually mean physical expansion.

    So increasing red shift with distance, up to and including the cosmic microwave background, doesn’t really mean that there is an increasing velocity difference? Now that’s hand waving.

  280. Tom Scharf,
    “He has been a reasonable governor in Florida so far”
    .
    I think he has been a very good governor, not just reasonable. Compared to Charley Christ, he is a super-star. Even compared to his immediate predecessor, he seems tougher, more principled, and more competent. I do hope Trump stays out of 2024; Desantis is indeed the “sane Trump”. Which is not to say he will not be attacked by those on the left as if he were Satan himself… he will suffer those attacks…. but he is smart enough, tough enough (unlike Romney) and disciplined enough (unlike Trump) for those attacks to fail.

  281. DeWitt,
    “Now that’s hand waving.”
    .
    Absolutely. I freely admit it is a hand wave…. on par with the hand waves of dark energy and dark matter. We do not understand what is happening. That is the problem; hand waves don’t clarify anything.

  282. SteveF,

    No, it’s not on par with dark matter/dark energy. To start with, it requires one to believe that astronomers don’t know what they are doing and their measurements are wrong. Also that there is some yet unknown explanation for the CMB other than the Big Bang and probably a lot of other impossible things to believe before breakfast.

    It’s a lot easier to accept the possibility of matter and energy that reacts to gravity but not EM radiation than to believe that there must be a whole lot more unobserved and unexplained phenomena that lead to red shifts that look like accelerating expansion of the universe, anomalous galactic rotation curves, galactic cluster dynamics and what looks like a gravitationally flat universe with only about 5% of the mass energy required.

    Dark matter/dark energy is actually the simplest explanation of what we observe, like the neutrino was the simplest explanation of an apparent failure of conservation of momentum in some particle decay reactions. And it is falsifiable, unlike string theory.

  283. DeWitt,
    “it’s a lot easier to accept the possibility of matter and energy that reacts to gravity but not EM radiation than to believe that there must be a whole lot more unobserved and unexplained phenomena that lead to red shifts that look like accelerating expansion of the universe, anomalous galactic rotation curves, galactic cluster dynamics and what looks like a gravitationally flat universe with only about 5% of the mass energy required.”
    .
    Woa. I completely disagree. Dark energy and dark matter are arbitrary constructs to explain inconvenient observations, nothing more. And worse, they are infinitely flexible, and can account for most any observation. They are now, and I am convinced ultimately will stay, in the extensive region of historical scientific rubbish. I note that these constructs remind me very much of physics prior to Einstein’s insights. Like cosmology now, all of physics was convinced it was right… while in fact it was very wrong. That is where cosmology is now: arbitrary nonsense, which is nothing like science.
    .
    “And it is falsifiable”. Rubbish.

  285. SteveF,

    Dark energy and dark matter are arbitrary constructs to explain inconvenient observations, nothing more. And worse, they are infinitely flexible, and can account for most any observation.

    That’s not my impression at all. The amount of dark matter and dark energy is, in fact, tightly constrained by the observations. What we have are observations that are accurately explained by postulating a certain amount of mass and energy. Any other explanation would have to explain why it looks so much like mass/energy.

    See, for example, this:

    https://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/184284/

    And also from Wikipedia:

    A problem with alternative hypotheses [to cold dark matter] is that observational evidence for dark matter comes from so many independent approaches (see the “observational evidence” section above). Explaining any individual observation is possible but explaining all of them in the absence of dark matter is very difficult. Nonetheless, there have been some scattered successes for alternative hypotheses, such as a 2016 test of gravitational lensing in entropic gravity[169][170][171] and a 2020 measurement of a unique MOND effect.[172][173]

    The prevailing opinion among most astrophysicists is that while modifications to general relativity can conceivably explain part of the observational evidence, there is probably enough data to conclude there must be some form of dark matter present in the Universe.[174]

    So telling angech that he should avoid even mentioning dark matter/energy when talking about cosmology would be doing his audience a disservice.

  286. From the WSJ online:

    Delta now accounts for more than 90% of all cases in England, according to England’s public-health agency. The variant is spreading mostly in unvaccinated, younger age groups, U.K. data shows.

    Dog bites man.

    Younger age groups would also have been far less likely to get infected by the earlier variants. As I said earlier, Delta is burning through the remaining susceptible population, who are also much less likely to suffer severe consequences from infection. Given the larger fraction of the US population with confirmed infections, it is unlikely that Delta will cause much of a problem here even when it becomes the most common variant.

  287. Well luminiferous aether used to be a thing too, ha ha. I suppose quantum physics kind of brought it back in a strangish way though. I’m only causally interested in astrophysics though so I won’t contribute much other than saying it smells a bit premature to declare much on this subject. I’m not sure if they can test for dark matter/energy in any real way, that is the challenge of the moment.

  288. DeWitt,
    “The amount of dark matter and dark energy is, in fact, tightly constrained by the observations.”
    The dark energy is prescribed by the measured red-shift “Hubble constant”; I don’t find that informative or in any way constrained. Were the Hubble constant a different value, the amount of dark energy would be calculated based on that measured value.
    .
    The amount of dark matter may be constrained, but it’s distribution seems fluid, and adjusted to explain each different galactic rotation curve. Once again, I don’t find that convincing. Nor do I find convincing the dark matter is always associated with proportional to the amount of regular matter. Why? Well, that is the only way to explain galactic rotations. It is all arbitrary.
    .
    The kindest thing I can say about dark energy and dark matter is that they are hypothetical constructs, much like the hypothetical graviton. The most unkind thing I can say is that astrophysics is going to remain lost until they figure out exactly what is causing the observations…. and prove the existence of those things. It has been a very long time since the red shift and anomalous rotational curves were identified, with no apparent progress.

  289. lucia,

    I assume since the web site is up, your house wasn’t demolished by a tornado.

  290. SteveF,

    The sum of dark matter and dark energy is fixed at the critical value to close the universe. The observed behavior of the Hubble ‘constant’, is of course, a determinant of the amount of dark energy. That’s what constraint means. But saying that measurement is arbitrary is somewhat equivalent to saying that if pigs had wings, they could fly. Baryonic matter is not evenly distributed in the universe, so there is no reason to believe that cold dark matter is perfectly uniform. But without a lot more mass than we can see, it is unlikely that galaxies would even form.

  291. The days of the NCAA monopoly on college sports with slave labor (yes, an exaggeration) are over.
    .
    Supreme Court Rejects NCAA’s Tight Limits on Athlete Benefits, Compensation
    The court rules the NCAA violated antitrust law by limiting schools from competing for player talent by offering better benefits
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-rejects-ncaas-tight-limits-on-athlete-benefits-compensation-11624285407
    .
    “The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that strict NCAA limits on compensating college athletes violate U.S. antitrust law, a decision that could have broad ramifications for the future of college sports.

