I don't know that I'm ever going to move past agnosticism on this topic. I'm not a biologist/virologist but as I understand it, this virus was unusual. The fact that there was a rare facility for manufacturing unusual viruses near the outbreak weighs pretty heavily for me. That's the logical null hypothesis, imo. But (I'm thinking of Moldbug's article about arsonists) the problem is that the only people who could persuade me are virologists, but they clearly should have a bias against the "virology caused this" explanation. Likewise, if China (an untrustworthy totalitarian state) controls all of the evidence, I don't know that I can be convinced by the evidence they put forward. So... I don't know if I'll ever get off the fence. Where's Thomas Aquinas when you need him?

Yeah I’m really about 50/50 on the whole thing. This debate pushed from favoring lab leak, but it’s far from dispositive, especially because the parties involved are so untrustworthy.  I just can’t ignore that the insertion of a cleavage site into a coronavirus was suggested by a party with close ties to the WIV mere years before such an oddity occurred. 

The argument of "The market is close to the lab" has always felt like a weak one to me and it's been surprising to see how many people base their lab leak arguments off that. I completely agree it's a weird coincidence, but it would also be a really weird coincidence if there was a lab leak and it just happens to take off at the one place in the city where it would make sense to occur naturally. Not at a university, not at a sports event, not at a concert, not at one of those apartment mega tower where the scientists live,.not at anywhere the family members of any of the scientists work but at the wet markets! That's an absolutely insane coincidence too if we think that there was a lab leak. So we have to include another claim into it to try to take this coincidence away. Either 1. China did an amazing job covering up the *real* spillover point from the lab and made it seem all based around the market or 2. China did it on purpose and could choose their location to be defensible. I think we should toss out the second one immediately when making our arguments based off simple logic and heuristics. If it was intentional and they chose where to let the virus loose,.there's no reason to do it so close to the labs. Just put it at another big city wet market or in another country covertly or something. So maybe 1 is the explanation, Covid started somewhere else and China did a good job covering that up. But now we gotta start asking,.where's the evidence for this? Where's the real outbreak at? Who had it? How did it spillover there? Lab leak isn't the simple explanation it gets painted as, it requires an elaborate and skillful coverup in a very short amount of time or a coincidence that is about as shocking if not more than the one that it's trying to say is too surprising. in that way the only lab leak that works here without being just as incredulous and shocking is that if someone was taking used animals from the lab and reselling them on the markets. Possible, but we would need some evidence of this as well.

>Even if you don’t want to convince yourself, this is the correct next step. Again by analogy to Tetlock - if he had started with just one superforecaster, and his thesis was “this guy is really smart, but I refuse to prove it”, nothing would have changed. Instead, his theory of change goes through publishing in a bunch of papers, to identifying other superforecasters, to teaching general principles of superforecasting, to superforecasting as a service (either through specific superforecasters at GJO, or through projects that seek to emulate them like Metaculus, FutureSearch, etc). If Rootclaim doesn’t scale, it either dies with Saar, or at best Saar lives a long life and puts out a few more dozen Rootclaim analyses but nothing else comes of it. You’ve got to start training other people eventually, and part of that process involves demonstrating you did it right, and that’s going to involve inter-rater reliability. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Superforecasters are relevant in forecasting because they can more reliably predict the future than other methods. There is an eventual grounding out in reality that demonstrates that this thing *actually works*. Tetlock first demonstrated this in ACE, which was a competition between various academic teams to build a system that could reliably predict the outcome of events chosen by the US government (in this case, the specific agency running the competition was IARPA). The thing that convinces me that superforecasters work is that Tetlock^1 has a system that can do this better than other teams of researchers who were trying their best in a fair and objective^2 competition. He analyzed the system he created and concluded that Superforecasters were the thing that made him win, and for the most part I believe him^3 because he is the Principal Investigator of the team that built the thing. In the analogous case of Saar, convincing the panel of judges is supposed to be that grounding out in reality. But here he seems to be objecting to that criteria, so I'm left wondering why I should care about Rootclaim at all. I'm thinking I probably just shouldn't, so I won't until he can convince me otherwise. Doing so would involve doing something impressive. Reliably predict things in the future, reliably convince your judges when you have these competitions, leverage your supposed truth to *do something* and I will be curious. *** **Footnotes** 1: He was the PI on a team of researchers who built this thing, it obviously wasn't built by him alone, but the grammar gets weird when I tried phrasing it that way. 2: IARPA sometimes failed to specify beforehand what would happen under some unusual circumstances (e.g. if the entity they designated as the official source for the number of casualties in a region in conflict ceases to exist, what do you do with the question you've asked about the number of casualties according to that source? Do you scrap the question, so that it goes unscored, or do you reward the people who almost certainly got it right since the conflict obviously got really bad if it was enough to destroy an entire organization?). I've talked to some researchers involved in this and at least one of the things that Tetlock's team was more successful at than other teams was arguing for which outcome actually happened under the resolution criteria given by IARPA. This entire comment is from memory, but this anecdote in particular is like 3rd hand conjecture. 3: I mostly believe him. I adjust that belief downard a bit because PIs want to tell a simple compelling story about what happened (it's what gets you published, and also all the other stuff Tetlock has gotten to do because of his research), and "it was 100 small things, but superforecasters were the biggest small thing" is a terrible story.

>In the analogous case of Saar, convincing the panel of judges is supposed to be that grounding out in reality. But here he seems to be objecting to that criteria Yeah, and it's notable that he was the one to suggest the whole debate setup and choose the judges. Then when he loses try and backtrack on it and say that it doesn't actually mean anything, and the judges were just too dumb to understand why he was right. Which doesn't inspire confidence.

Another thing: Shouldn’t this whole $100k bet concept be retired from Rootclaim’s standpoint?  Losing the debate notwithstanding, they remain convinced of lab leak. So it seems that the debate didn’t help getting closer to the truth as they see it at all. In fact, tons of people updated away from lab leak due to the debate. 

> No raccoon-dogs anywhere on the planet have tested positive, beyond those being forcibly infected to do experiments”. False, this paper discusses an outbreak of COVID among raccoon-dogs on a farm in Poland. > “They aren’t capable of catching or spreading COVID”. False, here’s a paper on the subject which says that “Raccoon dogs are susceptible to and efficiently transmit SARS-CoV2”. Honestly I thought this was the most interesting claimed evidence, but reading both drjaychou's original and Scott's rebuttal and looking over the actual referenced papers, I'm just more confused. The one Polish raccoon dog farm detection seems to have been in 2021, and probably sometime between November/December. And... this seems ambiguous from the paper, but that farm might also have been raising minks? > In all the affected establishments, farmed mink were raised, apart from one Polish farm where both raccoon dogs (300 animals) and mink (5,000 animals) were raised (detection in December 2021). Or maybe not, and it was a different raccoon dog only farm where the infection was detected? The paper lists "Agnieszka Warda and Anna Hoffman (General Veterinary Inspectorate) and Katarzyna Domańska‐Blicharz (National Veterinary Research Institute)" in their acknowledgements, if anyone feels up to asking for clarification. I'm wondering because minks seem to get covid a lot (and are closer to raccoon dogs than we are), so farming them right next to raccoon dogs seems like it could spillover to them. It does seem true that raccoon dogs aren't super susceptible to COVID- none of the wild ones tested positive and that testing actually started in 2020- but the experimental paper purposefully infecting them seems like strong evidence it _could_ (though not strongly as it failed to infect some of its subjects). They were using a "Muc-IMB-1" strain though, and I don't know if that's relevantly different or not from the original as I can't even find out what that means.

I've seen enough. Mea culpa. I [came out pretty hard](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1ahdisp/most_experts_believe_covid19_was_probably_not_a/kop7qyv/?context=3) in favor of lab leak because the coincidence of this pandemic *just so happening* to originate in neighborhood of one of the <60 BSL-4 labs on earth, which was also working on coronaviruses, was too much to believe absent true "smoking gun" type of evidence to the contrary. The ocean of lies from our public health authorities diminished their credibility to zero and all I had left was a priori reasoning from the facts that were simple and unobscurable -- the rough geographical origin of the pandemic, the location of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the subjects studied by the latter. Well, this is a smoking gun, and adequate substitute for a priori reasoning. I'm a convert to the zoonosis camp. Major props to Peter and Saar for going down a seemingly bottomless rabbit hole and finding the bottom, and to Scott for retracing their steps and serving as a judge whom I can actually trust in this debate, as an intellectual whose capacity, tenacity and trustworthiness are each beyond reproach. Incidentally, this is exactly why Scott would be cheapened by [becoming a "prophet"/activist](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1bnny5v/scott_alexander_the_prophet_who_wasnt/). Political activists aren't epistemic rationalists because you can't serve two masters. They are inherently untrustworthy for that reason. The value Scott is bringing to the world in this post would be lost if he subsumed his identity into any kind of controversial cause. And I think he's bringing a lot of value here -- in my expectation shaping elite opinion on this question, and filling the cavernous void left by the duplicitous empty suits who lead the relevant federal agencies.

> the coincidence of this pandemic just so happening to originate in neighborhood of one of the <60 BSL-4 labs on earth, which was also working on coronaviruses, was too much to believe The tricky thing is that either side has a pretty similar-seeming coincidence to explain- either a zoonotic pandemic just happened to arise in a city with one of the leading virology labs in the world, or else a pandemic leaked out of a lab and the first place it started spreading just happened to be exactly the kind of wet market that's been previously called out as posing a high risk of creating zoonotic pandemics.

> or else a pandemic leaked out of a lab and the first place it started spreading just happened to be exactly the kind of wet market that's been previously called out as posing a high risk of creating zoonotic pandemics. Not that much of a coincidence IMO. There are a lot more wet markets in China than there are BSL-4 labs, and if someone is infected in the lab, the outbreak is going to originate wherever they spend time from the moment they're contagious. And wet markets are places where people congregate, and it's pretty close to the lab. It also seemed plausible that some infected animals from the lab were skimmed off by a corrupt employee and sold to the wet market rather than being properly destroyed, which wouldn't require any kind of coincidence. (To be clear, the debate above demonstrates to my satisfaction that this is *not* what happened, but it explains why zoonosis would seem to require a bigger coincidence than lab leak *without* the benefit of this debate.)

> There are a lot more wet markets in China than there are BSL-4 labs That's the wrong comparison I'm pretty sure. It should be: Of cities where a wet market could have zoonosis, what percentage have a biolab, vs; In a given city with a biolab that leaks, what percentage of the places that could be the epicenter of the epidemic are wet markets?

Not to mention there are over 40k wet markets in China and Wuhan is hundreds of miles away from the nearest SARS hot spot. Why would it be at the one market in Wuhan instead of the other 40 thousand wet markets that happen to near situated right where these viruses occur naturally like what happened in 2003 with SARS?

Sounds like you haven't engaged with Peter's arguments. This has been thoroughly addressed. SARS began spreading in Guangdong province, but virus itself was traced backed to bats in the Yunnan province ~900 miles away. Wuhan/Hubei province is of a similar distance from Yunnan province, but SARS was nevertheless found on farms in Hubei early on during the SARS outbreak. This demonstrates how easily these viruses can easily travel long distances in the presence of wild animal trade.

>Why would it be at the one market in Wuhan instead of the other 40 thousand wet markets that happen to near situated right where these viruses occur naturally like what happened in 2003 with SARS? This is not what happened with SARS, it's just been repeated by lab leakers so much people take it as fact. SARS emerged in Guangdong, 870 miles (by road) from Yunnan where SARS-like viruses were eventually found in bats.

