Judging by the comments in this thread, it seems a lot of people are still unaware that:
1. Gain of function research primarily uses samples collected from nature, and seeks to stimulate their evolution in as natural a way as possible to learn how viruses evolve in nature. If such viruses were to escape the lab, they would appear "natural"
2. It's not xenophobic for people from the US to suggest the possibility of a lab leak, because the US was itself funding gain of function research on novel coronaviruses in the Wuhan BSL4 lab
3. Lab leaks happen more often than most people realize[1]
I feel like people are doing a poor job distinguishing between "engineered" and "leaked."
There is, from my understanding, reasonable evidence to conclude the virus was not engineered from the perspective of "we took genes from one virus and moved them to this virus," but there's no evidence disproving the idea that it was the result of gain of function research.
My personal feeling is that these statements are true:
* The virus is unlikely to have been engineered (in the way I described above) and leaked.
* There is circumstantial evidence the virus was the result of gain of function research and it leaked.
* There is circumstantial evidence the virus was a natural research sample and it leaked.
* There is circumstantial evidence the virus was introduced by an animal/person who traveled to the wet market.
Some of these are more likely than others, and an individual's own calibration for what is likely or unlikely will probably come into play more than evidence in the short term and possibly long term as well. I can say the vast majority of us are not qualified to answer the question either way though.
My personal feelings are that all 3 are possible, but approximately 0.0001% of people will actually consider the likelihood of each one, but rather, most will choose whichever one is most convenient and comfortable to believe in.
Of course as an Asian person, whatever people believe in will have a direct impact on me. I remember after 9/11, the amount of awful things that were said and done to the Sikh population in my city. It didn’t matter they had literally nothing to do with the attacks. People were angry and wanted someone to blame.
As a white American in Beijing during the 9/11 attacks, I experienced lots of not-so-surprising behavior from my Chinese hosts. Many Chinese felt that America deserved what they got. Tensions were still high from the "Hainan Island Incident" only a few months earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident
As long as we stick to the concept of nation, we likely have to live with such issues. This is how group identity works, sometimes to your advantage, sometimes to your disadvantage.
> Many Chinese felt that America deserved what they got.
I don't see how their opinion matters, since they're misinformed and orchestrated by the CCP.
The Hainan incident was caused by a Chinese fighter pilot running into a US surveillance plane. The former is agile, the latter is not, so that's the fault of the fighter.
Also, a plane in distress doesn't need permission to land. For the CCP to make a big deal out of that when there's no other runway available shows their true nature - evil and authoritarian.
The CCP has been at war with the US since the 1950s over ideology. If the US was not their enemy, the CCP would just pick another country.
I've noticed that otherwise intelligent people seem to place significance in "man in the street" conversations with people who live in totalitarian countries and have no power.
FWIW, when we heard of the incident, I think the prevailing sentiment was that America deserved it, and we are unrelated to China (in Europe).
America has made a lot of enemies and inflicted a lot of damage and terror for what seems as both good and bad reasons. After all the one-sided "interventions", I find it hard to disagree that America (not the Americans affected) deserved something in return.
I assign non-negligible probability to each of them. I don't know.
But I hate the stupid racism and hate around it. COVID-19 attacked every country. With the exception of, like, New Zealand (but it affected them as well... had to shut down their borders, etc).
These viruses are a threat to all humanity. I just want us to fight them better and help everyone.
I think it's super important that we both simultaneously hold China accountable (rhetorically, in the social sphere at very least) for aggressive expansionary actions (i.e. vs Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines) and human rights abuses (Uighur, etc)...
...while simultaneously trying to help everyone do better, including the Chinese, to face common threats (like novel viruses, climate change, etc). And we must not start up a new Cold War with all its proxy conflicts, death, and unnecessary economic suffering and threat of annihilation.
> But I hate the stupid racism and hate around it.
What is most astonishingly stupid about this particular racism is that while the CCP doesn’t come off looking great in significant ways, Taiwan comes away looking spectacular! Japan, Korea and Vietnam also have a lot to be commended for major aspects of their responses! Asians in the United States have on average done an excellent job of staying safe and therefore keeping our communities safer! The rest of us should be studying their policies and behaviors with a mind to adapt and emulate not having racist delusions.
> But I hate the stupid racism and hate around it. COVID-19 attacked every country. With the exception of, like, New Zealand (but it affected them as well... had to shut down their borders, etc).
As someone who lives in New Zealand, we were still "attacked" by covid all the same. The only difference arguably is the coordinated response from our government compared to others. Some of that is presumably culture too (we don't have a document held to a pseudo-religious standard ie the constitution for example) although being too laid back can have its consequences too if emergency health laws were to be abused in order to infringe on personal freedoms for example
There was a lot of luck too. Not being a major travel hub meant the virus hadn’t become widespread. The New Zealand government dragged its feet at first and clamped down just in time to prevent a much worse outbreak. If they had waited a few more days the cases likely would have gone exponentially vertical, possibly made it into more vulnerable populations and the death toll would have then increased considerably. I’m very grateful for the luck!
NZ has extremely high international air traffic. With 11M international passengers per year Auckland airport is comparable with the big US airports like SFO with 13.8M international. Even kiwis often don’t realize just how busy Auckland airport is!
> NZ has extremely high international air traffic.
Maybe per capita but not per se. The US had 241 million international air passengers in 2019[1]. The UK had >160 million[2]. The US has two land borders with significant traffic and the UK had 21.5 million Chunnel passengers in 2019[3]. The volume of passenger shipping is also vastly higher in both countries. NZ also has almost no illegal border crossings.
NZ has a much smaller risk profile than these and many other countries. And this is born out by events. By the time the world became aware of what was happening the virus had already been spreading in Europe and the US for months. While it had been introduced to NZ it was still in much earlier stages.
Keep in mind that NZ is less than a tenth the population of the UK and less than a 60th of USAs. And those figures are for the country, not a city. The point made that Auckland has a lot of travellers.
It is true that in absolute terms NZ has small trade and travel relative to the UK and US, but those factors are far from being the only reasons that NZ has suffered less death and destruction. It’s more that the UK and US have done poorly.
> Keep in mind that NZ is less than a tenth the population of the UK and less than a 60th of USAs.
Yes, hence my "per capita" comment. The risk of infection getting into a country is more of a function of how much total traffic it gets rather than the per-capita traffic.
> And those figures are for the country, not a city.
Auckland Airport represents the vast majority of all international traffic into New Zealand, and not just flights.
> The point made that Auckland has a lot of travellers.
Not by absolute number which is what matters most for how easy it is for a virus to find its way in and get established domestically.
> It’s more that the UK and US have done poorly.
This is an important point and I do not belittle it at all. My point isn't to defend the USA and the UK but to point out that the difficulty of NZ's response was enormously easier both absolutely and relatively given the nature of NZ's geography and the fact that the local epidemic had barely started by the lockdowns. NZ has a lot to be proud of in its response, but no reason to be smug.
> Auckland Airport represents the vast majority of all international traffic into New Zealand, and not just flights.
Yes - and that is a hell of a lot for a small place. It’s comparable to something like SFO, but at the far end of the planet. But yes, the scale is small by international standards.
> the difficulty of NZ's response was enormously easier both absolutely and relatively given the nature of NZ's geography
This helped, but there are a lot more islands that have done poorly. I’m not sure that it was enormously easier, but the few week we got were key.
In terms of getting governments to move fast, NZs government moved far faster than one would have expected, and the advantage gained by the short delay due to geography undoubtedly saved us a lot of deaths. We were on a vicious exponential growth.
> NZ has a lot to be proud of in its response, but no reason to be smug.
Absolutely. My view is more one of horror at the considerable reliance placed on gut feeling, belief systems and hope rather than science and cooperation.
NZ had swine flu just 10 days after the USA. Covid19 reached New Zealand before Berlin. Even back in 1918 the flu pandemic reached NZ in months at a time when that journey by ship wasn't much faster!
Correction, NZ had its first cases of swine flu connected directly with travel to Mexico, the epicenter of the pandemic, 10 days after the USA identified its first cases which were community spread. In other words the virus had been circulating for some time in the United States already and just happened to be observed then. Case in point. The US/Mexico border is the most crossed border in the world with 350 million documented crossings annually and undocumented crossings in the 6 figures annually. Each crossing is another chance that the virus gets in and starts spreading domestically which is why the first case was community spread and not associated with travel to Mexico.
> Covid19 reached New Zealand before Berlin.
Maybe the first detected case but considering that Germany had its first detected case in late January in Bavaria a full month before NZ's first case, again directly associated with international travel, the virus very well had opportunity to have already gotten to Berlin and elsewhere undetected.
> Even back in 1918 the flu pandemic reached NZ in months at a time when that journey by ship wasn't much faster!
This was the massive demobilization from WWI with a rush of repatriation from the epicenter of the pandemic which had been active in Europe for some time, Spain was just the first country to admit it had an epidemic. Again, my case in point, NZ was infected long after most of the rest of world because NZ is out of the way. Thank goodness it is.
Those who had planes flying over our homes know. The various trials the airport conducted with low A380s and other large plane were a nightmare. We aren’t in a typical flight path, but various trials put us in one. I’m not sorry to see that cease.
Being small kind of a bigger deal than being an island. Air travel doesn’t care much if you’re an island or not. The US is practically an island in many senses except for Mexico and Canada, but the virus didn’t come over land, it came over air in multiple places, especially from folks going on Alpine ski trips.
If we had shut down air travel early on globally (not just China...) and pursued a vigorous in-country test and trace program, we would’ve had a chance.
Unlikely imo. False reliance on testing has created more issues than it helped. Look at Taiwan (another small island nation). They don't bother testing. If you are sick, it's assumed you have COVID and you quarantine for two weeks. Much smarter and safer imo.
I disagree, and think small island nations do have much better chances. Otherwise we'd probably have great success stories in places like Andorra, Armenia, and Vatican City. I'm sure island countries to be more self reliant, with fewer major transport hubs that can be locked down.
Vatican City is not a near-island like the US, tho. It’s a micro state with massive travel to/from the rest of Italy (which was hit early).
Taiwan had high mask usage early on. That would’ve helped a lot in the US.
Testing was very successful, actually, in places like Singapore. Didn’t help that there was official discouragement of wearing masks followed by culture-war mask avoidance in the US.
I don’t think the ‘island’ part is the important bit, but the ‘small’ might be.
Hawaii and the the UK are examples of islands that haven’t done that well.
> These viruses are a threat to all humanity. I just want us to fight them better and help everyone.
It would be more accurate to say: these viruses are a threat to the current socioeconomic and sociopolitical status quo.
Take air travel for instance. It was key to spreading this and other pandemic viruses. Yet no one is questioning air travel. Note: I'm not suggesting it should be shut down, only that the idea of international flights being normalized should be revisited.
Looking at Forbes latest list to the richest people in the world tells us 2020 was a great year for wealth redistribution (from the bottom to the top). It was a great year for the status quo, for the globalists. As for the rest of us? 2020 was not so good.
Nitpick, but important: saying "wealth redistribution (from the bottom to the top)" implies there's a fixed amount of wealth, like a pie, and the "top" are getting a bigger and bigger slice. A lot of people actually think like this, and it's incorrect.
It's more correct to think of e.g. Carlos or Elon as leading efforts to bake lots and lots more pie, and then keeping a lot of the pie for themselves. The dominant theme is that they're creating value that didn't exist before, not taking a larger proportion of already-existing value.
Not true. The people in the middle expand the pie, the people at the top (the 1% of the 1%) eat it. And the people at the bottom are indeed having a harder and harder time.
I hear what you're saying, and I think it hinges on how you assign credit for making more pie. Did the employee make the pie, or did the person choosing deploying the capital that particular way make the pie?
In any case, the point I think is important, and which I wanted to make, is "more pie, not dividing up the same pie" which works with both our stories.
Edit: oh, and I think it's probably not true that the people at the bottom are having a "harder and harder time". It of course would depend on which metrics you pick, but I generally understand that sort of sentiment as popular in the media but wrong in a Better-Angels-of-our-Nature kind of way. I could believe that people at the bottom are getting a smaller share percentage-wise, but the actual amount of pie they're getting is growing. People are living longer, healthier lives, there's less food insecurity, etc.
Unfortunately, avoiding a new Cold War is something that would take equal effort from both sides. If just one side is eager to wage such a battle, it will happen unless the other side acquiesces at every turn.
Actually annihilating, no. But a Cold War isn't that - it's a constant threat of such. Which can be very useful to manipulate public opinion - and there are plenty of sociopaths in politics who deem the risks worth the reward.
Despite what a lot of people think we had covid here in NZ too, people died - but like China we did a nationwide lockdown and people actually took it seriously, people only went out to buy food for 6 weeks. The government opened its pockets and made sure people, could live and still had jobs when it was over, and the economy was ready to be restarted.
If SARS-CoV-2 emerged due to the WIV's research activities, then it was potentially with the knowledge and funding of the American government, via the EcoHealth Alliance. Racism is always stupid, but in this case it's particularly so.
This absolutely shouldn't be China vs. USA, and it's deeply unfortunate that the Trump administration's early, characteristically unsupported rhetoric made it so. The WIV's safety was probably below American standards, but probably closer than a wet market is to American agricultural standards. So it's ridiculous to think a lab vs. natural origin makes it "more China's fault". If the CCP is currently covering up a lab accident, then they're probably quite unhappy that they've been "forced" to do so, and wishing in retrospect they'd instead decided a year ago to publicly blame the rogue, American-funded researcher.
Long before the pandemic, this was an obscure academic debate, between virologists who wanted to perform certain risky experiments and others who thought they presented an unacceptable risk:
With the possibility (absolutely not proven; but not disproven either) that such an experiment has just killed 2.9M people, that debate takes on a terrible new significance.
Anti-Chinese racism is stupid and toxic, yes, but you're missing the point.
People here generally aren't blaming China because that's where COVID-19 originated. That would be stupid.
No, they're blaming the CCP for covering it up in the early days, which allowed it to spread and become the global pandemic which it became. Big difference.
It's not China's fault that COVID originated there (lab leak or otherwise). It is their fault for covering up the scale of the problem and thereby helping it spread.
The article is about the earliest origins of SARS-CoV-2, whether that arose from the activities of the WIV or naturally. My comment is as well.
Once the pandemic emerged, the CCP's response was certainly terrible in many well-known ways (e.g., their attempt to suppress Yan Limeng's initial alarm, and the disappearance of multiple citizen journalists from Wuhan), though it's impossible to know whether a better response could have suppressed its worldwide spread. That's a separate question from those earliest origins, though.
I just don't think the anti-CCP sentiment is unjustified, though.
Whether it was a lab leak is important but a misdirection.
Their cover-up of the true scale of the problem (lab leak or not) made it hard for politicians in other countries to lock down quickly. It helped it spread intentionally to multiple countries and by then it was too late.
If they were blasting their sirens early in 2021 instead of covering it up we might have had swifter border closures etc.
> Their cover-up of the true scale of the problem (lab leak or not) made it hard for politicians in other countries to lock down quickly. It helped it spread intentionally to multiple countries and by then it was too late.
I disagree. The actions from a lot of countries were absolutely lacking, even when they could see how bad it was given both China's data, and Italy, Israel's initial incidents.
China locked down super hard towards late February/mid-March.
During this time there was countless reports about the "ridiculous" and "draconian" lockdowns that occurred in China. The West basically pointed fingers, laughed, and said we'd be fine. And yet they're still not.
> If they were blasting their sirens early in 2021 instead of covering it up we might have had swifter border closures etc.
I agree that even earlier warning would have been good. I just don't see it changing anything. Countries only started to take it seriously when it really started to affect them. They didn't want to risk a political/ financial hit on taking the measures that were needed, and they paid for it.
Well said. China botched it at the beginning. They could have prevented a worldwide pandemic, but they started acting to late. However, what I know now is that pretty much any western country couldn't have prevented a pandemic, if the origin of the virus would have been them.
I'm in Germany and the whole situation is a joke. Incompetence in any way possible, everywhere. Half heated "soft lockdowns" whenever things get worse, reopen everything as soon as it gets a little better, then be all surprised that incidents are on a rise again, rinse and repeat. Obviously every state does this without any coordination with neighboring ones.
And it's not surprising. Do you think any politician is even remotely qualified for the position they have? Usually you get your position as minister of health, or defense, or whatever, but because everything in Germany just goes its way and nothing is wrong, you do your four years, pass a few meaningless bills, and that's it. Now that we have a pandemic at our hands and the minister of health would have to actually do something for the first time in several decades, the whole spiel falls apart.
I don't think we disagree? There's plenty of reason to dislike the CCP, in relation to their handling of SARS-CoV-2 and otherwise. I just don't think SARS-CoV-2 originating in a WIV lab accident would add to that.
It would add to it, because it would significantly increase the number of lies they told the rest of the world, given that they've been maintaining that it isn't a lab leak.
Depending on the official, the CCP also seems to be maintaining that SARS-CoV-2 didn't originate naturally in China either, thus their (entirely unsupported) frozen food theory and push for sampling in other SE Asian countries. So I again see plenty of reason to dislike the CCP, but little specific to actual lab vs. non-lab origin.
I'm absolutely not saying the origin doesn't matter for anything--if 2.9M people died due to a particular class of research, then that absolutely should affect our judgment as to whether that research should be funded or permitted (though that cost/benefit tradeoff seems grossly unfavorable to me regardless). The link between that question and China's perceived culpability just seems bizarrely overstated to me, divorced from the reality that the USA was entirely supportive of that research pre-pandemic.
I guess you could try counting up and comparing the total lies implied by each origin, but the volume is so high that seems pointless to me. Their strategy seems more like a general fog of confusion to me than a particular story intended to be believed.
The thing with covid was it caught everyone by surprise. It’s not like the US even caught on first. It devastated Italy before we even flinched, so that alone is evidence that, at least for the US response, we would have gone to shit no matter who warned us.
The counterfactual is hard to reason about. SARS-1 was contained because international travel was restricted immediately after the first few cases. Once you seed multiple countries with it, competence matters for little.
Sars 1 made it to the US and many countries. Short story was it was contained because it was much more deadly, and transmission was tied to symptoms so it was more easily detected.
We should also blame the CCP for screwing up containment. Chinese culture is still deeply corrupt in ways that prevent honest and open discussion of safety issues. Honest and open discussion of safety issues should be table stakes for facilities like that in Wuhan. The rest of the world should be pressuring China to not operate these sorts of high-risk enterprises.
I don't mean to troll. It just seems obvious to me that countries are pressuring other countries to do stuff all the time. Of course some countries have more power than others. Malawi isn't going to be able to lean on Poland in the same way the U.S. will be able to.
By the way, one of the big proponents of gain-of-function research was Anthony Fauci. It makes sense that he came out and tried to control the narrative around the virus given that he may have been responsible for its creation.
>I can say the vast majority of us are not qualified to answer the question either way though.
It's also worth noting that even the leading experts can get these things wrong, as was the case with the Sverdlovsk lab leak.
Soviet authorities covered it up by blaming local meat markets, and leading US experts concurred with them, only to reverse their conclusion 6 years later.
It’s worth noting that in both the Sverdlov case and in this one, world scientists are only being given access to the situation in an extremely controlled fashion. A primary reason we can’t say more on what happened in this case is the CCP’s tight control over access that could help clarify the situation.
Which will always look suspicious, whether it was actually a completely natural virus or not.
Then don't make conclusions from insufficient data and manufacture consent?
I think historians in a million years will snort from laughter when reading "The WHO that denies the existence of Taiwan determined that COVID19 did not originate from the bioweapons lab in Wuhan researching that very virus, only in the city".
If it looks like a coverup, Occam says it is a coverup.
The Chinese authorities are not stupid. They know how bad it looks to not allow investigation. Which means they think the result of a free investigation would look even worse.
I disagree. The CCP's modus operandi is self preservation through suppression of information. To those perpetrating the cover up what actually happened is irrelevant. The CCP is never transparent in matters that could make them look bad. From their perspective allowing an open international investigation would make them appear guilty regardless of the results because it would be unprecedented.
While I agree with you, I'm thinking that this is a response common to sensitive government institutions in general. If this lab leak happened in the US, would we suddenly invite CCP (or Russian/N.Korean/Iranian) agents into Fort Detrick to conduct their "investigations"? Which country would actually allow such a thing?
Consider for a moment the propaganda value of being able to say, "we visited their labs and witnessed first-hand their failure to {do some sanitization procedure} correctly! Oh how they clearly don't value human lives!"
... so if an open investigation and free access would look better then a cover up then by your logic they would allow it leading to the conclusion reality looks worse?
Without going into subjective current event interpretation, the phenomenon is well illustrated in HBO's Chernobyl with the plant engineers and manager, or the show trial. Their discounting of material facts in favour of "the expected answer" by higher-ups is an endemic (and probably rational) strategy in response to ruthless (central plan+party politics)'d organisations.
I thought the lab leak hypothesis was pretty unlikely in early 2020 but having seen the how the Chinese state has acted since then it now seems entirely believable.
there were similar conspiracy way back in 2003 when SARS outbreak, except this time in 2019~, the social medias are way more viral than the virus and CCP apparently can't suppress these "contents/info/fakenews" even with the enormous help from WHO
I don't understand how this works, so forgive my ignorance.
Wouldn't the Wuhan lab be able to disprove this really easily? How often do they sequence viruses? Couldn't they show categorically that COVID-19 is not a descendant of a virus they were working with/on?
No, it's impossible for them to categorically show that it wasn't. However, they could make an extremely strong case if they completely documented all ongoing research activities in the lab before the beginning of the pandemic. This would involve total disclosure of the activity of every researcher, open access to all materials and the sequencing of all viral samples and cultures.
It is not feasible to do this probably. The WIV even claims to have completely consumed all biosamples related to RaTG13, which is the most-closely-related known virus to SARS-CoV-2. Supporting such an investigation is completely counter to their interests (speaking both of the institute and the CCP).
The overwhelming evidence is that SARS-CoV-2 emerged completely adapted to humans. This has been confirmed by the amazing lack of initial adaptation to the new human host. We only saw major changes in the spike resulting in a change in phenotype later in 2020. The proximal origins of the spike protein suggest a primate or human host. For this to happen, a natural origin in another species is astronomically improbable. It's the strongest evidence that we'll ever have as to the origins of the virus, and to this biologist it is completely indicative of what happened. We will only know the full truth if people speak out.
I had never heard this before. Do you have a source? It seems to me the more informed in virology people are the more they seem to think the 'leak' is the most likely scenario.
In politics controlling narative is more important than the truths. PRC govt paranoids US will control the narrative into another iraq's WMD. The PRC looks at this issue differently US.
As long as they don't have an audited central database of all viruses that they sequenced, they have no way to demonstrate that they showed you all of their virus lines.
And if they had such a central database, we'd have probably heard about it by now.
I'm not sure about the "audited" part, but the WIV did have such a central database. It went offline in September 2019, they say due to repeated hacking attempts. It hasn't been back since, and access to that database has been a major point of contention between those who believe a forensic investigation (i.e., one that doesn't simply trust the WIV to report whether they were working with related viruses) is necessary, and those who do not.
> Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar issued a decree to begin demilitarization of Compound 19 in 1992. However, the facility continued its work. Not a single journalist has been allowed onto the premises since 1992. About 200 soldiers with Rottweiler dogs still patrol the complex.
Absolutely, without multiple trust-worthy first-person accounts backed by evidence, the likely best we can hope for is an eventually-consistent story that we are "pretty sure" about. Considering the size of the impact on the world, that will take a long time.
I like this presentation of evidence. Rarely do you see such a short acknowledgement that there are multiple contradictory theories, each having some evidence, and making no attempt to pick which theory is correct.
Sometimes its wrong to present "both sides" like that. Like pretending the evidence against the moon landings is equal to the evidence for the moon landings. But if you're going to be wrong, this is probably the best kind of wrong.
You can present evidence for and against moon landing being a hoax and if done properly the delusional theory among them (hoax) should be really clear. Presenting the evidence as plainly as possible should be elucidating not misleading
No one's saying we didn't send artefacts to the moon ...
{Actually, done prior probably say the moon doesn't even exist, but I think this makes the point - there's a plausible reason for a reflector being there that doesn't require a manned moon-landing.
Just saying that for the sake of argument.
Though I did see a program as a teenager that presented some convincing 'evidence' that NASA/USA Government were lying to the public. Then it comes down to whether you trust the USAG who you know have lied access manipulated public perceptions on a grand scale, or trust random program makers who you don't yet know to be liars.}
Surely that can be easily waved away in the minds of an ignorant by saying it's just a shiny rock, crashed satellite, ice patch or some other silly nonsense.
well, often the benefit of listing out as much evidence as possible (basically, look at the facts on hand) is that it can help clarify WHICH theory makes the most sense
I think this is one of those areas where our day-to-day probability heuristics do not align with the actual probabilities. So, as an individual, trying to decide which theory makes the most sense is a Sisyphean task.
For example, I have seen a lot of comments that the closest natural COVID reservoir is 500 miles away, that sounds like a lot! But the average tractor trailer can cover that in a day no problem, so our heuristic needs to include how many trucks are moving between those areas, how many have come in contact with wildlife or are transporting it, etc. Since it only takes one transmission the problem rapidly becomes too complex.
Fortunately the answer has no bearing on decisions being made in the here and now, so we can afford to wait and let experts do their jobs and hope we take the right steps long term if it was something that could have been avoided.
> we can afford to wait and let experts do their jobs
We can emphatically not expect the experts to do their job. Those cited as having the most expertise (virologists who undertake gain-of-function research, symbolically under the auspices of HHS’ toothless P3CO regulation framework) have the most to lose from a finding that the pandemic’s source was a lab leak. They lose all the grants and public financial support, not to mention endure unending public scorn that will haunt the their careers for the duration.
For evidence that the relevant, oft-cited scientists act precisely this way, one need no more than to look at @BlockedVirology’s retweets:
https://twitter.com/blockedvirology
Scientists are human - I would highly recommend disabusing oneself of the notion that they might act contrary to overwhelming human incentives in as weighty a context as investigating the origins of the greatest pandemic in a century.
The only alternative in the face of this embedded conflict of interest in our (society’s) ability to credibly investigate the pandemic’s origins is for technically-minded individuals (who don’t run multimillion dollar virology labs) to avail themselves of the findings gathered to date on the origins (there’s lots! Just need to take a look, the contributors to the above feed are a good place to start), and advocate to their representatives for a credible & even-handed origins investigation.
Failing that, expect no origin beyond all reasonable doubt to be credibly identified in our lifetimes.
Scientists are human, and they will make mistakes, the benefit is that there are many of them with different incentives. The "Blocked Virology" twitter account references a lot of previous lab escapes to say that lab escapes are possible, this is good evidence against your point - how do you think we know about the previous escapes? It wasn't a random group of technically-minded individuals, it was experts that tracked it down.
The level of arrogance necessary to believe that any "technically minded" individual can find where the virus originated is mind blowing to me. Logic isn't the end-all-be-all, for many fields you must also have knowledge. We should not ignore the blindspots that deep knowledge can introduce but to just dismiss it is absurd.
There has never been a lab leak leading to a global pandemic and mass deaths, I don’t think you can compare now to anything other then maybe the Spanish flu
About 700k people died worldwide. That's more than a typical flu season but not grossly so, and it's impossible to say with certainty what kind of flu season would have occurred naturally without the escape.
This is a straw man argument. No one is seriously claiming that this is a "cooked up" (artificially created) virus. It could be a natural virus that escaped the lab.
Also, you can literally look around on this exact post and find people who believe that this virus was cooked up in a lab. There were also a lot of people on my original post who believed that.
As is often the case: never underestimate the intellectual overconfidence of people with little knowledge of the subject matter.
To draw a very clear distinction in the sand, I never said we can be 100% certain that this virus didn't originate in a lab. It's just really really unlikely. And there isn't any real evidence to support it. /Maybe/ some circumstantial evidence in the geographic proximity. But even that is probably irrelevant if the current epidemiological evidence is to be believed, which shows that the virus likely jumped into humans outside of Wuhan entirely. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
In order of likelihood, based on all available evidence and expert consensus:
zoonotic release >>> accidental lab release of a wildly collected virus >>>>>>> accidental lab release of a "cooked up" virus > intentional lab release of a "cooked up virus"
I read your post on Reddit back in the day. It was evasive and frankly condescending because you basically argue against something no-one familiar with the science is claiming: that COV is a chimeric virus that is the product of copy-and-paste genetic manipulation rather than directed evolution or gain-of-function research that has resulted in phylogenetic drift against something that was found in the wild -- most likely RaTG13.
