[HN Gopher] I'm not convinced by the new lab leak debunking ___________________________________________________________________ I'm not convinced by the new lab leak debunking Author : jeffmh Score : 30 points Date : 2022-03-05 21:52 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.slowboring.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.slowboring.com) | Jerry2 wrote: | If anyone wants to go down the "lab leak" rabbit hole, check out | Charles Rixey's Substack [1]. He's assembled a massive database | of articles and a complete timeline of events [2] that lead to | COVID-19 pandemic. He's one of the members of DRASTIC which is a | loose group of researchers looking into the "lab leak" | hypothesis. [3][4][5] | | [1] https://prometheusshrugged.substack.com/ | | [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353547700_SARS- | CoV-... | | [3] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak- | theory-... | | [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRASTIC | | [5] https://drasticscience.com/ | jeffmh wrote: | The article (by Matt Yglesias) is more nuanced than the title may | suggest. Here's a quote that gets at the gist of the piece: | | "The evidence really does show pretty clearly that there were one | or more superspreader events at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale | Market. I just don't think that's really what the lab leak debate | is about; it's about why there was a superspreader event at the | market. Did an infected animal pass it to people there or did a | person who got infected at the lab pass it to people there?" | bediger4000 wrote: | Thank you for including the "by Matt Yglesias". Yglesias | periodically admits to trolling, but as near as I can tell, | also wants to be taken Very Seriously sometimes. I personally | think he comes too close to "trolling" a lot of the time he | wants to be taken Very Seriously, so I have to be careful when | reading his takes. I would advise other people to also read | Matt Yglesias carefully to decide if he's trolling in any given | article. | _dain_ wrote: | poisoning the well | xxpor wrote: | I can't recall an actual article where he's trolling. That's | more of a twitter thing. | dluan wrote: | I would not take anything Matt Yglesias says seriously, at all. | mhh__ wrote: | Why? | pbiggar wrote: | Here's a rebuttal to this by one of the authors of the paper: | | https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/14994061482517544... | timr wrote: | This is not a "rebuttal". This is terrible. | | Rasmussen asserts things she could not possibly know (e.g. the | Wuhan lab did not have "the fucking virus" -- we don't know | _what_ they had or did not have, because the Chinese government | is not exactly being forthright on the matter), and focuses on | a corner of the article (a side debate about RaTG13 and the | physical proximity of it to Wuhan), while completely brushing | off the core argument of the piece: the authors of these papers | have not demonstrated that the early infections at the market | came from animals. | | That's the whole ballgame. Rasmussen spends a lot of words | setting up and knocking down straw men, but there's nothing | else here. To make it worse, she is rude, dismissive, profane | and needlessly aggressive. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-05 23:00 UTC)