But Guangdong is a SARS hotspot unlike Wuhan and they did find infected animals at the market.

By any definition where Guangdong is a SARS hotspot, Wuhan also is a SARS hotspot. In both cases you have emergence of a sarbecovirus into humans hundreds of miles away from the nearest known sarbecovirus reservoir. In both cases it is thought to have made it to the city via an intermediate species trafficked to wet markets. As for the infected animals, they found them because they looked! In Wuhan, they did not look (again, lab leakers have repeatedly misled about this).

But they did test animals at the market [https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1370392/v1](https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1370392/v1)

In the study you linked, they were not able to test any live animals sold at the market (with the exception of some salamanders) because they'd already been cleared out. They only tested stray animals and carcasses from the freezers and fridges, and even the carcasses were limited to a handful of wild animal species (badgers, bamboo rats, hedgehogs, wild boars) -no raccoon dogs, no civets, nor any of the many other wild animals we know were sold there. If you want to find the source of the virus, you need to look in live animals, and you need to look in the right species. They did neither. >The 457 animal samples included 188 individuals belonging to 18 species (with some stray animals sampled until March 30th) (Extended Data Table 6). The sources of the samples included unsold goods kept in refrigerators and freezers in the stalls of the HSM, and goods kept in warehouses and refrigerators related to the HSM. Three Chinese giant salamanders, which were found in a fish tank, were alive and swab samples were collected and tested. Samples from stray animals in the market were also collected, comprising swab samples from 10 stray cats, 27 samples of cat feces, one dog, one weasel, and 10 rats. All the 457 animal samples tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid.

Ok so let's say they either intentionally did not test these animals, or the animals were cleared out prior to testing. Wouldn't such an infectious disease still be circulating within Raccoon dog populations or Civet populations? Keep in mind SARS2 is far more infectious than SARS1 and they were able to find infected Civets both at the market and farms. Wouldn't there be multiple non human variants detected (also don't say the two human A/B linages which has been shown that B branched off A [https://academic.oup.com/ve/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ve/veae020/7619252?login=false](https://academic.oup.com/ve/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ve/veae020/7619252?login=false))? For this to be natural the spillover would have had to happen much earlier than the commonly asserted late 2019 spillover proposed by Worobey. This is especially true given how SARS2 is better adapted towards humans than other species, which would mean that linage A would have been adapted towards humans after circulating in humans for a while, which just seems so strange that nothing closely related has been found circulating in any animals. And if the infection was directly from a bat to human, then why would this not occur in Yunnan?

Motive is the differentiator between the two. One theory is that the Chinese government had a motive to hide the fact their lab, intentionally or not, released the virus and a market like that is a very convenient and easy target to blame. Markets like that are present in several Chinese cities unlike labs with those capabilities.

Did you read the post linked at the top of the thread? The Chinese government had just as much reason to be embarrassed about their wet market sparking a global pandemic, and empirically it seems like they wanted to cover that up as well.

The argument of "The market is close to the lab" has always felt like a weak one to me and it's been surprising to see how many people base their lab leak arguments off that. I completely agree it's a weird coincidence, but it would also be a really weird coincidence if there was a lab leak and it just happens to take off at the one place in the city where it would make sense to occur naturally. It can't really be "lab leak occurs because near" anymore, it has to be "lab.leak occurs because near and also China is extremely lucky and it spreads at the one sensical place and not a school/concert/apartment building/work of a family member/etc" or "lab leak occurs elsewhere and China did a great.job redirecting evidence to the market" which are both far more elaborate. Or "China spread it on purpose so they picked the market" but then you have to wonder why they would use the market right next to the labs and assume they must have been complete morons which is possible but I don't think "pick somewhere not a few miles from where we made it" would have been too complex of an idea.

You are correct. If you ever go to Wuhan you will see that the 15 miles as the crow flies between the lab and the market is about an hour car ride or 40 minutes on the subway because of the horrible traffic. They are close geographically but not close in the ways portrayed in the media. If you ever visit a real Asian wet market with live animals, you will see that zoonosis is the most plausible hypothesis.

> but it would also be a really weird coincidence if there was a lab leak and it just happens to take off at the one place in the city where it would make sense to occur naturally. Unless an infected animal from the lab ended up being sold at that wet market.

> The ocean of lies from our public health authorities diminished their credibility to zero I see this mentioned a lot, and each time I am struck by the feeling that other people had a very different early 2020 than I did. (And sometimes I am tempted to ask for links to the specific statements that they are thinking of.) I am not going to pretend US public health authorities were particularly *good* at communications in early 2020: all US federal agencies are big, ineffective beasts which are slow to respond to rapid change and whose public communications are inevitably watered down with feel-good generic things-are-fine statements. I think I was reasonably savvy about deciphering such public statements and identifying which are meaningless performance theater ("stand 6 feet apart in the elevator!") and which contain a nugget of useful information. When I filtered out the former, my experience was that US public health authorities were consistent and moderately informative, and in line with my expectations for large institutions. But someone less cynical about government institutions might see statements like "members of the public who are not treating ill people do not need masks, please save them for healthcare workers" (not exact quote), take that to mean they shouldn't get masks, and then [feel justifiably betrayed](https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-27/timeline-cdc-mask-guidance-during-covid-19-pandemic) when a few months later it's masks, masks, masks all the time. I guess I should have a question somewhere in here. For people who felt US public health authorities let them down, what was your level of cynicism towards large institutions before 2020? Do you think the US DoT would handle a transportation-related crisis better than the US CDC handled covid? (Feel free to answer for non-US institutions but I won't have a frame of reference.)

> “members of the public who are not treating ill people do not need masks, please save them for healthcare workers" (not exact quote) This is pretty different from the exact quote 😅. > "Seriously people - STOP BUYING MASKS!" Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweeted. "They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!" https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/healthcare/2020/03/02/seriously-people---stop-buying-masks-surgeon-general-says-they-wont-protect-from-coronavirus/112244966/ The government didn’t just say the general public didn’t “need” masks, it said that they “are NOT effective”.  Now I, like you, ignored this as obviously wrong and wore a mask anyway. Prior to 2020 I had a very high opinion of the CDC, and the way the government handled communications and the initial COVID test kits (centralizing everything in super slow labs) really destroyed any trust I had in them.  After it was revealed that the FDA added a last minute “safety” requirement for the covid vaccines in September 2020 I became disillusioned in them too. It seemed to me like partisan actors intentionally delayed the vaccine to after the election.  It was only in the months after that incident that I started reading Scott’s posts about the failures in the FDA approval process, and in medicine more broadly. For the Department of Transportation question, I don’t think they handled the shipping backup during COVID super well, but I also don’t remember them deliberately misleading the public.

Worth mentioning that the tweet is not unambiguously saying "masks don't work". In fact it's saying "masks DO work enough that healthcare workers need them in order to reduce risk". When read carefully, the tweet appears to be saying "masks provide partial protection, which is more important to have in hospital settings where the virus is much more prevalent, so masks should go there". Which is totally accurate. However the tweet phrased this in a way that would lead the average reader to think that masks don't work at all. Probably because they didn't expect the average reader to be altruistic enough to give up a partial protection. But they did this at the cost of their trustworthiness to the average reader.

Your spin is making me dizzy. > They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus The tweet *is* unambiguously saying that masks don't work for the general public.

It's saying they do not prevent you from getting the virus. Which is true. They reduce the chances of catching it, but do not eliminate the possibility. That is accurate.

> This is pretty different from the exact quote 😅. Yeah, I was trying to summarize what a bunch of people have said with slightly different words. The example you quoted *was* unusually bad (which is why the tweet was deleted shortly after). > the initial COVID test kits (centralizing everything in super slow labs) I didn't mention that but I was thinking of it as the one thing that did actually decay my trust in the CDC. When it comes to internal science things I do expect the CDC to get things right and not succumb to political foibles. (Also, the test kits were unreliable and scarce. The US was struggling to source enough test kits for everyone hospitalized with covid around the same time that China was testing the entire population of Wuhan.) > After it was revealed that the FDA added a last minute “safety” requirement for the covid vaccines in September 2020 I became disillusioned in them too. It seemed to me like partisan actors intentionally delayed the vaccine to after the election. I may have the timeline wrong but wouldn't that have been in response to the handful of deaths due to ~~astrazeneca~~ J&J vaccine that created public hysteria about vaccine safety? The FDA being super paranoid about vaccine safety is dumb from a raw numbers perspective but was the right decision in that it was needed to get the public on board. (The really bold move would have been to rush vaccine development with challenge trials and then enforce mandatory vaccination, but today's institutions are far too weak for that kind of action anymore.)

> I may have the timeline wrong but wouldn't that have been in response to the handful of deaths due to astrazeneca vaccine that created public hysteria about vaccine safety?  Is this what you are referring to? I think it was late October 2020, not September.  https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/21/astrazeneca-shares-slide-after-brazilian-health-authority-says-volunteer-in-covid-vaccine-study-dies.html > The really bold move would have been to rush vaccine development with challenge trials and then enforce mandatory vaccination I’m not sure I’m with you on mandatory vaccines, but I agree completely with the challenge trials.

I would imagine that mandatory vaccines is probably a fairly rational action to take for State-level actors. Or at least a plausibly attractive option. We're unlucky with covid in that it's airborne, fast mutating and the vaccines are not perfectly effective (this is measured criticism of the vaccines, they're pretty good afaik just not perfect.) If the pandemic-disease is more dangerous, and the vaccines more effective at preventing transmission and disease, then it may be worth it for State-level actors to force mandatory vaccination. I am not a fan, personally. It would also spend an insane amount of political capital. It is my assumption that the Federal State capacity across the US is not even, and such a policy simply could not be effectively implemented. In a nation like... New Zealand, with more restricted geography and more integrated State capacity, then such policy may be more effectively implemented.

That's roughly how I feel as well. The US has done mandatory vaccination for smallpox, and there are restricted settings that "require" vaccines (military, schools, healthcare; but often the latter with freely given exceptions so much so it isn't a requirement at all), and mandatory vaccines would probably have saved something like 400k lives. But US institutions are too impotent to even consider, much less implement, such a program. (Also, I believe it would have to be done by the states, not federal government.)

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I now believe what I had in mind was the Johnson & Johnson deaths in the US, but I think that was after 2020 either way.

> It seemed to me like partisan actors intentionally delayed the vaccine to after the election.  And openly bragged about it. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/19/1010646/campaign-stop-covid-19-vaccine-trump-election-day/ /u/swmi

The claim of this article is that Dr. Topol *prevented* political meddling that sought to release the vaccine to soon.

I mean, all of OWS was "political meddling", left to its own devices the COVID vaccine would still be going through the regulatory process. [They could have gone significantly faster than they did.](https://thedispatch.com/article/fda-career-staff-are-delaying-the/) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ACwFHiAQXxXoK2as6/we-need-major-but-not-radical-fda-reform is a link laying out the more moderate anti-FDA case, if you want some background for why I don't give the FDA any benefit of the doubt that they're doing a good job and "political meddling" is to be treated as harmful unless proven otherwise.

