英语教师（本人不是）的典型回答如下: Plausible v.s. Possible The word "possible" doesn't really imply "truth" or "certainty" at all. It gives a stronger sense of doubt and skepticism than that. However, "plausible" doesn't imply that doubt. For example... It's possible that you are correct = I don't know if you are correct, but you might be. It's plausible that you are correct = It's reasonable to think that you are correct, so you probably are.
回复 208楼noshock的帖子 你 google 到的 Internet 上这个例子，”It’s plausible that you are correct” 很少这么用，很别扭。Plausible 是说 一个 statement 或 argument 听起来合理、可信、服人。它跟 applaud ”鼓掌” 同源，来自拉丁词 plausibilis，“值得鼓掌”。 可以说 a plausible explanation / story / denial / post / excuse / reasons, the plausibility of the theory... 如果它们 believable 或 sounds credible or reasonable。 It’s plausible that... 接一个可信的statement It’s plausible to assume... 不用谢
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-08/u-s-eu-set-to-back-fresh-study-into-origins-of-covid-19 U.S. Gets Crucial EU Support for New Study Into Covid’s Origins By Alberto Nardelli and Josh Wingrove June 8, 2021, 11:13 AM PDT Draft statement says study should be free from interference U.S. has previously called for more transparency from China The U.S. and the European Union are set to back a renewed push into investigating the origins of Covid-19 after conflicting assessments about where the outbreak started, according to a document seen by Bloomberg News. In a draft statement the countries hope to adopt at a summit later this month, they “call for progress on a transparent, evidence-based, and expert-led WHO-convened phase 2 study on the origins of COVID-19, that is free from interference.” The U.S. is among several countries that have called on China to be more transparent with its data and allow greater access, amid ongoing questions over whether the outbreak was caused by a laboratory accident, was transmitted from wildlife or caused by something else. A new investigation risks fueling tensions with China, which has rejected suggestions of a lab leak and rebuffed international efforts to further probe the virus’s origins. A World Health Organization report earlier this year said the most likely origin was natural, but it’s also called for further studies. A person familiar with discussions, which have taken place between European diplomats preparing the meeting, said that the U.S. had asked the bloc for support on a study into Covid’s origins. Where Are We in Hunting for the Coronavirus’sOrigin?: QuickTake The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The statement is a draft and could change before the U.S. and European leaders meet in Brussels on June 15. The document also says the U.S. and EU “commit to working together toward the development and use of a swift and independent means for investigating such outbreaks in the future.” U.S. President Joe Biden issued a surprise statement late last month, revealing that his intelligence community remained divided on the origins of the pandemic -- giving new life to theories that it escaped from a lab. Biden said that two “elements” of the intelligence community, which he didn’t identify, leaned toward a natural origin for the virus, while another leaned toward the Wuhan lab, a global hub for coronavirus research. Each side had “low to moderate confidence.” Global Tensions Biden wants intelligence agencies to report back in 90 days, setting up the prospect of the issue flaring up again ahead of the Group of 20 summit where Biden could potentially meet Chinese President Xi Jinping. The EU would also risk angering China by giving its backing to the study. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian has dismissed Biden’s move as an attempt to engage in “stigmatization, political manipulation and blame-shifting.” Elsewhere in the statement, the U.S. and the EU will commit to continuing to support the Covax facility to boost vaccinations in developing countries, and will “encourage more donors to make 2 billion vaccine doses available worldwide by late 2021.” Funding and distributing vaccines to developing countries will be a key agenda item when G-7 leaders meet in Cornwall, England, this week. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he wants the group to commit to inoculating the entire world by the end of next year The EU and the US will also pledge to work together on their “similar multi-faceted approaches to China, which include elements of cooperation, competition, and systemic rivalry.” The draft sets out a list of shared concerns about Beijing, including: Human rights violations in Xinjiang and Tibet The erosion of democratic processes in Hong Kong Economic coercion Disinformation campaigns Regional security issues And the situation in the East China Sea and South China Sea
连Nature都开始改风向风向了？！真是恍如隔世，不可思议！ 下面就看柳叶刀了… The COVID lab-leak hypothesis: what scientists do and don’t know Nature examines arguments that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab in China, and the science behind them. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3
连Nature都开始改风向风向了？！真是恍如隔世，不可思议！ 下面就看柳叶刀了… The COVID lab-leak hypothesis: what scientists do and don’t know Nature examines arguments that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab in China, and the science behind them. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3
连Nature都开始改风向风向了？！真是恍如隔世，不可思议！ 下面就看柳叶刀了… The COVID lab-leak hypothesis: what scientists do and don’t know Nature examines arguments that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab in China, and the science behind them. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3
DRASTIC很多参与者都是有生物背景，只是不做病毒，对克隆，突变，进化这些概念/技术不陌生，却没有做病毒那些人脑子里的条条框框和利益冲突(做病毒的不能做GOF research 就很难发有high impact的文章了吧!) 。事实证明，他们挖出来的料说服了小浣熊这样的专业人士，也说服了发science公开信的业界大佬。
Daszak的自供状，描述如何和中国同事筛选、加工病毒！4‘09”起 These bastards!
