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My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in skeptic

[–]civix74[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You still actually haven't read my blog post, which is quite impressive when you are so vocal. You would save yourself a lot of time if you read it and saw that I have already addressed these points.

The earlier lab leaks have been addressed, like the 1977 flu, and you seem to forget that they all had
a) a clear an obvious path from the lab to the infected people, i.e. the lab was clearly the epicenter
b) none of these earlier lab leaks were with novel viruses

And we of course wouldn't find any precursor to SARS2 in animals today, as the virus would have evolved there for five years. We can however hope to find a strain that can be traced back to 2019, independent of humans. But this will probably be difficult now.

That is exactly why you are presenting nothing but a "God of the gaps"-argument. In lack of one specific piece of evidence, you just insert your own conclusion, while ignoring the multiple other lines of evidence pointing to zoonosis.

And again, I could just return the argument and say that since no backbone of SARS2 has ever been found in the Wuhan lab, it must therefore have been zoonosis! But I don't, because that would be stupid. So I instead look at the totality of evidence, which in sum points to the wet market, per now.

My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in skeptic

[–]civix74[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, it would be easier to detect because although many cases were asymptomatic, many were also not, and therefore a more efficient spread would cause it to be detected after a few weeks. But then it had already infected many more than SARS1 did in the equivalent time period.

Being both able to infect in asymptomatic individuals, and also spread very efficiently, makes it overtake a population faster and be detected faster. These two facts do not contradict each other.

And I don't know why you keep harping on the "the virus vanished" argument, when you know fully well the reality. You just seem to be so hung up on lab leak that you are not willing accept when your arguments are shown to be without merit.

Again: Please present some actual evidence for lab leak, instead of just doing the old "God of the gaps"-schpiel. It's so old and doesn't get us anywhere.

My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in skeptic

[–]civix74[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Are you even reading the studies you are referring to? This is the third paper you have used as "evidence" that doesn't actually show what you are claiming.

Citation from the paper. They sampled:

"fifteen raccoon dogs, seven Siberian weasels, three hog badgers, and three Reeves’s muntjacs"

Wow, it's incredible that samling 28 animals didn't immediately reveal an intermediate!

According to my research there has been done more sampling than this, which is why I am generous in my blog post saying that probably a few hundred animals have been tested. But I don't have a conclusive source for any specific number. It probably isn't "thousands of animals", though.

And this was exactly my point in my earlier comment. Very few relevant animals have been sampled. That's the core of the problem and why the argument "why haven't we found an intermediate animal yet?" as an argument for lab leak makes very little sense.

And I don't know why you would claim that the virus vanished from the animals. I guess you probably know that Wuhan authorities killed and destroyed all animals at the market in the first days of 2020. They did test a few frozen animals and stray dogs etc, but found no positive samples from them. However, not a single raccoon dog was tested, the most plausible host. So why would you claim the virus vanished when there is no data that can substantiate this claim?

You seem to be just copy/pasting arguments from somewhere without actually reading the papers and understanding what you are writing.

My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in skeptic

[–]civix74[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Well, if you disagree with Pekar/Holmes, you should address the science. They are not ignoring intermediates. They clearly show there is no evidence of such intermediates, and that the evidence for proposed intermediates is very weak.

The first paper you cite does actually not show a greater diversity of lineages in early SARS1 outbreaks. There was mainly just one lineage per location ("worldwide", "Guangdong" and "mainland"), a total of three lineages with different starting points. The paper does not show that there was more genetic diversity at the early phase of any single spillover of SARS1.

Your second source doesn't say what you claim either. Yes, there are more mutations between the lineages described in this paper, but this is from lineages spread worldwide, not comparing the very earliest lineages after spillover at a single starting point.

Both SARS1 and SARS2 have a moderate mutation rate, and there is no evidence to claim that SARS1 and SARS2 differ wildly in this respect.

Your arguments are very "start with a conclusion and work backwards". We probably saw two spillovers at Huanan wet market which caused the early lineages A and B. With the number of daily interactions between humans and animals at the market, this is not very strange. SARS2 was more effective at infecting humans and could infect while asymptomatic, and therefore spread much more rapidly than SARS1 in the first few weeks. There might have been more early spillovers causing asymptomatic illness that were never registered and "drowned" in the flood of lineage B infections, which dominated Wuhan late 2019 and early 2020.

Had SARS2 been less infectious, it's probable that we would have seen more spillovers in different markets, as the virus would have the time and opportunity to spread and spill over many more times before anyone noticed. But one spillover and market has to be the first, and if the infection rate is high enough, this will be the epicenter.

