Skeptic Ginger
Nasty Woman
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2005
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I quoted from the interview. Those blatantly biased words were Quammen's, not an interpretation by someone else. That's why they are in quotes.Sorry I haven't gotten back to this sooner:
Really? That's not what I remember him saying.
Unfortunately the written version of the article is behind a paywall and I can't re-listen now. Maybe later.
I guess if "biased" means that he has an opinion on the matter, and presents facts and arguments to support that opinion, then you are correct.
Again, I seem to remember his saying the opposite. That lab leaks have occurred and therefore it is not an implausible possibility. (He was more dismissive about the idea that it was engineered to be a bioweapon.)
"Never once" said that he might be biased toward spillover hypothesis? I thought he suggested precisely that possibility.
Has anyone else listened? Because it seems like I heard something different from SG.
Here's an interview transcript with Quammen from Oct 2022. Keep in mind the guy wrote a book called "Spillover". It's unlikely he has a completely open mind about the COVID origin.
Unraveling the Causes of the Pandemic, and Preparing for the Next
David Quammen was one of the first science writers to report on the spillover of viruses from wildlife to humans. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, he talks about what scientists now know – and don’t know – about what caused the Covid-19 pandemic and why it matters.
BY NICOLA JONES • OCTOBER 19, 2022
I agree with this. But it's when "possibly" becomes "probably" that objectivity wanes.[Jones] ... Is there a final consensus?
David Quammen: There is a consensus among experts that it came almost certainly from a wild animal, most likely a horseshoe bat from somewhere in southern or Central China, and spilled over into humans, possibly by way of an intermediate animal.
And that's where Quammen goes next.
Nefarious? Not every lab accident scenario is nefarious. Nefarious is of course framing that sets up people who don't agree with a natural spillover origin as CTers.There are still people arguing what I call the “nefarious origins” school of thought, which encompasses the idea that it’s an intentionally engineered virus, or that it was a virus manipulated for scientific reasons in lab, or that it was a wild virus brought into the lab and cultured and that accidentally escaped. ...
No we don't know with that level of certainty. There are too many issues with the spillover origin in this case.... Do we know, absolutely, that this was not the result of a lab leak? I’d say we know with 98 or 99 percent probability
This part is easily demonstrated to be flawed, biased thinking:
Sure but the same can be said for evidence of SARS CoV2 anywhere in any animal species. Yes, one can speculate, there are all the bits and pieces of SARS CoV2 circulating in the wild. And the virus is known to sometimes replicate via recombinant events. But such a resulting recombinant virus has to go on to establish a replicating colony. Otherwise we'd see a gazillion different lineages of coronaviruses with none of them establishing a clade of any kind.[Quammen] And there is no evidence whatsoever that this virus existed in any viral lab that works on coronaviruses.
It seems this is Quammen's idea of what happened:
And yet no such circulating coronavirus precursor has been found. His suggestion is that somehow there were recombinant events going on willynilly in the market animals developing a SARS CoV2 that then spread to a human.Quammen: It does seem a remarkable coincidence. But it’s not, if you understand that viruses circulate from animal to animal all the time. If you put a whole lot of animals of different species together in a wet market — meaning live animals for sale as food stacked in wire cages on top of one another — it is just the ideal situation for the transmission of viruses from one animal to another and from animals into people. It most likely was not just one animal that was carrying a coronavirus like this. It was a virus that was being shared among animals, probably across species boundaries. And those various different animals were all coming in contact with humans. And that makes it seem very plausible that it would spill over twice.
There is no evidence of this whatsoever. None. Where is the evidence of any recombinant coronaviruses developing within market stalls or even in the wild animal farms some of the market animals came from?
You can find a number of recombinant events in colonies of horseshoe bats in one or two caves in Yunnan, China and in some caves in Laos. But these are not SARS-like CoVs in multiple species recombining all the time in the wild. Yes a single gene segment here and there might be involved in a cross species recombinant event. The majority of the events are within species.
Quammen goes on to describe how a single spillover event leads to a pandemic. It happens of course. But in this case there are plot holes, several of them. Mainly why can this precursor virus not be found? Yes, it only needed to happen once. But a lab accident only needed to happen once as well. So why is one scenario so much more likely than another?
If you've been immersed for decades of your life looking at spillovers, you see a spillover. If like me you've been immersed for decades of your life looking at occupational safety, lab safety, occupational infection hazards, and so on, you do not so easily dismiss a lab origin hypothesis. You look at the evidence for both scenarios.
It wasn't found circulating in humans outside of Wuhan before the Dec 2019 Wuhan cases.
You have Daszak saying on camera at almost the same time as the first cases began occurring in Wuhan that coronaviruses were easily manipulated in the lab and they were doing so to find a universal vaccine before a spillover event occurred. There was a grant proposal to the same effect in 2018 that while denied didn't mean it was the only source of funding for this project.
Did Quammen mention Daszak's interview or the grant proposal? I don't think so.
Here like others those excusing why the animal source of COVID has not been found Quammen conflates finding the natural reservoir with finding the intermediary source species:
So when people say, “Oh, if this had come from a wild animal, we would have found it by now,” they really just don’t know what they’re talking about.
The intermediary species SARS jumped from the market to humans was found within months and SARS was found circulating in civet cats in multiple market locations. Camels were suspected early on when MERS appeared in people. Here we have a virus, SARS CoV2, that readily infects other species yet no circulating SARS CoV2 can be found in any animal species including humans before the human outbreak in Wuhan. No closely related viruses have been found despite extensive searching.
Think about that for a minute. I call it the immaculate infection. SARS CoV2 began abruptly in humans in Wuhan China very close to the WIV which was doing intensive research on SARS-like (or related) CoVs. The research had the intended goal of developing a universal vaccine before a natural spillover of this dangerous virus occurred.
Quammen did note this:
No question of this evidence. But there is one big fat problem and that is the timeline. All of these cases he mentions occurred after the virus entered the human population in Wuhan. There were some tragic news accounts of people in China being rounded up and placed in isolation 'camps' or apartments. Meanwhile other Chinese security or military went into their homes and killed their pets. In one case a dog was beaten to death on the pet owner's security camera, the poor man watched his dog being beaten to death.Quammen: There’s a ton of evidence. It began early on, when some person who was sick with this virus had a Pomeranian dog and the dog tested positive. A German Shepherd in Hong Kong also tested positive. And then very quickly, a cat in Belgium; a cat in France; tigers at the Bronx Zoo in New York; snow leopards at a zoo in Louisville; gorillas at a zoo in San Diego. Mink all across Europe now seem to be infected with this virus. White-tailed deer in Iowa, in Pennsylvania, in Michigan are testing positive at high rates. There may soon be evidence that it has gotten into mice in the wild. We should not be surprised if we hear that.
So there has been a passage of this virus into all kinds of animals. And that means that it can also pass from them back into us.
Sorry, I digress because when I go over this stuff again I get upset.
Back to Quammen's spillover biases. Of course you didn't notice when you listened to the podcast. That's how biased narrative framing works.
This post is too long already. I'll see what else is in the 2022 transcript in a bit.