There's a lot of bad headline-writing on this subject today.
Here's the NYT's headline: Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says
And then the sub-head (or dek, if you want to sound like you're in the know): The conclusion, which was made with “low confidence,” came as America’s intelligence agencies remained divided over the origins of the coronavirus.
So we have a conclusion: 'lab leak most likely cause,' and a confidence score: 'low'.
The NYT goes on to say:
Some officials briefed on the intelligence said that it was relatively weak and that the Energy Department’s conclusion was made with “low confidence,” suggesting its level of certainty was not high. While the department shared the information with other agencies, none of them changed their conclusions, officials said.
The headline is absolutely, literally true. I also don't understand the nuance that anyone could miss here. The astounding thing is that the Energy Dept. can say that a lab leak is the most likely cause of the pandemic, and people jump out in front of them to say that what they somehow still mean is that a lab leak wasn't the cause of the pandemic.
They have "low confidence" that it was a lab leak (there might not even be a physical way to prove that conclusively), but they have higher confidence in that theory than in any other theory or possibly even than in all other theories combined. When evidence pointing to your previous belief being untrue makes you more confident in your previous belief, you're in When Prophecy Fails territory.
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edit:
Just wanted to add this wikipedia quote because it makes me sad...
* 12:05 am. December 21. No visitor. Someone in the group notices that another clock in the room shows 11:55. The group agrees that it is not yet midnight.
Where’s your comment from two years ago belittling the wet market theory as shitty?
This whole saga is a damning indictment of: science journalism, government agencies’ public engagement, scientists’ public engagement, and the critical reasoning skills of middlebrow audiences.
I know you're making a rhetorical point, but I found a thread I remembered from May 2020 where I both said that the wet market theory was shit[1] and that the Wuhan Institute of Virology/Wuhan CDC needed to be investigated without widespread censorship.[0] At the time, it was not exactly well-received. Someone accused me of throwing out so many lies that reasonable people couldn't even rebut it.
I saw a lot of folks saying that the theories all kinda stank at the time, and to wait and see. Interestingly, a lot of folks also kept quiet and didn't champion any theories. Maybe I can link you to a lack of comment two years ago to back up my bona fides?
Normally when you try to solve a serious problem in a small company you might want to know who caused the problem, but most of the times you just need to know it wasn't intentional and you focus on addressing the outcome and making sure it never happens again.
In big enterprises usually solving the problem is secondary to finding who the culprit is so that all future problems can be blamed on that department.
China and the US are both like big enterprises. None of them is actually focused on making sure all the problems that happened will not happen again. People are just focused on blaming their domestic shit on the other.
China releases a strategy paper on US hegemony, US brings the lab leak theory back into the spotlight. It doesn't really matter if there was valid research on that theory. The fact that the major newspapers come out with it 1 day after China releases their stuff, shows you it's political.
It may be right, it may be wrong, an unintended leak has always been a very likely on the list for me. It's not like lack of security in labs hasn't been an issue in the US, in China and in a bunch of labs in Europe for that matter. Probably other countries are way worse.
The point isn't whether it's right or wrong, the point is that the goal isn't to solve the problem, but exclusively to assert blame.
When it hit, I took the first Wuhan sequence and ran it through some Python and pulled out string repeats in nucleotides. I then searched for those repeated sequences in Google and found the NIH lab in Maryland was doing research on how to better infect mice or rats with a substitution technique for twiddling into a cell's ports. So, it's entirely plausible, but without proof it isn't scientific.
It seems that lo these many years later all the theories are still full of holes. Lab leak is plausible but there's no public evidence to back it. Somehow the DOE thinks they have something but we haven't seen it. Just based on history, zoonotic remains most likely but no host has been found.
There’s evidence that it’s more likely than various other theories, but there isn’t a smoking gun. That’s the kind of nuance that’s easy to ignore in favor of your preconceived notions because weak evidence is rarely worth changing your mind over.
At a practical level I don’t think there’s much difference between the lab link being a 7% chance vs a 70% chance. What’s more concerning is the potential of future leaks and what responses they might result in. The possibility that local officials get in CYA mode over a possible lab leak of a more dangerous virus is seriously concerning.
Which has little to do with the existence of said evidence. I’ve never seen direct evidence for the year Columbus sailed.
Anyway, many things that would make future leaks less likely also make past leaks less likely. The types of experiments being conducted and the types of labs those experiments are conducted in. Oversight, funding, and systems for reporting safety issues etc etc.
The DOE has not, to my knowledge, published their "low confidence" intelligence. Only their conclusion. Which still disagrees with every other agency. So it doesn't seem we actually have more evidence for lab leak.
Calling it a lie is a bit uncharitable. It’s gone from “disagrees with every other agency” to “disagrees with the majority of agencies.” I wouldn’t say that dramatically changes the point.
It's also weird to me that the Department of Energy (and not, say, the CDC/DHHS or USAMRIID or what have you) is advancing such hypotheses in the first place. What does the origin of SARS-CoV-2 have to do with American energy policy?
DOE supervises the national labs, which have 1) bio experience 2) high classification 3) supercomputers 4) lots more scientists than CIA or God help us FBI. DOE has organic science resources. The other agencies tend to rely on academic consultants, who are compromised because no one wants to bring virology labs under intense and blaming scrutiny.
That would also imply they were specifically looking at lab protocols to determine if there was a possibility of leak and perhaps not fully evaluating the likelihood of other origins which would be outside their expertise. The CDC/NIH/WHO operate loads more labs and also employ loads of epidemiologists.
Right, but that still doesn't answer why the DoE is supervising the national labs or otherwise has any significant degree of bio experience in the first place.