系统提示：若遇到视频无法播放请点击下方链接 https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZeMljOni2yA “Then when you get a sequence of a virus, and it looks like a relative of a known nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS. We found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So we sequenced the spike protein: the protein that attaches to cells. Then we… Well I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work. You create pseudo particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells. At each step of this you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people… “You end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers,
A Scientist Who Said No to Covid Groupthink Many experts aggressively denied a lab leak was possible and only now admit it. It took courage to make the case a year ago. By Adam O’Neal June 11, 2021 12:57 pm ET PHOTO: BARBARA KELLEY A few months before Covid-19 became a pandemic, Filippa Lentzos started reading about unusual flu cases in Wuhan, China. Ms. Lentzos, a social scientist who studies biological threats, belongs to an email group she describes as consisting of “ex-intelligence, bioweapons specialists, experts, former State Department diplomats” and others “who have worked in arms control, biological disarmament.” As Chinese authorities struggled to contain the outbreak, she recalls, the expert circle asked questions about the pathogen’s origin: “Is this security related? Is it military? Is there something dodgy going on? What information are we not getting here?” They asked these questions “not because we are conspiracy theorists. This is our profession,” Ms. Lentzos, 44, says in a video interview from her home in Switzerland. As the coronavirus and alarm about it spread, nonexperts started asking similar questions—only to be mocked or silenced by journalists, social-media companies and prominent scientists. By spring 2020, top Republicans—including Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Trump—were arguing that the pandemic could have started at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had conducted experiments on coronaviruses. “For me, the lab leak was always on the table,” Ms. Lentzos says. “For a lot of us in the biological weapons, security world.” But in February 2020, a group of scientists had published a statement in the Lancet calling out “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The New York Times and Washington Post dutifully attacked Mr. Cotton as unhinged. Media, with an assist from some virologists, dismissed the lab-leak theory as “debunked.” Ms. Lentzos, who places her own politics on the Swiss “center left,” thought that conclusion premature and said so publicly. In May 2020, she published an in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists weighing whether “safety lapses in the course of basic scientific research” caused the pandemic. While acknowledging there was, “as of yet, little concrete evidence,” she noted “several indications that collectively suggest this is a serious possibility that needs following up by the international community.” She was suggesting an accident, not a deliberate release: “If you’re culturing a virus that is readily able to infect humans, particularly via the respiratory tract, then any droplet caused by a simple splash or aerosolization of liquid can be inhaled without you realizing it,” she wrote. “Could an unknowingly infected researcher showing no symptoms unwittingly have infected family, friends, and anyone else he or she was in contact with? Or was there perhaps an unnoticed leak of a coronavirus from the lab, from improperly incinerated waste material or animal carcasses that found their way to rubbish bins that rats or cats could have accessed?” She was confident in her argument but “a bit wary about writing it” given that it challenged the enforced consensus. “It was really sticking my neck out, because no one else was saying it at the time, even a lot of people who know better. Everyone was just going with the narrative: ‘Yeah, no, it’s natural,’ and there’s no discussion.” The article barely made a ripple. “If you look at the argumentation that’s used today, it’s exactly the same basically as what I laid out, which was, accidents happen,” she says. “We know that they’re having questions around safety. We know they were doing this field work. We see videos where they’re in breach of standard biosafety protocol. We know China is manipulating the narrative, closing down information sources—all of that stuff. All of that is in there. But it didn’t get much traction.” That began to change early this year. Media outlets published articles considering the possibility of a lab leak. At least five of the Lancet signers have distanced themselves from the letter. Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization’s Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus said the theory merits further study. President Biden ordered the intelligence community to investigate the question. Even Facebook reversed its ban. It’s no coincidence that the debate shifted after Mr. Trump was voted out of office. Ms. Lentzos faults him for “meddling” in the debate. In April 2020 he suggested that the virus came from a Chinese lab but didn’t provide evidence. “Then very quickly, it became very politicized, that question.” American liberals—including many scientists—conflated open-mindedness about the question with support for Mr. Trump. Ms. Lentzos was one of the few who could separate their distaste for him from their analysis of the pandemic. Another problem was confusion about the terms of debate. Many failed to distinguish between an accident and a weapon. The notion that China had created the virus with the intention to kill “was a possibility, and it was fairly soon disregarded,” Ms. Lentzos says. “The idea that it could be an accidental lab leak wasn’t really part of the narrative.” The most significant problem came from the scientific community. “Some of the scientists in this area very quickly closed ranks,” she says, and partisanship wasn’t their only motive: “Like most things in life, there are power plays. There are agendas that are part of the scientific community. Just like any other community, there are strong vested interests. There were people that did not talk about this, because they feared for their careers. They feared for their