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This article has previously been nominated to be moved. Please review the prior discussions if you are considering re-nomination. Discussions: RM, COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis → COVID-19 lab leak theory, Moved, 26 July 2021, discussion RM, COVID-19 lab leak theory → COVID-19 lab leak conspiracy, Not moved, 15 August 2023, discussion RM, COVID-19 lab leak theory → COVID-19 Lab Leak Conspiracy Theory, Not moved, 2 October 2023, discussion

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This article was nominated for deletion on July 18, 2021. The result of the discussion was keep.

This article has been mentioned by multiple media organizations: Jackson Ryan (27 June 2021). "Misplaced Pages is at war over the coronavirus lab leak theory". Cnet. Retrieved 21 February 2022. Rhys Blakely (11 November 2021). "The Covid-19 lab-leak theory: 'I've had death threats'". The Times. Retrieved 21 February 2022. When she first spoke out, the lab-leak theory was dismissed – in public, at least – by senior virologists as a fantasy of populist politicians and internet cranks. Facebook and Misplaced Pages banned any mention of the possibility that the virus had escaped from a Wuhan lab, branding it a conspiracy theory. Renée DiResta (21 July 2021). "Institutional Authority Has Vanished. Misplaced Pages Points to the Answer". The Atlantic. Retrieved 21 February 2021. The "Talk" page linked to the Misplaced Pages entry on the origin of the coronavirus provides visibility into the roiling editing wars. Sock-puppet accounts descended, trying to nudge the coverage of the topic to reflect particular points of view. A separate page was created, dedicated specifically to the "COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis," but site administrators later deleted it—a decision that remains in dispute within the Misplaced Pages community. Julian Adorney (6 November 2023). "Is it possible to save Misplaced Pages?". Washington Examiner. Retrieved 13 November 2023. The Misplaced Pages page for the COVID-19 lab leak theory, for instance, calls it a "conspiracy theory" that is "informed by racist undercurrents" and "fed by pseudoscientific … thinking." That's in spite of the fact that a 302-page Senate report found credible evidence for the theory.

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Origins of COVID-19: Current consensus

1. There is no consensus on whether the lab leak theory is a "conspiracy theory" or a "minority scientific viewpoint". (RfC, February 2021)
2. There is consensus against defining "disease and pandemic origins" (broadly speaking) as a form of biomedical information for the purpose of WP:MEDRS. However, information that already fits into biomedical information remains classified as such, even if it relates to disease and pandemic origins (e.g. genome sequences, symptom descriptions, phylogenetic trees). (RfC, May 2021)
3. In multiple prior non-RFC discussions about manuscripts authored by Rossana Segreto and/or Yuri Deigin, editors have found the sources to be unreliable. Specifically, editors were not convinced by the credentials of the authors, and concerns were raised with the editorial oversight of the BioEssays "Problems & Paradigms" series. (Jan 2021, Jan 2021, Jan 2021, Feb 2021, June 2021, ...)
4. The consensus of scientists is that SARS-CoV-2 is likely of zoonotic origin. (January 2021, May 2021, May 2021, May 2021, June 2021, June 2021, WP:NOLABLEAK (frequently cited in discussions))
5. The March 2021 WHO report on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 should be referred to as the "WHO-convened report" or "WHO-convened study" on first usage in article prose, and may be abbreviated as "WHO report" or "WHO study" thereafter. (RfC, June 2021)
6. The "manufactured bioweapon" idea should be described as a "conspiracy theory" in wiki-voice. (January 2021, February 2021, May 2021, May 2021, June 2021, June 2021, June 2021, June 2021, July 2021, July 2021, July 2021, August 2021)
7. The scientific consensus (and the Frutos et al. sources () which support it), which dismisses the lab leak, should not be described as "based in part on Shi 's emailed answers." (RfC, December 2021)
8. The American FBI and Department of Energy finding that a lab leak was likely should not be mentioned in the lead of COVID-19 lab leak theory, because it is WP:UNDUE. (RFC, October 2023)
9. The article COVID-19 lab leak theory may not go through the requested moves process between 4 March 2024 and 3 March 2025. (RM, March 2024)

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Lab leak theory sources

This section is pinned and will not be automatically archived.

List of good sources with good coverage to help expand. Not necessarily for inclusion but just for consideration. Preferably not articles that just discuss a single quote/press conference. The long-style reporting would be even better. Feel free to edit directly to add to the list. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:39, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Last updated by Julian Brown (talk) 23:43, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

References

"informed by racist undercurrents" redux

This was discussed previously a couple months ago, and I don't recall it reaching any firm conclusion. I am reminded of it by some comments I saw elsewhere on the web, where people talking about this article called out this sentence specifically as confusing and meaningless.

The phrase "informed by racist undercurrents", as currently used in the article, is ambiguous, poorly defined, editorializing, and it's not supported by the sources. What it used to say was this:

• The lab leak theory has been described as racist and xenophobic, because it has resulted in anti-Chinese sentiment.

Here is what it says now:

• The lab leak theory is informed by racist undercurrents, and has resulted in anti-Chinese sentiment.

I say now, as I said then, that this does not make sense. Since the terms are extremely vague, it's hard to know precisely what this sentence is saying. "Informed by" means that something is dependent on, or caused by; an "undercurrent" means a foundation or basis. Does this mean that the theory is fundamentally caused by racism? I don't know -- it's ambiguous flowery language. As I said in the previous section: were the landing parties at Normandy "informed by undercurrents of Nazism"? Maybe they were -- if there were no Nazis, they wouldn't have been landing at Normandy -- but if a phrase can be used to mean two things that are diametrically opposed to one another, then it isn't encyclopedic, and we should say something more clear. The only reason not to would be if a large number of sources used that phrase, and it were in some way meaningful in and of itself (i.e. "clear and present danger", "stop, drop and roll", "null and void").

This is not the case here. None of the sources mention anything being "informed by" anything, or the presence of "undercurrents". Moreover, the ambiguity of the phrase lends itself to an interpretation ("the lab leak theory is caused by racism") that isn't supported by any of the sources. Accordingly, I am going to restore this to what it used to say, which does not present the issue of implying original research. jp×g🗯️ 06:30, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

@Bon courage: jp×g🗯️ 07:01, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

The trouble with your edit is it's just wrong (per the sources). The racist aspect isn't (just) because it causes xenophobia and racism; those things feed LL. As we explain, some politicians leveraged racism to spread the idea ('kung flu' anyone?) From PMID:36355862 "Lab leak theories are often bolstered by racist tropes ..." And there is further discussion about this racism aspect in the body. I don't think the language is 'flowery'; it's just that these concepts need careful, nuanced description, and that's how the WP:BESTSOURCES handle it. Misplaced Pages should follow. Perhaps 'shaped by racist undercurrents' would be better and more coherent? 07:07, 7 November 2023 (UTC) Bon courage (talk) 07:07, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't think this warrants inclusion. I am sure these people know a lot of stuff about epidemiology. "Whether some people online are racist" is not epidemiology. "The specific percentage of people online who said this thing was true and who were also racist" is definitely not epidemiology. In this article you're citing, the full quotation is this:

Lab leak theories are often bolstered by racist tropes that suggest that epidemiological, genetic, or other scientific data have been purposefully withheld or altered to obscure the origin of the virus(9).