And why should anyone take your writing seriously when you don't even talk about "gain of function" research or the various other techniques that have been used in the past decade to aerosolize viruses like H5N1? If you know about them and are deliberately omitting all mention and analysis you are just being dishonest. If you don't then you clearly aren't an expert.
There are also lots of on-topic scientific claims you could address that would let people evaluate your competence and also provide illumination -- what do statistical models say about how long it would take for RaTG13 to evolve into COV19 in the wild? What about in a lab? How likely or unlikely it is to find virii so far away from known ancestors? What are the chances of finding them once we start looking in the wild -- should we have expected to find a closer ancestor by now? And what about the claims made by the State Department about WIV, its closure in September (related: who in the West should be able to confirm/deny if this is the case)? I'd also personally be interested to hear how long it takes to develop research mice with ACE2 receptors since their existence by mid-2020 surely suggests a targeted research agenda that preceded the outbreak? Could scientists in Beijing really have done that in 2 months or whatever?
If you want to be taken seriously, you need to frame the top two or three most credible lab-escape scenarios that work with what is actually public knowledge. Then address the evidence for and against. Setting up strawmen argument, knocking them down and then virtue-signalling on racism isn't useful or on-topic.
I go into detail about petri dish vs lab animals vs accelerated evolution and how implausible it is.
Re: sampling viruses in the wild this isn't necessarily my area of expertise, I'm a lab guy. But I do know a lil bit about it, re: ebola in bats mostly. Only that it actually takes much longer than you think, and it has to do with our sampling methods. RNA is really really really short lived outside the host, and our sampling methods aren't that good at finding it inside animal secretions, they're optimized for humans and humans want to be sampled. you don't need to squeeze a human to get them to pee in a cup, or spit in one, or hold still to swab them like you do bats. So sampling is much more difficult. And since it's out in the field, the RNA decays more quickly too. Some advances have been made in this but it still is quite difficult.
To give you an idea, here is a paper all about the vastly MASSIVE amount of estimated undiscovered viruses out there (figure 3 in particular): https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22975
Re: research mice, the mouse germination time from IVF to F1 (the first useful generation of mice) is about 12-16 weeks. Not that long on the global timescale, but really long in science. You can see a source for this here: http://ko.cwru.edu/info/breeding_strategies_manual.pdf
And that's from Case Western in Ohio, not a Chinese source. It really is that fast.
I'm sorry I'm not framing my arguments in precisely the way you want them, I framed them how I received the arguments out there having discussions in the real world with real skeptics. I then constructed the post to respond to those arguments I had been asked about.
I'm sorry, but that's just the way it is. Take it or leave it.
Everyone knows that mutations that increase transmissability generally hurt morbidity. Is there some reason you think this supports zoonotic hypothesis? It is public knowledge RaTG13 was collected from a mine shaft where a similar virus killed 50% of infected workers and where WIV was doing significant sampling work.
Your comments on mutation rates confirm that RaTG13 is not closely related to COV (we knew that) and imply we should expect to find a closer relative. Yet we haven't. And the paper you share argues (again) against your conclusions by pointing out that neither Yunnan nor Wuhan are expected hotspots for missing zoonoses to emerge. We've also now spent more than a year hunting there and elsewhere in SEAsia and haven't discovered anything remotely related. But China won't let anyone look at or sample Tongguan mineshaft.
Your comments on the State Department factsheet don't say anything except express a vague chummy solidarity that would lead a reasonable person to believe that SOMEONE in your group of international scientists should be able to confirm or deny allegations the WIV was in fact shutdown for a week in September. If no-one cannot confirm or deny this direct and very specific allegation how can anyone take seriously your claim that international civilian researchers would have any clue who was doing what kind of research in the facility or with its materials elsewhere? And if your mouse answer is correct surely it should take significantly longer than 4 months to bootstrap a program that can do practical experiments on mice with human ACE2 receptors, if only because IVF is hardly the start of the process.
None of these things support your argument. They just raise further questions that you seem to have zero interest in flagging or asking, despite having a very keen interest in the conclusions that you want people to draw. Science does not work that way.
>Everyone knows that mutations that increase transmissability generally hurt morbidity. Is there some reason you think this supports zoonotic hypothesis? It is public knowledge RaTG13 was collected from a mine shaft where a similar virus killed 50% of infected workers and where WIV was doing significant sampling work.
Why would this support either hypothesis? The cleavage site clearly has nothing to do with RATG-13 and it is probably one of the main drivers of SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis. See here:
So why did you bring it up? The observation doesn't support zoonotic hypothesis at all, although it could support lab leak if we assume GOF was done on a natural or modified virus with a higher IFR rate, such as the ones known to be present in Tongguan where WIV sampled RaTG13.
Similarly -- it isn't clear why you are talking about the cleavage site. You appear to think it argues against some sort of hypothesis. But you haven't stated what you think the most credible lab-leak scenario is and why. It isn't even clear that COV came from RaTG13.
>Your comments on mutation rates confirm that RaTG13 is not closely related to COV (we knew that) and imply we should expect to find a closer relative. Yet we haven't. And the paper you share argues (again) against your conclusions by pointing out that neither Yunnan nor Wuhan are expected hotspots for missing zoonoses to emerge
It's really funny you mention that because when I presented this paper in my departmental journal club, that was the #1 criticism levied. This model over-enriches for South America and under-enriches for East Asia.
Mostly it has to do with (in my opinion) their under-reliance on host-specificity and over-reliance on overall biological diversity. The Pacific Northwest is a hotbed of ecological and biological diversity in rodents among other things, but we haven't had any major outbreaks out of that area yet (knock on wood).
Papers can be wrong or whatever. Or underappreciate things. Lots of other scientists think there's a massive underappreciated reservoir of bat-related viruses in Asia. Peter Daszak is the obvious one, but also Heinz Feldmann, Christian Drosten, Peter Daniels, basically anyone who has ever studied bat viruses or influenza viruses believes there's a lot left undiscovered in Asia. That's also why several of the most recent hemorrhagic fever virus meetings from Keystone was in Hong Kong. SARS-1 is a big memory there, and not a very long ago one.
>SOMEONE in your group of international scientists should be able to confirm or deny allegations the WIV was in fact shutdown for a week in September. If no-one cannot confirm or deny this direct and very specific allegation how can anyone take seriously your claim that international civilian researchers would have any clue who was doing what kind of research in the facility or with its materials elsewhere?
My BSL3/4 was shut down all the time. For maintenance or whatever. They're facilities that go down for maintenance often because of how important it is to make them safe. Anytime an autoclave broke, or a fan broke, you had to take it down because it no longer met the biosafety standards set forth in the protocols.
I personally have no idea if it was shut down for a week in September, that's a very specific thing. Do you know exactly when a company in your line of work started doing work from home? Or when it was shut down for an internet outage? etc. etc. That's a very specific thing.
Sure I could ask around and probably figure that out. But I also don't want to, because I'm not interested in fueling your conspiracy theory when I have no idea what relevance that would have to the likelihood of a lab leak. Given how often these facilities shut down. They do it yearly as a rule, and often 4-5 times per year due to other maintenance reasons. And yes that includes brand new facilities. I cannot tell you how many times people at the BSL4 in Montana here in the US told me about facility shutdowns as reasons they couldn't conduct my experiments! It delayed my PhD a bit!
IVF is actually ALMOST the start of the process since we already had the ACE2 gene sequence. I suppose you would have to clone it and that might take a month. So altogether probably 3-4 months. Especially since it was TOP priority, like drop everything else and do this.
I'll give you an example. In my work, we had to clone Stat1 and Stat2 knockout mice, these are a model for Zika and for testing ebola vaccines and creating anti-Ebola antibodies, I published a paper all about it you can look it up in my gscholar linked elsewhere here.
Anyway, to go from idea to first generation of mouse (I didn't actually do the work, just watched someone else do it this was really early in my PhD)... it took about 6 months. And that's with a zillion other things on our plates. If it was the ONLY thing we were doing? Yeah it probably could have been done in 4 months. Probably 3 if you gave us unlimited funding and perfect facilities.
Science doesn't work the way you want it to work either, btw. It's not about wild hypotheses and conspiracies about people hiding stuff from the public. It's not about supposition and theoretical thought experiments. We rely on concrete data to make very small conclusions based on probability, and then test them.
Unfortunately, this really isn't a testable hypothesis either way. That's why the occam's razor factor matters so much here. It really is a probabilistic argument.
I never said it was impossible that this was a lab leak, only really unlikely.
> I personally have no idea if it was shut down for a week in September, that's a very specific thing. Do you know exactly when a company in your line of work started doing work from home?
I'm quite familiar with my own industry and could easily fact-check claims of this specificity or follow-up with people who would know. If I could not do this, I would not be making appeals to authority in public.
> Sure I could ask around and probably figure that out. But I also don't want to, because I'm not interested in fueling your conspiracy theory when I have no idea what relevance that would have to the likelihood of a lab leak.
Conspiracy theory? This is a claim by the US Government. And you're clearly interested in "debunking" it given the amount you have written on the topic and your holding proactive AMAs. So - yeah - this leaves anyone reading your comments wondering (1) why you are rebutting strawmen arguments, (2) why you don't appear familiar with the facts [i.e. pushed the wet market hypothesis long after we knew it wasn't the origin], and (3) why you still aren't addressing basic, specific and addressable claims from sources with assumed credibility who take a different position.
> Science doesn't work the way you want it to work
The sad thing is that it does. You figure out what the most viable hypotheses are and then evaluate the evidence. Update your priors based on what you find and repeat the process. That's how you end up being able to make statements about Occam's Razor. Quite different from building strawmen, knocking them down and calling anyone who asks questions you a conspiracy theorist.
And you also don't have to take my word for it re: China's problem with zoonotic transmission. Here are scientific review articles that demonstrate that consensus:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16940861/ (this one says wet markets, which probably are an issue, but not as big as initially thought, and probably not the origin of CoV-2)
I don't see the point. We know that zoonotic transmission and natural origin is possible. The question is about how likely it is to be the origin of COV. No-one who has been to Wuhan would expect zoonotic transfer. And certainly not of aersolized bat coronaviruses.
afaict the strongest evidence against lab-origin is the claim that COV was circulating in Italy in early autumn 2019, although I've read lately that the tests claiming this are now apparently suspect. go figure.
The above findings are replicable by any bioinformatician operating on published sources.
This preprint was reviewed by one of the authors of the Human Genome Project’s landmark 2001 paper having served as an HGP sequencing team leader at the Whitehead Institute:
The findings critically undermine Western zoonotic scientists’ (Daszak of the WHO-convened study particularly) claim that they knew what viruses WIV researchers were working on.
> By the way, welcome to HN commments, as I note your account is five hours old.
In this context, that does not read like a genuine welcome but rather as a sinister insinuation. That is seriously against the site guidelines. Please read and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We want HN to be a place that's open to newcomers, not a smug and insular backwater. Internet users (including HN users, unfortunately) are vastly too likely to assume sinister manipulation and bad faith in others.
By leading with a swipe like that, you not only break the site guidelines, you discredit the rest of your own comment. That's a pity. Please stick to substantive points in the future, and follow the rule of assuming good faith even when you feel like the other person isn't necessarily in good faith. The primary reason for the rule is that you (i.e. all of us) owe it to the community, not just to the other person per se.
Thanks, and I upvoted this mod comment. In my defense, I'll voice that the offending line contributes to the conversation, as it asserts the interlocutor has an axe to grind by setting up an account for just this article and commenting extensively on it. Of course however I'm sure many HN users ordinarily and appropriately register on the basis of one such stirring subject or another. Anyway I would edit out the offending line if I had the ability to.
> That's why when consensus exists about something, you should respect it. There is quite a large consensus about this one.
Respecting a consensus is reasonable. That having been said, I would be interested to hear what the virologists to whom you refer think about Ralph Baric's work. Ralph Baric is a very well-known virologist specializing in corona virology. His group synthesized quite a few SARS-CoV variants, a number of years before SARS-CoV-2 made its appearance. While there's no proof that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab, there are quite a few studies describing the synthesis of different SARS-CoV variants, some quite dangerous.
"Using the SARS-CoV infectious clone as a template (7), we designed and synthesized a full-length infectious clone of WIV1-CoV consisting of six plasmids that could be enzymatically cut, ligated together, and electroporated into cells to rescue replication competent progeny virions (Fig. S1A). In addition to the full-length clone, we also produced WIV1-CoV chimeric virus that replaced the SARS spike with the WIV1 spike within the mouse-adapted backbone (WIV1-MA15, Fig. S1B)"
EDIT: jeduehr, given your background in virology, I would be interested in any technical critique you may have regarding the Yuri Deigin article referenced in my post below.
It's important to understand the distinction between chimeric and mosaic viruses.
Baric makes Chimeras. CoV-2 in comparison to the other closely related viruses in nature, is a mosaic. Lots of little changes all over the genome, not big copy and pastes.
Hi, I made a response to the Deigin medium post in your original context. Sorry I don't have time to go more in depth, that thing is a beast. But he makes a few fundamental mistakes that tear at his core argument that I think are sufficient to show he doesn't really know what he's talking about in this arena.
Wow I also describe elsewhere how his understanding of the CGGCGG codon usage is truly flawed. It looks like these codons weren't actually there in the earliest sequences of the pandemic, but evolved over time as the virus adapted to us as a host. Really not the smoking gun he thinks it is. If you wanna see what I mean, just search this page for "CGGCGG"
@jeduehr No one established there was a consensus, nor should a consensus necessarily be respected out of hand even if there was one. (Recall that it was not long ago that there was ‘consensus’ that sc2 couldn’t pass human-to-human, or that non-healthcare workers shouldn’t wear masks to name a few examples). A lot of lab leak researchers _are_ scientists (microbiologists, genomics researchers & bioinformaticians). The profile you describe of an anti-GOF scientist is met by Marc Lipsitch of The Cambridge Working Group, and he is far from taking any position that states a wholly zoonotic origin for sc2:
There was never a consensus that SARS-2 couldn't pass human-to-human. Just because WHO said it doesn't mean there was a consensus.
There was also never a consensus about masks, the US government and a few US virologists just felt that way. Asia and a lot of Europe definitely did not feel that way. I would urge you to be as non-America-centric as possible because the consensus that the virus is very likely not a lab leak is also global in character.
I actually know Dr. Lipsitch and have met him at a conference or two before, and he's not wrong in a lot of ways, it should be investigated to the fullest extent possible, I would absolutely agree with that and have never disagreed on that. China should allow in international investigators from unbiased third-party institutions with expertise in the relevant areas.
The problem, of course, is that it will likely be impossible to prove it either way. The closest we could get is identifying an extremely close relative of SARS-2 in nature, in bats or w/e, in an area where we also find Human seropositivity (antibodies in the blood).
On the other side, we could find a sample of SARS-2 frozen and old in a chinese lab that shows they had it before the outbreak.
Presumably finding unbiased people is impossible. Trump latched on to calling it the "China virus" because he knew it would feed into nationalism/separatism and harm Chinese imports. All countries are involved in global trade; at this level of importance most people could be influenced.
As far as finding frozen samples, you'd also need verifiable documentation, presumably, otherwise we wouldn't know if it were a zoonotic sample ... so we wouldn't know if it were a wild origin, or a lab-captured origin?
If it were a lab-release, was it accidental or the actions of some other nation wanting to harm China.
It seems to me that conclusion people want is quite possibly not out there.
1) Chimeric viruses (copy and paste) are what scientists make in the lab. They take a piece of one virus and paste it into the genome of another, en masse. This is very different from what SARS-2 is, which is more accurately described as a "mosaic" (lots of little changes all over the genome). This is much much more difficult (if not very close to impossible in the case of SARS-2) to make in the lab, at least not and have it be done and "cooked" by the time the pandemic started. See the part of my post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
2) He makes it sound like the techniques Shi Zhengli uses in the lab could create SARS-CoV-2. This is not true. For the reasons I describe above in point 1, and others, this is not really a likely possibility. Modern virology just does not have the tools to do this. Only mother nature with its many millions of hosts and diversity of hosts (in different mammals) could do this in the span of time molecular clock analysis says it took to take similar viruses like RaTG-13 and mutate them into SARS-CoV-2. I go into extreme detail about this in this part of my original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
3) He also says things like "Considering the heights of user friendliness and automation that genetic engineering tools have attained, creating a synthetic CoV2 via the above methodology would be in reach of even a grad student." Yeah, in 2020. Not in 2000 when they would have needed to start doing this. We did not have these tools back then. We did not understand enough about viruses, and this is /before/ we even discovered SARS-CoV-1!
The molecular clock + the synonymous/nonsynonymous criteria + the mosaic nature of the virus together put constraints on how this virus could have evolved. The first says it takes about 50-70 years to evolve a virus like this, evolving as fast as it does in nature. The second says it evolved in a fashion that wasn't putting more selective pressure on it than nature usually does. The third says it happened in a semi-random way, the way natural mutations occur. All of these together (plus other stuff) mean that it's unlikely that anyone /grew/ the virus in a lab intentionally.
I go into extreme detail about the synonymous nonsynonymous stuff in 3.1.1 of my post.
4) Also, it doesn't actually look like a virus that was grown in a petri dish or one that was grown in a single species of animals. It has O-linked glycans on it that cell culture wouldn't add. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
Also, if it were grown in a single species of animal, then the SARS-2 spike protein would bind most tightly to that receptor. That's not actually what it is. As best we can tell, the S from SARS-2 binds just ~okay~ to a lot of different ACE2 receptors, and it just happens to work to bind human ACE2 kinda well. It's not at all how anyone would have actually designed it if they wanted to make a virus that kills humans. If they were designing it that way, they were some really shitty super villains, let me tell you that. I go into some extreme detail about this in this part of my post: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
5) Yuri gets really hot and bothered about the furin cleavage site. But what he seems to misunderstand is that these cleavage sites have evolved in nature too. It's likely either A) a recombinatorial event between SARS-2 and similar viruses in nature or B) it mutated over a short period of time in a way similar to other "mutagenicity islands." We have actually seen this before in nature. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
He even says it has been shown to be disabled in a relatively short period of time in lab animals, so why wouldn't it be able to show up in nature in 50-70 years in millions of wild animals? It's really not that unlikely when you consider that certain areas of viral genomes mutate a lot faster than others in the wild.
6) He even points out that the only viruses in nature that share the cleavage site share only 40% of the rest of their genomes with SARS-2. But that just shows it's likely that SARS-2 and one of these other viruses happened to infect the same animal at the same time, and their genomes had a cross-over event. This happens ALL. THE. TIME. in viruses in nature. It's basically how flu pandemics occur. See:
Why is it not likely this sort of thing was involved in this coronavirus pandemic?
Honestly I can't keep going because I need to be studying for the most important exam of my career (USMLE Step 1) but I can tell you just from the first couple pages of this extremely long thing that Yuri is not a virologist and has never taken a formal viral genetics class. He is making fundamental mistakes in how viruses evolve and change over time. He clearly knows a lot about biochemistry and regular genetics, but viruses are a whole different ballgame.
Deigin has said explicitly elsewhere that if SARS-CoV-2 arose from a lab accident, he believes it arose from manipulation of a novel, unpublished virus collected by the WIV from nature. This makes any arguments based on distance from existing, published viruses irrelevant.
RaTG13 was such a virus (collected 2013, published post-pandemic), but it's very unlikely to be the ancestor for the reasons that you note. No one outside the WIV (and thus, no one beyond the physical control of the Chinese government) knows what other viruses they had in their freezer or database. Deigin has recently published an article claiming to have discovered a novel coronavirus in contamination of agricultural samples sequenced at the same facility:
To be clear, the new virus that he "discovered" absolutely is not an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, and he absolutely isn't claiming that is; but it's (more) evidence that the WIV had unpublished coronaviruses.
The WIV took their database of viruses down from public access in September 2019. They say this was due to repeated hacking attempts. They haven't restored access, or provided their database in another format (e.g., a dump on a flash drive) that obviously presents no information security risk. Do you believe their claimed reason for taking it down? If not, why do you think they're lying?
Thanks. That comment doesn't address the database, though. Do you believe their stated reason for taking it down? If not, why do you think they're lying?
Hi, I have no way to verify if that is the true reason, but also no reason to doubt it.
I will say DDOS attacks on scientific databases are not that uncommon. This is the same reason that a lot of scientific publication data are now hosted by the publisher and not the scientist.
It's rarely actually a malicious "hacker," though. Usually it's some grad student somewhere pulling a really crappily made wget script out and accidentally using all the bandwidth.
Scientists aren't actually that great of programmers, yours truly included. Have I done this before with an independently hosted database? I can neither confirm not deny. Lol.
But seriously I have no idea. I get why you find this suspicious, but to me it is extremely circumstantial and I can think of a lot of mundane reasons for it.
For one, I don't know that the translation of DDOS and hacker or idiot script kiddie is nuanced enough between Mandarin and English.
This is probably the biggest database of bat-origin coronaviruses in the world, and we're in the middle of a bat-origin coronavirus pandemic. Even ignoring the question of SARS-CoV-2's origins, shouldn't this be of great scientific interest? (If it isn't, then what was the point of the research in the first place?)
Perhaps I could believe that a small group of virologists would have trouble keeping a website running, and that just by chance they gave up right around when a pandemic likely first entered humans, of the same type of virus that they studied in the same town--coincidences do happen. But now that this is a matter of international importance, do you really believe that no one in China has the technology to make this information available in any form? That seems impossible to me; so why don't they want to?
I appreciate the opportunity to discuss, and I do believe that you're sincerely convinced that the chance that virological research could result in such an accident is negligibly small. With respect, I'd suggest that your attitude seems typical of the profession, and that that's exactly when the worst accidents happen. Engineers are constantly taught that their work may bring catastrophe, and that it's their job to consider and manage every conceivable way that it could. I get the feeling that virologists aren't, perhaps because there are fewer past disasters to point to; though with the 1977 flu pandemic as a warning, that's not a great excuse.
Certainly this is unlike e.g. the 1977 flu pandemic, whose genetic sequence provided strong evidence that it was an accidental release of something derived from a stored 1950 sample. Even so, at the time the WHO said "laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time":
And nothing requires accidents to happen the same way each time. If SARS-CoV-2 was a lab accident, then it's probably an accident involving a novel bat-origin coronavirus collected from nature. The WIV probably had the biggest program sampling such viruses in the world, and that's the database they made unavailable.
Why do you think that database is unavailable now? The WIV's stated reason could possibly explain why they took it down in the first place (though it would be a spectacular coincidence), but it doesn't explain why they can't bring it back up.
Note that I asked this in my previous comment, and you chose to ignore it, instead responding to the less substantive comment from another user. You likewise ignored my original question about the database until I asked it twice. You didn't discuss the possibility of an accident involving a novel, unpublished virus (which you consider the most likely lab accident scenario, I believe correctly) until others brought it up.
I don't think that's malicious, but that's not a comforting pattern. Virologists are supposed to be the experts, so they should be the ones presenting (and refuting where applicable) the strongest and most likely scenarios for a lab accident. Instead, they (and you) seem entirely focused on defending the profession, refuting easy and wrong arguments, and waiting to see how long it takes adjacent non-specialists to learn enough to discover the harder ones. You then dismiss their arguments, because they (David Relman, Alina Chan, Richard Ebright, I assume Marc Lipsitch too; the list is getting long) are mere molecular biologists or epidemiologists or whatever, and not specialist virologists.
Regardless of what we eventually learn about the origin of this pandemic, that's not the behavior of a profession that can be trusted to regulate itself, and I believe the world is realizing that now. It would be unfortunate if important virological research gets banned because the regulations are drafted by half-informed outsiders; but if virologists themselves don't seriously engage with the possibility that their work just killed 2.9M people, that's what will happen.
Of course that's not all virologists. Étienne Decroly has been pushing quite openly for an investigation of a possible lab accident, though mostly in French-language media and perhaps you'll find something wrong with his resume too.
And just so you don't miss it: Why do you think that database is unavailable now? Please feel free to ignore everything I've written except that question.
Hi you'll see elsewhere that I was very open about the fact that I, too, think an open and honest investigation from third parties is necessary. Seriously just search this page for "independent" or "investigation." I have said that several times on this post, and in the OP I linked as well. I am 100% in support of that and always have been. I just don't think the outcome will be conclusive, but I hope it will maybe prevent some of the damage this theory is causing.
I don't have time to address the rest of your comment I'm sorry, I have already sunk so much time into this post that I should have spent studying. This is the exam I have in 3 weeks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USMLE_Step_1 Pay particular attention to the section marked "effect on matching residency." I never should have responded or brought myself into this post in the first place.
Sorry, but I need to exit now. I hope you find the certainty you're looking for, either way. I hope you find the solace in "holding virologists to account" that you are looking for, although I'm not sure it will happen the way you are suggesting.
Then it seems like from a policy standpoint, you actually agree with Alina Chan, David Relman, Richard Ebright, etc. that a forensic investigation (i.e., an investigation that doesn't rely entirely on trust of the people providing information, similar to a financial audit) of the WIV's samples and records is necessary? That would imply you disagree with the Chinese government and with the WHO team's report, whose conclusion that lab origin was "extremely unlikely" was generally taken as meaning no further study of that scenario was required.
In any case, I certainly have work that I should be doing too, though lower-stakes than your exam. I'm not looking for solace or blame here; I just don't want another pandemic. Certainly this one might have been caused by exotic wildlife trading, or guano collection by farmers, or other nonscientific activity, and those activities should be restricted. But unless and until the WIV's collection and lab manipulation of novel potential pandemic pathogens can be confidently excluded as the cause, I don't see why anyone would permit that work either.
I'd privately guess that the Chinese government has already imposed such restrictions, and that while Shi's group may still publish occasionally for the sake of appearances their volume of risky research will fall sharply--the CCP doesn't want to lose face, but they don't want another pandemic either. Of course there's no way to confirm or refute that prediction but to wait and see.
Final note, I see that you wrote your "CoVID-19 did not come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology" post about a year ago. At the time, I would have mostly agreed with you; but since then no proximal animal host has been found, and quite a lot of Chinese-government obstruction has been. It's uncomfortable to adjust a position when you've previously made a strong statement; but that's a lot better than getting locked in to a position that you adopted based on less evidence than is available today.
Anyways, good luck on your exam. I'll continue to do everything I can to ensure that my group's designs don't explode or catch fire, and I hope you'll do the same with the risk that your (prospective) group starts a pandemic.
That was a great writeup that I enjoyed reading a lot.
It dumbed it down just enough that I didn't feel completely lost while still being deep enough.
Now the only problem is that the people that spew Asian hate and call it Kung Flu are likely not the people who read 34 page virology for dummies documents.
That's correct. The RdRp was published as RaBtCoV/4991 in 2016, and that's how the link to the Mojiang mine became known. The first publication on SARS-CoV-2 didn't mention that, instead referring to the virus by its new name RaTG13, but others made the connection:
Of course that's not evidence of anything malicious; the renaming and failure to reference might have just been inadvertent. But it's still a bit weird, and it unquestionably shows at least a 2.5 year delay between sampling and publishing even a fragment of the genome.
That delay isn't evidence of anything malicious either. Research takes time, and any group in any discipline has a backlog of unpublished work. The WIV didn't stop sampling in 2013 though, and no one outside China's physical control knows what else might be in their collection.
RaTG13 was simply uninteresting before the pandemic. It only became worth writing a full paper on after SARS-CoV-2 was discovered. When they wrote a paper about it, they also gave it a more memorable name.
> The WIV didn't stop sampling in 2013 though, and no one outside China's physical control knows what else might be in their collection.
They upload sequences to Genbank (just like they did with RaTG13, years before the pandemic), they have international collaborators, and they give talks at conferences. Tons of people know what they work on and what they have in their collection.
> Tons of people know what they work on and what they have in their collection.