grants.” Ms. Lentzos counsels against idealizing scientists and in favor of “seeing science and scientific activity, and how the community works, not as this inner sacred sanctum that’s devoid of any conflicts of interests, or agendas, or any of that stuff, but seeing it as also a social activity, where there are good players and bad players.” Take Peter Daszak, the zoologist who organized the Lancet letter condemning lab-leak “conspiracy theories.” He had directed millions of dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through his nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance. A lab mistake that killed millions would be bad for his reputation. Other researchers have taken part in gain-of-function research, which can make viruses deadlier or easier to transmit. Who would permit, much less fund, such research if it proved so catastrophic? Yet researchers like Marion Koopmans, who oversees an institution that has conducted gain-of-function research, had an outsize voice in media. Both she and Mr. Daszak served on the World Health Organization’s origin investigation team. A scientific consensus isn’t always true, and peer review can look like peer pressure. “How do we know what we know? Well, the way we know in science is you provide references to everything, all the claims that you make, and you can trace it back,” Ms. Lentzos says. The lab-leak theory began to be treated “like an attack on science, the sciences. And so the scientists were like, ‘Well, I trust other scientists,’ without actually doing the groundwork.” Few nonscientists, including journalists and social-media executives, even have the capacity to do the groundwork. “For many,” she says, “it was a shortcut. ‘Yeah, scientists are saying this and we also believe in those scientists.’ ” Ms. Lentzos wasn’t alone in raising the lab-leak theory before it became widely respectable. This newspaper, for instance, ran an op-ed about it by Mr. Cotton the week before her article appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She acknowledges the point: “The open letters, all of The Wall Street Journal contributions in this area; also the Washington Post has done a fair bit on this. The New York Times has been totally silent. But there’s been a lot of ground preparation for people.” The problem is, it matters who speaks. “Your institution, the fact that you have a doctorate, or the fact that you have previously gotten all of these grants make what you say weightier than what somebody else, even though they’re saying the same thing—even though they use the same evidence.” Ms. Lentzos has a doctorate in sociology and is an associate professor at King’s College London. As an example, she compares a letter signed by several biologists and immunologists and published May 14 in Science with another, published earlier in the year, by a less specialized collection of experts known as “the Paris group.” The latter received “a lot of media attention and stuff, but scientists didn’t take that as seriously because it wasn’t the right voices saying it in the right outlets, even though there were many scientists in the group, and a much more diverse group, including biosafety experts like myself.” The difference in reception was striking, because both letters “said exactly the same thing.” Ms. Lentzos says it’s possible Covid-19 originated in the wild, but “as time goes on, there has been more and more circumstantial evidence for the lab-leak theory that’s come out, and less and less from the natural-spillover theory.” With evidence mostly circumstantial, and the Chinese Communist Party stonewalling, can we ever know? “In a perfect world, it would be open; we’d have a serious forensic investigation,” she says. “Evidence has been deliberately taken away, or erased, but even time would have just done that anyway.” She says that regardless of Covid’s origin, lab safety is crucial for preventing a future pandemic. “There needs to be a body, an international body that has a mandate to track and keep oversight of these kinds of facilities,” she says. “You’ve got to ingrain more of a safety and security culture in people and the labs.” Are international institutions capable of the task? Ms. Lentzos has experience working with United Nations agencies, including the World Health Organization. “It was incredibly exciting to finally go in. And then you become more disillusioned when you see how things operate, how things don’t operate,” she says. “Like any large organization, they are slow, and inflexible, and bureaucratic.” But, she asks rhetorically, “What is the alternative?” Last month she co-published a study on global lab safety, along with an interactive map that tracks biosafety level 4 laboratories such as the one in Wuhan. These labs work with the most dangerous pathogens, but “there’s no international body that has a mandate to track where they are, and to have any oversight over them. There’s no official list of how many of these labs there are in the world, or where they are.” The new project tracks each lab’s “levels of transparency, or training, or membership in various biosafety associations,” to assess its potential threat. A more daunting task is reining in a rogue Beijing. “It’s more about the political narrative that you’re able to tell,” says Ms. Lentzos. The Communist Party has adopted a triumphant narrative about Covid-19—that despite early stumbles, it controlled the virus and let in international investigators. That’s technically true, Ms. Lentzos says, but misleading, since the investigators were provided with little useful information. “This is where China’s foreign policy of the Belt and Road Initiative, of vaccine diplomacy, comes in,” she says. Aid from China comes with the implicit condition that the recipient won’t criticize Beijing in venues like the U.N. General Assembly or World Health Assembly. Ms. Lentzos urges the U.S. and other nations to build a broad coalition—beyond Europe and the English-speaking world—to demand a real forensic investigation. Beijing may not yield, but “you force China to say, ‘No, we’re not going to let you do that,’ ” she says. “Then they’re on the back foot.” She concedes it’s unlikely “we’ll get anywhere on the origins. We’re not going to find the smoking gun. But I do think we have power to change that narrative.” Mr. O’Neal is a European-based editorial page writer for the Journal.