What does that citation go to? It's Cho J., (2021) Lab-Leak, gain-of-function and the media myths swirling around the Wuhan Institute of Virology. https://www.mintpressnews.com/lab-leak-gain-function-media-myths-swirling-around-wuhan-institute/278555/. Accessed 11 August 2022. This is not some kind of scientifically researched conclusion: it's an article on a news site, and on said site it's tagged "opinion and analysis" -- it's literally an opinion piece. It's not a claim of objective determination of fact. It may be false and it may be true, but it is not verifiable, and we should not have it written in the voice of the encyclopedia -- and we definitely should not make up a completely different statement that kinda-sorta sounds like it and then say that in the voice of the encyclopedia. jp×g🗯️ 07:32, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, but it's not Misplaced Pages editors' job to reject peer-reviewed journal articles because they query underlying sources. Garry will have been completely immersed in the whole debate, and the eistence of gain-of-function / media myths is so banal as to be a commonplace. Bon courage (talk) 07:41, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

It's not Misplaced Pages editors' job to find a bunch of papers that say "Napoleon was short" and combine them together to say "Napoleon had dwarfism"; that is not how addition works. The actual, objective claim that can be supported here is that some people who were racist supported the lab leak theory. The claim that all of them were "informed by undercurrents" cannot. jp×g🗯️ 07:57, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

The straw men are on fire. But, we don't say "all of them". Bon courage (talk) 09:12, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

MintPress News was deprecated as a source for facts in 2019, so that doesn't inspire confidence. VintageVernacular (talk) 15:08, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

I started the last discussion on this. My opinion hasn't changed, and I agree with JPxG. "Inform" and "undercurrent" are unclear and lacking in precision. –Novem Linguae (talk) 07:09, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm sure it can be improved, but we need to capture the sense of the sources. Edit warring something that does not reflect the sources (as the OP is doing) is not a good idea. The question would be how to summarise stuff like:

• bolstered by racist tropes (cited source)
• Motivated reasoning based on blaming an 'other' is a powerful force against scientific evidence (cited source)
• The American president of the time, Donald Trump, used anti-Chinese rhetoric (such as "Kung flu") to feed the idea (our article body)

... perhaps we could just say the theory relies on racist motivated reasoning more than scientific evidence? Bon courage (talk) 07:22, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

We should not "just say" things that aren't supported by reliable sources. We should not take things from op-eds and restate them as objective fact. I understand that Donald Trump is a dick. I understand that some people who made this claim were racist, and indeed, that some people who made this claim undoubtedly did so merely as a means of being racist. This is completely fine to mention. However, the bulletpoints you give here do not logically connect to each other, and by doing so you are performing WP:SYNTH. It simply does not follow from any set of reasonable premises that the claim "COVID came from a laboratory" is inherently racist. Stupid, yes. Wrong, yes. But not "informed by undercurrents"; this is just a weird guilt-by-association attack on something which is dumb enough that we ought to be able to just say why it's dumb and be done with it. jp×g🗯️ 07:54, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

The racism aspects of LL are a major theme in the literature (in fact, the article body should have more on this). The task is how to cover them. I don't think any source says LL is "inherently" racist, and neither do we (and of course LL is not just one thing). However, the sources do say that racism feeds LL. How do we summarize that? Bon courage (talk) 08:05, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

I dislike "In many Western countries, belief in the lab leak theory is correlated with distrust of government and anti-China sentiment, and has kindled the latter" and would prefer to go back to The lab leak theory has been described as racist and xenophobic, because it has resulted in anti-Chinese sentiment., which is clear and precise. –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:24, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

The trouble with that is the "because". It's not "because" of it giving rise, rather there is blatant racism behind LL (too). That is what we describe in the article body anyway. Bon courage (talk) 08:27, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

I agree with this; it also avoids the headache of trying to source sweeping objective claims about correlation and population statistics, and provides useful attribution for the claim (i.e. an in-text hint of "well, here is who said that"). jp×g🗯️ 08:28, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

To be clear, I offered that as an example to make a point about writing style, not an actual proposal; we don't use sources that support "correlated with distrust of government", for example. DFlhb (talk) 08:41, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

I'd be very happy with this proposal. DFlhb (talk) 08:50, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Alternative: The lab leak theory and its weaponization by politicians have increased anti-Chinese racism. - the weaponization seems prominent in the various sources we currently cite for that sentence, and I think they're strong enough to use wikivoice. Arguments that racism fed the lab leak theory are better left to the body, methinks. DFlhb (talk) 09:01, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

But again that makes it sound like the racism is just an OUTPUT from LL, where our sources are emphasizing that it's an INPUT to it. Bon courage (talk) 09:08, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

It's true, but mentioned by a minority of sources we currently cite, and requires sufficient contextualisation/explanation that it's IMO best left to the body. But my proposal swaps attribution for wikivoice for an uncontested fact, and points to the primary actors (politicians, i.e. Trump/Bolsanaro/etc), which reflects the same emphasis present in our citations. DFlhb (talk) 09:17, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

I see. If you swapped "have increased" to "have both leveraged and increased" that'd capture it and I could get behind that! Bon courage (talk) 09:20, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

That's fine too; good wording - DFlhb (talk) 09:27, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Fully agree with jpxg and Novem, and I'll go further, the sentence is bad enough that it unfairly discredits the rest of the article. jpxg's checking of Garry's citation tells me we need to find another source. Garry is free to cite a semi-fake news site, but his one-sentence comment isn't enough; we need full-length reliable sources that examine this issue in detail, that we can properly summarise.

Further, we say it in an unintellectual (IMO anti-intellectual), unencyclopedic way. A more professional way to write would be: "In many Western countries, belief in the lab leak theory is correlated with distrust of government and anti-China sentiment, and has kindled the latter". Something along those lines. Any newspaper editor would have an issue if they saw our sentence; and our standards are supposed to be even higher. DFlhb (talk) 07:57, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Something like that would be fine too (I've put a slightly trimmed version of it in the lede, let's see if it sticks). But we mustn't say LL is merely called racist because it gives rise to racism, and that make it seem like a legitimate idea with an unfortunate consequence. And that's not what the sources say. Bon courage (talk) 08:18, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

The point of this article is to document the lab leak theory in an encyclopedic manner. The point is not to simply say as many bad things about it as humanly possible. This is not only counter to the purpose of Misplaced Pages, but prima facie absurd: do you really think that people are going to be more convinced by an article that spends 200,000 bytes and 236 references refuting them with citations to actual scientific publications, or by an article that spends its lead making unsupported, vague insinuations that they smell bad, are racist, don't even lift, etc? jp×g🗯️ 08:26, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

The point of the article is to mirror the WP:BESTSOURCES. Those treating this topic in depth describe how racism plays a role. We shouldn't care if that "convinces" any LL fans (it won't) but if it reflects insight into the topic from experts then that's cool. Bon courage (talk) 08:41, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't think you understand my basic point here. You've said that racism "feeds", "plays a role", "are a major theme", was "leveraged to spread", is "relied on", "feeds", is "behind", or was a "link in the chain". What I'm saying is that these are vague handwaves; they're unfalsifiable, and they don't demonstrate an actual causal relationship between the things. You insist that the article should claim a causal relationship. What is it? jp×g🗯️ 08:56, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Don't twist things and put words in my mouth. When the article tried to use subtle wording which was not strictly causal "informed by undercurrents" editors (you most loudly) didn't like it. This is in the realm of social anthropology not hard cause-and-effect science, so one would not expect falsifiability. We need to reflect the knowledge in this realm from the experts. Bon courage (talk) 09:03, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Okay. jp×g🗯️ 09:34, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

You say above that you don't think any source says LL is "inherently" racist, yet that's the essential meaning of what you prepended to my suggestion, and I oppose it. The only source presented so far isn't good enough — it's hard to move forward before we find more. DFlhb (talk) 08:28, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Well, that's another discussion, but we mention in the article body "the blatant anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia behind lab leak, whose proponents often ascribe a nefarious coverup to the Chinese government" citing Gorski. Bon courage (talk) 08:32, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Fine, Gorsky is good. DFlhb (talk) 08:35, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

I am somewhat concerned about the way that you want to use the Gorski source. This is an opinion piece -- which is fine, we have WP:RSOPINION for a reason -- but there is a difference between an opinion and a factual claim.