Because "Department of Energy" is a friendly name for what should really be the Department of Nuclear Weapons, a subsidiary of the Defense Department.
DoE does a lot of civilian stuff now (electrical grid, cybersecurity, etc.) but it's kind of an add-on. The first couple of national labs - places like Los Alamos and Oak Ridge - are historically related to the nuke mission.
Were any of these "theories" (they're hypotheses, at best) ever mutually exclusive? It seems entirely possible - and maybe even probable - that SARS-CoV-2:
- Originally evolved in the wild to at least some extent
Originally evolved in the wild to at least some extent
Almost everyone thinks this is true. Even the most fringy people don’t seem to be claiming that a virus was synthesized from scratch.
Found its way into a wet market near said lab
Ditto for this one. It’s pretty clear that there was a cluster of people early on that were infected in or near the market.
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The distinction between the lab leak and non-lab leak theory is whether the lab had anything at all to do with the chain of transmission.
If patient zero caught the virus in the lab or from a vector that was once in the lab, that’s lab leak. It’s apologists for the lab that want to conflate lab leak and bioweapon in order to dismiss the former as a nutty conspiracy theory.
Suppose a lab worker went to a cave hundreds of miles away and collected a bunch of bats. Those bats were returned to the lab. At some point a different lab worker exposed himself to one of the bat carcasses and caught proto-Covid-19. Three days later he stopped at the wet market on the way home from work to pick up dinner and infected patients 1-5.
In what way is the lab in this scenario superfluous? If it had better and enforced protocols for handling potentially infected specimens there would have been no pandemic.
Because there's no reason it has to be a lab worker involved.
The ground zero wet market in Wuhan is several miles away from the virology lab, and across the river.
The simplest explanation is that one of the 11 million Wuhan residents who do not work at that particular lab brought it to the wet market. It was right before spring festival, lots of people traveling.
Inserting "possible" events that loop in the virology lab while all of the initial infections were nowhere close to it, with no evidence, is just trying to keep "lab leak" alive. Sure, it's possible! We could assume it was lab workers somewhere in the chain, or assume the CIA, we can assume whatever we want.
I lived in Macau for 6 years, and I went to Wuhan more than a few times. How is "several miles away from the virology lab, and across the river.", a virology lab that specifically studies coronaviruses, be so much more unlikely than a bunch of people traveling from places that don't have bat caves or other zootonic sources be more likely? Also, going to the wet market from work is very common for lunch and to pick up food on the way home. I have been to the wet market in Wuhan.
Second, COVID-19's furin cleavage site is unique from all other coronaviruses and that is what allows it to bind so well in humans. A new preprint (not full reviewed, Oct 2022) is interesting from a genomics perspective on this being a potential bioengineering marker[1].
I think just because Orange man called it out early on, it immediately became a non-starter for most people. A coronavirus lab just mere miles from a wet market where it supposedly bloomed, and contrary to finding other zootonic sources of other viruses relatively soon, none has been found at all in the past two-plus years. The wiping of databases by China; the involvement of US/Europpean/Russian agencies in the Wuhan lab; the whole NIH/Fauci mess with funded research there in gain of function or whatever you want to call it research, and it is unlikely?
Common sense has left the room during the political divisiveness these past years. I do believe over the years more evidence will come out proving a lab leak given the advances in genomics, intentionally slow drip feed of documents, and the sheer number of factors pointing towards this. I do believe it was an accident, and not a bioweapons thing, and originated from the Wuhan lab. Lab leaks are more common than people think, and having worked in China for over 7 years, I can imagine this was not your movie rendition of a BSL-4 lab, but one with a lot of warts. I say this about other countries too. I did some work for an aerospace robotics lab and I was dreaming of the BSL-4 suits and all, and what I found was a normal shop with out of tolerance machinery. This was in the U.S.
I've also been to Wuhan and it's a big town with more than one place to buy food.
It's absolutely possible that the epicenter wet market was on a particular lab worker's way home and that's how the spread started. Also possible that someone who lived in the countryside, contracted it from an animal, and went to Wuhan to visit family for spring festival.
That biomarker stuff is interesting and I'll have to take the biologists' word for it. If it looks and quacks like a bio weapon, that is evidence. "Some people generally study viruses across town" is a lot weaker.. it's like automatically blaming Columbia University for an infection in Brooklyn because they have bio labs.
I believe it was an accidental leak of a modified coronavirus in order to study possible epidemiology even if from the lab, and not a bio weapon. Spring Festival? If it started in Oct-Dec 2019, it would be around Golden Week. Chinese Spring Festival 2020 was January 25.
Yes there are a lot of places to buy food, but wet markets are a special type of place to buy food. The wet market in question is right across the river from the WIV, which coincidentally(?) studies coronaviruses and was conducting studies prior to the outbreak.
From a 7 June 2021 paper [1]:
Here we document 47,381 individuals from 38 species, including 31 protected species sold between May 2017 and November 2019 in Wuhan’s markets. We note that no pangolins (or bats) were traded, supporting reformed opinion that pangolins were not likely the spillover host at the source of the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
The other human coronaviruses came from bats mainly. The WIV had bats from a location known to have coronaviruses. Scientists now wear masks when bat hunting in caves, but before COVID-19 they typically did not (I'll dig up the reference later). No bats were sold at the Wuhan wet market. The US/NIH/Fauci and other world players have a stake in the WIV of some sort. They were doing research on coronaviruses, and they were manipulating the virus. Documents before 2019 asking for approval to conduct such research are in the public record.
As far as I know, "wet market" just means a place you can buy live food. It's the default rather than the exception outside of tier 1 cities for most of the third world, live animals are self-preserving and don't require refrigeration. You can walk past several "wet markets" on a single block.