If that's true, then why has the WIV removed public access from their database? It serves only to remove a valuable scientific resource, and to cast suspicion on China; so why would they do such a thing? Do you genuinely believe that even with the international importance of the topic, no one in China can figure out how to keep a simple database-backed website up?
And again, Deigin et al. report assembly of the genome of a novel coronavirus from contamination in other published reads sequenced in the same facility:
As far as I can tell, this virus wasn't previously known outside the WIV. Am I mistaken? I emphasize again that their novel virus is relevant not because it's an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 (it's not), but because if the WIV had one unpublished virus, it gets harder to claim it's ridiculous that they might have had others.
Without explicitly supporting the theory it is a loosed weapon, I think your estimation of technology is off. Typically military technology will lead by about a decade, maybe more. So all of the rest could be explained, a little paranoically, as intentional action.
In virology and other related biological sciences, the opposite is usually the case. All the most cutting edge stuff either happens in university labs or in the private sector.
The military (in the US at least) has too much red tape and bureaucracy that gets in the way of that kind of fast-paced experimentation.
Source: I was about an inch away from working at the Defense Intelligence Agency after grad school, but this is why I turned them down. After talking to all the people on the hiring team, this was the consensus. They did it because they loved their country, despite those challenges. And this is what my friends at USAMRIID tell me (US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases). If they want to present anything or publish it, they have months of red tape to go through first. They can't collaborate as easily either.
Also you can read books like The Hot Zone (sensationalized, but shows they weren't doing anything that wasn't happening at the same time in academia) or Ken Alibek's BioHazard, both of which describe the past history of bioweapons research and how it wasn't 10 years ahead of anyone else (in the USSR or the US). It was about where everyone else was, but applying it maybe 2 or 3 years ahead of the game.
> The military (in the US at least) has too much red tape and bureaucracy that gets in the way of that kind of fast-paced experimentation.
The DoD and specific branches of the armed forces just hand out money. It is those labs and the companies that staff them that are ahead of the current state of the art, but they're unable to commercialize them until after other applications are evaluated.
There is an increasing trend for the military to rely on CoTS hardware, but I know with some certainty there are still fields, like metallurgy (for jet engines), that are still leading anything else by a wide margin.
In some sense, it doesn't matter dramatically which of the 3 it was.
All seem plausible because...
1) gain of function research is super risky and there have been lab escapes before. We need to do MUCH better about lab leaks. We should spend more on security and have greater transparency. We should also question whether it even makes sense to do that kind of research.
2) Same thing for natural research sample being leaked...
3) wet markets are probably a really bad idea. And we should probably keep a better eye on natural virus variants, HOWEVER... that's somewhat in conflict with the "maybe this research isn't worth it" line of thinking.
So we have some somewhat hard trade-offs, here, but there are aspects where we can just do better. Like, whenever we do do research on viruses, we should probably be a LOT more careful about how and when we do it.
And although it's very unlikely the virus was engineered, we should probably be careful with the technology that would let it be engineered. The technology that makes sequencing novel virus strains and developing novel vaccines using mRNA also makes it easier to engineer a virus. This is a tough one because if we had clamped down super hard on mRNA tech too early, we would've been perhaps unprepared to make a vaccine...
I don’t think that’s how legal system or science works(at least in statistics). We can assume that null hypothesis is that there was no leak/engineering of the virus, i.e. defendant isn’t guilty. Then it’s up to a prosecutor/someone with the evidence to reject that hypothesis. But you don’t start proving the alternative hypothesis when doing science, since it’s much more complicated. And again, the defendant doesn’t have to prove his innocence.
The circumstantial evidence exists though and I’m not making a claim to be a court of law, I’m claiming that these are how I view the probabilities, as a layman, and that anyone who doesn’t work on these things for a living that suggests they are more confident in one of these probabilities than another probably has some biases they need to check.
Yea, I'm not sure how some people can vehemently say any of the most plausible explanations are absolutely wrong or right. It seems like it's just not possible for anyone outside of a very small group in China to know the truth and also seems possible that no one at all knows exactly what happened. Without any smoking gun evidence, it seems like everything else is just guess work with some guesses a lot more educated than others.
Hi, you're probably right it isn't possible to know 100% the origin at this point.
All we can do is make probabilistic arguments. Inferences. Inductive reasoning.
And that sort of analysis, occam's razor based on the least new assumptions necessary to conclude the mechanism, I think the zoonotic theory is more likely.
The lab theory isn't impossible, it just requires a lot more untested and unknown assumptions.
I agree that the virus is unlikely to have been engineered in the manner you describe. But, I'm wondering: where is this circumstantial evidence for the leak scenario, be it a natural sample or one that had some help evolving? (I also doubt the wet market scenario, but that one isn't nearly so contentious.)
Here's the thing: in my mind, anyone who wants to claim the virus escaped the lab as a result of an accident needs to show how someone could have gotten infected with it while working with it in a lab using BSL-3 precautions. We're all just walking around wearing plain old surgical masks, and sometimes not even that level of protection, but literally a piece of cloth is enough to reduce transmission of this virus significantly. Now, tell me how someone wearing full body PPE gets infected with it.
Even at BSL-2, any procedures that would create aerosols are done inside a containment vessel, so, I can't honestly see it happening there, either. And, it certainly wouldn't have been at BSL-1, as that's reserved for known non-pathogenic organisms. Basically, the criterion for a BSL-1 lab is "we grow bugs here, on purpose." Clearly, any of the bat coronaviruses they would handle at WIV would greatly exceed that level of precaution.
With that in mind, IMO, the real interesting bit this article had to offer was to suggest the possibility that the virus snuck into the lab. Given the virus's relative inability to spread via surface contact and necessity of aerosolized droplet spread, you still have to answer the question of how it got out, but, it's at least an intriguing origin story.
So, in summary, yes, the only correct answer we can really say for sure is "we don't know exactly where it came from, if it leaked out of a lab, and what might have been done with it while it was in the lab." But, I'm having a really hard time believing a virus that gets largely stopped by a simple mask could sneak out of a BSL-2+ lab.
> The virus is unlikely to have been engineered (in the way I described above) and leaked.
Likely, unlikely, it's not really possible to attach probabilities to events that already happened. Also history is told chronologically, when told anti-chronologically we tend to make causal connections where there are none.
I don't want to dismiss the lab theory completely but consider this:
These kinds of labs are all over the world, in China, in the Netherlands, in the US and so on. They are mostly being built in metropole regions because that's where large science clusters tend to be. Coincidentally city centers are traditionally built around markets. These tend to be the densest areas of cities. Densest areas are where infection clusters are most likely to build up and get noticed.
And now we find a case where all these 3 coincide. Really, that doesn't say much. Also there have been quite some hints about Covid19 cases before December 2019, outside of China even. [1] Statistics is a highly counter-intuitive discipline. If it wasn't maybe the virus would be already under control anyway.
I'm not sure you can rule out "engineered as you described above."
WIV had recently published research on, and had an active grant to perform (at the time of the outbreak), chimeric Coronavirus research, and they were one of the two world leading labs in this. In that research, they were transplanting the spike gene from one virus to the "backbone" of another. You could call this "engineering" or "gain of function" depending on your perspective.
The thing that raised people's suspicions about this is that the spike RBD strongly resembles a virus sequence they released recently (Pangolin-CoV), and the backbone strongly resembles another virus they recently published (RaTG13). That suggests that there was some sort of recombination event. That recombination could have occurred in nature, in an animal that was simultaneously infected with two viruses, or it could have occurred in the lab.
This is older but it shows the BLAST of the two viruses. They're more than the same family. RaTG13 is the closest sequence ever discovered (in open literature) to SARS-CoV-2.
Incidentally (or perhaps not?), there is some evidence that the furin-cleavage site is what makes the virus resistant to hydroxychloroquine, which can be countered by combining it with a TMPRSS2 inhibitor: https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
And to a fair extent these questions are academic - say that it wasn't a lab leak and came from a natural reservoir. That doesn't change the fact that BSL-4 lab protections aren't perfect and there will be leaks of a similar magnitude of risk in the future.
The biological research community are obviously playing with some much riskier toys than everyone else.
So even if what we're saying if not true, we're still right. collateral racism bedamned. You're not going to take our legitimized bias say from us, so stahp trying!
* There is no evidence that the virus originated with imported frozen seafood.
* There is no evidence that the virus originated with US Army personnel who were present for the Military World Games.
* There is no evidence for the "multiple origins theory" that the Chinese government is currently promoting.
The wet market origin theory would be more plausible to me if not for the fact that SARS-CoV-2 was found all over surfaces there but not in a single live or dead animal. That seems to indicate that it was merely the location of an early superspreader event and not the true origin.
Best epidemiological and genetic evidence suggests it originated somewhere outside Wuhan and then became a serious outbreak there as it's a major population center.
Even the WHO report didn't rule out the possibility of a leak. They just said the evidence is weak and the evidence of animal to human transmission is stronger.
It's also not xenophobic to suggest the possibility of a lab leak because lab leaks happen regardless of who's doing the research; even at BSL-4 facilities, mistakes are made. And also because there were two separate SARS-CoV-1 leaks/outbreaks from Chinese labs which the PRC admitted to. [1]
I just want to add: "A government is not the people and the people are not the government." Just in case this needs to be stated for anyone here or reading. If you disagree with a people's government that doesn't mean you should treat the people of said government in a critical manner. Their views do not necessarily reflect that of their government (often they do not, just look at us here in America where criticizing the government is the great American past time)
The CCP is basically China and at least most Chinese people, because it draws its authority and power from the complacency of its constituents. Trying to differentiate the CCP from its subjects will leave you labeling all counter-parties as communist agents until you’ve realized you’ve labeled the majority of Chinese citizens!
Of course no country’s government has the full support of its citizens, but to say Chinese people are wholly distinct from the CCP is disingenuous.
There is no ruling ethnicity, just a more unified single party system. People can choose to participate in politics, they just have to do it within the party.
the american experiment in democracy was to make the government synonymous with the people. certainly that was pulled back a bit by the republican (as in republic, not the political party) elements by our founders, who were themselves 'elites' of the time. in china, the communist party is meant to be the same: a party of (all) the people.
certainly xenophobia expresses itself acutely in mediopolitical contexts where power and money are on the line, but also in forums like this where such ego boosts are basically costless. it's not really about a distinction between the people and the government.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that the American experiment is about making the government synonymous with the people.
The American experiment was all about splitting the governmental power among different entities, keeping the government small and letting the people preserve freedom and power - while still being protected by the government.
The constitution is a tool to prevent the government from overreaching - and it's been successful at that.
Unfortunately, this experiment also grew in the largest and most warmongering government in the world.
To me, the USA are the proof that minarchism doesn't work and that we need to try anarcho-capitalism.
> I'm not sure where you got the idea that the American experiment is about making the government synonymous with the people.
It's a common mistake to conflate the Gettysburg Address ("government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth") and the Preamble of the US Constitution ("We the people...")
The whole point of the electoral college was to intermediate the people and the government. The fear was that information wouldn't travel quickly enough to all edges of the realm, and that people couldn't therefore be trusted to make an electoral decision.
it's hard to take that criticism seriously when you choose to hang your hat on anarcho-capitalism, a system that isn't even coherent in theory, much less in practice (were it to be). democracy is literally about aligning the government to the will of the people. the US is a representative democracy, which is a compromise borne of the founders' uneasiness with direct democracy (partially because it would mean piercing the sovereignty of the states).
that had me literally laughing out loud. although to be fair, it was only depicting libertarian capitalism. anarcho-capitalism would be more like westworld on steroids.
There are also cases isolated from US blood samples taken before any known infection in China's outbreak, so the racist nature of this discussion is really misplaced. In reality, statements about the origin of this virus are almost purely geopolitical speculation, and it is from these politics that racism is injected into the etymology.
The fact that this particular theory reaches the front page of hacker news every week, despite zero evidence besides the existence of a lab.. hey, we're just asking questions, here, right?
Frankly, it would be irresponsible NOT to provacatively suggest this thing we have no evidence of, repeatedly.
Yes it sure would be irresponsible to ask questions about the...
(1) BSL-3 lab doing bat coronavirus research...
(2) on gain-of-function projects...
(3) one block away from the epicenter of a coronavirus pandemic with bat ties...
(4) that nobody's being allowed into...
(5) when they have a history of coronavirus lab escapes.
I'm not saying we know this is what happened. I'm saying it's not a far-fetched position and there's a lot of experts who agree. I hear there's even an MIT Technology Review write-up about it.
Sure, but also, if the PRC didn't have a tendency of murdering it's dissenters and anyone who made them look bad. They're not exactly a shining beacon of transparency. If this was going down in New Zealand I'm not sure anyone would be speculating, and also WHO investigators would have been granted full access to the facility on day 1.
Nope, I don't think they're evil, I think they have a track record. That's not the same thing at all. Track records can be good or bad -- in this case, it's a bad track record.
Plenty of bad track records to go around. You started off saying this wasn't about xenophobia, and sure that's a strong word, but it does seem like 'bias' would hit the mark pretty squarely.
Xenophobia is roughly defined as "dislike of or prejudice against people from other countries." Certainly a blanket dislike without any justification.
On the other hand, what I've said is (a) I have nothing against "foreigners" (b) there's a ton of circumstantial evidence and (c) China has a long track record of silencing opposition and criticism to prevent derogatory information from getting out.
That's not xenophobia.
It's like if you have someone who's robbed 6 convenience stores, and your reaction is "hey I'm not sure they're a good fit for the world of cashiering." Or better yet, a 7th convenience store is robbed adjacent to the first 6 in the same exact way, and your reaction is "someone should see what Steve was up to that night." That's not bias, that's a substantiated track record.
It's inductive reasoning.
It's utterly unreasonable to call anyone who holds China's track record against them xenophobic or biased lol. They've earned that track record. When they show a different attitude they'll get treated differently.
We're pretty deep into "I support this lab theory for unrelated political reasons", but hey, it's Friday night, I'll get sidetracked.
Their government has more support from their people than ours does -- ours is capped at 50% approval.
So go whole hog or go home. Hair-splitting is for cowards.
Either include the people or, if you'd like, you can start wondering why they think that, maybe they have more context and things are more subtle. But you can't think one is black-and-white evil without including the other.
Youd support your government too if it massively raised yours and your neighbors standard of living within a 30-40 year period. The Nazis did that too and were wildly popular.
But evil is evil. And theres a really bad and consistent track record.
The Nazis were not wildly popular, they were a minority government, and they definitely did not improve material conditions for their people. World War II fucking sucked. They barely held on by being at war, stirring things up against foreign enemies, and getting lucky against assassination attempts. Peace would have ruined them.
The Chinese government is not at war. They are vastly less at-war than the US is. They have no rally-around-the-flag effect and yet their people still like them better than we like our government.
Hi there's actually quite a bit of reason to believe the zoonotic transmission didn't actually happen in Wuhan, based on the available genetic and epidemiological evidence.
Add in bat-livestock interactions and a very hands-on agricultural sector, and you get a real, real lot of rolls.
Obviously noone can prove a negative, there's a chance it came from that lab, but the odds are astronomical that it came about the same boring way as bird flu and SARS.
And SARS escaped from a lab twice. In China. The government at the time admitted it. So I’m not 100% that’s the example I’d go with haha.
It’s important to split this in two: one thesis is that it was invented or created or synthesized at a lab in China. This I’m far less bullish on.
The other separate thesis is regardless of origin, man made or wild, it accidentally or intentionally found its way through the doors of a lab in China and into society. It’s this one we’re talking about. At least I am.
Look, if the point here is blame, have at it. It started in China, blame China, feel great about that and don't worry about our government's performance or theirs.
But if the point is truth, it probably came from agriculture->society. Labs are not necessary for that story, and China was blindsided anyways.
Define "start in a lab" -- are you talking about "created in a lab" or "accidentally released from a lab in which it was being studied causing a pandemic"?
If the latter, I don't think you have any evidence to say the pandemic didn't begin as a result of an accidental release from a lab in the literal epicenter of the pandemic. It's not possible to prove a negative in general, although in this case, it would have been pretty easy to prove by allowing international inspectors into the facility and turning over records.
Of course labs are not necessary. However, there's a precedent for labs causing outbreaks.
Were it indeed a totally spontaneous wild situation that occurred, why would I blame China? Diseases start all over the place, there's no fault for that. Any more than I blame the Congo for Ebola (named after the Ebola River) or America for Lyme disease (named after Old Lyme, CT). Even if it was an accidental release from a lab, I don't think China as an entity bears responsibility for that.
If it was an accidental release from a lab (an if), then they bear the responsibility for the coverup that led to insufficient efforts towards containment.
America has done a dreadful job to be sure, but that's more whataboutism.
However; since the "leaked virus" narrative was mostly parroted by rightwing media, and promoted from an overtly racist and xenophobic administration and political party, (in the USA) - it very much muddies the waters. There's also some very strong, direct evidence, that political appointees discussed (over email) strategies for subverting messaging from actual scientific experts who had actual data and studies backing up alternative explanations.
It would be nice if such narratives arose organically from actual events, and could be discussed openly. But that's impossible in our present political environment, and that's one of many many hazards of far-right politics. Any questions? Just ask Galileo his opinion on the matter.
This is why it becomes important for us to have good faith conversations. I don't think it is impossible to have said conversations, but more difficult. We have to act in good faith and determine who is using this language as a dog whistle vs who is using it normally. We've seen how assuming everything is a dog whistle has backfired on us, so I'm not sure erroring in that direction is correct. But at the same time I don't think we should necessarily act as if there is no possibility someone is using language in that way (muddied waters). I think we just proceed with caution and do our best.
I'm sorry man, but wouldn't you be able to just reply directly if you feel inclined to disagree with the parent. I'm not saying HN is entitled to your opinion but it feels a little lazy and disrespectful to the parent to say "you're wrong" then drop a link off site to a massive general summary of the situation in order to respond to a few specific points. Especially since point 3 has a source from a decently reputable news site with reputable sources.
Hi, I actually ended up responding below to point 3 in particular but I also respond to it in my original post. Very few, if any of these arguments are novel.
The reason you will find extremely few people with actual credentials in the science we're discussing in these discussions is that working scientists don't have the time or will to get into these debates with people who wouldn't have the faintest idea how to actually conduct the research they're criticizing.
That post I linked took like dozens and dozens of man hours to write, workshop, source, and edit.
And I wrote it so I could link it in situations like this, and not repeat myself dozens or hundreds of times.
Personally, I'm studying for the biggest exam of my professional life at the moment, and I'm procrastinating here because I find these discussions so horrifying.
This entire thread could be a valuable case study in the Dunning Krueger effect.
Not saying it's not worth talking about, but rather that the amount of time and effort it takes to refute bullshit is several magnitudes more than the amount of effort it takes to create it.
In my case, that's 10+ years studying viruses so people on the internet with no credentials can tell me I'm wrong.
She's a geneticst or biochemist. She just uses some viruses in her research sometimes, like basically all biochemists.
Calling her qualified in virus biosafety is like saying someone with a PhD in Visual Arts is qualified as an expert in ballpoint pens because they've used them to draw. Sure they know some things about using ballpoint pens and which ones they prefer, but would you trust them to tell you how to design one from scratch? Or how to fix pens?
Not as much as some guy with a PhD in engineering and design at Mont Blanc, get what I'm saying?
I have also responded to her criticisms substance elsewhere, but she makes some big leaps in judgment that show she hasn't ever worked in a BSL4 lab before. Or studied the nitty gritty of virus genetics in nature before.
this pulling rank thing might work better on reddit, but if you want to make an argument you should give your audience the courtesy of actually making one
Honestly, can't find it. It was in some random facebook group about this stuff, I joined a couple dozen as the pandemic went on, so hard to find which one and my activity log search isn't turning up anything.
Sorry. :(
I don't have the time or bandwidth to re-write it at the moment. But a lot of her arguments are similar to Dr. Degerin's and also Dr. Ebright over at Rutgers. They are a small minority, like the OP says.
I tend to rely on expert consensus when it makes mechanistic sense like this one does.
Nothing, no evidence we have, makes either possibility impossible. The lab leak just requires a lot more cloak and dagger and new assumptions. Occam's razer tells me to favor the hypothesis with the least new assumptions. Hence zoonotic release is more likely in my opinion. That's truly the crux of it, the rest of it is arguing over the number of angels on the head of a pin.
That's fair if you don't want to engage because you feel you don't have time, but the spirit of the website is to have an open discussion. That means people will say wrong things. If you don't have time to engage with that....it's totally fine. But just saying I'm right and dropping a large read goes against the spirt of discussion. No one is forcing you to. If you wanted to just do a general response to everyone just make a comment on the main article with your link.
Thanks for posting this - really interesting and valuable in my view.
> The reason you will find extremely few people with actual credentials in the science we're discussing in these discussions is that working scientists don't have the time or will to get into these debates with people who wouldn't have the faintest idea how to actually conduct the research they're criticizing.
We have such a big problem with public perception of science. I think many people are willing to be educated, but internet forums tend to degenerate into arguments between people who think they know a lot more than they do (even in (especially?) places like HN).
Controversial idea: I think in the future we should pay researchers to spend x% of their time just interacting with people on internet forums answering questions and correcting misperceptions. The amount of disinformation out there is staggering.
Oh yeah I think that's a great idea. NSF has been toying with this kind of thing for a while, and they've put mandatory public-facing time in some of their grants. There just aren't all that many good venues for it. But I think the principle is fabulous, and we should fund more places for it to happen.
The National Science Policy Network has a good Q&A site where credentialed scientists answer public questions about their subject area. I forget the URL but a google search should turn it up in a few pages.
There's a similar one called the Science Creative Exchange where scientists sign up to talk to writers in hollywood and work through scripts and make the science in fiction more accurate wherever possible.
I love both of these and have spent lots of time on them in my (ever dwindling) free time. But I'm also the guy who's commenting on a HN post when I should be studying for the biggest exam in my career (USMLE Step 1), so I'm not the best example.
Firstly it is "Dunning-Kruger".
Secondly you are engaging in an argument from "authority" without evidence which is often fallacious and always disingenuous.
I'm typing on a phone keyboard so forgive my typo.
And I linked to a literal mountain of evidence describing both my credentials on this topic and then an extremely detailed and heavily sourced set of arguments.
I'm not talking out of my ass, I'm sorry it sounds that way. After you have several hundred of these discussions and they keep popping up with zero new evidence, it tends to color your attitude.
Pointing out spelling mistakes is a fallacy in the sense of attacking the person rather than the argument (as in, you know what they meant to say, but wanted to make them look silly), and they did post a literal megathread of evidence which (because it wasn't summarised for you) you decided to discount.
I am sure you are familiar with the concept involved with Dunning-Kruger, misspelling it when trying to make a point, makes said point somewhat hard to take seriously.
I have pursued most of what OP posted on reddit, I am not qualified to judge the finer points, but it doesn't mesh up with what I have seen presented by other independent expert sources or common sense. So I discounted it for that reason not the one you gave.
This idea that everything always needs to be litigated from first principles is stupid. They pointed out what they thought was salient about their write up, if you don't want to read it don't, if you do and think they are wrong, you can write about why.
Hi. Do you still stand by your point 3.1.1, specifically your mutation rate of 2 changes/month, given that newer variants are believed to have arisen from intense mutational events in a small number of immunodeficient people?
Because those mutation events in a small number of people still require a longer time to become "stable" in the overall population of viruses.
Generally speaking, the more virus "generations" you have, the more likely you are to generate a successful variant. But then it takes time for that variant to achieve dynamic equilibrium in the greater population of viruses. For it to take over.
And the initial SARS-CoV-2 had so little diversity for so long, that we can say it likely had been stable before passing into humans, or there would have been more initial diversity in it compared to its closest viral relatives.
It is a picture overall consistent with a random crossover event. Not ruling out a lab leak (because that's quite difficult if not impossible to do). The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
But we have just as much evidence to say the virus came from aliens who planted it in humans as we do to say it came from a human lab that has no trace of the virus anywhere in it.
1.3. you cannot take any virus known in nature (like Ratg-13 for example) and "cook" it for long enough or in any specific way to make it look like SARS-CoV-2.
You can't do it in the time we've been able to handle viruses like this or modify them in the ways we can. You'd have needed to start a few decades ago, have tools that we've only just invented, and a huge number of willing test subjects.
I cover this in extreme detail in the post I linked under Q2 and Q3.
One of the most compelling pieces of evidence is the synonymous/nonsynonomous ratio of the genome and it's mosaic mutations.
That's not something you can just cook up over night, it takes many millions of viral generations which require A) diverse hosts (like you find in a natural ecosystem), B) many millions of hosts, like you find in nature, and C) decades of time.
The chinese virology labs don't have the resources, time, or space to do something like that. And maybe it would be kind of possible today with CRISPR and many thousands of oligonucleotides printed off of a desktop printer, but that technology hasn't existed for more than a few years. The timelines just don't add up.
WIV had many unpublished coronavirus samples, and took their database offline in fall 2019. RaTG13 is just the least distant relative to SARS-CoV-2 that they did publish.
Thank you for the detailed response. As a layperson, these specifics are over my head.
Assuming everything you say is true, that still would not rule out a lab leak of a virus collected from nature, would it?
>You can't do it in the time we've been able to handle viruses like this or modify them in the ways we can. You'd have needed to start a few decades ago, have tools that we've only just invented, and a huge number of willing test subjects.
Does this imply that covid19 has been circulating among humans for a very long time?
Yes, a lab leak of a virus collected from nature is the most plausible of these lab theories.
But the epidemiological evidence points to covid-19 originating outside wuhan entirely, that's why I find that theory less likely, among other reasons. See here:
Also if they had collected it in nature, it would have been in their freezers, or likely that people involved in that research would have been patient zero etc. See here:
Wuhan institute of virology also aren't the labs I'm worried about. They were built and designed by very reputable people in the virology community. Not saying you should trust them, but at least recognize that the people who are most qualified to distrust them think it's unlikely.
>Does this imply covid-19 has been circulating in humans a long time?
No, it implies it was relatively stable passing amongst several species of bats (and other related mammals) before a single or a few crossover events into humans recently.
It's behaving exactly like we would expect a zoonotic transmission to behave. It's not very well adapted to bats, it's not very well adapted to humans. It's sort of "promiscuous" likely because it has infected several different species over several decades before arriving in humans.
> They were built and designed by very reputable people in the virology community.
Anyone under the thumb of communist party minders is by definition not in a position to freely act as a very reputable person. They may very well have a reputation, but they are not free to fulfill it well.
Scientists in China play balancing acts all the time. They have to assess the risks and decide on a case by case basis what to say. I’m not inside her head but perhaps she also wants to try to maintain some scientific credibility for herself. It’s fine to wonder why, as you are, as long as you don’t assume that the question existing acts as a validation of your position.
I live in a rural place in the middle of the USA, but we have a large number of international travelers pass through. I am aware of several local cases that seem very COVID-like that predate January 2020. Two of these I knew about before anyone heard of the outbreak in Hubei. I remember discussing at the time how it was weird to hear of someone in their early 50s to be hospitalized with pneumonia from 'flu'. Anyway I wonder if you have heard any similar reports and your thoughts on the potential for much earlier transmission in the US.
It's not super likely, because we don't have the epidemiological data (increased deaths from non-influenza pneumonia at a large scale) to support that, to my knowledge.
It's certainly possible. And it is true that our methods of detection of viruses are ill-equipped so you can assume we're almost always behind the curve a bit.
But there also isn't much more than anecdote to support this. Lots of people get influenza-based pneumonia in the winter. Could you consider the possibility that your recollection is now tainted? And that you are primed to notice those events more? It was also already a very bad flu season. See here:
Another kind of issue is that early reports of "SARS-2 positive serum!" were overblown, which colored a lot of news reports on this. They basically made the tests too "promiscuous" so they also detected antibodies against common cold coronaviruses. That was a big problem. If you're curious about how tests like this work, you can check out this other post I wrote on that! Antibody tests are actually my specialty!
Okay they at least need to stay quiet, sit in their warehouse of cages, and no journalists need to find out about it. And there can't be any leaks from anyone involved suddenly gaining a deathbed conscience.
The conspiracy becomes so immense it's absurd the many thousands of people who would have to keep quiet.
