I have only skimmed the early parts of the Rootclaim videos, and the first ~half of Daniel Filan’s tweet thread about it. So it’s possible this was discussed somewhere in there, but there’s something major that doesn’t sit right with me:
In the first month of the pandemic, I was watching the news about it. I remember that the city government of Wuhan attempted to conceal the fact that there was a pandemic. I remember Li Wenliang being punished for speaking about it. I remember that reliable tests to determine whether someone had COVID were extremely scarce. I remember the US CDC publishing a paper absurdly claiming that the attack rate was near zero, because they wouldn’t count infections unless they had a positive test, and then refused to test people who hadn’t travelled to Wuhan. I remember Chinese whistleblowers visiting hospitals and filming the influx of patients.
It appears to me that all evidence for the claim that the virus originated in the wet market pass through Chinese government sources. And it appears to me that those same sources were unequipped to do effective contact tracing, and executing a coverup. When a coverup was no longer possible, the incentive would have been to confidently identify an origin, even if they had no idea what the true origin was; and they could easily create the impression that it started in any place they chose, simply by focusing their attention there, since cases would be found no matter where they focused.
It appears to me that all evidence for the claim that the virus originated in the wet market pass through Chinese government sources
This is my concern.
Data from Wuhan in early 2020 is “dirty”. It had to pass through Chinese government hands, and then maybe also got filtered by the 2021 WHO investigation which was headed by… well you know who ;-)
But the government would need to have started the coverup while they were suppressing evidence. It’s weird to think they simultaneously were covering up transmission, and faking the data about the cases to make it fit the claim it originated in the wet market.
It is weird, but there are two different groups (China, Daszak/Ecohealth) with different incentives. In fact there are more than two different groups—Wuhan local authorities and Chinese central party officials had different incetives.
The Chinese initially wanted to cover it up, but they couldn’t keep that up forever. Daszak and Echohealth (and likely parts of the US intelligence agencies and military) desperately wanted this to not be a lab leak, as shown by FOIA’d emails from early 2020.
So, who faked what? Who molested the data before I get to see it?
Whoever publishes or sends out notices may or may not have others they check with. That’s sometimes the local health authority directly, but may go through the national government. I don’t know enough about how that works in China to say in general who might have been able to tell Wuhan Municipal Health Committee or WCDC what they were and were not supposed to say when they made their announcements. However, we have lots of information about what was said in the public statements and hospital records from that time, most of which is mentioned here. (You don’t need to trust him much, the descriptions of the systems and what happened when are well known.) But data is also disseminated informally through lots of channels, and I don’t know who would have been getting updates from colleagues or sending data to the WHO or US CDC.
Regarding cases at the Wuhan Central Hospital and HPHICWM, patients with a history of exposure at Huanan Market could not have been “cherry picked” before anyone had identified the market as an epidemiologic risk factor. Hence, there was a genuine preponderance of early COVID-19 cases associated with Huanan Market.
I see. So the claim is that these early cases were reported via channels that could not have been messed with, and they could not have been cherry picked because it was not known what the disease was.
But I suppose it is still possible that maybe these records were actually messed with, or that someone from WIV or SKVL or whatever deliberately infected the market with covid-19 as they knew it would make for a fairly bulletproof cover of an actual leak that they already knew about. Or something else weird like that—maybe intel did it on purpose for some convoluted set of reasons, knowing that it would create an ambiguous situation with some people pointing at a lab leak and some people pointing at the market.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m saying it’s implausible. (So if this is a necessary precondition for believing in a lab leak, it is clear evidence against it.)
Given that they were already caught in two separate coverups, it is not only not implausible it is highly likely that some kind of cover-up of the early cases was attempted. The only question is whether they succeeded to the extent of making it look like the wet market was the origin.
True, but you still need to demonstrate that your suppositions are more credible/reliable/falsifiable/etc… than someone else’s suppositions, in this case many someone else’s. Which you have not done yet.
Can you write down something actually rock-solid, (that requires more than a few dozen hours to credibly dismiss)?
That just shows different intel orgs have different ideas.
We know from declassified docs that the spate of UFO sightings in the 1940s and 1950s were caused by various US spy balloon projects, but different parts of the US military and intel are very heavily siloed from each other so even most of the military thought the UFOs were real.