I meant they were special compared to Western market models, but there are usually large, famous ones in any Chinese city compared to any small, limited 'wet market'. In Macau it was Hung Kai Sie (Red Market), which takes up an entire block or more.
You’ve now pivoted from saying that the lab is irrelevant in the lab leak scenario to saying the lab leak scenario is unlikely. Those are two very different statements.
Why the need to throw everything against the wall to see what sticks?
I'm saying it's being shoehorned into the middle of a series of events, in a way that is both irrelevant and unlikely. And I'm positing that the shoehorning is because people are really attached to the idea of blaming a lab, given that said lab is not a necessary or likely component of the story.
I can't prove a negative, you believe what you want.
They were not really mutually exclusive, but were often portrayed as such. The lab leak theory got confused with the intentionally fabricated theory, probably as a strawman argument to discredit the lab leak theory.
For what it's worth, your scenario seems to me the most probably by far. I don't think we'll ever know for sure, since China has done it's best to destroy all evidence (we should be careful not to take that fact as evidence for one theory or another though).
What was the origin of Bubonic Plague, of AIDS, of Polio? Do we know in sufficient detail? I remember many saying that the exact origin of SARS-CoV-2 may never be known. Say it did escape from a Chinese lab - is that all you need to know? Or would you want to know how it came to be in the lab in the first place?
I remember articles and quotes firmly rejecting the lab leak hypothesis and darkly implying that those championing the theory had a hidden agenda.
The considerations were:
— there were random attacks on Asians
- public health officials and scientists were worried about an anti science backlash
- virologists were really worried about a backlash against virology
— relations with China had not yet deteriorated to their current levels and government leaders didn’t want to antagonize them
So there was a semi-coordinated effort by government officials and the scientific establishment to put the lab leak theory beyond the pale. The middlebrow media either wittingly or unwittingly went along for the ride. Their readership ate it up.
There were and are problematic elements of the lab leak people as well - I still see people (on this site) who claim that some or all aspects of the virus were synthetically created at the behest of Anthony Fauci. You may say I'm nutpicking, but I truly have a hard time determining what the lab leak theory is sometimes.
But my sense was that the agenda behind the lab leak family of theories was to lay blame at some human or humans for the events of the pandemic, which to me seems like a fairly futile endeavor. One of my questions for these people has always been this: say their darkest theories are correct; what am I supposed to do about that? It seems that the best course of action was to wear masks, socially isolate as much as possible, and get vaccinated and keep getting vaccinations as new strains appear.
It’s one thing for nutjobs to push a bad theory for some whacky reason and another thing entirely for establishment figures to shade the truth in order to push a (positive!) agenda. We have so many nutjobs, in part, because of generations of establishment figures being dishonest for the greater good.
Lab leak was always a better theory. There were what hundreds? thousands? of wet markets across China and two bsl-4 labs. Given that the virus arose in a city with a wet market and a bsl-4 lab, the prior should be that it had to do with the lab and not the wet market. That could be overcome with evidence, of course, but it is not some out there idea.
What are you supposed to do about it? Maybe nothing. But if you are an establishment figure, certainly don’t lie about it and further destroy our society’s trust in experts.
Except for the little detail that this virus has been observed to make natural zoonotic jumps at least twice--and has infected other humans (probably *many* other humans) without appreciable onward transmission. It's an entirely reasonable thing for it to have happened once again. We simply don't need to involve the lab, so why blame it other than to bash China?
Do you think all these establishment figures all had perfect knowledge of the origin of this novel virus and all chose a coordinated lie, or does it seem possible that this was all the process (which I'll note is ongoing and may never be complete) of figuring it out, which is indeed messy and happens over time and in public?
I called it semi-coordinated and shading the truth above. I think they privately and in small groups decided to shade the truth or keep silent while their colleagues were doing so. All for “the greater good.”
Specifically, the talking point put out to the media that lab leak is highly unlikely is wrong and was unreasonable based on what they knew at the time.
I think that shading of the truth was arrogant and pernicious.
Great point - let's just get people rabid over what we don't know for sure, that doesn't likely have repercussions that are at least as negative at all.
I don't really think it destroys the public's faith in institutions, I think the people that are deadset on attacking institutions are destroying the public's faith in institutions by making badfaith arguments such as what we are discussing here
Peter Daszak’s letter to the Lancet (prestigious British medical journal) on this matter is a very interesting rabbithole. Sadly it seems that most of the top of my search engine is filled with less substantial writing on this matter than I recall finding.
From the memory of this conspiracy-minded non-scientist:
- The signers declared no conflict of interest, but their lives would be made substantially more complicated and less lucrative by any increase in/scrutiny of biohazard control. One signer worked at or with the lab in question.
- The letter dismissed (VERY early and without any evidence to speak of) out of hand the possibility of a lab leak.
- The letter was picked up by the media and influenced public discussion and scientists’ opinions significantly.
According to the search I just did, Peter Daszak has recently been booted from investigations of this matter by the US government. He stands to gain and lose enormously depending on the future of virology research. This includes (iirc) the ‘ban’ on gain of function research, and the current loophole that taking an animal virus and changing it to be infectious to humans does not count as gain of function. There is much more to this story but that’s all I can remember with confidence.
Additionally, I would like to note that I’ve seen some solid-looking science tracing the outbreak to the wet market, but nobody seems to ever mention that lab workers have been (iirc) caught selling lab animals to wet markets in China in the past.
