Because having opinions that challenge us are useful. Nobody needs an article that documents Richard Ebright being a pile. We all know that.

Sure but the WIV was built in 1956, multiple decades prior to SARS-1 . Also, if you wanted to do that, you might build it where SARS-1 spilled over. Or where bats that are reservoirs for SARS-1 live.

Ok sounds good

There is evidence a lab was interested in GOF on bat coronaviruses and furin cleavage sites. That's not a common research project. How can we argue that is not evidence?

Again, I would argue there's good evidence for the market. Plus, f it was a lab leak, why did a super spreading event happen at this random market? That's why I lean to the market hypothesis. However, you are claiming that there is NO evidence of a lab leak and I strongly disagree with that.

i was talking to a virologist two hours ago about this very topic. paraphrasing, but essentially "we often write grants to fund work we've already done"

again, let me emphasize, i think a natural origin is more likely. but i think it's naive to claim there's 'no evidence' of a lab leak.

I've never found the grant not being funded convincing. When a grant is funded, it's often pretty typical to use funds to run a pilot of that grant to get more preliminary data to convince reviewers the project is feasible.

I read it again yesterday

Sure. A spillover event is more likely to happen/be detected in a large city. But natural origins proponents (and I am one) should acknowledge that this large city also had a bat coronavirus lab (which is NOT common) with grant proposals to do GOF-like work on bat coronaviruses.

We can't choose to pay attention to Worobey et al and ignore the DEFUSE grant.

I'm sorry but I disagree. I lean towards the market spillover theory, but there is real evidence of a lab leak. There has also good evidence of a spillover event.

I had this amazing experience with Claude where it had mis-learned some important formulas from Bishops "Patterns in Machine Learning." Specifically, it took the matrix inverses to be matrix transposes. It was very pushy on this topic and insisted it was right.

In fairness, couldn't that also be used as evidence Canada isn't doing enough? "Look, they only managed to stop 0.03 pounds, they aren't doing enough!"

Students pointed out some limitations with my gifs. Specifically, it's not realistic that one resistance strategy starts out with a massive pathogen load (fair enough). Anyway, feel free to use if they are helpful.

Here is the resistance graph, but again with time instead of our health metric.

Here are my resistance graphs. For every unit increase in our pathogen we have the same impact on our health metric. However, pathogen loads are quite different.