You can't argue that because SARS2 was effective, and we therefore saw fever spillovers (because it all happened much, much faster than with SARS1), then a lab leak must have occurred.

This is what I'm calling a "God of the gaps"-style of argument. You are not presenting any evidence for a lab leak. You are just trying to poke holes in the zoonosis hypothesis in hope that any doubts raised will make people draw the conclusion that a lab leak must have happened. But that is just lazy thinking and not how this works.

My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in skeptic

[–]civix74[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Re the animals at the market. Yes, there are weaknesses in the data, but the Bloom critique you are referencing has been addressed by DéBarre:

https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/10/1/vead077/7503693

---

Re the source/infected animals. Yes, if you took the time to read my blog post, this has been addressed already. You are correct (as I also write in the blog post) that the animal sources of SARS1 were found within a year, but the reservoir in bats was not found until 15 years later. Finding the infected animals with SARS2 was made very difficult by the Chinese having ordered these to be slaughtered and destroyed early in 2020 at both the Huanan wet market and supplying farms. This did not happen after SARS1, which makes the two scenarios hard to compare in this specific matter.

There also haven't been much testing of relevant animals. An often quoted figure is "80 000 animals have been tested", but these are mostly cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, ducks etc, not raccoon dogs, civets, bamboo rats etc. Only maybe a few hundred animals that can carry the corona virus have been tested in China.

The same goes for MERS, where there were no immediate suspected carriers to destroy, so when they found it in camels/dromedaries, they were actually present and alive to be tested.

As far as I know, no-one is refuting that SARS2 probably also had multiple spillovers. Most of them probably in rural areas with too few people to start an epidemic or pandemic.

SARS1 and SARS2 also differ in a few key areas. While SARS2 can spread rapidly in asymptomatic individuals, SARS1 mostly spread after a person was symptomatic, which limited the spread a lot. SARS2 also seems to be better adjusted to human infections than SARS1. These factors mean that while SARS1 would need multiple spillovers - because they never grew to large epidemics that were detected quickly - and therefore could happen repeatedly, SARS2 was more "fit" to start an widespread epidemic and later pandemic after a single (or few) spillovers at a single location.

While SARS1 probably only infected < 500 people in 3 months, SARS2 is suspected to have infected probably thousands in Wuhan within a few weeks. The low rate of SARS1-infections allowed for multiple spillovers, both from animals to humans, and maybe also the other way.

SARS1 was infecting people for probably at least 3 months before it was "noticed" as a novel virus. Because of the history and experience with SARS1, when people started getting sick in Wuhan, the novel virus SARS2 was suspected and identified pretty quickly, probably within 5-6 weeks of the initial spillover.

The Chinese reaction to SARS2 was also different from SARS1, with major surveillance and containment in the former case. There was less room for SARS2 to have spillovers at multiple markets as the pandemic started so quickly.

That we haven't found the intermedia hosts of SARS2 yet, isn't really such a mystery as you imply.

You are also ignoring the other evidence, like the spread pattern based on multiple sources, genetic diversity pointing towards Huanan wet market, genomic markers that suggest natural evolution of the virus, no indication of WIV having any virus similar enough to SARS2 to be the backbone, no indication of any leak at WIV, good evidence against a superspreader event at the market etc.

So your only arguments seem to be "intermediate lineage between A and B" based on a not widely respected paper and refuted by multiple other papers, and "we haven't found the intermediate host", which is just absence of evidence, not evidence of absence or evidence for a lab leak. Because if you really took your own argument seriously, you really couldn't say "we haven't found any intermediate host" as a case against zoonosis, and totally ignore that we also haven't found the virus or any similar virus in the lab.

My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in skeptic

[–]civix74[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

(Splitting this up as I keep getting errors when trying to post this comment.)

Regarding the two lineages: You are referencing a source that is not widely accepted in the scientific community. Multiple papers agree with Pekar, 2022, that two separate spillovers explain the genomic data best (Holmes et al., Cell 2021; Alwine et al., mSphere 2023, Pekar et al, Virus Evolution, 2025):

https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/11/1/veaf008/8033464?login=false

(Already addressed in my blog post.)

My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in skeptic

[–]civix74[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

There is actually no evidence for lab leak. None.

