 It's not like the New York Times has not covered the idea of a lab leak at all or other large prestigious organizations. It's just that there's a sort of a symmetry because I think it goes back to this network that you're talking about. It's kind of understandable. You have a respectable scientist saying one thing. They might have motives for saying that thing, but then that is what gets treated as more credible right out of the gate. And like one striking example to me was the way that this is a New York Times article on the pre-print on the kind of definitive paper that's making the argument that this spillover from animals to humans happened at the Hunan market. New research points to Wuhan market as pandemic origin and kind of the way this was reported. You can see a quote from Michael Warby, one of the lead authors on it when you look at the evidence all together, it's an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started in the Hunan market. Some of those conclusions were softened a little bit once this went through peer review notes there that at the time of publication in the New York Times it had not yet been published in a scientific journal. I do wanna like, you know, talk a little bit about like the way that was covered but also about the study itself. Maybe Alex could weigh in on this. They're arguing that the argument of the paper is they did samples in the market and you can see in this diagram there's a little red hotspot where they're saying most of the virus was transmitted or the hotspot of viral samples was in this little corner like one or two stalls. And then if you zoom in on that, you'll see they've got these two stalls kind of highlighted in red and they've got pictures of raccoon dogs and unknown birds, these basically mammals that plausibly could have transmitted the virus from two human beings in the market and kicked this pandemic off. What's, this and one other paper who was by many of the same authors are kind of like the touchstones for like this is the definitive argument for zoonotic spillover of the virus which is a very common way for pandemics to start. What is your analysis in short of this paper, Alex? If you could keep up that figure, that's actually a great, great touch point. So this analysis made a statistical error and the error fails to account for sampling biases. If you look at that little gradation of number of environmental positives at the middle kind of near the bottom there, that's the statistic that they were analyzing. And so yeah, it looks like there's a high number of environmental positives in this lower left quadrant. However, we pointed out that the Chinese researchers who conducted this work said in their methods, they are prioritizing samples near animal stalls. So they took more samples. That's why there's a higher number of samples. If you look at the percent of samples that test positive, they were actually highest near vegetable traders and in the toilet, in the sewage. So it tells a very different epidemiological story of human to human transmission. And another point on the broader topic of war being out, they looked at where are cases found within the city of Wuhan? And they said, ah, well these cases is found within the city of Wuhan with asterisks cases provided by the Chinese government were centralized, localized around the Wuhan that went on seafood market. However, when you do this statistical analysis of those data, you find that the unlinked cases are actually closer to the seafood market which suggests that these cases did have this bias in case ascertainment. Furthermore, there were cases left out of this analysis, cases that preceded the wet market outbreak. For instance, a December 4th report of a SARS coronavirus case in Wuhan that coincided with an uptick of the use of the word SARS in the Chinese social media app Weibo. So those two data points corroborate this case preceding the wet market outbreak. And furthermore, there's another analysis of these care seeking terms that are less likely to have been filtered which showed that the earlier hotspot of care seeking termed usage in Wuhan was on the other side of the river near a hospital that's one of the closest hospitals to the Wuhan Institute of Biology. So when we try to look at these independent lines to corroborate this and when we account for the statistical biases, their findings don't hold. Their claim of dispositive evidence hasn't lasted the test of time. So that's the reward we had on paper and most of us who were in the field knew that right away. David Roman called this hopelessly impoverished early case data and it was quite evident that that was the case. So for us scientists in the field, it's unusual that these two papers, the other one had similar statistical flaws and a bug in its code that completely undermined it. These two papers were both published side by side in science and then both presented in the New York times of the Atlantic and the Guardian as you know, dispositive evidence that's been solved. And for many of us scientists, especially me, familiar with the standards of evidence in the field before COVID, for instance, looking at the percent of PCR tests that are positive, which we all know was a big debate during COVID in terms of how to measure prevalence in the population to control for increasing rates of testing. For us who are familiar with the standards of evidence and the common modes of analysis in the field, these papers were highly unusual. So was the proximal origin paper by these same authors and then you trace it back to the wall and you find that Anthony Fauci who flooded the diffused PIs in 2019, he prompted this call. He put the people in the room and who did he put in the room with Christian Anderson and Eddie Holmes? He put in the leading proponents of gain of function research, including the OG Ron Fousier who passage that alien influenza through ferrets. So this was, you know, it's like the EPA calling in all the oil and gas companies when they're presented with a study, finding evidence of climate change. When us scientists who are familiar with the other scientists and the debates in the field and the methods and modes of analysis, when we see this it's just that to me is raising alarm bells in addition to the genomic evidence of the fear and cleavage site, not just any fear and cleavage site, you know but a fear and cleavage site in the