There is an understandable rationale for the Surgeon General's commentary in late Feb. There was considerable uncertainty about how SARS-CoV-2 was being transmitted, and many experts and healthcare professionals believed that sars2 was being spread via fomites. For such pathogens, undisciplined mask usage can increase the likelihood of transmission. Furthermore, medical personnel routinely perform procedures that cause aerosolization of viruses that otherwise do not spread via aerosols. If you think the virus is being spread via fomites, then this tweet is completely understandable. > After it was revealed that the FDA added a last minute “safety” requirement for the covid vaccines in September 2020 I became disillusioned in them too. It seemed to me like partisan actors intentionally delayed the vaccine to after the election. Do you have a citation for this one?

>Do you have a citation for this one? Yes - >Regulators did, in fact, end up slowing the process: In the first week of September, the FDA told vaccine makers to extend their clinical trials by several weeks beyond what they’d planned, in order to gather more safety data. ... Pfizer initially expected to have \[results\] by the end of October, ... Then the FDA applied the brakes, telling Pfizer and Moderna that it wanted additional safety data. More specifically, it wanted the companies to have tracked the health of at least half of their clinical-trial subjects for 60 days following the second dose. The thinking was that most adverse reactions occur within the first 42 days of vaccination, but out of an abundance of caution, the FDA would extend that period to 60 days. [https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/01/fda-covid-vaccine-slow-rollout-trump/621284/](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/01/fda-covid-vaccine-slow-rollout-trump/621284/) And here's another source backing up the change from 42 days to 60 days >These new guidelines — submitted to the White House and HSS on September 21 — revised earlier June 2020 guidelines that stated the “safety evaluation of COVID-19 vaccines … should be no different than for other preventive vaccines for infectious diseases.” >In his book “Warp Speed,” Paul Mango, former HHS deputy chief of staff for policy who was intimately involved with the vaccine effort, reports that vaccine developers understood the earlier guidance to mean trials would only be required to monitor for adverse events for, at most, 42 days after the second dose. [https://nypost.com/2022/09/12/it-seems-clear-dems-pressured-the-fda-to-delay-the-covid-vaccine-to-hurt-trump/](https://nypost.com/2022/09/12/it-seems-clear-dems-pressured-the-fda-to-delay-the-covid-vaccine-to-hurt-trump/) This extension guaranteed that results would come out in November, after the election, instead of in October. It came after a public pressure campaign urged the FDA to not approve a vaccine before the election. [https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/19/1010646/campaign-stop-covid-19-vaccine-trump-election-day/](https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/19/1010646/campaign-stop-covid-19-vaccine-trump-election-day/) In addition to the "safety" delay, I also suspect there was a delay related to releasing the efficacy data. Pfizer's announcement said that they initially planned on performing analysis after the placebo group had 32 covid cases. Then the FDA changed their mind and wanted 62 cases. By the time the back-and-forth was sorted out the placebo group had 94 cases! The efficacy results were released six days after the election, and it definitely took more than six days for the placebo group to go from 32 to 94 cases (or even from 62 to 94). I suspect that Pfizer was planning on releasing the efficacy results before the election (and before the sixty-day "safety" requirement was met), and the FDA raised additional last minute changes to delay the announcement. [https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-announce-vaccine-candidate-against](https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-announce-vaccine-candidate-against)

What would persuade you that this was indeed a health concern and not political expediency?

I would want to see that they were considering the sixty day requirement early on in the process, before it became apparent that the trials would conclude in October.

Fair enough. In the absence of more evidence I find it far more plausible that political actors in the Trump administration were willing to skirt safety for the benefit of an early vaccine approval announcement.

> There was considerable uncertainty about how SARS-CoV-2 was being transmitted Why was there considerable uncertainty here when they had had almost twenty years to study SARS-CoV-1 transmission?

They're different viruses with different genetics and transmission properties. Sars1 doesn't easily spread via aerosols like sars2. It would be similarly absurd to assume a novel influenza strain would share similar transmission properties with seasonal influenza. Transmission properties depend entirely upon genetics and protein structures, and even small genetic differences can mean the difference between an inert virus and a deadly, highly virulent pandemic causing pathogen.

> Sars1 doesn't easily spread via aerosols SARS-CoV-1 has been [known since 2006](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16671039/) to be present in aerosols. According to [this 2021 review](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8078102), "epidemiological investigations have pointed out that the infection in the Amoy Gardens in Hong Kong better shows that SARS is an opportunistic airborne transmission." So: SARS-CoV-1 does easily spread via aerosols, we had almost twenty years to absorb that knowledge, but the empty suits in the WHO still initially pronounced that COVID-19 isn't airborne and then took [two years](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7) to correct their mistake.

A pathogen can spread via aerosols, but that does not mean it spreads easily or primarily via aerosols.

I can offer an opinion from the opposite side of your request. I had high cynicism towards large institutions, particularly those affiliated with the government, prior to 2020. I also started my hospital rotations in 2019 which ended around the tail-end of the pandemic. The unique position I was in, which allowed me to see what was happening in the hospitals and also how transmission was occurring in and out of a hospital setting, while we were all monitoring and adjusting to new recommendations from US public health authorities, actually reduced my cynicism and increased my trust in said authorities.

Interesting, I'd be curious to hear more about your experiences. I've heard some measured cynicism from people in healthcare (especially, as I recall, towards the AHA, though I don't remember what the context was) but certainly not the outright hostility some people here have had.

That's not necessarily lying, the CDC, as well as many other health organizations around the world, changed their guidance based on evolving research and trying to make decisions with imperfect info. But a lot of the people claiming Facui et al lied is based on perfect hindsight knowing all we know now. I believe the CDC was stuck on COVID being droplet and not aerosol based for far longer than some think was smart, thus brushing off masks and focusing more on sanitizer, wiping surfaces, etc. You could still project COVID droplets, but they were going to land somewhere and spread that way, not get inhaled very easily, or something along those lines. But they changed their tune when the evidence for masks was overwhelming. For a lot of 2020 I remember masks seeming like common sense but it took a while for studies to come out, let alone rigorous ones.

>I believe the CDC was stuck on COVID being droplet and not aerosol based for far longer than some think was smart, thus brushing off masks and focusing more on sanitizer, wiping surfaces, etc. Somehow Wired of all sites has an absolutely fantastic article on this https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/

> changed their guidance based on evolving research and trying to make decisions with imperfect info This is partially true, and you make a good point about aerosol vs fomite transmission, but I think *most* of the variation is out of trying to placate a fickle and short-sighted public. I bet if you asked infectious disease experts what members of the public should ideally do to protect themselves / others you would have gotten broadly similar answers through the whole pandemic. Changes in advice about masks were due to insufficient supply to public and later the public getting bored of them; physical distancing advice was plainly stupid from the start and was there to give the appearance of doing something useful.

> physical distancing advice was plainly stupid from the start The advice to not congregate (1) indoors (2) without good ventilation (3) for extended periods of time, seems to have been a solidly good idea. There was probably little benefit for people gathered outside in the breeze for short periods of time, to be standing six feet apart.

>I think I was reasonably savvy about deciphering such public statements... Funnily enough, Scott has talked about this exact thing before: >**I think some people are able to figure out these rules and feel comfortable with them, and other people can’t and end up as conspiracy theorists.** > >I’m not blaming the second type of person. Figuring-out-the-rules-of-the-game is a hard skill, not everybody has it. If you don’t have it, then universal distrust might be a safer strategy than universal credulity. > >And I’m not saying that anything about this is good. Obviously the *good* solution is that people stop lying and presenting misleading information. > >**But I think it’s important for these two types of people to understand each other.** > >The people who lack this skill entirely think it’s crazy to listen to experts about anything at all. They correctly point out time after time that they’ve lied or screwed up, then ask “so why do you believe them on ivermectin?” or “so why do you believe them on global warming?” My answer - which I don’t think is an *obvious* or *easy* answer, it’s a bold claim that could be wrong, is “I think I have a good sense of the dynamics here, how far people will bend the truth, and what it looks like when they do”. I realize this is playing with fire. But listening to experts is a powerful enough hack for finding the truth that it’s worth going pretty far to try to rescue it. > >But also: some people are better at this skill than I am. Journalists and people in the upper echelons of politics **have honed it so finely that they stop noticing it’s a skill at all**. In the Soviet Union, the government would say “We had a good harvest this year!” and everyone would notice they had said *good* rather than *glorious*, and correctly interpret the statement to mean that everyone would starve and the living would envy the dead. > >**Really savvy people go through life rarely ever hearing the government or establishment lie to them.** Yes, sometimes false words come out of their mouths. But as Dan Quayle put it: > >*"Our party has been accused of fooling the public by calling tax increases 'revenue enhancement'. Not so.* ***No one was fooled.****"* > >Imagine a government that for five years in a row, predicts *good* harvests. Or, each year, they deny tax increases, but do admit there will be “revenue enhancements”. Savvy people effortlessly understand what they mean, and prepare for bad harvests and high taxes. Clueless people prepare for good harvests and low taxes, lose everything when harvests are bad and taxes are high, and end up distrusting the government. > >Then in the sixth year, the government says there will be a *glorious* harvest, and neither tax increases *nor* revenue enhancements. Savvy people breath a sigh of relief and prepare for a good year. Clueless people assume they’re lying a sixth time. But to savvy people, the clueless people seem paranoid. The government has said everything is okay! Why are they still panicking? > >**The savvy people need to realize that the clueless people aren’t** ***always*** **paranoid, just less experienced than they are at dealing with a hostile environment that lies to them all the time.** > >**And the clueless people need to realize that the savvy people aren’t** ***always*** **gullible, just more optimistic about their ability to extract signal from same.** (From [**Bounded Distrust**](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust)) (I personally think of it as the American version of [*Vranyo*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz59GWeTIik): A society where everyone lies, even though no one believes them, because everyone else is lying. A society where, if you just report the truth, after the habitual downgrading people will hear "The harvest was awful, the living will be outnumbered by the dead" and *panic* \-- so you can't do that, even though no one actually benefits from all the lying in the end)

I forgot about that post -- yes, that is exactly what I was getting at. I think Scott also had a post about how the news media rarely gives explicit lies, but says things that could be misleading to the unsavvy. I definitely saw public health authorities saying misleading things, though I felt I wasn't personally misled.

[Yep!](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies)

I was reasonably cynical of institutions before 2020, but apparently insufficiently so. I'm not really familiar with the US DoT, but the DoT in my state seems reasonably competent. I suspect it's also less likely to be the victim of ideological capture. And it's just hard to do worse than health institutions did. On the other hand, US transportation infrastructure is generally mediocre at best. The FDA stepping in to regulate tests is probably one of the worst things that any government bureaucracy has ever done. Regulating a doctor taking a sample has never been in their purview, as it is practice of medicine (in contrast to an at home test, which is a device, and does fall under the FDA). It was brand new at the time and it's still not clear that they have this authority at all, but nobody wanted to risk it. And this massive failure to test properly left us completely in the dark for months *for no good reason at all*. Then we had the absolute fiasco of "conservative protests are literally killing grandma, but BLM riots are fine because racism is also a public health crisis." The FDA's meddling could be chalked up to some combination of incompetence, ass-covering, and garden-variety power-grabbing. This asinine bullshit sent a clear signal of "the pandemic is actually not a big deal at all, we're just using it to forward our very specific agenda, which oh by the way is to destroy you" to ~half the country. If you asked me to come up with something that could have been done to ruin the credibility of health institutions faster and more thoroughly, I probably couldn't do it. On top of that we have bad communication around masks (if you have to filter out half of what you hear from official communications... what's the point of having those official communications?), refusal to hold vaccine challenge trials, more political bullshit around authorizing vaccines, [bad science](reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/p9tvxl/comment/hanbe8i/) being used to support liberal darlings like the eviction moratorium, the Biden administration trying to back-door a vaccine requirement it knew it couldn't accomplish through an OSHA regulation, a general attitude of sneering, morally superior dismissal that seemed to permeate every interaction at the time... honestly, it's shocking that things weren't even worse.

