Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, cat shabbos and March 22, 2025. It’s also International Day of the Seal. Here’s a photo of a seal I took in March, 2022 in Antarctica. Because it has external ears, it’s not a “true” seal, but either a sea lion or fur seal. I’m guessing the latter, but readers can help.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 22 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Given that for several years the NYT pushed the “wet-market” theory for the origin of Covid and poo-pooed the lab-leak theory, this NYT piece by Zeynep Tufekci, “We were badly misled about the event that changed out lives,” should have been an article rather than an op-ed. At least they’re falling in line with the evidence, which increasingly points to the Hunan lab as the source of the virus. An extract:
Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.
So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission — it certainly seemed like consensus.
We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.
Among those people who tried to quash the lab-leak theory, using their authority rather than evidence, were Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, whose reputations have been besmirched. But wait! There’s more!
That’s a start. The C.I.A. recently updated its assessment of how the Covid pandemic began, judging a lab leak to be the likely origin, albeit with low confidence. The Department of Energy, which runs sophisticated labs, and the F.B.I. came to that conclusion in 2023. But there are certainly more questions for governments and researchers across the world to answer. Why did it take until now for the German public to learn that way back in 2020, their Federal Intelligence Service endorsed a lab leak origin with 80 to 95 percent probability? What else is still being kept from us about the pandemic that half a decade ago changed all of our lives?
To this day, there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market. The few papers cited for market origin were written by a small, overlapping group of authors, including those who didn’t tell the public how serious their doubts had been.
The article is not conclusive, and we may never know the answer. But the lesson, as Collins himself tried to make in his new book, is that we need open discussion. His very behavior during this controversy, though belies his advice.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has informed other Arab leaders that he is willing to temporarily relocate half a million residents from Gaza to northern Sinai in a designated city as part of the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, according to a Friday report.
According to the report in the Lebanese Al-Akhbar newspaper, Sissi made his willingness known during meetings held by Arab leaders in recent weeks in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. There was no confirmation of the report from any other source.
The Egyptian State Information Service denied the report, saying, “Egypt’s position is firm in its absolute and final rejection of any attempt to displace Palestinians, and the Cairo Arab Summit’s emergency plan for reconstruction is based on it.”
In public statements, Sissi and Jordan’s King Abdullah have repeatedly rebuffed US President Donald Trump’s assertion that the two Arab countries could take in Palestinian refugees on a permanent basis under his plan to empty the Gaza Strip of its residents and turn it into a “riviera.” The issue is of crucial significance for Jordan and Egypt, which fear that an influx of Palestinians will destabilize their countries.
Throughout the recent two-month ceasefire between Hamas and Israel — which collapsed this week — Arab leaders held several summits regarding Gaza and their vision for “the day after the war.”
At an Arab League summit in Cairo in early March, Egypt presented its plan for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip and emphasized that it would not include the displacement of residents.
The upside of this is that one-quarter of Gazans are removed from the war zone, so there will be less ancillary killing of civilians, and those people would presumably live better off than in Gaza. The downside is that it’s not at all certain, and if they return and Gaza is still run by Hamas, the enmity and fighting will continue. But at least it gives Gazans a choice of whether they want to stay. However, the more I ponder this the less I think it will come to fruition.
*As usual, I’ll steal a few stories from Nellie Bowles’s wonderful weekly news-and-snark summary at the Free Press, called this week: “TGIF: Passed Peak Intelligence.”
→ This WaPo Israel reporter literally supports Hamas: Legacy newspapers look so nice, so calm. Their design is so beautiful. The typeface, enchanting. Which is why it’s always so unsettling to read a story and then google the reporter. Honestly, try it. Any story.
For example, what about the Washington Post reporter bringing us our trusted, important news on the Israel-Hamas war? What has she posted on her personal time? Just normal stuff like this: “Call me a Nazi, call me a terrorist, call me backward, but still, fuck your illegal ‘state’ of #Israel.” The reporter, Heba Farouk Mahfouz, once posted that she will “always and forever” support Hamas. She called her critics “Zio-Nazis.”
It’s so hard to parse her politics—she’s playing it so close to the chest. She’s like a modern Walter Cronkite. Woodward, but more private. At this point, the better the design of the website, the less I trust the news I’m reading. I try to explain this to our new head of product, like, listen, Daniel, keep it crappy. I need half the links broken. I need five different fonts. I need it to make Drudge look like The Paris Review. He nods and says “totally” and then ignores me, which is why I know we’re on the edge of fake news. The homepage is a little too elegant. I’m trying to hold on, though: All new hires still have to pass my litmus test, where I casually say “chemtrails cause autism” and see if they blink.
In other notes, Brown University professor and Lebanese national Rasha Alawieh was deported by the Trump administration as part of their effort to eject terrorism supporters. In a panicked article, TheNew York Times explained that she was a “valid visa” holder and a kidney transplant specialist. It’s so messed up that she was randomly deported! Well. The Times didn’t think it was relevant to mention that Rasha Alawieh was a pretty big Hezbollah fan and had traveled to Beirut to go to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral. (Fine, they later covered it.)
The do-gooder lawyers who took Rasha’s case have since dropped her, stating it comes “as a result of further diligence,” a line I’m telling Suzy to use on men instead of ghosting them.
→ That’s beautiful:Axios this week blessed us with a magical Trump quote, from a story called “Trump Unplugged: What He Says Behind Closed Doors.” And what does he say?
The Diet Coke button. The Village People obsession. The tans. The pageantry. The pettiness. The Liberace aesthetic. It’s been said, but: Just as Bill Clinton was our first black president, Trump is truly our first gay one.
→ Dark new polls for the Dems despite all the opportunities: The Democratic Party’s popularity is hitting new lows. Only 27 percent of voters say they have a positive view of Dems, the lowest rating for Dems in NBC polling history, and only a brave 7 percent say they have a very positive view, according to an NBC News poll. CNN similarly reported a record low favorability rating for the Dems.
I love the 7 percent who think the Democrats are doing great. That’s the 7 percent of Americans who don’t read the news and live happy, good, peaceful lives. That’s the 7 percent of Americans who make lemongrass tea from their garden, and they go to an Episcopal church with rainbow stained glass windows, and they have zero grandchildren and three Subarus, but you know what? It’s a good life. They are the Mel Robbins people, shouting Let them! every time a Democrat dies on the hill of gender-affirming healthcare for illegal immigrants. The Democrats are committing slow-motion suicide and 7 percent of voters are all, That’s their truth, and I love them not despite it, but because of it.
Meanwhile, ol’ Trumpo enjoys a 48 percent approval rating this week. That’s despite making America’s debutantes (all my friends and me) aghast and alarmed by our collective portfolio performance. “It’s not fair!” we shriek. “You said he was the businessman president! Why is line going down? Line supposed to go up!”
*This tweet by Brian Soucek, Professor of Law at the University of California at Davis, notes that the entire University of California System will no longer be asking for diversity statements in hiring, explaining that they weren’t useful. But three years ago they were mandatory in the system. (My friends at some campuses have said that even when they were required, departments simply ignored them completely, so hiring was done purely on merit.)
The announcement acts as if some rogue departments within UC have been doing this on their own. But compare this 2022 report from the Office of the President, which the previous Provost presented to the Regents. DEI statements were mandatory at the majority of the ten campuses. pic.twitter.com/Nqyl0CJfbq
The University of California said on Wednesday that it would stop requiring the use of diversity statements in hiring, a practice praised by some who said it made campuses more inclusive but criticized by others who said it did the opposite.
Diversity statements typically ask job applicants to describe in a page or so how they would contribute to campus diversity. The move away from them, by one of the biggest higher education systems in the United States, comes as the Trump administration escalates an attack on higher education over diversity programming.
For a decade, the 10-campus system was a national leader in using such statements, as universities increasingly came under pressure from those who wanted more diverse student bodies and faculties.
“Our values and commitment to our mission have not changed,” Janet Reilly, the chair of the system’s Board of Regents, said in a statement late Wednesday. “We will continue to embrace and celebrate Californians from a variety of life experiences, backgrounds and points of view.”
Of course that last paragraph means that if departments did actually use DEI statements in hiring, they’ll find a way to keep diversity on the front burner, and by “diversity” they mean “racial diversity”, no matter what they say. If their “values and commitments” haven’t changed, then they’ll try to do what they did before.
