The origins debate

I’ve mostly tried to avoid the Covid origins debate, but I listened to a very good Guruspod episode, where they covered this. It was an interview with Eddie Holmes, Kristian Andersen, and Michael Worobey, and was partly intended as a response to a Sam Harris podcast with Matt Ridley and Alina Chan.

I encourage you to listen, but they did highlight a couple of things that I thought were particularly interesting. For example, some argue that it’s too much of a coincidence that the Covid virus emerged in a city that has a lab that happens to study coronaviruses. They point out that, firstly, given the properties of the virus, it was almost certainly going to start spreading in a big city, and that Wuhan was certainly amongst the cities in which you might expect such an outbreach to start. Secondly, many of the major cities in which you might expect such an outbreach to start have labs that could, after the fact, seem to be coincidental.

The suggestion is that the most likely origin was a spillover to humans in the Huanan Seafood Market. In fact, the evidence indicates two separate spillover events involving two closely related variants. It could be that someone was infected in the lab and then spread the virus in the market. This, however, becomes less likely if it happened twice. This doesn’t preclude some kind of lab origin, but the overall evidence seems to point much more strongly to a zoonotic origin with the spillover occuring in this market.

However, what I found particularly interesting was the similarities with the climate debate. Those who dispute the mainstream view use emails taken out of context. Many of the scientists who become prominent are publicly attacked. There are claims that the scientific community somehow benefits from promoting a particular narrative. There are claims that dissenting views are silenced and that the mainstream scientific community are not willing to debate these alternative ideas. There are arguments that continually get repeated despite having been debunked time and time again. There are non-experts who suddenly think they know better than experts. In fact, some of these people are the same as in the climate debate (Matt Ridley, for example).

Even though I am a scientist, I certainly have no relevant expertise in this context. I’m having to rely on heuristics to try and get some sense of what is most likely. My general sense is that it’s now pretty clear that the virus could not have been engineered and that some other kind of lab leak is much less likely than the origin being transmission from animals to people in the seafood market. My heuristic is essentially that this seems to be the view of relevant experts and that they seem to present arguments that make sense, that acknowledge uncertainty, and that are well thought out.

My other heuristic is that some who appear to be on the other side of the debate have held similarly contrarian positions with regards to climate change. Past evidence would seem to indicate that they’re not particularly skilled at objectively assessing evidence, and are perfectly comfortable promoting views that most with relevant expertise would regard as obviously wrong.

This doesn’t mean that my current assessment is correct, but it currently seems more likely that the experts are right, than those who hold contrarian views and have been wrong before.