I wrote a long post laying out the evidence for the lab leak theory. It’s very likely that when the US intelligence community reports on 25. August on their data about the orgins of the COVID-19 they will conclude that it was a lab leak. This then will lead to the discovery that the virology community mislead the public and Fauci will be forced to resign. Once he’s resigned a senate committee will have a lot of fun asking him how the funding decision for Baric & Shi was made in 2015 while the gain of function ban was in place and why the safety framework for gain of function research that was instituted after the ban was lifted in 2019 was never applied to the grant even so it was paid till 2019. They will also enjoy subpoenaing Twitter and Facebook for the documents about how those started censoring the lab leak hypothesis.
These events make it quite likely that we have a huge crisis of faith in the medical establishment. Milton Freedman used to say: “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
There are likely two months to plan what to do once things blow up and it might be valuable to plan for the scenario. Is this the time where structural change to the medical system can be made? What solutions should be proposed to deal with malicious and incompetent scientists?
Unfortunately, there’s a good chance this will happen while we have a new SARS-CoV-2 variant that would be better fought by giving a third vaccination dose. It might be pretty important to have Novavax around as an alternative to the current vaccines to give people alternatives to the current solutions.
Lastly, this scenario might be worth trading on. This isn’t financial advice, but if you want to trade it might be worthwhile about coming up with your own probability for this event happening and thinking through what it will do to the markets.
To capture the burdensome detail of this scenario, can you unpack your probability estimates for each step—conditional on the previous—and any reasoning?
Using made-up numbers for an example:
The report will be issued by the end of August (95%) [usually I wouldn’t worry much about this, but it’s crucial for trading decisions!]
The report will present a definite conclusion (40%) [I feel this is a high estimate, but expresses my ignorance]
The conclusion will be “lab leak” (80%) [leaning heavily on the conditional on earlier steps, hard to honestly and definitely rule out]
The virology community will be seen to have misled the public (33%) [when in this whole pandemic has epistemic vice been publicly recognised or even understood? But blame games are easier]
Fauci will (be forced to) resign (50%)
A senate committee will question Fauci about gain-of-function research (75%) [maybe 30% even without all the conjunctions]
...and subpoena Twitter and Facebook re censorship of the lab leak hypothesis (20%) [another conjunction, and kinda off-topic from virology]
Causing a crisis of faith in the medical establishment which will drive structural reform (1%) [specific reforms to GoF research seem likely, but I’d be (happily) shocked by reforms that address the underlying problems]
And independently,
A new variant appears, in 2021 (80%)
which is best addressed by a third or additional or different vaccine dose (30%) [seems hard to approve, then produce and distribute at scale in the relevant time frame, but vaccines are great]
This is just way way way too many conjunctions. I get p=0.0075, a little less than one percent, without the structural reform clause or new variant—but I’d love to see your numbers.
If you list a bunch of single events you get way to many conjunctions. There are however alternative ways. Someone might win a court case to unredacted the part of Fauci’s emails that’s about the lab leak theory and the plans to fight it.
The senate might create their own committee regardless of what the intelligence community report says and possibly even earlier.
As far as timing goes, I don’t think the loss of trust will happen in parallel with the report being released. It’s the start of more questions being asked.
Virus constantly mutate so whether or not you define something as a new variant is a matter of definition. The Delta that we have right now manages to have r>1 in the US, UK and Germany despite it being summer.
Given that Fauci and Farrar seem to be very directly responsible for the censorship of Twitter and Facebook happening when it did happen. It might be off-topic from virology but it’s far from offtopic from virologists.
An alternative story:
The report will be ~500 pages long, and shrouded in an impenetrable dialect of bureaucratese. No-one in the world will read it in its entirety. A lot of people will cherry-pick bits that sound like they support their previous conclusion. Some people will declare that it proves the coronavirus was a deliberate Chinese bioweapon released to attack America and we should retaliate by nuking them. Some people will declare that it proves that discussion of the lab leak hypothesis has always been unfounded anti-Asian discriminatory hate speech. No-one will change their mind about anything or do anything different.
In the few cases where the report presents clear statements of fact, it will be pretended that they were already the viewpoint of experts. Any media outlets that made earlier statements incompatible with the report will quietly edit or simply ignore their past statements. Only a handful of people will notice or care about this.
Imagine thinking the intelligence community will be honest.
A lot of the individual facts are already out there from the NIH letter to the EcoHealth alliance and what the intelligence community leaked. It’s really hard to tell a story given the facts that doesn’t come out with the lab leak being the most likely explanation.
Additionally, the intelligence community itself won’t be harmed by finding that there was a lab leak. They can leverage it into more funding by saying that they didn’t have enough manpower in October 2019 to investigate the WIV when it started acting strange and call for more funding to surveil biosafety labs. The story is good for justying more NSA spying powers.
How often does the US intelligence community fail to find the story that helps them to justify their spying powers?