*The NYT has an official review of the controversial Disney remake of the “Snow White” film. It’s a generally favorable though rather tepid review, and there’s one bit that stopped me in my tracks:
Disney’s new “Snow White” is perfectly adequate, though the scene when our heroine stands alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chanting “no justice, no peace” did admittedly give me pause.
WHAAAAT? Why is that in there? Anybody who says this movie isn’t woke is immediately refuted by that line alone. But otherwise the review is okay:
Yes, this live-action redo of its 1937 feature-length animated film has been called out as woke, but by the end, the overall damage from Snow White’s liberation struggle proves minimal. She still smiles and sings, whistles and works, rejects evil and rescues seven potential incels. Snow White no longer trills about a prince, true, but heteronormativity still has its happy ending. Huzzah!
The Snow White in the new movie isn’t coded as anything other than sweet and spunky. Like her predecessors, she comes with the usual princess prerequisites: a royal patrimony, a dead mother, a killer stepmom and a guy waiting, at times riding in from the wings on a white horse. As in the original film — the studio’s first full-length animated feature — this Snow White is born to a King and Queen who are expediently sidelined. The Evil Queen (as she’s called), who’s played by Gal Gadot with less animation than the typical cartoon royal, talks into a mirror and doesn’t like what she hears. She subsequently makes life miserable for Snow White, who remains spirited enough to sing while mopping.
Zegler has enough charm and lung power to hold the center of this busy, overproduced movie with its mix of memorable old and unmemorable new songs. Directed by Marc Webb and written by Erin Cressida Wilson, Snow White 2.0 dusts off Disney’s take on the Grimm fairy tale, modernizes it with girl empowerment and tosses in a bit of “Les Mis”-style storm-the-barricades uplift. Oddly, while the prince in the first film shows up only near the start and end, Zegler’s Snow White has to deal more forcefully with her insipid love interest, presumably to pad the story. He’s a smiler, Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), who’s been demoted to a commoner and leads a merry band of dancing-and-singing thieves.
But then there are those computer-generated dwarfs, who cost real dwarfs acting jobs:
it’s also true that Disney’s remakes often introduce new problems. That’s teeth-grindingly true here of the dwarf characters, whose bodies were created with a combination of performance capture, puppetry and computer generated imagery, using actors to voice them. The results are, er, grim. The delicate, flowing lines of the original’s animation style softened every edge to beautiful effect and made even potentially scary moments inviting for tots. The eerie photorealistic look in the redo, by contrast, emphasizes every craggy line and tumescently bulbous nose; weirdly, Grumpy (voiced by Martin Klebba) looks like a ragged, very angry Dermot Mulroney.
In an essay pegged to Disney’s unhappy 2019 live-action version of “Aladdin,” the critic Aisha Harris wrote in The New York Times that “shoehorned-in progressive messages only call more attention to the inherent crassness of Disney’s current exercise in money-grabbing nostalgia.” That was true then and it remains the case with “Snow White,” which is neither good enough to admire nor bad enough to joyfully skewer; its mediocrity is among its biggest bummers.
Well, I ain’t paying to go to no mediocre movie with computer-generated “little people” and especially with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is snapped through the window:
Hili: These pictures taken through the window are strange.
A: But they are funny.
In Polish:
Hili: Te zdjęcia przez szybę zawsze dziwnie wychodzą.
Ja: Ale są zabawne.
And a photo of baby Kulka. Notice4 that she has more white on her face than Szaron does:
*******************
From Facebook; LOOK AT THIS ADORABLE PALLAS’S CAT (Ocotolobus manul)!
From Masih. Two of the assassins that Iran sent to murder her in the U.S. have been convicted! It’s the headline in the New York Post:
Good morning everyone!
The day after two assassins sent to kill me by the Islamic Republic of Iran were convicted in US Federal Court.
Truly an American Dream…Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Thank you America! For being a Light to the World.
From Malgorzata, the eloquent Elica Le Bon (not Jewish) explains her pro-Israeli activism:
Many of us are very familiar with the amazing Chris Kenny of @SkyNewsAust. And most of us love the incredible @elicalebon who has been such an immense and inspiring voice throughout the last 17 months.
Beautiful shot captured yesterday by Curiosity in the canyon between Gould Mesa and Texoli Butte#Mars Mar. 18, 2025 (Sol 4484) 🧪🔭Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/fredk
Because sometimes you just need to watch a nudibranch floof around the seafloor for a whole minute 🥰Tritonia tetraquetra can grow to 22 centimeters (about eight inches) in length. The two horn-like structures on Tritonia's head are rhinophores that help locate the sea slug's prey—deep-sea corals.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. -Derek Bok, lawyer and educator (b. 22 Mar 1930)
EDUCATION, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
1911
Incredible photo on Mars! When I think about the gain in knowledge from the smudgy ghost images from our best Earth-bound telescopes when I was in high school in the 1960’s to the best Hubble Space Telescope images of around 22km/pixel in 1997 to this “being right there on the ground” photo, I am astounded at what the U.S. government investment in science and engineering has bought.
Amazing! It looks like the geology of the American southwest.
I remember sitting immobile in front of the TV in 1976, transfixed by the first Mars Viking photo filling the screen line by line (amazed that the signal originated from a probe successfully landed on a planet 75-140M miles away), occasionally hearing terse, no nonsense comments from “steely-eyed missilemen” types in response to “Flight”‘s inquiries. (Didn’t need today’s logorrheic and borderline histrionic PR types to keep me interested and focused.)
Yes. I agree. “Just the facts” are incredible and interesting enough.
It is truly astounding what we naked apes can do. I can spend hours going through Hubble or JWST or Mars rover photos; I marvel at the things we can see (and understand), millions of kms or light years from us.
I tell you, in this world of crumbling democracies, suicidal cultures, ruined colleges and universities, and bat-shit crazy leaders, sometimes it is so nice to escape for awhile by enjoying those astonishing galleries. It’s that or, in the words of Nellie Bowles, “I find that just closing my eyes and rocking back and forth works pretty well.”
What would be the motivation of Collins and Fauci in covering up Wuhan? To my non-biologist mind, that was a secondary issue, second to what can we do to avoid it or treat it? I would prefer Collins and Fauci to concentrate on prevention and treatment and let the CIA worry about how it started.
Collins and Fauci have an interest in defending the integrity of virology/biomedical research. This has always caused me to be suspicious of their certainty in this matter. Now we have intelligence agencies who have an interest in damaging the reputation of the CCP by claiming it was a lab leak. I don’t know who to believe. I just hope we don’t have to go through another pandemic anytime soon – but I expect we will.
Collins and Fauci had supported years of basic research which produced the scientific knowledge allowing for the rapid engineering, supported by a HUGE one-time infusion of funding by the Trump administration, of the mRNA vaccines and their testing, saving perhaps millions of lives and, often forgotten, allowing our schools and economy to reopen.
Perhaps were you lived, Jim, but in Sweden and many US states, nobody waited for the vaccines before reopening many K-12 schools, colleges, and businesses. What “allowed” schools to reopen was the will to reopen (or to never close) the schools.
And enough of this covid origins controversy mishigas. One theory, and the only real theory, is natural spillover as concluded in the peer-reviewed Worobey paper while the other, a lab leak, really a speculation, continues to be raised by loud voices referencing the same agencies that gave us WMDs. We in the general public have to evaluate and make decisions about what to believe. I trust the virologists, epidemiologists, and physicians on TWiV and their references as well as Dr Fauci, regardless of what kind of hit jobs are concocted about him.
Agree. Is here actually any new evidence presented for lab leak? It seems like every now and then a new article appears with no new evidence and it re-ignites debate.
and for people who want there to be a “China bad” angle — there is in the spillover. China was supposed to have closed all wet markets after SARS-1. They didn’t adn that is why they closed the Wuhan market before any testing could be done on the animals there.
My concern about the lab leak theory from the start was that it seemed to rest on clinical rather than biological evidence, comparable to believing that, since my cold symptoms started after I went to the grocery store, I must have contracted my cold at the grocery store. Maybe, but the incubation period is long enough for most rhinoviruses that it can be hard to pin down the source — and with Covid we don’t know who had exposure to a virus from the wet market that might have been experienced as a cold or flu rather than a novel disease. I also keep in mind a famous study by one of my old medical school mentors, who found that Chinese workers were reluctant to report illness or take off of work for sickness because their work group might not meet production goals, leading to a different kind of evaluation of illness than people in the West experience. No early cases of Covid in the wet market? We simply don’t know.