> The conspiracy becomes so immense it's absurd the many thousands of people who would have to keep quiet.
We don't know how many nukes Russia has, even though that's knowledge shared by thousands of people. There has only been a single point of information about Israel's nuclear weapons program, Mordechai Vanunu, and we still barely know anything. Heck, we don't even know if and when the Nintendo Switch 2 will be released, even though again thousands of people must be privy to that information.
I don't see what people find so unrealistic about conspiracy theories in general, especially when massive nationstates are involved.
> The conspiracy becomes so immense it's absurd the many thousands of people who would have to keep quiet.
This really indicates you have idea about China. The CCP can easily make millions and tens of millions not only quiet, but enthusiastically deny what happened to them.
The existence of the outbreak in Wuhan leaked within 72 hours of the first suspicious patient test results coming back. China is not the black box many Americans and Europeans think it is.
That's only because at the time the central government didn't know what's happening. After that, you don't even know how many patients died. Check China's death count to see how unreal it is. And not a single doctor in the whole country dear to speak out.
The government made its first public announcements pretty much at the same time that information on the patients leaked online, on 30 December 2019. It was even on the national news that evening.
China's low death count is exactly what you'd expect for a country that had a severe lockdown early on, and which has not had significant community transmission since.
Beginning in late January 2020, there was a strict lockdown throughout China. In Hubei, people were essentially told not to leave their homes, food was delivered door-to-door, local volunteers went around checking people's temperatures at home and sending sick people to hospital or quarantine, in order to prevent even family members from infecting one another. The virus was starved of hosts and driven to near extinction in the country.
When China opened up again, there were sporadic cases in some cities, which were finally dealt with through mass testing campaigns. In Wuhan, for example, the government tested nearly all residents (about 10 million people) over the course of a few days in June 2020.
There have been a few outbreaks since. China has very strict quarantine rules, but the virus somehow finds a way in every few months. Most recently, someone who was infected walked over the border from Myanmar, without being tested or sent into quarantine. When these outbreaks occur, the government tests nearly every person in the affected region (the newest twist is now that there are vaccines, the government is vaccinating every person in the affected border town - in previous outbreaks, they would have just done PCR tests on everyone). When you have the resources of a massive country to throw at a small, localized outbreak, you can actually contain it.
So the basic situation is that China had one major outbreak in Hubei province early on, but that the virus has been nearly completely absent from the country for more than a year now. China's death toll is exactly what you'd expect for an outbreak in one province that infected <5% of the population of that province before it was stamped out.
> 1.3. you cannot take any virus known in nature (like Ratg-13 for example) and "cook" it for long enough or in any specific way to make it look like SARS-CoV-2.
Military lab can do it. Virus can be cooked long enough in hosts with depressed immune system. Soviet Union did such experiments before.
That is such a straw man. I seriously doubt anyone, much less a signatory to the recent open letter (many with experience and knowledge far beyond yours) would have claimed they can take ANY virus and transform it to ANY OTHER virus. Your green handle just lost any respect I might have extended to it.
yeah, not in the time frame available or with the tools available. It would either have to be some hidden virus that they all lied about, or somehow an unknown contaminant in their samples that then also disappeared when they looked.
All new assumptions that make this theory less likely.
Or, rather than starting with ANY virus as in your straw man, the lab started with a strain of the actual virus, from nature, and then leaked it with or without changes. Note the “or without” part. I don’t see how you rule this out.
Thank you for all that info and for taking the time to write it. Don't know why people can't be bother to just follow the link and instead expect you to repeat it all here.
Perhaps it's due to conditioning on stack overflow, where posting links on their own always swiftly invokes rebukes from the moderators (because linkrot).
But these are permalinks? This is like linking to a github. It doesn't just "disappear." Unless Reddit goes under, which is just as likely as StackOverflow or HN going under.
At this point, with their market cap and increased moderation, probably less likely than the two I listed.
Everyone is citing the evidence of the SARS-CoV-1 leak as reason to believe that viruses escape labs.
But you know what's interesting about that?
We know about the CoV-1 leak because /the chinese scientists told us about it./
They owned up to it and told the world and the biosafety community (the people with degrees in these things) helped china become more standard and respectable and safe.
And now 15 years later, with zero evidence, we're accusing them of covering up the same thing.
Scientists are not their government, and China's government is not a huge fan of it's scientists. Just look at the great leap forward. And how they're treating Shi Zhengli now that she is arguing the virus came from a zoonotic event in the provinces. China's party line no longer agrees, and she's been silenced.
Why would she lie for her government when they don't even agree?
>We know about the CoV-1 leak because /the chinese scientists told us about it./
Sometimes humans tell the truth, sometimes humans don't.
Pointing to one group of people who told the truth, and asserting that means another group must be telling the truth is just silly.
Especially considering the former example was in regards to a small accident relative to potentially the greatest accident in human history.
I know I would be strongly inclined to lie if I was responsible for the accidental death of millions of people.
If a human being was not inclined to lie about their responsibility for greatest accident in human history, why would humans ever lie about any mistake?
But at the time when it was important, in both of these leak events, only extremely few people had died. Not millions.
It was far from the worst accident in human history at that point, it looked like nothing and in America lots of people thought it would never affect us at all.
That's when it came up and when Zhengli had her lab searched and checked their freezers etc.
It's also important to think about the other BSL4 labs around the world they sent tons of samples to. If they were hiding SARS-CoV-2, why wouldn't it have slipped into any of these many thousands of inter-lab samples?
Releases aren't all that common but cross-contamination within and between secure sites actually is.
Why has no one found SARS-2 in any of the samples sent out of Wuhan to Australia, Singapore, Canada, or the US?
This is the most naive take of the real world. Yes. The Chinese government can easily make Chinese scientists lie when needed.
"with zero evidence"? The Chinese government told their labs destroy lab samples at the beginning of the pandemic. The Chinese government refuse to give raw data of early patients to the WHO investigation team. Not matter what the origin of the virus is, the "covering up" is strongly supported by evidence.
> The Chinese government told their labs destroy lab samples at the beginning of the pandemic.
I know the news reports you're referring to, but they're a good example of sensationalist reporting on China.
Very early on, when several patients in Wuhan had pneumonia of unknown cause, doctors sent samples from the patients across the country for testing. When it turned out that they had a novel coronavirus, that triggered rules about dealing with dangerous pathogens. You can't just have something like SARS-CoV-2 sitting around in any diagnostic lab. Labs with lower standards of biosecurity were required to either transfer their samples to labs with better biosecurity or to destroy them.
These sorts of rules are not unique to China. The US has very similar rules. However, in the hands of the news media, this story has been misrepresented.
> The Chinese government refuse to give raw data of early patients to the WHO investigation team.
Good luck getting any government to allow you to take 75000 de-anonymized patient records out of the country.
I'm not "attacking" them for wanting to have access to large amounts of raw patient records (which is, in fact, what the dispute was about). It's just not surprising that a sovereign country would refuse to allow foreigners to have that data.
What you wrote here is not wrong, but point number 3 stated:
> 3. Lab leaks happen more often than most people realize[1]
As I see it, there are two variables involved:
- how frequently lab leaks happen (total number of historic leaks - known + unknown)
- people's realization / awareness of how often they happen
> And now 15 years later, with zero evidence, we're accusing them of covering up the same thing.
Regardless of whether there is evidence or not (have they been perfectly transparent and enthusiastically encouraging of inspections?), a leak did happen, or it did not happen...and then on top of it, there is the problem of whether we have knowledge of it or not.
> Why would she lie for her government when they don't even agree?
I am definitely not a fan of the Chinese government. But the scientists I've met at conferences and the papers I've reviewed from their labs have been of a very high quality.
Not saying such people could not commit atrocities or coverups like this. But I do find it personally less likely.
That isn't the evidence I rely on most in my personal assessment, though. The epidemiology and molecular clock data points to a zoonotic origin outside of Wuhan. Check out here to see what I mean: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/-/fqpcfs2
Which makes the lab leak a whole lot less interesting of an idea since its' circumstantial evidence isn't actually the circumstance anymore.
I'd think you would also appreciate the idea that leaked from a lab does NOT strictly indicate manipulation -- only that manipulation COULD happen.
None of the bats they claim it came from were sold at the market. Meanwhile, they're tracking down every bat strain they can find and collecting them at the Wuhan lab.
Carelessness in handling would be the root cause whether the virus was manipulated or not. You provide zero evidence on the most important point.
Now, to the more conspiratorial point. UFO pyramid-shaped small drones hounded a US destroyer group for many hours. Any drone flyer would tell you that drones that shape are heavy and even stripped down ones don't fly for dozens of hours.
By the numbers, that requires a huge leap in material science and energy storage. This was not too far from a base that does classified research, so I doubt the cause was more than human.
The military really does keep a generation or two of technology to itself in every area it can. If they did make a breakthrough in quickly modifying viruses, would they publish it in a paper? No more so than the NSA would immediately publish their discovery of differential cryptanalysis. It became public in the late 80s. IBM kept it secret since the early 70s and the NSA knew about it long before that. That’s probably because the NSA employs the lion’s share of mathematicians in those areas (which also makes recruiting more top scientists easier).
Other countries do the same. If Chinese scientists discovered a faster and more natural looking method of manipulation, what incentive would they have to publish a paper? Their only incentive would be to hide it as much as possible and use it as a material advantage in the upcoming and growing conflict with the US.
I believe it was probably naturally discovered and leaked through carelessness, but assuming they couldn’t possibly have had a breakthrough when other countries obviously have in many other areas seems overly confident.
Agreed, I've read other plausible claims of ~evidence suggesting the Wuhan origin theory is incorrect.
Generally speaking, I think the whole world would be better off if we aligned our perceptions of our knowledge more closely with its likely true quality: very often, we think we know things, but we are actually just estimating if not outright guessing, and then declaring it to be true. Unfortunately, very few people seem to be comfortable with this idea regardless of their political orientation or education level. But as I see it, it is simply applying the discipline and methodology of science to the real world, so it's kind of weird how unpopular it is with educated people who are otherwise enthusiastic promoters of Scientific Thinking.
This is frankly an ignorant comment. Many of the best Special Olympic athletes would absolutely thrash your average in shape adult. Many of the men in their respective disability category for the 100m dash are sub 11-second, putting them in or near world class athlete times. And while those aren't Usain Bolt times, and not every category of Special Olympic athlete is equal, your average athletic male would be lucky to be in the 11-12 seconds range.
If anything you are fueling his argument. /r/science actually has a pretty high bar for submissions and is heavily moderated. In addition, you must directly link to published peer reviewed research. It's not the traditional subreddit that you are used to when you think of "Reddit". It's not quite the major leagues but has A LOT of quality posts because of the rules and moderation.
What? I had to ubsubscribe that joke of a subreddit. It's full of dumb American politics, literally 'research proves gop votes are more likely poorer than..". Day in and out.
That whole place is as much as to do with science than your FB mum group.
There's very little serous discussion going on.
You can't expect him to restrict his criticism to the content of your arguments and not your person if you claim your argument must be true because you have a PhD and no time to retype your essay for us lowlifes.
I didn't say my argument must be true because I have a PhD. I said you should trust that I'm not talking out of my ass because I have a PhD.
I'd much rather you read my arguments and criticize my content.
The fact is, criticisms in these things come from all angles. I was simply preempting one type of criticism in saying I have a PhD so I have thought about this and studied it a lot.
And then directly responding to another (that reddit is full of crap) by saying the content is what's important anyway.
I'm not saying I'm right because I have a PhD. In the post I drectly say "I'd much rather you read the arguments anyway"
I would like to criticise your content but you haven't posted any. You have simply claimed the posters claims #1 and #3 were false "because you said so".
Anyways I applaud and respect you for working your way up to the PhD and I am sure you are trying your best to spread the truth, but it would be more effective if you rehashed the main parts of that essay for all the readers here to see if you want to clear up whatever errors the poster has put out into the world.
The core argument of your Reddit post addressing gain-of-function research is that GoF research causes the sugars on the surface of the virus to be lost.
But that doesn't address the recombination event / recombinant virus, which is what the proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis seem to be arguing (spike protein from one virus combined with backbone from another virus)
The core argument is actually one of occam's razor. Is such a recombinant /technically/ possible? Yes.
How many new assumptions does it require? A lot. Lots of people who help cover it up, lots of people who get sick and say nothing, lots of samples destroyed. And then also the epidemiological and genetic evidence doesn't support it.
How many new assumptions do you need for the zoonosis theory? Very few. It consists almost entirely of phenomena we know occur in nature, via mechanisms already described and known to occur at a frequent enough time scale to make it not just plausible, but probable.
Also, I just want to reiterate here, we virologists have literally been saying this is going to happen from nature FOR YEARS.
People like Michael Osterholm and Peter Daszak and Vincent Muenster and Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli have been saying this was going to happen /for years/. It was a matter of "when" not "if" to us virologists. We absolutely saw the writing on the wall and saw specifically SARS-1 and MERS and knew that meant there were likely other coronaviruses that could emerge.
But funding was always so low, because the viruses weren't currently infecting anybody! So the sampling efforts were always very minimal and underfunded!
And now, because of the lab leak theory, that has actually gotten worse, not better!
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16940861/ (this one says wet markets, which probably are an issue, but not as big as initially thought, and probably not the origin of CoV-2)
While racism and xenophobia is real, it has been and is being used very effectively, especially by China but others too, to deflect/blunt genuine criticisms and claims.
Just as an amusing example, we talk openly about UK variant, SA variant, Brazil variant - but never talk about original as Wuhan variant - it is simply coronavirus.
It's cuts both ways. Some of the UK Politicians happily throwing around "China/Wuhan virus" got butt-hurt on Twitter when people called the B117 strain the "UK Variant."
We shouldn't be using that terminology for variants either. While I understand that people largely use location names for the sake of convenience, it really doesn't feel good to be a person from one of those locations.
Were they "butt-hurt" or were they feigning outrage to point out the hypocrisy of their opponents? I feel the later happens a lot on the internet (and some people even loose sight of the original intent).
It's like "censorship is OK if a private company does it". This makes a bit of sense if you're attacking a Libertarian, but for left wingers to earnestly think that private companies should have the right to shut down discussion they don't like is very odd.
Sometimes I worry that large portions of online debate has been overrun by people making claims they don't really believe because they're a bad slippery slope take on the views of the people they disagree with; and sometimes people have even started to buy the deliberately bad arguments their side has created.
> Were they "butt-hurt" or were they feigning outrage to point out the hypocrisy of their opponents?
How should one tell the difference?
> think that private companies should have the right to shut down discussion they don't like
That's a perverse take on supporting 1st amendment rights. Do you believe that right-wingers in turn believe that private companies should be forced to serve users and content they don't want to?
Really? Why would it bother anyone there is a strain after your city/country/continent? Seriously I can't think of one reason it would bother me. It's so much easier to NOT take things personally. It's easier, and feels better.
In my opinion, location names are the easiest and most memorable way to refer to variants. The tradition is as old as the "Spanish flu"... which isn't from Spain at all.
They might be the easiest way to refer to variants but it does seem to incentivise countries/regions not disclosing/testing for new variants in the first place.
So, on balance, it all evens out. Anti China racism, causality delusion to the detriment of the West, all looks to be in order. Carry on
Humans responding to a crisis by blaming each other. Most predictable thing ever. HN commentariat talking with such authority about things which they know nought and can't even see beyond their bias to engage their rational faculty about. Me included
Double most predictable thing ever. Hn is a microcosm.
Each of us all prisoners of our bias pretending we hold the truth of the world in the palms of our hands. a shining pearl of truth is actually a musty bolus we've wrenched up from the bowels of our own experience.
If only we were all a little less sure. A little less strident. But it's not gonna happen. This is who we are. This is where we are. We are the truth!
So let's get back to fighting. It'll be dark soon... Still a lot of fight needs gettin done before the day's out.
Pretty crazy that people have been placing so much criticism on response-related aspects, but don't have any interest in the root cause. This entire mess could start over from scratch tomorrow with a completely different virus...but who cares, let's argue about the political response.
I think this is in large part a display of the power the media has to steer what a population thinks about. They clearly don't want the root cause investigated, or even thought about for that matter. We should go one step deeper and question why that is so, and who stands to benefit from that?
I feel the idiotic claims by the Trump admin (it is a bioweapon! It was released by China to make me look bad!) made it hard to actually push forward the strong arguments in favor of an accidental lab release.
There was a lot of controversy around the P4 lab in Wuhan when it was built, as this was seen an unnecessary risk. There has been breaches of security protocols several times in the past.
The fact that a new virus would first appear in that city would have been quite a coincidence that could not be ruled out, but the accidental lab release should always have been an hypothesis.
You are missing the important bit: The lab leak would have to be covered up by the Chinese authorities and the WHO would some how have had to be in on it.
Read the section in the WHO report on COVID19 and listen to the reputable international scientist that actually went and visited the lab and interviewed the people who worked there.
>The lab leak would have to be covered up by the Chinese authorities and the WHO would some how have had to be in on it.
Indeed. There's another important bit that you seem to be missing.
Did you know that Peter Daszak, one of the "reputable international scientists" you speak of who helped investigate and author that report was himself the project lead for the US funded gain of function research at the WIV?
Who would be more inclined or in a better position to cover that up than him?
There were around 20 scientist who went to Wuhan with WHO. From all over the world, with actual relevant qualifications, specialised enough in virology to form a meaningful opinion on this subject.
Today they are all being harrassed by anonymous internet users because their conclusion didn't follow some conspiratorial paranoid anti-China story. What does that tell you?
There are people out there who happily make up stuff to fit a certain story. And people who will happily repeat it.
You can bury your head in ignorance and let yourself be manipulated by the likes of Steve Bannon or you can choose to listen to people, who actually have qualifications in the field and who have a meaningful reputation to loose.
> You are missing the important bit: The lab leak would have to be covered up by the Chinese authorities and the WHO would some how have had to be in on it.
Is that so inconceivable? The Chinese government has historically obfuscated facts and runs one of the largest media control operations in modern history. The WHO is also an organization of questionable trustworthiness and with suspicious subservience to China[1]. But the WHO wouldn't necessarily had to have been complicit. This could've easily been covered up by Chinese authorities during the many months of blocking external researchers into the country[2]. The research in the report you linked to started in January 2021.
As for the report itself, I skimmed a few pages and noticed some issues. My understanding is limited in this area, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
0. First of all, the conflict of interest of it being reported by WHO and Chinese researchers should be a factor in judging the validity of any of its claims.
1. From the arguments in favour of the intermediate host scenario (p. 115):
> Although the closest related viruses have been found in bats, the
> evolutionary distance between these bat viruses and SARS-CoV-2 is estimated
> to be several decades, suggesting a missing link (either a missing progenitor
> virus, or evolution of a progenitor virus in an intermediate host).
Why would this suggest a missing link? Couldn't gain of function research accelerate the mutations of the virus to make it seem far distant genetically from the ones found in bats?
2. From the arguments against the intermediate host scenario (p. 116):
> There was no genetic or serological evidence for SARS-CoV-2 in a wide
> range of domestic and wild animals tested to date.
And immediately after:
> Screening of farmed wildlife was limited but did not provide conclusive
> evidence for the existence of circulation.
So only major livestock species were screened, and wildlife screening was "limited", yet it concludes that there was no evidence. This scenario is "likely to very likely" based on a faulty missing link argument and dismissing the point that the research was limited.
3. From the arguments against the laboratory incident scenario (p. 119):
> There is no record of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 in any
> laboratory before December 2019, or genomes that in combination could
> provide a SARS-CoV-2 genome.
"There is no record" doesn't exclude the possibility of records being deleted before January 2021.
The rest of the arguments that all labs complied with high safety standards, with no reports of illnesses or disruption are also coming from Chinese authorities, and should be taken with a grain of salt. Yet this is enough to consider this scenario "extremely unlikely".
4. China is praised multiple times for its "near-elimination of SARS-CoV-2", but the official data is comically suspicious[3]. A total of 4,851 deaths in a country of 1.4 billion people. That week of April 13, 2020 was rough.
Apologies if I sound inflammatory and conspiratorial, my disinformation senses are tingling.
Ugh and apologies for the formatting. HN please adopt Markdown.
Thanks for the detailed criticisms, you raise some good points.
>4. China is praised multiple times for its "near-elimination of SARS-CoV-2", but the official data is comically suspicious[3]. A total of 4,851 deaths in a country of 1.4 billion people. That week of April 13, 2020 was rough.
Indeed, the same day China decided to censor all covid death counts was the same day Chinese activists who were reporting on covid deaths using Github were dissappeared.
To think that China couldn't or wouldn't carefully control this situation and what information is available to external parties is being credulous to the point of this sounding like propaganda. They did everything they could to downplay the severity of the issue for months while they had people in hazmat suits trying to decon Wuhan.
As far as I know, the government may have tried, but the scientists themselves were not down with it.
This sort of culture of the openness of science is why the Chinese government distrusts scientists inherently. And also why Shi Zhengli has maintained an extremely consistent story with the pandemic despite the government's changing its story like 3 times. Also why they've since silenced her. They don't trust their own citizens, and definitely not their own scientists.
It's common knowledge that the CCP tried to cover up the SARS outbreak initially, and then later changed course. Just like they tried to fly under the radar with covid-19, the WHO changed the timeline last year admitting China never informed them. Then China tried to silence anyone who spoke out about it. It makes you wonder what would have happened if Taiwan never requested information from the WHO, effectively informing the WHO to begin with.
You can't break the site guidelines like this regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. We ban accounts that do it, so please don't do it again.
Sorry I'm a green account but I forgot the password to the HN account I made like 10 years ago. I mostly lurk so I haven't logged in in a looong time. Since before password managers became convenient or commonplace. Like 3 email addresses ago.
Hi I'm not "coming to China's defense" here. I am no fan of the Chinese government I literally find them horrifically oppressive and a place I would /never/ want to live. I am no fan of China. I also anticipated this exact criticism and wrote a whole response to it. See here (#4): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vRbACWf90iBC35xNOwlI5bWcUq0...
I want to apologize for some of my attitude in my comments to you here. Some of what I said I regret. Some of what I said was probably incorrect, and a lot of it was rude. Other parts, I still believe I would stand by, but I have to admit I haven't yet worked my way fully through your document, and it was poor form of me to give you that much grief especially given that fact, and, whether I agree with you or not, my way of expressing disagreement could have been less bad. Thank you for all your contributions on this.
While I do have my doubts reading some of your responses (which do not always seem to address concerns head on, especially responses to questions about lab leaks of natural viruses, which I've seen you respond to with something about engineered viruses, which wasn't the question), I believe you may be sincere, and I understand the value of extending the benefit of the doubt. I hope this discussion doesn't color your experience in a bad way.
I'll say one thing about China… it will surprise you (general "you") and defy your assumptions. Jaw-dropping moments are a daily occurrence. Of course we could say the same thing about most countries though.
You have repeatedly been an asshole in this thread. That's seriously not cool, regardless of how wrong other commenters are or you feel they are.
Attacking users for being new is particularly bad. Do we want HN to be a smug, insular community or welcoming to newcomers? Obviously the latter. Please don't poison it.
Sorry! I'll reexamine myself on the comments in this thread. I suppose I was kind of triggered by certain aspects, which may not be a good excuse. And I realize this is only part of it, but I definitely don't want to attack someone for being new.
I'm too ignorant of this field to form any opinion on it, but I'm curious how much you would wager with even odds that COVID-19 didn't originate from a virology lab?
Not with me, because as I said I'm too ignorant of this field to form any opinion on it, but with some of the people who are pushing back against your posts.
I don't really have a lot of money (I'm 300k in debt from medical school and PhD school and undergrad combined) but sure...
if Yuri Deigin or Alina Chan wagered with me, I would probably bet like.... idk $2,000 that it was a natural zoonotic event? Like I said I don't have a lot of money in my bank account. That would be about how much I spend out of my student loans for rent, food, utilities, bills, etc. in a given month.
The problem with a wager like that is that we will probably /never/ be truly 100% sure either way. The thing I would push on, though, is that we would need to set forward exactly the criteria we would use to reassess our positions or give up the bet.
We're seeing this reaction because of the bi-partisan view of the world which is so widespread in the USA.
These days there is more interesting data in what is considered kosher on mainstream media and what is labelled a conspiracy theory, than the information itself.
This top comment and the thread caused by posting it actually seems to be the main source of heated discussions about whether lab leak suggestions are xenophobic or not.
For your second point: it’s not racist, but not because the US was funding it, but because it’s possible to criticize a regime and failures of a country without criticizing the ethnicity of people. The only reason racism ever gets conflated here is because people are implicitly aware of the fact that China is an ethnostate for all intents and purposes.
Gain of function research still uses genetically tagged samples. They insert minor inactive sequences who's purpose is solely for identifying when there's been a lab leak. These samples are not Engineered, but still identifiable using DNA/RNA sequencing.
As far as I’m concerned you can start right now, I’m not afraid of ideas. I think however that, unless someone makes a really big mistake, it’ll never be possible to prove such a hypothesis.
Of course; if we wait around for documentary proof of covert operations to emerge it almost invariably arrives long after the point where anything can be done with the information.
There are oddities in the whole timeline which stand out to me. The social media videos of people keeling over in streets and buildings in Wuhan from the virus, which doesn't appear to be a genuine phenomenon of its pathology and therefore looks planted for psyop purposes. The CDC behaving so incompetently around testing and acknowledging the threat of the virus that it beggars belief (see: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-cdc-re...). No one from the global ruling class succumbing to the virus even as it claims multiple Covid-skeptical leaders in Africa where its impact is otherwise quite muted. Cuomo, Newsom, and Whitmer implementing policies which grossly amplified nursing home deaths in the early stages of the pandemic. Various maneuvers of public consent management, e.g. "15 Days to Slow the Spread" to get people to start lockdowns, followed by "we have to keep going until we get the vaccines" alongside zero investment in new ICU capacity and even reductions in hospital staff. The obvious wealth transfers and consolidation of the economy away from the middle class and small businesses which has occurred, along with the accelerated adoption of surveillable tech platforms as the primary means of interpersonal communication. Doctors reduced to begging on Twitter for people to run trials on repurposed generic treatments while all the stops are pulled out for the vaccines (even the Washington Post has recently acknowledged that financial incentives and political considerations are preventing cheap drugs from getting a fair shake: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/04/08/ivermectin-...).
But yeah, certainly nothing I can point to as hard proof.
Well, dreaming about how the world would be able to organize such a conspiracy does sound like conspiracy theory to me. But that is not my point, what I wanted to say is that, even if it turns out the coronavirus was leaked from a lab, practically it is impossible to prove that this was intentional.
If the release was intentional then there was almost certainly a great deal of contingency planning in place, distribution of a prediscovered cure, etc. The release itself is easy enough to conceal, the planning to take maximum advantage of it, not so much.
> 2. It's not xenophobic for people from the US to suggest the possibility of a lab leak
Inherently? Of course not. But does xenophobia motivate a lot of this argument? It certainly seems to. Look at how quickly proponents of this nonsense jump from detached discussion about the possibilities to outraged condemnation of the PRC. Just read the discussion here in this thread.
If you only wanted to discuss the lab and the virus and try to put relative likelihoods on the natural evolution vs. Andromeda Strain theories, that would be one thing. But... that doesn't seem to be all you want.
Just because the motivation for the argument is bad, it doesn't mean that the argument itself is bad. I think you agree by saying it's not "inherently" xenophobic.
All we need to do to take xenophobia out of this discussion is to not be xenophobic ourselves. The xenophobes may talk to themselves. But let's make sure we are talking about this problem instead of falling for the "guilty by association fallacy".
> Just because the motivation for the argument is bad, it doesn't mean that the argument itself is bad.
Inherently? Of course not. But in practice it tends to act as a good prior for detecting bullshit. How many of these people would really be making the same argument in this way had the virus appeared in Bonn or Montreal?
And again, to repeat: in this particular situation we have a very acceptable, very convincing, very obvious hypothesis for covid origins that simply does not require trafficking in badly-motivated argument.
At the end of the day there's no strong evidence, we all agree on that. So I choose to believe something obvious that fits the data and patterns previous events, and others... choose to believe that a (literal!) conspiracy is afoot acting to cover up wrongdoing by an evil foreign nation. And that's bad.
