A Good Way to Debate
Remember COVID? People want you to.
Hey everyone. I know we are in the August break but I have been meaning to write something about a debate I watched this year, simply because it was an actual healthy and great way to use the Internet in an era where the Internet is dark and full of terrors. But COVID was also in the news recently, and it is related to that evil topic.
Earlier this year, I came across a wild debate about the origins of COVID, but it wasn’t a simple back-and-forth. Rather, it was a detailed, twenty hour debate where both sides got lots of time to make their points and respond to their opponents.
There is no name-calling.
There is no yelling.
There is no lying.
It was a simple dialogue between two parties, presenting evidence and then letting a set of judges determine a winner. And here’s the biggest thing: In order to participate, the person taking a side in the debate has to put $100,000 on the line.
You read that correctly: A dude who said he thinks COVID originated in nature put $100K of his own money on the line and let a few judges determine if he was right. And he won. Not a bad way to earn $100,000.
Of course, the debate took place over the course of a twenty hour discussion, which is a lot. But it’s still impressive! The format is organized by a group called Rootclaim, who allow you to put up $100,000 to debate your point in front of two neutral judges who determine - using a “Bayesian,” or probabilistic analysis - whether or not you have proven that your claim is more likely than not.
Again, Rootclaim did not agree with Miller’s point going into the debate (you actually have to challenge them to make money),1 but still found that he won. It was a good faith discussion on a highly contentious topic, and it was so much more rewarding to watch as opposed to the other “debate” shows that are out there (looking at you, Jubilee). Here is Miller’s first debate, and links to the follow-ups should be easily accessible:
I know what you’re thinking: Rico David, I don’t have 20 hours to devote to watching a debate about the origins of COVID. Fair enough, and I didn’t either, so I watched it over the course of many months and often in the background of what I was doing. It works as a podcast too, and I know all you guys listen to those (sickos).
Here were the big points that were made by Miller that stood out to me:
All of the early COVID hospitalizations in Wuhan were connected to the market. There were some doctors who got sick early, but they had patients who were working in the market.
When scientists tested areas in the market, they not only found two separate strains of COVID,2 but they found those strains to be highly concentrated in the portion of the market where animals were kept. They found COVID lining the cages where animals were held, and COVID was found all along a drain for the animals’ waste:
The very first officially confirmed COVID case (not hospitalization), was a vendor at the market. Same goes for the next four, and then about twenty of the next forty confirmed cases. Pretty hard for it to jump from the lab to the market without causing a single other infection.3
There is no evidence at all for any genetic manipulation of the virus, which means COVID was out there in the wild.4
Miller won the debate, but that isn’t to say the other side lacked arguments. Rootclaim’s debaters made lots of good points, which is possible with a topic like this because there are genuine differences in opinion. However, I do think that 200 almost 7 years post-COVID, the evidence for a zoonotic, natural origin is really starting to pile up.5 I’ve written before about the growing (albeit contested) consensus in the intelligence community and the overwhelming agreement amongst the scientific community that COVID was a spillover event, but I think with a topic like this there are always going to be areas of disagreement. What I enjoyed about the Rootclaim debate was that this disagreement never descended into insanity or crazy conspiracy theories. Both sides presented factual claims and let the judges come to a conclusion. Pretty neat, and an argument for the Internet not being a bad idea after all.
Say something about the Fauci hearing since you’re already here talking about COVID.
The argument for the Internet being a bad idea popped up last week when Anthony Fauci was called to testify in front of the Senate by Senator Rand Paul. Well, he didn’t really testify, because he took the fifth and said nothing. #YOLO
To get the legal analysis out of the way, Fauci’s decision to plead the fifth was fully supported by the evidence in front of him. If you want to blame anyone for Fauci not testifying, look no further than Senator Paul himself.
As most people know, Fauci was given a pardon by then-President Joe Biden, with the stated goal of protecting him from malicious prosecution under the Trump Administration. Pardons were also extended to Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney for the same reason (Schiff rejected his). So, what does Fauci have to fear if he has a pardon and can’t be prosecuted anyway? Well, Paul said it himself that if Fauci lied during the hearing, that Biden’s pardon wouldn’t cover any of Fauci’s testimony.6 Paul is right: Fauci’s pardon is for the period leading up to January 20, 2025, so anything that happened after that date is up for grabs.
Paul has also said multiple times in public that he thinks Fauci should go to jail and that he lies under oath. So, logically, if a prosecutor comes out and says, “Yeah, I am trying to engineer a perjury trap for this guy,” a lawyer is going to tell their client, “omg, invoke your fifth amendment right now bae.”
But another thing has jumped out at me over the past few days: A lot of Paul’s statements about what Fauci said simply aren’t true. Paul said this in a tweet:
Fauci walked into a CIA briefing in 2020 and overrode six out of seven scientists who said COVID came from a Wuhan lab. This isn't a conspiracy. It's a convergence of interests. They funded gain-of-function research. The virus leaked. So they covered their tracks.
That is 100% false. It was a group of CIA agents who said what Paul is attributing to Fauci, not the Italian Stallion himself. Paul did this a few times. After releasing copies of Fauci’s journal, Paul repeatedly said that Fauci was concealing COVID’s origin from the public, because in private he was saying the market was not the beginning of COVID, but the “amplifier.” However, in the same journal entry, Fauci said that he believed it was a natural spillover event, which is a weird thing to write in private if you somehow “knew” it was a lab leak! But it contradicts Paul’s major point.