Otherwise I am willing to leave the technicalities of the biology to the virologists and geneticists, who seemed to find that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could simply not have emerged from the kind of work being conducted at the Wuhan lab, but it is possible that some have changed their mind — though I note that the NYT article focuses more on the security and safety issues than on the virology being conducted.
It’s worth pointing out that Paul Offit doesn’t think Covid was a lab leak.
Chancellor Angela Merkel had asked for the assessment, and then never said a word in public about it. Ditto Boris in the UK. MI6 gave him a report in March 2020 that said: “It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Not likely with “low confidence,” not even 80-95 percent, but “beyond reasonable doubt.” In his memoir, Johnson explains Covid thus: “Some scientists were clearly splicing bits of virus together like the witches in Macbeth — eye of bat and toe of frog — and oops, the frisky little critter jumped out of the test tube and started replicating all over the world.” And yet at the time, he said nothing about this in public at all.
Yeah, I read that. I wax and wane on Sullivan pieces. This one was, to my mind, pure bs.
It must be fun for the JPLers to get to name features on Mars. Gould Mesa is two miles up the canyon from JPL; I was just there yesterday. (Didn’t quite look like this one.)
To me, as a non-expect, the SARS-CoV-2 origin controversy resembles a crime story with two suspects—the lab and the market. Both seem suspicious to many people. Nefarious activities and motives have been attributed to both.
Beyond that, however, the actual physical evidence to date is consistent with a market origin. Among a huge number of DNA sequence samples taken after the market closed, two similar SARS-CoV-2 variants matching those from the earliest COVID-19 cases were found in the vicinity of the market known to house mammals with potential to carry the virus (specifically raccoon dogs), along with DNA from those animals. Further, the earliest human cases show a significant, non-random spatial association with the market.
To my knowledge, there is no actual physical evidence supporting a lab leak. There is only the aforementioned speculation, by various agencies, about nefarious activities and motives.
I agree the case can never be solved to the satisfaction of everyone. One can always come up with some alternative scenario to explain existing evidence. Or maybe more evidence will be found. However, the only existing evidence to date is most parsimoniously explained by a connection to the market.
I second Jim Batterson’s recommendation to follow This Week in Virology for anyone interested in viral pathogens.
Yes, TWiV and Paul Offit’s Beyond the Noise” substack which recently has also appeared in video form with Paul and Vincent. Lot’s of research and clinical expertise available for free…though as Jerry often says: if we regularly use these sources we should chip in a donation from time to time. Paul Offit also recommended by Frau Katze in #4 above.
Yep, and if you look at the TWiV link that I posted above, in addition to that video there are links below the video to eight further TWiV epitsodes with other scientists, all presenting evidence supporting natural origins. For some unknown reason, what surfaces here are what intelligence organizations think and summaries of that from news outlets. If you’re in the business of ferreting out plots & conspiracies, that’s usually what you’ll find. Science is perfectly capable of supporting that kind of thing, but in this case it doesn’t.
And FWIW, I donate to TWiV.
“If you’re in the business of ferreting out plots & conspiracies, that’s usually what you’ll find.”
That’s an excellent point, IMO.
I wish I could find it again, but back when we in the middle of the pandemic, I read a blog post by a geneticist who discussed the possibility of the lab leak. I’m not a biologist by any stretch, and his explanation was long and very detailed, but what stuck with me was his assertion that a virus created in a lab would leave obvious markers in the genetic material. And, he further asserted, those markers are not present in the COVID virus found in humans.
Of course, I don’t know if that’s true. But I trust that analysis more than that of folks whose livelihood is sniffing out spooks.
What strikes me about the two possible origins is that I’ve never heard of a laboratory-engineered virus escaping and causing disease, so considering Occam’s Razor, the wet market (natural) origin is likeliest. It’s the sort of thing that is common in movies but has it happened in real life? If not, why are we thinking it’s a good possibility now?
These are all good comments. I don’t think anyone disputes what Jim Batterson and Hempenstein write here. The existing evidence for choosing between wet market vs. lab leak points toward wet market.
But the evidence is weak and circumstantial (this is how Mike Worobey himself characterized that evidence in the 2022 Science paper). AFAIK no one has yet found the wild bat population that has a natural coronavirus infection that could be the source of those two SARS-CoV-2 lineages found in Wuhan in 2019. That would be strong evidence for wet market. Do other readers know?
There is a strong prior on lab leak because of the possibility that WIV and EcoHealth Alliance did exactly what they told NIH grant reviewers they would do: use their well known laboratory collection of many bat coronaviruses in gain-of-function experiments by serial passage through mammalian cell cultures or humanized lab mice to explore kinds of natural mutations (not any kind of nefarious genetic engineering) that would be selected in coronaviruses to increase their ability to infect human cells. We don’t know whether WIV did that because China refuses to cooperate with an investigation of that possibility. At least AFAIK, maybe other readers know more than I do.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory to suggest that this may be what happened. It’s just acknowledging that the strong prior exists for good reasons. The fact that RWNJs who really are conspiracy theorists also favoured lab leak for other bad reasons doesn’t affect the quality of the prior. Good evidence (unredacted records from WIV; finding the natural source bat population) could overwhelm that prior and its effect on my tentative conclusion that it was more likely a lab leak, but it seems that good evidence probably can’t be collected any longer.
On the continuing kookiness on the left:
This man, Robert Reich, a former official in the Clinton administration, runs a Substack. Yesterday he had a piece that hit every leftist point I disagree with: the poor transgender athletes (Lia Thomas), the horror of Trump rejecting DEI, but mostly how could Columbia cave in to Trump?
This guy is Jewish, too! Excerpt:
“Don’t fool yourself into thinking this is just about Trump wanting to protect Jewish students from expressions of antisemitism.
“It’s about the Trump regime wanting to impose all sorts of values on American higher education.
“This week, the Trump regime also targeted the University of Pennsylvania, threatening to cancel $175 million in federal funding, at least partly because the university allowed a transgender woman [Lia Thomas] to participate on a women’s swim team.
“What about the rights of that transgender woman to be free from harassment and intimidation?
“The Trump regime is also targeting diversity efforts at universities.”
The left is going to keep losing elections until they drop these excesses!!!
Robert Reich is a known trolley crazy, Frau K.
He wasn’t insane working for Clinton (as I remember anyway) but in later years he’s a very bonkers banana. Don’t take him seriously ever. If there were still a USSR he’d have defected there, and possibly been eaten. A tasty little morsel of madness (he’s about 4ft high).
D.A.
NYC
Thanks for the information.
He has a lot of followers, which doesn’t bode well. There was some pushback in the comments, with a few defending Zionism (!)
I’ll drop him.
PS His short statue is due to a hereditary condition, he explained.
I find the report about Egypt accepting Gazan refugees to be interesting, even though Egypt denies its veracity. True or not, it does seem that Arab countries are trying to find a solution. Trump’s “hell to pay” is partly responsible, as is Israel’s new offensive which, itself, was green-lighted by the Trump administration. I fear for the hostages, but they are the only leverage that Hamas has left.
I don’t think Sisi/Egypt will take ANY Palestinian (non) refugees*, let alone a large bunch. Go figure – Sisi might be telling an untruth.
HA! Next I’ll be telling you Trump isn’t always scrupulously honest!
“But David – WHY won’t they take their Arab brothers? After all, until 1967 ALL Gazans were Egyptian citizens! They still are.”
*for they are most assuredly NOT “refugees”. And until they started a war lately they didn’t live in “camps”. These are lies distributed by leftists whose education was paid for by Qatar.
The suppression of the lab-leak theory left me deeply disheartened—not just by how swiftly legitimate inquiry was stifled, but by the creeping realization that elements of the CIA, other intelligence agencies, and foreign operatives appear to be deeply embedded within our universities.
It raises uncomfortable questions. When Trump calls for “draining the swamp,” is it truly authoritarianism if that so-called swamp—the entrenched bureaucracy and intelligence apparatus—wields more influence than our elected leaders? Hasn’t the Democratic Party, for all its rhetoric about democracy, become a mouthpiece for unelected power brokers?
Perhaps this explains why dissent—whether about the lab-leak theory or any number of progressive orthodoxies—remains so perilous on campus. How many operatives are quietly working in newsrooms, universities, and think tanks? It’s hard to believe the number is small.