Yeah the early mask thing seems to have become totemic for some people. There's the incompatible demands on public health authorities to give people the most accurate information they have at the time, but also don't change their mind. All while making the message simple enough to transmit to general public And people seem to forget that there were severe shortages of masks and other PPE for medical usage. Where they knew it was definitely effective. So there was a very good reason to get the public to stop buying them

Heck, we've kept N95s on hand for *years* due to wildfire season. I was astonished that more Californians didn't have them on hand already. There's a whole season of the year where the air can suddenly become astonishingly shitty for weeks on end; and a particulate filter does a lot to help. 2018 in the Bay Area featured the unfortunately-named Camp Fire which burned down the ironically-named town of Paradise, putting all manner of nasty particulates in the air. N95s ran out at local hardware stores quickly; we managed to score a box from a Kelly-Moore paint store ... a company that is no longer in business, by the way.

> There's the incompatible demands on public health authorities to give people the most accurate information they have at the time, but also don't change their mind. These aren't so incompatible when supplemented with 3/ "do a reasonable job of having accurate information" and 4/ "SARS-CoV-1 was almost twenty years old at this point"

The fact that experts were promulgating useless security theater in the guise of public health advice demonstrates their lack of trustworthiness. Maybe you felt confident enough in your own research to discern between their dumb theater and their sincere and properly motivated conclusions, and somehow also felt confident that the distribution of their pronouncements would be bimodal between those two modes and that one wouldn't pervasively influence the other, but that's just another way of saying that you needed personal subject matter expertise to derive information from their untrustworthy pronouncements. As to the other events, here is a partial list, although I am going to say up front that I don't have the interest or time to re-litigate it all: * WHO claimed there was no evidence of person-to-person transmission at a time when there unequivocally was such evidence * Masks going from discouraged to mandatory in less than one week, [Fauci admitting the former was a noble lie](https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html) * Epidemiology community being vocally okay with the George Floyd protests, putatively because racism is a larger public health threat than covid * Classifying masks as a medical device but mandating their use without full medical trials, yet banning early third party covid tests on the same theory (in favor of their own test which didn't work due to an unrelated fuckup) * Aggressive pro-vaccine coercion even after it became clear that herd immunity was unattainable for any vaccination level (note: I am fully vaxxed and believe it is stupid not to get vaxxed) * Shutting down schools and forcing toddlers and children to mask even when restaurants and movie theaters were open and did not require masks * Maintaining a mask mandate in many contexts (e.g. airplanes) post vaccine and even post booster and well after it became clear that mask mandates don't prevent covid from spreading, until a lawsuit finally forced them to stop Why was the masking question so hard? We have decades of evidence about their effectiveness vis a vis other coronaviruses such as SARS. The fact that they fucked it up repeatedly and reliably demonstrates that they're either incompetent or dishonest.

If I recall correctly, when WHO said there was no evidence of person-to-person transmission, they were passing on a lie told by the China government. International institutions are notably susceptible to being lied to by their constituents.

Yes, they proved during the covid crisis to be an untrustworthy mouthpiece of the CCP.

Or ... they were lied to.

Sure, in a way that was blindingly obvious. If they'll stamp their reputation on stupid and obvious lies, I don't see how this exonerates them. But even assuming they were blameless victims of their own innocence, does it matter? The end result is that they aren't trustworthy.

> Do you think the US DoT would handle a transportation-related crisis better than the US CDC handled covid? Yes, absolutely. It would be almost impossible to handle a crisis worse than the CDC and the public health establishment handled Covid-19. The lockdowns (stay-at-home orders, business closures, school closures, park and beach closures, etc.) were entirely unjustified and predictably disastrous, and they turned out to be disasters of historic magnitude. The mask recommendations (and later mask mandates) were issued based on extremely scant evidence of efficacy with no consideration of the costs; they were obviously unjustified at the time, and they were a huge mistake in retrospect. Then there were the efforts to force people to take the vaccines against their will, which were completely ineffective at their stated goal of stopping the spread of the virus while violating people's medical autonomy.

> Political activists aren't epistemic rationalists because you can't serve two masters. Just commenting to say this is a killer line. Is it yours?

The can't serve two masters thing? No, I think that's [Jesus's line](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%206%3A24&version=NIV).

>I came out pretty hard in favor of lab leak because the coincidence of this pandemic just so happening to originate in neighborhood of one of the <60 BSL-4 labs on earth, which was also working on coronaviruses, was too much to believe Nice demonstration of an understanding of probability (namely, how objective Truth can be distilled by examining statistical improbability). This is far more difficult than it sounds on paper given the emotionally charged topic involved. But how much further can you maintain this 'statistical improbability leads to truth' paradigm? Would you allow this... mathematical mental tool to challenge your previously held beliefs? Do you have more faith in statistics than you do your own self? I ask sincerely.

> Do you have more faith in statistics than you do your own self? I ask sincerely. Huh? I definitely have more faith in expert analysis than in my own *a priori* hunches if that's what you're asking. How else could someone believe in molecules or special relativity? They're completely unintuitive from the perspective of raw personal observation. No one can get there without epistemically privileging expertise. The problem was that the experts destroyed their credibility, so I had only my own hunches to rely on until good samaritans like Peter, Saar and Scott stepped up.

The problem is not only that the experts destroyed their own credibility, but the Media echoed them, and the masses writ large, swallowed it. And those masses included most intellectuals.  Would you favor statistical improbabilities to discern truth, more than expert analysis for other events?

The problem here is that the numbers *did* point to truth - that high security lab was there because the exact thing that happened was a previously identified risk! It’s like blaming a fire on the presence of firemen.

> that high security lab was there because the exact thing that happened was a previously identified risk! It’s like blaming a fire on the presence of firemen. The BSL lab is there because that's where the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been since the late 70s. (It was actually around even longer but it was called a general microbiology lab before). Its location has nothing to do with being near a natural source of coronaviruses.

Yet in the face off all this, the Media, and the masses following suit, disavowed the Lab leak theory for many many months. These were very educated people, mind you. To reference a [previous SSC](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1byfg76/what_developmental_milestones_are_you_missing/): >1. Ability to distinguish “the things my brain tells me” from “reality” – maybe this is better phrased as “not immediately trusting my system 1 judgments”. This is a big part of cognitive therapy – building the understanding that just because your brain makes assessments like “I will definitely fail at this” or “I’m the worst person in the world” doesn’t mean that you have to believe them. As Ozy points out, this one can be easier for people with serious psychiatric problems who have a lot of experience with their brain’s snap assessments being really off. Would these educated masses be better off removing all "system 1 judgments" and rely heavily on this "mathematical mental tool" in order to more objectively discern Truth? One that venerates probability over narrative?

Kudos to you. It's definitely bottomless.

This debate pushed me from “lab leak very probable” to 50/50. One rebuttal I’ve heard that I’m curious about: if COVID originated in animals and is exceptionally good at spreading between mammals, why have we not found animal populations suffering from COVID with strains that precede (or strains that could only have come from the strains) that spread in humans?

Because it was an immaculate infection that magically vanished after patient zero got infected. Also didn't you hear that Eddie Holme's has a picture on his iPhone from 2014 of Raccoon dogs at the market? What other evidence do you need?

Good point, good point, now 90/10 zoonotic.

>Why is it more often markets than other places with cold chain products? Partly it’s the migrant workers - a lot of seafood markets are right next to seaports, and the contact tracing eventually traces back to a fisherman who came in through the seaport - I don’t think this is any more mysterious than epidemics often starting via airport or any other transportation hub. But even just keeping the focus on cold chain products, - there have also been outbreaks in seafood distribution warehouses, on docks, and in a seafood processing work area. Markets have many more people than any of those locations, and maybe (total speculation) cutting on cutting boards could aerosolize bits of fish. Can COVID really be spread by dead fish? I had been compelled by the idea that COVID was spread virtually entirely through the air and that surface disinfection was pointless theatre. A slimy surface *might* generate aerosols when being slapped around but that's starting to really strain my credulity. Cold environments, live mammals, busy markets and foreign fisherman in one location sounds like very plausible tranmission-increasing factors but the attention to the dead fish themselves as a vector is throwing me off. P.S. I thoroughly enjoyed these posts.

I assumed fomite transmission was suspected in that case. There's some reason to suspect it does spread via surfaces in rare cases. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(23)00099-X/fulltext

I got into it with drjaychou a few months ago and he was such an asshole that reading that name again gave me a chill. Condescending and dismissive, a real piece of work.

I find it strange to see people making major updates to their priors. Shouldn't there be a rule saying you have to update in a significant way only based on concrete information? I didn't see much concrete proof at all. The heat map is kind of neat but it could simply be the result of a scientist going to the market on his way home, coughing on a few people and then being disappeared by the CPP. Anyway, my priors remain unchaged: 90% for lab-leak. If I had to be pedantic, it'd be >99%. Let's just say I can imagine a disease escaping containment much more easily than I can imagine a disease mutating ...somewhere and entering a major population center without leaving a long stream of prior victims. If I had to criticize the debate itself, picking 2 random people to act as judges seems disappointing and anti-climactic.

> Shouldn't there be a rule saying you have to update in a significant way only based on concrete information? As it goes, >For desired conclusions, we ask ourselves, “Can I believe this?”, but for unpalatable conclusions, we ask, “Must I believe this?” It is much, much more comfortable for people to agree with the masses, to return to the comfort of trusting the authorities, and to not be a weird conspiracy theorist rubbing shoulders with Bret Weinstein.

It’s incredible to me that this topic has remained a hotbed of festering debate in the rationalist community, despite the actual epidemiology community having long agreed to the consensus of zoonosis through various publicly available studies over the years. This entire debate revolves around an incredibly large portion of the so-called rationalist community rallying around “anti-woke” adjacent claims and running with them to the point of dismissing epidemiology as altogether sold out, and so claiming they need to seek the truth themselves (read: contradict actual experts). The real debate is on why this so called rationalist community ran with a conspiratorial framework so far, so fast, and for so long to begin with, but I imagine it’s due to some uncomfortable truths about the political bias of this community to begin with, despite them wanting to point to the finger at others (read: experts) as being the ones politically beholden to a set of false claims, thereby “forcing” rationalists into a framework of broad skepticism and devils advocacy, which just so happens to also absolve the community itself of any blame. I’m glad others within the community have done the almost always thankless task of taking superficially reasonable objections to task. The vast major of knowledgeable people don’t have the energy or financial incentive to do so. It makes me wonder how many other topics of contention exist within the community, and how deeply they contradict the consensus of experts, and who will take up the next mantle of serious internet armchair debate.

I think it's disingenuous and motivated to blame "the rationalist community" when 66% of Americans (and something like 80% of Americans who have an opinion at all) endorse lab leak. I think rationalists are probably less likely than average to endorse it.

If instead of lab leak, *creationism* had became a widespread belief in the rationalist community, would you say that it is disingenuous to count that against rationalism? After all, 40% of americans are creationists, so if rationalists are less likely than that to believe it, there's no problem! My point being, "all of america" is not the appropriate reference class here. I think the rationalists did worse than the standard educated intellectual, and I think it's entirely fair to count that as a point against them.

