Not gonna link to or rebut the lab origin opinion in this morning's NYT. It's just the same old stuff rehashed again. Instead I briefly counted any misleading articles I could find that were supportive or uncritical of a lab origin. I found 324 articles since Mar 2020. The median month had 3. - ThreadSky

acritschristoph.bsky.social • 49 days ago

Not gonna link to or rebut the lab origin opinion in this morning's NYT. It's just the same old stuff rehashed again.

Instead I briefly counted any misleading articles I could find that were supportive or uncritical of a lab origin.

I found 324 articles since Mar 2020. The median month had 3.

Comments

mbweissman.bsky.social•49 days ago

A list of names of press articles is not even superficially evidence of anything. One needs to look systematically at actual evidence to see what the most likely explanation is.
https://michaelweissman.substack.com/p/an-inconvenient-probability-v57

acritschristoph.bsky.social•49 days ago

Quite so- that's not the topic of this thread! This thread is about propaganda in our media.

You are very wrong about that evidence, as different folks have patiently tried explaining to you. Which is why the scientific community disagrees with you, and why you would have also lost $100k as well :)

mbweissman.bsky.social•49 days ago

One could call a list of articles poo-poo-ing lab leak an analysis of "propaganda". The first issue is which account is more likely to be true. Speculations on motivations can be interesting (e.g. https://michaelweissman.substack.com/p/science-in-the-swamp), but should come after the scientific analysis.

acritschristoph.bsky.social•49 days ago

Indeed, it is coming after the scientific analysis :)

liiiiiiira.bsky.social•49 days ago

what is the Y axis?

acritschristoph.bsky.social•49 days ago

y is just sorted rows for each media outlet (1 media outlet per row)

castdeath97.bsky.social•40 days ago

Any idea what happened at late 2020 and mid 2022?

I guess other news stories like the vaccines and the Ukraine war kept everyone busy?

acritschristoph.bsky.social•49 days ago

So if it feels like we've been subject to a non-stop barrage of lab leak nonsense like this from the media for 5 years now, it's because we have! Any given month in that time period had on average 3 articles boosting it.

This dataset is certainly incomplete, so ~1 a week is a safe guess.

acritschristoph.bsky.social•49 days ago

This would be remarkable in any context.

But especially in the context that experts anonymously put the median odds for the idea at 10%.

And with the context that it is even more strongly rejected by the data today. The 0.3% odds outcome from the $100k debate is good, but still an overestimate.

acritschristoph.bsky.social•49 days ago

Is there any parallel for this in our society's recent history? I am not sure. We didn't even hear about WMDs in Iraq every week for 5 years.

If such articles were published in China or Russia every week for 5 years about a Ft. Detrick origin, we would all recognize that for what it is.

zachhensel.bsky.social•49 days ago

Almost every day between 9/2001 and long after 3/2003, including complex theories about how pre-war WMD theories had been right all along even as evidence mounted that they were wrong.

Pretty solid parallel, especially the pre-war period when Blix looked where we said to and found nothing.

zachhensel.bsky.social•49 days ago

Some have now transitioned to the parallel of the stage where people admitted that no one will ever find WMD, but that war was worth it anyway because Hussein’s desire for WMD was too dangerous and would’ve gone wrong eventually.

acritschristoph.bsky.social•49 days ago

Yeah I need to look back at just how bad that stuff was

climateofgavin.bsky.social•49 days ago

Climate denial has been pushing out the same BS every week for the last thirty years. Venues shift and it’s lost salience, but it never goes away… 🤷

zachhensel.bsky.social•49 days ago

Ironic that these stories come in cycles; Curry et al should apply their models to lab leak and climate change skepticism article frequencies to discern periodicity from a long term trend.

acritschristoph.bsky.social•48 days ago

yeah.... probably the most analogous situation. If only there were also a bunch of "Secret spies have top secret information that climate isn't changing that we won't tell you, but we can assure you it's definitely not based on something they read on twitter" every few months as well :)

zachhensel.bsky.social•48 days ago

Surely there’ve been analogous explanations for why the deep state and mainstream media are universally motivated to support biased climate reconstructions

pjacobs.bsky.social•48 days ago

It's not quite 1:1 on that but the posture is the same: an attempted global hoax by the world's godless elites that is opposed by the true heirs to empiricism, which is simultaneously a plucky few mavericks but also incredibly common sense that everyone agrees about as is situationally convenient.

acritschristoph.bsky.social•49 days ago

Link to the dataset: https://gist.github.com/alexcritschristoph/a99bd626a88c487418ce79c83cd15d19

eubiedrew.bsky.social•49 days ago

The story is way too engaging to let it die, and that is where "journalism" is these days.

benfpiercephd.bsky.social•49 days ago

Very interesting that there were plenty in 2020-21, when lab leakers claim to have been silenced.

acritschristoph.bsky.social•49 days ago

Not only that, but there were scores of *neutral* articles on the possibility of a lab origin in 2020. My analysis is just of articles that promoted a lab origin theory.