We spend so much time wringing our hands over Trump, branding him a dictator or oligarch, while it’s the political Left that censors debate, manufactures narratives, and weaponizes institutions against dissent. If we’re serious about defending democracy, we should be honest about where the real threats to it are coming from.
I also worry that even some of our most celebrated centrists—people I have admired—might be playing a role in this machinery. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but I’ve lost nearly all trust in our institutions. How can we claim any shared understanding of truth when journalists and professors are willing to lie to protect the interests of the state? That so many academics colluded to quash the lab-leak theory undermines trust in science itself—so much so that I can almost understand the calls to defund universities.
And yet, I don’t support Trump’s sweeping cuts to university research. It’s clear they don’t truly address antisemitism or ideological overreach on campus. Halting life-saving biomedical research in the name of fighting wokeness feels like burning down the village to save it.
So, what do we do? Call Trump a dictator for cutting institutions that are both corrupt and essential? Label him an oligarch for pulling funding from national media that long ago abandoned objectivity? I’m not sure anymore.
What I do know is that I no longer trust the scientific bodies that issue sweeping statements on “the science.” Too often, it’s not science at all—it’s narrative management.
Anything is possible and nothing is true. Book by Pomerantsev(?)
I think the best way forward to our present information reality is more discussion, like at WEIT. I don’t know who to trust but I don’t have to have an answer right now. Like the Quakers say, be open to continuing revelation.
What else can we do?
I meant this to tag roz’s comment. Not sure where it’ll end up.
Yes. Without wading into the covid thing specifically, what I think you’re troubled by is exactly what the lovely and articulate @elicalebon was talking about. She refers to it as “moral ambiguity”.
Thanks Malgorzata and PCC(E) for that post, by the way.
And a photo of baby Kulka. Notice4 that she has more white on her face than Szaron does:
I am confused. Should it be Hili instead of Szaron?
I believe so.
“But then there are those computer-generated dwarfs, who cost real dwarfs acting jobs”
So sad. So true.
Robert Reich comes to mind…
Not sure he’s taking woke Hollywood parts given his horribly large readership in the Palestinian “The Guardian.”
His unseriousness would be welcome in the movie though.
😉
D.A.
NYC
ps I probably shouldn’t pick on his height, his bad ideas are enough.
I was going to say, you’d better watch out… Filippo will get you for that sort of thing. He’s straightened me out more than once. I needed it!
Trump announced the existence of the F-47 fighter jet yesterday. The plane has definitely NOT been under development and flying for the last five years because those who speculated about it before this week could not provide firm evidence. The same applies for all programs and operations that are special access or reside in the black world. Until the people read-in to these programs go public, the programs do not exist. Well, they do, but not to you.
I have no vested interest in either the “natural origin” story or the “lab leak.” Whichever it was, I think the correct course of action is to ensure appropriate containment measures remain in place in relevant labs and to debate publicly whether the government should pursue gain-of-function research. But I am amused by those who say that lab leak proponents simply speculate and do not provide evidence. This is a rhetorical dodge. Tell me, please, other than circumstantial, what type of evidence would be forthcoming? If researchers had been manipulating a virus to make it more infectious for humans, if governments knowingly funded this research, if an accident allowed its escape and the consequent deaths of millions, tell me what evidence would be released by those who possess it. Tell me why you would trust what data they do selectively release—particularly if that data pointed a different direction and they dogmatically insisted at a very early stage that no other scenarios were possible.
If US intelligence agencies had communication intercepts demonstrating that Xi was aware of a lab leak, do you really believe US intel would compromise such high-level sources? If we had human resources on the ground in the Wuhan lab, do you think we would compromise them? For those of us outside a very small group who are read-in to such programs, any talk about a lab leak will remain speculation—even if it happened. But, please, do tell me how government black programs only exist in the minds of the conspiracy theorists.
I will add this. If it were a lab leak, I would at least have a better idea why our Establishment panicked and tossed decades of pandemic planning in the trash, opting for measures that were in many cases quite the opposite of what those plans recommended. Dr Fauci himself went from textbook calm and measured in early 2020 to something very different by late March—even though we already knew by then of the stark differences in age-stratified mortality and had grounds to believe that the reported case fatality rates were significantly higher than the likely infection fatality rates. “Scared shitless” about the implications of a leak at least has explanatory power. In a strange way, I would find that more comforting than accepting that groupthink, cowardice, politics, and incompetence drove much of our response—and our failure to reckon with that response.
Interesting take, Doug. Thanks.
Circumstances change individuals. It is easy to bash Fauci but who among us could imagine being at the center of such pressure – particularly with a hostile administration?
D.A.
NYC
Re accepting that cowardice, politics, and incompetence drove much of our CoViD response, isn’t it widely acknowledged that cowardice etc. drive most human society most of the time, good times and bad? Seriously.
(And I have come to the view that hypocrisy is often necessary, in diplomacy, politics, and many other social activities. Sad but true.)
The NYT reviewer’s ‘though the scene when our heroine stands alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chanting “no justice, no peace” did admittedly give me pause’ was a joke, surely?
RE lab leak. From yesterday’s Real Time with Bill Maher show (HBO). The guests were Andrew Sullivan and NYT journalist Ezra Klein (and, in a very funny “interview,” the comedian Dana Carvey, formerly of SNL). This is from the Overtime segment of the show. It’s on YouTube (for free). The following is from the YouTube-generated transcript (that’s why capitalization is not in order), slightly edited by me:
Maher: Andrew, what do you think of news that British intelligence knew Covid was a lab leak in 2020 and officially ignored their report?
Sullivan (0:23): not just knew, 80 to 95% certainty. same with the German intelligence service. March 2020. there’s a new book out called In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us [by Princeton University political scientists Stephen Macedo & Frances Lee, Princeton Univ Press, March 11, 2025]. I was reading it this last couple of weeks. And the core paper that killed off any idea that this was a lab leak in China, the proximal origin paper, which was produced with Fauci and Collins of the NIH [National Institutes of Health] and NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] helping it along, was a lie, a conscious lie. The people who looked at it – we now have their emails – are saying in the very first days of looking at the virus “this looks very man-made to us.” “this is so freaking obvious. this is man-made.” “freaking obvious” one of them said. and then they wrote the report saying there is no evidence that this was made in a lab. the question is why. why would they lie to us about that? and they did.
Maher: I can give you one answer. the New York Times said any questioning of this being from a lab was racist, which always struck me as odd, because it seems much more racist to go “wow, these people are eating bats.” I mean it’s just one example, but a good example, of why people lost faith in the left. because they do stupid things like that. not to be “and I told you so,” but from the very beginning I was saying this shouldn’t even be political. but it’s at least 50/50 that it came from the lab. And that in 50 years, I can imagine people going “wait, you mean in 2020 there was this thing that escaped from a lab in Wuhan, that started in Wuhan, and there was a lab in Wuhan that was studying it, and they didn’t think that was connected, and they blamed it on bats? Really?” it just doesn’t make any sense.
Sullivan (2:15): I don’t think the Democrats are at fault so much as the scientists who went along with this, knowing better. it’s their integrity I’m concerned about, to actually lie and distort what they could see with their own eyes, because they were afraid of politics. the other question is this: this lab was a gain-of-function lab. that means, they were creating viruses, dangerous viruses, to figure out how to how to protect you from them. this gain-of-function research was always dangerous. everyone knew it was dangerous. long time ago, you go back to 2015, you will find a big meeting in London, where they say there’s one lab in the world most likely to have a problem with this – Wuhan. do you know who was the biggest supporter of gain-of-function research for the last 30 years? Anthony Fauci. Anthony Fauci. now remember that name. there’s a reason he was given a pardon back to 2014. there is something very wrong going on here.
Maher: I also don’t think he did it for nefarious reasons. there’s an argument to be made, there’s an actual intellectual debate to be had: should gain-of-function research be done? we want to get ahead of viruses. the other response would be: it’s too dangerous, because if it gets out, it’s going to be bad. and that’s what happened. I don’t think he’s an evil guy like some people believe, who was trying to get rich off this. he just made the wrong call.
Sullivan: no. he knew from the get-go that the Wuhan lab had security levels that were the average of a dentist’s office. they should have been at the highest level imaginable. he knew that. not only that: the NIH and NIAID had helped fund it. so you don’t want to go down in history as the person who helped develop the virus that killed millions of people. you want to go down as the one who saved millions of people. that was at stake, a reputational matter.
