- Kristian Andersen offered to abuse his power as editor to stealthily edit a preprint. He is the main author of the most notable paper supporting a natural origin, and has been one of the major resources of the natural origins camp. Now his scientific integrity is seriously questioned.
- Peter Daszak appears much more focused on finding new sources of grant money than on doing good science: "What was needed, he exhorted his staff, was a “change in culture” as “part of [a] mentaility [sic] to get money,”
- The Wuhan Institute of Virology is more of a second zone lab than a top lab: "The WIV was also viewed as subpar, especially when compared with the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute. Harbin was China’s Harvard, said the former DARPA official. The WIV was more like a safety school"
- EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak were seen by DARPA as amateurs in virology, not at all the expert frontline organisation that's been suggested before: "EcoHealth Alliance was viewed as a “ragtag group” and a “middle guy,” a backseat collaborator willing to get on an Air China jet, eat terrible food, and stay in bad hotels" "EcoHealth Alliance had “bolted on” a serious scientist, Ralph Baric".
> a backseat collaborator willing to get on an Air China jet, eat terrible food, and stay in bad hotels
I'm not sure why this is supposed to be compelling evidence. Are people who refuse to work unless provided first class plane tickets, meals at Michelin star restaurants, and five-star hotels expected to be more reliable? If anything, I imagine people would be way more willing fudge or flat out lie about their research if they were willing to get that kind of accommodation out of it.
Seems you have missed the greater point: these people were willing to do the science that the Administration granting money wanted to have done and no one of repute would sign up to do. Focusing on a small bit of hyperbole in order to reverse the argument is a weak stance to take
If my stance on the correctness of their argument was stated weakly, it's because I don't have one. I do have a stance that criticizing people for having different standards for plane travel and hotels and cuisine is in poor taste, and that applies regardless of whether the greater point the criticism was intended to convey was valid or not.
The quoted DARPA official is slagging EcoHealth Alliance for "willing to get on an Air China jet, eat terrible food, and stay in bad hotels", which doesn't sound like it has much if anything to do with science.
For what it's worth, to me Dazsak and EcoHealth sound sketchy as fuck and it's pretty obvious the WIV is frantically trying to cover its ass. However, this is a national pastime in China when anything goes wrong (exhibit A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenzhou_train_collision), and thus doesn't necessarily mean the WIV is directly responsible.
It's interesting that Harbin became so prominent given its general obscurity otherwise. If you are interested in the history of biology, Harbin during WWII was occupied by the Japanese and was the primary site of their "Unit 731" which focused on biological warfare. Did the Chinese take over their labs post war?
It seems to be mostly grim coincidence. All the researchers were Japanese, who destroyed everything including the buildings themselves before they left. Most returned to Japan and were granted immunity by the US in exchange for access to their research, a few served short jail terms in the USSR, but none remained behind in China.
>The report he finally did submit worried the agency’s grant specialists. It stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and killed 35% of the humans it infected. The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide. (A chimeric virus is one that combines fragments of different viruses.) These revelations prompted the NIH’s grant specialists to ask a critical question: Should the work be subject to a federal moratorium on what was called gain-of-function research?
Wait what?! Is this new information ? Because this is incredibly troubling
No it's not, and yes it is. That these laboratories were (and still are?) doing gain of function research - deliberately creating new variants of viruses to study them - has been known since the start of the pandemic (the results are published in reputable scientific journals, and a lot of the funding came from western medical research bodies). And it's definitely something I think we need to have a societal conversation about. Personally in light of recent events I feel like this is something we probably ought not to be doing.
Yeah I knew about GoF research but I didn't know they planned on doing it on MERS. Another troubling thing was that they basically ignored the moratorium so even if measures were taken to stop GoF... they were just ignored by using a foreign lab as a loophole?
To me it's mind-boggling that you could get arrested and fined for violating covid-related restrictions but people who did much much much more potentially dangerous stuff are not only getting away with it but also kept getting financed by the government. Even if covid turns out to not originate from a lab, just the insane potential risks that came from the blatant violations of the GoF moratorium should have been enough to land people in trouble. Especially since us commoners were punished based on the possibility that we could transmit the virus, whether we were infected or completely virus free didn't matter.
Yes, this is where the whole lab leak "conspiracy" came from.
The lab was doing GoF research with bat and pangolin Coronaviruses exploring if the spike protein can be modified to enter through the human ACE2 receptor. There are a number of papers from Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli on the topic with research done at the Wuhan lab.
The conspiracy theory (at this point, is it even one?) is that they want to create a virus that targets only certain ethnic group, like SARS2 did to some extent, or at least being a able to have the vaccine before everyone else, which also happened to some extent.
Because otherwise there are no valid reasons to create this kind of pathogens in labs; the chance the bugs created there will be similar to the naturally occurring ones are basically none and even less so that the vaccines or treatment will be or remain efficient treatment.
I think that the covid pandemic is highly unlikely to be the result of such research. It's much more likely to be the result of research into how to prevent future pandemics and treat coronaviruses.
Ok, I think that’s reasonable. At the level of individual research directors, I agree that probably the large majority of them have good intentions.
My concern is that there aren’t just altruistic research directors. There are funders. There are politicians. There are militaries. There are covert agents. And I get really concerned how easy it is for actors with less savory, noble intentions to coopt naive researchers into participating in a larger agenda.
It’s super convenient for everyone to be able to have the plucky, innocent, earnest research director come out with shining optimism about the potential. And it’s a convenient reason not to totally slam the brakes on research that, for better or worse, may lead (may have led) to global pandemic.
Not sure what the GP's point was but I'll just point out that there is literally a conspiracy theory being circulated right now that says just that. It's being used in Russia to justify the war in Ukraine.
There were alleged leaks from a whistle-blower from the CCP regarding developing bio-weapons that targeted specific gene sequences attributed to certain ethnicities.
"A new report from Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk says that world governments have failed when it comes to preparing against threats like futuristic bioweapons powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and genetic manipulation. Such weapons would have to power to target specific DNA, and kill certain races of people leaving other swaths of the population unharmed."
>no valid reasons to create this kind of pathogens in labs; the chance the bugs created there will be similar to the naturally occurring ones are basically none and even less so that the vaccines or treatment will be or remain efficient treatment.
This is literally the purpose of gain of function virology research. Modify bugs in ways that could be seen in nature and explore vaccines and treatments.
> Modify bugs in ways that could be seen in nature and explore vaccines and treatments.
There are no reasons to believe the mutants created in laboratories will arise in nature nor that the vaccines or treatments will be effective compared to what nature does. Added to the fact that GOF research never produced any kind of meaningful treatment or response so far and given how they are dangerous and leaks happen all the time; they should be outright banned.
This is where it becomes more sinister. You have to consider that other countries are doing the same research, and developing super bugs that only they have the treatment for
Gain of function isn't about predicting future natural mutations. It's about generating virus that can be used in dish and animal model studies, often blending features of existing viruses.
I think your 'commoners' framing... is not helpful here.
You raise a few objectionable assertions that I think is good to contemplate:
- GoF was never banned
- The ban was NIH funding GoF
- The ban was lifted in 2017 anyways
- Is this risky? The ban on funding it doesn't mean it's risky, as per se.
- The potential pie in the eye risk are infinite, but what are the realistic risks? That really depends on the technical details of how the research is done, and where it's done.
- Compare and contrast to activities that are very dangerous and have nearly infinite catastrophic risks but we do every day: driving, flying, operating nuclear power plants, refining oil, and much much more.
All of this research came out of the desire not to be caught flat footed by the next version of SARS or MERS. Overall global research did in fact prep us for SARS-CoV-2. Vaccines "made in months" that have stood the test of efficacy and safety? Months if you ignore the years of research behind it.
Is this particular thing excessively dangerous or not? I'm not 100% sure. Most of the "this is unacceptable" seems to be coming from people who seem to have a visceral hatred of Dr Fauci and who as head of the NIH was indirectly responsible for this funding. But I don't find that a reasonable line of reasoning. One thing I know, is every scientist I know is not paid a boat load, and care deeply about what they are doing and why.
Perhaps GoF is too 'dangerous', but maybe we should also hear about how it can be made safe, how does it compare in hazardousness to other common things that are deemed 'safe' and what the benefits are.
> Compare and contrast to activities that are very dangerous and have nearly infinite catastrophic risks but we do every day: driving, flying, operating nuclear power plants, refining oil, and much much more.
What? The risks for each of those, even the nuclear power plant operation, are extremely limited and localized. GoF research has potential near-extinction levels of risk. Nuclear weapons are the ony thing on remotely the same tier IMO. It's not to say that GoF is not a good idea, as clearly there is potential benefit. But to compare it to the risks of driving a car is apples to radioactive oranges.
Stupid GoF research has those risks. Totally eliminating a research methodology because of possible bad actors is just like how nuclear energy was delayed for decades because of green ooze.