七国集团峰会联合公报就溯源调查的声明： Strengthening transparency and accountability, including reiterating our commitment to the full implementation of, and improved compliance with, the International Health Regulations 2005. This includes investigating, reporting and responding to outbreaks of unknown origin. We also call for a timely, transparent, expert-led, and science- based WHO-convened Phase 2 COVID-19 Origins study including, as recommended by the experts’ report, in China.
这个本身我觉得比GoF研究和强迫打实验性疫苗都吓人的多
喜欢一言堂的话 还来美国干嘛呢 强国多好
腐败透顶了
顶着科学家的帽子坑蒙拐骗…… well
你说probable 和 possible吗？Plausible 意思是，听起来有道理、服人、可信，跟“可能性”只有一点点关系
还有“deep state”，就因为是Trump要做的事，必然反对使绊子 党同伐异，毫无是非原则
也许，明确的外部敌人可以把这个割裂的社会拢回来
我居然不知道alina chan和baric一起和国防部门打了一通三小时的电话
国务院里的刀光剑影，激烈交锋对决
http://downloads.vanityfair.com/lab-leak-theory/1821COVIDemail.pdf
http://downloads.vanityfair.com/lab-leak-theory/Response_to_Former_Asst_Sec_Ford.pdf
所以 所谓check and balance都没有了？
恰恰相反，AVC不畏上级（助理国务卿）捣乱，据理力争 而且Vanity Fair能够把这些材料原封不动呈现出来 说明制衡在相当程度上还是存在着的
🦄🦄🦄
英语教师（本人不是）的典型回答如下:
Plausible v.s. Possible
The word "possible" doesn't really imply "truth" or "certainty" at all. It gives a stronger sense of doubt and skepticism than that. However, "plausible" doesn't imply that doubt.
For example...
It's possible that you are correct = I don't know if you are correct, but you might be.
It's plausible that you are correct = It's reasonable to think that you are correct, so you probably are.
这是同一个branch 政府内部的争论，与check and balance 无关。
你 google 到的 Internet 上这个例子，”It’s plausible that you are correct” 很少这么用，很别扭。Plausible 是说 一个 statement 或 argument 听起来合理、可信、服人。它跟 applaud ”鼓掌” 同源，来自拉丁词 plausibilis，“值得鼓掌”。
可以说 a plausible explanation / story / denial / post / excuse / reasons, the plausibility of the theory... 如果它们 believable 或 sounds credible or reasonable。
It’s plausible that... 接一个可信的statement
It’s plausible to assume...