Excuse me but PRC = People's Republic of China correct?
How would it be xenophobic to criticize a government? This conflation is so pervasive and toxic to the discourse.
The Chinese government does bear some of the responsibility here. The Chinese people do not. At a minimum, they actively tried to cover-up an investigation into a leak and leaned on the World Health Organization in order to do so.
This had two negative affects globally. First is the slowed response time from the rest of the World as they were assured this was mild and contained. Second is the rightfully degraded trust in the WHO which will impede ongoing and future efforts not only to stop Covid-19 but also future pandemics.
The reason right-wing media sources are the only ones talking about this is because they are the only ones with the freedom to do so. If we do not like that some of these source are implying that Chinese people as a group are to blame, then that is an invitation for more mainstream outlets to stop carrying water for the Chinese and American governments.
Be upfront, the WHO was compromised by the Chinese government. There could have been a leak, a hypothesis that is looking more likely with each passing week. If this was in fact a leak, then gain of function research could also be implicated. This produces a conflict of interest with experts in the field because their funding and research may utilize gain of function methods.
Done.
This was a known unknown over a year ago, but stifled due to political interests. The casting of xenophobic aspersions onto the right-leaning media sources who got this correct is an attempt at damage control for the same political interests.
I get it. Admitting those media sources were better when it really mattered means fewer people will get vaccinated and we may get a Trump 2.0. That is the political price of lying and getting caught. Jacketing all these conversations with underlying accusations of "well they were right but also racist" is not going to be a win. If you want to win you have to actually be better.
> The Chinese government does bear some of the responsibility here. The Chinese people do not.
I don't know how much clearer I can make a distinction between a people and their government in words. I do not consider myself responsible for the decisions of Dick Cheney and Obama. Nor would I consider a random Chinese person responsible for the actions of Tedros Adhanom or Xi Jinping.
I would find someone blaming a Chinese or Chinese-American person on a subway for the coronavirus misguided and wrong.
I would find someone critiquing the Chinese governments response to the virus very justifiable.
> The virus does have an inexplicable feature: a so-called “furin cleavage site” in the spike protein that helps SARS-CoV-2 pry its way into human cells. While such sites are present in some coronaviruses, they haven’t been found in any of SARS-CoV-2’s closest known relatives.
This is false. First of all it should be stated clearer that there has been parallel evolution across several branches of coronaviruses which have independently evolved a furin cleavage site (so there is evolutionary pressure and advantage for coronaviruses to follow this path):
And then the statement is just wrong. The related sarbecoviruses found in Thailand have similar furin cleavage sites:
> The RacCS203 S gene is most similar to that of RmYN02 (Supplementary Fig. 3a). The two viruses shared part of the furin cleavage site unique to SARS-CoV-2 (Supplementary Fig. 3b) and have an almost identical RBD aa sequence with only two residue differences out of 204 aa residues
Yes. And making it even more obvious the extremely well known (now) story of how the researcher that discovered the technique of stablizing the spike in it's pre-fusion conformation with proline substitutions (before being acted on by furin proteases) did so while working with MERS-CoV. It's not even obscure knowledge anymore that MERS had the same furin cleavage site. It's filtered out into public non-expert awareness.
I have to nitpick. I don't believe there's evolutionary pressure to evolve this. Evolution is (going to piss some people off) almost entirely random. There may be purifying selection but that has an entirely different set of properties than the idea of Lamarckian evolution.
Edit: Perhaps to clarify, what I'm trying to say is that evolution does not have foresight. And this is not my opinion, but merely that of Eugene Koonin, and I'm just repeating it.
I hate to nitpick. How do you end up bringing Lamarckism into this? It's thoroughly discredited, and misleading to call it 'evolution'. Did you just travel here from the late 19th century?
Mutations are entirely random, usually deletrious. Evolutionary pressure is the selection for fitness.
Actually, CRISPR/Cas is a fantastic example of lamarckian evolution.
What I'm trying to say is that it's not pressure into with evolution, but rather, random mutation + purifying selection = evolution of new traits.
Organisms can't determine what they need to evolve to. There is no guidance of "evolve to this", but rather - "entirely random evolution maybe I won't die yay" - everything that isn't useful dies.
So saying that organisms can evolve to something is a little misguided because they have no specific objective in mind.
>Actually, CRISPR/Cas is a fantastic example of lamarckian evolution.
This, however, is completely wrong.
>Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism,[1] is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime.
I'm just doing a poor job of explaining what I'm trying to say , mainly because I was typing from my phone, and also because it's Friday evening after a long week and I've had a couple beers. And because a lot of this stuff is over my head.
Let me restate my issue with the OP in a clearer way and then I'll get into the rest of the nuance and detail.
OP said:
>there is evolutionary pressure [...] for coronaviruses to follow this path
I interpreted this line as reading: "coronaviruses will likely evolve furin sites because <some external force/evolution> is causing them to". The issue I take with it is that coronaviruses don't know what to evolve to, they simply evolve, and if it works, great. If not, they die. I'm not sure there's a cause beyond random/stochastic factors. Otherwise, it would be Lamarckian. If I were to reword it myself, I'd say "evolution of furin sites will be selected for". The reason I make this distinction is because elsewhere in the thread, I commented that a lab leak is a real hypothesis, and one of the counterarguments of that seems to be that because coronavirus could evolve a furin site without human intervention means that they did evolve a furin site without human intervention, and I dislike the narrative that it was an inevitability. (To make my position clear, I'd give a personal weighting of a natural evolution of Covid as about 85%, and a lab leak at about 14.9999999999%, and a malicious lab leak at about 0.000000000001%. Those numbers could be wildly off. I just get upset when people try to say a lab leak was definitely not possible).
>You understand the nuances better than most. I'm guessing you're self taught? I've never read the origin of species, but I feel like you might have!
I'd prefer to avoid a conversation based on credentials because of recent bad experiences there, but yes, I have read it. However, I was thinking about "The Logic of Chance" by Eugene Koonin, who is fairly well respected in the evolutionary biology field. Particularly, in "The Logic of Chance", he defines Lamarckian evolution as the following:
>Lamarckian inheritance refers to nonrandomly acquired phenotypic changes, particularly those that are directly affected by the use of organs and are accordingly assumed to be adaptive (beneficial for the organism). The controversial French naturalist Jean-Bapteste Lamarck believed that directed changes are inheritable and constitute the basis of evolution
He also goes on to say:
>Lamarck was the author of the first coherent theory of the evolution of life, which he presented in his Philosophie Zoologique; “inheritance of acquired (adaptive) characters” played a key role in this theory.
He makes a good, and much more nuanced argument than I'll attempt to explain here (see "The Logic of chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution, Chapter 9 for the full argument) that the inability of Lamarckian evolution only applies to the central dogma (DNA -> RNA -> Protein) because the central dogma has no reverse mechanism (no way to transfer information from protein back to DNA). However, this scenario falls apart with the advent of things like proteins that can insert novel DNA into a genome, or reverse-transcriptases.
Specifically regarding CRISPR/Cas, Koonin has this to say:
>The mechanism of heredity and genome evolution embodied in the CRISPR-Cas system seems to be bona fide Lamarckian (see Figure 9-2):
>• An environmental cue (a selfish genetic element, such as a virus) is employed to directly modify the genome.
>• The resulting modification (unique, element-specific spacer) directly affects the same cue that caused the modification.
>• The modification is clearly adaptive and is inherited by the progeny of the cell that encountered the selfish element.
He goes on to address your points about losing with disuse, as well:
>The CRISPR-mediated heredity appears to be short-lived: Even closely related bacterial and archaeal genomes do not carry the same inserts. The implication is that, as soon as a bacterium or archaeon ceases to encounter a particular agent (virus), the cognate spacer rapidly deteriorates.
While "Logic of Chance" was written in 2013, if I remember correctly, which was the nascent stages of CRISPR/Cas understanding, my personal experience in biology has proven that to be quite true. We know now that CRISPR spacers are inserted into the beginning of the spacer locus, directly adjacent the leader which is where spacer transcription is initiated, and this apparently serves an evolutionary function of ensuring that the transcription guarantees more transcripts of the most recently encountered viruses.
That said, there are some serious flaws in his thinking. See this rebuttal:
As always, in large part, the phenomena is undisputed, and the fact that it breaks the central dogma is...mostly...undisputed, but the actual definition of the term "Lamarckian" is in hot dispute.
I feel that for people paying attention to COVID news, this has always been the case; there's never been any kind of conclusive evidence on the origin of the virus (that I've read of). The article outlines three main possible origins - natural, accidental combination in lab, deliberate construction in lab. (There's a fourth option I've seen floating around - deliberate release of a constructed virus.) It seems that most of the scientists in the article are considering the second option; however, right-wing media has apparently in multiple instances sought to take their work to push the third, or even fourth option.
It is thoroughly unsurprising to me that most scientific publications would take a stance against releasing studies or articles considering option two or three, as right-wing media and politicians were/are fishing for anything with a suitable scientific veneer they could throw out as evidence of someone to blame. (And its not hard to see why - telling your constituents they have to deal with job losses, family deaths and lockdowns because someone in China ate a bat leaves people without something to blame, and the politicians tend to be the closest relevant people.) Given the amount of anti-asian racism/crime/murder we've seen spiking in the last year, I think the publications' stances (and the more mainstream media) to lean heavily towards option one is understandable - no one wants to be the used as justification for hate crimes or political action a la the Iraq war buildup.
Perhaps in another year or two things will have cooled down enough that stuff like this can be considered without collateral damage.
Absolutely. Lots of issues that are just way too high-emotion right now for rational and objective discussion.
One other reason it's way too hot to discuss right now: it would suggest that scientists were at least partly to blame for the pandemic. Even if you're not Chinese, you might not want to be discussing that idea if you were a scientist yourself.
Not if it causes people to (emotionally) dig themselves into positions which they later are unwilling to relent on because people hate admitting they're wrong, and hate it more the more adamantly they had stated their position before. We're in a very polarized environment, with very little trust between groups, and having an early emotional hard conversation could actually be another obstacle in the way of having a productive one later.
> Given the amount of anti-asian racism/crime/murder we've seen spiking in the last year, I think the publications' stances (and the more mainstream media) to lean heavily towards option one is understandable
So we start with one marginal conspiracy theory 4, add some lies trying to silence very likely theory 2, and as a result get even more people believing in global conspiracy to create and use the virus, who think the lies are the best proof for their theory.
Any lies are bound to backfire, and there is nothing understandable in supporting dishonesty. The Iraq war buildup is not comparable here in any way as it was a misinformation campaign started by government, not an attempt to find the truth.
I don't think it matters much how long we take, because it's not figuring out the pandemic - that we're already failing to do, even without an origin story - but instead figuring out the origin.
The origin, truth be told, is basically irrelevant, just like the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. We live in the world today, and while the story of how we got here might be somewhat academically or historically interesting, it's about a million items down the list of things that are actually important right now.
The origin is interesting but hardly conclusive in stopping the next pandemic, which is only a matter of time anyway.
Instead, the significant economic and health costs could have been significantly mitigated by the response of governments. That’s going to be more important for preventing harm in the next pandemic. Even if it was a lab escape, how does shutting down the labs help for the future? They are also a defence against the next pandemic
You don't have to shut down the labs. Understanding how it happened in the first place can inform effective policies to prevent future lab leaks. The Obama administration temporarily suspended Gain of Function research in the US in 2014 to investigate and mitigate lab leak risks. They did not dismiss lab leak concerns and characterize them as xenophobic attacks on the country.
Frankly, any solution that does not in some way involve "how can we prevent or reduce the incidence of this kind of problem happening" is political nonsense to me. Even with the most effective defensive protocols, a pandemic-grade virus costs a staggering amount of resources to deal with.
The evidence is circumstantial, but there has yet to be any evidence ruling it out. To be clear, the lab leak hypothesis is always possible. Things can always leak out of labs, let's not kid ourselves.
Some things (going by memory here) that seem to support the hypothesis:
1) Major point of differentiation for this virus is that compared to it's closest known relatives, it has acquired a furin site (eukaryotic protein cleavage site) that enhances its virulence.
2) That furin site RNA contains a non-canonical amino acid codon
3) That non-canonical codon contains a restriction site that could easily be used to track, whether, say, your added furin site is surviving multiple cell passages, by performing a restriction digest and running the fragments on a cell.
Like I said above, it's circumstantial, but this is all very normal. Both adding the furin site (how does coronavirus evolve into something more virulent?) and tracking it that way. Then all it takes is someone to get infected (EVERYONE working in biology has broken at least one lab safety rule in their life, even in BSL4) and either not be symptomatic and realize, or not say anything.
Furin cleavage sites very similar if not largely identical to this one have also been found in nature, and have been generated in nature in very short spans of time (on the order of a few decades, which is what is suspected to have happened with SARS-CoV-2).
I describe the evidence in detail in this detailed longform post I wrote on reddit a few months back: Hi, I have a PhD in virology focused on emerging viruses, and a few months back I wrote a very lengthy and involved piece full of sources.
And in there, I describe exactly how wrong your point 1 is. And how misguided your point 3 is.
The post also won a "best of r/science 2020" award!
I read through your post and it was incomplete and hand wavy, although that makes sense because it was written for Reddit. The bias was also obvious, and remarkably unscientific in how you approached the "problems" in a deterministic manner. You cherry picked examples (for instance, saying we can detect Cas9 mutations) that make no conclusive point (for example, there are a variety of ways to add a furin site to a genome that don't involve Cas9) but are indistinguishable as proof by the Reddit audience. The bottom line is, though, you are cherry picking arguments that lay people are more or less too unaware of their cherry picked status to argue with.
As a virologist, who "engineers viruses", I also take some offense to this line:
>The virus itself, to the eye of any virologist, is clearly not engineered.
I also suspect that the viruses referenced in the featured article would object to that line as well.
I agree with you that I am uncomfortable with the "hand-waviness" of the OP's response. If you are a virologist, I would really like your opinion on the science of the following document:
Like you, I don't enjoy when facts I post are de-railed without actually addressing any of them. It happens a lot, but I try my best to not let them be the last word.
There is plenty of factual information out there that makes an accidental lab-leak hypothesis strong.
I'm unfortunately going to give an equally hand-wavy response. There's nothing in there that strikes me as factually incorrect (I could be wrong though because I am not an expert on these viruses). I did a brief genome analysis myself - only ~5% of the arginines are encoded by the CGG codon. It's also true that those two introduce the furin site, and it's hypothesized that the furin site is critical to the viruses ability to enter the human cell. It's also true that it's a large difference between the closest variant and SARS-CoV 2. There's also the fact that it's an insertion, not a mutation. i.e. the gene acquired extra amino acids, not just changing the new ones (that's one point I think is hand-waved over in the OP's comment, as he points out that there are many mutations between SARS-2 and the closest relative - which is true, but there is (to my knowledge and I'm happy to be corrected on this) only one insertion, and that is the furin site bearing two adjecent non-canonical arginine codons next to each other that also introduce a restriction site.) However, I do believe the insertion is out of frame, which is odd. If I was engineering the protein, I'd probably make the insertion in-frame to reduce variables as much as possible. So that's a point against. The paper also just glosses over that.
The restriction site is interesting because to my knowledge, mammals don't produce the protein that would normally digest it (which implies that it's probably rare among infectious eukaryotic viruses), but again, I could be wrong there and am happy to be corrected. Typically, a restriction enzyme will, under the right conditions, cut the DNA (or RNA) at the restriction site. One of the interesting things here is that if I was introducing a restriction site to track GoF research, adding it directly in the thing I added greatly simplifies my life. If that restriction site goes away, I know I lost my insert. It's also nicer to use a restriction site because I can do the digest in 30 minutes on a benchtop, run an agarose gel in an hour, and know if I still have it after passaging the virus, vs say, sequencing, which is usually more expensive and takes longer. Especially if it's BSL2+ because now I need to put it over a BSL2+ sequencer.
It's a hypothesis. We'll never know. There's no conclusive evidence either way, and it's absolutely something we should all be talking about, and the scientists among us should be trying to properly falsify it to the best of our ability.
Thanks for that, I'm very glad I asked. Your hypothesis around the restriction site is rather eye opening. The scientists involved in this study have faced intense online campaigns against them.
> the scientists among us should be trying to properly falsify it to the best of our ability.
This is precisely why I am bothered this has been placed into "conspiracy theory" land, due to a lot of political reasons and a whole lot of online pressure with those "hand-wavy" arguments. The same type of arguments you originally did not accept. I get them constantly when I post facts, and the are meant specifically to try to steer the discussion away from anything I was pointing out, to get that last word in.
Did SARS-CoV-2, with its affinity for human ACE2, leak from a lab in Wuhan that was doing known gain of function experiments dealing with CoV and human ACE2?
Or did it somehow show up in a market right next to the lab, with "hand-wavy" explanations as to how that happened?
The science seems to strongly point to one of those. Since access to the lab has been completely shut down, and historical information on the web has been systematically being removed, finding a smoking gun is difficult. But I feel an extremely strong case can be made with circumstantial evidence.
I say that we could /very likely/ detect the methods necessary to edit the virus.
How do you suggest we would be able to completely engineer, from scratch, a novel virus with 1200 mutations spaced randomly throughout the genome, that would rescue properly and be capable of infecting a novel host? I know of no such modeling technology to accomplish this. All of these are phenomena that happen easily and constantly in a massive natural reservoir of any viral population.
And if you think it was not strictly "engineered" but instead "evolved" selectively by hand, then how can you escape the S/NS ratio problem? How can you escape the adaptation and glycosylation problem I describe in my original post? How could you avoid the issue of adapting to the host it was evolved in, and acquiring these "lab animal" or "cell culture" specific adaptation mutants that would then need to be somehow removed. Or it likely would not infect humans with any great reproductive efficiency. And then it would have an S protein that would be a bit more adapted to humans, as it has become over the course of the last year. As it's evolving in us, it is becoming better at infecting us. If it had been evolved in humans prior to the pandemic, this would not be as necessary and it would not happen on the scale it's currently happening.
And when exactly would China have started this little "experiment?" Where? With what subjects? How did they keep it secret?
That's interesting, because of the scientists featured in the above article... None of them are virologists.
Petrovsky, for instance, if you look at his google scholar, hasn't published a paper in a virology journal in the 10 years that I looked. He's published in some predatory journals, ones I wouldn't be caught dead publishing in.
He's also gotten /close/, I guess, by publishing about tuberculosis. But it really is different and the man clearly has never done any viral biosafety work or worked or supervised work in any secure facilities working with viruses.
If he did, I think he might be more cautious about being so cavalier with the probabilities here.
David Relman studies the gut microbiome.
I have no reason to believe you're a virologist with any training other than your word, but that isn't actually all that important to my argument.
Using viruses in your research doesn't make you a virologist any more than using pens in an art school thesis makes you an expert in ballpoint pens.
All of that aside, the consensus among people who actually use or study dangerous viruses in biosafety labs (both those for and against gain of function research, btw) is that the virus likely came from a wild zoonotic crossover event.
I'm going to start off by pointing out that again, almost your entire argument is an appeal to authority, which is not a scientific argument. Oh and add gatekeeping to the list as well, in support of your appeal to authority.
As an aside to anyone that isn't a professional scientist reading this thread: I'd just like to issue a caution that any time some supposed "expert" is telling you that you should listen to them because of their credentials, and not the merit of their argument, you should promptly ignore them. Extra points if they tell you that the argument is too complex for you to understand. If they can't explain it to a highschooler, they don't understand it either.
>I have no reason to believe you're a virologist with any training other than your word, but that isn't actually all that important to my argument.
Actually, that's pretty much your entire argument. I'd rather not tie my HN identity to my real identity, as it's not unique to HN but all of my online life. All of my published work, with the exception of a single 1st author and a single 2nd author paper about CRISPR/Cas, is about viruses.
Here are some micrographs of viruses I work with that I took, today:
Feel free to reverse image search them or whatever. Edit: removed reference to specific lab for sake of anonymity.
>All of that aside, the consensus among people who actually use or study dangerous viruses in biosafety labs (both those for and against gain of function research, btw)
Ah so now the goalposts have moved from "any virologist" to "people that use or study dangerous viruses in biosafety labs". Interesting.
>is that the virus likely came from a wild zoonotic crossover event.
I don't, and have never disputed that. You seem to think that the 3 points I laid out were some sort of thesis about the origins of the virus. They weren't and aren't. Just some interesting data that can be used to form a coherent hypothesis about the origins of the virus.
Similarly, none of the points in your "Reddit post of the year!" even remotely refute them. They cherry pick data.
Present an actual argument (here) and I'll engage on it based on the merits of the argument, not either of our credentials.
....I presented a lot of extremely detailed arguments backed up by references in my original post and you just dismissed them by saying they "cherry pick" data.
How is that true about anything I said regarding S/NS ratios, molecular clock analysis, the mosaic nature of the virus, the presence of O-linked glycans, the promiscuity and non-species specific nature of the spike protein, etc.
You conducted the mother of all handwaves and then asked me to present "actual" arguments. What? You never even approached the detail of any arguments I have made thus far.
I'm not going to make new ones until you provide some actual factual responses to the ones I've already made, thanks.
Your arguments are not arranged in any sort of logical way against the hypothesis I discussed which set this whole chain off. I examined the one that you claimed refuted it, and failed to see how it applied. If you apply it to my statement, we could actually discuss it, but until you do that I'm lost by what you're supposedly proving with it.
>I'm not going to make new ones until you provide some actual factual responses to the ones I've already made, thanks.
Considering I started the comment chain by offering a comment about biology, that you then derailed with some link to a reddit post that I fail to see how it applied, and then insinuated I'm not "a real virologist" (by the way great job just sidestepping my rebuttall to that) I'm a bit confused at this statement. If you're interested in the scientific discussion, you're welcome to have that discussion. So far all you've done is linked to a reddit post and listed some science terms, but failed to explain how any of that refutes my initial statement.
I'm kind of an idiot. Please, explain how CRISPR/Cas9 leaving off target mutation effects rules out that CoV 2 could have been genetically altered by humans in a lab. Please explain how having a bunch of Snps compared to its closest known neighbor somehow rules out that a 4 amino acid insertion was man made. Because I'm not making those connections, but then again, I'm apparently not a virologist.
I made statements. You claim to have refuted them (although 90% of your text has been questioning the credentials of others). I fail to see how you have refuted them. Maybe it's just over my head.
Edit: To get more specific:
2.1.1) You claim the virus is mosaic. True. What is not true is the conclusion you draw from that. Being mosaic does not mean that the virus isn't altered by humans. Take for instance, the furin site, which is a multiple-amino acid insertion, with a close match to, unless I'm mixing up stories, a pangolin. That hardly seems mosaic. So here's a scenario that explains that point away:
-The virus that was altered in the lab with GoF research is not derived exactly from the published RATG-13 genome. It is from a different isolate or extraction, and therefore contains a huge amount of SNPs and other mutations, something that RNA viruses can accomplish in extremely short amount of times (which we obviously both know). This could be the difference between sampling weeks apart.
And, the mosaicity (word?) of the virus does not adequately explain the furin site insertion.
2.2.1) Again, explains the mutations, not the insertion
2.2.2) Not sure what point you're making here, or how it applies to any of mine. Obviously it looks like a bat virus, probably because it is a bat virus. Still doesn't rule out the insertion of a furin site.
2.2.3) No one is suggesting that CRISPR-Cas9 was used to make the 1200 SNPs and other mutations across the genome. Obviously those could be natural, while the furin site insertion could have been done by people. Also, there are other ways to introduce mutations and insertions into RNA and DNA. Perhaps you've heard of PCR and infectious clones?
2.3) You're making a critical assumption that what was being tested and studied was a virus intended to hurt humans. (You also hilariously admit that it is the most effective it probably could be in the earlier sentence, but I'm not sure if you realize this). My hypothesis stated in my opening comment is not suggesting that.
I'm not suggesting someone took RATG-13, made 1200 SNPs and an insertion, all using CRISPR-Cas9, to design a virus to wipe out the human race.
Let me restate my hypothesis:
Someone was working in a lab, added a furin site to an ordinary coronavirus that didn't infect some type of organism, to see if it suddenly could. And guess what, it could. And oh no, it accidentally got out.
Nothing in your post refutes that in any way whatsoever. Your post is so far off in the weeds (suggesting that someone engineered 1200 SNPs into the virus, why on earth would they do that?) or that I am suggesting it was designed to be lethal to humans (I'm not) or that it's bad at being a virus because it's not lethal (which makes it a phenomenal virus) or that it's a terrible virus to study because the spike protein is promiscuous thanks to its furin site (which makes it good at jumping species which is a great reason to study that promiscuity).
Your argument flat out does not apply to my hypothesis, which is why I assume you have wasted most of your breath attacking the credentials of the people criticizing it.
Also, important to say, if the virus emerged outside of Wuhan, nowhere near a lab, then this entire hypothesis falls apart because the only thing supporting it is the geographic proximity of Wuhan and the WIV.
You spend an awful lot of time attacking me and not very much time attacking my arguments. That's not very scientific of you. I said I had no way to know you were actually a virologist, which I didn't. It isn't really important to the discussion though, as I said. Can we talk about this like adults? Thanks.
I'm only gonna address the science in your post from here on out. I want to make it clear I never insulted you or attacked your character, I only said I had no way to know you were a virologist and only could go off of your word.
I get your hypothesis now that you have fully stated it.
And here are some questions that need answers.
Where did they get the virus? It's not anything like any coronavirus we know of before SARS-CoV-2 emerged in humans, it's 1200 away from RATG-13.
What experimental question were they trying to answer? We already know that the furin cleavage site is necessary for some aspects of pathogenicity, but not the ones canonically thought important (cell entry for SARS-1 for example, since furin doesn't actually cleave SARS-1 or MERS). Why would they test a random unrelated coronavirus' site? Why not try the SARS-CoV-1 site? Or the MERS site? Why was it a furin site in the first place? And why did they do it on the weirdly promiscuous SARS-2 ACE2 and not in a virus like RATG-13?
Re: cleavage site, I go into extreme detail about how possible it is for cleavage sites to evolve in nature here and here:
It's really not that unusual for a cleavage site to evolve in nature, and especially not when we consider that furin cleavage sites are mutagenicity islands. It absolutely could have evolved from recombination with a distantly related coronavirus that has an extremely similar site.
Also, the cleavage site isn't even that long. Short stretches of nucleotides like that, upwards of 15-30 nucleotides, can absolutely evolve over the course of 50-70 years. Happens literally all the time. In influenza it happens on much shorter time scales. I provide evidence to that effect in the above posts.
Yes I actually address the idea of using recombinatorial cloning to make SARS-CoV-2 at several points in my post.
Nothing about the furin cleavage site makes it more likely to be unnatural than it is natural?
And so far, I don't see any compelling reason to believe that anyone would take a completely undiscovered and undescribed virus out of nature, not describe it or publish on it at all, and then start inserting random furin sites into it from random other coronaviruses.
Why would they be doing that? Is it technically /possible/? Yes, but I see no reason why it is more likely than a natural emergence.
>You spend an awful lot of time attacking me and not very much time attacking my arguments. That's not very scientific of you. I said I had no way to know you were actually a virologist, which I didn't. It isn't really important to the discussion though, as I said. Can we talk about this like adults? Thanks.
Unfortunately that is impossible for two reasons:
1) Because you have inextricably tied your argument to who you are with lines like:
>All of that aside, the consensus among people who actually use or study dangerous viruses in biosafety labs (both those for and against gain of function research, btw) is that the virus likely came from a wild zoonotic crossover event.
2) Because you refused to present your argument here in a way that stands against my hypothesis, and instead relied on simply introduction of yourself and your credentials.
>Where did they get the virus? It's not anything like any coronavirus we know of before SARS-CoV-2 emerged in humans, it's 1200 away from RATG-13.
1200 mutations away from RATG-13 is how significant exactly? I will propose that it is not particularly significant. One virus I work with, I have 14 variants ranging from 300 to 500 base-pair differences. That is from passing in a laboratory only. I have one variant that has a 14000 BP deletion! (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7217056/#mmi144... TABLE S2) However, it is noteworthy for that reason. That said, these are dsDNA viruses with comparatively much slower mutation rates. 1200-base differences are almost nothing.
