Recent NYT article This book is a textbook example of how faulty reasoning fuels conspiracy theories. The author claims to present five pieces of evidence that show that the new coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. In reality, none of the evidence is convincing, and some are factually incorrect. Here, we focus on the inferences that should be drawn from the first piece of evidence cited: the fact that the new coronavirus originated in Wuhan.
The article presented a graph showing “hundreds of major cities” within about 1,500 miles of the bat cave where the coronavirus is believed to have originated.
We are then forced to believe that it would be an astonishing coincidence if the novel coronavirus emerged naturally in a city in the region that happened to be home to a large virology laboratory. But is this claim true?
In 1994, I got married in Beijing. We spent our honeymoon in Wuhan and Chongqing. Is it an “amazing coincidence” that my honeymoon took place in the city that became the epicenter of the coronavirus? As we will see, the answer is no.
A more pertinent example occurred in 2014, when virologist Eddie Holmes visited the animal market in Wuhan where the new coronavirus first jumped to humans. He photographed cages housing raccoon dogs and speculated that this might be where the animals were infecting humans. Future pandemics The following can happen:
Even more curiously, one of the study’s co-authors said: Eddie HolmesA few years before the pandemic, he was taken to Huanan market, shown a raccoon dog in one of the stalls, and told that “this is a place where there is the potential for interspecies transmission of dangerous pathogens.”
There he photographed raccoons, and in one photograph the raccoon was in a cage stacked on top of a cage containing a bird.
And at the end of our investigation, when we checked the GPS coordinates of his camera, we found that he had taken the photo at the same stall where five samples had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
I don’t know about you guys, but this seems like an even more significant coincidence than the virus emerging in Wuhan.
The NYT article is wrong. Wuhan is not one of hundreds of large cities in China. MegacitySouthern China has four major cities (Wuhan, Chongqing, Chengdu, and Guangzhou/Shenzhen), or five if you consider Guangzhou and Shenzhen as separate metropolitan areas. All of these cities are hundreds of miles away from the so-called “Bat Caves.” A pandemic would be much more likely to break out in these locations than in hundreds of other Chinese cities. These cities have large populations of wealthy shoppers, huge animal markets with exotic animals from all over China, and high population densities and visitors from other regions. They are magnets for people and trade.
But if I am wrong and there is nothing special about these four big Chinese cities, then those who claim the virus leaked from a lab face another problem. Unlike the new coronavirus (aka SARS-2), there is no dispute about how SARS-1 jumped to humans in 2002; it first appeared near a wild animal market in the city of Guangzhou. So those who deny my claim that the big cities in southern China are special have simply traded one amazing coincidence for another. Now they have to explain why the new coronavirus originated in the megacity of Guangzhou and not in hundreds of other cities in southern China.
Here are the facts:
We know that SARS-1 was transmitted from the bat caves to an animal market about 900 miles away, where there were intermediate animal hosts.
SARS-2 first appeared in people who worked or shopped at an animal market about 1,000 miles away from the bat caves, and the famous virology laboratory was in an entirely different part of a huge metropolitan area.
Apply Occam’s razor.
Many Americans have limited knowledge of Chinese geography and are easily persuaded by arguments like those in the New York Times. So consider an American analogy: Imagine a pandemic breaking out among people who work and shop near an animal market in Flushing, New York City’s Chinatown. Pandemics have been known to start in such markets before. Someone on the Internet The pandemic started in “New York City,” it notes, but New York City is also home to the all-important virology lab at Columbia University. It could have leaked the virus from the lab, and an infected scientist happened to be shopping at the animal market in Flushing, on the other side of the city, and infected others.
Does that seem like a very plausible “conspiracy theory”?
Throughout history, many Global pandemic It started in southern China, where people are known for eating a variety of exotic animals, even by Chinese standards, and where the population is densely populated and often lives in close proximity to animals.
Yes, the New York Times article contains other “evidence” but it is similarly weak. Other points have been refuted. here and here and here.