The full quote is this: That’s evolutionary biologist Heather Heying on the podcast that she does with her husband, biologist Bret Weinstein, claiming that it’s a conspiracy to “definitely” show that it was “those people” who caused the pandemic, not a lab leak. In a massive exercise in projection, she calls claims that the pandemic started at the Huanan market “racist,” apparently ignoring the blatant anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia behind lab leak, whose proponents often ascribe a nefarious coverup to the Chinese government. This is opinion writing. It's clear that his opinion is that there is "blatant anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia behind lab leak". This is not an objective claim being made about reality; it's an opinion. Do you understand the difference?

Elsewhere in the piece, he says "Also, in that interview from last year Jon Stewart disappointed me in the extreme by sounding very much like the sort of conspiracy theorists that he used to mock on The Daily Show." Is it acceptable to add "He is 'disappointing in the extreme'." to Jon Stewart? I would advise you to read WP:RSOPINION. jp×g🗯️ 08:45, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Well, WP:SBM is a WP:GREL. But even so we say LL "has been described as" rather than asserting it as fact, and the comments are attributed in the body. Bon courage (talk) 08:47, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes, that's why I am arguing in favor of including that language. Does the entry say that all opinions expressed in op-eds on SBM are factually correct? jp×g🗯️ 08:58, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Straw man argument. They're not really op-eds; that's trying to force a news mindset onto scicomms writing. Bon courage (talk) 09:05, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Is "Jon Stewart disappointed me in the extreme" a scientific fact or an opinion? jp×g🗯️ 09:35, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Why would you think it has anything to do with science? If Jon Stewart disappointed you it would be a fact you were disappointed. Bon courage (talk) 09:39, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

They are clearly op-eds... They're opinion pieces written by the editor/owner/founder of the publication. That editor is a SME so their opinions can absolutely be included, but with attribution of course. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 05:41, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

The exact wording is not so critical compared to appropriate weight, which is minimal. The placement and quantity of text should not give the impression that racism is a significant part of the origin, content, or evidence for the lab leak hypothesis. To do so would be WP:PROFRINGE. Sennalen (talk) 16:46, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't see the problem in saying that LL is informed by racism, pointing to the very genesis of LL. There's a not insignificant amount of academic sources cited from this article that attest to that fact. "Kung Foo Flu" anyone? CHYNA? Do I even need to say his name? Our job as editors is not to quote the words of others verbatim, that would obviously be copyvio and so we paraphrase. TarnishedPath 08:28, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Excerpting five to ten words with quotation marks and in-text attribution would never, under any circumstances, be considered copyright violation. As for the other stuff in your comment, I am confused -- the lab leak theory is not true, but thousands of scientific studies have confirmed that the pandemic started in China. I am unaware of any claim whatsoever to the contrary (except urban legends about it being caused by cell phones, etc). jp×g🗯️ 08:34, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Trump's contribution was just one link in the chain as we (hopefully) make clear in the discussion of LL origins in the article. The origin of LL was Infowars and 4Chan. Bon courage (talk) 08:46, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

The origin of the lab leak hypothesis is the fact that WIV began modifying novel bat coronaviruses to use human ACE2 receptors in 2017. The dangers were long recognized in the scientific community. https://archive.is/IuLcX Sennalen (talk) 17:02, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

This an example of the kind of problem we get here. Misplaced Pages follows sources not what editors fancy. Bon courage (talk) 17:06, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10234839/ Sennalen (talk) 17:36, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Whether the length is too short to worry about copyvio, I as an editor still regularly paraphrase. I don't think that would be uncommon. TarnishedPath 09:47, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

A this stage a red through off wp:v might be useful, to be used as a source disputing the claim that the lab leak story was either informed by or led to racism, a source must discuss that issue, not just the veracity of the lab lek story. Slatersteven (talk) 17:45, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

break

I think we should try a straw poll and not get lost into the weeds too much. 3 proposals on the table so far:

• Option 1: The lab leak theory has been described as racist and xenophobic, because it has resulted in anti-Chinese sentiment (Novem)
• Option 2: The lab leak theory and its weaponization by politicians have increased anti-Chinese racism. (me)
• Option 3: The lab leak theory and its weaponization by politicians have both leveraged and increased anti-Chinese racism (Bon courage)

I'm fine with 2 or 3, prefer 3. DFlhb (talk) 09:29, 7 November 2023 (UTC) edited 19:00, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

• I think the first one is the best of these, although I guess the second one is fine if that ends up being a tiebreaker. jp×g🗯️ 09:31, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

On second thought, I am not really sure that the second one is backed up by the sources we have. I think if we can't do any better than the status quo we should just go back to that. To be honest, in the larger scheme of things I'm not fully confident that this needs to be mentioned in the lead in the first place; it's not really a standard practice for us to open articles about (scientific, discredited, formerly scientific, etc) ideas/theories/notions with sociodemographic disclaimers about the type of people who at one point believed them. jp×g🗯️ 10:16, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

What is your source for "it has resulted in anti-Chinese sentiment"? Bon courage (talk) 05:33, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

I think if we can't do any better than the status quo we should just go back to that. To be honest, in the larger scheme of things I'm not fully confident that this needs to be mentioned in the lead in the first place; it's not really a standard practice for us to open articles about (scientific, discredited, formerly scientific, etc) ideas/theories/notions with sociodemographic disclaimers about the type of people who at one point believed them. jp×g🗯️ 06:12, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

• Has to be 3 if we're trying to summarize the body in the lede. Bon courage (talk) 09:35, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
• I'd say 3 but I'd agree to 2 as a tiebreaker.TarnishedPath 09:54, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
• Words such as "leveraged", "informed by", "undercurrents", "is correlated", and "kindled" are too vague and imprecise, and I would urge picking a version that does not use them. –Novem Linguae (talk) 10:14, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
• 3, because both things are supported by sources and need to be included: racism increased the appeal of the lab leak theory, making it easier to ignore scientific consensus, and the lab leak theory's wide dissemination also contributed to increased racism. NightHeron (talk) 11:19, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
• 2 or 3. Slatersteven (talk) 11:24, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

3. Option 3 reflects the sources that show two-way influence. It's the most inline with NPOV. Rjjiii (ii) (talk) 00:50, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

• 1, second choice 2. It's nice a factual, no imprecise language High Tinker (talk) 21:06, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
• 1, I think; the others somehow sound passive-aggressive. --Andreas JN466 21:52, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
• Happy with 2 or 3, or a version of 1 that ends with "because of anti-Chinese sentiment associated with many proponents and arguments in favor" or similar. We should not say that the effects of the theory are the only reason it is considered racist or xenophobic. It's more than just that. — Shibbolethink 03:57, 9 November 2023 (UTC)
• No change, i guess that would be option #1? Hate discussions, polls and RfC's which jump right to the wording of the lede yet ignore the content in the body. Fix the content in the body first then make an argument for change which reflect your summary of sources. fiveby(zero) 14:45, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