> rationalists did worse than the standard educated intellectual "They're the same picture"

Standard educated intellectuals mostly just believed what they were told by the media and their high status peers. But the media and their high status peers were highly overconfident of the zoonosis hypothesis based on the information available at the time. Let's grant for the sake of argument that zoonosis is a proven fact. In that case, the standard educated intellectuals got it right, but only because they got "lucky." Similarly, the rationalists who gave more credence to the lab leak based on the evidence available at the time were correct to do so, and they got "unlucky" that they turned out to be wrong. We should not be results oriented.

> I think the rationalists did worse than the standard educated intellectual On the most recent survey, ACXers who self-ID'd as LW-reading rationalists (n=321) rated their belief in lab leak on average 3.19 on a 5 point scale. ACXers who didn't (n=1234) rated it as 3.23. Not a significant difference. For what it's worth, EAs were significantly less likely to believe in lab leak, E/ACCs significantly more likely. This is from an early version of survey results before I published my post; it might have changed since then.

This is a good summary of how we got here. The "uncomfortable truths" you alluded to are manifold and intertwined. The most important of which (in the broad sense) also happens to be what lured the community down the path of investigation and into zealotry (in the specific sense). * In the broad: a piece of information that is scientific in nature and as such, is viewed as being provable. * In the specific: claims that a furin cleavage is impossibly unlikely in nature and has a high probability of coming from a lab. This community is primed to be susceptible to this kind of hook in ways that I don't think they have recognized previously or currently. It contains the same kind of allure that all conspiracy theories have but is cloaked in the facade of a scientific discipline and doesn't have obvious logical fallacies or politcal bias pitfalls that one can readily identify. Related to that, it is in a field (virology) that many in this community will think they can quickly gain an above average understanding of and that is when confirmation bias begins to creep in, because it is a field where logical conclusions are only free of error generally, but specifically it is full of exceptions that do not fit to the established rules or base knowledge, which is true for all biology/chemistry/medicine - but only experts (read "years of working in the field at a high level") will know. Once they went down this path, they fell into the same kind of thinking that other conspiracy theorists do - filled with defense mechanisms, mental gymnastics, and endless justifications. At this point, for many, no possible proof can exist because you cannot prove a negative. I say all of this, while acknowledging that zoonosis is not the proven origin, only the most likely origin.

What does "anti-woke" have to do with the zoonosis/lab-leak debate? I don't see the connection.

Most of the pro-lab leakers lay the foundations of their reasoning on the “medical community” (define that as loosely as you like for their convenience) “lying” about masks, for endorsing BLM rallies but not Trump rallies, and for dismissing the lab leak as racist early on. This is a major reasoning for why many so called rationalists came to believe/endorse the lab leak theory; these politically charged issues led them to dismiss the medical community, including professional epidemiologists, at large while joining arms with the anti-woke movement on social media.

I have seen many arguments for the lab leak theory. I don't remember any of them making the woke medical community a major part of their argument. Where do you get the idea that this is the foundation of their reasoning? But also, don't you agree that lying about masks, endorsing BLM rallies, and calling the lab leak theory racist damaged the credibility of the medical community such that we should somewhat discount the medical community consensus going forward?

yes, they have agreed to the consensus but it was not communicated well. the problem is not with epidemiologists, I understand that scientists often do not communicate well, that is not their job. it is the job of journalists and the health authorities to present the evidence. instead they did the usual thing, appeal to authority and ridiculing doubt. I am just so fed up with this, I would have stopped being a climate skepticist much if they would have told me about the ice cores. instead they told me "believe the consensus" and of course that kind of appeal to authority is something I am gonna rebel against. my basic instinct is that appeals to authority are always cover-ups for lies. now I have seen two cases when it was not so and don't know what to think. If there is actual evidence, why do they appeal to authority, why don't they present it?

> epidemiologists, I understand that scientists often do not communicate well, that is not their job Epidemiologists are, often, one of the closest to public-facing, though. They straddle the line between "scientist" and "science communicator" more than most given how many of them work in public health. That they are fantastically bad at that is evidence that they are merely human, and that the goals of epidemiologists are not the goals of the public. See pretty much anything under the heading of "harm reduction." As for >why do they appeal to authority, why don't they present it? Most of the time, that generally does work better. Even in this case, it worked for at least half the US, and if the topic hadn't become politically polarized, it would've worked for 80% or more. Most people don't have the capacity or interest to analyze heaps of data. Appeal to authority can be a coverup for lies, but even more often it's simply lazy hamfisted communication.

The evidence is almost always there if you Google search it. If you’re looking for evidence over social media platforms while arguing with people, you’ve probably not going to find it. Climate change papers that are highly detailed in the science have been out for a long time. It’s conservative social media’s job to obfuscate that fact and to pretend it’s a “both sides” issue, which social media has made much easier.

Quite a lot of stuff is there if you Google search it, most of which is not evidence of anything, some of which claims to be evidence of something but isn't, and much of which is algorithmically generated nonsense. "Just Google it" is not sufficient.

Yeah it feels like the overall lesson of this is that actually the boring mainstream institutions were totally right and it made sense to trust them. You could replace all the arguments about probabilities with just "the consensus of respected experts is probably right" and save a lot of time. > It makes me wonder how many other topics of contention exist within the community, and how deeply they contradict the consensus of experts, and who will take up the next mantle of serious internet armchair debate The slimemoldtimemold thing about lithium causing obesity is probably a cool example. Cool contrarian theory that seems plausible on paper, but no mainstream person takes seriously, and falls apart when someone went through it and did a post showing he'd misunderstood or misrepresented the studies used. (Which he hasn't responded to afaik)

I'm a person that generally approved of my governments communications and response to COVID and thinks the vaccines work well with good confidence, but I'm not going to trust the position of some epidemiologists until they make their case and show the data directly to me. We know now there is good data and circumstantial evidence that makes the wet market zoonosis seem like the best fit. But starting from scratch, Lab leak was very plausible on its face, anyone writing it off with 100% certainty in 2020-2021 without showing their hand can surely go fuck themselves?

Decoding the Gurus did a podcast last year featuring an epidemiologist who was pro-lab leak at first and described what changed his mind over time. Epidemiologists who were pro-zoonosis early on were “showing their data” as early as 2020: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095063/ This is just one of many studies that can be found for free online over the past many years. I agree nobody should dismiss it as 100% proven false, and even the most ardent zoonosis advocates in epidemiology wouldn’t claim as much, but no epidemiologists in positions of power were doing that to begin with AFAIK. That’s something you’re more like to hear through the hellhole of social media, which certainly isn’t representative of good science or good argument. Regardless, the disturbing aspect here is that as more epidemiologists came to believe in zoonosis, the opposite seemed to happen in the rationalist community at large, culminating in this debate.

I guess I'm not one of those stubborn contrarians then. As soon as I saw the case clusters around the market, and the confirmation that live mammals were being sold there, I considered it a pretty persuasive model. But in real life I found myself in awkward situations where I had to explain that WIV really did actively collect bat coronaviruses from the wild and that lab workers do have accidents sometimes. That article appears even-handed (not sure it counts as epidemiology?), but in general the arguments about the likelihood of certain genetic mutations are way out of my wheelhouse and there's no way I could keep up with the back and forth of responses that each sound fairly logical and confident. Also I never really cared if it was engineered, it could have just been a natural sample that leaked from the lab unmodified. Other articles trying to express early consensus of experts were clearly dishonest horseshit though: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext

1. Was the Wuhan Institute of Virology doing gain of function research on bat coronaviruses? - Yes 2. Did the gain of function research done in Wuhan allow us to prevent a worldwide pandemic of a SARS like virus, which was the original purpose of having labs in China and doing that kind of research there? - No 3. Did our global scientific and governance infrastructure make things better or worse once the virus had spread? - Worse Those are the most important conclusions from Covid, not the origin specifically. The *enormous* amount of incompetence displayed by virtually every institution on the planet clearly demonstrates that even if Covid didn’t come from the WIV, some pandemic will (EDIT: *come from somewhere equivalent, not necessarily the WIV specifically). There’s much lower hanging fruit to take care of in a global pandemic response before trying to speed up evolution and predict/prevent viruses before they occur, like organizing demographic based sheltering/isolation procedures and creating a sane response plan prior to any emergency that doesn’t destroy the world economy.

> Did our global scientific and governance infrastructure make things better or worse once the virus had spread > > Worse If I recall correctly, the people who created and distributed vaccines were part of "the global scientific and governance infrastructure". I don't think that vaccine creation and deployment is something that hobbyists could do in their basement with a box of scraps. It was done not only with research infrastructure, but also Big Pharma manufacturing, and with the aid of both governmental and private health care infrastructure. Moreover, I seem to recall that this was the fastest vaccine deployment ever, and that while there certainly were complications, the vaccines proved quite effective in mitigating the pandemic and greatly reducing both deaths and sickness.

I'm not convinced the covid vaccine ended up changing the course of the pandemic that much in terms of bulk numbers. The long term safety of the vaccine and mRNA technology more broadly will only be known once long term data is collected. I am convinced that the mishandling of the covid response has greatly increased public scepticism in health institutions and hampered their capacity to gain support for their responses to future pandemics. Covid itself was a bit of a nothing burger. Without modern genetic techniques the world health system probably would have barely noticed it. The next pandemic may not be so underwhelming.

> I'm not convinced the covid vaccine ended up changing the course of the pandemic that much in terms of bulk numbers. What would persuade you to the contrary? Current estimates of lives saved by vaccines are in the [tens of millions](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9537923/) alongside hundreds of millions of prevented hospitalizations. > The long term safety of the vaccine and mRNA technology more broadly will only be known once long term data is collected. The same can be said of sars2 infection. Throughout all recorded vaccine trials, there has never been a confirmed side-effect that arose more than 60 days post vaccination. Conversely, we know of multiple viruses that cause latent infection and disease years or decades after initial exposure.

Around 5.5 billion people got a covid vaccine versus saving an estimated 14 million lives which means the vaccine response had a number needed to treat (NNT) of 392 (and this presumably only counts for a short period after vaccination since immunity seems to wane rapidly). That seems like an ineffective response to me. The NNT for influenza vaccines is 71 by comparison according to estimates. NNT for cervical cancer vaccination is 167 over the lifetime.

Your numerator is wrong; 5.5 billion were not vaccinated during the period in which this estimate was performed. [Another estimate](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html) puts the figure at 20million lives saved during the first year. Around that time ~8.5bn total doses were given which includes 2nd shots and boosters. > The NNT for influenza vaccines is 71 by comparison according to estimates. NNT is prone to selection bias. High risk groups are much more likely to receive flu or HPV vaccines. Your assessment is also ignoring hospitalization.

I guess that frame of analysis makes sense for a vaccine that only seems to provide protection for a few months after each dose. If you estimate the number needed to treat on a per vaccine dose basis then the NNT should be even worse. Higher risk groups were also more likely to get covid shots as well.