You quote Nellie Bowles: Just as Bill Clinton was our first black president, Trump is truly our first gay one.
I think that is offensive, not amusing.
Amusingly offensive?
From Barry, “The laziest cat fight ever”:
They are playing patty cake. Not fighting. Okay, black and white has an aggressive side. But 98% patty cake. 2% b/w trying to goad other cat.
(wearily) This is astonishing and discouraging.
There is detailed and wide literature going back for many years on issues related to the ecology and human activity of Coronaviruses and their hosts.
The vast weight of evidence and argument points to the Huanan “Seafood” wet market in Wuhan as the epicenter of the spillover, probably via raccoon dogs from southern China. The virus likely was circulating in bats, with raccoon dogs (possibly other animals) as intermediate hosts to the market. The papers are easy to find, but do require some concentration to read and understand.
I had hoped to find here real curiosity and some respect for the science around zoonotic origins of infectious disease, inccluding SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.
It’s actually intellectually interesting. There is robust and important work regarding the ecology and evolution of viruses and their hosts. Why evolution is true, over & over again. Fascinating, deep science, learned, brilliant people.
There is not so much “suppression” of the lab leak notion as real, considered rejection. There certainly is valid disparagement!
About this issue, for example, Maher utterly wrong — and completely unqualified to comment.
This is not an issue for serious scholars or public intellectuals to build their “heterodox” reputation. It won’t wear well. Perhaps it was touted at the USC censorship meeting — but it’s contrarian to the realm beyond credibility. I see some comparisons to issues around HIV.
Something about viruses gets the cranks going. Maybe always has, maybe always will — I have studied these things. (e.g. I have a copy of Jakob Segal’s manuscript arguing for Ft. Detrick origin of HIV.)
I share your weariness. Here’s the entry-level summary from a recent issue of Nature, summarizing the evidence that raccoon dogs were the most likely means by which SARS-CoV-2 found its way into the Huanan market, with plenty of refs for deeper dives. Besides the presence of viral RNA in the market stalls where raccoon dogs were sold, the animals themselves have been shown capable of being infected by the virus, but without becoming sick, which otherwise might have kept them from reaching the market.
Far better to start here than listening to Maher and Sullivan, who just want attention and ratings.
Quite the coincidence then given that there are live animal markets all over China yet the one place where the virus leapt from animal to human just happened to be the one that had a low biosecurity lab nearby that was working to make bat coronaviruses infect human cells. Occam’s Razor would suggest that the most likely explanation was a lab leak, otherwise it was just an amazing coincidence. Which maybe it was. But I wouldn’t ascribe nefarious motives to Sullivan or Maher on this, as they were just expressing their opinions based on intelligence sources. And perhaps their faith in Occam’s famous Razor.
Rasha Alawieh was not deported, she was denied entry into the USA (apparently, based on what I read)
Alas, things aren’t going well for liberal democrats:
“1. Democracy in the World 2024:
* Level of democracy for the average world citizen is back to 1985; by country averages, it is back to 1996.
* Democracy is losing out the most in terms of economic power. It is at its lowest level in over 50 years.
* It is a truly global wave of autocratization. Eastern Europe and South and Central Asia are in particularly steep decline.
Autocracies and Democracies:
* The world has fewer democracies (N=88) than autocracies
(N=91) for the first time in over 20 years.
* Liberal democracies have become the least common regime type in the world, a total of 29 in 2024.
* Nearly 3 out of 4 persons in the world – 72% – now live in autocracies. This is the highest since 1978.
Alarming Loss of Freedom of Expression
* Losses in freedom of expression are alarming: Worsening in 44 countries by 2024, up from 35 in last year’s report.
* Clean elections declining in 25, freedom of association in 22, and rule of law in 18 countries.”
As for the USA, V-DEM director Staffan I. Lindberg said the following in an interview from April 2024:
“I am deeply concerned about the possibility of Donald Trump being reelected. I have expressed this concern on multiple occasions in various public settings. In the current context, I believe that if Donald Trump is reelected, democracy in the US might not survive. He has been explicit about his dictatorial intentions, even going as far as labeling Democrats as vermin, a term that evokes disturbing parallels with Nazi Germany from the late 1930s to 1945. Such statements must be taken seriously, as they could embolden autocrats worldwide. During his previous term, Trump demonstrated a willingness to cozy up to dictators in North Korea and Putin in Russia. They understand what they could expect from him. We can extrapolate the potential consequences for NATO collaboration, support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, and the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. In summary, it presents a bleak outlook not only for the United States but also for the world as a whole.”
“This Is Going Even Worse Than Steven Levitsky Expected:
In 2018, Harvard professor Steven Levitsky co-authored How Democracies Die, a hit book that explored the way strongmen leaders, including Donald Trump, can erode once-stable political systems. How Democracies Die resonated in the middle of Trump’s first term and made Levitsky a famous name among anxious liberals. Unfortunately, his work is even more relevant to American politics seven years later.…”
“China is very good at building dams,
the US is very good at enforcing PC,
which system will prevail in the 21st century”
Historically, the US was highly effective and China was not. In 1968, the US was in the final stages of the moon landing and China was being torn apart by the Cultural Revolution. What about now? China has 25,000+ miles of HSR, the US has 0.
China has the Gaokao and doesn’t apologize for it. In the US the ACT/SAT are denounced as “racist”.
Men in women’s sport, terrorist sympathizers, Venezuelan gangs, etc. are very strange choices of hills to die on
Nellie Bowles writes “Just as Bill Clinton was our first black president, Trump is truly our first gay one.”
Aw HELL no! We gays (LGB) don’t want him! Please don’t insult us, Nellie. You’re one of us.
I didn’t know there was a vetting process. I thought it was just what you were.
If you are going to be purging anyone from the club, I’d suggest you start with the trans-rights activists doing their damnedest to derail laws that protect children/adolescents from gender doctors and keep men out of women’s spaces.
I was partly joking, Leslie. Obviously my joke wasn’t very good.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. -Derek Bok, lawyer and educator (b. 22 Mar 1930)
EDUCATION, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil’s Dictionary
1911
Incredible photo on Mars! When I think about the gain in knowledge from the smudgy ghost images from our best Earth-bound telescopes when I was in high school in the 1960’s to the best Hubble Space Telescope images of around 22km/pixel in 1997 to this “being right there on the ground” photo, I am astounded at what the U.S. government investment in science and engineering has bought.
Amazing! It looks like the geology of the American southwest.
I remember sitting immobile in front of the TV in 1976, transfixed by the first Mars Viking photo filling the screen line by line (amazed that the signal originated from a probe successfully landed on a planet 75-140M miles away), occasionally hearing terse, no nonsense comments from “steely-eyed missilemen” types in response to “Flight”‘s inquiries. (Didn’t need today’s logorrheic and borderline histrionic PR types to keep me interested and focused.)
Yes. I agree. “Just the facts” are incredible and interesting enough.
It is truly astounding what we naked apes can do. I can spend hours going through Hubble or JWST or Mars rover photos; I marvel at the things we can see (and understand), millions of kms or light years from us.
I tell you, in this world of crumbling democracies, suicidal cultures, ruined colleges and universities, and bat-shit crazy leaders, sometimes it is so nice to escape for awhile by enjoying those astonishing galleries. It’s that or, in the words of Nellie Bowles, “I find that just closing my eyes and rocking back and forth works pretty well.”
What would be the motivation of Collins and Fauci in covering up Wuhan? To my non-biologist mind, that was a secondary issue, second to what can we do to avoid it or treat it? I would prefer Collins and Fauci to concentrate on prevention and treatment and let the CIA worry about how it started.
Collins and Fauci have an interest in defending the integrity of virology/biomedical research. This has always caused me to be suspicious of their certainty in this matter. Now we have intelligence agencies who have an interest in damaging the reputation of the CCP by claiming it was a lab leak. I don’t know who to believe. I just hope we don’t have to go through another pandemic anytime soon – but I expect we will.
Collins and Fauci had supported years of basic research which produced the scientific knowledge allowing for the rapid engineering, supported by a HUGE one-time infusion of funding by the Trump administration, of the mRNA vaccines and their testing, saving perhaps millions of lives and, often forgotten, allowing our schools and economy to reopen.
Perhaps were you lived, Jim, but in Sweden and many US states, nobody waited for the vaccines before reopening many K-12 schools, colleges, and businesses. What “allowed” schools to reopen was the will to reopen (or to never close) the schools.