  Quite, and one of the problems is that we no longer have any usable source that says LL "resulted in" racism, so option (1) would (now) be completely unverified. Bon courage (talk) 14:53, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

• 3. Anti-Chinese racism existed before this, and anti-Chinese racism increased after this. If anyone's concerned about calling it racism (e.g., because some of the anti-Chinese views were about distrusting the government itself, and an organization, not being a human, does not really have a race), then we could say (and link to) Anti-Chinese sentiment, since that's the title of an obviously relevant Misplaced Pages article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:31, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

  I've been reading-up on this, and there in fact plenty of sources on how LL gave rise to (and was even deliberately use to stoke) anti-Chinese racism, including some fascinating stuff on the enduring Fu Manchu trope. When the article is expanded with these sources, this knowledge can duly be summarized in the lede. But I'm still reading ... ! The bottom line is that racism is quite a big aspect of LL, in quality RS. Bon courage (talk) 16:48, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

  I think that if we want to write an article about "lab leakers" as a social group, we should just do that, rather than having an article which represents itself as being about a set of factual claims, and then continually interrupts itself to go on long asides about the prejudicial beliefs of a group of people on the Internet. To draw a somewhat blunt comparison: say that an athlete (let's call him Ronald) loses a race. Why? Well, it's simple: he didn't run as fast as the other guy. That is the only actual factor involved in determining who wins a race. Let's say that Ronald supporters come up with some theory about how the cameras they used for the photo finish were misaligned. Well, here's the disproof: "we went and measured them and they weren't". If you're writing about who won the race, this is the most important thing to mention. Note that "his fans are jerks to the Swiss" does not demonstrate that he lost. It might be true, and it might be relevant to a sociological analysis of the theory as a social phenomenon, but it gives you basically zero information about the theory itself, or who won the race, or how we know this. It would be possible for his fans to be jerks and also right. If we write an article called "Ronald victory theory", and our explanation of why he lost the race is that "the pro-Ronald theory was informed by anti-Swiss undercurrents", it's worse than irrelevant, it devalues the rest of the information on the page; one gets the impression that the main goal of the article is to wiggle its tongue at the Ronald supporters rather than inform its readers.

  To clarify, lest someone respond that the article shouldn't completely omit all mention of this: I do not think it should, and nowhere have I said it should. My only claim is that it should not say "informed by racist undercurrents", and it should also not say any kind of weird ambiguous flowery insinuation ("undergirded by racist overtones", "reminiscent of racist reifications", "instantiated hitherto alongforeunderwith racializationisms", or the like). If it is mentioned at all in the lede (which I'm not completely certain of, since most of the sources claimed to support the language in the lead didn't) it should just straightforwardly say something like "It has been described as xenophobic". But as has been mentioned before, most of the references for the "undercurrents" line did not actually support that claim, so it would have to be cited to something. jp×g🗯️ 04:10, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

  I think it depends on what you believe the scope of the article is. If you think the scope is narrow ("Was this virus physically present in this building towards the end of 2019, and did it leak out?"), then all the stuff about human reactions is irrelevant. If you think the scope is broader ("The internet blew up with this idea"), then all the stuff about human reactions is important. The lab leak story "out-competed" many other stories. Hundreds of reliable sources addressed the lab leak story; almost none addressed stories about COVID-19 being a divine punishment, or being an attempt by rival countries to poison China, or being an accidental contamination from alien creatures visiting Earth.

  If you're trying to write about the broader scope, then you have to look for reliable sources that ask why people were so fascinated with this story. The sources say that one important reason behind the fascination is anti-Chinese racism. Therefore, this fact should be included. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:23, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Source analysis for "xenophobia" reference group

I am going through the refgroup, currently citation number 23, which is being used as sourcing to argue in favor of the theory being described as having "undercurrents", being "leveraged", and increasing racism in the lead. I am somewhat concerned that this is a WP:REFBOMB: an overwhelmingly large number of sources have been gathered in one place to support a contentious statement with an impressively long block of citations, but it's not clear that they actually back up the claim. These are the individual sources (refgroup "racism and xenophobia"):

• 1. N Does not make the claim. Hardy, Lisa J. (17 September 2020). "Connection, Contagion, and COVID-19". Medical Anthropology. 39 (8): 655–659. doi:10.1080/01459740.2020.1814773. eISSN 1545-5882. ISSN 0145-9740. PMID 32941085. S2CID 221789709. People question if scientists and/or political leaders created the virus in a lab and/or intentionally leaked it into the general public. Blame in conspiracies of COVID-19 is distributed differently across beliefs. Some question actions of the Chinese government and/or mention relationships with, for instance, people from Wuhan, China, reflecting xenophobic ideologies.

Here, the claim is that among all of the people who "question if" this is true, "some" of them "mention relationships with, for instance, people from Wuhan, China, reflecting xenophobic ideologies". This does not say that the "lab leak theory", as a singular entity, is "leveraging" or "increasing" racism or xenophobia. It says that some people, somewhere, were racist. jp×g🗯️ 05:00, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

• 2. N Opinion of a Chinese government official. Al-Mwzaiji, Khaled Nasser Ali (27 February 2021). "The Political Spin of Conviction: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Origin of Covid-19". GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies. 21 (1): 239–252. doi:10.17576/gema-2021-2101-14. eISSN 2550-2131. ISSN 1675-8021. S2CID 233903461. Cui Tiankai, on the other hand, refutes the alleged claim of Covid-19 being a bioweapon of China on the 'Face the Nation' program on 9th Feb...The Ambassador points out the harmfulness of such allegation and likens the rumors with the virus because like the virus rumors spread among people and create 'panic' and hatred in the form of 'racial discrimination, xenophobia.'...

This is an opinion from an ambassador, officially representing the perspective of the Chinese government. It is not fact. If it is mentioned at all -- and it probably shouldn't be -- it must be given in-text attribution as the opinion of an officer of the Chinese government. jp×g🗯️ 05:00, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

• 3. N Opinion of the book's author. Zhou, Xun; Gilman, Sander L. (2021). 'I know who caused COVID-19' : pandemics and xenophobia. London: University of Chicago Press. pp. 160–164. ISBN 9781789145076.

I don't know what the deal is on this book. It's described on the publisher's website is that it's a "close analysis". No quote is given for this, so I had to actually get a digital copy of the book. From pages 160 to 164, we have a story about a guy from Michigan at a protest against Gretchen Whitmer, citing George Santayana, whose Hegelianism the book goes into detail on; it then incorrectly quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes' "shouting fire" opinion on the notoriously overturned Schenck v. United States (attributing it instead to Abrams v. United States; neither the court's opinion nor Holmes' dissent in that case mentions the word "fire" once). I am not sure why this is used as a source, because there isn't a lot in here that is directly related to the lab leak theory; the closest I could find was this quote.

The rhetoric of the 'stolen' election invoked by Trump was psychologically very powerful for these White supporters. Many of them truly believe, cognitively, that their misfortunes and miseries are the result of being 'robbed'. The culprits were either the Chinese or illegal immigrants or Jewish plutocrats or the BLM mob, or all of them in concert, and Trump was the white knight in shining armour who would help them get back what was truly theirs. Indeed, all these groups, over the course of the year, had been blamed for spreading the virus, whether by purposely developing it in a laboratory in Wuhan (according to Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his CDC Director Robert Redfield) or by smuggling their infected bodies across the Southern border (according to the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott) or by George Soros and the Rothschilds creating a pandemic to control the world economy, never mind Bill Gates and high tech developing a vaccine to place a microchip in your brain!