Scientists and good journalists were covering the possibility from a scientific and skeptical standpoint then: https://archive.ph/kREIY

christophstc.bsky.social•49 days ago

In germany, we are currently having a resurgence of the lab-leak hypothesis in "the media", as this is allegedly described as ~85% certain in an intelligence report that has been withheld until today (and still is). any interest in getting into this debate again? me not so much...

acritschristoph.bsky.social•49 days ago

Yeah, saw the germany BND stuff. Honestly if people understood just how ignorant and baseless the nonsense underneath that sort of breathless ~top secret~ reporting is, they'd be absolutely furious at the journalists and the media outlets

christophstc.bsky.social•48 days ago

📌

christophstc.bsky.social•48 days ago

will look into this a bit more tomorrow, alex👋

eubiedrew.bsky.social•49 days ago

*unanimously?

acritschristoph.bsky.social•49 days ago

No, I meant, anonymously - talking about this anonymous survey https://gcrinstitute.org/covid-origin/

eubiedrew.bsky.social•49 days ago

Gotcha.

jhdcate.bsky.social•48 days ago

You are sorely mistaken to ignore this opinion piece. Just recently @cellpress.bsky.social published work on coronaviruses done under entirely unsafe laboratory conditions. It’s as if we’ve learned nothing.

acritschristoph.bsky.social•48 days ago

I don't have strong opinions on exact PPE regulations per virus in other countries. I'd lean towards more safety myself.

But if someone did have a strong opinion on that, my strong advice would be to have the intellectual honesty to not pretend that has anything to do with the origins of COVID-19.

acritschristoph.bsky.social•48 days ago

I won't debate whether "researchers should have had a respirator in addition to working in a BSC for a particular virus in a recent paper" because that has nothing to do with the origins of COVID-19, but also, we all know that nobody would be talking about it if some weren't pretending it did!

acritschristoph.bsky.social•48 days ago

But finally, something that that opinion left out is that the other recent work from the same lab on a merbecovirus did the work at BSL-3 instead of BSL-2+.

So why one and not the other? Is is because there is nuance (gasp) behind biosafety regulations for each virus

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00049-1

jhdcate.bsky.social•48 days ago

I know for a fact very experienced virologists were shocked by the 1st paper.

jhdcate.bsky.social•48 days ago

I mean, from the methods: "Biorisk assessment would be re-analyzed based on newly observed data of this virus to meet the necessary requirement of biocontainment levels." A little late in the process!

yousitonmyspot.bsky.social•48 days ago

In that great read here
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/09/1044985/shi-zhengli-covid-lab-leak-wuhan/

It is said that the USA uses BSL-2 for deadly pig bat-related viruses.

jhdcate.bsky.social•48 days ago

This is as much about trust in scientists today as it is about COVID-19. We can't pretend otherwise.

flodebarre.bsky.social•48 days ago

Are you going to call out US researchers for their unsafe handling of rabies virus?
Probably not, because they are following local guidelines.

https://my.absa.org/tiki-index.php?page=Riskgroups&default%5bcontent%5d=rhabdoviridae

acritschristoph.bsky.social•48 days ago

To restore trust in science, they would write: "SARS-CoV-2 didn't come from a lab. However, laboratory acquired infections are important to prevent, as they put researchers at risk. We should rejoin the WHO and have open dialogue with researchers in other countries about international regulations".

hypoautonomic.bsky.social•47 days ago

Last time this author taught me that they thought the idea that BSL-2 was comparable to a dentist office was a good thing to broadcast to the world.

Somehow I don’t think this time they will give a compelling discussion of biosafety either

kroekermartin.bsky.social•49 days ago

Wonder who keeps pushing this story - similar is currently running in Germany as "it's all uncovered in a top-secret report by the German secret service (BND) that then-chancellor Merkel suppressed"

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