(Note again: I am not a scientist and I am conspiratorially-minded)
You know how you're driving and a person behind you gets in a turning lane but then continues to go straight anyway and then honks at YOU for getting in their way. And because you are the nice guy but knows they fucked up you don't raise a stink and honk back but you're still fucking mad as hell?
AIDS is caused by HIV, which is believed to have evolved from a virus infecting primates in Africa (probably more specific details than that exist, but I don't know them offhand).
Bubonic plague and polio both predate the existence of writing, and may well predate even agriculture.
>>> This whole saga is a damning indictment of: science journalism, government agencies’ public engagement, scientists’ public engagement, and the critical reasoning skills of middlebrow audiences
How many people in this world just put their blinders on and distort new information to fit their preconceptions and biases? What do you think "low confidence" means in the context of an intelligence report? I tried finding out myself, and I mostly just found people like yourself pretending it means whatever they want it to.
"A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion."
Yikes, what's your definition for "shitty theory" then? Something that's "not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion" sounds pretty shitty to me. Literal shit lets you draw more conclusions about the defecator than that!
What do you think a theory is? A theory is by definition unproven. With enough evidence, it becomes proven and therefore no longer a theory. Then there's the grey area in between, where a theory seems plausible but there's not enough evidence to be conclusive about it.
A "shitty" theory is one which completely lacks evidence supporting it and/or has far more evidence that contradicts it. The covid lab leak theory is not "shitty" by either metric.
Yes it's a completely ridiculous theory that the biolab that works on bat borne coronaviruses might have had something to do with the bad borne coronavirus that sprang up a mile away.
It's just a theory. Totally crackpot.
I mean come on they totally found the animal that came from to support the zoonotic origin theory.
Oh wait, they have yet to identify a spillover animal.
Anyone with common sense notice the lab leak is the most likely scenario here. But sure go ahead and continue to defend the honor of the CCP, an organization that is shortly going to be sending lethal weaponry including suicide drones to Vladimir Putin so he can murder Ukrainian civilians with impunity.
The spillover animals (aka intermediate hosts) for SARS-1 were rapidly identified as civets in a wet market, in less than a year. The animal reservoir that infected the civets were the horseshoe bats, and yes, that took a few years to confirm.
No intermediate host was ever identified as the source of infection in Wuhan. The article you posted regarding minks has absolutely nothing to do with an original source of spillover. It's simply documenting the common pandemic phenomenon of humans infecting mammals with covid, and, wow, the minks infecting humans with the same virus that is already evolved to infect human ACE2 receptors.
You started with an absurd, inverse hypothesis.
The lab that studies bat-borne coronaviruses had absolutely nothing to do with the bat-borne coronavirus that broke out a kilometer away, despite:
Location is 1000km away from the known horseshoe bat populations in Yunnan that are SARS reservoirs.
Emergence was during late autumn/early winter when local bats are already hibernating.
Emergence was in the middle of a cosmopolitan metropolis where the locals don't eat bats.
Chinese Communist Party immediately blocked any investigations and never even pretended to want to restore records that were deleted, despite the prospect of being vindicated by a zoonotic origin being found.
CCP currently, rather than attempt to continue to claim a non-existent zoonotic origin, has now claimed a US-based lab leak is at fault.
Multiple NIH grants specifically mention humanized mouse models with human ACE2 receptors lining air passages, and conducting serial passage of wild-type bat-borne SARS in research being conducted by grant recipient in Wuhan lab. (There was an intermediate host, it was a genetically modified mouse model, and long since disposed of.)
> The spillover animals (aka intermediate hosts) for SARS-1 were rapidly identified as civets in a wet market…
I'll take your word for it. (A long "few years" — "The virus originally came from horseshoe bats, though that wasn’t conclusively determined until 2017".)
"No intermediate host was ever identified as the source of infection in Wuhan" likely because —
"Unlike with SARS, however, there were no opportunities to sample the markets to look for animals infected with SARS-CoV-2. Chinese authorities closed and cleared out the markets soon after the epidemic started, citing public-health concerns, and banned all wildlife trade on 26 January 2020. Eating and trading wild animals were permanently banned in February 2020. Samples at the market to test for SARS-CoV-2 were not taken until months later. The virus was found in the drains of the market, but there were no live animals to test."
"The tick study that documented the sale of illegal animals in the Huanan market observed, however, that the sellers were not too concerned about law enforcement, and that plainly illegal animals were openly sold. It is unclear whether any of the animal traders engaged in illegal wildlife commerce have been since found, fined or punished. The swift clear-out of the market may have been intended to protect them as well as the law-enforcement officers and local politicians who had looked the other way."
> You started with an absurd, inverse hypothesis. The lab that studies bat-borne coronaviruses had absolutely nothing to do with the bat-borne coronavirus that broke out a kilometer away…
People want a blunt weapon to promote their politics with.
All of the theories had the properties of being convenient darlings of some pre-existing political faction.
The most responsible thing is to claim ignorance on the origin story unless you have genuine, credentialed, expertise and analytical training for it and even then, those people choose their audiences and presentation carefully because of the unintended consequences.
Those who refuse to fuel speculation on topics they are unqualified to comment on is by definition, absent and invisible.
It's also a distraction. The real problem is the chain of decisions and coordinating made by hundreds of groups around the planet between say November and April that catalyzed this from a problem to a global catastrophe. That's really the focus here because an H5N1 mutation is potentially around the corner and that could be much much worse.
It's dramatically affected egg supplies as you've probably seen at your local supermarket. A human uncontrolled outbreak would be a disaster. It's far more dangerous than covid.
"People want a blunt weapon to promote their politics with."