    The court, in a unanimous opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, upheld lower court rulings that said the NCAA unlawfully limited schools from competing for player talent by offering better benefits, to the detriment of college athletes.”
    .
    Unanimous opinion. What the NCAA was doing was never justifiable IMO. I find it incredible that the BLM activists et. al. weren’t outraged by this, the most visible exploitation of minorities around if you examine racial disparities. The most performative racial swooners are in academia and they had almost nothing to say on this subject.
    .
    Will this make college sports better? Not for fans, but better for good players who are not being rewarded by the market. The Alabama’s and Ohio State’s of college football will reap the rewards here. Second tier schools will not be able to compete financially, and the lesser sports are going to see their budgets shrink to finance better benefits for football and basketball. As it should be based on market demands.
    .
    Pay for play is only a few more lawsuits away. College player’s union. Ugh, it will likely get ugly. But the NCAA should have never let it get this far that the SC had to set the rules. Conferences and schools are likely going to continue to collude to limit benefits and back to the SC it will go, and they will lose again.

  292. If you want to see how desperate the anti-lab leak backers are getting, read this:

    https://www.timesnews.net/opinion/editorials/editorial-the-wuhan-lab-leak-is-not-a-theory/article_4f003156-cedb-11eb-9cbe-53bfec9c14b2.html

    To summarize, a lab leak origin is not a theory because it’s not falsifiable and we have to believe that its origin is natural because we can’t trust China and we know that other viruses have jumped from animals to humans.

    But of course it is falsifiable and thus qualifies as a scientific hypothesis/theory. If the intermediate animal host and intermediate virus were ever found, the lab leak theory goes up in smoke. The intermediate hosts were found for SARS and MERS in a matter of months. But there is no evidence that China has ever seriously looked for the intermediate, perhaps because they know where it originated and that the intermediate hosts were humanized mice. And even the Chinese claim to believe it was created in a lab, just not a lab in China. They have pointed a finger at Fort Detrick in Maryland.

    Note also the total lack of discussion of the circumstantial evidence in favor of a lab leak based on the suspicious coding of the furin cleavage link and the lack of rapid early mutations as would be expected for a virus that had just jumped from an animal host. This article would be a good example for the logical fallacy called begging the question as the argument clearly assumes the conclusion.

  293. The talk went well mostly due to a wife who is a Wiz with power point.
    Cosmology does appear to be at one of those breaking points like the old earth centric increasing number of weird orbits to explain the movement of the planets.
    Not that the system was wrong if you chose earth as a centre point, just that it was a lot easier to explain rotation with the sun at the centre of the solar system.
    DeWitt is right in saying that the observations have to fit the theory, that is how Einstein upset Newton, just that he made it move to a slightly more complicated model.
    Steve F is right as well the current explanations of Gravitons and dark matter do not cut the mustard though something has to be doing it.
    My hardest act was to try to convince them that a tennis ball [and every other still object on the earth’s surface] has its own inertial frame of reference accelerating towards the earth’s centre at 32 feet/sec2^.
    Went over like a lead balloon.
    Thanks to both for your comments and insights.

  294. a lab leak origin is not a theory because it’s not falsifiable

    It seems to me the natural origin notion equally also not falsifiable!
    .
    Anyway, that might be an argument for not using the term “theory”. But it’s not an argument in favor of the claim”the lab leak did not happen”.

  295. lucia,

    Someone commented at wsj.com that there was zero evidence for the lab leak scenario. I pointed out that is the classic argument from ignorance fallacy because without an intermediate host, there is also zero evidence for a natural origin. It proves nothing except that we cannot prove beyond a doubt that either hypothesis is true.

    Another thing the editorial failed to acknowledge is that lab leaks are also known to have happened. They’re not as common as a jump from an animal host, but they’re clearly not impossible.

  296. With regard to the lab leak theory, there are people who *know*. We have been assuming that we will never hear from them. But that might not be so.
    .
    China’s Vice Minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei, seems to be missing. There are reports that he defected to the U.S. in February and has classified information on the origin of the Wuhan virus.
    .
    We shall see. Unless the Biden Admisinistration and/or Deep State buries the guy.
    .
    Oops. Here is a link: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2021/06/21/china-China-Dong-Jingwei-COVID-US-defect/5391624284922/

  297. DeWitt Payne
    Lab leaks themselves aren’t uncommon. Lab leaks of really, truly bad things are uncommon. But they happen. Weapons grade anthrax was leaked in the soviet union. SARS has leaked.
    .
    I agree with you that there is zero evidence that this disease was caused by an animal jump. Unless you take the fact of a disease to be evidence that “it must be a jump”, there is no evidence.
    .
    Of course we believe many past diseases were jumps. We also have established some where. In the later case with specific evidence for that case. As far as I am aware, there is none in this case.
    .
    Obviously, this happened somehow. But we just don’t have specific evidence to pin it on one of the theories.

  298. Tom,
    I’m happy about the NCAA ruling.
    .
    Whether it will make college sports “better” depends on how you define “better”. It already had serious elements of “not good”– specifically, it exploited some high performing young athletes with access to pretense of education. Now they’ll evidently be allowed to provide them support to get post graduate education which could either be grad school or vocational education.
    .
    We should see some athletes actually get paid soon.
    .

  299. Tom Scharf,
    “Pay for play is only a few more lawsuits away. College player’s union. Ugh, it will likely get ugly. But the NCAA should have never let it get this far that the SC had to set the rules. Conferences and schools are likely going to continue to collude to limit benefits and back to the SC it will go, and they will lose again.”
    .
    College football should be modeled more like college baseball…. where the colleges settle for mostly non-star players, and the most talented sign lucrative contracts to play professionally. Of course, there is some need for a “farm system” like in baseball, and college football serves that purpose, but without signing bonuses and compensation for the players. The most talented players get absolutely screwed, the less talented get a free education (at least in theory), the NFL gets a farm system at no cost, minor sports get supported, and the major conference teams make a fortune…. everything on the backs of the most talented football players. You are right that many people who play in lesser sports will not any longer be supported via athletic scholarships, but IMO, they should never have been supported in the first place. College football will continue, of course, but in a more financially fair form, and one way or another the most talented players will be highly compensated…. as they should be.

  300. SteveF

    Of course, there is some need for a “farm system” like in baseball, and college football serves that purpose, but without signing bonuses and compensation for the players.

    Professional sports needs a farm system. That doesn’t mean there is a need for colleges to supply the farm system. Currently colleges do supply it. But that could change.
    .

    You are right that many people who play in lesser sports will not any longer be supported via athletic scholarships, but IMO, they should never have been supported in the first place.

    That’s my view too.
    .
    I don’t see any libertarian case for volleyball, track, wrestling or swimming to be subsidized of the backs of football players. I don’t particularly see a communist one why we need the cross-subsidy either. Heck, I don’t see any reason why volleyball etc. gets a subsidy while competitive ballroom dance does not. They can all be clubs. Or a school can subsidize the ones they want to subsidize some other way.
    .
    Or if someon wants to go full on communist with “club” revenues, they could decree all excess revenue raised by student activities is taxed and that money is split evenly with all registered clubs on a need basis. Someone could organize a club for discussing the philosophy of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and get money on the same basis as wrestling or gymnastics. Just because the spoils are generated by “able” students, there’s no reason to give preference to “ableist” organization when dividing the spoils.

  301. The most abusive practices have to do with the monopoly the NCAA has. If they allowed non-college privately owned teams who set their own compensation rules to compete against their teams and championships then most of the whining will end. The best players can then decide for themselves how much value they put on an education and the college experience versus direct payments. I don’t think the NCAA is going to like the answer to that question.