First of all, this is specifically talking about white Trump supporters, not "lab leak" as an independent entity. To reiterate: if all cats are mammals, and Donald Trump is a mammal, this does not support the claim "Donald Trump is a cat". And while it certainly paints an illustrious picture, I must take great pains to again say that is the opinion of the author, even if it is printed on pieces of paper and bound with glue. This quote is not an objective factual claim that has the full backing of its publisher; it's an emotive sentence that is being written to illustrate an opinion. In case the distinction is not clear: would it be acceptable to write "Trump was the white knight in shining armor" in wikivoice -- no quotes, no attribution, just as a straight objective fact, and cite it to this? jp×g🗯️ 05:00, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

• 4. N Does not support the claim. Allsop, Jon (2 June 2021). "The lab-leak mess". Columbia Journalism Review. But virologists are generally more credible than Trump, who does lie systematically, and did seek to blame China for the pandemic to distract from his own dismal performance; various actors, meanwhile, have weaponized the lab-leak theory as part of a racist agenda that has had very real consequences. A given theory can be a conspiracy and racist and, at root, true, just as a given theory can be scientifically grounded and not racist and, at root, false; who is propounding it, and why, and based on what, matters. The mistake many in the media made was to cast the lab-leak theory as inherently conspiratorial and racist, and misunderstand the relation between those properties and the immutable underlying facts. It would also be wrong, now, to assume that the lab-leak theory is inherently clean of those taints.

The claim here is that it "would be wrong to assume that the lab-leak theory is inherently clean of those taints". The only way to turn this into "would be right to assume that the lab-leak theory is inherently not clean of those taints" is literally false; it is a formal fallacy called denying the antecedent (P → Q ∴ ¬P → ¬Q). But even if this were the intention of the original text, I just don't think it is the case that being "unclean of those taints" is the same as being inherently racist or conspiratorial. In fact, the quoted text itself literally says that this is "a mistake" in the previous sentence. jp×g🗯️ 05:00, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

even if this were the intention of the original text, I just don't think it is the case that being "unclean of those taints" is the same as being inherently racist or conspiratorial
no one is saying that the lab leak theory is "inherently racist". We don't say that in the article. We say there are some racist undercurrents which underlie its popularity. That does not presuppose racism in all aspects of the theory, nor does it presuppose racism in all its supporters. It simply means that there is racism/racist ideas/etc wrapped up in the motivations/reasoning of some of the lab leak's supporters. — Shibbolethink 03:49, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Well, the stuff you're saying sounds fine to me: "there is racism/racist ideas/etc wrapped up in the motivations/reasoning of some of the lab leak's supporters" for example. I like this sentence and think it's true (as well as supported); I put a N next to it here because the thing it was being used to support in article text was "The lab leak theory is informed by undercurrents of racism", which I think it's a gigantic stretch to come out of this. The thing you said would be good to put in the body; I don't know precisely what that translates into as far as a summary in the lead, but would be happy to come up with something. jp×g🗯️ 06:25, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

• 5. N Literally does not mention the lab leak theory a single time. Ullah, AKM Ahsan; Ferdous, Jannatul (2022). "Pandemic, Predictions and Propagation". The Post-Pandemic World and Global Politics. Springer Nature Singapore. pp. 105–151. doi:10.1007/978-981-19-1910-7_4. ISBN 978-981-19-1909-1.

Pages 105-151? I don't know who added this, but I suspect they did not read it if they're citing a 46-page range. My observations, as I read through: On p. 110 it says some very strange things:

By 2020, the Asia–Pacific Employment and Social Outlook 2020: Navigating the Crisis to a Human-Centred Future of Work anticipates that economic implications from the COVID-19 outbreak will result in the loss of 81 million jobs in Asia– Pacific.

In the second and third quarters of 2020, working hours in Asia and Pacific working hours are expected to fall by 15.2% and 10.7%, respectively

Preliminary research suggests that between 22 and 25 million people may fall into working poverty by 2020

This isn't quoted as a retrospective or anything -- it's being said in the current tense, i.e. that 2020 is in the future. This makes no sense to me, since the book was published in 2022; my best guess is that it's an anthology of various publications. However, if content in the book is that badly out of date, it does raise some concerns for quoting it about things that happened betweeen 2020 and 2023.

Page 114: Again with the bizarre references to 2020 in the future tense. "In mid-July 2020, the Democratic Party nominated Joe Biden and his running partner in Milwaukee, while the Republican Party is prepared to renominate Donald Trump in Charlotte, North Carolina."

Page 120: The first real mention of anything to do with race or ethnicity. Governments must ensure that COVID-19 measures do not discriminate against or target specific ethnic or racial groups and that marginalized groups, such as people with disabilities or special needs, are included and treated with dignity.

Page 143: In truth, natural disasters exacerbate underlying flaws in political and economic processes, such as elite distrust.

Page 133, I believe, is what this citation was actually meant to refer to.

COVID-19 has triggered a surge of xenophobia, which we mentioned earlier, toward internal Chinese migrants, Asian migrants in other countries, and, more lately, European migrants and foreigners in general, including in China and other places where the virus has had an impact. Scapegoating and stigmatization are widespread after natural catastrophes, terrorist attacks, and prior pandemics and epidemics. In general, the pandemic has been exploited to spread anti-migrant propaganda and advocate for stricter immigration controls and fewer rights for migrants. In many countries, newly emerging xenophobia has largely replicated pre-existing discriminatory practices, frequently targeting migrants from areas where COVID-19 infection is rare or non-existent, as well as people who have resided in the country for a long time.

Emphasis mine. This literally does not mention or allude to the "lab leak" whatsoever. Whoever added this was either mistaken or deliberately misrepresenting the source with a vague and difficult-to-verify citation. I've removed it from the article. jp×g🗯️ 05:00, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

• 6. N Does not support the claim Mohammadi, Ehsan; Tahamtan, Iman; Mansourian, Yazdan; Overton, Holly (13 April 2022). "Identifying Frames of the COVID-19 Infodemic: Thematic Analysis of Misinformation Stories Across Media". JMIR Infodemiology. 2 (1): e33827. doi:10.2196/33827. eISSN 2564-1891. PMC 9987193. PMID 37113806. S2CID 246508544. They identified 6 frames, including authoritative agency (claims about actions of public authorities), intolerance (expressions of racism, xenophobia, and sexism), virulence (claims that the virus is not real), medical efficacy (claims that treatments exist for the virus), prophecy (claims that the virus has previously been predicted), and satire (humorous content)....Racist Issues: This category is about blaming the Chinese, as a nationality or ethnicity, for causing and spreading the COVID-19 virus. Some false statements attributed the root of the virus to the Chinese Communist Party, for instance: 'The Chinese Communist Party will admit that there was an accidental leak of lab-created coronavirus.'

This study cites data "collected from 8 fact-checking websites that formed a sample of 127 pieces of false COVID-19 news published from January 1, 2020 to March 30, 2020". That is to say, their sample was drawn entirely from claims during a three-month period at the beginning of the pandemic, and among them, only the claims so obviously false as to warrant public debunking by fact-checking websites. Even among this highly restricted sample, there are many types of untrue claims cited (i.e. "Sam Hyde is responsible for the spread of the new coronavirus", "The virus is an American product par excellence, according to the registry of inventions submitted in 2015"). The "racist issues" heading is given as one of four "impact themes". An example of a claim that would be supported by this reference is something like: "According to a study conducted on social media posts between January and March 2020, which looked at six 'frames' of false statements identified during that period, 'some false statements attributed the root of the virus to the Chinese Communist Party'." jp×g🗯️ 05:00, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

• 7. ? Directly makes the claim, but mostly about "Donald Trump and his entourage". Neil, Stuart; Jacobs, Peter; Lewandowsky, Stephan (1 March 2022). "The Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth". Scientific American. Motivated reasoning based on blaming an 'other' is a powerful force against scientific evidence. Some politicians—most notably former President Donald Trump and his entourage—still push the lab-leak hypothesis and blame China in broad daylight...Ironically the xenophobic instrumentalization of the lab-leak hypothesis may have made it harder for reasonable scientific voices to suggest and explore theories because so much time and effort has gone into containing the fallout from conspiratorial rhetoric.