It’s not just about bad actors. It’s that the techniques (serial passaging) aren’t even controllable in the sense that we don’t know what will result.
GoF is often not lab engineering and the outcomes are not predictable and the range of possible danger is almost infinite. Even from perfectly well intentioned actors.
Not knowing the result is the point. You develop novel viruses that you may not be able to imagine and then study how they impact an organism. This is useful.
I don't have any particular opinion on fauci and 2 years ago I'd have agreed on pretty much everything you said. The issue though is not necessarily the GoF research by itself. If the scientists involved did not try to completely silence everyone, cover their tracks and basically stonewall any potential investigation, I wouldn't see the problem.
From my point of view, you simply cannot assess the risk when the main party involved in taking and being responsible for said risk has proven itself to be so shady. We all know that there areinherent dangers to this type of research, but we can't account for human deception and tribal wagon circling on top of that.
The proponents of GoF could've come clean, been transparent and welcomed the scrutiny considering the insane magnitude of the situation. But they have not! Even if it turns out that this is purely zoonotic, the trust is rightfully broken imo. Maybe research should continue, even on GoF, but consequences should now be clear. The article details such a long pattern of deliberate obfuscation, gaslighting and outright manipulation that it's becomes impossible to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Also, considering that we went through the biggest pandemic of the past century during which most people have seen their lives literally dictated by arbitrary (and very low) risk thresholds that authorities have decided to follow... it would be a bit rich to now just say that we have to live with the risks of scientists fucking up and that we have to let the pros handle it. Yes screw ups happen, but asking billions of people to just live with the consequences won't work.
Again, 2 years ago I'd have said that we need to take the risk because it can have tremendous benefits. But as much as appealing to "commoners" might sound lazy, there's still something deeply wrong when we see a much stronger and visceral reactions/consequences to maskless "karens" than we do to the individuals involved with orgs like the EcoHealth alliance. Yes it's maybe a populist take, but at some point the elitism becomes so blatant that even populism makes sense
The tail risk of taking viruses and deliberately making them more dangerous is not even comparable to the tail risks of flying, driving, or (imo) operating nuclear power plants. This is either a profoundly ignorant statement or just disingenuous. Like seriously, this is a mind boggling statement you just made
Yep - we kept having near-misses with prior coronaviruses, so understandably, scientists were spending a ton of energy trying to figure out what makes them so pathogenic and how the animal-human jumps occur. Considering the fact that SARS and MERS both came from zoonotic origin (and IMO, Sarscov2 did as well) - we should really be spending our energy on the best research methods to prevent another pandemic, whether that's GoF research or something else.
> Even if "we" figure out how the animal-jump can occur, it's not like "we" can stop it or even predict it.
The first step is understanding. Until you understand how it happens, statements about whether or not you can prevent it do not make much sense to me.
For example: imagine you have not yet discovered that the unwashed hands of doctors are transmitting disease in a hospital. You might make a statement very similar to yours about how "even if we can figure out how people get sick, it's not like we can stop it".
The problem is, there's no real clinical benefit that comes out of gain of function research. Virologists claim that there is, but they can't point to examples of where it helped us actually treat or prevent something.
Basically they're creating bigger and bigger fires and claiming that doing so somehow helps firefighters. Next we'll have nuclear weapons researchers claiming that higher yields are good to know about so we can work out how to protect against stronger explosions.
The potential benefit is developing novel viruses. That's it. They will likely be infectious. Hopefully, ahem, your operating protocols prevent the release of that virus and you study it in model organisms to figure out metabolic pathways to fight it before such a real virus occurs naturally.
I suppose I'm operating from the belief that everyone cares about preventing possible virologic doomsday weapons. I'm sure quite a few people have not the slightest concern.
That's true, but whether the understanding is worth the risk is questionable. It seems likely that we've managed to cause rather than prevent a pandemic with this particular research.
> Until you understand how it happens, statements about whether or not you can prevent it do not make much sense to me.
Except we do understand. It seems to me that you are lacking is basic scientific knowledge. Virus mutates naturally and become more virulent due to evolution.
> For example: imagine you have not yet discovered that the unwashed hands of doctors are transmitting disease in a hospital. You might make a statement very similar to yours about how "even if we can figure out how people get sick, it's not like we can stop it".
We can control our hands, we can't control viruses in nature.
I’m not sure how realistic your example is. Prior to discovering handwashing, were scientists doing things they knew had the potential to get literally everyone morbidly sick, just to try figuring out how it worked?
That was mostly due to advances in mRNA technology, no? Moderna was able to design the vaccine in days mostly because of it's RNA tech, not because it was prepared for a coronavirus pandemic.
This is missing basic understanding risk management.
Parent is solely focused on probability, when what really matters is outcome.
Lets say that for every 10 years:
1) p of lab leak is 0.002% vs
2) p of nuclear accident is 0.03%
Although (2) is much more probable, from a risk management perspective, (1) is unacceptable because risks compound over time and critically, the domain of outcomes are vastly less localized and certain than (2).
Disclaimer: I think the virus leaked from a lab because scientists are usually more stupid and reckless than what their funders think they are, so maybe I'm insane and you shouldn't listen to me because I can affect your mental health. Also what I will write may be very dangerous misinformation so be careful because if you keep reading you consent to being misinformed. This writing is known by the state of California to cause cancer.
There's two objectives of this type of research. One is that after you have the new virus you can try different drugs on it, so that if gets out you can rapidly control it. Usually the drugs you try are ones that the company you work for sell or have a patent for. I think creating a pathogen and then testing how you can cure it with stuff that you can sell for a big profit creates a conflict of interest if it's also your responsibility to be sure it's not released, but apparently I'm pretty alone in this conspiranoic belief.
The other objective is creating a bioweapon, or getting ready for one. The US allegedly withdrew from researching bioweapons in an offensive manner but offensive and defensive research are very similar in that field because you speculate what viruses your alleged adversaries have and then recreate them to try the vaccines against them.
Even if scientists are competent, virus can be leaked because of someone else stupidity. For example, look at blast in «Vector» lab, Novosibirsk, RF, Sep 16 2019, where Russian first responders entered into biosafety level 4 lab without protective equipment, then opened every door checking for fire and stole some equipment. How you protect your lab from that?
Do you mean it's a long term goal in terms of ability or in terms of policy? Cause as far as I know there's been at least one experiment doing this already, all the way back in 2001:
Policy a bit but mostly market, I think it can be done. People already show with their wallets that they prefer to get either "meat products" where the origin of the meat is dubious and hidden so you are probably getting scraps and meat from factory farms, and on the other end they want free range no antibiotics products. This pathogen vaccine thing doesn't make sense in factory farming and would "polute" free range, and for a good reason.
Hmm, yeah idk about the industrial agriculture market either. But a lot of the papers about these argue that this stuff is necessary to prevent climate change driven zoonotic diseases. So I guess the "market" would be governments. The lack of clear legal framework might stop some countries from trying this stuff out but probably not all of them.
If it's going to be anything like GMO soy that Monsanto pushed into the Buenos Aires government in Argentina because "it was the future and we need it to feed the world after climate change" then maybe they'll try it on another third world "weak" or "cheap" government. Also BTW after that the US passed the law saying if something is GMO it needs to be on the label and there was a huge campaign against GMO foods so they pushed out the farmers using GMO in most of the third world out of the US market. Lovely.
I wouldn't be surprised if it goes the same way, push the little guy into trying it and then push everything else in the supply chain so that their meat can only be used for low margin cheap shit.
Somehow the world came to a consensus that nuclear weapons should never be used, and that genocide and slavery are reprehensible. Creating and/or modifying viruses to better infect humans belongs on the short global "don't do" list.
But if the drills end up killing thousands or the pen tests end up causing massive data breaches, wouldn't you agree that the pen tester or drill organizer should be held liable? Or do you just let them do it again because it's just a risk we need to take
If you leak pathogen - sure. But there’s no proof of any kind that it happened, and people fear mongering greatly overestimate abilities of gain of function. It’s like Skynet vs current state of an AI.
We don’t ban pen tests, just because people who have 0 understanding of it are sacred of it.
There have been many documented instances of lab leaks. It's even happened with Covid-19 research[1] at least once that was reported, and with the virus being pandemic around most of the world I'd assume there were many other leaks that weren't reported because nobody could prove it came from a lab. And even if the evidence that the original Covid-19 resulted from a lab leak is weak the evidence that the Omicron variant came from a lab is much stronger.
Scientists are only human and bio research labs don't have the same culture of continuous improvement and lack of blame that have let the airline industry, say, get to its current level of safety.
And there are highly qualified experts in the field who view GoF research as the most likely source of COVID-19, so on what basis are you so confident that it doesn't pose a major risk?
gain of function research is more like inventing novel nuclear weapons more likely to kill humans to study bomb shelter and anti radiagion technology than any drill. the pathogens created are not drills.