There’s the state department’s effort to investigate the lab leak hypothesis by building some Bayesian model which was shut down because it might “open a can of worms”. From the memo notes:
Over the past months, members of Former Assistant Secretary Ford’s staff, and some AVC staff members, warned AVC leadership not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19. Both AVC and ISN staff members stated that AVC would “open a can of worms” if it continued.
There are also the whistleblower complaints that CIA analysts were bribed to rule against lab leak hypothesis.
The FBI analysts came to a different conclusion than the major US intelligence agencies while probably having similar access to evidence.
There are limits of how much the intelligence agencies can bias the findings by putting pressure on analysts. It seems that they didn’t totally rule out the lab leak hypothesis because that would be pretty hard to justify.
State department isn’t part of “US intelligence agencies and military,” and faces very, very different pressures. And despite this, as you point out there are limits to internal pressures in intel agencies—which at least makes it clear that the intel agencies don’t have strong and convincing non-public evidence for the leak hypothesis.
With the amount of leaking going on, I think it would have leaked if they had picked up through their surveillance efforts acknowledgments of how Chinese leaders admitted a lab leak to each other.
There seems to be some evidence of the unusual activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) with reduced cell phone traffic and possible roadblocks as mentioned in the NIH letter to the EcoHealth Alliance. The US intelligence community should have more details about this.
There also seems to be some evidence pointing towards three employees of the WIV being hospitalized with COVID-19 before the COVID-19 cases that we publically know about. This evidence seems to be illegally withheld from Congress. I see no reason for the intelligence agencies to violate the law and not disclose that evidence if they aren’t interested in discouraging people from believing in the lab leak hypothesis.
Sorry, I’m having trouble following. You’re saying that 1) it’s unlikely to be a lab leak known to US Intel because it would have been known to us via leaks, and 2) you think that Intel agencies have evidence about WIV employees having COVID and that it’s being withheld?
First, I think you’re overestimating both how much information from highly sensitive sources would leak, and how much Chinese leaders would know if it were a lab leak. This seems on net to be mostly uninformative.
Second, if they have evidence about WIV members having COVID, (and not, you know, any other respiratory disease in the middle of flu/cold season,) I still don’t know why you think you would know that it was withheld from congress. Intel agencies share classified information with certain members of Congress routinely, but you’d never know what was or was not said. You think a lack of a leak is evidence that would have been illegally withheld from congress—but it’s not illegal for Intel agencies to keep information secret, in a wide variety of cases.
And on that second point, even without the above arguments, not having seen such evidence publicly leaked can’t plausibly be more likely in a world where it was a lab leak that was hidden, than it would be in a world where it wasn’t a lab leak and the evidence you’re not seeing simply doesn’t exist!
You’re saying that 1) it’s unlikely to be a lab leak known to US Intel
I’m not sure what you mean with “known to”. There’s evidence. If we believe reporting that at least some people within the intelligence agencies who were willing to leak information to Schellenberger/Taibbi believe that this evidence feels conclusive to some members of the intelligence agencies about three WIV employees being ill with COVID but it doesn’t seem conclusive to other people.
Evidence often is in a form where it looks conclusive to some people but not others, especially when some of the people engage in motivated reasoning.
Second, if they have evidence about WIV members having COVID, (and not, you know, any other respiratory disease in the middle of flu/cold season,) I still don’t know why you think you would know that it was withheld from congress.
The COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 puts a legal obligation on the Director of National Intelligence to disclose among other things:
(C) researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in autumn 2019, including for any such researcher-- (i) the researcher’s name; (ii) the researcher’s symptoms; (iii) the date of the onset of the researcher’s symptoms;
(iv) the researcher’s role at the Wuhan Institute of Virology; (v) whether the researcher was involved with or exposed to coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology; (vi) whether the researcher visited a hospital while they were ill; and (vii) a description of any other actions taken by the researcher that may suggest they were experiencing a serious illness at the time
The report that was created in response does not provide that information.
I think from the reporting we have, we can be relatively certain that the intelligence agencies have reports of three WIV employees falling ill. How strong the evidence happens to be that this was COVID-19 is not publically known but would be publically known if the Director of National Intelligence had followed the law.