  302. Delta variant has taken over very quickly. See the UK graph here:
    https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57489740
    .
    >95% in the UK from almost nothing in 6 weeks. Similarly the US has seen this triple in the past several weeks but still not dominant yet. The absolute case rates are relatively low thanks mostly to vaccination, but the UK is seeing a mini-breakout.
    .
    It’s a good idea to get vaccinated if you haven’t already done so. The US was lucky with its vaccine timing to avoid this. If this was around in Jan it would have been much worse.

  304. Tom
    The rather amazing thing is he must have thought he wouldn’t be questioned on the conflict of interest issue. My guess is he believes that he doesn’t have one. He probably believes he is both utterly objective and upright. So his opinion is not swayed by conflict.
    .
    Lots of people think that way. That’s why the rule is that if you appear to have a conflict of interest, then you do. If $$$$ is involved, that goes double. $$$$ is involved in Daszak’s conflicts.

  305. Tom,
    My ballroom dance teacher is not vaccinated. I wish I could persuade him. But it’s not my call. ( The immigrants from former soviet block countries are very suspicious of the government. It’s a thing with them.)

  306. Tom Scharf,
    “Daszak is “invited” by The Lancet to update his conflict of interests statement”
    .
    They guy is a dishonest scumbag. He should have disqualified himself from all things covid-19 in January 2020. That he didn’t means he and his organization should never receive another dime of taxpayer money, even if that cuts into his $400K per year taxpayer funded salary… running a non-profit! Unfortunately, dishonest scumbags like Daszak seem to do remarkably well under Democrat administrations, especially if they support the Denocrat’s ‘correct’ left political narrative…. and Daszak does. He is going to be protected until Republican’s take control, scumbag or not.

  307. Tom Scharf,

    I wouldn’t refer to what’s happening in the UK as a breakout. From what I’ve read almost all of the cases are young and unvaccinated. A more contagious variant will burn through these young susceptibles faster than the less contagious variants so you get a spike in cases, but probably not in deaths. The UK has more susceptibles at the moment than the US because they have had fewer infections. A test of that hypothesis will be when Delta completely takes over here but we still don’t get a spike in the new case rate.

    Again I would like to point out that the US establishment is substantially underestimating the fraction of susceptibles in the US by only counting vaccinated as being immune. It’s very likely, IMO, that more than 70% of the US population is now immune. The percentage is likely even higher in the high risk population.

  308. A BENIFIT from Covid lockdown: I have learned to grocery shop with Walmart delivery. If you are careful you get name brands at bargain basement prices. If you spend $35 you get free shipping and I’m not worried about catching anything from the cardboard boxes they deliver. Almost everything arrives in two days. Also, it saves my old legs from a hike through the big box store. Finally, I have tried some of their store brands and they are [usually] quite good [and dirt cheap!] Negatives: I do not buy any perishables and I need to watch out for price traps.

  310. It looks like the Wall Street Bets gang was right about Gamestop. The company just raised over a billion dollars by issuing 5 million new shares of stock at over $200 per share. So their stock was massively undervalued.

  311. Russel,
    I predict home delivery of lots of things will be a lingering aspect of Covid. Some people got used to it and will prefer it.
    .
    Jim’s former boss used to go out to dinner with his young family a lot. They went to “family” places like Denny’s, Chili’s etc. Not fine dining. While families can find that fun, I’m betting a fraction of the sort who already spend in that way (rather than doing home cooking) will take to having meals delivered rather than bundling everyone up and driving to the strip mall.
    .
    Having it delivered saves over all family time.
    .
    I’m sure some single people will do it.
    .
    The only thing slowing down lots of home delivery was people developing the habit. Now many have. (I haven’t. I still go to the store or restaurant. But we are seeing frequent home delivery around here. )

  312. MikeM,
    That doesn’t mean they were right! It means the owners of Gamestop finally figured out they should offer new shares while the price is wildly overvalued. They the raise cash cheap! Oddly, if enough people buy at $x per share, the companies value approaches $x/share because they are sitting on $x/share or cash!
    .
    It’s a weird way for a company to grow. They also can’t count on someone driving their price up so they can raise money that way. But if bettors do drive the price up, the company should get in on the action!
    .
    Now, if Gamestop uses that cash wisely, they can grow and the sane meaningful value can grow. If they can’t use it wisely, the value will tank.

  313. DeWitt,
    “It’s very likely, IMO, that more than 70% of the US population is now immune. The percentage is likely even higher in the high risk population.”
    The over 65 vaccination rate is now over 75% in most states, so the fraction of the at-risk population that is immune has to be higher than that, certainly over 80%.
    .
    I expect there will be research which better quantifies how many adults were exposed/infected (even if symptomatic) and how many had some pre-existing natural resistance. Anecdotal observation suggests nearly half of individuals with known exposure never tested positive. I think that solid data about the range of susceptibility will be very interesting and informative, and perhaps provide some guidance should another novel virus….. ummm…. arise.

  314. There have been multiple news reports of parents protesting the Loudon county school board’s decisions to teach critical race theory and gender “fluidity”. Two were arrested yesterday after they refused to leave a school board meeting. Since the school board is elected, I wondered how there could be such a wide chasm between the school board and parents. Turns out Loudon county is a commutable distance to Washington DC…. so as the Federal bureaucracy has exploded, so has the population of the county (https://www.loudoun.gov/DocumentCenter/View/120300/Population—Decennial?bidId=). The population has almost doubled in the last 10 years, and all those new voters have elected a school board that reflects their politics…. extremely progressive… which embraces CRT and gender fluidity.
    .
    It is a miniature version of the political shift in all of Virginia…. bureaucrats have been adding dramatically to the voting population, flipping a once reliably conservative state to a reliably ‘progressive’ state. The projections of ever increasing Federal bureaucracy mean VA is unlikely to elect Republicans for statewide office in the foreseeable future.

  315. Compare and contrast with the ‘mostly peaceful’ protests last year that killed 20-30 people and the billions in damage caused :

    At least two people were arrested as parents cut off from speaking before the board remained in the room to deliver their prepared remarks to others in the crowd. One of them refused to leave until everyone had an opportunity to speak, and deputies told him that he would be arrested for trespassing if he refused to follow their orders to vacate the room.

    The first man was issued a trespassing summons and released, a Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson told Fox News Tuesday evening. The second allegedly “was acting disorderly and displayed aggressive behavior towards another attendee.”

    “A second adult male was acting disorderly and displayed aggressive behavior towards another attendee,” the spokesperson said. “A deputy intervened and the subject continued to be disorderly with the deputy. LCSO Deputies attempted to take him into custody and he physically resisted arrest. The subject was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.”

    https://www.foxnews.com/us/virginia-loudoun-county-school-board-mulls-transgender-critical-race-theory-policies
    Right wing extremists. Heh.

  316. lucia (Comment #202977): “That doesn’t mean they were right! It means the owners of Gamestop finally figured out they should offer new shares while the price is wildly overvalued. They the raise cash cheap!”
    .
    But that overlooks supply and demand. In an efficient market, the value of the stock should be close to what the market as a whole thinks it should be. Yes, it is possible for the market as a whole to be mistaken; is that what you mean? If so, you could be right, but why would that happen? A factor of 2 or 3, maybe. But not two orders of magnitude.
    .
    The wild price fluctuations last winter were a market breakdown. One group of investors was manipulating the market via massive short sales. Those positions meant that the supply of stock available for sale was tiny, so a modest increase in demand sent the price soaring. But if the price is high because of such an artificial shortage, then trying to issue more stock would crash the price.
    .
    Gamestop sold over a billion dollars of stock. Where did that come from? I very much doubt that the Wall Street Bets guy had a spare billion lying around.
    .
    lucia: “Oddly, if enough people buy at $x per share, the companies value approaches $x/share because they are sitting on $x/share or cash!”
    .
    I don’t follow. There is the tautological position that a stock is worth whatever it sells for. But I don’t see why that matters here.