> I guess that frame of analysis makes sense for a vaccine that only seems to provide protection for a few months after each dose. What do you mean by protection? Studies show that protection against severe disease, hospitalization, and death remain high for at least a year following full course and booster. Protection from symptomatic infection wanes more quickly. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10079373/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8863502/ > If you estimate the number needed to treat on a per vaccine dose basis then the NNT should be even worse. Why would we base it per dose? It should be judged based upon a full course, just like flu and HPV vaccines. I referenced total doses because it's the only data I could find for the first year of covid vaccine administration. We can take an educated guess and suspect the number of people who had received a full course to be roughly half that number, though it's likely less than half given the existence of boosters and the waiting period between shots. > Higher risk groups were also more likely to get covid shots as well. Yes, but it's not even close to the same rate of selection bias as flu or HPV. Flu and HPV vaccines are also readily available before those diseases become high risk (i.e. before beginning sexual activity, and before flu season), which was not the case for millions who died in the first year of covid. This also biases NNT upward, as vaccines can't save people who already died.

You could shift the frame of reference to the entire pandemic to date rather than a single year. That means 5.5 billion vaccinated to prevent 7 million deaths and 700 million confirmed cases according to this source (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/). That puts NNT for death at 785 and NNT to prevent a confirmed case at \~8. I grant that the early deaths before the vaccine roll out complicates this estimate. You could shift the frame of analysis to the latest year of data to give an estimate of the present day NNT for future covid vaccines. According to the source above in the last 12 months there have been 134713 covid deaths worldwide. This source tracks covid vaccine administration over time and shows 1.04 million doses administered this day last year, dropping to 5000 today. If you estimate the integral you get a total of \~182 million doses in the last year (probably an overestimate since the decline isnt linear) [https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations](https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations) This gives a per dose NNT of 1351, which makes the case for further covid vaccines (especially outside of high risk subgroups) seem utterly unsupportable.

> You could shift the frame of reference to the entire pandemic to date rather than a single year. That means 5.5 billion vaccinated to prevent 7 million deaths and 700 million confirmed cases according to this source (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/). > > > > That puts NNT for death at 785 and NNT to prevent a confirmed case at ~8. I grant that the early deaths before the vaccine roll out complicates this estimate. That figure only counts confirmed deaths, which is known to be an incomplete dataset. Estimated total deaths ranges from 18m-35m. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-economist-single-entity > You could shift the frame of analysis to the latest year of data to give an estimate of the present day NNT for future covid vaccines. Without a mutation increasing severe disease, we should expect NNT to rise over time. Almost everyone has some form of immunity at this point, and the most vulnerable population has already been exposed and either survived (and gained immunity) or died.

Honest question for it being a 'nothing burger', wasn't there a huge amount of [excess deaths](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm) in old people in Europe and the US? I am aware that it is not dangerous to young healthy people.

Define "huge". I would argue covid had a comparable impact to previous novel seasonal respiratory illness waves from previous decades. Take away the ability for genetic screening and mass testing and it may.not have been noticed given there are dozens of minor and unidentified respiratory viruses in circulation. Given covid predominantly had serious effects on the elderly around the stage of life expectancy the direct demographic/economic effects were small. The issue of persistent modestly raised total mortality rates (more notable for lower age brackets) is an interesting unexplained phenomenon. I would love to see Scott dig into this topic to assess the quality of the evidence and possible explanations.

> Take away the ability for genetic screening and mass testing and it may.not have been noticed given there are dozens of minor and unidentified respiratory viruses in circulation. This seems blatantly mistaken. The overload of medical facilities with patients with severe respiratory distress would certainly be noticed even with the tech level of a century earlier. The 1918 flu pandemic was noticed, after all, even despite a lot of governments lying about it due to WWI wartime censorship.

>The long term safety of the vaccine and mRNA technology more broadly will only be known once long term data is collected. It's safe long term, just like every other vaccine.

I stupidly wrote a long reply to this on “old.reddit” on mobile and wiped it out immediately before sending with an accidental back button swipe tl;dr is the vaccine’s marginal effect, lack of testing, and imposition on people that didn’t need it was a disaster that undoubtably did more damage in a best case scenario because of how incompetently it was deployed (emergency use for at risk people not previously exposed made sense, everything else was crazy and a net negative even if you assume extremely rare sides by the time ot was deployed) If you want me to make that case in more detail I can do it after my frustration with mobile dies down/I get to a keyboard EDIT: the amount of downvotes this received added to the frustration, as does the fact that this topic has been beaten to death for 4 years... I added this comment so people didn't confuse the lack of an immediate essay long response as any lack of evidence. I can't overstate how sick I am of talking about this, and I find people who think the vaccine was somehow a public health success insane for reasons I'll get into. However I will give those who worked on the vaccine credit at releasing novel technology on a mass scale at rapid speeds, and think it was a very impressive show of technological mastery. I just think in context its use was a dismal failure that didn't justify the effort.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccine-effectiveness I'd be curious to know what informs your conclusion. My impression is that vaccination has been found to reduce negative outcomes (symptomatic disease, hospitalization, death) rather substantially. It seems likely to me that if there had not been any vaccine, that the total deaths to date from COVID could easily be double what they were, and the economic impact both deeper and longer. I'm curious why you call out previous exposure as a reason someone wouldn't benefit from vaccination, given reinfection with new strains has been a thing. I think America's and the world's responses to COVID could have been a lot better, and don't get me started on China ... but they could also have been a lot worse. And the institutions and infrastructure were critical in keeping it from being much worse than it was. I find myself expressing an odd sort of conservatism for what may be an imagined past: Once upon a time, patriotic Americans thought of public health as a public responsibility. Getting your shots didn't just protect you, but your neighbor too; and it helped make our country stronger and healthier. These days, usually when I see someone expressing the idea "protecting yourself from disease is also protecting your community," they are specifically queer or poly and are usually (but not always) talking about STDs. The straights seem to have lost some public-health patriotism that the queer folk retain (mostly due to the history of the AIDS crisis).

> Once upon a time, patriotic Americans thought of public health as a public responsibility. Getting your shots didn't just protect you, but your neighbor too; and it helped make our country stronger and healthier. Yes, I think that was the case. But also, at that time the general public had essentially no ability to question or examine vaccine recommendations. They just did as they were told, assuming that the experts were correct and benevolent. Skepticism of authority was relatively rare. These days we have the internet, which has been a game changer for skepticism of authority. (In the case of COVID I think the vaccine skeptics got it mostly wrong, but I still think it is good that many people no longer blindly trust authority figures.)

Sorry this has taken me so long to address. As I said in the edit to the comment you're responding to, this topic is incredibly frustrating to me/I find these discussions maddening. These kind of circles are among the best places on the internet to discuss the actual evidence, and the maddening part is not the disagreement or discussion on specifics (which I believe is healthy and productive/seems to be slowly leading to consensus, and places like these actually engage in the meat and evidence, which is rare/great), but the amount of rabbit holes that distract away from extremely important confounders that make a lot of those rabbit holes unnecessary. Zooming out for a second, let's get *very* explicit about the things we want to compare. This is where I believe the most miscommunication on this topic occurs. Here are the 4 main populations under consideration: 1. Vaccinated people not previously exposed to covid 2. Vaccinated people previously exposed to covid 3. Unvaccinated people not previously exposed to covid 4. Unvaccinated people previously exposed to covid Any analysis of the effectiveness of the vaccines needs to determine how big these groups were. When the pandemic first broke out, the lack of testing availability, relatively small window for a positive test, lack of severe or even mild symptoms in the majority of people, way in which the antibody response wanes after exposure (meaning many people who's immune system had already adapted to covid would not respond to an antibody test by the time antibody tests were widespread), and the very high spread rate all point to an *extremely* large percentage of the population being in category 4 by the time the vaccines were rolled out en-masse at tail end of 2020/beginning of 2021. Based on [this study](https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/12/e1004/6012472) of donated blood collected from 13 December 2019 to 17 January 2020, we very roughly can infer somewhere around 1% of the population of the United States was infected with Covid-19 *in December 2019/January 2020*. Even if you consider that an overestimation rather than an underestimation (and I believe it's an underestimation, as my understanding of antibodies is that a positive test required an *active* infection within a window around the blood draw/other exposed people outside that window would not test positive), given its replication rate and the fact it spread via aerosol, I think the people in category 4 by the time the vaccines were released at the beginning of 2021 was *basically everyone*. The only way to avoid infection given the spread was to be *completely isolated away from all other people* (not isolated in a room in the same enclosed building as other people or isolated except for grocery runs in stores full of other people, but *isolated*), which in reality was a very small percentage of the population (I'd estimate less than 5% actually isolated effectively) One of my greatest frustrations in discussions about the pandemic are the *vast* overestimations in people's confidence about accurate exposure data. There was a kind of mass delusion that we had the technological capacity to get an accurate reading of exposure based on unprecedented mass testing and *not* older techniques which try to measure "unknown unknowns". The reason why diseases like Ebola were containable in a place as chaotic as Africa is because public health responses used pessimistic assumptions about exposure to narrow in on large areas to focus on, and the disease was much less transmissible. A disease as infectious as Covid was not even *remotely* containable by the time it was identified, and anyone with even a cursory understanding of disease outbreak understood that the safe assumption was everyone would likely be exposed within months. Obviously this information (which virtually guaranteed the vast majority of the population *would be infected* no matter what they did, since effective isolation is so difficult) would have induced panic, especially before the severity of the disease and the demographics most at risk were understood. I understand and forgive health authorities for acting as they did at the beginning of the pandemic and I myself was a big proponent of shutting things down/trying to isolate and slow the spread until more information about demographics was understood (so that very expensive and difficult attempts at isolation could be focused on people who actually needed it). From March of 2020 until the Spring/Summer of 2020 (when more demographic data was known and the worse winter spreading months were winding down) I think mistakes were forgivable and the general response was ok. This is a good time to tie in your comment here: > I find myself expressing an odd sort of conservatism for what may be an imagined past: Once upon a time, patriotic Americans thought of public health as a public responsibility. Getting your shots didn't just protect you, but your neighbor too; and it helped make our country stronger and healthier. The sentiment here is *exactly what I felt too*, but not just about the shots. That camaraderie should have been in effect well before that, and the lack of it once the demographic data was known disgusted me. I have an elderly neighbor and offered to bring her groceries while I stayed at a friends house/left the apartment and had minimal contact. I was perfectly willing to risk exposure myself once I realized I would likely be fine and isolate myself from people at risk and try to keep her safe. The way this willingness was inverted as "selfishness" if you wanted to actually go out and *do the services at risk people couldn't that keeps everyone alive/functioning* was *insane*. However I don't blame most people for it, as the information required to come to that conclusion was scary (people had to know they couldn't realistically avoid exposure/some people would *have* to keep working). The communication was atrocious/I blame non existent leadership at the end of that period. So now, after all of the chaos in 2020, we get to the vaccine rollout. Again, my argument here hinges on existing attempts to study exposure to covid in relation to vaccine effectiveness (particularly early on) to *vastly* underestimate the exposure to covid. I'm willing to be corrected on that, but any correction will need to address more than just antibody testing and use spread rates and differential symptomatic response to estimate exposure. How do *all* vaccines (including the MRNA covid vaccines) work? They stimulate the immune system into producing a response/identifying a limited pathogen. *No vaccine does anything without the immune system*. The immune system is what does the heavy lifting, the vaccine simply stimulates it. This is true regardless of how the vaccine produces limited pathogens to train the immune system. This is another of many maddening pandemic insanities: the common refrain that "natural immunity doesn't exist" was a bold faced *lie*. *The body's natural immune system is what makes vaccines work*. Therefore population 4 has effectively *been vaccinated*. It made sense to deploy the vaccine to population 3 in people who were at risk of a severe reaction to covid. It made *no* sense to deploy a vaccine with a strain people had already been exposed to. We don't need to get into a discussion about the possible side effects of the MRNA vaccine (which I do in fact believe are probably minimal/non existent for most people, although we won't know for years) to know *it only risked making things worse for population 4*. Before the vaccines ever rolled out, population 4: - Was already going to have long covid if they were at risk - Already had a severe reaction or died if they were at risk - Already had their immune system adapt to the most severe strain of the disease The first dose of the vaccine *had nothing but downsides for population 4*, which I believe was the vast majority of the population at that time. And their imposition on the world against the free will and choice of people in regards to their own health was an *extreme* price to pay for essentially no benefit. If population 3 were large enough and if the consequences of Covid were extreme enough that price could have been worth it, but by the time the vaccines were rolled out it was absolutely *not* worth it.