>Why would they test a random unrelated coronavirus' site?
That's a good question, and not one that I can answer suitably with this hypothesis. Perhaps because they were looking for a cleavable one?
>And why did they do it on the weirdly promiscuous SARS-2 ACE2 and not in a virus like RATG-13?
To me this is obvious. SARS-2 ACE2 is extremely promiscuous. That's a very good reason to study it - it has broad potential for cross-species jumps. If you are trying to narrow down what it is that causes the jump, you want to study on the virus that is most capable of making that jump.
>Re: cleavage site, I go into extreme detail about how possible it is for cleavage sites to evolve in nature here and here:
Again, I don't think that applies my hypothesis. Of course it had to evolve in nature. Otherwise there would be no furin site. The ability of a furin site to evolve in nature has almost no bearing on whether or not one could be inserted into coronavirus by humans, unless I'm totally misunderstanding what you're suggesting here.
>Also, the cleavage site isn't even that long.
Sure, and again, this furin site likely did evolve in nature (at least in amino acid form). Whether or not it evolved in coronavirus is the topic here.
>Nothing about the furin cleavage site makes it more likely to be unnatural than it is natural?
The two non-canonical arginines don't make it less likely?
>And so far, I don't see any compelling reason to believe that anyone would take a completely undiscovered and undescribed virus out of nature, not describe it or publish on it at all, and then start inserting random furin sites into it from random other coronaviruses.
I have some of viruses I work with I haven't published on yet, because I am either waiting to complete work, or they aren't significant enough compared to their peers for me to publish on them.
>Why would they be doing that? Is it technically /possible/? Yes, but I see no reason why it is more likely than a natural emergence.
OK so that's the crux of my argument. There's some interesting anomalies that point to it being a possibility. There's no way to rule it out. At the end of the day, it comes down to one opinion vs another, which is why statements like:
>The virus itself, to the eye of any virologist, is clearly not engineered.
1200 mutations away from RATG-13 is how significant exactly? I will propose that it is not particularly significant. One virus I work with, I have 14 variants ranging from 300 to 500 base-pair differences. That is from passing in a laboratory only. I have one variant that has a 14000 BP deletion! (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7217056/#mmi144... TABLE S2) However, it is noteworthy for that reason. That said, these are dsDNA viruses with comparatively much slower mutation rates. 1200-base differences are almost nothing.
You're comparing apples and oranges. 14 mutational sites across a virus with 17k ssDNA genome is not comparable to RATG-13 vs SARS-2, which have not just 1200 mutations different, they're spread out over HUNDREDS of SNPs.
That's the important comparator. And why it will take so long to mutate one into the other by natural mutation rates.
>The two non-canonical arginines don't make it less likely?
Not particularly. CGG exists in MERS 15 times. NL63, 29 times. It even exists twice in a row in Human coronavirus 229E. Throughout all of the known alphacoronaviruses (94 described) CGG exists 1575 times. In betacoronaviruses, it exists more times than my processor can count without hanging, and I believe it tops out at 9,999 events.
Why is it so unlikely that synonymous mutational drift over the course of 70 years of infections in millions of viral generations could create these arginine codons that are not the most optimized but still work in the mammals this virus infects? CGG works. It makes an arginine when this virus infects its host.
Why couldn't it be a recombination event between SARS-2 and one of the known coronaviruses with an extremely similar cleavage site? We know already coronaviruses have recombined with viruses totally outside of their family on occasion: https://www.virology.ws/2016/10/27/genome-recombination-acro...
>You're comparing apples and oranges. 14 mutational sites across a virus with 17k ssDNA genome is not comparable to RATG-13 vs SARS-2, which have not just 1200 mutations different, they're spread out over HUNDREDS of SNPs.
If memory serves, that was a single generation. An rdrp produces one error per thousand bases, which comes out to 30 mutations per generation, so we're talking 40 generations away? That hardly seems significant.
>Not particularly. CGG exists in MERS 15 times. NL63, 29 times. It even exists twice in a row in Human coronavirus 229E. Throughout all of the known alphacoronaviruses (94 described) CGG exists 1575 times. In betacoronaviruses, it exists more times than my processor can count without hanging, and I believe it tops out at 9,999 events.
How many of those are in frame for an amino acid? How many of those are two in frame for arginine in a protein, next to each other?
>Why is it so unlikely that synonymous mutational drift over the course of 70 years of infections in millions of viral generations could create these arginine codons that are not the most optimized but still work in the mammals this virus infects? CGG works. It makes an arginine when this virus infects its host.
There are many reasons why it's unlikely. The first is pure statistics. But the statistics are almost certainly influenced by millions of years of biology.
>Why couldn't it be a recombination event between SARS-2 and one of the known coronaviruses with an extremely similar cleavage site?
It's absolutely possible and I would never dispute this. The possibility of it isn't a refutation of the possibility of other hypotheses, and I don't think it's in the scientific spirit to discount other viable hypotheses.
> If memory serves, that was a single generation. An rdrp produces one error per thousand bases, which comes out to 30 mutations per generation, so we're talking 40 generations away? That hardly seems significant.
SARS-CoV-2 is mutating at the rate of about 2 changes/month (68,69,70,71), out there in society, circulating in millions of humans. 2/month in the overall population of millions of tiny viruses, among 30,000 letters in each genome.
So, at the fixation rate (~2 fixed mutations/month), with all the many billions of SARS-2 viruses making copies inside all those people, how long would it take to change RaTG-13 into SARS-CoV-2?
Answer: about 50 years. 30 years before the world even knew about SARS or MERS or any other pandemic-potential coronavirus. Before we knew these viruses even existed. Before we knew they liked to live in bats (72,73,74,75). And, for the record, they didn’t even build a BSL4 (the kind of lab you really need to handle this kind of virus in animals) in Wuhan until 2016 (76).
And that estimate (50 years) is with all the many mutations that are happening in all the many infected humans during a pandemic situation.
We know that with a smaller group of lab animals (or even human subjects), the virus is much slower at “finding” mutations that “stick around” (77,78). You have to picture it kind of like a big room full of millions of slot machines. Each machine is a virus, pulling the lever each time it makes a copy of itself. And you only win a payoff when you’ve found a change in the virus that A) makes it look different, and B) doesn’t screw it up, so it can still survive and do its job (infect people). A lot of these mutations screw the virus up, so they wouldn’t be a payoff. They wouldn’t be a “fixed” mutation.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
We can't just focus on random mutation, we have to think about fixation. Because virus populations don't just evolve in one concerted direction. They evolve /outwards/ in a cloud. It's not simply A to B, it's A to B then back to A then over to C then to D, then back to B, then over to A again, then finally settled on C. A random walk.
That's why the population level data is so important.
> How many of those are in frame for an amino acid? How many of those are two in frame for arginine in a protein, next to each other?
Who said recombination events only happen in frame? Or that viruses only drift in frame?
> There are many reasons why it's unlikely. The first is pure statistics. But the statistics are almost certainly influenced by millions of years of biology.
I would respond to this if it contained any evidence other than 'statistics say it is so.'
> I don't think it's in the scientific spirit to discount other viable hypotheses.
Who said I'm discounting anything? I said it's just not very likely. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
>We can't just focus on random mutation, we have to think about fixation. Because virus populations don't just evolve in one concerted direction. They evolve /outwards/ in a cloud. It's not simply A to B, it's A to B then back to A then over to C then to D, then back to B, then over to A again, then finally settled on C. A random walk.
Fixation relies on selection, which is entirely different in a laboratory environment than in a population with immune systems.
>Who said recombination events only happen in frame? Or that viruses only drift in frame? No one, but the fact is that two in-frame CGGs next to each other are substantially less likely "to be fixed" than two CGGs out of frame, or in a non-coding region. Almost every gene evolves more slowly than non-coding space, beyond very few specific non-coding regions. CGGCGG is very different than ACGGCGG and we both know that. You get an entirely different peptide out of each one. And selection almost exclusively happens at the protein level.
This is the part that's confusing me. I haven't made any claims other than that it's possible? And I have provided plenty of evidence that it's possible. I'm not sure what claims you think I'm making.
Hi, I want to apologize. I was the one who did not see that you from the very beginning said you did not put much stock into the lab theory, and I basically ignored that. I didn't see it. I also did not read closely enough some other things as well. I was attacking some strawmen, some of which I have seen in the real world and others I have not.
I'm sorry, that colored a lot of my responses to you because I made unfair assumptions about what you were saying. I sent you a longer form email to your protonmail about it.
>Fixation relies on selection, which is entirely different in a laboratory environment than in a population with immune systems.
This is actually extremely controversial. There's a great deal of evidence that random walks are more important than selection in fixation events. Does selection play a role? Yes! Definitely! But the evidence is mounting and almost at consensus that random chance is actually what dictates most fixation events. It just can't be /deleterious/ but it does not have to be /helpful/ to fix. The evidence shows that most mutations, on median, are neutral or slightly deleterious. But the ones that are beneficial are so beneficial that the average is neutral-to-net-positive. A lot more of it is actually stochastic than you think! A lot of the transmission between hosts, for example, is stochastic and not selective.
See these reviews/studies from Bloom, Audino, etc:
This is why it's less easy to maintain a virus at the proper S/NS ratio in the lab. It becomes too stochastic. too little selection. So your mad scientist would have to have extremely few viral genera.
You say every gene evolves more slowly than non-coding, which is true. but synonymous mutations happen at the same rate as one would expect it to occur in both.
Are you trying to say it isn't ever going to happen? From what I'm reading, there's actually no reason to believe the CGG in that site is fixed in any way. It's not always CGG. In fact, it rarely is in CoV-2 isolates. Maybe that was a fluke of the sequencer or the isolate?
Wow, now I'm starting to think Yuri just didn't do his homework.
but that's just in the isolates they're analyzing.
"All human coronaviruses analyzed in this study did not use two synonymous codons (CGC, CGG) for arginine as well as CCG for proline and UGA for stop codon at all"
I couldn't find CGG in the cleavage site sequence anywhere in the early pandemic. Not in any of the earliest papers.
I could only find it in clinical sequences from later on in the pandemic, suggesting it may have been a random mutant that fixed /after/ the emergence into humans. Which pokes a big ol hole in the idea that it represents a smoking gun of genetic manipulation:
I shouldn't have taken it as a given that CGGCGG was actually there in the beginning. Looks like it wasn't It certainly isn't in the refseq.
And the thing I'm asking here is: Are you really saying you think the lab leak is /as probable/ as the zoonotic crossover? Given that the A) the CGGCGG wasn't even there when the crossover happened, B) the probabilistic arguments I've made above, and C) the fact that you can't provide any actual evidence of a mechanism? I gave you lots of mechanisms and examples of how it would happen in nature. Why is one not more likely than the other?
And here is probably the most salient argument of all.
It comes down to occam's razor.
Sure, is it /possible/ that some scientist in a lab decided to use an entirely unknown and undescribed natural virus as the subject of their experiments? And use a completely out of nowhere cleavage site from a distant coronavirus that nobody talks about or really studies to do it? And then that virus escaped?
Sure.
But in order for that to be true, we need to make some new assumptions. We need to assume such a person exists, that they had that exact idea, and that it worked and they didn't tell anyone about it, or they all agreed to cover it up, and then some of them got sick (and again, covered it up) and it got out into the public, and voila, pandemic.
Or, it could have been a completely natural event that we know already happens all the time, in the contexts we know it to occur, using mechanisms that have already been described.
On a pure numbers game, on a scale of pure virus-host interactions, which do you think happens more often? People out in the provinces use bat guano as eye drops, eat bat in soups, use bat guano as fertilizer, harvest it without gloves, tour caves without any protection, etc. All of these are well-described. They are all known to occur on the scale of many thousands if not tens of thousands of events per day throughout rural China. Each one of these is a roll of the dice.
OR, how many times do we think a human contaminates themselves in a virology lab in china, working on coronaviruses? or with bats? Sure it probably happens some, but I have a hard time believing it happens more than 100 times per day in China. There just aren't that many bat colonies or virology labs.
So Occam's razor would tell us that the most likely of these two scenarios is the natural one. Is that conclusive proof? no, and I never said it was. I don't think at this point conclusive proof is possible. We're just making estimations. I've always just been making estimations.
A lab release is much less likely than a natural one, even if both are /technically/ possible.
A lot of things are /technically/ possible. On the scale of things, I think the lab leak is likely /enough/ that China should open up itself to international investigators, to show with all available evidence it probably didn't happen. But I don't think it's likely enough that we should all be condemning china, or fueling racist anti-chinese sentiment, or all the other consequences of these news stories. The consequences are right in front of you, anti-asian hate crimes are on the rise in the US, and 30+% of the US thinks the lab release is the most likely scenario.
I'm not saying we stop talking about the lab release, just that we need to put it in the proper context of probability. It is /possible/ but it really is not very /probable/.
Okay, let me know when you wanna talk about it like adults! I'll be around when you do.
Until then, I'm not really interested in being ad hominem attacked and so I'm gonna step back and study for my med school exams instead. It's important to have conversational ground rules and one of those for me is decency and no ad hominems.
As a last thought: You seem to kind of disregard the consensus that exists among virologists (even as pointed out in the very article we're discussing under, the OP). All those statements I made are consistent with the consensus.
And on a small scale, I had that post reviewed by 8ish working PhD virologists before I posted it as part of the editorial process. I say 8ish because some of them have PhDs in non-virology stuff but now work exclusively on virology. It's not a true peer review since I know them and it wasn't blinded. But I want to be clear it's not like I just wrote it out of nowhere.
Many of those same virologists helped me field comments on the original post! It was a great time we all got together on zoom to do it.
Anyway, let me know when you wanna discuss the science and not ad hominems.
>And on a small scale, I had that post reviewed by 8-10 working PhD virologists before I posted it as part of the editorial process. Not a true peer review since I know them and it wasn't blinded. But I want to be clear it's not like I just wrote it out of nowhere.
Again with the appeal to authority. Argue the merits of the argument. Not who is making it (which is almost all you've done). Except in this case, the merits of the argument were pretty weak and superficial, and only applied to people who weren't expert enough to realize that no one is suggesting CRISPR-Cas9 was used to make 1200 edits to a virus lmao. There's no talking your way out of that one. Anyone who knows anything about molecular biology or virology knows clearly that that was a total strawman rebuttal. I won't suggest motive, just that it was not ever a good faith argument.
>Okay, let me know when you wanna talk about it like adults!
If you point out where I'm not in that reply, I'll happily edit it to be less offensive.
*Still waiting for you to refute my hypothesis with an actual argument, by the way.*
as long as we're discussing the molecular science, I won't have to bring any credentials up. But you just /had/ to get those two little accusations in there, didn't you?
Let me go back to my original hypothesis, and then try to restate your arguments, and you can tell me where I'm restating them incorrectly.
My original hypothesis:
1) Major point of differentiation for this virus is that compared to it's closest known relatives, it has acquired a furin site (eukaryotic protein cleavage site) that enhances its virulence.
You said:
>And in there, I describe exactly how wrong your point 1 is.
I honestly can't find anything that refutes what I said. Please, just paste the line that points out how this is, to quote you, wrong. As in, disproves that compared to its closest known relatives (RATG-13) it has acquired a furin site, which increases its virulence"
I can find absolutely nothing* in either your Reddit posts, or your posts here on HN, that refute this. I can find plenty of things explaining how natural evolution could cause it, but nothing saying that it hasn't acquired a furin site that enhances its virulence that its closest known relative doesn't have.
2) That furin site RNA contains a non-canonical amino acid codon
To be fair, you didn't dispute this.
3) That non-canonical codon contains a restriction site that could easily be used to track, whether, say, your added furin site is surviving multiple cell passages, by performing a restriction digest and running the fragments on a cell.
You said:
>how misguided your point 3 is.
OK, let's examine my point #3. It is non-canonical, as in only 5% of the arginines in SARS-CoV 2 contain it. I guess we can get into what exactly non-canonical means, and you do make some points there, but at the end of the day, 5% is 5%, and 5%*5% is 0.25%, so it seems to me that the usage of the term "non-canonical" to describe a site that has a 0.25% chance of occurring is fitting.
OK, so let's talk about the restriction site. You don't dispute the presence of it anywhere, at least not that I can find. Please, if you have something to dispute the presence of it, just paste it in reply to this because I legitimately can't find it. You also don't dispute the usefulness of using a restriction site to track genetic engineering, presumably because it's done all the time.
So with all this in mind, it seems to me like your disagreement with me is not with any of the 3 major points I made, or even the two of those three points you called out in your initial reply. So I'm thoroughly confused by what you're trying to debate. Are you debating the interpretation of those facts? Because that interpretation appears to be almost entirely of your own imagination. Nowhere did I offer (at least not that I can see) an interpretation of those facts beyond speculating that they are a possibility. In fact, my entire first post was just to reframe the argument as I understood it, and comment that it's very difficult to rule out because of the nature of the evidence. For the record, I find the likelihood that it was a lab leak extremely slim, but I'm not going to discount it, especially not concretely.
On the other hand, the post you linked to was very much dancing around any of the concrete arguments about the topic, making absurd insinuations like that people are claiming the 1200 mutations came from engineered Cas9 usage, which I've personally never seen claimed (by the way I'm still waiting for you to address this). All while ignoring crucial facts like that the furin site was an insertion, not a polymorphism.
I'm thoroughly confused by whatever point you're trying to make here. To me, it seems like you've been arguing against words you imagined me saying.
And if you actually have been playing "devil's advocate" this whole time and don't believe the interpretation of facts that you've put forth, then that is very much "arguing in bad faith." You were not up front with your beliefs or positions, you just wanted "to ask questions."
If you did not believe in good faith the statements you made, or have substance behind the questions you asked as though you believed them to be true (CGG for example), that is very much insincere.
I am not going to be dragged into an endless debate with someone who wants to play devil's advocate. There are people with actual misunderstandings and misconceptions about science that are out there that need our help to understand the world around them.
Why waste time like this if we agree on the basic points? This is not a socratic discussion, you are not Socrates, and I am not Plato. This is not a PhD defense. It is not an academic conference.
I'm here to talk about this with people who have legitimate concerns that they actually believe about the subject matter at hand.
And please, I'm sorry if I mischaracterized your position or your actions thus far, but that's what it looks like. If you had said at some point "just playing devil's advocate here!" or "I don't 100% believe this but what about this thing I saw?" then if I had seen that, I would have engaged in a completely different way, and likely disengaged much earlier.
Thanks for the interesting ideas, but I have to go study for exams, and procrastinate in ways that are better for both of our mental health.
Have a great day, and I hope this hasn't taken up as much of your mental energy as it has mine. Because it took up a lot of mine.
All of this aside, the actual point I have been making the whole time is this:
Do you think these two possibilities are equally likely?
Do you think one is more likely than the other?
Which?
You say that you find the lab possibility not very likely, so do you find the zoonotic scenario any more likely? If so, then you and I are in agreement, of a kind. You never said that above, and you definitely argued in a way that implied something else. Especially given the CGG codons.
Probabilistic thinking is the nature of the discussion in the absence of conclusive evidence. Probabilistic thinking. Heuristics. That's what I've been discussing this entire time, that's what I was talking about in my original post, and it's what your reply comments were, therefore, replying to.
I never make any claims saying either is the only possible scenario or an impossible one.
I also was not "dancing around the concrete arguments on the topic." I was directly answering arguments that had been put forth to me by random people on the internet. That's it. That's the point of the post. To answer those arguments.
I get that you've never seen it claimed that engineering made all 1200 mutations, but plenty of people claim it. You can look on my original reddit post and see people in the comments claiming it's possible because "China is so far ahead of us, they could have generated the primers 20 years ago to do something like that."
That's why it's not a strawman, I was directly answering arguments that had been made to me by people on the internet. Just because you think they are ludicrous arguments does not mean that someone has not made them. The internet is larger and more diverse in its idiocy than you have conceived of in your dreams, Horatio. etc. etc.
>2) That furin site RNA contains a non-canonical amino acid codon. To be fair, you didn't dispute this.
Hi, I have disputed the claim you've made since that the virus contains two such codons in a row. That is patently not the case in the earliest examples of the virus known. And wow, I just checked, and those three sequences from the earliest part of the pandemic I linked, they don't contain the cgg in the furin site. Literally look yourself. The earliest sequences out of China, Korea, and Iran do not have the cgg where you're talking about. It isn't there. Not that I saw, lol. Show me where it is if you find it. I just used BLOSUM similarity alignment and looked where the cleavage is supposed to be. And I don't see CGG there.
I actually address the restriction site directly in the original discussion. I don't recall you mentioning it before now. if you did, my apologies I missed it. See my comments on that copy/pasted here:
"For sticky end ligation, for example, you can examine the relative length of homologous regions around restriction enzyme cutting motifs. And sort of detect it like a photoshopped gel almost. But in sequence form. Real mutations shouldn't occur predominately around restriction enzyme motifs. But engineered mutations would. You'd have to use evolutionary comparison of similar viral species to see if there are any mutations that appear too improbable to have happened by polymerase error alone.
Is it still possible to slip one by such a method? yes, of course. Especially small insertions or deletions would be easy to hide...
[But] it literally wouldn't make sense to do it. We have established backbones that would make more sense and be easier to use. The only reason would be to "hide your work." And that's like years and years worth of genetic manipulation, several post-docs worth of work, easy. All to "hide your work." When you could just use SARS-CoV-1 and be A) more deadly, B) more "natural", and C) easier to use."
It's just really funny if we do agree about both of these being possible, but one being more likely than the other. If we both agree that the zoonotic is probably more likely, what are we arguing about? I don't disagree that it is /technically/ possible, but I also find it more likely to have occurred in nature. Restriction sites can also occur in nature, btw. This is a case of the "lottery" fallacy. There are so many goddamn restriction sites throughout any viral genome, why is this surprising?
I find this argument comes most often from people who already are so far down the rabbit hole, I had no chance of convincing them of anything anyway. Not always. But often.
If you read the reddit comments, you'd also see ones like this:
all praising my tone and how I "kept my cool" despite the trolls and sealions. A few similar comments here as well. Sorry it wasn't to your taste. Better luck next time I guess
Or to be fair, I should say: I will try harder next time, I guess.
You can't please all of the people all of the time, but you can certainly make an effort. Right now I don't really see what specific criticisms you're making other than that you don't like the way I write.
> Furin cleavage sites very similar if not largely identical to this one have also been found in nature
I don't believe this is correct.
There are no other examples of a CoV within the sub-genera Sarbecovirus of a species/strain that shows evidence of insertion of a polybasic furin cleavage site.
Hi, never said they had to be within the sub-genera.
Recombination can absolutely happen inter-genera and even inter-family.
There's some evidence that Ebola got its VP40 from bats, or vice versa. Meaning that an RNA virus somehow got its nuclear regulatory factor from a bat. We have no idea in science how that happened. But we know there is homology! I can't find the link at the moment, but when I do I'll add it here. It's not actually that important to my argument.
There are also examples of inter-family recombination in viruses that are much more down to earth.
And you might be asking yourself, after reading that link "Why is it always bats?? Isn't that /suspicious/?" It's actually in keeping with everything we know about bats and their role as a viral reservoir. Lots of viruses cross paths in bats. See this other detailed post I wrote a while back: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gehvui/why_do_viru...
I just wanted to add that I probably was exaggerating when I said "we have no idea how that happened." re: VP40, bats, and ebola.
Best guess is: a retrovirus and an ebola-like virus infected a bat cell at the same time, the retrovirus accidentally picked up some of the bat genome, which then somehow recombined with the negative sense RNA genome of the ebola-like virus. We have no proof this happened like this, but it's the best guess.
Just as an example of the crazy things that we think probably happen in the world of viruses in nature.
You seem confident that it wasn't a lab leak on the basis that Chinese scientists have no reason to lie and that the (alleged) first case wasn't a scientist.
What about the CCPs long track record of cover ups and lies instills you with confidence that there isn't a top-down effort to coverup a possible lab leak?
If the CCP wants a cover up, then the scientists under their employ will probably lie. Very few would be brave enough to be publicly truthful in such a situation.
Look, this is simple: the lab leak theory shouldn't be discounted until the WHO or some independent body does their due diligence on, at an absolute minimum, these points:
1. Account for what coronaviruses Wuhan labs actually have. The Chinese authorities have been circumspect on this; and
2. Examine the virus database that was taken offline right before all this started.
To be clear: I'm not insinuating that this is true or that China has covered something up here. I consider it more likely that no one simply knows (including in China) but for China there's little upside in being open about this so we can explore these avenues of inquiry. This "not wanting to know" isn't uniquely a China problem either.
The WHO simply hasn't done the due diligence warranted to eliminate this theory. That's all.
VERY VERY importantly, the cables were not written by or authored by scientists. It was all Trump State Department-hired businessmen and diplomats who inspected the facility and wrote that cable.
Why should we expect them to be good at determining what is a dangerous or risky lab facility?
Notably, in the same cable, they also requested more funding be sent to the facility, so they could conduct more pandemic surveillance work (and possibly prevent outbreaks like this).
I have A) direct relationships with the people who study viral biodefense at USAMRIID and serve on the government panels, and they were very surprised to hear about these cables. They didn't find the authors credible at all. One is an entrepreneur and the other a career diplomat.
And for all those who don't have a PhD in the subject or know the people who know people, B) it's detailed closely in this washington post article who was there and what they wrote:
>The U.S. delegation was *led* by Jamison Fouss, the consule general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health.
The first article lists the “leaders” of the delegation only. Diplomatic business always needs diplomatic leaders, so it doesn’t tell us anything of the Doctors who were with them. Reading the rest of it, there’s a very convincing case that China is hiding something. The doctors that have “disappeared” are especially troubling as well as the information lockdown they imposed.
It should also be noted that the cables don't say that the lab has any unsafe practices. They only say that as of the time of writing (before the lab opened), there were not yet enough trained technicians to run the lab at full capacity. They asked the US government to continue its program that trained Chinese lab technicians at a top US national lab.
According to Wikipedia there are 56 BSL-4 labs globally, I cant find any good references on the amount of labs (BSL-3/BSL-4) doing GoF research on coronaviruses, but I cant imagine it is a significant amount.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#List_of_BSL-4_...
There is strong tertiary evidence that patient zero was a Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher named Huang YanLing 黃燕玲, this has all been scrubbed from public memory. The wayback archive links still hold up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU (links are at the bottom of the video description).
A gas cylinder exploded and prompted a fire in a Siberian research facility which houses samples of smallpox, SARS, Ebola and other potentially deadly viruses. Russian officials said there was no threat of contamination.
This seems rather unlikely based on how quickly covid spreads in countries that don't take many precautions or slow to quarantine (like the USA and Russia) . Only countries that lock down fast and decisively like China, Korea, and Taiwan kept it under semblence of control initially.
Yep, covid spread quickly over Russian Federation, but it was unnoticed until first test systems arrived. Quote:
"The first practical use of the test system for the detection of antibodies to COVID-19, developed by the Novosibirsk State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology" Vector ", was held among the employees of the FSBI" National Medical and Surgical Center. N.I. Pirogov" Ministry of Health of Russia. Testing was carried out in 204 employees of the center, who had no symptoms of acute respiratory viral infections in the previous two months. According to the results of testing, antibodies to coronavirus were detected in 30 employees of the Center working in the" red "zone and at the entrance to it", - the message says.
When the epidemic was started, I started to spread information about new danger in my country, and I was attacked by our government then (including police and three letter agency), so I'm not surprised that the lead SARS researcher is missing in China, because she knows the danger of SARS-CoV very well. Our government did not understand the danger of SARS-CoV-2 until now, when clinics collapsed under load.
This depends how you define "like this one"; but Zhengli Shi personally discovered the origin of SARS in bats, and her group is probably the world's top researcher of such viruses. The only lab I'm aware of that's remotely competitive is Ralph Baric's. If anyone knows of others with programs of similar scale, please post citations.
Of course far more virology labs exist in the world. But since this pandemic is SARS-like, the correct comparison is only labs working with SARS-like viruses, weighted by amount of such work.
Also worth noting that gain of function may be a distraction. It's entirely possible that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus but still emerged due to WIV staff activity, either from culture in their lab or just from a researcher who got infected while sampling. The WIV's sampling program was the biggest in the world, visiting remote caves known to be inhabited by infected bats, to bring back samples to be cultured, sequenced, and otherwise manipulated.