This article does discuss the lab leak, but the quote here continues as such:

When Trump baldly pointed the finger at China in the earliest days of the pandemic, unfortunate consequences followed. The proliferation of xenophobic rhetoric has been linked to a striking increase in anti-Asian hate crimes.

That sentence contains a link to this ABC article, which is about a sentiment analysis study involving hashtags used after Trump tweeted the term "ChineseVirus" on March 16, 2020; it does not mention the lab leak theory. The "proliferation of xenophobic rhetoric" referred to in this sentence is obviously attributed to "former President Donald Trump and his entourage". Similarly, later in the story, the "xenophobic instrumentalization of the lab-leak hypothesis" would seem to also refer back to Trump. This may well be worth mentioning, since the theory saw a lot of attention and interest from this highly political context throughout the years, and that's certainly a relevant part of the discourse surrounding it. If we decided this was WP:DUE, it could be cited like: "an article in Scientific American said that 'some politicians—most notably former President Donald Trump and his entourage' had engaged in 'xenophobic instrumentalization' of the lab-leak hypothesis." jp×g🗯️ 05:00, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

• 8. ? Opinion piece in a literary magazine.Liu, Andrew (10 March 2022). "Lab-Leak Theory and the 'Asiatic' Form". n+1. Archived from the original on 3 March 2023. Retrieved 1 March 2023. The lab-leak theory came to legitimacy by a circuitous path. It was first auditioned by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo shortly after lockdown started, but journalists were quick to distance themselves from its overtones of crude Trumpian racism...the New York Times reported triumphantly that... Asians have trusted their governments to do the right thing, and they were willing to put the needs of the community over their individual freedoms. Such examples attempt to repudiate racist stereotypes of Asian disloyalty and backwardness by foregrounding Asian modernity and collectivity.

n+1 describes itself, on its "about" page, as "a print and digital magazine of literature, culture, and politics" founded by "writers and editors who wanted to revive the American tradition of politically engaged literary magazines", which sees "literature, politics, and culture as aspects of the same project". While this sounds cool, and indeed a perusal of the magazine leads me to the opinion that it is indeed pretty cool, we again run into the same issue: literary criticism is not fact, and should be attributed as opinion to its authors. Here, for example, is a great article, which opens with "We live in undeniably ugly times. Architecture, industrial design, cinematography, probiotic soda branding — many of the defining features of the visual field aren’t sending their best." I agree with this, but it would be ridiculous to add it in wikivoice to the lead of architecture, industrial design, cinematography etc. "Architecture is undeniably ugly": this would be so obviously inappropriate, it's hard to even explain how.

The article begins by saying that the coverage and discourse about the wet-market theory was xenophobic, among the examples of which were Fauci and a senior UN official, and later, "That the wet-market theory is Sinophobic became liberal common sense". The full quote, from which the citation's quote has been excerpted, goes on to say:

The lab-leak theory came to legitimacy by a circuitous path. It was first auditioned by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo shortly after lockdown started, but journalists were quick to distance themselves from its overtones of crude Trumpian racism. Nevertheless the theory gained new life last spring, when some of those same journalists — abetted by a chorus of concern trolls — began to question if they had been blinded by liberal partisanship. By May 2021, lab leak was circulating more widely in the mainstream news than wet market ever had, leading to new Senate hearings, an investigation by the Biden Administration, and an endorsement by the conscience of safe liberalism, Jon Stewart. A December 2021 poll indicated that the lab-leak theory is now believed by 72 percent of Americans.

This seems to militate against the claim that the idea was "fed by racist undercurrents", and rather implies that it was believed by lots of people for a variety of reasons. Overall, the article is quite long, and is a perfectly acceptable piece of social and literary critique. However, the nature of literary critique as the personal expression of its author becomes apparent in passages like this one:

Although there are many reasons for the lab-leak theory’s wide acceptance, it is hard to ignore just how neatly its abstract, worldwide contours align with burgeoning global animosity toward China as an omnipotent economic force. It is the plausibility of this China, rather than a generic, foreign Orient, that I believe serves as the major basis for stereotype and the resonance of the lab-leak theory.

Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Cite it with in-text attribution then; for it is the opinion of its author. jp×g🗯️ 05:00, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

• 9. ? Directly makes the claim about Donald Trump. Aria Adibrata, Jordan; Fikhri Khairi, Naufal (29 April 2022). "The Impact of Covid-19 Blame Game Towards Anti-Asian Discrimination Phenomena". The Journal of Society and Media. 6 (1): 17–38. doi:10.26740/jsm.v6n1.p17-38. eISSN 2580-1341. ISSN 2721-0383. S2CID 248616418. The endless debate between the United States and China led to various statements by politicians in various countries blaming China for the Covid-19 virus. Among them is hate speech by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, which is a form of Sinophobic sentiment that aims to create a public narrative to discriminate and corner China. Bolsonaro's views have received support from several political elites in Brazil, such as Brazil's Minister of Economy Paulo Guedes, who said that China was the creator of Covid-19, and also supported by Minister of Education Abraham Weintraub, who supported the theory that the Covid-19 pandemic stems from a virus lab leak in China.

This source has significant amounts of hedging which aren't reflected in the quote. Here is an example (emphasis mine):

Narrations carried out by various political elites from various countries in the world, one of which is Donald Trump, who calls the Covid-19 virus the "Chinese Virus", "Kung Flu", "Wuhan Virus," and various other negative mentions that are spread through social media and news channel is a form of xenophobic and racist narrative (Benjamin 2021). The speech has connotations that seem to be scapegoating a specific institution or community—which in this case is China and the Asian community

The paper overwhelmingly discusses the issue of racism as a consequence of the pandemic's origin in China and of politicians' inflammatory remarks regarding that, rather than in specific conjunction with a lab leak theory. Apart from that, yes; it does directly say that Donald Trump's advancement of the lab leak theory directly caused anti-Asian racism. I'm not sure about the rigor of the paper or of the journal (it makes some questionable claims) but that can be addressed later. jp×g🗯️ 05:00, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

• 10. = Not a clear attribution. Perng, Wei; Dhaliwal, Satvinder K. (May 2022). "Anti-Asian Racism and COVID-19". Epidemiology. 33 (3): 379–382. doi:10.1097/EDE.0000000000001458. ISSN 1044-3983. PMC 8983612. PMID 34954709. Since the early days of the pandemic, politicians promoted the unsubstantiated hypothesis the virus was developed in a laboratory in Wuhan, referring to COVID-19 as 'foreign,' 'Chinese,' and 'the Kung Flu.' Use of such language led to an 800% increase of these racist terms on social media and news outlets,6 and redirected fear and anger in a manner that reinforced racism and xenophobia.