Look I find Rand Paul as amusing as the next guy and I like that he has a voice, but he's been censored because he sounds insane. I watched most of the discussions with Fauci honestly it's just two old dudes that hate each other trying to get the other dude to say the thing that will give them their political win.
I don't have anything in particular against insane people, most of my family has anger issues, I didn't have a happy childhood, I have friends with degenerative conditions, etc, etc ,etc... Rand Paul sound insane to me because I have a great deal of experience with both down to earth and psychotic people, grounded and dissociative people, all in real life. Based on that experience, Paul's performance in the committee looks more like what an intoxicated autistic individual edging a psychotic breakdown looks like _in real life_ and not on TV or the media, than what a down to earth honest legislator trying to investigate a mass pandemic looks like.
I understand he uses that character to push water down to his mill. That doesn't excuse his behavior on my regard and most of all it doesn't excuse his complete inaction doing actual research into where the virus came from instead of digging dirt on Fauci.
> Paul's performance in the committee looks more like what an intoxicated autistic individual edging a psychotic breakdown looks like
I thought so, too. His presentation was overly theatrical. But on the other hand, he has been vindicated on most of the points he made against Fauci. Any reasonable person would consider what they were doing gain-of-function research. I don't think Fauci has any maniacal plans or backroom pharma deals going on, he's just a corrupt bureaucrat trying to cover his ass for a series of incompetent decisions.
A guy can be drunk and autistic while at the same time being 100% correct.
Just because you’re an expert in crazy people and you see them everywhere doesn’t mean this particular one is wrong.
And honestly, if you were a senator and had inside information that convinced you the pandemic was deliberate and funded by the US government, I would hope you’d act a little unhinged, too.
He sounds totally normal to me, honest and serious, but very much normal. Maybe we’ve become so accustomed to bullshit and sugarcoating that we’ve unwittingly reframed seriousness and rigor into seeming ludicrous?
I would say I agree with his position more than any other senator, but I think he focuses too much on what Fauci did or didn't know or do about gain of function research and not enough on actually investigating where the virus came from. I don't care about Fauci, I think Paul wants to out him to show a political victory but honestly that wouldn't change anything. The idea of the senate committee was to investigate the lab leak theory, but Paul made it about investigating Fauci and I think that was not for the benefit of the people but for his own personal campaign agenda and that sucks.
I agree with you, but he doesn’t really have the authority to push the investigation in any other way than to roast whoever he has access to in public meetings. There isn’t congressional support to pass a resolution or bill to do so. He holds minority views within a minority party, and he is just one legislator, not an executive.
In other words, the only way that Rand Paul can influence the situation in any meaningful way is through political means. So, I find it hard to fault the theatrics with Fauci as distasteful as there are.
He has an army of publicly funded staffers and has resources that I would never dream off and will never have in my life to actually do research into where the virus came from. He can do all the theatrics he wants as long as he's also using his resources for something that is not digging dirt on Fauci also.
I don't buy when politicians start being all like "look I agree with you and that's my end game but first we need to get rid of this guy, and then we win the election, and then we put this other guy in that position and then and then and then". It's not true he can't do better now, it's just not convenient to him and since it's convenient to me I will not support him.
Rand Paul knows Fauci suppressed information and lied to congress. He has to attack his credibility and management of the pandemic to open the door for further investigation.
In his position he can't investigate where the virus actually came from. Absolutely all formal channels were blocked by widespread censorship, which is why the investigation was done by groups of anonymous internet users like DRASTIC, and relies so heavily on leaked documents. How exactly is a Senator meant to make that happen?
As a member of the legislative branch, Paul's role is fairly narrow: he can summon the people who actually do the work to ask them pointy questions, and try to build support for changing the law. If you look at how things are done in the UK Parliament or other legislative bodies in democracies, it's no different. The question of who is in power is the key one they focus on because they can't micro-manage the details of every possible government agency.
I think with him being the highest paid employee In The entire U.S. federal government and being the figurehead controlling the restrictions on our lives for 2+ years then caring about him is justified.
Unfortunately this is the way he must proceed in order to bring about change, within the confines of his role and the law.
I do think even in this very narrow role he may be succesful. There seems to be sufficient support built-up for an investigation to happen before long, whereas less than a year ago this seemed unfathomable.
I'm confused about this comment. The biochem weapons lab in Ukraine are accusations Putin has made but has not substantiated, whereas the GoF research being done in Wuhan is known and there is ample evidence from many sources, including this Vanity Fair article. If you have a problem with the article's contents, please post your own comment on the main feed instead of making snark comments on mine. Thanks.
The WIV doing dangerous GoF on Coronaviruses were widely described as unsubstantiated allegations by misinformation spreaders who had no evidence at all, right up until people managed to break through the propaganda and censorship. Now as far as you're concerned it's known, because Vanity Fair wrote about it.
But here's the thing. Vanity Fair wrote about this theory in 2020 too:
“The Discussion Is Basically Over”: Why Scientists Believe the Wuhan-Lab Coronavirus Origin Theory Is Highly Unlikely. Trump and Mike Pompeo’s favorite blame-China theory makes great propaganda—but dubious science.
"An opinion-section column and a British tabloid story are hardly enough to give the Wuhan lab theory full mainstream credibility"
The quantity of things that are true yet lack "mainstream credibility" is quite large, because the self-appointed mainstream isn't very good at figuring out what's true. The Ukraine labs story comes from evidence gathered from Hunter Biden's laptop, which, if we recall, resulted in the New York Post story about it being immediately frozen by Twitter in an unprecedented manner. You couldn't even share links to it privately. Justified because the story was "Russian misinformation" except it wasn't, and now even the NYT has admitted the contents are authentic. What was on that laptop, well:
The Russian government held a press conference Thursday claiming that Hunter Biden helped finance a US military 'bioweapons' research program in Ukraine.
However the allegations were branded a brazen propaganda ploy to justify president Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and sow discord in the US.
But emails and correspondence obtained by DailyMail.com from Hunter's abandoned laptop show the claims may well be true. The emails show Hunter helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor specializing in research on pandemic-causing diseases. He also introduced Metabiota to an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas firm, Burisma, for a 'science project' involving high biosecurity level labs in Ukraine.
If you rely on places like Vanity Fair then you'll always be behind the curve on these things, constantly saying that yesterday's lunatic fringe conspiracy is obviously reasonable, whilst today's is not.
> Hunter Biden's little Ukraine-related consulting business related to biolabs
If the Russian defense ministry was a reliable source, Russia might have annexed Ukraine a little sooner. I wouldn't take anything out of state media at their word; I agree NYT can't be trusted, but how is Russia Today better?
Coincidentally, the moratorium on gain of function research was dropped during the Trump administration, though I believe funding to Wuhan’s virology institute started in the Obama administration.
A lot of this is tough to evaluate as a lay person. For example:
>From the 75-page proposal, a striking detail stood out: a plan to examine SARS-like bat coronaviruses for furin cleavage sites and possibly insert new ones that would enable them to infect human cells.
>A furin cleavage site is a spot in the surface protein of a virus that can boost its entry into human cells. SARS-CoV-2, which emerged more than a year after the DARPA grant was submitted, is notable among SARS-like coronaviruses for having a unique furin cleavage site. This anomaly has led some scientists to consider whether the virus could have emerged from laboratory work gone awry.
Should I interpret it as a would-be unbelievable coincidence that they would be working on the very same furin cleavage site that is unique in CoV-2? Or should I interpret it as obvious - maybe the furin cleavage site is the most important part for infectiousness, and so we should expect any new human-infecting virus to have changes there, and should also expect that to be the area scientists focus on.
Without expert knowledge, I have no way to tell, but it feels like the sort of thing I could very easily interpret incorrectly one way or the other.
Quite a few experts said originally that the furin cleavage site (FCS) is the "smoking gun" evidence that the virus is lab modified.
But then other experts said that it's just a coincidence that could arise naturally.
Now we learn that EcoHealth had these plans to insert FCS's in viruses, yet they stayed quiet during the whole FCS debate and didn't mentioned it until it was found out from FOIA'd emails.
And not only that they didn't mention it, they kept saying it's just a coincidence and to say otherwise is a conspiracy theory.
part of the claim of the furan cleavage "smoking gun" is that the sequence matches a sequence that was patented by Moderna 3 years before the Covid-19 outbreak
(Hoping somebody here can shed further light. I don't want to spread misinformation, and I'm not able to corroborate this myself, so be skeptical; however we have seen a lot information manipulation or suppression in every direction the past few years, so be skeptical in the other direction too)
most people in that discussion want to debunk the salience of the Moderna patent sequence on the grounds that there are other examples of the same sequence in earth's biome, so it could have entered the covid-19 virus some other way. While that is worth knowing/noting, to me it doesn't debunk because Moderna still took a recent interest in it, enough to patent it and it was of interest for the same reason that it would be suggested to test it on a coronavirus.
