Slack / Private Message Drop — page 909

[Andrew Rambaut] OK. Here is a stab at the opening paragraph and structure of the letter. I think this point (that lab escape is not the point) is still worth making as it is not well understood. All of the other stuff (FCSs etc is just irrelevant if the virus was never there in the first place). If people want to say 'well what if... humanised', 'well what if... GOF' etc then let them. It is the grandstanding 'leaks are plausible' scientists that I think we should put on the spot here. ```Since the first reports of a new SARS-like human coronavirus in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China, and as a result of the subsequent pandemic, there has been intense global interest in understanding how and where SARS-CoV-2 first infected humans. Both preceding and following the recent WHO-convened "Global Study of Origins of SARS-CoV-2", primary interest has coalesced on two seemingly competing hypotheses: the "lab escape" scenario and one of natural "zoonotic" emergence. However with the focus on escape and arguments of plausibility based on prior instances of pathogens leaking from laboratory environments, proponents omit to consider the other component of this hypothesis, "lab capture" - the plausibility that SARS-CoV-2 was ever in a laboratory from which to escape in the first place. In essence the "lab-capture-escape" scenario is just a very specific conjecture about the exact nature and route of a zoonotic spillover. In the absence of any documentary evidence at all, we believe the likelihood that a human-transmissible bat coronavirus would ever have been present in a laboratory is so unlikely that the plausibility of escape is irrelevant. [Discuss all the zoonosis stuff... intermediate hosts... animal exposure etc] [Bring it back to the tiny prior probability of capture given how rare human transmissible viruses are in bats] [finish with the implied cover-up by the leak-proponents, the pointlessness of demanding anything and the fact the natural origins need to be the focus of our time]``` I haven't put this in the document because I think we (the executive committee) should make a decision about whether we go forward with this. [2021-06-03 05:02:51] [Robert Garry] This is it! The only debate would be to even bother to include one sentence to totally dismiss the even more extreme lab capture-manipulate-release. [2021-06-03 05:13:59] [Robert Garry] And, word-smithing needed but in the opening point out that it's a fatal logical flaw of the Lab Leak to only consider the Leak part, since at minimum it's a two step process. [2021-06-03 05:26:27] [Robert Garry] Also - keeping with a logical fallacies overall theme, perhaps note that most iterations of the lab leak are unfalsifiable - relman et al saying that lab leak could be a field worker getting asymptomatically infected in the field (and not seroconverting btw) fails the falsifiable test for a hypothesis - it can only be conjecture or speculation (tied in with the accusation of cover-up part). This version of Lab Leak is indeed a similar to other unfalsifiable "theories," for ex. that eDim keeps an Invisible Pink Unicorn up his ass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Pink_Unicorn [2021-06-03 05:34:17] [Robert Garry] If logical fallacies becomes the theme as @Andrew Rambaut suggests - then one could consider - *or not* - mentioning Umbrella Man=FCS [2021-06-03 05:55:39] [Robert Garry] Regardless of the specifics, I agree with Andrew that hitting them with logic is what we must do. The arguments have to be framed sans subtilty - like a Mike Tyson punch. [2021-06-03 06:51:44] [Robert Garry] Of course, False equivalence prime logical fallicy.