"Somehow, It Must Have Escaped"
Surveying the Lab Origin/Lab Leak landscape
This morning
sent me a story from The Telegraph (UK) and asked for my thoughts.
The only thing ‘new’ here is a major newspaper rehashing information that has already been reported and more ‘officially’ endorsing the lab leak hypothesis. If that isn’t reason enough for you to say to yourself, “Yeah, Self, maybe this was/is a psy-op…” then I am not sure what to tell you except that you might still be trapped in a false binary intended to keep you from questioning whether something was spreading and in need of slowing, besides lies.
However, in the spirit of keeping things focused on The Science, let’s look at a single sentence from the article:
Somehow, it must have escaped.
Interesting. Escaped how? Escaped when?
If you are a Lab Leak proponent, please walk me through this. I’m not a scientist, didn’t come into this mess with the burden benefit of relevant coursework & professional experience, and have been asking pointed questions about the physics since January 2023.
I admit to not being able to explain the ins and outs of statements like RNA can’t pandemic. Yet, I can see those who assert as much are able to defend their reasoning to the hilt and am among those saying YES gain-of-function research is conducted but NO it cannot yield globe-trotting ‘pandemic potential’ coronaviruses.
“Lab ORIGIN!!!” some say. “It was released!”
Okay.
Released how? Released when? Released where? What’s the timeline here? Tell me the method(s) used. Direct? Indirect? See the helpful table at this end of this article, if needed.
We simply cannot keep accepting fantastical propositions on faith. I have made sincere efforts to understand what the Lab Fans’ believe happened and am not getting anywhere.
The Lab Landscape
With that in mind, I offer a brief survey of the Lab Origin landscape.1 Nominations for other Lab-oriented views are welcome - especially from individuals or entities that have articulated complete hypotheses or ideas not already represented below.
Jay Bhattacharya
In a 2024 interview, incoming NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya defined a Lab Leak this way:
He seems to believe that SARS-CoV-2 was either created or altered in a lab and entered the wider world by hitching a ride on a lab worker, who then transmitted it to others. Based on his public statements and interactions with me and others, Bhattacharya also appears to have made up his mind on the question of whether a pandemic involving a lab-origin coronavirus occurred.
Meryl Nass
Meryl Nass (I think) holds a view similar to what Bhattacharya has implied, but my colleagues and I had difficulty getting her to elaborate with respect to mechanism.
Michael Shellenberger
Michael "Case Closed" Shellenberger and his colleagues argue that the virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) via infected worker(s) sometime in autumn 2019, and was followed by human-to-human transmission. The fact that their story names a specific individual—Ben Wu—doesn’t make it any more plausible or less Hollywood.
As far as I know, Shellenberger et al don’t try explain why this lightening-fast pathogen was “spreading” and didn’t show up in any data or on-the-ground experiences prior to the launch of testing and emergency declarations.
(To be fair, I’ve yet to hear a persuasive explanation for this from any Lab-Origin or Zoonotic-Origin proponent. This is where those who say There are no viruses or - the view I hold - There was no novel, risk-additive spreading coronavirus - provide more reasonable explanations.)
Matt Ridley & Alina Chan
Matt Ridley has taken pains to "set the stage" for a Lab Origin. Unfortunately, he hasn’t explained how his Antagonist - a virus - left the lab scene and made its way everywhere else.
Observations about the traits of a thing, plus the place where the thing is supposed to have been adulterated or created, minus (or absent) a hypothesis about how the thing traveled from its place of origin, or why the thing "behaved" in the way that testing patterns and differential death curves depict, equals wishful thinking.
Ridley’s co-author, Alina Chan, is "not 100% convinced 'Covid' came from a lab.”2 The virus story as she tells it is also incomplete and contains serious plot holes.
Clare Craig
Pathologist Clare Craig claims SARS-CoV-2 is a "manmade" virus but acknowledges there’s no way (at least for her) to prove where it was created.
She says, “Within a few days, the virus can traverse most of the world,” and describes a spread mechanism once the virus is "out there" (see image below). However, she hasn’t proposed any possible routes through which the virus departed the lab(s).