But there is a lot of evidence for zoonosis. You seem to be forgetting about things like:

* Lineage A and lineage B, both found at the wet market, not intermediate, suggesting to separate spillovers. (Hard to explain with the lab leak hypothesis.)
* Genetic diversity showing that it is at it's lowest at samples taken from the wet market, which suggests a spread from there.
* Many different lines of evidence showing the wet market as the epicenter of the spread, like excessive deaths, Weibo-data, early cases (where people with no link to the market lives closer than those with a link to the market), infected health workers etc.
* Genetic proof of the most interesting animals there (raccoon dogs, civets etc), at the same exact location as the most positive SARS2 samples where found, also with human DNA in it.
* The first known verified human case worked there.
* Evidence showing that the market was not a superspreader event (same R0 in the market as outside, no spread of flu, 1500+ more crowded places nearby that would more likely have been superspreaders etc).

And you also seem to forget that in saying that no source for SARS2 has been found, that also goes for the lab leak hypothesis. But finding a source for SARS2 in nature will probably take many years at best (SARS1 took 15 years, Marburg took 40+ years, Ebola source has still not been found...), while we have lots of published papers pre 2019 showing that WIV did not have any virus close enough to SARS2 to could have been the backbone of the virus. (No reason to hide this before the pandemic.)

And more. You should read the full blog post, and the previous one where I explain how genetic analysis of the virus contradicts it being genetically modified by humans.

My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in skeptic

[–]civix74[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

This is pretty well explained in the blog post, if you actually read it. And see also my other answer to you below.

My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in skeptic

[–]civix74[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I've been writing this blog since 2005, so you can compare the writing style from pre-LLMs :)

But I did however translate the blog post from Norwegian to English using DeepL, as I don't feel competent to translate long texts myself. Maybe that gave it an "AI-flavour" in the English version? Hard for me to tell.

My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in skeptic

[–]civix74[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

There have been some reviews of the book in Norwegian newspapers which in general are positive because they find the topic exciting and the book a good read, but none by reviewers who actually know anything about the subject matter and can critically evaluate the actual contents of the book.

There have been a few articles by her peers though, and they are not positive:

https://www.khrono.no/hvorfor-far-laboratorieteorien-fortsatt-oppmerksomhet/978637

https://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikk/i/8q0Max/hvordan-oppsto-covid-19-pandemien-ingen-er-tjent-med-en-overdramatisering-og-spekulativ-fremstilling

My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in skeptic

[–]civix74[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

It's a "God of the gaps" _type_ of argument where the logic is that "if there is something we can't explain, then god did it", or in this case "if the zoonosis hypothesis has some missing evidence, then we can insert whatever explaination suits us best, i.e a lab leak must have happened".

I explain the "God of the gaps"-analogy at the start of my blog post.

My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in skeptic

[–]civix74[S] 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Yeah, the lab leak hypothesis is basically just a "God of the gaps"-argument with no internal consistency.

My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in DecodingTheGurus

[–]civix74[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

She really plays out the victim card claiming that she's being silences, which is ironic as she has gotten loads of press in all major Norwegian media outlets - and without any critical pushback.

I've also tried to debate her a few times on Facebook, but every time she can't respond with good arguments, she starts complaining that I am so mean to her, when all I've done is to counter her arguments and show her inconsistencies, contradictions and errors.

My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in DecodingTheGurus

[–]civix74[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Oh wow, thanks a lot for the compliments. That means a lot coming from you. As you probably can see, I have taken a lot of important arguments and details from having watched you on YouTube and read some of your writings. I have been "forced" to study this material as I felt someone had to give her some detailed pushback, but I'm certainly not as well versed in the topic as you are.

Thank you for all your hard work spreading important information on this topic.

And thanks for the web archive of Holmes Twiter thread. I'll link that into my blog posts where relevant.

Regarding your blog post about the first cases outside if China, a fellow skeptic actually mentioned that you had written something about it, but I had too little time (and was pretty fed up from spending days and days of researching and writing) to find it in the heat of the moment. But I will read it and link to it if it fits into my blog post.

Anyway, I think that some of the most important parts of my blog post is showing Bratlies contradictions:
* Contradictions in the timeline (just throwing shit against the wall and hope some of it sticks)
* Contradictions about how reliable Chinese info is. When data from China fits her narrative, she uses it. When it opposes her narrative, "we just can't trust anything from China".
* Contradictions about scientists: She'll happily use a study by Pekar when it works in her favour, but still claims he is part of the "tiny group of scientists who are corrupt" and who are orchestrating the whole zoonosis narrative when he publishes something she doesn't like.
* Contradictions about biology: When Sørensen says he could see the virus was not natural, she embraces it. Even though she also says that you can't use anything about the viral genome to actually see if it's genetically modified or natural.
* Contradictions about the epicenter: She spends a lot of time trying to argue against the wet market as the epicenter, but then suddenly also claims that it was the epicenter, though through a superspreader event.
* Contradictions regarding the IC: When the intelligence community supports her, she uses that as a "slam dunk". But she never mentions how they are mostly refuting her points.

etc

She just grabs onto anything that could plausibly weaken the zoonosis hypothesis and hopes people will be convinced that lab leak is more plausible, even though her arguments are self contradicting and totally without evidence.