And enough of this covid origins controversy mishigas. One theory, and the only real theory, is natural spillover as concluded in the peer-reviewed Worobey paper while the other, a lab leak, really a speculation, continues to be raised by loud voices referencing the same agencies that gave us WMDs. We in the general public have to evaluate and make decisions about what to believe. I trust the virologists, epidemiologists, and physicians on TWiV and their references as well as Dr Fauci, regardless of what kind of hit jobs are concocted about him.
Indeed. Here we go again. Here’s the discussion, among competent virologists>, not writers @ NYT etc.
Agree. Is here actually any new evidence presented for lab leak? It seems like every now and then a new article appears with no new evidence and it re-ignites debate.
and for people who want there to be a “China bad” angle — there is in the spillover. China was supposed to have closed all wet markets after SARS-1. They didn’t adn that is why they closed the Wuhan market before any testing could be done on the animals there.
My concern about the lab leak theory from the start was that it seemed to rest on clinical rather than biological evidence, comparable to believing that, since my cold symptoms started after I went to the grocery store, I must have contracted my cold at the grocery store. Maybe, but the incubation period is long enough for most rhinoviruses that it can be hard to pin down the source — and with Covid we don’t know who had exposure to a virus from the wet market that might have been experienced as a cold or flu rather than a novel disease. I also keep in mind a famous study by one of my old medical school mentors, who found that Chinese workers were reluctant to report illness or take off of work for sickness because their work group might not meet production goals, leading to a different kind of evaluation of illness than people in the West experience. No early cases of Covid in the wet market? We simply don’t know.
Otherwise I am willing to leave the technicalities of the biology to the virologists and geneticists, who seemed to find that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could simply not have emerged from the kind of work being conducted at the Wuhan lab, but it is possible that some have changed their mind — though I note that the NYT article focuses more on the security and safety issues than on the virology being conducted.
It’s worth pointing out that Paul Offit doesn’t think Covid was a lab leak.
https://pauloffit.substack.com/p/lab-leak-mania
Elica Le Bon was right on the money in her explanation of continuing left wing stupidity.
Oh I ADORE her. Erica is The Boss. Watch her when your algorithm offers her up.
She’s almost at Natasha Hausdorff level.
D.A.
NYC
They are both great. We need a lot more like them.
Andrew Sullivan on Fauci:
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/why-did-this-man-mislead-us-cba?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=qy63&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Chancellor Angela Merkel had asked for the assessment, and then never said a word in public about it. Ditto Boris in the UK. MI6 gave him a report in March 2020 that said: “It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Not likely with “low confidence,” not even 80-95 percent, but “beyond reasonable doubt.” In his memoir, Johnson explains Covid thus: “Some scientists were clearly splicing bits of virus together like the witches in Macbeth — eye of bat and toe of frog — and oops, the frisky little critter jumped out of the test tube and started replicating all over the world.” And yet at the time, he said nothing about this in public at all.
Yeah, I read that. I wax and wane on Sullivan pieces. This one was, to my mind, pure bs.
It must be fun for the JPLers to get to name features on Mars. Gould Mesa is two miles up the canyon from JPL; I was just there yesterday. (Didn’t quite look like this one.)
To me, as a non-expect, the SARS-CoV-2 origin controversy resembles a crime story with two suspects—the lab and the market. Both seem suspicious to many people. Nefarious activities and motives have been attributed to both.
Beyond that, however, the actual physical evidence to date is consistent with a market origin. Among a huge number of DNA sequence samples taken after the market closed, two similar SARS-CoV-2 variants matching those from the earliest COVID-19 cases were found in the vicinity of the market known to house mammals with potential to carry the virus (specifically raccoon dogs), along with DNA from those animals. Further, the earliest human cases show a significant, non-random spatial association with the market.
To my knowledge, there is no actual physical evidence supporting a lab leak. There is only the aforementioned speculation, by various agencies, about nefarious activities and motives.
I agree the case can never be solved to the satisfaction of everyone. One can always come up with some alternative scenario to explain existing evidence. Or maybe more evidence will be found. However, the only existing evidence to date is most parsimoniously explained by a connection to the market.
I second Jim Batterson’s recommendation to follow This Week in Virology for anyone interested in viral pathogens.
Yes, TWiV and Paul Offit’s Beyond the Noise” substack which recently has also appeared in video form with Paul and Vincent. Lot’s of research and clinical expertise available for free…though as Jerry often says: if we regularly use these sources we should chip in a donation from time to time. Paul Offit also recommended by Frau Katze in #4 above.
Yep, and if you look at the TWiV link that I posted above, in addition to that video there are links below the video to eight further TWiV epitsodes with other scientists, all presenting evidence supporting natural origins. For some unknown reason, what surfaces here are what intelligence organizations think and summaries of that from news outlets. If you’re in the business of ferreting out plots & conspiracies, that’s usually what you’ll find. Science is perfectly capable of supporting that kind of thing, but in this case it doesn’t.
And FWIW, I donate to TWiV.
“If you’re in the business of ferreting out plots & conspiracies, that’s usually what you’ll find.”
That’s an excellent point, IMO.
I wish I could find it again, but back when we in the middle of the pandemic, I read a blog post by a geneticist who discussed the possibility of the lab leak. I’m not a biologist by any stretch, and his explanation was long and very detailed, but what stuck with me was his assertion that a virus created in a lab would leave obvious markers in the genetic material. And, he further asserted, those markers are not present in the COVID virus found in humans.
Of course, I don’t know if that’s true. But I trust that analysis more than that of folks whose livelihood is sniffing out spooks.
What strikes me about the two possible origins is that I’ve never heard of a laboratory-engineered virus escaping and causing disease, so considering Occam’s Razor, the wet market (natural) origin is likeliest. It’s the sort of thing that is common in movies but has it happened in real life? If not, why are we thinking it’s a good possibility now?
These are all good comments. I don’t think anyone disputes what Jim Batterson and Hempenstein write here. The existing evidence for choosing between wet market vs. lab leak points toward wet market.
But the evidence is weak and circumstantial (this is how Mike Worobey himself characterized that evidence in the 2022 Science paper). AFAIK no one has yet found the wild bat population that has a natural coronavirus infection that could be the source of those two SARS-CoV-2 lineages found in Wuhan in 2019. That would be strong evidence for wet market. Do other readers know?
There is a strong prior on lab leak because of the possibility that WIV and EcoHealth Alliance did exactly what they told NIH grant reviewers they would do: use their well known laboratory collection of many bat coronaviruses in gain-of-function experiments by serial passage through mammalian cell cultures or humanized lab mice to explore kinds of natural mutations (not any kind of nefarious genetic engineering) that would be selected in coronaviruses to increase their ability to infect human cells. We don’t know whether WIV did that because China refuses to cooperate with an investigation of that possibility. At least AFAIK, maybe other readers know more than I do.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory to suggest that this may be what happened. It’s just acknowledging that the strong prior exists for good reasons. The fact that RWNJs who really are conspiracy theorists also favoured lab leak for other bad reasons doesn’t affect the quality of the prior. Good evidence (unredacted records from WIV; finding the natural source bat population) could overwhelm that prior and its effect on my tentative conclusion that it was more likely a lab leak, but it seems that good evidence probably can’t be collected any longer.
On the continuing kookiness on the left:
This man, Robert Reich, a former official in the Clinton administration, runs a Substack. Yesterday he had a piece that hit every leftist point I disagree with: the poor transgender athletes (Lia Thomas), the horror of Trump rejecting DEI, but mostly how could Columbia cave in to Trump?
This guy is Jewish, too! Excerpt:
“Don’t fool yourself into thinking this is just about Trump wanting to protect Jewish students from expressions of antisemitism.
“It’s about the Trump regime wanting to impose all sorts of values on American higher education.
“This week, the Trump regime also targeted the University of Pennsylvania, threatening to cancel $175 million in federal funding, at least partly because the university allowed a transgender woman [Lia Thomas] to participate on a women’s swim team.
“What about the rights of that transgender woman to be free from harassment and intimidation?
“The Trump regime is also targeting diversity efforts at universities.”
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-shame-of-columbia-university
The left is going to keep losing elections until they drop these excesses!!!
Robert Reich is a known trolley crazy, Frau K.
He wasn’t insane working for Clinton (as I remember anyway) but in later years he’s a very bonkers banana. Don’t take him seriously ever. If there were still a USSR he’d have defected there, and possibly been eaten. A tasty little morsel of madness (he’s about 4ft high).