不用谢
几个疮轮刚倒地打滚，煞有介事大肆炒作总统选举作弊， 现在又上蹿下跳阴谋论。翻翻你们4个月前自己打脸的贴吧。
回错，抱歉。
我是说一个典型的解释，你不信无所谓，Lawrence 实验室文章作者信就可以了。
很多像我这样强烈反川的也出来站调查病毒实验室起源说了啊，就是为了追求事实真相。浑水摸鱼的两边都有。
vanity fair这片万字长文里面无数事实证据，你一张口就是人家没有credit八卦杂志，走的跟当年川粉一个路子。半斤八两，都是一路货。
是啊 我不要太反川哦 但是fauci的问题一点不小
这事和川普就没啥关系。无论川普说啥，该调查事实真相就要调查事实真相。这么大的事情，如果是人为的一定要查清楚。这事你也能和支持不支持trump联系起来，说明你脑子不健康，该看看医生了 。
New York Times, Wall Street Journal这些所谓主流媒体，也都发了同样口径的文章，不仅仅是Vanity Fair
是的 言论压制在慢慢被打开
迄今为止，你和bluecrab之流为这个话题贡献了什么建设性的东西？
像你们这样的喷子和走狗，本可以屏蔽以图耳根清净。不过，看到这么多明眼的兄弟姐妹打你们的脸，我有一种莫名的快感。不知道你们的主子们知不知道豢养了这么一群蠢且无用的东西！
可惜的是，浪费了版面。
我非常希望他们能提供科学论据支持自然发生说或投毒论或天降论，不要捣乱讨论版面。
不过并无新瓜
新冠的那个Furin Cleavage Site 有人说是MHC1的binding site的一部分 所以才会出现在moderna的专利里面
猜想是有人想搞疫苗 所以加了个MHC1的binding site 结果歪打正着把传染力增强了 （不巧的是致病力也强了）
你能否解释一下对立方面的科学论据概括，起码我们可以看到一些思路。这里的反对派看来都是不学无术，只有政治喧闹。
想想也很可怜 写的那么好的不让发好杂志
只能发时装杂志
不过经历此事 我对各类报章又增进了认知
我们耐心等等 像主楼那样的好文会越来越多的
我当不了alina chan 不够中立 哈哈
哈哈哈，建议出书《说话的艺术》
Social Media About Face: Facebook Won’t Remove Claims Covid Was Man-Made https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2021/05/28/social-media-about-face-facebook-wont-remove-claims-covid-was-man-made
他们叫的越凶，就表明你的贴越戳中要害啊，应该感到高兴。
你可以写论文 自然发生论，先预帖在此，供外行人学习。
finally
这里是啥
U.S. Gets Crucial EU Support for New Study Into Covid’s Origins By Alberto Nardelli and Josh Wingrove June 8, 2021, 11:13 AM PDT
Draft statement says study should be free from interference U.S. has previously called for more transparency from China
The U.S. and the European Union are set to back a renewed push into investigating the origins of Covid-19 after conflicting assessments about where the outbreak started, according to a document seen by Bloomberg News.
In a draft statement the countries hope to adopt at a summit later this month, they “call for progress on a transparent, evidence-based, and expert-led WHO-convened phase 2 study on the origins of COVID-19, that is free from interference.”
The U.S. is among several countries that have called on China to be more transparent with its data and allow greater access, amid ongoing questions over whether the outbreak was caused by a laboratory accident, was transmitted from wildlife or caused by something else. A new investigation risks fueling tensions with China, which has rejected suggestions of a lab leak and rebuffed international efforts to further probe the virus’s origins.
A World Health Organization report earlier this year said the most likely origin was natural, but it’s also called for further studies.
A person familiar with discussions, which have taken place between European diplomats preparing the meeting, said that the U.S. had asked the bloc for support on a study into Covid’s origins.
Where Are We in Hunting for the Coronavirus’sOrigin?: QuickTake The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The statement is a draft and could change before the U.S. and European leaders meet in Brussels on June 15. The document also says the U.S. and EU “commit to working together toward the development and use of a swift and independent means for investigating such outbreaks in the future.”
U.S. President Joe Biden issued a surprise statement late last month, revealing that his intelligence community remained divided on the origins of the pandemic -- giving new life to theories that it escaped from a lab.
Biden said that two “elements” of the intelligence community, which he didn’t identify, leaned toward a natural origin for the virus, while another leaned toward the Wuhan lab, a global hub for coronavirus research. Each side had “low to moderate confidence.”
Global Tensions Biden wants intelligence agencies to report back in 90 days, setting up the prospect of the issue flaring up again ahead of the Group of 20 summit where Biden could potentially meet Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The EU would also risk angering China by giving its backing to the study. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian has dismissed Biden’s move as an attempt to engage in “stigmatization, political manipulation and blame-shifting.”
Elsewhere in the statement, the U.S. and the EU will commit to continuing to support the Covax facility to boost vaccinations in developing countries, and will “encourage more donors to make 2 billion vaccine doses available worldwide by late 2021.”