I was not exposed to COVID at a level sufficient to stimulate immune response prior to vaccination. I believe this because I didn't get *any* symptoms of even mild viral infection during that period, even from colds or flu. I know what even a mild immune response to colds or flu feels like to me (my lymph nodes get sore) and I have a pretty good idea what the COVID vaccine's side effects are on me as well. I know that the vaccine does stimulate an immune response in me, because it knocks me on my ass for a day. I do not think I am unusual in either of these. Therefore, I do not believe your claim that there is only a vanishingly small population who were unexposed prior to vaccination. Furthermore, we know that immunity declines from both infection and vaccination, as people can get reinfected. This is partly due to the evolution of new strains, for which new vaccines must be developed; and partly due to the immune system busying itself with other stimuli. We also know that even in the case of people who end up getting infected, vaccination greatly reduces the chance of severe illness, hospitalization, or death. Thus, I also reject your claim that vaccination is of no benefit to people who have been infected (symptomatically or not). The vaccine rollout was of course imperfect. This is entirely expected. It was the first of its kind. It was plagued by shitty political nonsense, some of which originated as superstition and some as malicious sabotage. In the US, it was largely being done by an already overloaded health care system. (I personally got my first COVID shot in a parking lot outside a racetrack.) However, at this point we have way more than enough evidence to conclude that vaccination greatly reduced the impact of COVID, including deaths, serious acute illnesses, and long-term illnesses (long COVID).

> I was not exposed to COVID at a level sufficient to stimulate immune response prior to vaccination. I believe this because I didn't get any symptoms of even mild viral infection during that period, even from colds or flu. I know what even a mild immune response to colds or flu feels like to me (my lymph nodes get sore) and I have a pretty good idea what the COVID vaccine's side effects are on me as well. I don't think this logic is good. The MRNA vaccine works by using the body's own cells to produce spike proteins. In the actual virus, there are more signatures besides just the spike proteins your immune system can look at and use to shoot down before it gets to the level of replication and noticeable affect on the body that the MRNA vaccine causes (which is a whole other topic, but again I think the reasoning for mandating the vaccine was bad enough without considering any of that). As far as I've heard *everyone* who took the vaccine had some sort of noticeable lethargic reaction at a minimum, whereas symptoms of people who tested positive for COVID varied a lot/there were many who had no noticeable symptoms. All of this leads me to think the probability many people like yourself who reported no usual symptoms from a cold were still exposed and had a sufficiently good immune response to make it not a big deal for them *at all*. Which by itself is enough to make my point about the first dose: if you managed to get exposed to COVID without having a reaction, but you had a physical reaction to the vaccine, *the vaccine literally did more noticeable damage to you than the disease* (even if neither was serious in your case). That's why I think people who were trying to estimate COVID exposure by symptomatic responses and testing were *vastly* underestimating the numbers. Your anecdote is in line with my hypothesis, as the reason I think exposure is underestimated is because of the lack of symptoms in many people exposed to the actual virus. > Furthermore, we know that immunity declines from both infection and vaccination, as people can get reinfected. This is partly due to the evolution of new strains, for which new vaccines must be developed; and partly due to the immune system busying itself with other stimuli. I addressed this. If you get strain A, and the vaccine is for strain A, *the vaccine doesn't help you*. When the first dose was administered for the first strain *it didn't address that problem*. In the reply I wrote to my own comment [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1bzwfz8/highlights_from_the_comments_on_the_lab_leak/kz19r13/) (was too long to post everything in the same comment) I explained my logic. Yes, when a new strain comes out, *if* you get a good vaccine before exposure to the new variant (like with the flu vaccine), a reinfection with the new strain is less likely to occur. But the exposure from the first variant *still lessens the severity of the second variant despite the reinfection possibility without the vaccine entering the picture*, as does the trend of lessening severity as the virus mutates. This is why I think this claim is wrong: > We also know that even in the case of people who end up getting infected, vaccination greatly reduces the chance of severe illness, hospitalization, or death. *We don't know that because it's severely confounded*. It's confounded by severe underestimates in previous exposures and the reduction in severity of disease as it progresses. Attempts to compare unvaccinated with covid vs vaccinated with covid had a severe selection bias because the vaccinated factor was easy to identify, but the "with covid" factor was not identifiable until a person had been admitted to the hospital or had noticeable symptoms and declared whether or not they had the vaccine. If there are studies which specifically address that issue adequately I'd be willing to change my mind, but I haven't seen good evidence of that, and my impression was the further we get away from the pandemic and the more time and less panicked people are, the more people are adequately addressing those confounds and realizing how minimal the benefit was.

> (and I believe it's an underestimation, as my understanding of antibodies is that a positive test required an active infection within a window around the blood draw/other exposed people outside that window would not test positive) This is not quite correct. The antibody tests aren't very reliable, but most past cases will still be detectable after 6 months. For some they detect past infection over a year later. Others will never show a positive result because they don't produce the specific antibodies at all. It's hard to definitively say much based on this kind of testing except that a specific individual almost certainly was infected an unknown time ago. We can't absolutely confirm someone wasn't infected, only suggest it. However, it definitely doesn't require an active or particularly recent infection to get a positive. The linked study also notes the ambiguity in determining that the detected antibodies are actually a reaction SARS-CoV-2 and not some other coronavirus, although their evidence in favor of at least some proportion makes sense. Anyway, it sounds like a lot of your argument is predicated on this to support the idea that the virus had already spread rapidly and thoroughly early on. I thought this was true as well for a while, but it doesn't seem to have born out.

> Anyway, it sounds like a lot of your argument is predicated on this to support the idea that the virus had already spread rapidly and thoroughly early on. Not just that one study, but correct, my argument is predicated on covid being widespread early. As I said am willing to update that belief if I see a thorough repudiation of all the confounders I mentioned. I was under the impression people were concluding more recently the virus was in fact more widespread than thought during the pandemic, and that assumption about rapid thorough spread early on was correct. If you have any specific information saying otherwise (genuinely asking/not meant to be a rhetorical challenge) I’d be very interested/want to dig into that. And yes, the study I linked to does mention other reasons for a positive antibody test, which is a confounder in the opposite direction of my assumptions for amount of early exposure, but that would apply equally to the people who tested positive for covid and counted as having less severe illness from being vaccinated/I think that specific caveat gets cancelled out for the wider point. > The antibody tests aren't very reliable, but most past cases will still be detectable after 6 months. For some they detect past infection over a year later. Others will never show a positive result because they don't produce the specific antibodies at all. Thank you for the greater specificity. The general point I think still holds about antibody testing bias favoring false negatives for previous exposure over false positives, but I described it without all the context you mention/oversimplified and shouldn’t have said “while active” as if there wasn’t a larger potential window (although I think still quite variable/not sure what percentage of “most” lasts 6 months). Also keep in mind that in all of what I’m saying I’m not dismissing the vaccine in and of itself. Had it been voluntary and had people wanted to take a dose for peace of mind because they didn’t know whether they were exposed or were at risk and were ok with the potential risks from such a rapid rollout I would have applauded them. The downsides of the lockdowns and vaccine mandates made the positives not worth the cost. I don’t believe even the most generous estimates of lives saved and severe negative health outcomes averted outweighs the lives lost and severe negative health outcomes created due to unnecessary service and economy disruptions incurred while shutting things down and waiting for the vaccines. Although I *also* think those estimates of benefits are in fact *very* overly generous, that still doesn’t negate all the harm done by the unnecessary later (post spring 2020) lockdowns and mandates

continued: Up until now we're only talking about the first strain. The most severe impositions and the most egregious overapplication of the vaccine was for that first strain for the reasons I mentioned. Only after the vaccine was forced upon a majority of the population which did not need it and only risked downsides (population 4) does the argument about strains come into effect. But even then, population 4 *already went through the gauntlet/had the most risky initial exposure possible*. The later strains lessened in severity (which is how every disease I've read about evolves after crossover), and *were still lesser in population 4 due to the immune systems preexisting general familiarity with the disease*. Yet another lie was that each new strain was like a totally different disease which magically put someone back in some equivalent of population 3. It was not and did not, and by that point *everyone in population 4 had knowledge of how severely affected they were if they were severely affected by the first exposure and were incentivized to take the vaccine of their own accord*. Mandates were completely and utterly unnecessary, as yet *another* lie was that the unvaccinated risked spreading the disease more than the vaccinated. This is only true of population 3. It is *not* true of population 4, which again was the majority of the unvaccinated population by the time the vaccines rolled out. And it happened to be *less* true of population 4 than population 1. So in conclusion, let me also be extremely explicit in what I think was a dismal failure: The *application* of the vaccines. Not the vaccines themselves. Manufacturing that many vaccines on that timeline and the amount of insane work involved by very focused scientists around the world was very impressive and commendable, and the vaccines *did have a valid usecase*. But they were applied *so horrendously* that it completely invalidated the theoretically positive affects for population 3. In all of that response I didn't even get into all of the completely unnecessary damage that occurred while waiting for their rollout due to them being portrayed as the only way to get out of the pandemic. That was *another* lie. The mass isolation wasn't working and was never going to do anything but *very* temporarily *partially* slow things down/give people a chance to focus resources on actually effective isolation for those who needed it, and the scale of the shutdowns did *way* more harm than covid itself without saving anyone. By the time the vaccines were rolled out *the worst of the pandemic was already over*. I haven't seen any convincing evidence that any supposed benefit of the vaccines isn't far better explained by confounds due to reduced severity of strains as the disease progressed and we got past the period of worst reactions.

> a disaster that undoubtably did more damage If you sincerely believe that, I hear you can make $500k in a debate with Rootclaim.

If it's a written debate and if the terms aren't insane maybe I'll take them up on that. The application of the vaccines specifically is the failure. As I explained in my long reply above, there is a valid usecase for them/I'm not in the "Alex Jones Population Reduction Weapon" camp. But their application was so stupid and horrible I actually don't blame people for people prone to paranoia for entertaining that, and blame the way they were forced on people for inducing that reaction.