There has to be some reason why the Director of National Intelligence decided not to follow the law passed by Congress and release that information in his report. The unwillingness shows that the Director of National Intelligence (as representative of the intelligence communities) is biased.
The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.
Thanks. I was unaware of the law, and yes, that does seem to be strong evidence that the agencies in question don’t have any evidence specific enough to come to any conclusion. That, or they are foolishly risking pissing off Congress, which can subpoena them, and seems happy to do exactly that in other situations—and they would do so knowing that it’s eventually going to come out that they withheld evidence?!?
Again, it’s winter, people get sick, that’s very weak Bayesian evidence of an outbreak, at best. On priors, how many people at an institute that size get influenza every month during the winter?
And the fact that it was only 3 people, months earlier, seems to indicate moderately strongly it wasn’t the source of the full COVID-19 outbreak, since if it were, given the lack of precautions against spread at the time, if it already infected 3 different people, it seems likely it would have spread more widely within China starting at that time.
I’m not as familiar with the details but I don’t see why a subpoena would have a stronger force of law than the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 when it comes to making information public. If they send a subpoena to the Director of Intelligence a subpoena I would expect him to claim executive privilege.
and they would do so knowing that it’s eventually going to come out that they withheld evidence?!?
They withheld evidence. The only question we don’t know is how strong the evidence they withheld happens to be. Congress specifically wrote the section into the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 because they know that there’s evidence about those three employees from the State Department quote from above.
Again, it’s winter, people get sick, that’s very weak Bayesian evidence of an outbreak, at best. On priors, how many people at an institute that size get influenza every month during the winter?
According to multiple U.S. government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by Public and Racket, the first people infected by the virus, “patients zero,” included Ben Hu, a researcher who led the WIV’s “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses, which increases the infectiousness of viruses.
This suggests that the evidence was strong enough to convince some of the U.S. government officials with access to the evidence to convince them.
According to that article, the three employees of the WIV were not random members of the institute but working on coronavirus gain-of-function. They also seemed to be ill enough to go to the hospital which is not typical with influenza.
That kind of information wasn’t in previous government disclosures and wrote the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 to make the government disclose it. For some reason, the Director of Intelligence is withholding information for which Congress explicitly asked them.
Given that the Director of Intelligence is willing to withhold evidence that Congress can be certain to exist, they might also be withholding pieces of evidence over which we have no clue, and that might be protected enough that the sources with whom journalists talked didn’t know either or were unwilling to share.
months earlier
As far I remember previous reporting was about them being ill in November so not multiple months earlier.
FWIW: in the debate, Rootclaim don’t really push the line that alleged evidence for zoonosis is a Chinese cover-up, but mostly take reports as-is, and accept that one of the first outbreaks was at the Huanan Seafood Market. I think in some cases they allege that some cases weren’t tracked or were suppressed, and maybe they say that some evidence is faked in passing, but it wasn’t core to their argument.
I have only skimmed the early parts of the Rootclaim videos, and the first ~half of Daniel Filan’s tweet thread about it. So it’s possible this was discussed somewhere in there, but there’s something major that doesn’t sit right with me:
In the first month of the pandemic, I was watching the news about it. I remember that the city government of Wuhan attempted to conceal the fact that there was a pandemic. I remember Li Wenliang being punished for speaking about it. I remember that reliable tests to determine whether someone had COVID were extremely scarce. I remember the US CDC publishing a paper absurdly claiming that the attack rate was near zero, because they wouldn’t count infections unless they had a positive test, and then refused to test people who hadn’t travelled to Wuhan. I remember Chinese whistleblowers visiting hospitals and filming the influx of patients.
It appears to me that all evidence for the claim that the virus originated in the wet market pass through Chinese government sources. And it appears to me that those same sources were unequipped to do effective contact tracing, and executing a coverup. When a coverup was no longer possible, the incentive would have been to confidently identify an origin, even if they had no idea what the true origin was; and they could easily create the impression that it started in any place they chose, simply by focusing their attention there, since cases would be found no matter where they focused.
This is my concern.
Data from Wuhan in early 2020 is “dirty”. It had to pass through Chinese government hands, and then maybe also got filtered by the 2021 WHO investigation which was headed by… well you know who ;-)
But the government would need to have started the coverup while they were suppressing evidence. It’s weird to think they simultaneously were covering up transmission, and faking the data about the cases to make it fit the claim it originated in the wet market.