The source says "use of such language", referring to the terms mentioned immediately before that sentence fragment. The lab leak theory constitutes the claim that "COVID-19 escaped from a laboratory". It does not encompass the claim that "COVID-19 is called the Kung Flu"; this is a separate thing. "COVID-19 came from China" is similarly a separate issue, and "COVID-19 is Chinese" is a linguistic concern. While "the hypothesis " is included in the list of things that politicians did, it's not clear that they are attributing the increase in racist terms being posted on social media to it. jp×g🗯️ 05:00, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

• 11. N This is an opinion piece. Gorski, David (1 August 2022). "The rise and fall of the lab leak hypothesis for the origin of SARS-CoV-2". Science-Based Medicine. That's evolutionary biologist Heather Heying on the podcast that she does with her husband, biologist Bret Weinstein, claiming that it's a conspiracy to 'definitely' show that it was 'those people' who caused the pandemic, not a lab leak. In a massive exercise in projection, she calls claims that the pandemic started at the Huanan market 'racist,' apparently ignoring the blatant anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia behind lab leak, whose proponents often ascribe a nefarious coverup to the Chinese government...

I addressed this above, so I will simply say here what I said there. This is an opinion piece written on a science website. The full quote is this:

That’s evolutionary biologist Heather Heying on the podcast that she does with her husband, biologist Bret Weinstein, claiming that it’s a conspiracy to “definitely” show that it was “those people” who caused the pandemic, not a lab leak. In a massive exercise in projection, she calls claims that the pandemic started at the Huanan market “racist,” apparently ignoring the blatant anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia behind lab leak, whose proponents often ascribe a nefarious coverup to the Chinese government."

This is opinion writing. It's clear that David Gorski thinks there is "blatant anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia behind lab leak", which is perfectly fine to attribute to him. However, the article is clearly a work of opinion: he also says things like "Also, in that interview from last year Jon Stewart disappointed me in the extreme by sounding very much like the sort of conspiracy theorists that he used to mock on The Daily Show."" It's clear here that David Gorski thinks Jon Stewart is 'disappointing in the extreme', but it would clearly be inappropriate to add He is "disappointing in the extreme". to Jon Stewart with no attribution. Opinions are not facts, and should be attributed to their authors. jp×g🗯️ 05:00, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

• 12. N This cites an opinion piece. Garry, Robert F. (10 November 2022). "The evidence remains clear: SARS-CoV-2 emerged via the wildlife trade". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 119 (47): 3. Bibcode:2022PNAS..11914427G. doi:10.1073/pnas.2214427119. eISSN 1091-6490. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 9704731. PMID 36355862. Lab leak theories are often bolstered by racist tropes that suggest that epidemiological, genetic, or other scientific data have been purposefully withheld or altered to obscure the origin of the virus.

A citation at the end of this sentence has been omitted from the quote. The citation leads to Cho J., (2021) Lab-Leak, gain-of-function and the media myths swirling around the Wuhan Institute of Virology. https://www.mintpressnews.com/lab-leak-gain-function-media-myths-swirling-around-wuhan-institute/278555/. Accessed 11 August 2022. There's absolutely no indication that the paper has done any empirical work to scientifically determine that the opinion is true. It is an opinion article on a website whose front page, as of right now, seems to clearly indicate it exists to advocate political ends. I do not think it should be cited as fact. jp×g🗯️ 05:00, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

As I recall the only purpose of the refgroup was to quell continued objections that LL had nothing to do with racism according to sources. It's redundant IMO and should be removed. Bon courage (talk) 02:27, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Is this true? If so, something very wrong has happened here; I am rather concerned by the idea that twelve references could be added to an article to "quell continued objections" in a way that substantially misrepresented the sources (either deliberately or through failure to actually read what they said before citing them). jp×g🗯️ 05:31, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Not sure. You'll need to do some digging. I think Shibbolethink might be able to help? I think if you're going to start lodging accusations about "deliberate" misrepresentation you need to provide diffs and evidence pronto (or strike), considering this is a WP:CTOP. Bon courage (talk) 05:37, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

I do not understand what you are talking about; you might want to read my comment again. jp×g🗯️ 06:10, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

You wrote: "... in a way that substantially misrepresented the sources (either deliberately or ...". What makes you cast WP:ASPERSIONS about sources being possibly misrepresented "deliberately"? How do you think that's helpful? Bon courage (talk) 06:15, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Please read my entire comment (i.e. all the way to the end of the sentence). jp×g🗯️ 07:17, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

I (obviously) did: "either deliberately or through failure to actually read what they said before citing them". I'm talking about the 'either' part of your 'either/or' accusation. Why are you raising the possibility of deliberate misrepresentation? And are you raising this as an admin or as a regular editor? Personally, I assume the refgroup was added with good intentions (FWIW). Bon courage (talk) 07:21, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

As I have tried to explain, I am not attempting to "raise", "cast" or "lodge" anything. I don't know how to explain the meaning of the words "either" and "or" in greater detail. jp×g🗯️ 05:52, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

@JPxG: the misrepresentations in this article are not confined to the statements about xenophobia, and the aspersions about racism are typical of the discussion page.

For example, the claim that "Most large Chinese cities have laboratories that study coronaviruses" is stated in wikivoice but sourced to an opinion piece by a conflicted author. This issue was raised on the Talk page and countered with a bunch of stuff about racism.

Besides the abuse of sourcing, that claim is misleading because the WIV lab in Wuhan is not just one of many coronavirus labs: it's the lab that was involved in the DEFUSE proposal to add a furin cleavage site to a sarbecovirus, the year before the outbreak. DEFUSE is easily the most disturbing piece of evidence on the lab-leak side, but it is relegated to a single paragraph buried deep in the article. - Palpable (talk) 03:53, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

I would disagree with some of your interpretations above. Others I do agree with and think those particular sources could be removed. I admit i added many of these, but I am not sure where others came from or if those are the original quotations I referenced. But many of the things you describe above I would take issue with.E.g. I think #1 does support the statement about "racist undercurrents" which underly the leveraging (by some) of the lab leak theory. E.g. yes, some people have racist ideas/motivations/ideologies which are part of their support of the theory. #1 absolutely supports that idea. We can word it however you would like, but that is the idea put forward in that ref. It is also the idea underlying a major thesis in Refs 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, . You repeatedly attempt to use formal logic to somehow invalidate refs and sourcing, but that isn't how Misplaced Pages works. We don't need our refs themselves to be "logical", we just need them to, in some semblance, to recapitulate or represent en face what we say they represent. We don't need formal logic proofs every time we write a reference on this website. If a source says "lots of people in group X who support theory Y do so based on racist ideology" then I can reference that source and say "many (or some) supporters of theory Y are motivated by racist ideology". That's WP:SYNTHNOTSUMMARY.Ref 10, I believe you are misreading. "use of such language" would also encompass rhetoric calling it a bioweapon, from a chinese lab, etc. in their analysis.
Ref 11, we have discussed many times. It is the expert opinion of an expert in the field of misinformation. And is therefore very useful here. WP:ASSERT expert opinions (which are widely regarded as true) as fact. The same goes for Ref 12, Garry is an expert on the topic of the lab leak theory. OTOH, he cites the mintpress article, so yes if we want to say it is in a sense poisoned since we don't consider Mintpress an RS, then yes we should remove 12.Ref 2 I mostly agree with your analysis, but I think it's just the wrong quote. I can't find the right one at the moment. I am not opposed to taking out that ref if we cannot produce a better quote from the source.I don't have a lot of time or energy to dedicate to a back and forth on this, and if most others here agree with your interpretation then I would say yeah, let's just take out the whole thing. However, if I am right, and some/many of these quotes do support a summary-style statement to the effect that "yes, there is some racism in the milleu of ideas which back up the lab leak theory" then we should keep those refs/quotes, and keep/optimize that statement. — Shibbolethink 03:42, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, your post deserves a longer response, but in short, yes -- I think these demonstrate something. They:re perfectly fine sources that should be used, I just think they fail to support the claim that the theory is "informed by racist undercurrents" or that it "leverages racist tropes", et cetera (at least as objective fact: it's clear that some people have said this, which is itself noteworthy). jp×g🗯️ 05:40, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