And even outside the biological details, without cooperation from the Chinese government and the lab in question it seems any investigation into alternate explanations will be nearly unfalsifiable. From the article:
>But as COVID-19 rampaged across the globe, the Chinese government’s commitment to transparency turned out to be limited. It has refused to share raw data from early patient cases, or participate in any further international efforts to investigate the virus’s origin...And in September 2019, three months before the officially recognized start of the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology took down its database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, refusing to restore it despite international requests.
> I could very easily interpret incorrectly one way or the other.
lets make it a bit harder for you :) - the approved EcoHealth NIH grant for the coronavirus GoF work in Wuhan had the "Human Subjects Included" checked.
I will guess this is because the number of enzymes that we can use is small, and each enzyme only work on specific site. So, check the specific site of each enzyme are first step.
I just sincerely hope that people remember that the subject of this article was “banned” from all media and social media as recent as 1.5 yrs ago. People got deplatformed and cancelled. And now it turns out to be true. What can we learn from this going forward?
What we can learn is that "mainstream media" (as they're called nowadays), the reputable, serious media that publish at large scale, should stay the fuck away from twitter (but also facebook and the rest of it). It's their reliance on easy vox-pops from social media that has given those platforms their almost global influence on opinions. Opinion settles (and divides) very quickly on twitter, and the rest follows out of fear of being called stupid or worse. That makes that publishing amibiguous information, or even being slow with an initial opinion, becomes a topic in itself. Corrections take forever, because you can't agree with the other side. Twitter is a cancer that's not going away soon, so the only option is to isolate it.
Even Trump can't be wrong all the time. Trump was quite the obsessive twitterer himself, BTW. But mind you: the (far) right has tried to use twitter to far more nefarious purposes.
My take: that when the house is on fire, deal with the fire first then the cause of the fire after. Put it on the shelf to deal with the real issues first.
Politically, Trump targeted China from the beginning of his race in 2015 and never backed down. We didn't need the further fan geopolitical or realpolitick flames when we needed at least minimal international cooperation.
I wish I could trust that people will respond with neighbor-first mentalities when disasters like pandemics arrive. I feel it might be unpopular with the HN crowd, but I believe the anti-public health measures tantrum will be used to justify a lot more draconian measures when the next global disaster comes around.
what we need is flexibility and good judgment (duh). in a crisis we need coordination and compromise, in "peacetime" we need the opposite.
it's hard to give up the simple mantras, but if we want more efficiency we need more complexity in our policies.
> I believe the anti-public health measures tantrum will be used to justify a lot more draconian measures when the next global disaster comes around.
on one hand, that might help to decrease the spread, on the other hand, spending resources on measures that are easy to enforce, but still not terribly effective is a bad trade off. (for example testing a lot more and organizing our life around respecting the result is a lot less draconian than simply shutting everything down, yet these nuances were mostly lost on people.)
> In Bloom’s view, their disappearance raised the possibility that the Chinese government might be trying to hide evidence about the pandemic’s early spread. Piecing together clues, Bloom established that the NIH itself had deleted the sequences from its own archive at the request of researchers in Wuhan.
Bloom's view on these sequences turned out to be wrong.
The sequences were accurately described in a peer-reviewed paper that the Chinese scientists in question published (well before Bloom's preprint). The raw sequence reads, which were deleted from the NIH database, added nothing. The important information (the mutations in the sequences) were already listed in the paper.
From the point of view of the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the sequences themselves were not interesting. They were from fairly late in the Wuhan outbreak, and they were only very short segments of the viral genome. The Chinese paper in question was actually a technical paper testing a new sequencing technology. The message of the paper was, "We have this new sequencing machine, and we're going to show it off using some random CoVID patient samples," not, "We've identified particularly important patient samples that will shed light on the outbreak in Wuhan."
What Andersen and Fauci objected to was Bloom's accusation that the Chinese scientists who wrote the paper were engaging in deliberate deception and were part of a cover-up. Bloom had no evidence of that, and there's nothing to indicate that the Chinese scientists' explanation is incorrect: that they meant to upload the data to a Chinese database but didn't get around to it. After all, the raw data itself wasn't that interesting, and was already accurately summarized in their paper.
In my opinion, Bloom owes his Chinese colleagues an apology. Accusing people of covering up a pandemic with no evidence is a pretty low thing to do.
Not wow. This is routine. The NIH has a policy to let researchers delete data from the sequence archive for various reasons. The reason they deleted it is very suspect, but the actual act is unremarkable and doesn’t implicate the NIH.
This is another reason I'm so skeptical of the lab leak theory. People with no knowledge of epidemiology are willing to portray routine actions as horrific ethical violations, and it's difficult to tell when they are.
Yes, I have some training in adjacent areas and have found the political argument very frustrating. The molecular evidence is very compelling for natural evolution. The idea of a naturally discovered virus leaking from a lab is plausible, but the accusations of it being lab created are absurd.
The uploading process is done using code. It is super easy to screw it up especially if you are a trained biologist who learnt some python and bash from some random websites that stole their content from stackoverflow. So the process is there for that. Also likely for retractions where people have uploaded spurious data.
> Presumably, Daszak possessed a great deal of that inaccessible data. He said as much during a March 2021 panel organized by a London-based think tank: “A lot of this work has been conducted with EcoHealth Alliance…. We do basically know what’s in those databases.” Previously, EcoHealth Alliance had signed a pledge, along with 57 other scientific and medical organizations, to share data promptly in the event of a global public health emergency. And yet, in the face of just such an emergency, Daszak told Nature magazine, “We don’t think it’s fair that we should have to reveal everything we do.”
Even if they fucked up by committing a legitimate mistake doing honest work, the cover-up is a legit conspiracy and downright criminal.
> Dr. Robert Redfield, a virologist and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), had urged Fauci privately to vigorously investigate both the lab and natural hypotheses. He was then excluded from the ensuing discussions—learning only later that they’d even occurred. “Their goal was to have a single narrative,” Redfield told Vanity Fair.
I'm actually a bit more shocked there's not more outrage coming from mid-level public health practitioners whose jobs will now be that much harder. Through incompetence, failure to admit and clarify mistakes, and deliberate steering of the narrative away from things they didn't want to talk about, this generation of leaders has destroyed the average person's confidence in public health agencies and we will likely feel the effects of this for generations to come.
There are also clips out there of Ralph Baric talking openly about making modified viruses (can't find it now but I believe he mentions it casually in passing in this lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE_H7dTqJXU ).
I guess I get why these researchers are so cagey about sharing in simple terms what they do. The facts have a huge potential to be twisted and weaponized politically in this situation, and I'm sure the rationale for the research is very complicated.
That said in my opinion there needs to be transparency around these kinds of incredibly risky ecological engineering projects.
Another thing,"self-disseminating vaccines": there are researchers who propose the creation and release of engineered viruses in animal populations adjacent to people (to prevent pandemics with zoonotic origins of course!):
It's hard to ignore the double edged sword of research like this though. Is there any question that this "biosecurity" technology has inherently troublesome uses as bioweaponry? The potential for sabotage by misanthropic / malthusian actors is also really unsettling. The game theory involved is probably really gnarly and I can only wonder what twisted offspring of mutually assured destruction intelligence agencies are using to grapple with this stuff, and to rationalize this kind of research.
During the cold war there was a kind of presumption that every life is worth protecting. Unfortunately I have a feeling that with the reality of climate change this belief is not as universal as it once was. I worry that it's quite common for people in positions of power to have Malthusian beliefs about overpopulation and stuff in the face of climate change.
(To be clear, I'm not in any way suggesting covid-19 was intentionally released as a tool of depopulation. I'm making a point about the game theory that has so far prevented nuclear catastrophe... I have trouble seeing what holds it together under the normalization of ethical frameworks that see depopulation as necessary, and wondering how that factors into the chess games that governments, defense agencies and their propagandists are playing right now...)
There's also Peter Daszak talking about modifying coronavirus spike proteins (through direct synthesis of RNA or serial passage or both). At "History & Future of Pandemics", at the New York Academy of Medicine. In February, 2016.
I can't get over just how insane this sounds. He goes on to claim it's to then check whether humans have antibodies to these mutant viruses they'll create in the lab, except why would there necessarily be that much antibody cross-reactivity between lab-engineered viral spike proteins and spike proteins that spilled over from bats to (eventually) humans naturally?
> there are researchers who propose the creation and release of engineered viruses in animal populations adjacent to people (to prevent pandemics with zoonotic origins of course!)
Humanity is so technophile these days... instead of doing the sensible thing (leaving bat caves alone, ending mass animal farms) we seriously think about massive bio-engineering of wildlife only so that we don't have to stop the bullshit we're doing.
> And in September 2019, three months before the officially recognized start of the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology took down its database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, refusing to restore it despite international requests.
This way an early part of the conspiracy theories, but it was subsequently debunked.