  317. Steve,
    Yeah. Youngkin might win in Virginia. But then again, even California elects Republican governors from time to time.

  318. mark bofill (Comment #202981): “Right wing extremists. Heh.”
    .
    Indeed. Sounds like a lot of Loudoun County residents are getting red pilled. In recent elections, the county has swung from solidly Republican to overwhelmingly Democrat. Might be about to swing back.

  319. Lucia, Russell,

    For me it’s less the time spent shopping and more the time spent cooking (and cleaning up after cooking, and cleaning up after eating, and putting away dishes after washing, and so forth).
    COVID has made ‘Grubhub’ and ‘DoorDash’ and similar companies more popular too I think, but my experience of them is that they have a ways to go to prosper post covid. The food is late, the order is wrong, the markup / delivery fee is preposterous, so on. Maybe I’m just getting grouchier in my old age though, that probably colors my view some.

  320. Mike,
    Wouldn’t that be nice. I doubt it though. I worry that Democratic Party dominance is a function of population density, and that once population density reaches a certain point, that’s pretty much it. Not sure about this; hope I’m wrong or at least oversimplifying. Not sure.
    [link to support my claim]

  321. mark bofill, Lucia,
    “Maybe I’m just getting grouchier in my old age though”…Roger that! I just embrace it and use it to my advantage. [I am still remarkably patient with my granddaughters though.] Regarding the ‘Grubhub’ and ‘DoorDash’ nonsense. I have never gone that route. I just order many more grocery items from Wally’s, Amazon and Target. Wally’s is free if you spend $35.00, Amazon is free [Prime] and Target is free and 5% off the total if you have a Target credit card. Everything arrives within two days. I also am a regular for curbside pickup at Sam’s Club, Whole Foods, Chic-fil-A, and the Chinese take out place. [and I still wear my mask for curbside pickup.]

  322. mark bofill

    At least two people were arrested as parents cut off from speaking before the board remained in the room to deliver their prepared remarks to others in the crowd. One of them refused to leave until everyone had an opportunity to speak, and deputies told him that he would be arrested for trespassing if he refused to follow their orders to vacate the room.

    Were some members of the public not allowed to speak to the board at all. We had a case like that with the village board in Lisle. It happened before I lived here. But afterwards, everyone on the village board was voted out. The mayor was out.
    .
    There was a lawsuit. The board had authorized construction of a grocery store. The citizen’s position was that the boards autorization as not valid because they cut off public comment. The boards position was that was stupid because after public comment, they can ignore everyone and vote whatever the heck they want.
    .
    Construction was enjoyed pending “actual” litigation, so the contstruction couldn’t start.
    .
    So you’d think the “actual” litigation would start? But noooooo!
    .
    The grocery store and village appealed the injunction to the Il. Supreme court who helped up the injunction on the grounds that the group of Lisle citizens suing to prevent construction would probably win on the basis that the board is required to listen to everyone no matter how repetitive blah, blah…. (They could limit time. But if 10,000 people show up and all want to talk, every one of them must be permitted to talk!)
    .
    At that point the injunction remained in place and the city and grocery stopped suiing. So the “actual” suit never took place. Just court cases on the injunction which are based on what the Courts think they would rule if the actual case came to court! :).

    So we don’t have a precedent that the public must be allowed to speak, but we have a precedent that all the courts say that if a suit actually went forward, they would probably find the public must be allowed to speak. (Weird distinction. But basically in Illinois all villages now schedule to allow everyone to speak no matter how repetitive or how long it takes! The board can then vote to utterly ignore the public, but they must let them comment! Even if — possibly especially if– the board wants to thwart actual public will, they don’t want to risk the court throwing their vote out. So they have to sit through all that comment in Illinois!

  323. MikeM

    But that overlooks supply and demand. In an efficient market, the value of the stock should be close to what the market as a whole thinks it should be.

    That’s not the rule. A Lamborghini’s price doesn’t depend on what the “market as a whole” will pay. If there are 8 people in the world who want to spend $100,000 or more for a Lamborghini and Lamborghini makes 8, they can sell for $100,000. But if the next highest bidder is $20,000, the price only drops when Lambo makes a 9th car and puts it up for sale.
    .
    So the price isn’t determined by what the “market a a whole” wants. It also depends on limitations in supply. If supply is limited, (and it is provided that Gamestop doesn’t issue new stock) the price is driven by the balance of buyers and sellers and buyers willing to pay a lot (and specifically the most) drive the price.
    .
    Gamestop (and actually a couple other companies) have stepped in and recognized that if their stock price is insane they should step in, create more stock and sell as much as they can at the ridiculously high price. The don’t take the downside risk shortsellers take. They just end up with cash! Afterwards they can decide what to do with the cash at their leisure.
    .
    Companies are rarely in the position to sell at a ridiculously inflated price. But when they are, they might as well do it. Figure out what to do with the cash later. (They could wait and buy the stock when the price falls or they could come up with ideas to improve their business. It’s up t them!)
    .

  324. Lucia,

    but we have a precedent that all the courts say that if a suit actually went forward, they would probably find the public must be allowed to speak.

    People in Loundoun could use a precedent like that.

  325. mark bofill (Comment #202986): “Wouldn’t that be nice. I doubt it though. I worry that Democratic Party dominance is a function of population density”.
    .
    I found the link completely unconvincing. We know that certain groups of people tend to vote Republican and that other groups tend to vote Democrat. The former tend to be more common in rural areas, the latter in cities. So rural areas are usually red and big cities tend to be blue. We have known that for a long time.
    .
    So the mere fact of a correlation with density demonstrates nothing. A far more elaborate statistical analysis would be needed to even suggest a causal relationship.

  326. lucia,

    Following procedure is important. As I remember, both Trump and Biden have had injunctions placed on executive orders because they didn’t follow procedure as specified by the Administrative Procedures Act. Preliminary injunctions were issued for Biden’s orders suspending offshore oil and gas leases and ordering a moratorium on deportation, for example. Having a pen and a phone isn’t quite enough for a tyranny yet.

    Mike M.,

    The stock market seems to be efficient only on average over the long term. I think the problem is that once an anomaly becomes public knowledge, it tends to go away. However, it might take quite a long time for a correction to happen. See, for example TSLA. I think the adage ‘don’t fight the tape’ would seem to apply, until it doesn’t.

  327. MikeM

    lucia: “Oddly, if enough people buy at $x per share, the companies value approaches $x/share because they are sitting on $x/share or cash!”
    .
    I don’t follow. There is the tautological position that a stock is worth whatever it sells for. But I don’t see why that matters here.

    Consider this transaction:

    (0) I previously had a company called “Lucia Inc” that had 10 outstanding shares. My assets are $20 all of which are stored in my mattress. If I liquidated and distributed, shareholders would get $2/share. A sane investor should figure it makes sense to pay about $2/share. (Or a little less since it makes more sense to put the money in a bank and get some interest. But still, this is not worth $50.)