It is weird, but there are two different groups (China, Daszak/Ecohealth) with different incentives. In fact there are more than two different groups—Wuhan local authorities and Chinese central party officials had different incetives.
The Chinese initially wanted to cover it up, but they couldn’t keep that up forever. Daszak and Echohealth (and likely parts of the US intelligence agencies and military) desperately wanted this to not be a lab leak, as shown by FOIA’d emails from early 2020.
So, who faked what? Who molested the data before I get to see it?
Whoever publishes or sends out notices may or may not have others they check with. That’s sometimes the local health authority directly, but may go through the national government. I don’t know enough about how that works in China to say in general who might have been able to tell Wuhan Municipal Health Committee or WCDC what they were and were not supposed to say when they made their announcements. However, we have lots of information about what was said in the public statements and hospital records from that time, most of which is mentioned here. (You don’t need to trust him much, the descriptions of the systems and what happened when are well known.) But data is also disseminated informally through lots of channels, and I don’t know who would have been getting updates from colleagues or sending data to the WHO or US CDC.
I see. So the claim is that these early cases were reported via channels that could not have been messed with, and they could not have been cherry picked because it was not known what the disease was.
But I suppose it is still possible that maybe these records were actually messed with, or that someone from WIV or SKVL or whatever deliberately infected the market with covid-19 as they knew it would make for a fairly bulletproof cover of an actual leak that they already knew about. Or something else weird like that—maybe intel did it on purpose for some convoluted set of reasons, knowing that it would create an ambiguous situation with some people pointing at a lab leak and some people pointing at the market.
Weird things happen in the murky world of human conflicts.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m saying it’s implausible. (So if this is a necessary precondition for believing in a lab leak, it is clear evidence against it.)
Given that they were already caught in two separate coverups, it is not only not implausible it is highly likely that some kind of cover-up of the early cases was attempted. The only question is whether they succeeded to the extent of making it look like the wet market was the origin.
True, but you still need to demonstrate that your suppositions are more credible/reliable/falsifiable/etc… than someone else’s suppositions, in this case many someone else’s. Which you have not done yet.
Can you write down something actually rock-solid, (that requires more than a few dozen hours to credibly dismiss)?
Credibly dismiss? What?
If your confused about something in the prior comment, can you specify the exact issue?
As I said in another comment, that seems very, very hard to continue to believe, even if it might have seemed plausible on priors.
That just shows different intel orgs have different ideas.
We know from declassified docs that the spate of UFO sightings in the 1940s and 1950s were caused by various US spy balloon projects, but different parts of the US military and intel are very heavily siloed from each other so even most of the military thought the UFOs were real.
There’s the state department’s effort to investigate the lab leak hypothesis by building some Bayesian model which was shut down because it might “open a can of worms”. From the memo notes:
There are also the whistleblower complaints that CIA analysts were bribed to rule against lab leak hypothesis.
The FBI analysts came to a different conclusion than the major US intelligence agencies while probably having similar access to evidence.
There are limits of how much the intelligence agencies can bias the findings by putting pressure on analysts. It seems that they didn’t totally rule out the lab leak hypothesis because that would be pretty hard to justify.
State department isn’t part of “US intelligence agencies and military,” and faces very, very different pressures. And despite this, as you point out there are limits to internal pressures in intel agencies—which at least makes it clear that the intel agencies don’t have strong and convincing non-public evidence for the leak hypothesis.
With the amount of leaking going on, I think it would have leaked if they had picked up through their surveillance efforts acknowledgments of how Chinese leaders admitted a lab leak to each other.
There seems to be some evidence of the unusual activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) with reduced cell phone traffic and possible roadblocks as mentioned in the NIH letter to the EcoHealth Alliance. The US intelligence community should have more details about this.
There also seems to be some evidence pointing towards three employees of the WIV being hospitalized with COVID-19 before the COVID-19 cases that we publically know about. This evidence seems to be illegally withheld from Congress. I see no reason for the intelligence agencies to violate the law and not disclose that evidence if they aren’t interested in discouraging people from believing in the lab leak hypothesis.