There is no disagreement in RS the LL is shaped by racism, so we are required simply to assert this expert knowledge in wikivoice, to be neutral. Bon courage (talk) 05:51, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

This is untrue. jp×g🗯️ 05:53, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

What, that it's a truism LL is a shaped by racism? or that we need to be neutral? Fron WP:NPOV:

Uncontested and uncontroversial factual assertions made by reliable sources should normally be directly stated in Misplaced Pages's voice. Unless a topic specifically deals with a disagreement over otherwise uncontested information, there is no need for specific attribution for the assertion

(my emphasis) Bon courage (talk) 05:57, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

What are the "uncontested and uncontroversial factual assertions made by reliable sources"? Are you just ignoring the above section completely? At this point it begins to feel like you are just WP:BLUDGEONING. jp×g🗯️ 06:09, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

The uncontested and uncontroversial factual assertion is that there is blatant anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia behind lab leak. RS tells us this and Nobody contests it. All that editors are trying to do is find the right words to relay this knowledge. Bon courage (talk) 06:18, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Please read the beginning part of this section, i.e. the more than twenty-four paragraphs of detailed source analysis. RS does not "tell us this". jp×g🗯️ 06:27, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm not particularly interested in (most of) those sources and support the refgroup removal; I usually prefer one stellar source to WP:REFBOMBing, and of course the lede should summarize the body. The WP:SBM source gives us Gorski's expert assessment that there is blatant anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia behind lab leak, and is RS for statements of fact so: we can just assert it. NPOV is not optional. Bon courage (talk) 06:33, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

No; like I've said several times, the Gorski reference is obviously an opinion piece. It is not a statement of fact. Are there any other references that support your claim? jp×g🗯️ 06:40, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

"Obviously" not. Like everything on SBM, the article offers analysis, commentary and evaluation around (fringe) scientific topics. As such it is suitable for assertions of fact, as the community has repeatedly found. If Gorski ventures opinions (typically by saying 'in my opinon') that's another matter. Bon courage (talk) 07:22, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Where is this consensus? jp×g🗯️ 07:51, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Many past RfCs - but it's wrapped-up (quite nicely in this case) at WP:RSP which says this source is WP:GREL. That is, "reliable in most cases on subject matters in its areas of expertise". We're in a WP:FRINGE science topic so this is its area of expertise. Bon courage (talk) 07:57, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

I understand what WP:GREL means, and have never disagreed with you that the source is GREL. Where is the consensus that "being WP:GREL" causes all opinions of its writers expressed in any context to become true? jp×g🗯️ 20:28, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

It is "reliable in most cases on subject matters in its areas of expertise". The lab leak is the subject matter of the article being cited. What you are basically doing is trying to recast all secondary assessments of subjects as "opinion", which happens to be a fringe-pusher gambit that is very familiar (as in "you can't use this source to say that coffee enemas are medically useless, it's just the author's OpInIon!"). Bon courage (talk) 20:35, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

If you really think I am a "fringe-pusher", feel free to start a noticeboard thread about it. Otherwise, I would appreciate if you could join me in discussing the content of the article. jp×g🗯️ 21:07, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

The point is, if the "expert assessment in fringe science is just opinion" idea was adopted, a large part of Misplaced Pages would need to be re-written. Fortunately we have a NPOV policy and consensus about reliable sourcing to make the position plain. Bon courage (talk) 21:11, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Okay, so I hope you'll allow me to ask a question, and I hope that you'll indulge me in answering it. What specific sentence do you think would be acceptable to write in the article attribute to this source, based on the excerpted section? jp×g🗯️ 21:32, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

We already have Gorski (quoted & attributed) in the body for this, so that's done already, if perhaps not in final form. Bon courage (talk) 22:41, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps instead of starting from the conclusion that the lab leak theory is racist, what if we surveyed the field unbiasedly for where lab leak hypotheses come from and what motivates them? Not to say this one is best, but for example David Quammen in NYT (https://archive.is/4nyZm) happened to cross my desk today. He says,

Research accidents have occurred, too, in the history of dangerous new viruses, and longtime concerns over such accidents constitute the priors of some who favor the lab-leak hypothesis for Covid.

The lab-leak idea, meanwhile, took hold in some political circles, partly because it dovetailed with attitudes toward the Chinese government, its repressive policies and its penchant for secrecy.

The attractions of the lab-leak idea weren’t entirely partisan.

Even the director-general of the W.H.O. himself, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, hoped for further investigation. At a news conference marking the report’s publication, Tedros said, “As far as W.H.O. is concerned, all hypotheses remain on the table,” noting the need for continued research.

So, what’s tilting the scales of popular opinion toward lab leak? The answer to that is not embedded deeply in the arcane data I’ve been skimming through here. What’s tilting the scales, it seems to me, is cynicism and narrative appeal. Sennalen (talk) 05:38, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

We already have an "Origins" section which actually details 'where it came from' (something that NYT piece doesn't consider). The chief document seems to be from Jan 26 2020 entitled Coronavirus Bioweapon–How China Stole Coronavirus From Canada And Weaponized It. (It would be fascinating to know about the gensis of this document, but alas there are no sources I know of.) Within a few days this had gone (ahem) viral with many millions of shares/views. But as we try to say in the article, LL is not one thing, there's the bare 'respectable' scientific question, which is fairly mundane (could it have been from a leak? that was considered somewhat possible at first, then increasingly less so), AND parallel to that is an enormous megastructure of pseudoscience/politics/conspiracism. As the science question has faded this megastructure has remained, and seems to be what is interesting academics as a kind of psycho-social phenomenon. Bon courage (talk) 06:24, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

A document widely ridiculed and with no use by others can hardly be called an origin for the still-active scientific inquiry into lab-related incidents. If you want to write about covid conspiracy theories, there's an article for that. Sennalen (talk) 06:35, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

The point is that this IS the origin of LL, according to RS. As I've said before this Misplaced Pages article should not exist. We should have the 'respectable' stuff in Origin of COVID-19 and there should be an article on the whack stuff. But editors (pro-LL ones especially) insisted on having this article which splices the two things. We are where we are. Bon courage (talk) 06:41, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

I agree with Bon courage that Gorski is not an opinion piece, and is WP:GREL. This is clearly supported by WP:RSPSOURCES and the RSN discussions it links. –Novem Linguae (talk) 12:36, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

I agree with Shibbolethink on all points. DFlhb (talk) 19:39, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Addition to the "Developments in 2022" section?

I propose we mention that Zapatero and Barba (2023) say that these developments (Worobey, Pekar, Holmes) do not close the discussion on the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The current section includes only comments on the 2022 developments that supports them, while including Zapatero and Barba adds proper balance, in my opinion. Forich (talk) 22:24, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

As a review, it's not really new information or an occurrence specifically in 2022, so a chronological section is not really the best for it. It could be used to shore up general summary statements that might be relying on older references. Sennalen (talk) 23:25, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

Arbitration Enforcement Request

There is a request for enforcement regarding editor behavior concerning COVID-19 origins at Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement#ජපස Sennalen (talk) 22:10, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

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