    (1) Because some c_r_a_y- c_r_a_y investors hyped my stock for reasons they think makes sense to them. I notice they’ve done this so I “float” 1,000,000 shares in “Lucia Inc” for $50/share. For now, my plan is to sell shares and just put this money in the mattress.

    (2) I manage to sell shares at that price. “Lucia Inc” now has an extra $50,000,000. I put that in a mattress which now holds $50,000,000. That’s all I’m going to do.

    (3) Lucia inc now has $50,000,020 but spread over 1,000,010 shares. Now, I could decide that I no longer want all that money in my mattress. So I liquidate and distribute to all the share holders. I will distribute $49.99952/share to each holder.

    (4) So the “book value” approached $50/share because I sold a super-mega shitwad of stock. As long as I just keep the money in the matters, it’s book value remains at $49.99952/share which nowis not wildly off the sale price of $50. But that doesn’t mean my stock was previously undervalued at $2/share.
    .
    Now, mind you, it might turn out that the c_r_a_y- c_r_a_y investors “really knew” that I had some brilliant plan up my sleeve and that I could do something wonderful . If they were right and it turns out I do do something brilliant, the book value could grow. Or if I just blow it all funding some pie in the sky thing, the book value could drop.
    .
    Now at all times, the retail value doesn’t equal the book value. It sort of depends on what sorts of things management ultimately does.
    .
    But, regardless, this price rise doesn’t mean the Gamestop bettors were “right” about the value of Gamestop back when it was worth pennies a share.
    .
    Gamestop is wise to float shares. They now have cash which they otherwise wouldn’t have had. With that cash, they may be able to do something useful and grow. There is even a possibility that now investors holding Gamestop won’t lose their shirts. But I would suggest there is serious risk of collapse down to $14.15/share:

    > (3.77*(69.38e3-5e6) + 200*5e6)/ 69.38e6
    [1] 14.14545

    This is based on the previous low price and the number of outstanding shares. Yes, maybe gamestop can do wonders withe the $1 billion. I bet they have not yet figured out what to do and are just sitting on a bit wad of cash. Cash you sit on is just worth it’s cash value, not more.

  328. Dewitt

    lucia,

    Following procedure is important.

    Yes. The Lisle village board learned that. Laws for public comment mean village boards must let the public comment. You have to sit there and let them slog through.
    .
    Yeah, the board can ignore the public. But at a minimum all those people showing up get to see that tons of people agreed with them and disagreed with the board. This is very useful in a democracy!

  329. Mike,
    I think for some reason, people who tend to vote democrat seek major population centers to live in. I think Jonathan Haidt had some explanation for it but I can’t recall the details.
    So I don’t think population density is an absolute rule, but I do think it’s a factor; it’s a side effect of the above. I don’t know the real underlying reason (underlying reason that people who tend to vote democrat seek to live in major population centers).
    At one point in time I might have chalked it up to a prevalence of black voters in major population centers but I don’t think that’s what it is.
    Shrug.

  330. In today’s WSJ online:

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-covid-vaccines-riskier-than-advertised-11624381749?mod=hp_opin_pos_3

    Are Covid Vaccines Riskier Than Advertised?
    There are concerning trends on blood clots and low platelets, not that the authorities will tell you.

    The implication is that the risks of a Covid-19 vaccine may outweigh the benefits for certain low-risk populations, such as children, young adults and people who have recovered from Covid-19[my emphasis]. This is especially true in regions with low levels of community spread, since the likelihood of illness depends on exposure risk.

    And while you would never know it from listening to public-health officials, not a single published study has demonstrated that patients with a prior infection benefit from Covid-19 vaccination[my emphasis]. That this isn’t readily acknowledged by the CDC or Anthony Fauci is an indication of how deeply entangled pandemic politics is in science.

    There’s also an opinion piece on Fauci and masks that I haven’t read yet, but anticipate will not redound to Fauci’s credit.

  331. https://www.wsj.com/articles/dr-fauci-and-the-mask-disaster-11624398991?mod=hp_opin_pos_2

    Dr. Fauci and the Mask Disaster
    What we really needed was intelligent advice on when and how transmission occurs.

    Late in the pandemic I described a public-service ad on a college radio station that tried to labor through the permutations of place, age, circumstance and behavior in which a mask might actually help. The Dr. Faucis of the world might tell us it’s a pipe dream to imagine the public could take on board such a complex message; the best we can do is an over-simple, endlessly repeated message—wear a mask!—devoid of nuance.

    But we never tried. How many times in the past 15 months did you see the three-minute public-service spot showing how aerosol dispersion works, what situations are high and low risk, and offering dramatized examples of people sizing up and responding intelligently to specific sets of circumstances? You never saw such an ad.

    But if government agencies actually tried to tell the truth to the public, they might be trusted more. Heaven forfend. The Jack Nicholson line from A Few Good Men would seem to be the policy:

    You cant handle the truth!

  332. DeWitt Payne (Comment #202997): “But if government agencies actually tried to tell the truth to the public, they might be trusted more. Heaven forfend.”
    .
    Indeed.
    .
    I was in Toronto during the SARS outbreak in 2003. If you remember, Toronto was the city outside the Far East with the worst outbreak. There was a lot of concern, even fear, but overwhelmingly people “kept calm and carried on”. I am convinced that was due to Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Sheela Basrur. She was magnificent. Totally honest and totally calm. She never exaggerated risks and she never minimized them. If she was sure of something, she said so. If she was not sure, she said so. If she didn’t know, she said so. So everyone trusted her and remained calm since the situation was obviously in capable hands.
    .
    What a contrast with the last year plus.
    .
    My default position is now that when the public health authorities say something, they are lying. Until proven otherwise.

  333. “Gamestop sold over a billion dollars of stock. Where did that come from?”
    .
    Crowdsourced.Very.dumb.money. Ha ha. Meme stocks are much closer to gambling than investing. Probably still better than Vegas though as the house margin is much smaller.

  334. I think progressives are depending on conservatives to do the dirty work here to get the CRT madness out of schools. Although they might virtue signal on the subject I very much doubt they want their kids taught this stuff. They will keep their heads down, denounce conservative extremism publicly, but secretly thank them for stopping this. I’d really like to see a voter referendum on this.

  335. In a simplified model vaccination will at worst case add no benefit to someone already infected. In this case it would seem that the body’s immune reaction to the vaccination and infection were identical, or the immune system’s response to infection is a 100% superset of the vaccination. Imagine that the immune system responded to a real infection with identical spike detection and defeat, or that a natural infection produced vastly superior protection.
    .
    However the immune system may respond differently to vaccination and infection, and when a variant shows up one or the other may have superior results if they are different mechanisms. So in this case it would be optimal to have both unless there is extra external risk from vaccination.
    .
    Which mechanism produces superior results to reinfection is unknown, but I’d guess natural infection has a more variable response due to a variable fight mechanism between individuals, and vaccination has a closer to all/none response since everyone is tuned to spike proteins.

  336. Tom Scharf,

    Admittedly anecdotal, but I know of one person who had the disease, got vaccinated and caught the disease again. This doesn’t make me confident that being vaccinated would increase my immunity if it happened to be low. If it’s already high, then I would think the risk of a strong reaction to the vaccine would also be high.