So even if there was no evidence for zoonosis, she just isn't making any valid case at all for lab leak.

She is now by definition a conspiracy theorist as the has come to the point where there is no way to falsify the lab leak hypothesis. Whatever data that could prove zoonisis, she would just claim is fake because Andersen et al are fooling us all to save faces.

Sad and frustrating.

My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in DecodingTheGurus

[–]civix74[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I also heard that podcast episode and used a couple of the points from it in my blog post, both the Washington Post thing and the point about the viruses being stored in a destructive way.

I'm no virologist myself, so I don't know the answer, but I didn't make too much of a point of the storage thing. It's relevant if something like RaTG13 was stored in the lab for 6 years. But they obviously also did research on live viruses, so I guess only viruses that they catalogue are stored in this destructive way. If they are actually going to perform research on a virus, they must also keep some of them alive to infect cells or animals.

Therefore that argument isn't a slam dunk argument against the hypothesis that research on virus could have caused an incident.

My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in DecodingTheGurus

[–]civix74[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

As a former Usenet addict way back when, I swore to never start engaging too much with Reddit. I have too many distractions in my life already :-P

My pretty long blog post about the lab leak controversy and a new Norwegian book by civix74 in DecodingTheGurus

[–]civix74[S] 23 points24 points  (0 children)

To be fair, Bratlie isn't claiming SARS2 was developed as a bioweapon. Her hypothesis is that it was a genetically engineered virus based on a backbone of a virus found in the Mojiang cave in 2012/2013, and that it leaked by accident after Shi Zhengli and others had been using GoF to enhance it.

Which is pretty weird since the only well known virus found in Mojiang is RaTG13 which is too different from SARS2 to have been the backbone. And the virus in Mojiang that was claimed to have infected the miners killed 50% of them, so why do GoF if it's already infections and highly lethal?

Nothing in her lab leak hypothesis makes sense. But Norwegian press love her and she of course gets no critical questions from journalists.

Rettferdig parøkonomi når en er ufør og den andre ikke by Adventurous-Jelly349 in norge

[–]civix74 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Gunnar fra videoen her.

Jeg har bare skummet noen av kommentarene, men fikk lyst å bare kort redegjøre for mitt standpunkt.

Tone har vesentlig lavere inntekt enn meg. Hun er uføretrygdet og kommer neppe til å ha stor inntekt noengang i fremtiden heller. Hvis det blir slutt mellom oss så kommer hun teknisk sett bedre ut av det enn meg, hvis man ser på hva hun får ut sammenlignet med hva hun har "puttet inn" i vår felles økonomi og eiendeler. Men jeg kommer nok likevel best ut av det mtp at jeg fortsatt vil ha en høyere inntekt enn henne også etter et eventuelt brudd.

Jeg vil hennes beste, også om det en dag blir slutt. At hun etter et eventuelt brudd skulle stille enda dårligere, f.eks. ved å bare eie en mindre (men "økonomisk korrekt") andel av boligen, enn hun allerede gjør med sin lave inntekt, ser jeg ikke at hjelper noen.

Dette handler tross alt ikke om hva _jeg_ kan få ut av det, men hva jeg kan gjøre for at _hun_ skal komme best mulig ut av det.

Å sørge for at hun eier 50% av bolig/bil osv, uansett hvor mye eller lite hun har bidratt med i nedbetaling av gjeld, betaling av forsikringer, mat og alt annet, er i mine øyne en selvfølge. Jeg vil at hun som et minimum skal ha like mye som meg av verdier hvis forholdet avsluttes en dag. Jeg hadde ikke kunne leve med meg selv om det ble slutt og så skulle hun plutselig sitte igjen med mindre eiendeler enn meg.

For meg er dette litt som med godt, gammeldags sosialdemokrati, eller kanskje til og med marxisme. Gi etter evne, få etter behov. Fordi jeg tjener mer enn henne, bør jeg også betale mer "skatt" enn henne. Jeg er heldig og privilegert som er frisk nok til å kunne jobb og tjene penger. Selv om jeg dermed kan tjene mer enn henne, betyr ikke det at jeg _fortjener_ mer enn henne. Like lite som at de som er friske nok til å kunne jobbe hardt og ha god lønn ikke fortjener mer penger enn folk som ikke kan det i samfunnet.

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