You are right and thats the most fascinating / absurd part of this whole thing. Somehow wet market vs lab leak has political sides and people are emotionally invested in one over the other. Its crazy, lets just have the truth and move on, either way it came out of China and savaged the world. People don't want the lab leak theory to be true for the sole reason that Trump said it and they believe Trump is the devil. I am very much not a fan of Trump and saw his actions leading up to the election as a clear and present danger to our democracy but still have no emotional investment in one theory over another. I just want the truth. This is an example of how insane American politics have gotten over the last 8? years
Do you need the truth though? In some ways the mere question on the origin of the virus is a political one. No one in the public has ever cared to have definitive proof where any virus came from before. The ability to point to a specific time and place is probably outside of our ability. A lab had it on Nov 1st, 2021. A lab worker brought it home, is that 100% proof that was the first infection? Or did the lab get it from a place where it was already infecting people?
Finally, what do we do with the info? Is it just a, 'oh well, that's interesting'?
I don't think it is just 'evil' China here. I think this is the US, China, and other world researchers who with NIMBY were doing research on coronaviruses and modifying them. Let's not use racism to mask the military-industrial-government complex as the true culprit. I do believe though that an accidental, not bioweapons release, of the virus occurred because people make mistakes. The coverup is why I think this needs to be vetted. It needs to be prevented, and not satisfy some stupid political ideologues. I commented elsewhere in this thread, but I lived in China over 7 years. I have been to Wuhan and the wet market there, and I have been disappointed at seeing tech sites in the US and China that don't live up to what people think when they hear a BSL-4 lab designation. Fauci and crew admit to doing experiments at the WIV, but argue the semantics "gain-of-function". The firin cleavage site on COVID-19 is very unique compared to other Corona viruses. It seems very plausible a lab leak spread to the wet market. We need to audit and call for more transparency so this never happens again, or it is minimized and can be attacked promptly and not when it's too late next time.
Moreover, disease stories has a very long history of being used to justify racism and genocide.
There's a specific American racist connection with blaming Chinese immigrants for disease that goes back to the era of the Chinese exclusion act of the 1880s. There were riots attacking chinatowns and doing ethnic cleansing with lynchings and mass destruction in Denver, Tacoma, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Eureka, Seattle and others throughout the 1880s.
Eugenicist texts of the early 1900s claimed Asians were disease carriers as well.
The general public's relationship with this stuff has only really been ugly and I can't stand here in 2023 pontificating absolute free speech and pretend like these types of narratives won't become tools of violence and racism in the hands of scammers and hatemongers.
So are you advocating for the government lying to the American people over where it came from because the truth might seem to be racist? Really? You would rather the government conceal information about a virus that killed millions of people because it might make some people upset with Asians? What else would you like the government to lie about? Murder rates? Crime Rates? The color of a man they are looking for accused of sexual assault?
Additionally it seems like you are advocating removing free speech? Friend you are sitting here actively campaigning for a 1984 style society. Not sure I have ever seen this one before; well done.
What a self-serving characterization... the issue wasn't that it was "racist" it's that people would have had excessively racialized and polarized reactions. Why are you being so purposefully obtuse about this? It's not a hard concept to grasp at all, but instead you pretend as if no one wanted to say it because the word was bad... no, they were avoiding the obvious reaction that would come from it.
It was excessive eisegesis. There may be a less scholarly word for it. Basically op presupposed a dynamic and then found his suppositions in my comment.
Considering possible eisegesis is one of the primary ways responsible experts with an audience police their speech.
It's probably impossible to both effectively communicate complex ideas and defend against all potential eisegesis. I wouldn't be surprised if enlightenment era philosophers talked about this. I'll readily admit their literature are beyond my patience so forgive me for my ignorance
I'm not being self serving, what could I possibly get out of this? I don't understand what the poster is saying or advocating for. I still don't apparently. It seems like both op and you are saying the truth is not important because it could lead to "excessively racialized and polarized reactions".
Which is exactly what I said op was saying in the first place and you and he reacted like I physically attacked you. From my perspective you are being needlessly obtuse not understanding what I am saying. The thought of not telling the truth and willingly advocate for the government to just ignore or not share the root cause of a pandemic that killed millions is anathema to me. I literally cannot wrap my head around it. How can you take the position that it's best not to know because some rogue elements could take it badly?
What you got out of it was an unfair characterization of something that only serves to advance your argument.
> It seems like both op and you are saying the truth is not important because it could lead to "excessively racialized and polarized reactions".
The truth... you act like there's a wholesale ban on truth. I think you are again mischaracterizing what is actually the media trying to not whip people up into a frenzy. People get whipped up into frenzies, you should probably check out some history. Maybe something on WWII. I'd recommend, Century of The Self, a great documentary that shows what kind of frenzies people get whipped up into when you have politicians using demagoguery to advance their agendas. You don't see how the entire past 3 years isn't completely different if every news paper is running with the headline "CHINESE VIRUS LEAK"? You are going to pretend, the same populace which was incapable of handling any actual discourse on the pandemic response, vaccination, etc, is going to just have a rational response? Regardless of where the virus came from, of which there is plenty literature available for the curious and literate, your perspective here seems childish at best.
>Which is exactly what I said op was saying in the first place and you and he reacted like I physically attacked you. From my perspective you are being needlessly obtuse not understanding what I am saying. The thought of not telling the truth and willingly advocate for the government to just ignore or not share the root cause of a pandemic that killed millions is anathema to me. I literally cannot wrap my head around it. How can you take the position that it's best not to know because some rogue elements could take it badly?
This is childishly naive. It's not rogue elements. The US president at the time was an actual demagogue.