  337. Tom,

    I think progressives are depending on conservatives to do the dirty work here to get the CRT madness out of schools. Although they might virtue signal on the subject I very much doubt they want their kids taught this stuff. They will keep their heads down, denounce conservative extremism publicly, but secretly thank them for stopping this.

    I agree.
    Personally I think the whole woke nonsense was more directly aimed at liberals than conservatives anyway. Conservatives are more used to being smeared as racist to begin with than liberals, and I suspect they generally give a lot less of a flip. The woke stuff was intended to get liberals to act like rabid progressives, or at least toe the line. Or at least that’s what I think.

  338. The potty mouthed cheerleader case was decided by the SC. Unsurprisingly they decided that the schools have limited power to control off campus school speech. They apparently laid down some markers where they can and cannot limit speech, which is what everyone really wanted. It was an 8-1 decision.
    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/06/supreme-court-backs-cheerleader-over-school-that-punished-her-for-snapchat-post/
    “While the 3rd Circuit appeals court affirmed the judgment, it also “reasoned that Tinker did not apply because schools had no special license to regulate student speech occurring off campus.””
    .
    “First, a school will rarely stand in loco parentis when a student speaks off campus. Second, from the student speaker’s perspective, regulations of off-campus speech, when coupled with regulations of on-campus speech, include all the speech a student utters during the full 24-hour day. That means courts must be more skeptical of a school’s efforts to regulate off-campus speech, for doing so may mean the student cannot engage in that kind of speech at all. Third, the school itself has an interest in protecting a student’s unpopular expression, especially when the expression takes place off campus, because America’s public schools are the nurseries of democracy. Taken together, these three features of much off-campus speech mean that the leeway the First Amendment grants to schools in light of their special characteristics is diminished.”
    .
    “In addition to making her posts away from school and outside school hours, Levy “did not identify the school in her posts or target any member of the school community with vulgar or abusive language,” the justices wrote. She also “transmitted her speech through a personal cellphone, to an audience consisting of her private circle of Snapchat friends.””
    .
    I voted for Trump based partly on SC free speech law, this is an example of why although this case would likely have been decided the same.

  339. mark bofill,
    I think Youngkin doesn’t have much of a chance, but if enough bureaucrats are actually put off by teaching white 8 year olds that they are irredeemably racist, then it could happen. If Youngkin wins, it would delay the state’s descent into madness for a while, but I wouldn’t give him more than a 25% chance.
    .
    In the long term, the crazies on the left are going to run the state.

  340. Tom Scharf,

    The amazing thing is not the SC ruling (which was widely expected… the only surprise is it wasn’t unanimous), but rather that the idiots on the local school board believed it was a good idea to spend public funds to appeal the case…. in spite of being smacked down hard by the courts, twice in a row. The only reason the SC took the case was to administer yet another smack down of the idiots on the school board, leaving zero doubt that school boards… and other local government agencies… can’t control people’s speech.
    .
    Political power truly does corrupt. It also seems to make people especially stupid. Or maybe most people who pursue political power are just naturally stupid….. which does explain the situation in Washington DC rather well.

  341. I think part of the reason for the appeal was that schools have no clear tests to determine when off campus speech can and cannot be limited. Now schools can point to this decision when nutty people try to force schools to punish students.

  342. mark bofill (Comment #203004): “Personally I think the whole woke nonsense was more directly aimed at liberals than conservatives anyway. Conservatives are more used to being smeared as racist to begin with than liberals, and I suspect they generally give a lot less of a flip.”
    .
    No doubt, part of these reason is to force “moderate” Dems to toe the line. Conventional, corporate Republicans are just as susceptible as Dens. But there are not so many of them left and the ones who are left need to worry about becoming a target for the populists. The populists don’t care so much, but the more Machiavellian on the Left probably see that as an opportunity to demonize the populists, without even mentioning Trump.
    .
    But there is more than political maneuvering going on. Many on the Left really believe the nonsense and see those who disagree as evil, moral relativists that they may be. For some of those driving the issues, the inanity of their positions is a feature, not a bug. If they can force people to accept such obvious lies, then there is nothing to stand between them and absolute power. Which is what they are after.

  343. Tom Scharf,
    The district court and the appeals court were both perfectly clear: the school board has no right to control off-campus speech. There was no judicial question. They were just too stubborn (and dumb) to accept the court rulings: you can’t control what students say when they are not in school. It is always the same simple question that numbskulls seem unable to grapple with; “What part of “no” do you not understand?”
    .
    In fairness to the school board, their stupidity has served a useful purpose…. no other school board is likely to try the same nonsense again…. and if they do, they will lose every time they try.

  344. SteveF,
    There is a partial win for school authoritarians. SCOTUS found that hypothetically the school could discipline for off campus speech. But it actually must interfere with schooling in some ways that this certainly did not. The district court would have said even then they can’t discipline.
    .
    So according to SCOTUS,
    A kid posting an actual death threat could (probably) be disciplined. A kid actually bullying could (probably) be disciplined.
    .
    In contrast the district court would have not let them discipline even that.
    .
    But “Fuck cheer”? No. Come on!
    .
    I think SCOTUS gets it right. There may be some off campus speech that can be disciplined. This was not it. We’ll let you know what off campus stuff can be disciplined when we actually see it!!
    .
    Seriously: This was just some jumped up high school math-teacher cheerleader coach who was pissed off her decisions were criticized. The criticism did NOT affect discipline or order at the school. But the delicate snowflake math-teacher cheer coach couldn’t stand it and went medieval on the cheerleader. The school board backed her.
    .
    And now we know that behavior is recognized as violating the students free speech rights with the student winning 3-0 in courts.
    Lucky for the snowflake teacher her name isn’t on the case. Otherwise people would meet her and say, “Oh YOU are teacher X! Hahahahahahahah!!! You looooooose!!!!”

  345. “Those who say the blood of Patriots, you know, and all the stuff about how we’re gonna have to move against the government,” Biden said. “If you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”

    There you have it, straight from the Presidents mouth. The public needs to be able to own F-15 and nuclear weapons. Long live the 2cnd Amendment, Thanks Joe!
    .
    [Edit: OMG – Love the Bee’s take:

    ‘You’ll Never Beat The Government With Just Guns,’ Says Party That Also Believes Government Was Almost Toppled By Unarmed Mob On January 6

    ~yuge grins~]

  346. ‘You’ll Never Beat The Government With Just Guns,’

    Somebody should have told the Taliban that. Would have saved a lot of trouble.

  347. I guess it depends what side those F-15 drivers are actually on. It may not always be so obvious who is on the side of angels (however clearly Trump was not in Jan 2021).
    .
    By the way Biden, we have modernized the Air Force since 1976, they have F-22’s, B-2’s now.

  348. Lucia,
    Yes, some speech can be limited…. death threats, bullying, etc. But in most places these are already crimes, so subject to criminal complaint. Crimes are always limited. I don’t see that as much of a victory for the schools…. they would be better off referring such cases to the local police or prosecutor. Controlling kids outside of school is simply not the school’s job. The key phrase in the opinion was ‘en loco parentis’…. the schools fill that parental roll, in part, but only at school.