This was a private database, not meant for the public, but rather for sharing data with colleagues off-site. It actually remained online until early 2020, when the WIV says it came under sustained attack and was taken offline. It should also be noted that this private database was only in existence for a short time period in the first place - less than a year, I believe.
I should warn everyone that this is far from the only error in this article. The lab leak theory has become ever more heavily rejected in the scientific community, as more evidence has piled up on various fronts (the early outbreak clustered around the market; two different viral lineages were discovered at the market, including on stalls where wild animals were sold, suggesting that there were multiple spillovers at the market; new viruses have been found in Laos that are closer to SARS-CoV-2 than anything previously discovered).
It seems, however, that the lab leakers are making another effort to push their case in the press, for a popular audience that doesn't know better.
While a good article, the evidence it presents has mostly already been known. What is very interesting, however, is that a publication as mainstream as Vanity Fair is publishing such an article. That, is new, as far as I know.
It is an interesting world where Vanity Fair publishes diligent reporting that reveals troubling information on the origins of ongoing pandemic (they did it more than once[0]).
The reasons might be that it is unaffiliated with scientific community and the editors probably don’t care if they burn a few bridges (it’s not VF’s core topic)—other outlets might be worried of being excluded from information streams and inside scoops for inconvenient reporting that could cost some individuals a lot of money in future grants.
As a non-US resident I also feel like there is an unfortunate consequence of political positioning, where the range of viewpoints acceptable to be held by left- and right-aligned US media is seemingly narrowing (so a left-aligned editor would not want to publish something that counters the conventional bat origin theory, and a right-aligned editor may not want to give even more airtime to the problem of COVID that they may consider insignificant), while most media becomes left- or right-aligned.
On that note, it is possible VF’s research is also funded by somebody politically aligned in some way and thus interested in exploring this viewpoint. Not to say it is mutually exclusive with truth, from what I read VF’s points are consistent and well-supported.
Your analysis of US newsmedia is spot-on. I take it your own country's newsmedia are not suffering from this (at least as much)? What country would that be, if you don't mind me asking?
"Among a cohort of 432,302 persons aged 2–19 years, the rate of body mass index (BMI) increase approximately doubled during the pandemic compared to a prepandemic period. Persons with prepandemic overweight or obesity and younger school-aged children experienced the largest increases."
And the civil liberties of literally billions of people were curtailed. Just India and China, which both imposed severe lockdowns, collectively have a population of 2.8 billion.
In Canada, thousands of people were locked in their room in their last year of their life:
So crime soared if we look at the rate of increase by percentage. But it didn't soar if we close our eyes. Got it. It's still soaring at the moment but I didn't include percentage signs in my calculations, what's going on, oyy veigh?!!
It appears the analogy is lost on most people. "Smoking gun" evidence would not be some kind of absolute proof of the virus origins. The whole point of the analogy is that if you find the just-fired gun, and a gunshot victim, you don't need to have seen the actual shot to deduce what happened and with what weapon. In the case of COVID-19, the smoking gun would be the virology lab down the street from the virus epicenter. Of course, smoking guns are rebuttable: there's the possibility that another weapon was involved and all the evidence vanished. But you can't consistently say that there's a smoking gun and yet we lack sufficient evidence. At this point there is sufficient evidence to reach a conclusion, and all that remains is to weigh it.
You're using "down the street" to mean, "On the other side of a massive city." It's like calling the Bronx "down the street" from JFK International Airport.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is on the other side of Wuhan from the market where the early cases were clustered. That market sold wild animals that are known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, and the virus was even found on the exact stalls where those animals were sold.
On the other hand, it's public knowledge which viruses the WIV has been working with (this was known even before the pandemic), and those viruses are not the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. They're not even the closest known relatives - those were found by a French team in Laos.
In a high k virus like Covid-19 you shouldn't really expect to be able to localize things that well. When the virus first entered France, for instance, there was a chain of individual transmission a half dozen links long before the first super-spreader event. I think a lot of the credibility of the natural origin story is that some farmer or miner in bumfuck Yunan might have been the first to be infected and he spread it to a trucker, who spread it to a wholesaler, who spread it to another trucker, who spread it to the first super-spreader who worked in the Wuhan Seafood market. That a scientist at the WIV might have given it to someone they were buying some meat from at the WIV who then turned into a super-spreader would also be pretty normal.
And yes, if there was a super-spreader event at the WIV of course you're going to be able to find viruses on lots of surfaces like the animal stalls.
That we knew what viruses the WIV was working on was why back in early 2020 I was very skeptical of the straightforward lab leak hypothesis. But articles like this one and books like Alina Chan's have convinced me that that isn't actually true, we wouldn't necessarily know about them until there were publishable results maybe years down the line and we do have evidence that the genomes of some viruses that they were working on were scrubbed from the records.
The original SARS in 2002 outbreak looked exactly like the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.
SARS also began at a market that sold the same types of animals, in a city far away from Yunnan province.
SARS-CoV-2 comes from Yunnan or Southeast Asia (its closest known relative comes from Laos), but once it gets into farmed wild animals, it doesn't necessarily stay there. These animals are traded over long distances. Heck, Hong Kong had a population of hamsters with Delta a few months ago. The hamsters caught it in Europe, made it all the way to Hong Kong, and then infected a human (this is established based on the viral genetic sequences in the hamsters and the human).
> we wouldn't necessarily know about them until there were publishable results maybe years down the line
We knew plenty about the viruses the WIV had found before the pandemic. RaTG13 (until recently, the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, and the center of a lot of conspiracy theorizing which we can now say with 100% certainty is wrong) was uploaded to an NIH database years before the pandemic. The conspiracy theorists made a lot of stink about 8 viruses that Dr. Shi Zhengli had mentioned in public talks. Those viruses turned out to be too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to be of much interest.
Most of these viruses don't actually exist in live form at the WIV. The WIV only has three live SARS-related viruses, and each one of them is very well known to the outside scientific community. It takes a lot of effort to isolate live virus from bat fecal samples, and it's something the WIV heavily publicizes when it succeeds.
> we do have evidence that the genomes of some viruses that they were working on were scrubbed from the records.
I've followed this story and haven't seen any evidence of that whatsoever.
First of all, I'm talking about the many publications, talks, and NIH-database submissions they made before the pandemic. The viruses that the WIV has worked with are publicly known, because like most scientists, the researchers at the WIV go to great lengths to publicize their work.
What you're talking about is a private, password-protected database that was used to share data with off-site collaborators. It was actually available until early 2020, when the WIV says they took it offline because of persistent attacks.
In the absence of any concrete scientific evidence for a lab leak (and an enormous amount of real, arguably dispositive, evidence against it), I see this doubling-down of articles attacking the character of anyone peripherally involved in work on coronaviruses. There's nothing at all new here.
A lot of people weren't even on this site back then... but this is exactly like watching the "ClimateGate" scandal play out here on HN over a decade ago, and in fact even involves some of the key players like Matt Ridley! Now, over a decade later, it turns out some messy dendrochronological paleoclimatology did not in fact represent a conspiracy invalidating the entirety of climate research and global warming is an even clearer threat.
In another decade we're going to have a much better understanding of horseshoe bats, asian animal markets, and coronavirus evolution... and not a single one of the breathless accusers involved in these screeds will ever apologize for flogging conspiracy.
Yeah, science is messy, scientists are flawed humans, desperate for money and generally terrified of bad PR and the mob. But the entirety of viral reverse genetics can't be thrown into an ill-defined "GOF" bucket. What constitutes acceptable risk and GOF in these areas has been an active debate in virology for as long as I can remember, and the quality of this dialogue is not going to be aided by this circus.
Consider the alternative history where we had always decided that GoF research is not worth the risks. There is a very real possibility that in that universe, we wouldn't have had the coronavirus pandemic with (checks) around 6 million casualties (and counting, and countless other negative effects for billions of people). You need A LOT of high quality results from successful GoF research to make up for that. I'm not familiar with the field at all, but I highly doubt you could point at the complete accumulated body of research resulting from all GoF research everywhere and say that it was worth it.
What is the evidence against a lab leak? As far as I know, they've not been able to find the an ancestor of COVID-19 in any natural reservoirs prior to the pandemic. Also mentioned in the article is research being done that indicates the virus was spreading weeks / months before the infamous wet market. From what I've seen, there is very little evidence of a natural origin, and a lot of circumstantial evidence of a lab leak.
> As far as I know, they've not been able to find the an ancestor of COVID-19 in any natural reservoirs prior to the pandemic.
Careful, this wording implies "if we evolved from apes why are the apes still here" logic.
Actual "ancestors" have all been dead for a bajillion of their generations. All we can hope to find are cousins, outside of some rare time-capsule situation.
Ancestors of the COVID-19 haven’t been dead for a million years though. If COVID-19 has natural origins, then the ancestors should still exist in nature and thus should the discoverable. Given that the ancestors must exist somewhat close to humans for transmission to occur, it’s not unreasonable to expect them to be found given the intense amount of resources dedicated to the search.
