Listen now | 0:00 Peter’s background and (Root)claim to fame 3:50 How Peter caught the Covid origins bug 9:25 The Wuhan wet market: source or amplifier? 14:23 Holes in the lab leak theory 24:33 The patient zero problem 28:01 A statistical deep dive into the wet market 42:49 What the genetic evidence can (and can’t) tell us 1:01:22 Can we “trust the science” on Covid? 1:07:15 Has tribalism made resolving the debate impossible? 1:13:08 Why lab leak matters—even if it didn’t happen
Nice discussion. Guy looks exactly like who I imagine reads Scott Alexander's substack.
I'll still leave my tent in the 'I don't know' camp, but that is as much a personality trait as an issue specific position. I also get a little sus when people start stacking probabilities and saying "what are the chances that... ?", because life is weird, man. That said, as a (soil) microbiologist married to a molecular biologist who used to work at WHO's influenza monitoring lab in Melbourne, I (we) have always leant zoonotic.
Anyway, was a good one. Bob, you should get this guy to do a deep dive on the JFK assassination for you.
This was extremely convincing. I had seen several of the more well known experts (Worobey, Andersen & Holmes) on Decoding the Gurus and that certainly moved me away from leaning strongly towards lab leak, but this was a much stronger argument I felt. The way Peter tied together the rate of spread in various parts of the market along with the other factors was superb.
I'm still a little dubious of the idea that there were only a few cities this could have happened in, which I've heard previously, but I don't think that's required to be true to be fairly convinced.
I'm afraid this is all wrong, and actually the probability that the virus came from a lab is either 0% or 100%, whereas the probability it didn't come from a lab is either 100% or 0%. Happy to debate with anyone for $100,000
I have been following this debate on Twitter since early 2020. I am very surprised that this episode made no mention of the immediate, coordinated attempts by the GoFRoC-aligned viroogy community to shut down any discussion of the plausibility of a research-related origin of covid, in the Lancet Letter of February 2020 and the Nature Medicine article of March 2020. This was at a time when it was clearly far too early for any rigorous, scientific way for said community to assert a zoonotic origin with the level of near-certainty that they did.
Further, I am surprised and frankly disappointed that Bob did not ask about the reliability of the data on which Peter's probability calculations are based. As far as I am aware, no one (in the West, or elsewhere perhaps) knows precisely how many bat coronaviruses the Wuhan Institute of Virology had; Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, the US-based nonprofit that collaborated with the WIV, has conceded this point.
Further, the origin of covid should never have been a partisan issue. GoFRoC research was paused in 2014 under *Obama* because he presciently understood the egregious risks of such research. It was reinstated under Trump, at Fauci's urging. This research has been highly contested among scientists for decades. There is absolutely no need to paint proponents of a research-related origin as Chinaphobes, particularly given that Richard Ebright and many others have been highlighting for the past four years that EcoHealth Alliance's collaboration with the WIV was a US-Chinese collaboration and that *both* countries would share responsibility if a research-related incident caused covid.
The huge injection of DoD funding to the NIAID some twenty years ago is another factor conspicuously absent in this discussion, ditto the fact that the US Federal agencies that consider a research-related incident more likely than zoonosis include the Department of Energy, the federal agency responsible for US national labs.
I sincerely hope you invite Yuri Deigin to offer a rebuttal to Peter Miller on this podcast. People who uncritically believe that scientists are above conflicts of interest and would never operate with incentives to skew results in their favor are either naive or being gaslit, or both.
Ralph Baric, the leading coronavirus expert at the UNC and who has worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and who has been notably silent on the origin of covid debate, said the market is not where the pandemic started.
I didn't watch the whole debate, but to me the most annoying aspect of this controversy is the disconnect between how messy the information landscape is and how confident folks on both sides of the debate often come off. Anytime someone says they're for one side or the other, the next obvious question should be about how confident they are about their answer. If they're more than 5-10% confident in their conclusion, imo they're full of it.
Solving Covid origin is like trying to figure out who committed a murder with two obvious suspects and a corrupt police force trying to frame a third person who wasn't even in town the day the murder happened.
Thanks for this excellent conversation. So many lab leak advocates that I hear seem to consider the hypothesis a main plank of their identity, and can't imagine anyone would be such a dupe that they'd even entertain doubts about it. If I were a praying man, I'd pray that we could de-politicize this stuff and get our heads straight before whatever's surely coming 'round the mountain next bites us. As it is, I'm just left to hope that it's possible.