  349. Biden’s comment about F-15s (and nuclear weapons!) is just more confirmation he suffers from dementia, and it is getting worse. I expect the puppet masters are going to have to be ever more careful about Biden being in unscripted situations… I very much doubt he will be in office at the end of 2024.

  350. SteveF,

    Yes, some speech can be limited…. death threats, bullying, etc. But in most places these are already crimes, so subject to criminal complaint.

    Death threats are crimes. I’m not sure “bullying” is. I guess that depends on the definition of bullying. When physical, it’s often going to be assault or battery or threats of assault and battery, which are crimes.
    .
    Verbal can be a bit more dicey. I’ve seen things called verbal bullying that are and I’ve seen things that are just attempts to suppress expression of unpopular opinions. Expressing a general view that merely hurts someone’s feelings or offends them is not “bullying”.
    .
    I’m waiting to see if any cases involving punishment for “bullying” get filed to see what the schools pursue as “bullying” and how that aligns with 1st Amendment rights.
    .
    But yes, some of the things the school claims THEY want to punish are punishable as crimes. When punished as crimes, the accused are generally afforded due process. When schools do it you sometimes end up with a Math-teacher-cheer coaches acting as judge and jury in cases where the person criticized is the Math-teacher-cheer coach. That’s begging for flawed due process.

  351. Assault doesn’t necessarily include actual violence, I’m pretty sure a credible threat of violence is often sufficient.

    On an anti-bullying site they had this list of things that could be crimes:

    Bullying and cyberbullying can become a crime if you:

    Physically assault someone
    Harass someone especially if the harassment is based on gender or racism
    Make violent threats
    Make death threats
    Make obscene and harassing phone calls and texts
    Sexting
    Sextortion which is sexual exploitation
    Child pornography
    Stalk someone
    Commit hate crimes
    Take a photo of someone in a place where they expect privacy
    Extortion

    A problem has been that lately schools have been reluctant to bring in the police. See, for example, Parkland, FL. Because there was a claim of disparate racial impact of school disciplinary actions, they basically gave up on discipline almost entirely and refused to refer incidents to the local police. It seems that schools and universities have a hard time with discipline and due process, especially on politically charged issues like race and sex.

  352. Babylon Bee or NYT?
    .
    “Facing a surge in shootings and homicides and persistent Republican attacks on liberal criminal-justice policies, Democrats from the White House to Brooklyn Borough Hall are rallying with sudden confidence around a politically potent cause: funding the police.”
    “Senior Democrats said they expected party leaders to lean hard into that issue in the coming months, trumpeting federal funding for police departments in the American Rescue Plan and attacking Republicans for having voted against it.
    “This is not a time to turn our backs on law enforcement or our communities,” Mr. Biden said in his speech.”
    .
    Well, it’s not the Babylon Bee.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/us/politics/gop-democrats-defund-police-biden.html
    .
    And they are saying these things with a straight face! I’m sure this has not a thing to do with a 22 year veteran of the police department who carries a gun who ran on crime winning the NYC mayor’s race on Tuesday, handily beating the NYT’s progressive candidate who thought police should not carry guns.
    .
    Defund the police is deader than dead, but the progressives cannot simply abandon over a year of supporting and cheerleading it. To say this about face lacks credibility is a vast understatement. The issue is killing them politically so the NYT is signaling its supporters to drop it, now. Courage of your convictions need not apply.

  353. Tom Scharf,
    “Well, it’s not the Babylon Bee.”
    .
    The NYT is run by a bunch of politically correct clowns. At least the Bee is trying to be funny… the NYT is both hilarious and ridiculous without even trying.

  355. DeWitt,
    “I’m pretty sure a credible threat of violence is often sufficient.”
    .
    Yes, that is right. There is normally a distinction drawn between ‘assault’ and ‘battery’. A credible threat of violence is normally considered assault, and can be prosecuted.
    .
    I once had a production plant worker threaten to “kneecap ” me with “a ball peen hammer”… in the presence of witnesses. I told him that if he ever issued another threat of violence I would call the police and have him arrested for assault. He never threatened me again.

  356. So ‘defund the police’ is going down the memory hole.

    This couldn’t have anything to do with the resignation of the entire Portland riot squad (Rapid Response Team) when one of the team was indicted for assault on a ‘peaceful demonstrator.’ Don’t prosecute any of the rioters, but instead go after the police. Great optics there. Note that the RRT was a voluntary assignment and the officers who resigned from the team are still employed by the Portland police department.

  357. Mark Bofill,
    “Fund the police, huh. Did they say if black lives still mattered?”
    .
    It has never been about BLM, nor even about the ‘resistance’ to Trump. It is naked power that matters to the left… nothing more and nothing less. Every policy position, every vote in Congress, and every solemn pronouncement (including blatant lies) is focused on taking political power. They are immoral, evil, destructive people… and I mean you, Squad.

  358. Steve,
    I agree that the thing has almost nothing to do with concern for the welfare of black people. You may be right when you say its about power. I think its either that or … flat out hatred of life and existence maybe.
    I still puzzle over the root motive.

  359. Sharri Markson and Liam Mendes, The Australian
    The CSIRO has been forced to correct evidence it gave at a Senate estimates hearing after initially denying its researchers had undertaken work on live bats with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab at the centre of growing international concern it was the source of Covid-19. CSIRO chief operating officer Judi Zielke admitted the organisation had “undertaken research on bats previously”.
    “Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness did undertake research on bats in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2016-17,” Ms Zielke said.
    –
    Might be a bit hard to burn all those research papers after all.

  360. mark bofill,
    “I still puzzle over the root motive.”
    .
    The history of the left is clear: it is always about the power to absolutely and completely control individuals. That is the motive. Some places the movement toward control of individuals is fast and violent. Other places it is slower and less violent. But in the end, it is always about the power to control the individual. As Chairman Mao said multiple times, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Which, of course, is the main reason why the left wants courts to neuter the second amendment and allow seizure of guns in private hands. And why our demented president talks about how F15s and nuclear weapons protect the Federal government from its own citizens. Even in the rapidly dimming mind of Biden, it is always about power.

  361. Last year at this time there was a big surge in Wuhan virus cases across the south, from Florida and Georgia in the east to Arizona in the west. This year, new case rates in those states are pretty much flat, while they have been declining steadily further north (although I did not check all the northern states). Yet one more piece of evidence that weather/climate is a major factor in the propagation of the Wuhan virus.
    .
    I await a spate of articles blaming Republicans for the difference.

  362. Steve,
    If that’s so, there’s a lot of dumb progressives out there. Not everybody can hold power; only so many can rule. Take China for example. Only 6.5% of the population is in any way involved in government, that’s less than one in fifteen people.
    It might be stupidity (effective stupidity; inability to do math + arrogance, unrealistic expectations and lust for power). It might be darker than that. It might be some combination of both stupidity and hatred. Orwell seemed to think so, in ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’:

    The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters.

  363. Or maybe it’s more pathological than that. He also suggests (same link):

    … That is the goal towards which we are already moving, though, of course, we have no intention of getting there; just as a man who drinks a bottle of whiskey a day does not actually intend to get cirrhosis of the liver.

    I don’t know. People are complicated.