Sorry, I’m having trouble following. You’re saying that 1) it’s unlikely to be a lab leak known to US Intel because it would have been known to us via leaks, and 2) you think that Intel agencies have evidence about WIV employees having COVID and that it’s being withheld?
First, I think you’re overestimating both how much information from highly sensitive sources would leak, and how much Chinese leaders would know if it were a lab leak. This seems on net to be mostly uninformative.
Second, if they have evidence about WIV members having COVID, (and not, you know, any other respiratory disease in the middle of flu/cold season,) I still don’t know why you think you would know that it was withheld from congress. Intel agencies share classified information with certain members of Congress routinely, but you’d never know what was or was not said. You think a lack of a leak is evidence that would have been illegally withheld from congress—but it’s not illegal for Intel agencies to keep information secret, in a wide variety of cases.
And on that second point, even without the above arguments, not having seen such evidence publicly leaked can’t plausibly be more likely in a world where it was a lab leak that was hidden, than it would be in a world where it wasn’t a lab leak and the evidence you’re not seeing simply doesn’t exist!
I’m not sure what you mean with “known to”. There’s evidence. If we believe reporting that at least some people within the intelligence agencies who were willing to leak information to Schellenberger/Taibbi believe that this evidence feels conclusive to some members of the intelligence agencies about three WIV employees being ill with COVID but it doesn’t seem conclusive to other people.
Evidence often is in a form where it looks conclusive to some people but not others, especially when some of the people engage in motivated reasoning.
The COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 puts a legal obligation on the Director of National Intelligence to disclose among other things:
The report that was created in response does not provide that information.
I think from the reporting we have, we can be relatively certain that the intelligence agencies have reports of three WIV employees falling ill. How strong the evidence happens to be that this was COVID-19 is not publically known but would be publically known if the Director of National Intelligence had followed the law.
There has to be some reason why the Director of National Intelligence decided not to follow the law passed by Congress and release that information in his report. The unwillingness shows that the Director of National Intelligence (as representative of the intelligence communities) is biased.
EDIT: According to the State Department:
Thanks. I was unaware of the law, and yes, that does seem to be strong evidence that the agencies in question don’t have any evidence specific enough to come to any conclusion. That, or they are foolishly risking pissing off Congress, which can subpoena them, and seems happy to do exactly that in other situations—and they would do so knowing that it’s eventually going to come out that they withheld evidence?!?
Again, it’s winter, people get sick, that’s very weak Bayesian evidence of an outbreak, at best. On priors, how many people at an institute that size get influenza every month during the winter?
And the fact that it was only 3 people, months earlier, seems to indicate moderately strongly it wasn’t the source of the full COVID-19 outbreak, since if it were, given the lack of precautions against spread at the time, if it already infected 3 different people, it seems likely it would have spread more widely within China starting at that time.
I’m not as familiar with the details but I don’t see why a subpoena would have a stronger force of law than the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 when it comes to making information public. If they send a subpoena to the Director of Intelligence a subpoena I would expect him to claim executive privilege.
They withheld evidence. The only question we don’t know is how strong the evidence they withheld happens to be. Congress specifically wrote the section into the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 because they know that there’s evidence about those three employees from the State Department quote from above.
Michael Schellenberger et al suggest:
This suggests that the evidence was strong enough to convince some of the U.S. government officials with access to the evidence to convince them.
According to that article, the three employees of the WIV were not random members of the institute but working on coronavirus gain-of-function. They also seemed to be ill enough to go to the hospital which is not typical with influenza.
That kind of information wasn’t in previous government disclosures and wrote the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 to make the government disclose it. For some reason, the Director of Intelligence is withholding information for which Congress explicitly asked them.
Given that the Director of Intelligence is willing to withhold evidence that Congress can be certain to exist, they might also be withholding pieces of evidence over which we have no clue, and that might be protected enough that the sources with whom journalists talked didn’t know either or were unwilling to share.
As far I remember previous reporting was about them being ill in November so not multiple months earlier.
FWIW: in the debate, Rootclaim don’t really push the line that alleged evidence for zoonosis is a Chinese cover-up, but mostly take reports as-is, and accept that one of the first outbreaks was at the Huanan Seafood Market. I think in some cases they allege that some cases weren’t tracked or were suppressed, and maybe they say that some evidence is faked in passing, but it wasn’t core to their argument.