Readers can see my dialogue with Clare Craig on this page.
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
In some ways, the CIA’s written assessment about the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was made with "low confidence," is one of the more honest statements about this entire affair.
Incredibly, it was WIDELY misinterpreted by people on all sides as endorsing a Lab Origin or Lab Leak view. As I’ve explained, the agency said nothing about a lab, named no countries, and did not use the word virus.
We are Still Being Misled
Look, I know everyone is tired. I know stories like the one in The Telegraph or the op-ed penned by scientific propagandists in The New York Times feel like wins — or ‘miracles’, as Jenin Younes put it.
Sadly - like I told her - they’re really not, and we are still being badly misled.
If you’re going with “It came from a lab,” I won’t stop you. But let’s go the whole nine yards, think this through, and stop pretending that magic is a good substitute for scientific thinking and common sense.
Somehow, it must have escaped explains nothing.
Related X thread here: https://x.com/Wood_House76/status/1902714632508240249
..which is good, because the name and determination about COVID-19 as a 'disease' came from the WHO. See COVID-19 Did Not Come From a Lab.
So now we have at least two major news outlets, the NYT and the Telegraph, each having proven themselves for 5 years to be entirely untrustworthy propaganda rags that repeatedly spout complete falsehoods in support of the official narrative, pushing the lab leak story. “Yeah we know they were lying and wrong about all that other stuff but they’re right about the lab leak!” Gell-Mann Amnesia to the max. Next let’s look at what we have to believe. We must believe that a man made virus, which by definition could never have been tested for real world fitness (this is a HUGE problem that almost no one considers) somehow got out of its place of manufacture and rapidly infected the world, but it waited to do any noticeable damage until after the official narrative said it could. “The thing maybe spread via infected lab workers infecting others!” Now assuming the thing was fit enough to avoid immune systems presumably well acquainted with corona viruses AND transmit outside the lab (which could not have been tested in advance and which is not well supported by a long historical record of failed challenge trials), it had to jump from person to person globally without making anyone sick, until it supposedly did once it was allowed too. But not in some jurisdictions. Mostly the most batshit (hey wait) crazy areas is where it attacked. Strangely the places that didn’t give a pangolin’s ass about supposed pandemics were unaffected by this carefully crafted weapon of mass destruction. “But maybe it spread via the jetstream or something and infected select areas!” Seems a hard ask for a lab creation that has never been subjected to the rigors of the wild. Somehow, somehow tho, it did it. I mean there’s a long historical record of lab leaks! (But strangely no long record of resultant pandemics). “But we were mislead by experts!” Says the woman who made herself famous by penning complete narrative-driving BS for the NYT for 5 years. But NOW she’s right and not grifting at all. Or maybe just maybe, it would’ve been much easier to just create a propaganda pandemic. Certainly international lockstep propaganda gained some function big-time, and spread easily and rapidly, infecting countless millions. That is a fact. GOF viruses somehow pandemic-ing, not so much. The CIA’s statement sure has broad application doesn’t it? They conclude a “pandemic” was most likely (but with low confidence) of “research related origin.” Could that be research related to the manipulation and control of the population perhaps?
"Somehow, it must have escaped" is as much a hand-waving explanation as "somehow it spreads contagiously."
To this day I have yet to see a rigorous explanation of how *anything* "spreads". Is it drops? Fomites? Aerosols? Free-floating in the wind? By skin contact?
Has any of this actually been quantified? I can find toxicology studies that can tell me exactly what dose (at least on lab rats) of various toxic substances can kill rats, whether via inhalation over a specified period of time expressed as parts-per-million or as mass per liter of air, or as per grams of skin contact, etc. I can find papers that attempt to quantify "amount of bacterial contamination per gram of food" thought to be capable of infection if eaten. I have found very little published research even attempting to quantify "how much virus is exhaled per minute from a sick person and exactly how many viruses-per-liter-of-air-inhaled make you sick" or even confirming that illness is even transmitted in the air at all.
To this day I feel like "spread" is an ill-defined unscientific term.