Also, Fauci was saying the exact same thing in public at the time! In multiple interviews he said he did not think the wet market was the source of the outbreak. We have since studied the first cases more and more, and it was clear by November 2021 that the first cases were all, in fact, tied to the wet market. Fauci was wrong at the time, but he was working with the evidence in front of him, which is something that applies to a lot of his journal entries.
Here is Paul with a tweet arguing that Fauci lied about the vaccines:
But the very journal entry Paul is citing to doesn’t support what he’s saying. Fauci is clearly saying that the vaccines help slow transmission of the virus, even though it doesn’t stop it 100%. He says it right there: “There is some degree of modest but declining protection as you would expect.”
This was completely consistent with what he was saying in public at the time. In fact, early on in 2021, Fauci was encouraging vaccinated people to still wear masks because we did not know if the vaccines reduced transmissibility or not. We just knew that they were effective in reducing symptoms. In January 2021, Fauci explicitly said:
You could be prevented from getting clinical disease, and still have the virus that is in your nasopharynx because you could get infected. We’re not sure, at this point, that the vaccine protects you against getting infected. We know for sure it’s very, very good, 94%, 95% in protecting you against clinically recognizable disease.
And that last line is where I’ll air my gripe with Fauci: Just talk like a human being, bro. “Clinically recognizable disease.” Come on! Speak to me like I’m a highly intelligent golden retriever (some would argue that’s possibly true).
What Fauci means is that the vaccine is 94-95% effective in reducing your symptoms,7 but it doesn’t mean you can’t carry COVID or pass it on to others. Fauci said in 2021 that it was “logical” to assume that reduced symptomatology would reduce spread (which ended up being true!), but we didn’t have any hard evidence at the time.
All in all, watching the discussion over Fauci again made me sad.8 Did we make mistakes during COVID? Of course. We probably shut down schools for too long (fun fact: Fauci was arguing to reopen them in July of 2020!). We punished people for being outdoors, when the virus was less likely to spread outdoors. We kept some restrictions in place for too long, even after emergency rooms had stabilized and cases went down. And too many people gave a tacit OK to the George Floyd protests in 2020, despite the fact that a pandemic was raging (guess who criticized the protests for that reason? Fauci!).
But there is a substantial difference between criticizing Tony Fauci for his conduct during COVID and believing lies and conspiracy theories. As all my readers know, those things have tragic and sad real-life consequences:
What we really need is a Rootclaim debate about all the COVID conspiracies, but I doubt anyone would want to put up the money, possibly on either side. Kudos to Peter Miller for taking the giant leap.
Only somewhat related to the foregoing: I’d love to see a Rootclaim debate format used to discuss the legal history of something like the 14th Amendment. A lot of law is persuasion, so I don’t know how applicable a Bayesian model would be, but the format makes for a fun discussion.
In any case, that’s it from me for the month of August. I might pop in with something, but don’t count on it. Hopefully you all get some time off too.
The founder of Rootclaim, Saar Wilff, is an Israeli entrepreneur who has made a bunch of money. Instead of hoarding it for himself, he basically allows people to challenge his claims and then pays them $100,000 if they win. Pretty awesome. And he swings to both sides of The Debates™: He is working out the details of a debate with Steve Kirsch (remember him?) about the COVID vaccines, although Kirsch has a long history of backing out of debates.
This feels like a smoking gun to me. At the very least, the presence of two strains of COVID means that if this was a lab leak, it wasn’t accidental. It could only be that someone from the lab went into the market and released the two strains directly into the market, and coincidentally right where the animal cages were.
I was on a podcast in May 2020, where I was pretty open to a lab leak as an explanation. If you have read the Jackal for a long time, you’ll recall that I posted almost every link I could find arguing for a lab leak. In the years since that I’ve spent looking at the evidence, it is almost impossible for me to see this as anything other than zoonotic. Maybe we’ll get the smoking gun evidence soon and I’ll change my mind! But there was one other thing I said in the podcast that has just now jumped into my head: The U.S. government said early on that they did not think it was a lab leak because they monitor Chinese communications and there was no discussion (at least that we observed) that featured Chinese officials scrambling to cover up a lab leak. Instead, they all reacted with puzzlement to the virus in late 2019, and began to worry like the rest of the world in early 2020.
Initially, one of the reasons some scientists suspected that COVID leaked from a lab was the presence of a “furin cleavage site” in the virus, which is unusual in a coronavirus. But subsequent studies have shown these sites are not uncommon in coronaviruses.
A powerful point made by Miller but I’m putting in a footnote: The overwhelming majority of Chinese citizens believe COVID leaked from a U.S. lab. Just goes to show you how media consumption can shape public opinion.
If you want to see what Fauci says to Paul when he’s not taking the fifth, this is a good video.
I have gotten COVID 3 times, and have only had symptoms once. All other times I was asymptomatic! The vaccines work!
It happened after I wrote the majority of this post, but now Fauci has been held in contempt and referred to the DOJ for prosecution. Here is my prediction for what happens next: DOJ will either decline to prosecute or they will move forward, and the case will not make it out of the grand jury process. If it does, I would expect a quick dismissal. TL;DR: Fauci isn’t going to jail.