And again, I was asking for specific evidence of a natural origin. Evolution has plenty of evidence even without living common ancestors between primates and humans.
> Ancestors of the COVID-19 haven’t been dead for a million years though.
Please read more carefully. I did not say "years". I said "their generations". The average virus generation is very very short.
> If COVID-19 has natural origins, then the ancestors should still exist
Again, you persist in confusing ancestors with relatives.
Insofar a particular viral-particle or sequence can even be considered "alive", they will "die" as a mandatory part of reproduction, kicking off millions of slightly-different descendants.
It's as if you're holding a fresh-caught salmon and insisting that you ought to be able to find its wild ancestors somewhere in the water. No, it doesn't work like that.
> Evolution has plenty of evidence even without living common ancestors between primates and humans.
That is true, but when you say "we should be able to find a living common ancestor", that's idiotic because that means finding AN IMMORTAL CREATURE 4+ MILLION YEARS OLD.
> If the Chinese scientists wanted to delete their sequences from the database, which NIH policy entitled them to do, it was unethical for Bloom to analyze them further, he claimed.
It's unethical to do things just because China doesn't want you to do them?
Bloom was saying it was unethical to use other scientists' unpublished data. In normal circumstances, that would be heavily frowned upon, and maybe even lead to some sort of censure.
Basically, imagine you find out a rival scientific group accidentally made a dataset public. Imagine that you found out how to reverse-engineer an AWS URL at which you could access the data. Now, you analyze this data and publish your own paper on it. Most scientists would view that as a form of theft.
In this case, Bloom can say that the data was so much in the public interest that what he did was ethical. However, the data didn't actually shed any light on the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
I'm inclined to say the way he obtained the data isn't such a big issue, since the raw data itself isn't useful, and because the Chinese team had already published a paper that described the only interesting parts of the data. What I do fault Bloom for is making unfounded accusations against his Chinese colleagues. That's something he should apologize to them for.
My occam's razor thoughts. Most bad viri have origins from humans using animals for food. Aids from bushmeat, 1918 pandemic is thought to be from birds, same with the common flu. Just look at the latest bird flu sweeping the world, this one isn't affecting humans, but yet another pandemic from raising animals for food.
Most people want to blame a lab, but the obvious answer is more likely imo.
Like you say, we couldn’t even do GoF when HIV and pandemic influenza became a thing. Why take seriously the feeble efforts of humans to recreate evolution in a lab when the real thing has demonstrated it’s terrifying effectiveness many many times?
I don't necessarily disagree, I don't necessarily believe in the lab leak theory. I just think that we don't know, and might never know because we have such a limited understanding of the early days of the virus. Hence why I don't think occam's razor does not apply; we are at a weird crossroad where technology is advanced enough to make it entirely possible for us to "evolve" a virus in a lab yet we also are pretty vulnerable and defenseless against zoonotic viruses in the same way humans have been for hundreds of thousands of years.
Consider the following scenarios from a Bayesian perspective:
- an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city
- an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city with a virus lab
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor and has a furin cleavage site (not present in RaTG13, SARS, or other similar coronaviruses) occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor, and is funded by a group (EcoHealth) which has filed grant applications for research that attempts to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like bat coronaviruses
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor and has a furin cleavage site (not present in RaTG13, SARS, or other similar coronaviruses) occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor, and is funded by a group (EcoHealth) which has filed grant applications for research that attempts to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like bat coronaviruses, and multiple years later no animal reservoir of this novel coronavirus has been found, despite the massive incentives for this. In fact they seemingly haven't even been able to fake it by infecting some wild animals deliberately and claiming that they found the zoonotic origin.
From a Bayesian perspective, it's difficult-to-impossible to evaluate the probability of these events without in-depth knowledge of genetics and/or epidemiology, and they could easily be highly correlated.
The alternative explanation to the lab leak is that the lab was studying factors like infection through ACE2 and furin cleavage sites because they were things considered likely to happen on their own, and were worth preparing for. Studying and preparing for possible mutations is what gain-of-function research is for.
Also, half of the bullets sound like filler. "An outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city" is definitely filler, and I'd estimate that P( "outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses" | "an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city with a virus lab" ) is probably not that far from 1.00.
And at the end you seem to be proposing the fact that they haven't faked a zoonotic origin is evidence that it was lab-created? That sounds backwards.
When faced with sourceless, pointless suffering, there's not much else to do than clean up the mess and prepare for if it comes back. A person or group of people to blame gives them someone to direct their anger at. If there's a villain, then it's possible to get revenge. People are motivated to create and believe explanations that give them someone to blame, so such explanations deserve more skepticism than others.
The creeping escalation is fun and dramatic, but here it's mainly serving to puff up the amount of evidence at hand.
> And at the end you seem to be proposing the fact that they haven't faked a zoonotic origin is evidence that it was lab-created? That sounds backwards.
You actually sort of can make that argument, yeah.
At this point, with the lab leak theory having become a lot more popular over the past year or so, the Chinese government would kill to be able to point to an animal reservoir. If they can't find it, the incentive for them to try to fake it is huge. My initial assumption is that if they haven't faked a zoonotic origin, it's probably because they can't, not because they don't want to. By assuming this, I'm assuming that they have basically looked in all the places possible by now, which seems reasonable because they have a lot of manpower and we're 2+ years into the pandemic. If they can't get the virus to infect bats/pangolins/etc, that indicates that the virus didn't originate in the wild and hence supports the lab leak theory
The virus can infect pangolins, bats, and dozens of other mammalian species. It's an incredibly generalist species.
When the outbreak began, China immediately culled virtually all the stock at wild animal farms throughout the country. That is where they thought the virus came from, and they wanted to prevent any more spillover events. One side-effect of that decision is that the animals that most likely served as the intermediate hosts are gone.
With the original SARS in 2002-2003, it was much easier to find the wild animal farms that hosted the virus because the Chinese government did not quickly move to shut them down. The farms remained open for a long time, and there were repeated spillover events.
My guess is that the first reaction of government officials this time around was to just cull all the animals and eliminate the danger right away, and that tracing the origins of the virus wasn't on their minds at that moment.
Sure. P(lab leak origin | last bullet) = P(last bullet | lab leak) * P(lab leak) / P(last bullet). There isn't much evidence to constrain each term, and your post doesn't make any attempt to estimate them, but let's make some stuff up. The values change a lot if you take P(lab leak) to be any lab leak, or specifically a modified RaTG13 from WIV.
Let's go with the more specific scenario. Then P(last bullet | WIV lab leak scenario) becomes P(outbreak | WIV lab leak &c.) because we've conditioned on everything but the outbreak part. I'll guess this is 0.001, which is generous because it's very unlikely for a mere exposure to turn into a pandemic. Exposures to natural potentially pandemic viruses happen every day, most don't become a pandemic. P(WIV lab leak scenario) is difficult. There are a lot of different lab leak scenarios that could have happened instead, but we also don't care that much about trivial differences. Let's be really generous and say P(WIV lab leak scenario) = 0.25 because it's one of I think 4 plausible covid origin sites in Wuhan. Probably it should be lower because it's plausible that Wuhan was only the site of the first superspreader event, not the origin. And let's say P(outbreak) = 0.2 because we seem to get a potential pandemic every 5 years or so. Then P(WIV origin | outbreak) = 0.00125.
There are all sorts of problems with my analysis of course. Even if I haven't made any mistakes, the numbers I conjured up are entirely unconvincing. With only one datum, we have hardly any objective support for our probability estimates, and Bayesian analysis only gives a semblance of objectivity to our prior opinions.
Edit: I have no desire to support either side here, just to point out that probabilistic reasoning doesn't help much here. Whatever happened, happened, regardless of how (un)likely it was.
I had a longer response but my browser crashed so I'll just try to summarize my thoughts.
Our disagreement basically comes down to how we assign priors. I'm not really sure how productive a debate on priors can be because it's not like there are a bunch of previous similar scenarios that we can study in detail.
On P(WIV leak):
Wikipedia[0] lists 50 lab leaks (or more precisely, failure of lab biosecurity measures) in the past century. The actual number is probably much higher because people and institutions like to hide their mistakes. So the base probability of a lab leak happening from a lab that studies pathogens is only moderately low to begin with.
But P(WIV leak) is probably significantly higher than average here, because WIV had worse than average safety procedure.
- According to leaked cables from 2018, american officials & scientists were already concerned about unsafe practices & lack of properly trained personnel at WIV[1]
- WIV researchers collected unknown viruses from bat caves with only hazmat suits + surgical mask as PPE, and handled vials of viral vector specimens without even masks[2]. If they demonstrated poor attention to safety outside the lab, it is likely that they disregarded it within the lab as well
- I recall reading something similar involving Shi Zhengli but I can't find the link now
- Shi Zhengli admitted (!) that bat coronavirus research was performed under BSL-2 and BSL-3 conditions, both of which are significantly more lax than BSL-4[3]
On P(last bullet):
It's a pretty specific scenario, so this probability is very low. It's specific in a way that's meaningful and relevant though, it's not like the specificity came from extraneous things like "and the virus' genome is between 29 and 30 kb" or "and the outbreak occured in a city whose name starts with W".