  364. marc bofill,
    Of course, Orwell was right about that. It starts as “we want everything to be more fair for everyone” (these days it is the pursuit of ‘equity’). But ultimately power is consolidated… de facto or de jure…. and only a few actually exercise control. And not by coincidence, those few lead lives of extreme wealth and privilege. Funny how that always turns out.

  365. Mark wrote: “Not everybody can hold power”
    .
    Only if you take a very narrow view of what represents power. Jockeying for position on the intersectional pyramid to cancelling or tearing down individuals for saying the wrong thing. These are all expressions of power. Virtue signalling is an expression of moral power. Of course, you’re not wrong that there are also the nihilists, who have been so completely demoralized that they see destruction of all existing power as the only power left available to them.

  366. Zeynep Tufekci writes another long and very good article at the NYT informing the liberati that science labs are pretty sloppy in reality. It’s possible, although not proven, that the people in these places are humans, perhaps even humans capable of error.
    .
    Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.html
    .
    As usual Daszak comes off looking more and more like Snidely Whiplash:
    “On Dec. 10, Peter Daszak, who organized The Lancet letter denouncing the questioning of Covid-19’s natural origins and was announced as a member of the W.H.O. origins investigation committee last fall, insisted it was a conspiracy theory to suggest that there were live bats in labs he had collaborated with for 15 years. “That’s not how this science works,” he wrote in a tweet he later deleted. “We collect bat samples, send them to the lab. We RELEASE bats where we catch them!””
    “Just a few weeks ago, Dr. Daszak changed his claims. “I wouldn’t be surprised if,” he said, “like many other virology labs, they were trying to set up a bat colony.””
    .

    Most of the items in here have been covered but there is a bit more detail on some. It is notable that a lot of work has been done by “internet sleuths”, it seems ‘S’cience isn’t too motivated to investigate itself in this circumstance. I think global biosafety needs a very hard examination, and that science itself isn’t calling for that is worrisome.
    .
    I find is somewhat amusing that they put her articles under “Guest Essay” (formerly opinion) while they write endless climate change propaganda as official science, it may be that she is not on staff.

  367. Thanks Dave. I hadn’t considered that, you may be right. There are different .. arenas, I guess besides just political power.

  369. DaveJR (Comment #203048): “Only if you take a very narrow view of what represents power. Jockeying for position on the intersectional pyramid to cancelling or tearing down individuals for saying the wrong thing. These are all expressions of power. Virtue signalling is an expression of moral power.”
    .
    Indeed. Another expression of power is influencing the agenda by getting your ideas/scheme to be widely considered. That probably applies to a lot of the leftists academics. The people driving the agenda probably expect to end up at or near the top and are likely focused on power for its own sake. By adopting the ideas of the would-be intellectuals (academics, press, etc.), they recruit those people to their cause. By cloaking their agenda in “morality”, they recruit the internet bullies and virtue signalers. Most of their followers are probably just trying to live their lives, stay out of trouble, and maintain their social position. That makes them highly controllable by the bullies.

  370. Tom Scharf (Comment #203051): “buildings just don’t collapse like this.”
    .
    On the contrary, buildings do collapse like that. But it is only supposed to happen in places like India and China, not here.

  371. Tom Scharf,
    “As usual Daszak comes off looking more and more like Snidely Whiplash”
    .
    Yup, the guy would help himself a lot if he disappeared from public view ASAP. He is the opposite of an effective spokesperson, and is making the entire field look dishonest.
    .
    .
    Mike M,
    “But it is only supposed to happen in places like India and China, not here.”
    .
    It has happened in Latin America as well. Every case I know of it was determined to be caused by cost cutting during construction; eg lack of specified steel re-inforcing, cheaper than specified (low compressive strength) concrete, or inadequate protection against corrosion. I have not heard of a collapse caused by engineering error, although I suppose some instances of building collapse are. Engineering margins for structures are typically so large that construction has to be horribly inadequate for a building to collapse.

  372. 40 years right next to the ocean might help corrosion a bit. There was a report the the night before someone’s (now missing) mother had told her son she couldn’t sleep because the building was creaking and it woke her up.
    .
    The building standards in Florida were pretty marginal 40 years ago. It wasn’t until Hurricane Andrew in 1995 that they got very serious after it was shown that most of the houses destroyed were not built to existing standards. Houses were self inspected by contractors, now the state does it. One hopes at least commercial buildings were inspected by the state back then. Corruption could of course side step that.

  373. Mike M,
    “I await a spate of articles blaming Republicans for the difference.”
    .
    No doubt there will be blame placed on Republicans. But there are multiple reasons why cases have not been falling as quickly in those three states as in some northern states:
    .
    1) The fraction of people in places like Massachusetts, NY, and NJ who have already had the illness is higher than in most southern states… so higher acquired immunity.
    .
    2) Fewer people in most northern states have refused the vaccines.
    .
    3) There are still some restrictions in many northern states which may reduce spread.
    .
    The weather could be involved, but I haven’t seen convincing evidence of that. The only ‘blame’ I see is as appropriate is people making a personal decision to not become vaccinated and then catching the virus…. but that is their choice to make.

  374. The south is running inside for the summer, the initial seeding of the delta variant is going to matter with timing, but not the ultimate outcome of it burning through the population that hasn’t reached herd immunity through (infection + vaccination). The good news is that we are close to or at herd immunity in much of the US AFAICT.
    .
    South America is still on fire, it’s winter down there. Definitely seasonal. It will be interesting to see if Australia/NZ can hold back the delta variant. Sydney is back into lockdown. My guess is that it will be near impossible to keep the delta variant out using a zero infection policy, but I have so far been proved wrong.

  375. Tom Scharf,
    Winter in Brazil (and in most of South America) is like summer most places. There is no significant difference in new cases between Brazilian states in the equatorial tropics (without any significant seasonal change) and southern states with winters more like northern Florida: https://www.citypopulation.de/en/brazil/covid/ The only states with much lower rates are in the Amazon basin and so sparsely populated that transmission is reduced.
    .
    Argentina really does have a winter (albeit mild), and there weather may be a factor.
    .
    These countries mostly lack wide distribution of effective vaccines.

  376. SteveF,

    Effective, yes. IOW, not a vaccine from China. The UAE was a leading country for vaccinations, but I’m pretty sure that they mostly used Chinese vaccines. As you might imagine, they’re still getting a lot of cases and the death rate is starting to go up again.

  377. DeWitt,

    The UAE is so young that even with a relatively high infection rate their death totals will remain low. They have almost nobody much over 60. See: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=united+arab+emerates+demographics&t=brave&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.populationpyramid.net%2Fcapture%2F%3Fselector%3D%2523pyramid-share-container%26url%3Dhttps%3A%252F%252Fwww.populationpyramid.net%2Funited-arab-emirates%2F2018%2F%253Fshare%253Dtrue
    .
    The disturbing thing about that population profile is that it shows before 20 years ago they eliminated most female births… or just murdered female babies. Horrible, either way. Only recently have birth ratios returned to near balance…… but at very low overall births for lack of women in their child bearing years. What a screwed up culture.

  378. SteveF (Comment #203060): “The disturbing thing about that population profile is that it shows before 20 years ago they eliminated most female births… or just murdered female babies.”
    .
    I don’t think so. Over 85% of the UAE’s population is foreign guest workers. Mostly relatively young adult males.

  379. Mike M,
    I stand corrected. I didn’t think the hired foreign workers were so big a portion of the population

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