Funding and distributing vaccines to developing countries will be a key agenda item when G-7 leaders meet in Cornwall, England, this week. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he wants the group to commit to inoculating the entire world by the end of next year
The EU and the US will also pledge to work together on their “similar multi-faceted approaches to China, which include elements of cooperation, competition, and systemic rivalry.” The draft sets out a list of shared concerns about Beijing, including: Human rights violations in Xinjiang and Tibet The erosion of democratic processes in Hong Kong Economic coercion Disinformation campaigns Regional security issues And the situation in the East China Sea and South China Sea
不可告人的东西…😬
基本赞同这个过程 但是11月份重病的几个武毒所研究员的情况从时间线上要有一个解释
继续把脑袋埋在沙子里吧
The COVID lab-leak hypothesis: what scientists do and don’t know Nature examines arguments that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab in China, and the science behind them.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3
不说别的，柳叶刀起码不应该登出Dazak 组织的非学术的政治声明，极大损害了自己的信誉。
属实。 但是Baric 已然回头是岸，弃暗投明，Fauci-Daszak阴谋集团肯定是时日不多了
反动学术权威应该被批倒批臭
现在都在猜那封信是baric还是andersen作为影子写手写的
我差点以为他是
可是又有人说这一切（哪怕alina chan作为中立派引导大家的对话方向）都是baric和welcome trust在背后指使的
情况很扑朔迷离
然后一堆科学爱好者在cat fight 😺
科学爱好者这个称呼不是很确切， 生物科学本来门槛就不高， 很多其他行业的科学家知识spillover过来，参与水平不低的。
Nature这文还是在洗白，故意设不存在的靶子。比如故意说从矿洞里搜集Sars-CoV-2, 现在的lab leak假说基本都是认为搜集的是病毒前身，后来在实验室里进化/改造的。另外完全没有提在发现病毒的早期病毒没有进化的历史，和(当时的)近期跳到人体的scenario 不符。又说没有WIV隐瞒秘密研究的证据，只字不提RaTG13早就被研究过，还发表了部分序列，去年换了个名字说是新发现的病毒，被人挖出来是旧病毒后闭口不言为什么改名。还撒谎什么时间为什么把病毒database下线。
DRASTIC很多参与者都是有生物背景，只是不做病毒，对克隆，突变，进化这些概念/技术不陌生，却没有做病毒那些人脑子里的条条框框和利益冲突(做病毒的不能做GOF research 就很难发有high impact的文章了吧!) 。事实证明，他们挖出来的料说服了小浣熊这样的专业人士，也说服了发science公开信的业界大佬。
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“Then when you get a sequence of a virus, and it looks like a relative of a known nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS. We found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So we sequenced the spike protein: the protein that attaches to cells. Then we…
Well I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work. You create pseudo particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells. At each step of this you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people…
“You end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers,
什么话题对你们这种货色重要？这个帖子里，有真正在探讨源头的，但大家都清楚，这个论坛里，有多少打着科学和正义名义搞政治猎巫运动的，今天对亚裔和中国的仇恨，有多少是这些人盼望的。连华人论坛上的言论摘抄给余茂春都知道，呵呵，挺好的解释了去年有多少和你相同观点的ID大批出现成千上万贴然后消失？科学研究值得尊重，但被尊重和一己之私的政治诉求去有目的的进行选择性科学八卦研究的人无关，和内心的扭曲心理听到风就说是雨的某些恨国党更无关。
嗯 无贬义 我自己也是哈
在这个主题议论中，你发了6篇，没有一篇与主题有关系，说你胡搅蛮缠，捣乱版面并不为过。
这是大家轻松的八卦网站，哪些人带着政治目的“一本正经”地搞“科研八卦”，大家都很清楚，然后还要收集这个网站的“证据”给余茂春，这话你说的吧，你咋不说说你是如何参与这个链条的？我不是专家，不装逼就是捣乱？要是专业的就去发paper，少跑来论坛里装专家。
As Chinese authorities struggled to contain the outbreak, she recalls, the expert circle asked questions about the pathogen’s origin: “Is this security related? Is it military? Is there something dodgy going on? What information are we not getting here?” They asked these questions “not because we are conspiracy theorists. This is our profession,” Ms. Lentzos, 44, says in a video interview from her home in Switzerland. As the coronavirus and alarm about it spread, nonexperts started asking similar questions—only to be mocked or silenced by journalists, social-media companies and prominent scientists.
By spring 2020, top Republicans—including Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Trump—were arguing that the pandemic could have started at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had conducted experiments on coronaviruses. “For me, the lab leak was always on the table,” Ms. Lentzos says. “For a lot of us in the biological weapons, security world.” But in February 2020, a group of scientists had published a statement in the Lancet calling out “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The New York Times and Washington Post dutifully attacked Mr. Cotton as unhinged. Media, with an assist from some virologists, dismissed the lab-leak theory as “debunked.”