On P(last bullet | WIV leak):
This probability is essentially a function of the infectiousness of the viruses in the WIV.
> it's very unlikely for a mere exposure to turn into a pandemic. Exposures to natural potentially pandemic viruses happen every day, most don't become a pandemic.
Strongly disagree. The viruses in WIV were deliberately altered, via either natural selection in host cells or direct genetic manipulation, to be significantly more infectious in human cells than a random virus found in the wild would be. It is unlikely for human exposure to a random new virus to lead to a pandemic. That is not the case for human exposure to a new virus that has been altered to be much more competent at infecting humans. Especially considering that these viruses we're talking about are coronaviruses, which are already significantly more infectious than the average virus. SARS2 also has features that are the sort of features we might expect from a virus in the WIV, such as the furin cleavage site and competence at infecting cells through ACE2. WIV research definitely focused on the latter and possibly on the former, so this attribute of the outbreak also increases P(last bullet | WIV leak).
There is also one known precedent for (some pandemic outbreak | some lab leak) which is the 1977 H1N1 flu epidemic. It isn't known with certainty to be from a lab but there is a general consensus that it probably is.[4]
Sorry for not providing numerical estimates for any of these. That would feel super handwavy and they would be, like you admit, entirely unconvincing. Besides, any motivated person can adjust his priors until Bayes spits out the desired outcome. In any case, I feel that the WIV leak theory is simply a more parsimonious explanation of the particular attributes of this pandemic than the zoonotic origin theory. However I doubt there will ever be a "smoking gun" for either theory.
For exposures not turning into pandemics, I think it's also important to note that most bat/human coronavirus crossovers occur in relatively small communities that limit the size of potential super spreader events. In something like the original form of Covid-19 where most people infected don't infect anyone else and the small number of people who infect hundreds are the main driver of the high R we can't necessarily generalize from what we see in rural Yunan and SE Asia to what we'd see in a big city. Though regardless of the origins of Covid-19 I do worry about these regions getting more connected to the global economy.
Thanks for your reply. Not providing numerical estimates is fine with me, my opinion is that they're not productive anyway. It's like the Drake equation but worse, or trying to estimate the probability of divine creation vs. a natural origin for the universe. Too many unknowns, no ability to test counterfactuals. We are not even close to inventorying all relevant natural coronaviruses, so we don't have a good estimate for the number of "draws" to assume against the natural origin, and we don't do the routine monitoring that would allow a good estimate of probability for potentially pandemic pathogen → actual pandemic. So an armchair analyst ends up with a solid "maybe", with massive uncertainty intervals, for any explanation.
I completely agree that WIV's practices were dangerous and irresponsible, and that they are a plausible origin at all is a crushing condemnation. There's an old piece of advice: imagine that what you're doing ends up on the front page of the newspaper, and consider whether you would be proud or ashamed. If the latter, do something else. WIV clearly didn't follow that advice.
The facts in your post are all correct to my knowledge, I only quibble with the emphasis on infectiousness. The uniquely dangerous aspect of SARS-CoV-2 was its several-day period of transmissibility in the absence of symptoms, not its infectiousness, which for early strains was not that remarkable. Without asymptomatic transmission it would probably have been contained and quickly forgotten, like SARS-CoV-1. We need to adopt methods that will detect and contain viruses like SARS-CoV-2 so we're better prepared for when SARS-CoV-3 shows up.
It’s rudimentary but demonstrates quantitatively how probabilities favoring one origin scenario or another can be reached. Easy to copy-paste it so any set of priors can be applied and collectively estimated,
If you click the time code (“one day ago”) to get the comment on its own page, you should see a “favorite” hyperlink, this will add the comment to a list of your favorites, the link to which is at the bottom of your own profile page. Took me a few years of HN to notice it.
RaTG13 is not the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2. Full stop.
Other, more closely related viruses have recently been found in nature (by a French team in Laos). That immediately 100% rules out all the conspiracy theories that have to do with RaTG13.
I'll also just mention that Wuhan happens to have wet markets where wild animals were sold until the end of 2019. The initial outbreak was clustered around a market that is known to have sold wild animals that are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. That market is on the opposite side of the city (and it's a big city, about the size of NY) from the WIV.
Well, Wuhan is a big transportation hub so regardless of the original crossover point it isn't crazy that the first super-spreader event might happen there.
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs where the closet natural resivoir sharing a similar bat virus population is between 800 miles (Yunnan province) or > 1000 miles (Laos)
I didn't add that because I don't think it's really all that compelling. People and biomass get moved around all the time. I don't think the geographical distance really affects the probability by much.
There are many variants of Occam's razor, but one commonality among them is that it is for comparing hypotheses that predict the same data (namely, the the simpler one should be preferred).
But in the case of COVID-19 lab escape versus zoonotic origin, the latter doesn't predict that the Chinese government and EcoHealth Alliance would attempt a coverup of the virus origins, so we really aren't talking about two hypothesis that explain the (same) data, and therefore this isn't really an appropriate candidate for the application of Occam's razor.
Chinese government will coverup even if China's lab is not the virus origin. Because their goal is to have a better image of the party.
To say it in other words, politicians will bullshit the populace in any case, they do not care if what they're saying is true or false as long as it makes them look better
I think it's important that we don't, in under any circumstances seek punishment here (if there are culprits). This is too politically charged and complex for that. But we can work to make sure this doesn't happen again (it could be worse next time).
If you do it accidentally, yes. The reason our airlines are so safe is that even if a lethal crash is due to the error of a pilot or mechanic we don't try to punish them but instead try to improve our systems so that it doesn't happen in the future.
IMVHO discover the real origin is just a game, we simply can't. What we can instead and the classic cui prodest (who gain) from covid, who pay for it.
Please remember a thing: there are thing that can't be really know, even if someone tell the real truth we can't know if that's true or not. While there are other things that can't really be hidden that much, banally by their size, we can't know them at the smallest details perhaps, but we can know enough.
Like we read about "a soldier kill a journalist in a certain place", we can't really know if it's true, if the killer was a soldier and one of witch side etc, even if the real truth is published, even with a non-tempered video of the action appear etc. But we can know that there is a war, that's can't really be hidden or mocked up in the modern world. Again we can't really know what's up in that war but war but we can speculate (in the Latin sense, witch means exploring) who profit, who want what etc.
For covid it's not different. We can't really know it's origin, it's real effects etc, but we can know who profit, and who loose. That's enough to act. The fact that:
- covid is natural
- covid is an artificially modified virus leaked from a lab
- covid is leaked by accident vs on purpose
- ...
does not really matter. What it matter is that "thanks to covid" our western world is far more similar to China after it. That big of IT, between those who have founded covid propaganda, research etc, are between the biggest earners from covid, like big pharma. That's matter because that's not just "good business" form them but a crime. The fact that such crime was crafted on purpose, to what extent, just ridden at the right time does not really makes much differences. Morally, politically, ... it makes big differences but since we can't know that for sure it does not matter, the effects are still the same, and those are what it matter.
Learning this is crucial to be part of a society. We can't know anything, we should master the uncertain part, we can't measure anything, we should master the art of "loose tolerance" etc. The society, the reality is not a computer program, imperative style, we can know just reading source code, it's level of complexity is just too big, and that does not means we can't know anything.
After reading this article, it seems that it's much more likely than not that the virus has lab origins. That is crazy, but what's more interesting is how interconnected all the players in this space are. Trump often referred to the virus as the "Chinese Virus" due to his view that the virus originated from the WIV. While it does appear likely that the virus originated in China, it turns out an NIH-funded U.S. NGO was also highly involved?
Also troubling are minor details not really related to the main lab-origin theory presented in this article:
> In 2011, two scientists separately announced that they had genetically altered Highly Pathogenic Asian Avian Influenza A (H5N1), the bird flu virus that has killed at least 456 people since 2003. The scientists gave the virus new functions—enabling it to spread efficiently among ferrets, which are genetically closer to humans than mice—as a way to gauge its risks to people. Both studies had received NIH funding.
I'm not saying the NIH is directly responsible for these programs, but it seems prudent to cut back on deadly virus creation.
Is it any surprise meetings around this topic are contentions?
Fauci was receiving credible death threats and even on this topic thread here there are a number of dead comments with comments similar to (and I quote): Fauci must be executed for us to move forward.
The idea that people voice approval for executing people they disagree with is so repugnant and contrary to the idea of civil discourse I don't find it surprising people start yelling in science meetings about the topic.
Hypothetically speaking, if it is ever proved that SARS-CoV-2 was indeed leaked from a lab, and that the people working there are guilty of gross negligence and the evading of gain of function controls, what do you think the punishment should be? Considering ~20 million world wide excess deaths.