D.A.
NYC
Thanks for the information.
He has a lot of followers, which doesn’t bode well. There was some pushback in the comments, with a few defending Zionism (!)
I’ll drop him.
PS His short statue is due to a hereditary condition, he explained.
I find the report about Egypt accepting Gazan refugees to be interesting, even though Egypt denies its veracity. True or not, it does seem that Arab countries are trying to find a solution. Trump’s “hell to pay” is partly responsible, as is Israel’s new offensive which, itself, was green-lighted by the Trump administration. I fear for the hostages, but they are the only leverage that Hamas has left.
I don’t think Sisi/Egypt will take ANY Palestinian (non) refugees*, let alone a large bunch. Go figure – Sisi might be telling an untruth.
HA! Next I’ll be telling you Trump isn’t always scrupulously honest!
“But David – WHY won’t they take their Arab brothers? After all, until 1967 ALL Gazans were Egyptian citizens! They still are.”
Well…THIS is why:
https://themoderatevoice.com/worst-houseguests-ever-the-palestinians/
D.A.
NYC
*for they are most assuredly NOT “refugees”. And until they started a war lately they didn’t live in “camps”. These are lies distributed by leftists whose education was paid for by Qatar.
The suppression of the lab-leak theory left me deeply disheartened—not just by how swiftly legitimate inquiry was stifled, but by the creeping realization that elements of the CIA, other intelligence agencies, and foreign operatives appear to be deeply embedded within our universities.
It raises uncomfortable questions. When Trump calls for “draining the swamp,” is it truly authoritarianism if that so-called swamp—the entrenched bureaucracy and intelligence apparatus—wields more influence than our elected leaders? Hasn’t the Democratic Party, for all its rhetoric about democracy, become a mouthpiece for unelected power brokers?
Perhaps this explains why dissent—whether about the lab-leak theory or any number of progressive orthodoxies—remains so perilous on campus. How many operatives are quietly working in newsrooms, universities, and think tanks? It’s hard to believe the number is small.
We spend so much time wringing our hands over Trump, branding him a dictator or oligarch, while it’s the political Left that censors debate, manufactures narratives, and weaponizes institutions against dissent. If we’re serious about defending democracy, we should be honest about where the real threats to it are coming from.
I also worry that even some of our most celebrated centrists—people I have admired—might be playing a role in this machinery. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but I’ve lost nearly all trust in our institutions. How can we claim any shared understanding of truth when journalists and professors are willing to lie to protect the interests of the state? That so many academics colluded to quash the lab-leak theory undermines trust in science itself—so much so that I can almost understand the calls to defund universities.
And yet, I don’t support Trump’s sweeping cuts to university research. It’s clear they don’t truly address antisemitism or ideological overreach on campus. Halting life-saving biomedical research in the name of fighting wokeness feels like burning down the village to save it.
So, what do we do? Call Trump a dictator for cutting institutions that are both corrupt and essential? Label him an oligarch for pulling funding from national media that long ago abandoned objectivity? I’m not sure anymore.
What I do know is that I no longer trust the scientific bodies that issue sweeping statements on “the science.” Too often, it’s not science at all—it’s narrative management.
Anything is possible and nothing is true. Book by Pomerantsev(?)
I think the best way forward to our present information reality is more discussion, like at WEIT. I don’t know who to trust but I don’t have to have an answer right now. Like the Quakers say, be open to continuing revelation.
What else can we do?
I meant this to tag roz’s comment. Not sure where it’ll end up.
Yes. Without wading into the covid thing specifically, what I think you’re troubled by is exactly what the lovely and articulate @elicalebon was talking about. She refers to it as “moral ambiguity”.
Thanks Malgorzata and PCC(E) for that post, by the way.
And a photo of baby Kulka. Notice4 that she has more white on her face than Szaron does:
I am confused. Should it be Hili instead of Szaron?
I believe so.
“But then there are those computer-generated dwarfs, who cost real dwarfs acting jobs”
So sad. So true.
Robert Reich comes to mind…
Not sure he’s taking woke Hollywood parts given his horribly large readership in the Palestinian “The Guardian.”
His unseriousness would be welcome in the movie though.
😉
D.A.
NYC
ps I probably shouldn’t pick on his height, his bad ideas are enough.
I was going to say, you’d better watch out… Filippo will get you for that sort of thing. He’s straightened me out more than once. I needed it!
Trump announced the existence of the F-47 fighter jet yesterday. The plane has definitely NOT been under development and flying for the last five years because those who speculated about it before this week could not provide firm evidence. The same applies for all programs and operations that are special access or reside in the black world. Until the people read-in to these programs go public, the programs do not exist. Well, they do, but not to you.
I have no vested interest in either the “natural origin” story or the “lab leak.” Whichever it was, I think the correct course of action is to ensure appropriate containment measures remain in place in relevant labs and to debate publicly whether the government should pursue gain-of-function research. But I am amused by those who say that lab leak proponents simply speculate and do not provide evidence. This is a rhetorical dodge. Tell me, please, other than circumstantial, what type of evidence would be forthcoming? If researchers had been manipulating a virus to make it more infectious for humans, if governments knowingly funded this research, if an accident allowed its escape and the consequent deaths of millions, tell me what evidence would be released by those who possess it. Tell me why you would trust what data they do selectively release—particularly if that data pointed a different direction and they dogmatically insisted at a very early stage that no other scenarios were possible.
If US intelligence agencies had communication intercepts demonstrating that Xi was aware of a lab leak, do you really believe US intel would compromise such high-level sources? If we had human resources on the ground in the Wuhan lab, do you think we would compromise them? For those of us outside a very small group who are read-in to such programs, any talk about a lab leak will remain speculation—even if it happened. But, please, do tell me how government black programs only exist in the minds of the conspiracy theorists.
I will add this. If it were a lab leak, I would at least have a better idea why our Establishment panicked and tossed decades of pandemic planning in the trash, opting for measures that were in many cases quite the opposite of what those plans recommended. Dr Fauci himself went from textbook calm and measured in early 2020 to something very different by late March—even though we already knew by then of the stark differences in age-stratified mortality and had grounds to believe that the reported case fatality rates were significantly higher than the likely infection fatality rates. “Scared shitless” about the implications of a leak at least has explanatory power. In a strange way, I would find that more comforting than accepting that groupthink, cowardice, politics, and incompetence drove much of our response—and our failure to reckon with that response.
Interesting take, Doug. Thanks.
Circumstances change individuals. It is easy to bash Fauci but who among us could imagine being at the center of such pressure – particularly with a hostile administration?
D.A.
NYC
Re accepting that cowardice, politics, and incompetence drove much of our CoViD response, isn’t it widely acknowledged that cowardice etc. drive most human society most of the time, good times and bad? Seriously.
(And I have come to the view that hypocrisy is often necessary, in diplomacy, politics, and many other social activities. Sad but true.)
The NYT reviewer’s ‘though the scene when our heroine stands alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chanting “no justice, no peace” did admittedly give me pause’ was a joke, surely?
RE lab leak. From yesterday’s Real Time with Bill Maher show (HBO). The guests were Andrew Sullivan and NYT journalist Ezra Klein (and, in a very funny “interview,” the comedian Dana Carvey, formerly of SNL). This is from the Overtime segment of the show. It’s on YouTube (for free). The following is from the YouTube-generated transcript (that’s why capitalization is not in order), slightly edited by me:
Maher: Andrew, what do you think of news that British intelligence knew Covid was a lab leak in 2020 and officially ignored their report?
Sullivan (0:23): not just knew, 80 to 95% certainty. same with the German intelligence service. March 2020. there’s a new book out called In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us [by Princeton University political scientists Stephen Macedo & Frances Lee, Princeton Univ Press, March 11, 2025]. I was reading it this last couple of weeks. And the core paper that killed off any idea that this was a lab leak in China, the proximal origin paper, which was produced with Fauci and Collins of the NIH [National Institutes of Health] and NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] helping it along, was a lie, a conscious lie. The people who looked at it – we now have their emails – are saying in the very first days of looking at the virus “this looks very man-made to us.” “this is so freaking obvious. this is man-made.” “freaking obvious” one of them said. and then they wrote the report saying there is no evidence that this was made in a lab. the question is why. why would they lie to us about that? and they did.