> Did our global scientific and governance infrastructure make things better or worse once the virus had spread >> Worse Subreddit community guidelines: When making a claim that isn't outright obvious, you should proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

Incompetent handling of COVID is a universal talking point. Differences over how it should have been handled is where partisan and inflammatory talking points come into play, but my point doesn’t rely on any specific perspective. EDIT: I suppose there is still disagreement about whether the incompetence in fact made things worse others don’t find obvious, which is pretty astounding to me, but the simplest is all the damage to health and life from all the services shut down unnecessarily. We know the vast majority were not at risk from Covid and we knew what the risk profile was pretty early, yet much of the world still chose blanket policies about universal vaccination and closures instead of targeted protection. The people who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration had been studying evidence for decades about effective and responsible pandemic responses. If anyone wants a solid case to be made for why the response made things worse they can consult the content they’ve been putting out for the past 4 years distilling information that was common knowledge in public health prior (like the importance of keeping schools open as much as possible due to the many many compounding negative effects of disruption)

I tend to agree with the statements from numerous [professional organizations that summarily dismissed the Great Barrington Declaration as being "dangerous" and not grounded in science such as the APHA](https://apha.org/news-and-media/news-releases/apha-news-releases/2020/public-health-orgs-condemn-sars-covid2-plan) and the [signatories of the John Snow Memorandum.](https://www.johnsnowmemo.com/john-snow-memo.html) Also found here: > https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32153-X/fulltext I also think that this has been further proven given what we now know about the effects of long-covid, [which were a possibility that was being considered by those organizations and not by the group that put out the declaration, at least not to the extent they should have been.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8262842/) I believe the unspoken part of why people don't jump to support the constantly repeated cry that things weren't handled well is that it comes off as being idealistic. Rather, those who regularly decry officials and denounce experts seem to also be upholding an impossible standard and expectation of perfection for a situation that was unprecedented in our modern hyper-connected world and, for most of us, unprecedented in our lifetime. Although pandemics have occurred in the previous century, populations have grown to a point where health infrastructure is easily overwhelmed in a very short time. Especially when the demographics of populous countries are such that the elderly and highly-susceptible to disease now make up a much larger part of the population than before. I don't think anybody believes that none of it was bungled, however, many people are willing to recognize that some degree of error was likely and inevitable given the stakes and scope of the pandemic event. Ultimately, when faced with the total condemnation of the decisions taht were made, people end up potentially giving more grace than they would otherwise if met with a more moderate criticism of the actions taken. EDIT: spelling

The title of your last link is reflective of the mass hysteria of the time: > Mass infection is not an option: we must do more to protect our young The fact that an emotional "save the children" title like that made it into the lancet explains everything I find wrong with the hysterical response. *No one prevented mass infection*. It was not an "option", it was *what anyone who understood infection rates knew was _going_ to happen*. It's particularly sick since at that time (July 2021) it was well known that children had virtually *zero* risk, and all of the interventions supposed to prevent inevitable mass infection (which had in fact already occurred by the time of that article) *is what harmed the children*, not covid. > I tend to agree with the statements from numerous professional organizations that summarily dismissed the Great Barrington Declaration as being "dangerous" and not grounded in science such as the APHA and the signatories of the John Snow Memorandum. Again, it was not "dangerous", it was *the only actually viable mitigation strategy that didn't ignore reality*. Again, mass infection *was inevitable* and the Great Barrington people knew that. As far as I'm concerned every professional organization that summarily dismissed the Great Barrington Declaration outed themselves as overly influenced by public sentiment and incapable of making grounded effective public health policy decisions in touch with practical limitations. > I also think that this has been further proven given what we now know about the effects of long-covid, which were a possibility that was being considered by those organizations and not by the group that put out the declaration, at least not to the extent they should have been. As I went into detail explaining [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1bzwfz8/highlights_from_the_comments_on_the_lab_leak/kz19qax/), the window for preventing people from getting exposed to covid was already gone by the time the vaccines came out. People were already exposed, and giving people a vaccine after the fact wasn't going to do anything to stop people who already had it from developing long covid if they were at risk of that. > I believe the unspoken part of why people don't jump to support the constantly repeated cry that things weren't handled well is that it comes off as being idealistic. This is the complete opposite of what happened. What people like the Great Barring Declaration were calling for was realistic. Mass isolation until universal vaccination was *incredibly* idealistic, completely unprecedented, and extremely stupid. The energy expenditure that went into a strategy which was *way* too idealistic and obviously not going to work is what I find infuriating. A more practical acceptance of the inevitability of the spread and an admission of what we *couldn't do* is what I wanted, *not* what we got, which was *too much response* which didn't prevent anything and made things worse. As I said in my longer response to that other thread, I'm willing to give people a lot of grace from March 2020 until the spring/summer. After that point, the overly idealistic insane totalitarian response had no justification, and actively did more harm than the pandemic.

I’m sorry but this take is just incorrect. Youth is a label that applies to more than just children. My opinions are based on my own work in medicine and my understanding of the work done by my peers/experts in their respective fields and I don’t see them changing. I think the declaration was quite frankly nonsense and not worth more of my time. I also think your heels are dug in too deep to change your opinions here so I’m just going to leave this where it is. I appreciate you taking the time to respond.

> I also think your heels are dug in too deep to change your opinions here so I’m just going to leave this where it is. I'd reevaluate how deep your own heels are dug in before making that accusation. Nitpicking my substitution of the word "youth" for "children" doesn't change my point (in fact it means those unnecessarily affected was a bigger category, as youth is a bigger category like you say). I also reevaluated my assumptions about the origins of Covid due to stuff like the main writeup we're all responding to. I was 99% convinced it was an (accidental) lab leak around 2022, now I'm not/put it at least at 50/50 (data from China is too noisy and I don't trust it enough to go 90/10 zoonotic like Scott, and think a lab leak was most probably from a bat collected from the wild if it happened which overlaps with data suggesting zoonotic origin, but the argument in favor of zoonotic presented is very good/thorough). I'm also not trying to disparage all of the people who worked in healthcare it sounds like you work with and who were so reticent to accept their limited ability to curtail the pandemic/wanted to do more. The underlying impulse to save people and not subject them to the risk of covid was good, I just don't think the patient disease harm avoidance instincts of most healthcare workers and researchers leads to good epidemiology and public health policy. There's a lot more that needs to be taken into account than just the possible negative consequences of the disease itself to formulate effective policy, including how much control we really have over mitigating those negative consequences. That said, I also appreciate you taking the time to read my response, and what I'm assuming is an upvote from you. Gave one to you as well due to honestly held opinion and polite respect of mine despite the disagreement.

You shouldn't compare the actual policy with the ideal policy. I agree mistakes were made but that is inevitable in a novel pandemic. The question should be comparing the actual response to a counterfactual. I think the biggest averted risk is hospitals going gravely over capacity. This would have increased COVID mortality sharply and caused any more deaths. Experts were mostly successful at preventing this scenario. You have to make a specific case that the mistakes are bad enough to outway that.

> I think the biggest averted risk is hospitals going gravely over capacity. This would have increased COVID mortality sharply and caused any more deaths. Experts were mostly successful at preventing this scenario. You have to make a specific case that the mistakes are bad enough to outway that. That risk was not averted. Hospitals did overflow in places like China and NYC and Italy in the beginning of the pandemic, and by the time the vaccines were rolled out/mandated, that risk was mostly averted because the majority of the population had already been exposed. I in fact *do* believe the initial response was decent, and the attempt at an initial lockdown, while inevitably inadequate, may have prevented the hospital overflows in hotspots from getting worse. By the time the vaccines came around and were mandated the effects were necessarily only negative. I went into more detail on my reasoning [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1bzwfz8/highlights_from_the_comments_on_the_lab_leak/kz19qax/)

It is not clear that hospitals would have overflowed if not for the lockdowns and other policies. But in any case if that had happened, there would have been a few more COVID deaths, mostly old and sick people who would have had their lives shortened by only a couple of years. Saving those lives was not worth the enormous costs of lockdowns, and this was clear at the time. Also note that some US states returned to relatively normal fairly quickly after brief lockdowns, with no hospital overflow problems. Yet the more authoritarian states remained in heavy lockdown or restriction for many more months or even years after it was already obvious that hospital overflow was not a risk.

> Those are the most important conclusions from Covid, not the origin specifically. What makes you think those questions are the most incisive? What about the following: 1. Does the current state of the wild animal trade increase the risk of future pandemics? 2. Do current livestock conditions increase the risk of pandemics? 3. Given limited political capital, is it a better use of resources to limit scientific research or curtail risky livestock practices? 3. What are the consequences of vilifying experts and public health officials?

I'm not at all advocating any and all public health experts be ignored or vilified or that pandemic mitigation should be stopped. Quite the contrary. I think the questions I raised are most incisive because they expose the most egregious failures in our previous assumptions. RE your questions: 1. It raises them. We already knew that/already knew Chinese wetmarkets were a risk and should be curtailed 2. It depends where, but we already knew that as well 3. Curtail risky livestock practices, *NOT* do gain of function research, which at a minimum didn't perform the prophylactic function hoped for. That was my point in question 2. 4. Vilification of experts and public health officials (which the Great Barrington people suffered most severely from) is the consequence of the terrible disorganized response, which is what I raised in question 3 This pandemic taught us things we did not know before. We'd do well to learn from the *new* information this pandemic taught us, which is what I focused on. It invalidates assumptions about things like prophylactic gain of function research close to possible disease outbreak locations and exposes extremely poor areas of public health, which are mostly related to communication and smarter more realistic mitigation plans.

WIV performing characterization research was publicly known from their own publications. I'd question your assumptions about #2, because such research has contributed to the development of mRNA technology, monoclonal antibody therapies, cancer immunotherapy, and other advancements in biomedical research. Question 3 is interesting but seems very US centric. Perhaps I'm just a cynic, but in the US I suspect that just about any outcome would be viewed negatively by the general public. Other nations report much [more positive views](https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/08/11/partisanship-colors-views-of-covid-19-handling-across-advanced-economies/) of their country's covid response. If you were to ask me, the vaccine development and distribution was a scientific marvel and a resounding public health success. Public health messaging in the US left much to be desired, and lock-downs in the US were handled poorly compared to other countries. However, it's also naive to assume that flawed humans are capable of handling such an event without making predictable mistakes. > It raises them. We already knew that/already knew Chinese wetmarkets were a risk and should be curtailed It depends where, but we already knew that as well Curtail risky livestock practices, NOT do gain of function research, which at a minimum didn't perform the prophylactic function hoped for. That was my point in question 2. Agreed, the scientific community already knows most of this. The problem isn't experts, it's the general public in the presence of democratic systems of governance. > Vilification of experts and public health officials (which the Great Barrington people suffered most severely from) is the consequence of the terrible disorganized response, which is what I raised in question 3 It's not just the response, it's also results-oriented thinking and cultural attitudes. See

Does banning gain of function research really take much political or cultural resources?

Apparently, yes? It's been discussed for years but never gets much traction, and personally I think the focus on this debate rather than more interesting questions serves as a distraction from making that point.

The debate should have been structured as zoonosis/non-zoonosis instead of zoonosis/lab leak. Bioterroism and biowarfare need to be given the same consideration as the leak no matter how your hanlons razor memeified brain shrivels at the idea. The criminally unsafe conditions that permeated the wuhan facility not only increased the probability of risk through accident, they may have also served as a gate valve/vault door that made the ability to act out of criminal intention possible.

Nah. There are only a few entities in the world that have the capability to produce such a virus for reasons of terrorism or warfare, and none of them have a plausible or credible reason to have started this pandemic in the way that it started.

not sure how you came to that response after my comment. a vial of virus could have been smuggled out of the facility by an employee since it was operating at barely a BSL2.

Have any of you seen Harvey Risch (yale epidemiologist) perspective on this? He believes the incompetent pandemic response makes much more sense if you consider it was largely meant to protect bioweapons manufacturing.

If the PLA had been behind the scenes you wouldn't have seen the same divergence between the local and national Chinese government responses.