Your entire approach to this is arrogant. You have decided that based on your superiority and judgement that your mental inferiors are too simple to handle the truth and thus it should not be revealed. While I dislike him, Trump was a democratically elected president.
"your perspective here seems childish at best"
This appears to be your approach to your fellow citizens, you are right and every one else is a child. You come off just as narcissist as Trump. Grow up friend, realize there is nothing special about you, you are just as intelligent and naive as your fellow man.
> You have decided that based on your superiority and judgement that your mental inferiors are too simple to handle the truth and thus it should not be revealed. While I dislike him, Trump was a democratically elected president.
I didn't make any decisions and you are incredibly foolish for even pretending that's the case. More of your false narrative creation that justifies your bullshit grievance-complex self-victimization. I don't edit any newspapers, I don't work in any government's health complex. I'm an IP attorney. Get a grip.
> This appears to be your approach to your fellow citizens, you are right and every one else is a child.
No, not sure why you are equivocating like that. As I pointed out, anyone who is interested is free to access all the literature on this. I did, you did.
>Grow up friend, realize there is nothing special about you, you are just as intelligent and naive as your fellow man.
lol, you seem angry and have devolved to personal attacks. I'll stop responding, don't want to upset you anymore. Sorry for hurting your feelings. Hope the rest of your day is better. Cheers.
You could just actually respond to what I said, instead of your made up version that has no resemblance to the words I wrote. That would definitely make me feel less annoyed about this conversation.
Or you could just ignore me. Allowing yourself to be emotionally compromised by an anonymous stranger on the internet is not a good thing. I'm not going to continue this discussion because I generally think it's a net negative for you. I wish you all the best.
It's actually totally normal to be annoyed by people who rudely put words in your mouth - you'd understand this if you ever had a normal social interaction. Couching this as you doing me some sort of favor, because I cannot navigate my own emotions, is just more of the same dishonesty from you. Rude and obnoxious.
> So are you advocating for the government lying to the American people over where it came from because the truth might seem to be racist?
no.
> Really?
no.
> You would rather the government conceal information about a virus that killed millions of people because it might make some people upset with Asians?
no.
> Additionally it seems like you are advocating removing free speech?
no.
The personal responsibility for the liberty of speech includes reasonable consideration for the reaction of people. That's the whole point of Oliver Wendell Holmes "fire in a crowded theater" when he concretized the modern notion of free speech with Learned Hand.
Only if you ignore what "reasonable consideration for the reaction of people." means, which is exactly what you are doing. People like you are the most painful to converse with because you offer responses that are the considerate equivalent to "I know you are but what am I?".
Like, are you seriously going to pretend that you mean the same thing by the "reasonable consideration for the reaction of people" when that's exactly what you've been debating with dozens of people in this thread. Give me a break. It's bad faith, highschool kid that just read ayn rand style posting.
I don't need it, not much in life anyone really needs besides food, air and shelter. This applies to the majority of information on earth. Doesn't stop me wanting to learn about things. Not much I would do with it either, it would just let me know what happened and what caused my kids to spend a year plus in isolation. I'm just a single guy, consequences are a little above my paygrade. Do we need to cause of the Ohio train crash? 9/11?
But while this helps the CCP party save face, it doesn't help to move on with the investigation. It's not even about the blame. We investigate air crashes in such detail so we can prevent them from happening again. Of course with an even bigger event like this we should do the same.
The pandemic has happened and no kind of blame or money can revert it. But we can try to learn everything about it that we can to stop the next one. I'm sure it was an accident but we need to know what happened.
For this reason I really think China should cooperate with the investigators.
You're missing the point. The main purpose of airplane crash investigations is to find the cause and fix it so it doesn't happen again in the future. This is done mostly without placing blame on anyone, precisely because that leads to finding a scapegoat instead of finding and fixing a problem.
Finding and fixing a problem is exactly what needs to happen here too.
You aren't going to get any confirmation or material evidence until the chinese government allows it to happen, and with their initial reaction to the situation before the rest of the world kenw what was happening and their reaction to the WHO inquiries, odds are we'll never get anything aside from "low confidence".
Science isn't a magic wand, its a process, and honestly assuming we do get access an investigation like this most likely wouldn't even involve the scientific method at all. If science was enough to determine the origin given current available knowledge it probably would've been solved already.
Low Confidence in intelligence assessments has a particular meaning, which is worth considering in this context:
> Low confidence generally means questionable or implausible information was used, the information is too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid analytic inferences, or significant concerns or problems with sources existed [1]
Yes, but the point is the headline is clickbaity, and for the uninformed masses, it sounds like it's highly likely it's from the lab, when that judgment was made with "low confidence"
I've said it was a lab leak from about month two of the pandemic.
Any sane person hearing me say this should assume I have low confidence as the sort of evidence necessary to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt is information a random hn commentor could not possibly have.
Unfortunately, even expressing that you thought it likely it was a lab leak was enough to get my accounts banned on several social media.
If I ask you what time it is and you're not really sure, do you say "It's 1:04:35.023"?
So if you 'said it was a lab leak', but expected people to know you really mean "based on the extremely limited information I have on the situation, it don't feel the possibly of it being a lab leak can not be entirely discounted", then you've communicated poorly.
You've said in this comment that "you thought it likely it was a lab leak". Again, that's not the words of someone with low confidence in their theory.
Then we have to come to your motives in espousing such a theory. What was your point in saying that then and now? Is it that you think the world in general should work towards better lab practices? If so why not say that instead. Why do you want people to know you think it was from a particular lab?
Just saying what you're saying sounds a lot like an anti-China dog-whistle, especially in the environment in which you're saying it.