exact position where Emily's recently FOIA documents proposed to insert it in Wuhan where this was proposed to be conducted and far from the hotspot of that SARS coronaviruses and a litany of other evidence that all combines. And I think for me that's how I think of the evidence is we have to treat these zoonotic origin papers methodically and look at them carefully and see how much evidence they do provide. Once we throw those off the table based on their statistical flaws and other problems with them, all that's left is this mountain of evidence, you know it's like the straw that broke the camel's back. We're looking for that straw but we're forgetting about the many bales of hay that are already there. And that's, you know, our paper was yet another straw but Emily is right to point out and thinking about this evidence you have to look at everything. You have to look at the Wuhan origin, the fear and cleavage site at the S1S2 junction with these weird codons, bioengineers use with all this weird behavior, both of the Chinese government and the researchers connected with the Wuhan labs and coincidentally we found evidence consistent with the exact method for assembly that they proposed and that every time we FOIA new documents we only get closer to the truth that corroborates the theory we've had all along. So what does this all say about the state of science journalism, Emily? Emily, do you wanna take that? I've got opinions but I feel like you have some good ones too. Yeah, I feel like I could rant about this all day but I think just taking the Warby paper as an example I mean, some of this stuff we're discussing is very high level and maybe the journalists just didn't understand you might say, but remember that at the point that that pre-print came out and the New York Times push alerted it. Senior authors of that paper had been caught lying already. We already had the FOIA emails showing that Anderson said that the SARS-CoV-2 genome had features consistent with engineering and then four days later told the national academies that that was a crank theory. And we already knew that Robert Gary another author on that paper had said I can't figure out how this spike protein gets accomplished in nature but it would be easy to do in a lab. And then a few days later started drafting a paper that would dismiss the idea of engineering as a conspiracy theory. So these people were already not credible and Zach you were talking about how people's default is often while this person has a lot of expertise they're affiliated with this prestigious institution they seem the most credible. And in 99% of cases I would agree but I think we're in this unique situation where we're trusting virologists to give us straight answers about whether a pandemic that killed millions of people stemmed from controversial virology research. And these virologists in particular already at this point had a track record of dishonesty. And I think when you're a reporter I think you have to have some healthy skepticism and you know, prestige is important expertise is important but so is integrity. And I remember when this paper got a lot of attention in the press I mean the New York Times alerted it CNN alerted it a bunch of other news organizations. I remember thinking, does honesty not matter? Does integrity not matter? I think it clearly matters. And another aspect here that should have alerted journalists to something strange going on was the fact that I mean literally hours before the war be preprint published the China CDC had come out with its own analysis in a preprint of this data. And they had concluded that the wet market was a super spreader event that it had just amplified an already existing epidemic. That conclusion happens to be consistent with their country's propaganda around the pandemic starting somewhere else but they did collect the data and they have more knowledge about how they collected their own data than Western scientists working on laptops many miles away. And what they said was exactly what Alex just said which is that these samples that appear to cluster around the animal stalls we actually focused our collection efforts there. And Jesse Bloom has analyzed the metagenomic data and found that animal DNA specifically animals that could have served as intermediate hosts like raccoon dogs is not correlated with SARS-CoV-2 virus. And so those samples are not very meaningful which China CDC knew and said right before the New York Times put on its front page that it was definitely the wet market and the lab leak theory, it's a conspiracy theory. And I think that the more information we've gotten the less and less these papers have stood up recently to experts in spatial statistics put out a paper basically saying that the War B paper is extremely flawed but there hasn't been a lot of follow up that I've seen in the Western media at least to correct record and to also look at some of the evidence that's accumulated on the lab side. So there's a lack of like follow up also. I don't know that I am hoping for any specific policy outcome or change in the press. I just honestly want there to be clarity and a national reckoning for everyone who lost loved ones to the pandemic or who lost businesses or major milestones in their life. I honestly think this will probably be my last investigation kind of been approaching it that way. I don't have a lot of hope that, you know, journalism will tomorrow be like, actually this is very valuable reporting and we should reward it. I think I just want there to be clarity and some closure for people who are grieving. That's really my one hope. Well, that's kind of surprising and disappointing. Why is this, why are you thinking this is your last investigation? Are you just like there's your, you've hit a brick wall? I don't know that I will be employable after this. At least in the media as it exists now. So yeah, so I don't, I guess think a lot about like, this is how I want the press to change. You know, I just want there to be clarity around this kind of most monumental thing that has happened in modern times. So that's really my hope. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. New episodes drop every week. So subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to get notified when that happens or to the Just Asking Questions podcast on Apple, Spotify or any other podcatcher. See you next week.