Maher: I can give you one answer. the New York Times said any questioning of this being from a lab was racist, which always struck me as odd, because it seems much more racist to go “wow, these people are eating bats.” I mean it’s just one example, but a good example, of why people lost faith in the left. because they do stupid things like that. not to be “and I told you so,” but from the very beginning I was saying this shouldn’t even be political. but it’s at least 50/50 that it came from the lab. And that in 50 years, I can imagine people going “wait, you mean in 2020 there was this thing that escaped from a lab in Wuhan, that started in Wuhan, and there was a lab in Wuhan that was studying it, and they didn’t think that was connected, and they blamed it on bats? Really?” it just doesn’t make any sense.
Sullivan (2:15): I don’t think the Democrats are at fault so much as the scientists who went along with this, knowing better. it’s their integrity I’m concerned about, to actually lie and distort what they could see with their own eyes, because they were afraid of politics. the other question is this: this lab was a gain-of-function lab. that means, they were creating viruses, dangerous viruses, to figure out how to how to protect you from them. this gain-of-function research was always dangerous. everyone knew it was dangerous. long time ago, you go back to 2015, you will find a big meeting in London, where they say there’s one lab in the world most likely to have a problem with this – Wuhan. do you know who was the biggest supporter of gain-of-function research for the last 30 years? Anthony Fauci. Anthony Fauci. now remember that name. there’s a reason he was given a pardon back to 2014. there is something very wrong going on here.
Maher: I also don’t think he did it for nefarious reasons. there’s an argument to be made, there’s an actual intellectual debate to be had: should gain-of-function research be done? we want to get ahead of viruses. the other response would be: it’s too dangerous, because if it gets out, it’s going to be bad. and that’s what happened. I don’t think he’s an evil guy like some people believe, who was trying to get rich off this. he just made the wrong call.
Sullivan: no. he knew from the get-go that the Wuhan lab had security levels that were the average of a dentist’s office. they should have been at the highest level imaginable. he knew that. not only that: the NIH and NIAID had helped fund it. so you don’t want to go down in history as the person who helped develop the virus that killed millions of people. you want to go down as the one who saved millions of people. that was at stake, a reputational matter.
You quote Nellie Bowles: Just as Bill Clinton was our first black president, Trump is truly our first gay one.
I think that is offensive, not amusing.
Amusingly offensive?
From Barry, “The laziest cat fight ever”:
They are playing patty cake. Not fighting. Okay, black and white has an aggressive side. But 98% patty cake. 2% b/w trying to goad other cat.
(wearily) This is astonishing and discouraging.
There is detailed and wide literature going back for many years on issues related to the ecology and human activity of Coronaviruses and their hosts.
The vast weight of evidence and argument points to the Huanan “Seafood” wet market in Wuhan as the epicenter of the spillover, probably via raccoon dogs from southern China. The virus likely was circulating in bats, with raccoon dogs (possibly other animals) as intermediate hosts to the market. The papers are easy to find, but do require some concentration to read and understand.
I had hoped to find here real curiosity and some respect for the science around zoonotic origins of infectious disease, inccluding SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.
It’s actually intellectually interesting. There is robust and important work regarding the ecology and evolution of viruses and their hosts. Why evolution is true, over & over again. Fascinating, deep science, learned, brilliant people.
There is not so much “suppression” of the lab leak notion as real, considered rejection. There certainly is valid disparagement!
About this issue, for example, Maher utterly wrong — and completely unqualified to comment.
This is not an issue for serious scholars or public intellectuals to build their “heterodox” reputation. It won’t wear well. Perhaps it was touted at the USC censorship meeting — but it’s contrarian to the realm beyond credibility. I see some comparisons to issues around HIV.
Something about viruses gets the cranks going. Maybe always has, maybe always will — I have studied these things. (e.g. I have a copy of Jakob Segal’s manuscript arguing for Ft. Detrick origin of HIV.)
I share your weariness. Here’s the entry-level summary from a recent issue of Nature, summarizing the evidence that raccoon dogs were the most likely means by which SARS-CoV-2 found its way into the Huanan market, with plenty of refs for deeper dives. Besides the presence of viral RNA in the market stalls where raccoon dogs were sold, the animals themselves have been shown capable of being infected by the virus, but without becoming sick, which otherwise might have kept them from reaching the market.
Far better to start here than listening to Maher and Sullivan, who just want attention and ratings.
Quite the coincidence then given that there are live animal markets all over China yet the one place where the virus leapt from animal to human just happened to be the one that had a low biosecurity lab nearby that was working to make bat coronaviruses infect human cells. Occam’s Razor would suggest that the most likely explanation was a lab leak, otherwise it was just an amazing coincidence. Which maybe it was. But I wouldn’t ascribe nefarious motives to Sullivan or Maher on this, as they were just expressing their opinions based on intelligence sources. And perhaps their faith in Occam’s famous Razor.
Rasha Alawieh was not deported, she was denied entry into the USA (apparently, based on what I read)
Recommended reading: The new V-DEM Democracy Report 2025: https://www.v-dem.net/publications/democracy-reports/
Alas, things aren’t going well for liberal democrats:
“1. Democracy in the World 2024:
* Level of democracy for the average world citizen is back to 1985; by country averages, it is back to 1996.
* Democracy is losing out the most in terms of economic power. It is at its lowest level in over 50 years.
* It is a truly global wave of autocratization. Eastern Europe and South and Central Asia are in particularly steep decline.
Autocracies and Democracies:
* The world has fewer democracies (N=88) than autocracies
(N=91) for the first time in over 20 years.
* Liberal democracies have become the least common regime type in the world, a total of 29 in 2024.
* Nearly 3 out of 4 persons in the world – 72% – now live in autocracies. This is the highest since 1978.
Alarming Loss of Freedom of Expression
* Losses in freedom of expression are alarming: Worsening in 44 countries by 2024, up from 35 in last year’s report.
* Clean elections declining in 25, freedom of association in 22, and rule of law in 18 countries.”
As for the USA, V-DEM director Staffan I. Lindberg said the following in an interview from April 2024:
“I am deeply concerned about the possibility of Donald Trump being reelected. I have expressed this concern on multiple occasions in various public settings. In the current context, I believe that if Donald Trump is reelected, democracy in the US might not survive. He has been explicit about his dictatorial intentions, even going as far as labeling Democrats as vermin, a term that evokes disturbing parallels with Nazi Germany from the late 1930s to 1945. Such statements must be taken seriously, as they could embolden autocrats worldwide. During his previous term, Trump demonstrated a willingness to cozy up to dictators in North Korea and Putin in Russia. They understand what they could expect from him. We can extrapolate the potential consequences for NATO collaboration, support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, and the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. In summary, it presents a bleak outlook not only for the United States but also for the world as a whole.”
Source: https://www.populismstudies.org/v-dems-professor-lindberg-if-trump-is-reelected-democracy-in-the-us-might-not-survive/
“This Is Going Even Worse Than Steven Levitsky Expected:
In 2018, Harvard professor Steven Levitsky co-authored How Democracies Die, a hit book that explored the way strongmen leaders, including Donald Trump, can erode once-stable political systems. How Democracies Die resonated in the middle of Trump’s first term and made Levitsky a famous name among anxious liberals. Unfortunately, his work is even more relevant to American politics seven years later.…”
Source: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/how-trump-brought-competitive-authoritarianism-to-america.html
I have a standard comment on this.
“China is very good at building dams,
the US is very good at enforcing PC,
which system will prevail in the 21st century”
Historically, the US was highly effective and China was not. In 1968, the US was in the final stages of the moon landing and China was being torn apart by the Cultural Revolution. What about now? China has 25,000+ miles of HSR, the US has 0.
China has the Gaokao and doesn’t apologize for it. In the US the ACT/SAT are denounced as “racist”.
Men in women’s sport, terrorist sympathizers, Venezuelan gangs, etc. are very strange choices of hills to die on
Nellie Bowles writes “Just as Bill Clinton was our first black president, Trump is truly our first gay one.”
Aw HELL no! We gays (LGB) don’t want him! Please don’t insult us, Nellie. You’re one of us.
I didn’t know there was a vetting process. I thought it was just what you were.
If you are going to be purging anyone from the club, I’d suggest you start with the trans-rights activists doing their damnedest to derail laws that protect children/adolescents from gender doctors and keep men out of women’s spaces.
I was partly joking, Leslie. Obviously my joke wasn’t very good.