Or should they just be forgiven because they were scientists with good intentions.
The even bigger (to me) question would be what level of liability would be attributed to people who granted funding or otherwise supported the work. Would they be charged with 20MM counts of contributory negligence? This situation does seem to have been “foreseeable” in the legal sense.
I'm not personally in favor of sizing punishment based on the outcome as opposed to based on the action. I'm not sure how it serves society other than some sort of sense of vindication to kill all these people.
Well, only to be expected when people fuck with peoples livelihoods to the degree things have evolved, either thru gross negligence or explicit intent…
There's a lot of people in power all over the world who have made decisions these past few years and it won't be surprising when people seek retribution (some of which who will seek for it to be payable in such decision makers blood).
And it could be worse, if the aggrieved are not satiated (within or outside the rule of law), people may seek retribution payable by such decision makers friends and families… metadata trails left all over the place would make such easy at scale…
Engineering this virus intentionally for research purposes and releasing it on purpose are very different things. If we still haven’t demonstrated the former conclusively why are we even discussing what the consequences should be for the latter?
It's a distinction without a difference. The level of negligence required to have it leak from a lab rises to the level of culpability.
If you knowingly drive a car with no brakes and kill someone, how is it less bad than driving a functional car and killing someone on purpose?
They knew the Wuhan labs had massive safety issues, from years prior to the pandemic. They knew GoF research was risky, and did it anyway. They knew covering it up was criminal behavior, yet did it anyway.
Why do you suggest that hasn’t been proved conclusively? It’s been more than two years no one has located the original pool (and we’ve been testing huge numbers of bat populations) or offered a plausible explanations for how the virus could be anything other than a bioweapon.
Essentially none of the virus’s main mutations are things that could have occurred without human involvement and certainly not on the timescale since its last common ancestor.
Sure, if someone released it deliberately, that would likely justify death for that person or persons.
But if it were developed with good intent, and released by a pure non-negligent accident, that would
Roughly, if it was deliberately developed with the intent to release, that would justify the same for everyone in the management chain with knowledge of the plot. But that responsibility would stop at the level where the plot intent was hidden.
From the article, it seems the most likely clue would be that the entire US chain and the WIV lab leadership was intent on developing knowledge to stop pandemics, but the Chinese military's involvement in the lab produced corrupt work on some team. Whether this was even known to the lab leadership, or they could know it is doubtful.
To take that and say that everyone all the way up the chain to Fauci should be executed is to advocate for guilt by association. If you want that, you should move to China, Russia, or some other autocracy, because it has no place in a democracy.
If you have some evidence that Fauci had intent and directed anyone to create and release such a virus, you need to produce that evidence before calling for his execution.
(note, I know you specifically avoided making such a call, but your message is easily read as supporting such calls)
Yeah, I wasn’t referring to Fauci in particular. At the very least, I think it’s safe to say he wasn’t in Wuhan at the time, and didn’t physically have access to release the virus at that time / place (if that’s how it happened).
My objection was to this idea that “death” is so far afield from the realm of reasonable discourse... and that there’s definitely nothing going on and we should just move on with the rest of our lives.
There needs to be the largest criminal investigation the world has ever seen. It should make the 9/11 commission look like peanuts. The possibility that this was done on purpose needs to be taken more seriously than probably any issue in the history of human civilization, because if people are able to do this in purpose and get away with it, then it’ll likely lead to the end of human civilization. Perhaps no one committed any crimes… but millions died and we need to be damned sure that we know exactly why.
I agree. This should be an extremely large and extremely serious investigation, no holds-barred.
It could even end up not only as a cause for death penalties, but for a hot war.
One huge problem is that China also knows that they would be the target in a hot war. So, they will do what they're already doing - attempt to destroy all evidence and bar access to the rest.
The other huge problem is that scientists would see such an investigation as, at the very least, risking the end of much viral research for generations. So, it may be hard to find enough good scientists in the field who DGAF about the consequences for their field, despite the fact that one of the best arguments for continued research is a finding that it WAS a weaponization attempt. Far better to make actual bio-secure facilities and develop models and vaccines than get blindsided by something even worse. But anti- hysteria will more likely rule the day.
There may be some solution to these problems, but I haven't got it.
So at this point, we are obviously already in a war against autocracies. As can be seen with RUS supplies of EU natgas, the result of interdependency is coercion, not actual democracy springing up via interchanve. CCP is obviously implementing similar long-term plans on many strategic technologies.
The only way forward today is to literally ban cooperation on this kind of research with such autocracies. CCP has just demonstrated that they will NEVER provide key information in an emergency, no matter how much they 'promised' or 'contracted' to be open.
Yes, international cooperation among peoples can be a wonderful thing.
But we've already done the experiment. If the other people are ruled by an autocracy, it is only poisoning our democracies and building vulnerabilities to future coercion.
So I don't think a single person is to blame for the COVID-19 pandemic. I think it was bad (and maybe even happened at all!) because of a systemic failure of the scientific medical community. Now, if you believed a single person or a small group of persons where to blame for it, you don't think they should be executed? I think it's a valid position to have. It's not mine, but I wouldn't censor it or call it contentious. I'm willing to personally kill someone for way less than that. I just don't think the someone to blame for the pandemic exists, but if I did yeah I would think they deserve to die.
Whether it's true or not, it does not justify what Putin is responsible for in Ukraine.
(I'm not sure whether your comment was trying to soften the Russian invasion of Ukraine or not, but any attempted justification is no justification at all).
Not to side step into a full on political discussion. The conflict has been going on since 2014. If it did turn out the Ukraine was developing biological weapons to target Russians, it would definitely bolster Putins justification for invading. I'm not sure you though this through.
Same way the US used Iraqi mobile labs to justify its invasion and the seeking of regime change in Iraq, with arguably more deadly to civilian tactics like "Shock and Awe".
Moreover, if biological weapon will target Russians only (by asking them a question in the Russian language, I suppose) then it's completely legal for Ukraine to use such biological weapon to defend itself against Russian aggression. Madness is an important part of MAD.
You know that Putin is the guy that approves killing using Polonium and Novochok, right? Russia also has got labs with all kinds of viruses, which will cause global disaster if they ever leak. Where are these biolabs, BTW? In the center of Kiev? Because that's what they're bombing.
I am not usually much of a conspiracy theorist but the giant bioweapons lab explosion in eastern Russia (accidentally caused by huge fires in Siberia) somewhere around November of 2019 always seemed a bit suspect considering the timing. I have not seen anyone else talk or theorize about this at all but given it was the same lab that ended up developing their Covid19 vaccine it seems (maybe) plausible that a virus was leaked during that time.
The only other person I found talking about this admittedly far fetched theory was a random Russian comedian - he made some jokes about it and the Russian government IMMEDIATELY came down super hard on him and he had take it all down.
> Quick left amid a bitter U.S. trade dispute with China when she learned her federally funded post, officially known as resident adviser to the U.S. Field Epidemiology Training Program in China, would be discontinued as of September, the sources said.
It's hard for me to forget the fake Time Magazine cover that the last president had hanging in his golf cabinet. One of the blurbs on it reads "Global Warming: A New Age of Extinction". It creeps me out to think this person who openly subscribes to a "racehorse" theory of eugenics was in charge of the US government during the leadup to the pandemic and during its immediate response.
Has anyone else looked into the things that former EcoHealth Alliance executive Dr. Andrew G. Huff (@aghuff on Twitter) has been saying since October? I am surprised that this article doesn’t even mention him, despite the fact that he worked at EHA for some of the years in question.
His Twitter thread is a mishmash of the zaniest conspiracy theories imaginable and plenty of concerning paranoia (the government is flying drones around his property to shut him up, "spooks" fired bullets through his mailbox, his vehicles were hacked, Hunter Biden funded labs in Ukraine to create pandemic viruses, and on and on) along with tons of promotion for his own book "The Truth About Wuhan - How I uncovered the biggest lie in history." He seems to have a psychology degree and a public health PhD and was a mid-level manager,
who likely wouldn't have any insight at all into the research activities of the lab..
Doesn't seem like an entirely trustworthy person..
> He seems to have a psychology degree and a public health PhD and was a mid-level manager, who likely wouldn't have any insight at all into the research activities of the lab..
I don't believe a PhD in virology is necessary to understand that this is some risky business. Not being in-line for patent royalties (or retributions--prisoner's dilemma and all that) may have made his lips a little looser than those of his co-workers.
You have proof that Hunter Biden funded labs in Ukraine to create pandemic viruses?
That is not any kind of idea I ever entertained in the past, but it is so outrageous that yes, I would apologize to you on behalf of OP if you had proof of it.
> The emails show Hunter helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor specializing in research on pandemic-causing diseases
To be clear - they're not "creating" viruses which is what Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin are both alleging.. Metabiota is a pathogen surveillance company, e.g. the exact thing that could help prevent pandemics.