Nice discussion. Guy looks exactly like who I imagine reads Scott Alexander's substack.
I'll still leave my tent in the 'I don't know' camp, but that is as much a personality trait as an issue specific position. I also get a little sus when people start stacking probabilities and saying "what are the chances that... ?", because life is weird, man. That said, as a (soil) microbiologist married to a molecular biologist who used to work at WHO's influenza monitoring lab in Melbourne, I (we) have always leant zoonotic.
Anyway, was a good one. Bob, you should get this guy to do a deep dive on the JFK assassination for you.
That JFK idea is good. And maybe he's already gone down the rabbit hole so I wouldn't have to ask him to spend any more time on it!
This was extremely convincing. I had seen several of the more well known experts (Worobey, Andersen & Holmes) on Decoding the Gurus and that certainly moved me away from leaning strongly towards lab leak, but this was a much stronger argument I felt. The way Peter tied together the rate of spread in various parts of the market along with the other factors was superb.
I'm still a little dubious of the idea that there were only a few cities this could have happened in, which I've heard previously, but I don't think that's required to be true to be fairly convinced.
I'm afraid this is all wrong, and actually the probability that the virus came from a lab is either 0% or 100%, whereas the probability it didn't come from a lab is either 100% or 0%. Happy to debate with anyone for $100,000
I have been following this debate on Twitter since early 2020. I am very surprised that this episode made no mention of the immediate, coordinated attempts by the GoFRoC-aligned viroogy community to shut down any discussion of the plausibility of a research-related origin of covid, in the Lancet Letter of February 2020 and the Nature Medicine article of March 2020. This was at a time when it was clearly far too early for any rigorous, scientific way for said community to assert a zoonotic origin with the level of near-certainty that they did.
Further, I am surprised and frankly disappointed that Bob did not ask about the reliability of the data on which Peter's probability calculations are based. As far as I am aware, no one (in the West, or elsewhere perhaps) knows precisely how many bat coronaviruses the Wuhan Institute of Virology had; Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, the US-based nonprofit that collaborated with the WIV, has conceded this point.
The degree of obfuscation on the part of the GoFRoC-aligned virology community is another disturbing point for any impartial observer. The DEFUSE proposal had to be leaked. Health officials deliberately communicated in ways that would thwart FOIA. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/health/nih-officials-foia-hidden-emails-covid.html
Further, the origin of covid should never have been a partisan issue. GoFRoC research was paused in 2014 under *Obama* because he presciently understood the egregious risks of such research. It was reinstated under Trump, at Fauci's urging. This research has been highly contested among scientists for decades. There is absolutely no need to paint proponents of a research-related origin as Chinaphobes, particularly given that Richard Ebright and many others have been highlighting for the past four years that EcoHealth Alliance's collaboration with the WIV was a US-Chinese collaboration and that *both* countries would share responsibility if a research-related incident caused covid.
The huge injection of DoD funding to the NIAID some twenty years ago is another factor conspicuously absent in this discussion, ditto the fact that the US Federal agencies that consider a research-related incident more likely than zoonosis include the Department of Energy, the federal agency responsible for US national labs.
I sincerely hope you invite Yuri Deigin to offer a rebuttal to Peter Miller on this podcast. People who uncritically believe that scientists are above conflicts of interest and would never operate with incentives to skew results in their favor are either naive or being gaslit, or both.
Ralph Baric, the leading coronavirus expert at the UNC and who has worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and who has been notably silent on the origin of covid debate, said the market is not where the pandemic started.
I didn't watch the whole debate, but to me the most annoying aspect of this controversy is the disconnect between how messy the information landscape is and how confident folks on both sides of the debate often come off. Anytime someone says they're for one side or the other, the next obvious question should be about how confident they are about their answer. If they're more than 5-10% confident in their conclusion, imo they're full of it.
Solving Covid origin is like trying to figure out who committed a murder with two obvious suspects and a corrupt police force trying to frame a third person who wasn't even in town the day the murder happened.
Thanks for this excellent conversation. So many lab leak advocates that I hear seem to consider the hypothesis a main plank of their identity, and can't imagine anyone would be such a dupe that they'd even entertain doubts about it. If I were a praying man, I'd pray that we could de-politicize this stuff and get our heads straight before whatever's surely coming 'round the mountain next bites us. As it is, I'm just left to hope that it's possible.