If the virus was manipulated in the lab (by genetic engineering, serial passaging, etc.), then it was probably starting from a novel natural virus. Many virologists seeking to exclude a lab origin have noted correctly that SARS-CoV-2 shows no signs of being derived in any known way from any known virus; so the WIV's (considerable) ability to sample new viruses from nature seems more significant to me than their ability to engineer them in the lab.
And just to address the frequent and wrong counterarguments:
1. The WIV is not located in an expected natural spillover zone. Their sampling trips were to Yunnan and surroundings, near Kunming or Pu'er, about 900 miles away.
2. If this was a naturally-evolved virus, then the probability that it was spread by an infected WIV researcher isn't [# of WIV researchers]/[# of total people in Wuhan]. WIV researchers are a vanishingly small fraction of the total population of Wuhan, but they're a large fraction of the total population traveling from remote bat caves in Yunnan back to Wuhan. An expert deliberately seeking novel viruses is far more likely to find one than a merely reckless wildlife smuggler. In theory the expert knows the risks better and will take precautions; but many photographs exist of WIV researchers handling animals with nothing more than a surgical mask and nitrile gloves.
3. The WIV certainly hadn't published every virus they'd collected. For example, RaTG13, the closest known animal virus to SARS-CoV-2, was reportedly collected by them in 2013, but published only after the pandemic emerged. Marc Lipsitch notes that if a researcher had become infected on a sampling trip, then the WIV might never even have sequenced the virus before the pandemic emerged.
To be clear, nothing above says SARS-CoV-2 definitely emerged due to WIV staff activity. The arguments that it definitely didn't all boil down to "because the WIV says it didn't", though, and China has thoroughly obstructed any attempt to audit that claim. It's possible that they're obstructing for a different reason--for example, the CCP's favored "frozen food" theory seems to be trying to exclude not only WIV lab origin, but origin anywhere in China, natural or otherwise. Nevertheless, I'm shocked to see how many people are willing to take the same one-man dictatorship that claims the camps in Xinjiang are for voluntary job training at its word.
Whatever actually happened, people have a pretty hard time with random chance. They need someone to blame, and a good reason as to why something bad can't happen to them. If the reason is "it just happened randomly", that's uncomfortable. There's nothing you can do to fix the problem, you just have to accept that every 100 years there's a 0.3% probability that you'll die from some random incurable disease. But if the reason is "some scientist was careless", then they can put that scientist in prison and society is saved from all future pandemics, and they can stop worrying. Of course, that won't actually fix the problem, but it doesn't need to, it just needs to make people feel better.
Especially for claims like this, they're nearly impossible to conclusively disprove, so people will cling to it regardless of whether or not it's true. You'll see this come up again and again forever.
It's possible that the maid dies randomly but if the Lord of the castle had some previous revealing interactions with her and the murder scene was scrubbed clean and no investigator was allowed in the castle for a whole year... then perhaps we can't rule out murder?
All of this can be explained by a real simple alternative hypothesis.
Farmed animals like minks and racoon dogs were kept in cramped breeding conditions. Rhinopholous bats infected with sarbecoviruses are also present in Hubei. Those bats probably roosted above the animal pens and shit down on the animals below for years. The animals would periodically become infected. Eventually through mutation or recombination a strain became epidemic in the animals and evolved to be successful in a very closely related ACE2 receptor to humans.
Then you had a large bioreactor which spread the virus doing "gain of function". Eventually it swapped backwards and forward from humans to those animals until it acquired the ability to spread epidemically in humans in late 2019.
That process absolutely could have evolved a furin cleavage site, or it may have simply been present in the bat version of the virus (like the RacCS203 sample from Thai bats). Recombination with human HCoVs may have also happened in this process where the intermediate animal coronavirus infected a worker who also had a cold.
When you read last year about the Danish mink farms with millions of mink being infected with SARS-CoV-2 you should realize that is a much better bioreactor to do natural "gain of function" experiments in than any BSL lab in the world has. Something like that, with a similar species, is likely how the virus hopped from bats to humans.
This actually better explains all of the suspect features of SARS-CoV-2 than a BSL program does.
An alternative hypothesis does not rule out the other possibilities, even if it provides a better explanation. What matters is what actually happened, not what provides the neatest explanation.
The claim is being made that no other alternative hypothesis exists which can explain the features of the virus, so it must have come from a BSL lab.
This is an alternative hypothesis which is simpler and less convoluted and does, in fact, completely undermine the "it can't be anything other than bioweapons research" argument.
You're aiming your criticism at the wrong end of the argument.
In light of the disruption COVID-19 has caused, it's necessary to understand how it got started. If we are going to keep our intellectual honesty, nothing should be dismissed from consideration, including the lab hypothesis. In the middle of all that, geopolitics is getting in the way, and rightly so. China increasingly considers itself a peer nation to USA - so an unfettered foreign-led investigation is unlikely.
I'm starting to say look at the silver lining and see how incredibly unprepared we are for a biological attack/pandemic that has a much higher kill rate. Maybe there can be some policy changes made now given the experience.
This headline does not match the original, but, more importantly, the HN version is unintentionally misleading.
It seems to be implying that these scientists who say this are outliers in their belief. Really they are just outliers (I believe) in their willingness to speak up about this matter.
There are reasons others won’t speak up, ranging from access to grant money, to wanting to keep the door open for a China visa in the future, to not wanting to rock the boat with colleagues who are loyal to China.
Unfortunately all this also gets mixed up, even if intentions are completely beyond reproach, with perceived racism and with possibly creating an uncomfortable environment for those who would rather not have the stuff talked about. It’s unfortunate. I don’t know the solution, but unfortunately a harsh “we must get to the bottom of all facts at all costs” approach is not cost free. The alternative let’s all sing Kumbaya approach also is not cost free. No conclusions or solutions here.. it’s a big complex problem. I would prefer to see more nuanced headlines though on HN...
So, I agree, but I find myself thinking it doesn't matter now. What matters is:
1) could an accident at a lab lead to another pandemic in the future? yes, certainly
2) ok then, how are we going to prevent that?
This seems much like what the world had to figure out after nuclear power became widespread; how do we keep this new technology from leading to catastrophic problems? It required international inspection, sanctions for nations who don't comply, and even big powers had to play along.
Whether this pandemic started in a lab or not, we need a system to prevent the rapid proliferation of biologically advanced research, in more and more countries, from resulting in pandemics. So, the question of whether China had a lab leak that caused this one seems irrelevant at this point; what we need to do going forwards is the same regardless.
By not doing bioweapons or gain-of-function research? Wasn't the whole point of that research to prevent these sorts of pandemics? Even if COVID-19 wasn't from a lab leak...were those experiments actually helpful in being able to combat the pandemic? The answer seems to be no.
Obviously it should a learning experience but if we can possibly figure out where and when it started we can obviously put in measures for the future to stop it so I don't see how you can say it doesn't matter what the origin was.
Almost no theories can be "ruled out" in this space. Viruses evolve in crazy and essentially unobservable ways.
Nonetheless, we know there was a close relative documented in bats on the same continent within a comparable timeframe. The clearly obvious hypothesis is that animal transmission was the vector, for the simple reason that this is the way every single other pandemic, human or otherwise, has happened. There is nothing unique or notable about covid from the perspective of viral evolution. Period. So Occam says we go with the simplest theory.
Attempts to wave away that fact have nothing to do with science about what was happening in Wuhan and everything to do with modern political opinions about a government 1000km away in Beijing.
Occam's Razor doesn't really apply to this one, because each side has different priors on which theory is actually the "simplest."
Given that, as far as I know, we don't have a single human case documented before those in Wuhan - something which a) should have been likely and b) China would be highly incentivized to root out since it would disprove the lab hypothesis, it implies patient zero was probably in Wuhan. If that's true, Occam could cut the other way, since the notion that case zero of a virus making a species transition would just so happen to occur in a city with a virology lab doing research on the same kind of viruses is a bit hard to believe.
Wuhan is a gigantic city, bigger than NYC. You'll be able to find an example of nearly anything in any category there. But it's also completely unsurprising they were researching the coronavirus category: the 2003 SARS outbreak was a coronavirus too, and obviously motivated an incredible amount of research across the world, but particularly in China.
Given that coronavirus would not be observable until there is a cluster of symptomatic cases in a city (and a doctor with relevant experience who can observe multiple cases - here 李文亮), I find it highly unlikely that we could observe earlier cases, if they spread less rapidly or outside a city - or even within another city with less institutional knowledge.
> b) China would be highly incentivized to root out
Even if so, this doesn't form part of any prior. China being incentivized to act in that situation, doesn't affect how likely or unlikely that situation was.
> China being incentivized to act in that situation, doesn't affect how likely or unlikely that situation was.
China being incentivized to find evidence supporting the CCP's desired image absolutely does affect how likely it would be for such evidence to surface if it exists.
We see virtually no such evidence; we can assume that's not because China's lack of trying to find it; which should adjust our prior against such evidence existing at all. Yes?
My belief is simply that there is no such evidence.
Reasonably convincing evidence, to me, would be:
- genetic precursor virus particles which have died and no longer exist - they are extinct, or,
- dated blood samples with immunological evidence of infection, sufficient that it isn’t just tampered/false positives. There’s no reason to expect this would have been collected.
i.e. if you haven’t collected it by 2019, there is never going to be any evidence.
This also answers your sibling commenter: it’s not in China’s interest to publicise any such search, when the odds of discovering anything (even if there were earlier infections) are vanishingly low.
After thinking about this statement a bit, I must also admit the possibility that it did not originate in a lab yet finding evidence that it did not is still very difficult. That said, I still think that CCP's default strategy to cover up everything and shroud the truth is now hurting it more than if they were just honest and straightforward about what really happened.
The point is that even if we didn't observe such cases originally, given the incentives now, I would have expected China to investigate and surface evidence of such cases, even if circumstantial. So your second point is not a real point: the incentives don't determine the likelihood of it occurring, but they do dictate the likelihood of an investigation to determine if it did occur.
Are they incentivized to do that? Remember they’re dealing not just with The west’s opinion, but also home opinion, where I don’t know that documenting that they should have found this weeks earlier would go over well. Not to mention I think they’re happy with the current local conspiracy theory that this was actually the US’s fault. It also seems likely that a big city especially one with a big lab would be more likely to be able to identify that the disease going around was new
I'm not an expert on China but I would generally assume that the consequences and reputational damage of being seen as responsible by the rest of the world for COVID-19 would outstrip nearly any other possible consequences being mitigated against by not seeking to clear themselves.
> we don't have a single human case documented before those in Wuhan
The disease spread all over the world before people discovered the first cases, so it's not very surprising if previous cases on a less developed area than Wuhan were ignored.
Well, sure, but my point is that now that people are suspecting it was the lab, we ought to expect China to be digging furiously for evidence of an earlier case. At least so far, I haven't heard of any such evidence.
Willful ignorance is the first posture I would expect from the CCP - that would be the specific avoidance of gathering evidence that would be embarrassing if found to exist.
The second posture I would expect (if the first posture was not takwn) is that if they did seek and find evidence of particularly embarassing variety, they would actively stonewall access to awareness of that evidence and do everything they could to suppress that evidence. The statement,
>we ought to expect China to be digging furiously for evidence of an earlier case
is prima facie either incorrect or irrelevant to whether your ever becoming aware such evidence exists.
China does not possess Western democratic institutions, (however flawed as even those might be), to achieve accountability. To wit, over here on the Western side of things, it’s going to be hard enough getting NIH to examine whether NIH funded this work in contravention of US gov mandates not to (see HHS Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, 2017).
> Given that, as far as I know, we don't have a single human case documented before those in Wuhan - something which a) should have been likely
Um... why? The virus has to jump species somewhere. If the first documented case was in Shanghai, you could make the same argument.
I think what you're trying to say is that the jump had to have happened in Yunnan, because that's where that particular bat sample was found. But that's not what the data says at all. The Yunnan virus was a relative, not an ancestor. There are uncounted millions of wild coronavirus strains we don't see for every one we sequence. There is no reason at all to believe that some Wuhan-local bat, say, had a related strain that became the covid ancestor. Or some other species, etc...
Again, that's the way viruses evolve. It's the way pandemics start. It's the way pandemics have always started. Demanding that this is somehow a crazy engineered virus dropped on us by a despotic foreign government is... how pandemics start in bad movies.
Your comment was rightly flagged because you broke the site guidelines and took the thread a big step further into flamewar hell. Please don't do that. Please do review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN.
pg knows as well as anyone else that if someone makes an attempt to paint you into alignment with a right-wing conspiracy theory, they're probably doing it with ill intent, especially if you made no such claim.
If you want the HN guidelines to be consistent, they shouldn't demand people presume good faith when the tactics of cancel culture are wielded in threads to try to tag people with the label they are promoting right or left wing conspiracy theories, which can direct a mob in their direction if not strongly pushed back against.
The guidelines are consistent. You should have replied to the argument instead of attacking the other comment. If you had simply posted your sentence "The claim is not that [etc.]" and omitted all the name-calling, your comment would not have been flagged and it would have been more persuasive too. By packing it with insults, you discredit your own point. By the way, that's one of several less-obvious reasons for presuming good faith even when you don't feel like it.
I agree with you that the GP swerved into a strawman at the end and shouldn't have. Indeed they broke the site guidelines there ("Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.") But piling on with grossly worse violations is exactly the wrong thing to do in such a case. If you have a better point, you should serve it properly by keeping your cool. Assuming you're in the right, doing otherwise just discredits the truth, and that actually causes harm.
“ it is widely believed that the virus was leaked to the public in a laboratory accident (may have been kept frozen in some laboratory beforehand).[4][5][10][11][12][13][17][19”
And on top of that, the original SARS leaked from Chinese, Taiwanese, and Singapore labs a minimum of 4 times.
So parent’s cited statement is false and does not apply.
Occam's Razor indeed. The lab in Wuhan was studying bats and coronaviruses. Animal transmission is completely consistent with a lab leak, especially given that the virus in question is transmissible before symptoms.
Actually occam's razor would say that the many many many more instances of bat-human contact throughout the Chinese countryside are likely responsible, not a lab leak.
Did you know that people use Bat Guano (literally bat shit) eyedrops to cure visual ailments in rural china? Among other risky practices. Bat guano is often handled with bare hands and used to fertilize fields without proper sanitary practices. The many tens of thousands of these events that happen everyday are a MUCH more likely scenario.
> And despite the tens of thousands of people rubbing bat turds in their eyes the first cases come from people living in the middle of a massive city.
Uh... yeah. Because massive cities have, y'know, more people mixing together with more varied activies. It would be very surprising indeed if a new pandemic just happened to pop up in a tiny hamlet in rural Tibet. But cities are absolutely where we expect to see this happen.
> The clearly obvious hypothesis is that animal transmission was the vector
Except nobody has been able to identify that animal. With SARS it was quickly determined to be civets, with MERS camels. With Covid, more than a year on, we still don't know.
We also know that a very closely related strain of the virus was being studied in the only BSL 4 lab in China, located less than a mile from the meat market where the virus supposedly originated.
But the distance inside China is the equivilant of a known bat virus in a remote location somewhere in Budapest, where only farmers live, and ground zero of the virus beeing downtown London streetfood market.. (were all the food and everything tested negativ..)
You don't think bats exchange viruses between Budapest and London? That's nothing. Viruses in interacting populations are routinely continent wide.
Let me flip this around: do you have even one example of a virus within a compatible species spectrum that does not expand across continent scales over the "few year" timeframe we're discussing?
I imagined a conspiracy theory (please build a lot of skepticism around this), that Trump asked for "covert ways" to damage china.
The CIA knew about this lab, they worked to cause the leak, maybe it was not done properly, the CIA people were not informed on the science, and they did not really know it would infect the entire world. There is a similar plot in the TV show "The Americans".
I don't believe this theory, but I'm guessing China could easily use this kind of narrative in disinformation campaigns.
My only worry is diplomatic tensions with china. I guess everybody is a little anxious now and wants peace.
So again, I ask - even if it's true, so what? It's impossible to conclusively prove, and even if proven what exactly is proven? That an accident occurred? OK, so what?
The article attempts to answer this:
> The vitriol also obscures a broader imperative, Relman says, which is that uncovering the virus’s origins is crucial to stopping the next pandemic. Threats from both lab accidents and natural spillovers are growing simultaneously as humans move steadily into wild places and new biosafety labs grow in number around the world. “This is why the origins question is so important,” Relman says.
However the reality is from the perspective of the USA it doesn't even matter. Even if China was malicious and deliberately sent it off to us, it could've been easily stopped but we didn't do it. Unless we're going to go to war over this it seems like a pointless exercise as conclusive evidence will never emerge as it requires cooperation from China.
We're worrying about whether it was created from labs in China, meanwhile we couldn't even prevent a massive superspreader event in Boston via the Biogen conference, filled with people who already has an awareness of the virus to begin with.
Even now as I type this cases of the variant are increasing and the amount of people taking the vaccine is decreasing and silly accidents like the J&J fiasco are occurring. Not to say that we can't explore both things simultaneously, but it's pretty obvious that the return on investment will differ - one will do... what exactly? And another will prevent more cases.
The conflict over the investigation is justifiable. It's necessary to understand how the virus got started. If it's lab-grown we will want to be very careful to scrutinize each other's labs. If it's natural we will want to be very careful to scrutinize wild game. The implications of any scenario are broad and complex, but clearly we don't want a repeat of 2020 if we can avoid it.
Another point: just because there's some uncomfortable conflict over the investigation doesn't mean we should abandon and investigation, in fact it probably means we should investigate more vigorously.
Thank you for your comment, but your comment is precisely the kind of comment I disagree with.
What difference does it make? Let's say that it's both lab-grown and wild game. OK, so that means we should scrutinize both. OK, then. Now what?
No amount of scrutiny can prevent an accident from occurring. It's not as if this pandemic happens every year. We're talking about a once in a century event. Not to mention some countries prevented the virus from spreading within their own countries very effectively, and others, well, did not.
If the virus was a product of gain of function research, the primary purpose of which is to reduce the risk of pandemics, then the research becomes much more difficult to justify. The argument I guess becomes then, yeah, periodically we’ll cause a pandemic, and millions of people will die, but we’ll be so much better at dealing with diseases that arise naturally, as SARS and MERS did, that on balance it will be worth the extra pandemics...
Whatever you think about this, it seems unbelievably foolish to locate these labs in the middle of metropolises.
OK, so what. What can we do to make China stop doing this research if they want to? Are we going to go to war over this? No. Are we going to have an embargo with China? No?
So effectively this becomes a situation of "oh yeah they should've not had that accident, oh well." In the USA we've had the same problem ourselves (lab accidents with pathogens), and we banned gain of function research and ended up removing the ban a few years later.
The entire exercise is meaningless. Note - I'm not even saying we shouldn't research the origins of COVID, what I'm saying is, the result doesn't really matter.
Why does it have to be a "we" vs "China" discussion at all? Why don't we think non-politically about it for a minute and recognize that as a global species we have a chance to learn as much as we can from a pandemic that affected us globally so that we can try to do better when the next one inevitably comes along?
And yeah, maybe China doesn't wanna think that way, but let's find out first, and second find out why.
On the other hand there are some great ways to think about this politically. If by "we" you mean the U.S. we don't really have a leg to stand on as far as respect from the international community right now anyway, so any fight we bring to China is basically one on one.
Other countries besides the U.S. would be able to wring significant concessions from China if they chose to a) believe collectively that it was China's malfeasance that caused the pandemic, and b) stood together to demand a response.
It’s either from wild animals, it was an accident, or it was spread with malice. In all scenarios we already have procedures around gain of function research, limiting interaction with animals in markets and biological weapons, respectively.
If the prevailing theory was that it came from an asteroid that would be interesting.
I personally doubt China would pay anything even if it was a lab accident. I guess we’ll see.
We conduct this sort of research, and in fact the NIH funded gain of function research taking place at WIV. So first we could reinstate the moratorium that was lifted in 2017, and we can stop funding it elsewhere. If the ultimate conclusion is that this research is too dangerous, we can create something analogous to the Biological Weapons Convention, to which China has acceded. I see no reason China wouldn't sign and abide by such a treaty.
Touché, didn't know that. I've actually been to Bitter Root Brewing, just a block or two away, but somehow completely missed it. Oh well, I guess they probably don't give tours anyway.
Here's an example: one of your local health department's jobs is to scrutinize private businesses sanitation practices so you don't get sick from contaminated food. Ditto the water systems, so you don't get sick from contaminated water. The idea is to prevent complacency.
Prior to that, people did get sick, and public investigations were mounted to pinpoint the problem. Nobody wanted to admit to themselves that they were to blame, that they had hurt or killed someone, but the society benefited from the momentary discomfort and those hard truths.
I don't think your example is relevant nor is it a good analogy.
The situation is more like you're McDonalds and everyone at your store and your competitors stores are getting food poisoning.
Instead of properly understanding why contaminated food is arriving at your store and stopping the poisoning within your store, you're researching whether or not the contaminated food originated at Burger King.
It's not bad to research whether or not the contaminated food originated at Burger King, but regardless knowing that isn't going to stop the food poisoning from spreading within your store.
I like this analogy because there are already food safety laws just like how there are safety standards for working within a lab. Regardless, accidents happen, and people get poisoned. Kind of like the Chipotle outbreaks.
If you buy tacos from Chipotle and they sell you a tainted taco on accident. You get sick. Hopefully you survive. In any case you will want Chipotle to do a thorough investigation to prevent it from happening again.
You've completely misunderstood my point. My point is that we're McDonalds - not Chipotle. Should McDonalds be investigating Chipotle's problems or their own? It's really that simple...
If you believe McDonalds in this analogy should be investigating the origins of Chipotle's problems as opposed to resolving their ongoing issue then we'll just have to agree to disagree.
I don't understand your analogy. If a sizeable population of the world got sick from eating at Chipotle...and it was easily communicably spreadable infecting even those that never ate there...and people died as a result (3 MILLION)...and it caused massive world-wide economic damage...I'd bet they'd be quite interested in the cause no matter where they worked. In your analogy, the impact wasn't just limited to those who ate at Chipotle. It was everyone.
That situation isn't analogous, but American Airlines would reduce its risk more by reading its own incident reports compared to Delta's, yes. In general focusing on one's own failings is superior to focusing on another's.
Ok but they can do both, right? I mean, I can improve my performance by looking at my own performance, but also watching others.
Moreover, the US can exert a lot of pressure on other countries to meet certain standards and reduce risk. Knowing what went wrong will help determine standards.
It's not like lab-leak-causes-disease only happens once. This happens all the time, just like aircraft incidents. If incidents weren't investigated and tracked, planes would be riskier than they are.
Now would you want McDonalds to research Chipotle or stop outbreaks in their own stores? Seems pretty obvious to me. Perhaps I'm missing something?
Ultimately Chipotle is already incentivized to figure it out themselves, unless the argument is Chipotle is intentionally infecting their own customers?
Going back to the original point - what the USA should do for its own citizens won't change regardless of whether COVID was an accident, from wild game, etc.
We're not talking about a once a century event. This is the third novel coronavirus outbreak in the past 2 decades, and it seems clear that SARS at least could have been pandemic if we hadn't gotten lucky.
Sure, but ultimately what's relevant here are the number of deaths. The other two killed orders of magnitude fewer people worldwide given the amount of time, no?
The gain of function research was at least in part US funded. We probably shouldn't fund gain of function research in Chinese labs if the resulting viruses are going to cause a global pandemic, for a start.
All else aside, the attempt to squelch these inquiries as off-limits justifies resistance. The more scientific consensus is about social power, the worse for science.
no it's not. it might be impossible to prove the negative, but if it did come from the lab there should be physical records and first hand witnesses.
> so what
so maybe we make it a point to have the lab shut down so this doesn't happen again? maybe we publicly acknowledge there are secret teams working on secret science and viruses that can kill people en masse?
but you have a point, it's always easier to embrace nihilism than tackle hard problems head on.
You have a misunderstanding of reality. The USA has done the exact same research before, and we have (also) had accidents around pathogens being mishandled, and we have had a consequent ban.
However we ended up unbanning it and we still do it now. If the goal is to simply stop this type of research in its entirety, there's still no point of trying to get China to stop as we have no authority in China (or any other country) to begin with. Even if China were to claim they've stopped we have no way of knowing.
Let's just assume China did have a lab accident. OK, then what? We tell them to stop doing it? Let's say they agree. In the future they decide to start doing it again. The entire thing is pointless to begin with. We can't get our own citizens to consistently wear masks and we think we're going to substantially change China's behavior here - hilarious.
Maybe we'll end up banning it again and stopping international funding of it?
It's pretty absurd to say that it makes no difference whether or not the virus was a lab leak or not. The answer to that question changes the posterior risk estimates of such research and therefore our international funding and domestic regulatory priorities.
There's also such a thing as soft, diplomatic nudges. Not everything is "force X to do Y when they want not-Y".
> How would you know if it's gross negligence or an accident?
That's a different question from "what difference does it make"
> What consequences are you thinking of that we haven't already done?
Sanctions, trade tariffs, political condemnation of an authoritarian state? There are many steps to pressure China before an open war is declared.
> Hilarious that we want to punish China but we won't punish our own politicians.
Why not both? I think Trump is already punished a bit, he lost the election.
Really it's a scape goat for gross negligence. Governments everywhere have been incredibly negligent in handling covid, and they really want to be able to pin it on china, taking no responsibility for their own response
> Even if China was malicious and deliberately sent it off to us, it could've been easily stopped but we didn't do it.
I don't think this is the argument.
China was affected by it immediately to, so it would seem that this wasn't intentional.
The question is what exactly was the Wuhan lab studying, why, and funded by whom. We already know part of this was funded by the US Government.
The information is all online about their studies specifically with ACE2 and coronaviruses, and suddenly we end up with a global pandemic where the virus latches onto human ACE2. Originating in Wuhan.
On the one hand, yes, many who ask this seem to have something political in-mind, so on that score, I kind of agree that there's no "there" there.
Aside from that, though, we can consider international treaties against gain of function research? International inspections? Have a debate on whether this type of research is allowed? Create improved international procedure standards for Biolab safety?
I mean, it has killed more people than American killed in WW2. Maybe a root cause analysis and better procedures are justified?
> I mean, it has killed more people than WW2. Maybe a root cause analysis and better procedures are justified?
Yes, I agree. However I believe what should be analyzed is why certain countries failed to contain it. Whether it was a lab accident or wild game doesn't really matter. There's no way the entire world could prevent accidents or people from interacting with wild animals.
At the end of the day the most effective thing is to ask why it spread as much as it did in your own country.
There are politicians in our (USA) own country that denounced COVID even as recently as this January. People who fabricated data (Cuomo), who peddled poor science (Trump), etc. etc.
Don't misunderstand me, China definitely deserves their share of the blame, but I just believe that share is small. Ultimately the USA's response to COVID could've been much, much better by pretty much every metric imaginable.
The same difference it would make to try to figure out if a plane crashed because a meteorite flew into it or because the human engineers screwed up some software component - to know if we should put more scrutiny on human activity that can cause catastrophes.
Other than vindicating much of Trump's rhetoric, you're mostly right. There's just no piece of evidence that could come out to definitely prove this came from China that wouldn't immediately have the plausible deniability of having been planted to frame China.
I'm with you, this has a borderline culture-war vibe to it, especially how some people are very into it and bring it up a lot. I don't see how an accident or natural origin changes anything.
to me the biggest so what is if it's a lab leak then that lab is liable for millions of deaths and trillions of dollars in economic damage all over the planet.
Whether the virus jumped to humans because someone handled the wrong bat or because some junior lab tech didn’t wash their hands shouldn’t really matter as far as reparations go
Yes. The lab leak hypothesis is tightly intertwined with the idea that China is not acting on good faith with the global community.
The CCP prohibited the virus's genetic sequence from being published. After a lab published it, it was shut down.
>On 11 January, Edward C. Holmes contacted Zhang for permission to publish the virus's genome. Zhang granted permission, and Holmes published the genome on virological.org that day.[1][3] The Chinese government had prohibited labs from publishing information about the new coronavirus, though Zhang later said he did not know about the prohibition.[3] The next day, the Shanghai Health Commission ordered Zhang's laboratory to close temporarily for "rectification".
