I write a lot about Covid origins. I thought the lab leak theory...

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I write a lot about Covid origins.

I thought the lab leak theory made sense, back in 2020, but I eventually came to realize that it's very unlikely to be true.

Here's a summary of some long posts I've written and many shorter threads:

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The first long blog post I wrote debunking the lab leak theory (this is somewhat out of date, but still a good summary):
medium.com/p/f640ae1c3704

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I argued the case for a natural origin of Covid, in a long debate against Rootclaim. Here's the first video:
youtube.com/watch?v=Y1vaoo…

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Scott Alexander wrote a summary of the debate:
astralcodexten.com/p/practically-…

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Scott Alexander wrote a second post, responding to many objections people had to his first:
astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-f…

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I went on Robert Wright's podcast, to talk about the debate:
youtube.com/watch?v=MTxgq8…

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A famous story says that 3 researchers got sick at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in November 2019.

The story appears to be completely made up by a guy from Trump's state department.

It was boosted by the same journalist who first said Iraq has WMD's:
medium.com/p/8e0d13a0c1b5

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The CIA says that Covid leaked from the WIV, but they only announced that opinion after Trump appointed John Ratcliffe as the head of the CIA.

The only evidence Ratcliffe mentions is the same fake story about 3 sick researchers:

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The FBI also supports a lab origin of Covid, but the technical details of their lab theory were already debunked in 2021:

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The DoE also thinks Covid is a lab leak, but they don't even agree with the other 2 agencies on which lab it leaked from:

(5 other US intelligence agencies disagree with these 3, and say that Covid had a natural origin)
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A GOP-led congressional investigation looked into Covid origins for 2 years but didn't find much more information than you can find on Twitter:

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Politicians in other countries also look for people to blame for the pandemic. Many of them say that SARS-CoV-2 was a US bioweapon:

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The evidence actually points towards Covid beginning at Huanan market, and claims about "ascertainment bias" don't hold up:

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Raccoon dog DNA at the market suggests that the pandemic started from infected animals at the market, but the data isn't perfect, and there are several other animals which could be to blame:

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SARS and MERS both originated far away from the closest known bat viruses, just like Covid did:

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If the WIV had engineered SARS-CoV-2, they would have needed to start with a secret virus that was very similar. The best evidence we have from 2019 is that they did not have any such secret virus:

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Epidemic models say the Covid pandemic most likely started in late November, 2019.

We can test if this timeline is reasonable by comparing the Wuhan outbreak to the early outbreak in Italy:

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We can also get an estimate of when Covid started by comparing the Wuhan market outbreak to a later market outbreak in Beijing:

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Some obscure studies claim that Covid was found outside of China as far back as September 2019. None of these claims hold up to scrutiny:
medium.com/p/e54c358736bb

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A prominent theory holds that Covid started with 2 spillovers from animals at Huanan market.

The arguments here get complicated enough that I've already written 5 threads on the details, and will probably end up writing more:

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Sometimes it's easier to recognize bad faith actors based on other conspiracy theories they support, rather than evaluating their scientific claims about Covid:

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It's also easy to recognize conspiracy theories as cope:

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Matt Ridley's covid origins theories are full of holes and inconsistencies. He has a history of science denial in other areas, for instance blaming a lab for the origin of HIV and denying global warming.

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I am not optimistic about the direction we're headed, with RFK Jr and Jay Bhattacharya in charge:

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I think the odds are at least 10X higher that the next pandemic will come from nature than from a lab, and we should be working harder to prevent the next natural pandemic:

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The 1977 flu probably came from a lab, though, so lab pandemic risk is real, and it's worth also taking steps to minimize the risks:

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An exponential model of the outbreak in Wuhan, used to estimate when the pandemic started:
medium.com/@tgof137/an-ex…

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Mutations which happened at the Huanan market were later found elsewhere in Wuhan, which is further evidence that the virus started at the market and spread out to the city, as opposed to the other way around:

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Double CGG codons in SARS-CoV-2 are not proof of engineering:

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I write a lot about Covid origins. I thought the lab leak theory...

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