New Scientist: "All the Evidence" Points to a Natural Origin of COVID-19 at the Wuhan Wet Market

eyeroll

The title at the site is the less-provocative and almost-defensible:

"Evidence points to Wuhan market as source of covid-19 outbreak"

Well, some evidence does...

Though the actual title still seems dishonest to me, as it sounds like it is asserting that, overall, that's where the evidence points.

   This is basically a marketing ploy I first noticed 20 years ago at CNN.com: put a provocative title-link on the front page, then a more-accurate title on the actual story. Also: de-escalate the front-page title a couple of hours after the story drops.

   Anyway.

   I glanced at some of the details of the story, appropriately digested by experts. The arguments have moved past the point at which I can make much of them...though, to the extent that I can make heads or tails of them (and their ilk), I'm often surprised at how similar they are to more ordinary arguments--including in their sketchiness.

   The new study seems to have been published in Cell (publisher of the Proximal Origins paper), which I guess has become the house organ of lab-leak denialism.

   Not that anyone doubts this, but: the Powers That Be really, really, really do not want the lab-leak hypothesis to be true. Which doesn't mean that it is true...but it's good to keep in mind what's happening here. This is the same kind of mindset that led the NPCs in in the medical and psychological communities to ensconce the idea of Aleph-null many genders as orthodoxy: a powerful, politically-motivated elite throwing its weight behind one of the competing hypotheses--generally the (often far) less plausible one... This all happened in the debate about the "social construction" of race quite some time ago in anthropology. "Socially constructed" means so many different things that it barely means anything at all...but it's the politically correct position, and now even believing that races are biological kinds is considered racist...

   Well, anyway.