The most likely candidate for this virus, and most future viruses that produce pandemics, will be environmental destruction and animal agriculture.
We know there are novel viruses out there, too many to count. Even if this started in a lab the most likely reason is that scientists need to study the viruses that we will be coming into contact with as we commit, as a species, to more environmental destruction. I'm really exhausted of watching scientists get blamed repeatedly for the failures of our economic and social systems to act responsibly.
Sure, the lab hypothesis might have some weight, some possibility of being true. It's still a red herring, either a distraction from the real issues we face by accident or design, or both.
The question of a lab leak is not incidental. The virus has caused massive suffering (and will continue to as we understand the fallout IMO).
If it leaked from a lab and that was hidden from the world we have to wonder how much suffering could have been avoided if all the information was given freely as Chinese authorities knew it.
There are some who suggest the virus was allowed to spread beyond China as a way to ensure China didn't fall behind competivley. Pure speculation, but we need to knowing if it came from a lab is a hugely important question.
Considering how much of the biosphere humans have destroyed I have my doubts about this theory I bet there are fewer novel viruses out there than any time in human history. I have a lot more fear of a crackpot despotic country like NK getting it's hands on something like a version of anthrax that is as virulent/transmissible as covid.
Similar article which made the same case. This one provided a few more interesting stories about just how close we have come to potentially similar leaks in the past (and based in US labs).
> 2. It's not xenophobic for people from the US to suggest the possibility of a lab leak, because the US was itself funding gain of function research on novel coronaviruses in the Wuhan BSL4 lab
It's not necessarily a Chinese lab where the leak originated from (hypothetical, of course). It could be a Russian lab - there are arguments for Novosibirsk Vector biology center as the origin of the leak.
I did a deep dive on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 last year and was surprised at how much information is readily available to anyone and yet so much of the story is still totally unknown to the vast majority of people.
I'm talking about sources like major scientific journals and mainstream media here. It just takes some work to piece it all together.
The story is actually really fascinating and almost seems like a fictional thriller novel. It actually gave me chills. This is all heavily cited with credible sources, here's the story: https://followtheplot.org/covid19
I think the following is much better paper on this topic. It discusses how the furin cleavage site occurs in lab and why ace2 binding could have emerged and why the virus was well adapted to ferrets right from the start.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7435492/
Yeah I get people want to point fingers as useless as it will be. But just tell me how we are going to protect ourselves from someone like Putin or Kim Jong-un doing it on purpose the next time when half the population refuses to mask or get a vax and stop it. That's the far bigger problem. You'll never stop it happening a second time but you can prepare with policy.
The idea that some scientist accidentally infected themself with this virus while trying to study it is far more believable than a person contracting it because they ate raw bat from a wet market. It can't be a coincidence that the epicenter of this pandemic is less than a mile away from a lab dedicated to studying coronaviruses.
>... for scientists to voice suspicions about a possible lab leak,... especially when there was already a long history of viral disease outbreaks spilling over from nature.
This is a really wired formulation whe we actually know, with absolute certainty, that every pandemic ever suffered was natural.
Does it really matter where the virus emerged from? What changes would we make if it came from bats by nature's own doing? Or of it came from wet markets? Or if it leaked from a research lab?
Maybe it leaked from a US lab? Blood samples from the Red Cross blood donor program show that it was already in 9 states in the US by mid December 2019.
"It is not possible to determine whether the potential SARS-CoV-2 infections suggested by this study may have been community- or travel-associated. A previous survey of blood donors, conducted to help understand travel practices, determined that less than 3% of respondents reported travel outside of the U.S. within the 28 days prior to donation, and of those reporting travel, only 5% traveled to Asia."
It was in all likelihood a lab leak. The WIV in the same city as the intial breakout? This isn’t hard to piece together.
I’m also convinced that the CCP will do everything in their power to deflect blame and claim a natural happenstance. The economic reparations that will be demanded from a faceless China would destroy their emergence.
it's not xenophobic, but xenophobic people really love to talk about it. that's the problem with the discourse.
of course the irony is that it doesn't even matter. We already know China (1) tried to cover it up, screwing the rest of the world, and (2) has poor wet market sanitation practices that seem designed to cultivate these kinds of diseases. Those issues are already bad enough.
> but xenophobic people really love to talk about it
All too often I see this used as the standard for labelling someone a xenophobe and it becomes a classic case of begging the question. Since we all agree it's not xenophobic to speak about it, perhaps it's time we wait for actual xenophobia before making what should be serious accusations?
Since some of the very first discussion of the topic in public was by the president using it as a political football alongside a trade war with China and a nontrivial amount of public fear and aversion to random people that happened to look Chinese, that well is pretty solidly poisoned at this point?
What exactly are the good guys supposed to do in a situation where bad guys enjoy the truth: support the noble lie, or hiss "you are not supposed to talk about this"?
What a jewel of a comment. One could not ask for a more succinct elucidation of the term "culture war". Truth should never be subsidiary to tribal loyalties. Lies are never noble.
The world would be a better place if we opted for Option C: embrace the truth. And if you must fight "bad guys", fight what makes them bad instead of gaslighting them.
Perhaps not divvy up the world, or people, as "good" and "bad" and instead focus on truth?
Or perhaps consider that if truth is good, then more truth is likely to be more good, and good people would (should) embrace truth and bad guys speaking more truth would be better than bad guys using less (as surely that is one way to measure who is bad).
Given these options (and I could go on) I'm not sure why a "noble" lie or suppression of speech are the only choices, or better choices.
Causal inference may not be important to media campaigns, but it is to reality. Can you honestly say that you have found causal evidence that people earnestly talking about a Wuhan having a lab leak is the cause of 24 extra hate crimes in a city of 8 million people?
My best friend is from Vietnam. He's face harassment in public for "being Chinese" since Covid started. I've seen it first-hand a few times. One of which, the instigators were clearly planning to escalate until they saw the company he keeps (very fit, very tired of this shit guys).
So yeah, it's fair to say that the racist assholes engaging in this harassment don't care where you're from. It doesn't matter if your a 9th generation American. If you "look Chinese" that's a convenient enough excuse for them to start shit.
It seems very obvious to me that those doing racist hate crimes aren't going to ask their victims if they're Chinese or not before attacking them, so you'd see an uptick in anti-Asian hate crimes in general, not just anti-Chinese hate crimes, and so it makes sense to talk about anti-Asian hate crimes as a whole.
> It seems very obvious to me that those doing racist hate crimes...
Who are doing racist hate crimes?
There is nothing obvious about it.
The media narrative is that Trump’s use of the term “China Virus” or “Kung Flu” has led to attacks on ALL Asians.
I’ve never seen any evidence of this.
And what is disgusting is assuming any old lady anywhere — be she Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, etc— who get pushed or mugged is the result of “anti-Asian racism” fueled by criticism of China.
That somebody would push an old lady because of their dislike of the CCP, is unbelievable enough. But, now I’m supposed to believe some mysterious ‘racists’ are harassing Japanese people because they dislike the CCP...
Where’s is the evidence for this ‘obvious’ state of affairs?
It’s absurd on its face.
Their is more ‘racism’ against Chinese from Vietnamese populations for instance... and vice versa. Ditto for Japanese v. Korean and Chinese v Japanese.
The fabled ‘white supremacist’ out there certainly know the difference between the various ethnicities. Your fabled red-neck Bubba knows the difference between Chinese and Vietnamese and the rest... many of these red-necked bubbas come from families that fought in the Korean War, Vietnam war, have been stationed in Japan, and took R&R in Thailand.
It seems the only segment of society that lumps them all together are white liberals who blithely assume all “people with slanty eyes” are the same. Just as they do with all “brown” people.
I happen to live in red-neck Bubba land and have for near all my life, but thank you for your input on matters you seem to not be very much personally acquainted with...
I thought about including something about this in my post, but as we're on HN, I deleted it as I didn't feel it was needed.
While you could be trolling, I'll never know - but simply put, the average person who would commit a hate crime - especially physically and publicly - is likely completely unable to distinguish/genuinely unaware of the various Asian ethnicities along with their distinguishing features. To them, it's all the same. Note, this has nothing to do with me - it's just a truth.
It's "anti-Asian hate crimes" and not "anti-Chinese hate crimes" because the people being harassed and attacked are from eastern Asian ethnic groups in general, not specifically Chinese ethnic groups.
It's not the worst rule of thumb as long as the social context is taken into account (i.e. it wouldn't be as appropriate here.) Heuristics do save time.
Honest question: Is that a fair/accurate generalization to make? If Hell's kitchen episodes and accounts from food industry workers are any indication, sanitation practices in food handling establishments elsewhere are not necessarily always stellar either. And surely China has some equivalent of WholeFoods?
One ought to be careful not to attribute a characteristic differently depending on whether they belong to the class of people in question[0]. If it turns out that reality is that some chinese establishments have poor sanitation practices just like some US establishments do, and it just so happens that they got unlucky (perhaps partially due to not-so-directly-related aspects like zoning law differences or propensity for higher bat populations due to local fauna/flora ecosystems), the us-vs-them blaming game doesn't necessarily have as strong legs to stand on.
Have you seen a easy Asian wet market in person before? If you’re comparing it to Whole Foods I’m not sure you have?
The term itself is somewhat ambiguous [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market] in that it can cover both cases. However the style common in many places in China (and many other areas in east Asia) is one where there is no refrigeration or adequate sanitation. To avoid spoilage, animals are brought in live and slaughtered as needed to provide meat. It can be when a customer picks it, or when needed to stock a counter.
These styles of market are problematic disease wise because it brings many species of animals together in crowded and often unsanitary conditions, high stress, with humans in close contact with them, and lots of people and animals coming and going constantly.
If you’re looking for a way to encourage Zoonotic disease, it’s hard to do better.
To be clear, I didn't mean to compare a butcher shop to a Whole Foods, but rather to point out that not all food markets are live animal markets, and that blanket statements like "China does X" can gloss over the fact that every country has nuances.
Your link suggests that the primary factor of disease transmission in live animal markets is the exoticness of the slaughtered animals. It certainly makes sense to make a distinction based on that criteria, since, for example, I can find high traffic markets that sell live animals in North America as well, though typically they sell less exotic animals (most commonly, lobsters).
This distinction, I feel, is meaningful because of the implications: north american diet is relatively restricted in terms of meat variety (we do mostly beef, pork, chicken, maybe lamb and few other meats on fairly rare occasions - even chicken gizzard isn't commonly consumed, for example). I'm not familiar enough with China to say to what extent exotic meat consumption is cultural vs driven by necessity vs other factors.
However, I do still feel that it might be crass to say things like "well chinese people ought to stop eating weird shit and close those filthy markets", without understanding the circumstances that lead to the status quo, and consequently how they could be changed realistically. (To be clear, I'm not saying you specifically are making these types of comments, but it's not an unpopular sentiment)
There is a big wet market in Wuhan, pretty close to the virus research lab.
According to the below video, eating exotic wildlife dates back to the starvation conditions of the Mao years and is now mostly practiced by the rich. The conditions in which these animals are kept are unsanitary, even by comparison to a market with live animals that you might be familiar with in the US.
There was a push to end the practice after SARS-CoV-1, but they came back a few years ago.
Definitely a valid point - there is a huge variety in what it looks like on the ground. Your other point re: availability, cost, etc is also right on point and part of what I was trying to cover.
The variety angle is because 1) the more factors you can roll the dice on at any given moment, the more likely you can come up ‘winning’ with a magically terrible combo through mutation. That ocelot flu mutate to something that could infect bats? Groovy. No bats though, so doesn’t go anywhere. If you have bats though.....
2) Many animal viruses can be low or no impact in a species, and some can infect others to different effects. This gives a given virus more chances to roll the dice and get the ‘magic’ combo without killing itself off by killing the host. The more other species it gets exposed to; the better.
3) some species have elements more common with humans than others. If a virus gets mostly infectious in one host, adapting in another environment can get it closer to dangerous to humans.
Also, if you live in an area without solid electricity or reliable refrigerated trucks - what else are you supposed to do? If you grew up in one of those areas, why bother with the more expensive option if you’re used to this (or poor and don’t have a choice).
A lot of our simplification in diet now is due to the ability to choose higher grade options coupled with strict government regulations on how food sold to the public can be sourced and the conditions it can be ‘made’ in. It used to be (several generations ago now), wild hunted deer, pidgeons, squirrel, a side of pork from your neighbor, etc. were common parts of daily food intake, and you HAD to cook your food or you wouldn’t go a week without something really nasty happening to you. There are many parts of the county that still do this, though usually more out of convenience than necessity.
Now you can pick from animals raised for purpose, with supply chains inspected and complying with a books worth of regulations. In many cases, you could go years without getting sick if you didn’t cook your food (don’t try this, it’s still a dumb idea).
It’s easy to point fingers, but if you haven’t seen it and lived in the environment, you can’t just change it without a lot of other things happening first or very nasty side effects (starvation, nutritional issues, etc).
>Have you seen a easy Asian wet market in person before? If you’re comparing it to Whole Foods I’m not sure you have?
Have you seen one in the last decade? It's changed dramatically, and ranges from an open-air grocery store to yes something more depressing like what is in that wiki article.
That is great to see, though for instance half that video would have flagged a US health inspector. Much cleaner than what I saw in Vietnam, Malaysia, or less high end areas of Hong Kong, or friends in Beijing or Fujian were used to when they lived in China. I can’t be sure how serious to take Foxnews in this regard, since you can pick and choose a lot of course.
Cities have been improving, and I don’t doubt Covid is helping. SARS seemed to help a lot in Singapore.
The comparison to Whole Foods with consistent refridgeration, regular clearing, limited supplies, regular health inspections still seems unlikely anywhere outside of the major metros.
>If Hell's kitchen episodes and accounts from food industry workers are any indication, sanitation practices in food handling establishments elsewhere are not necessarily always stellar either.
The issue with wet markets isn't the sanitary practices of their workers so much as the fact that meat and other food is handled in very close proximity to live animals being slaughtered, and this combined with a large volume of foot traffic. Granted, I haven't seen all episodes of Kitchen Nightmares, but I've never seen slaughter of any kind taking place at a restaurant in that show, let alone at a restaurant that is visited by tens of thousands of people each day.
They aren't equivalent, and it's not even solely a factor of sanitation. You are keeping tons of live animals in cages in close proximity to each other and tons of people. Stress is extremely effective at weakening immune response, which makes it easier for pathogens to replicate, jump hosts, and jump species. Now the pathogen is an a different environment, which begins to force adaptation, which is to say the pathogens that mutate in beneficial ways to their new environment begin to outcompete the rest. And this just keeps happening. And happening. And happening. And with new strains of disease brought in from pathogen reservoirs in the wild.
There's only so much good sanitation processes could even achieve here, in the same way there's only so much that bad sanitation processes at a restaurant can do. Bad sanitation in a restaurant almost always means an increase in known pathogens that we can either take care of fairly easily, or even in the worst case scenarios of something such as botulism, have limited ability to spread among the general population.
The risk of an unsanitized kitchen is just totally different from that of even a somewhat sanitized wet market.
I've been to "fish markets" in Germany that kept live animals (mostly poultry and rabbits) in cages in close proximity to each other and tons of people. Just because it's uncommon or illegal in the US doesn't mean it's exotic or unusual in the rest of the world. We only freak out about "wet markets" because 1) the name sounds gross (but it's catchier than "perishable goods street market", I guess) and 2) orientalism.
If the wet markets in china were just poultry and rabbits, it would not be an issue. We have a good understanding of the potential zoonotic diseases from those vectors.
We - including China - do not have a good understanding of the potential zoonotic diseases from the large variety of wild game that is captured and sold in these markets.
Wet markets are not as sanitary as others. However all evidence we have suggest that covid was first spread there, not that it originated there. Someone got covid - we don't know who or how - and then went to the wet market. That person could have gone to any crowded local venue and spread it just as well, but it seems they didn't.
I suspect that the Chinese government actively works to conflate criticism as xenophobia. This same strategy is exactly why it's so hard to discuss Israel in anything other than a positive light.
Regarding 1), local authorities tried to cover it up. Or did we all forget how fast China built hospitals in late 2019?
I just want to add, so, that SARS-Cov 2 was found in blood samples from November 2019 in Europe. And also, what does it matter anymore where it came from? We don't need the host to develop a cure, we have a couple of working vaccines by now.
Which is obviously a problem. The US more or less has two sides, and both are routinely responsible for(or at least align with) morally reprehensible things. It should not be a problem to choose truth regardless of where if falls in a political spectrum. And no one who wants to just find the truth should have to second guess their findings because they're politically inconvenient for someone.
The opposition to the idea comes down to one thing 1)Donald Trump et al supported this hypothesis, and thus disagreeing with the hypothesis becomes reflexive for many.
Just shows how politics have divided us. No one seems to be thinking independently and that includes myself - I try but often the first reaction is otherwise.
You can despise someone deeply, but if they are citing facts, reason, logic, etc - have no association, they stand on their own. Doesn't matter who uttered it.
Researchers should be discussing it. Until conclusive evidence is found, the only reason to post it on social media is to add fuel to the conspiracy fire, a fire that's inspiring people to kill people that couldn't possibly have anything to do with the origin of the virus.
maybe Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/Other multi-billion dollar entities should censor their platforms and stop inciting violence algorithmically? why do I have to self censor because I'm smart enough to consider this with a beginner's mind, and not a bigot's?
Same reason you don't post links on how to build a bomb to twitter. Post it on demolition professional forums, cool. Talk about it with you demolition expert friends, cool. Show your mentally unstable neighbor how to make one with kitchen supplies, not cool.
“If we are at the point where all science is politicized and no one cares about truth and only being politically correct,” he [Petrovsky] says, “we may as well give up and shut down and stop doing science.”
It is ad hominem but not ad hominem fallacy. Wikipedia gives a good summary [1] of when ad hominem is not a fallacy:
> Valid ad hominem arguments occur in informal logic, where the person making the argument relies on arguments from authority such as testimony, expertise, or on a selective presentation of information supporting the position they are advocating. In this case, counter-arguments may be made that the target is dishonest, lacks the claimed expertise, or has a conflict of interest.
For example, if someone tells you that hydroxychloroquinea will cure COVID and cites a doctor, it is an ad hominem not but not a fallacy to counter that the same doctor also says that infertility, impotence, cysts, and various other reproductive medical problems are caused by witches and demons that have sex with people in the dreamworld, where they also gather sperm from people and use it on other people to produce more demons. (And yes, there really is a doctor who says all that).
It's not a fallacy because it is not offered to refute the claim that hydroxychloroquine cures COVID--it is offered to show that the person making the claim is not competent to make the claim.
The premise should be up for debate but we shouldn't accept the implication that because a lab in China leaked the virus it is moral to attack Chinese looking people in the street. You are effectively accepting the racist's reasoning if you ignore the implication and devote your energy to attacking their premise. I see this over and over again. Someone says A can't be true when A is a statement of fact because a group will make the argument A => B where B is something they find morally repugnant. When it comes to statements of fact you are much better arguing over A => B than hoping facts about the world conveniently line up with your moral conclusions.
Presenting the idea of laboratory escape as a remote but possible scenario is perfectly reasonable. Presenting it as a fact, without backing it up with evidence or subtly is a good indication that they are speaking from a place of prejudice.
While interesting on a purely intellectual level, I think people unhealthily obsess over this.
Epidemiologists have warned about the possibility of a pandemic for years. They've even been pretty clear about factors that manifested in SARS-CoV-2, like it having flu-like symptoms and originating in China.
Whether the virus leaked from a lab, from a chicken or from some guy eating a bat, doesn't matter. This was going to happen one way or another and many countries, especially in the West, were incredibly arrogant thinking it wouldn't be a problem for them.
Consider Vietnam: they followed the news very closely early on and already had procedures in place that would reduce the likelihood of transmission. While Europeans and Americans were only talking about some new disease in China, they started wearing masks and tracing contacts. When we only just started recommending people make masks at home, they already had the situation under control and were providing free meals to quarantined foreigners.
We didn't take SARS-CoV-2 serious because we expected our "superior" hygiene, technology and healthcare systems to protect us even if authoritarian China had to "wall people in" to contain the spread. Surely we wouldn't need draconian uncivilized measures like lockdowns. In Germany we even maintained this arrogance when Italy had to send in military convoys to get rid of the bodybags -- of course they wouldn't be able to contain this, because everybody knows they're careless and flamboyant and disorganized.
At several points, the US lost as many people to COVID per day as it lost to 9/11. Germany is already riding the third wave with no real plans in sight and a dysfunctional vaccine rollout. New mutations are arising and taking their toll in Western countries. This isn't on China, this is on us.
So if you follow these stories out of pure curiosity, good on you. If you follow them because you desperately want someone to blame: stop. Blame your own country's government. This is on them. All they needed to do was take the experts seriously and not listen to industry lobby groups instead. Countries like Australia have understood this. Countries like Germany are too busy cutting backroom deals and playing party politics instead.
Agreed. Putting blame is not helpful at the moment or at best a sideshow. What counts now is how to deal with the situation. Knowing that China is to blame or not won’t save lives.
We should really be considering this if we want to make sure something like this doesn't happen again.
Unfortunately this theory coming out during the Trump era made people knee-jerk shoot it down for political reasons, and you can also say the CCP is very invested in making sure they don't have pie on their face if this ends up being what truly happened.
What is the actionable "fix", though? I mean: there are very real questions to be asked about gain-of-function research. There are other questions to be asked about standards for lab safety. But we should be asking these questions anyway, especially now that we've seen how devastating a real pandemic can be.
Whatever happened in Wuhan it seems like the primary evidence is gone now. Trading in unverifiable theories about a lab leak is only useful insofar is that it kicks the ball forward on these issues. However the risk here is that these debates will make the issues controversial and politicized in ways that actually make safety improvements more difficult and not less.
One actionable fix is not putting virus labs in big cities (just like Nuclear and industrial plants), the other is stronger regulation of animal markets. Both make sense independent of where the virus originated from.
The problem is evidence. What is the evidence? As far as I can tell, what we have is either circumstantial (for example, the location of the first detected cases) or outright hunches (the virus seems to be more adaptive than expected for normal corona viruses).
Compare that to what we know: it's a SARS variant, in a place where SARS outbreaks have already occurred in the past, with DNA showing it came from pangolins, in a place where pangolins are caught, sold, and eaten by people.
There is a lot of evidence. The lab in question was specifically warned about by the US State Department for studying coronaviruses that affect human ACE-2.
I mentioned this in another comment, but here's the 2018 State Department warning.
Please note part (6) about human ACE2 coroniavirus:
> with DNA showing it came from pangolins, in a place where pangolins
This is false. You can read the science here (note the "receptor binding studies of reconstituted RaTG13 showed that it does not bind to pangolin ACE2."
It originated in a city with a research lab that was criticized for bad safety practices. That lab performed gain of function research on coronaviruses, and the strangest element of covid-19 is the spike protein furin site, which enables the infectivity in humans, and is not present in other coronaviruses.
Or we can take the Bayesian approach, and look at the base rate of novel pathogens coming out of China over the past 70 years and determine how many were lab leaks versus not, and realize the majority were lab leaks.
This doesn't mean it for sure was a lab leak, but it does mean it should be investigated, which is all any one reasonable has been saying for the past year anyway.
> in a place where SARS outbreaks have already occurred in the past,
Not correct. All previous SARS outbreaks were in a totally different places (~1000 km away).
Prof. Shi (石正丽, the head of the Wuhan virus lab) herself said in her March 2020 interview that she was totally surprised of a SARS outbreak in Wuhan. It is not a location where it was expected.
> That's why everyone who has seen classified information is sticking with the lab theory.
That’s false.
> Trump, Pompeo, Redfield (CDC) ... forget the politics, but they have seen information we don't have access to.
Yes, one would need to forget the politics in order to overlook how selective a misrepresentation this is of “everyone who has seen classified information”, so its clear why you ask us to do that.
I changed "every" to "many", I wasn't intending to paint that with a broad brush. But they are making public statements with access to information that we don't have. So who's to say they are wrong?
Personally I am no fan of Trump but on this particular subject I can't say he's right or wrong, and he has more information than I do on it.
> But they are making public statements with access to information that we don't have. So who's to say they are wrong?
Anyone with any experience with any public statements any of them have made that have subsequently been subject to scrutiny on virtually any topic is in a position to say that them saying something based on nondisclosed evidence on an issue that aligns with factional/partisan propaganda interests has, at best, zero evidentiary value. (In Trump’s case specifically, his habit of stating falsehoods even when it doesn’t particularly help his case might lead one to conclude it has actually negative evidentiary value.)
The only issue here is that lab safety protocols may have to be tightened up in the lab responsible. Scientists mutate things in the lab all the time in order to have a tool for effective study. If this came from a lab, then it would be the same thing (not some sort of weapon, like the hysterical Right wants people to believe).
Most believe that it didn't, but rather that it was in the human population a few months before we knew. But maybe not.
The BSL prescribes the precautions that must be taken to maintain safety, but it's up to human oversight to actually enforce those practices. It's not uncommon for viruses to escape even BSL4 both in the US and abroad.
Both labs in Wuhan have had accidental contamination incidents while collecting field samples in caves. Working with hazardous materials is always dangerous, and history has no shortage of lessons to teach us.
It's not that you need to tighten up the rules... it's that you need to actually follow them. The Wuhan lab had a reputation for not following the rules for the CCP-Claimed Biosafety Level 4.
I didn't hear that it was a level 4 lab. Those are for the viruses deemed most severe. Plenty of work goes on at other labs- at least in the US. Not sure about China.
Looks good on paper but what is actually happening in reality? How do I know they follow those procedures? How do I know they're not paying someone to give a checkmark for inspection?
What would be the punishment if they were caught not following procedures? Would they publicly punished or would the embarrassment for the Chinese government be quietly swept under the rug?
What nobody seems willing to say out loud to a reporter is that even talking at high levels about SARS-CoV-2 having possibly escaped from the lab would very probably sabotage Chinese cooperation in finding out more about its origins, whether it did or did not in fact did escape the lab.
Now it appears that whatever damage could be done was, and China did block access to key information. I haven't seen anything to indicate it did come from the lab, or didn't. China's actions are consistent with either scenario. It would be very embarrassing to Chinese leadership if the lab-escape idea became popular, regardless of whether it was true, but especially if it were found to be true. China will be acting mainly to try to stop the idea gaining popularity, and be much less concerned with whether the international community actually learns its true origin.
But if the Chinese leadership had confidence that it escaped the lab, my interpretation is they would probably do a lot more stone-walling than they are doing. But that doesn't mean it didn't.
My brother flies freight in and out of Wuhan, never leaving the airport, and says border-patrol behavior at that airport is very strange, unlike at any other Chinese city. Before they are allowed to take off, the whole plane is carefully searched by soldiers in complete-isolation bunny suits, and passports collected on arrival are then carefully matched, one by one, to each crew member before departure. His interpretation is that China wants to be certain that nobody in Wuhan leaves China whom they would rather have stay.
They have been stone walling. The WHO was not allowed into the lab for a long period providing time for a cover up there was no agreement investigation until September 2020. They were then told to take the lab workers testimony at face value and not investigate the lab leak hypothesis any further.
Doctors have escaped and claimed that it was lab engineered
Thank you for the link. The English text is very, very good, making it a pleasant read. I cannot judge its technical statements, and would welcome an expert evaluation. That RaTG13 and pangolin viruses were released only after the pandemic commenced was news to me.
The Chinese are much better at stonewalling than you give them credit for. Allowing a team into the country was a major concession, and getting to actually meet (some) lab employees, sheesh! That amounts to a charm offensive, in context.
1. Gain of function research primarily uses samples collected from nature, and seeks to stimulate their evolution in as natural a way as possible to learn how viruses evolve in nature. If such viruses were to escape the lab, they would appear "natural"
2. It's not xenophobic for people from the US to suggest the possibility of a lab leak, because the US was itself funding gain of function research on novel coronaviruses in the Wuhan BSL4 lab
3. Lab leaks happen more often than most people realize[1]
[1]https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/20/18260669/deadly...