Ms. Lentzos, who places her own politics on the Swiss “center left,” thought that conclusion premature and said so publicly. In May 2020, she published an in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists weighing whether “safety lapses in the course of basic scientific research” caused the pandemic. While acknowledging there was, “as of yet, little concrete evidence,” she noted “several indications that collectively suggest this is a serious possibility that needs following up by the international community.”
She was suggesting an accident, not a deliberate release: “If you’re culturing a virus that is readily able to infect humans, particularly via the respiratory tract, then any droplet caused by a simple splash or aerosolization of liquid can be inhaled without you realizing it,” she wrote. “Could an unknowingly infected researcher showing no symptoms unwittingly have infected family, friends, and anyone else he or she was in contact with? Or was there perhaps an unnoticed leak of a coronavirus from the lab, from improperly incinerated waste material or animal carcasses that found their way to rubbish bins that rats or cats could have accessed?”
She was confident in her argument but “a bit wary about writing it” given that it challenged the enforced consensus. “It was really sticking my neck out, because no one else was saying it at the time, even a lot of people who know better. Everyone was just going with the narrative: ‘Yeah, no, it’s natural,’ and there’s no discussion.”
The article barely made a ripple. “If you look at the argumentation that’s used today, it’s exactly the same basically as what I laid out, which was, accidents happen,” she says. “We know that they’re having questions around safety. We know they were doing this field work. We see videos where they’re in breach of standard biosafety protocol. We know China is manipulating the narrative, closing down information sources—all of that stuff. All of that is in there. But it didn’t get much traction.”
That began to change early this year. Media outlets published articles considering the possibility of a lab leak. At least five of the Lancet signers have distanced themselves from the letter. Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization’s Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus said the theory merits further study. President Biden ordered the intelligence community to investigate the question. Even Facebook reversed its ban.
It’s no coincidence that the debate shifted after Mr. Trump was voted out of office. Ms. Lentzos faults him for “meddling” in the debate. In April 2020 he suggested that the virus came from a Chinese lab but didn’t provide evidence. “Then very quickly, it became very politicized, that question.” American liberals—including many scientists—conflated open-mindedness about the question with support for Mr. Trump. Ms. Lentzos was one of the few who could separate their distaste for him from their analysis of the pandemic.
Another problem was confusion about the terms of debate. Many failed to distinguish between an accident and a weapon. The notion that China had created the virus with the intention to kill “was a possibility, and it was fairly soon disregarded,” Ms. Lentzos says. “The idea that it could be an accidental lab leak wasn’t really part of the narrative.”
The most significant problem came from the scientific community. “Some of the scientists in this area very quickly closed ranks,” she says, and partisanship wasn’t their only motive: “Like most things in life, there are power plays. There are agendas that are part of the scientific community. Just like any other community, there are strong vested interests. There were people that did not talk about this, because they feared for their careers. They feared for their grants.”
Ms. Lentzos counsels against idealizing scientists and in favor of “seeing science and scientific activity, and how the community works, not as this inner sacred sanctum that’s devoid of any conflicts of interests, or agendas, or any of that stuff, but seeing it as also a social activity, where there are good players and bad players.”
Take Peter Daszak, the zoologist who organized the Lancet letter condemning lab-leak “conspiracy theories.” He had directed millions of dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through his nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance. A lab mistake that killed millions would be bad for his reputation. Other researchers have taken part in gain-of-function research, which can make viruses deadlier or easier to transmit. Who would permit, much less fund, such research if it proved so catastrophic? Yet researchers like Marion Koopmans, who oversees an institution that has conducted gain-of-function research, had an outsize voice in media. Both she and Mr. Daszak served on the World Health Organization’s origin investigation team.
A scientific consensus isn’t always true, and peer review can look like peer pressure. “How do we know what we know? Well, the way we know in science is you provide references to everything, all the claims that you make, and you can trace it back,” Ms. Lentzos says. The lab-leak theory began to be treated “like an attack on science, the sciences. And so the scientists were like, ‘Well, I trust other scientists,’ without actually doing the groundwork.” Few nonscientists, including journalists and social-media executives, even have the capacity to do the groundwork. “For many,” she says, “it was a shortcut. ‘Yeah, scientists are saying this and we also believe in those scientists.’ ”
Ms. Lentzos wasn’t alone in raising the lab-leak theory before it became widely respectable. This newspaper, for instance, ran an op-ed about it by Mr. Cotton the week before her article appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She acknowledges the point: “The open letters, all of The Wall Street Journal contributions in this area; also the Washington Post has done a fair bit on this. The New York Times has been totally silent. But there’s been a lot of ground preparation for people.”