What is your motivation in making this post other than to protect the Chinese communist party from any and all criticism? Since we're questioning motivations and all. Exactly what do we get by leaving the origins of COVID a mystery, and uninvestigated. Why do you think it's not important to know exactly the source of the virus.
Yes, if the virus were engineered or even just leaked from a wild source kept in the lab, we deserve to know, for a multitude of reasons.
That you think it's a coincidence that a novel coronavirus pops up in the only place in china working on coronaviruses blows my mind. Any sane, rational human thought it likely a lab leak from the moment this thing started.
Or the scientists sensibly chose to build their lab near where novel viruses are expected to be found, to make studying them easier?
You'd probably, for example, find that charities studying/helping poverty are often found near where lots of poor people live - yet you wouldn't blame charities for creating poverty.
> chose to build their lab near where novel viruses are expected to be found
Then they should have built the lab 800 KM south west in Yunnan. The lab is there for the same reason we have labs in NYC major regional hub with many universities, the lab has been there since the 1950s. Researchers had to travel to places like Yunnan and Laos to collect samples.
It's a large region. Also the virus didn't come from anywhere near there. Also, the bats they supposedly came from weren't sold at the wet market. Start with the suspicion and work your way through the facts from there.
> (there might not even be a physical way to prove that conclusively)
There is a way, or there would be a way had this not been in an autocratic country. A developed and free nation would have formed an independent enquiry and be given access to the lab, its staff and documents. That would have had a high likelihood to either find the cause there or rule it out with some certainty.
But this is China, and for some reason some people don't want to admit that it's a repressive dictatorship with no regard for human life, justice and transparency.
Yeah, this is how the fake news can lie with facts.
"Most likely" might be technically true - in the sense that there might be a 2% chance it was that, but there's a hundred other possibilities each with lesser probability, so that one is on top. But it's not really likely at all. So writing the headline that way is absolutely designed to give you a false perception if you don't stop to think about that, which nobody will.
(don't focus on the actual number, that's just for illustration.)
Where did you get 2% from? I tried searching for what "low confidence" means when given by an intelligence agency, and in the process I'm finding a lot of people like yourself that apparently like to pretend it means whatever they want it to.
"Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence. A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion."
That's a far cry from your made-up definition, which is, to be honest, likely motivated by your own partisan biases.
> So writing the headline that way is absolutely designed to give you a false perception if you don't stop to think about that
This news story was broken by the NYT, probably the most leftwing major print media company in the world. I'm pretty sure they have nothing to gain by misleading people into thinking the lab leak theory is more likely to be true than not, especially given their previous stances: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/health/wuhan-coronavirus-.... On the contrary, they risk offending their payer base by reporting the truth in this instance.
Let's face it. Your partisan side lost this one. They worked hard to suppress and censor anyone who dared claim the lab leak theory was plausible. They were wrong. And they were evil to do the censoring in the first place. Take your loss and move on.
I said don't focus on the number, I was simply using 2% as an illustration for how such a headline can be constructed to be misleading. Since you didn't read my post I won't read the rest of yours.
You say "don't focus on the number", and then say in the same sentence "it's for illustration." Well, if you pick a terrible number, don't you think that affects the quality of your illustration? See, your illustration was as bad as the number you pulled out of a hat to construct it, but if you refuse to learn from criticism when presented to you, then I'm certainly not going to waste any more time on you either.
To recap, you assumed "low confidence" means "highly unlikely", which is false. The 2% number you chose, is, let's say, very illustrative of your mistaken assumption.
The point is that the headline is clickbait. As you have said, you have to read the article to determine the radically different meaning of the headline. That's how clickbait works.
By that definition, any headline of any article will be clickbait to someone just by them saying so regardless of any truth in the matter. People lie every day.
If you are looking at 'reading' articles, its kind of expected that you will read them if you choose to do so. Complaining about it doesn't change any meaningful thing.
I really don't understand the point you were trying to communicate.
Is it that you want someone to just tell you everything to believe, without needing to critically think at all?
People lie, so it sounds like you want something that will never come to pass, and trying to make it come to pass would only create a negative outcome for you, those close to you, and anyone else that happened to be within your sphere of influence, at least given a sufficient amount of time.
For the past couple thousand years of history exploitation has been the norm in various forms.
Did I completely misread what you meant (but didn't say?). Could you clarify?
How is it clickbait? A US intelligence agency did say that the lab leak theory was more likely than the wet market one, even if their confidence is low to moderate.
The headline says the lab leak is the most likely origin. The lab theory being the least shitty theory absolutely doesn't make it a likely origin: it is purely a statement about the information we have (rather lack thereof) on origins, not on the likelihood of any of those. Likelihood of origin doesn't even come into it given the current state of theories.
> It is talking about the relative likelihood of the possible origins.
That's how you read it. GP is reading "most likely" as statement of absolute likelihood, making it false here, because the most likely thing is "any of the possibilities not under consideration", which takes most of the probability mass.
IMO, GP's interpretation is the one that most people take for "most likely" statements, which in our opinion makes this headline a blatant lie.
If you told most people you had 10 rolls of a dice to land a 6 and then suggested the most likely number of rolls you'll get it on is 1 I wonder whether they'd believe you...
I think most people would have the same reaction as me, that is "er, I'm having trouble parsing this, could you rephrase?".
Anyway, a different way of putting my point is: "most likely" modifies meaning of the thing it attaches to. "Lab leak [is the] most likely origin of" strongly suggests the absolute take. Relative take would be phrased "Lab leak [is the] most likely of hypotheses proposed for the origin of", or something to that effect - that is, attaching "most likely" to the body of proposed explanations (which, by definition, excludes "anything else not on this list" as an option), not to the origin itself.