The problem is, it matters who speaks. “Your institution, the fact that you have a doctorate, or the fact that you have previously gotten all of these grants make what you say weightier than what somebody else, even though they’re saying the same thing—even though they use the same evidence.” Ms. Lentzos has a doctorate in sociology and is an associate professor at King’s College London.
As an example, she compares a letter signed by several biologists and immunologists and published May 14 in Science with another, published earlier in the year, by a less specialized collection of experts known as “the Paris group.” The latter received “a lot of media attention and stuff, but scientists didn’t take that as seriously because it wasn’t the right voices saying it in the right outlets, even though there were many scientists in the group, and a much more diverse group, including biosafety experts like myself.” The difference in reception was striking, because both letters “said exactly the same thing.”
Ms. Lentzos says it’s possible Covid-19 originated in the wild, but “as time goes on, there has been more and more circumstantial evidence for the lab-leak theory that’s come out, and less and less from the natural-spillover theory.” With evidence mostly circumstantial, and the Chinese Communist Party stonewalling, can we ever know? “In a perfect world, it would be open; we’d have a serious forensic investigation,” she says. “Evidence has been deliberately taken away, or erased, but even time would have just done that anyway.”
She says that regardless of Covid’s origin, lab safety is crucial for preventing a future pandemic. “There needs to be a body, an international body that has a mandate to track and keep oversight of these kinds of facilities,” she says. “You’ve got to ingrain more of a safety and security culture in people and the labs.”
Are international institutions capable of the task? Ms. Lentzos has experience working with United Nations agencies, including the World Health Organization. “It was incredibly exciting to finally go in. And then you become more disillusioned when you see how things operate, how things don’t operate,” she says. “Like any large organization, they are slow, and inflexible, and bureaucratic.” But, she asks rhetorically, “What is the alternative?”
Last month she co-published a study on global lab safety, along with an interactive map that tracks biosafety level 4 laboratories such as the one in Wuhan. These labs work with the most dangerous pathogens, but “there’s no international body that has a mandate to track where they are, and to have any oversight over them. There’s no official list of how many of these labs there are in the world, or where they are.” The new project tracks each lab’s “levels of transparency, or training, or membership in various biosafety associations,” to assess its potential threat.
A more daunting task is reining in a rogue Beijing. “It’s more about the political narrative that you’re able to tell,” says Ms. Lentzos. The Communist Party has adopted a triumphant narrative about Covid-19—that despite early stumbles, it controlled the virus and let in international investigators. That’s technically true, Ms. Lentzos says, but misleading, since the investigators were provided with little useful information.
“This is where China’s foreign policy of the Belt and Road Initiative, of vaccine diplomacy, comes in,” she says. Aid from China comes with the implicit condition that the recipient won’t criticize Beijing in venues like the U.N. General Assembly or World Health Assembly. Ms. Lentzos urges the U.S. and other nations to build a broad coalition—beyond Europe and the English-speaking world—to demand a real forensic investigation. Beijing may not yield, but “you force China to say, ‘No, we’re not going to let you do that,’ ” she says. “Then they’re on the back foot.”
She concedes it’s unlikely “we’ll get anywhere on the origins. We’re not going to find the smoking gun. But I do think we have power to change that narrative.”
Mr. O’Neal is a European-based editorial page writer for the Journal.
只要是认真探究起源的人，从世界的不同角落，从完全不同的角度，都不约而同地指向武毒所这个疫情前连中国人绝大多数都没有听说的单位。事实上，是中国自己军管武毒所，又宣布生物研究安全条例才把武毒所高调推到世界眼光之下。它们发现了这个错误之后才竭尽全力掩盖武毒所与疫情的任何联系，但是泼出去的水已经收不回来了，所做的一切都是欲盖弥彰。
本来这话题应该是100%科学家领域，现在却是，名利场时装杂志，花街读者来信，一群前疮粉阴谋论者在拼命spin
Strengthening transparency and accountability, including reiterating our commitment to the full implementation of, and improved compliance with, the International Health Regulations 2005. This includes investigating, reporting and responding to outbreaks of unknown origin. We also call for a timely, transparent, expert-led, and science- based WHO-convened Phase 2 COVID-19 Origins study including, as recommended by the experts’ report, in China.
如果像你说的是阴谋论炒冷饭，怎么解释现在七国集团联合公报也正式呼吁溯源，而且特别点名中国呢？
你猜错了。我既不是轮子也不是疮粉。纯粹是在了解到那封《柳叶刀》上的科学家联署信其实是Peter Daszak背后协调的之后，感到有点愤怒了。