A yet different way: NYT is doing the equivalent of me putting some object under a color detector, and announcing "Blue most likely color of Object", without mentioning that my color detector consists of separate R, G, and B color sensors, and that I'm just reporting which sensor gave the highest reading. Most people would read my announcement as "Object is some shade of blue, unless their machine is broken or something", whereas the object itself could be purple, or white, or yellow, or near-black, or any other color that just has "B" component stronger than "G" and "R".
"The CIA had been plotting to assassinate Castro since the summer of 1960, even before John Kennedy was elected. A congressional investigation of the CIA later uncovered eight separate plots of varying ridiculousness between 1960 and 1965."
I agree with this statement, COVID is very likely to be an accident, unless it was created by a mad scientist or aliens, I can't think of any reason to artificially create COVID to harm the interests of China or other countries other than China.
I don't think it would have been unreasonable for a nation-state to imagine, pre-pandemic, that China would be better equipped to handle such a thing with their lack of individual rights and that it might provide a competitive advantage.
I'm not entirely clear on why the Energy Department would even be investigating this let alone issuing a controversial finding with low confidence at all. They mention specific intelligence that flipped their conclusion but didn't even characterize what the nature of that intelligence is.
How can "low confidence" and "higher confidence than all other theories combined" jive? Does it require "all other theories" to not include "we don't have a clue" which is the most likely of all or am I missing something else?
"we don't have a clue" is not a theory about the origin. It's a theory about your knowledge of the origin. It's not in the pool of competing theories you're considering in this context.
True, in this case “nature” is basically the catch all “not lab” theory already including the probabilities the source is "not lab but we haven't named the source".
Well say you have one theory you reckon has a 40% chance of being correct, one theory with a 5% chance, and one theory with a 55% chance. One theory is more likely than the rest put together, but is still almost as likely to be incorrect as not.
Plus "none of the above" is always an option. You could have 3 theories that all have very little supporting evidence - one of those theories could be the most likely of all the actual theories, but "none of the above" could be even more likely if the best theory is still weak.
It sounds like it's just semantics but there's a world of difference between saying a theory is very likely correct and saying that it's the most likely of competing theories.
- No idea for either solution and we'll never know - 70% chance
- Lab leak - 20% chance
- Occurred in nature - 10% chance
In that case, you could say that the most likely answer is "lab leak" if you must have an answer, but it's very "low confidence." I don't know what the actual odds are, it's just made up for demonstration.
Im in China myself and I dont mind if it's a lab leak, better than saying we re degenerate Pangolin eaters :D
However, it's hard to be too trusting of the US, I want to believe them but they just shot 3 balloons in hysterical panic that were just their own weather balloons just because we sent 1... so sometimes they seem to be wrong and we should keep an open mind.
The best would be that a bat shat on a pangolin a lab worker ate before going to work, he sneezed around and contaminated all his colleagues who spread it around and poom: wild bat + pangolin traffic + lab leak all together lol Now that we can all agree, what has changed ?
Surely we re not agreeing that China was making weapons or leaked voluntarily, so beyond us being weasels unable to accept we screwed up, not sure why we drag on: we ll never say we screwed up, the US will never entirely accept we didnt screw up, what then?
The question is not whether to trust the US [government] in absolute terms, the question is whether the democratically elected US government that is bound by the rule of law, strong institutions providing checks and balances and the Freedom of Information Act can be trusted more than the autocratic Chinese communist party that is accountable to absolutely no one.
> The question is not whether to trust the US [government] in absolute terms, the question is whether the democratically elected US government that is bound by the rule of law, strong institutions providing checks and balances and the Freedom of Information Act can be trusted
No. Where were checks and balances when a coup attempt happened? Or before that, when a sitting US president committed multiple crimes, including influence peddling, and got away with it? Or when Guantanamo was established and random people were kidnapped and tortured because of their name or watch? Or when the US president decided to murder a US citizen without due process? Or when it was decided to implement dragnet surveillance of the whole Internet? Or when it was decided to spy on allies? Just because we later learned about some of those transgressions doesn't in any way make the US government and it's various entities trustworthy. Yes, it's better than the authoritarian regime in China, sure, but that doesn't equal actual trust.
The communist party is as accountable as the CIA. It works the same way, handwave a little national security here, assassimate a little critic there. The CIA is not Chinese.
But, Im not saying the department of energy is the CIA, Im saying it s made of the same american citizens who can fear us sometimes to the point of sending million-dollar missiles towards canadian weather balloons, see ? It's a matter of belief for me: are they objective and we screwed up, or are they hysterical and we dont know really? A democracy can absolutely elect lunatics if the population is afraid, as well.
Im certainly not saying the communist party is better, so not sure why you brought it up. Maybe part of the general hysteria, you think criticizing the US is a sort of patriotic duty for me or something, and Im like a red communist spouting Mao like a demented on the streets... but we can be anti communist in China and not impressed at all by the US general performance.
they shot the balloons as theater to show they are tough on balloons after the political opposition started hassling them about the balloon, I wouldnt call it a panic
They're not even crappy theories, they just don't have enough evidence to improve confidence or be solved. A crappy theory would be that an alien dropped it as part of an attack on Earth.
It is an interesting admission though, because by definition that means that the "evolved in nature and came from wet markets" view is also a crappy theory.
Our ability to prove a theory or not is entirely dependent on our ability to gather evidence for or against. How many other theories can be thought of is totally irrelevant.
Low confidence means inability to prove or disprove. That is it.
Edit: extrapolating further about this is just a Rorschach test.
The argument is descending into one about the definition of "crap theory."
I have a low bar for crap theory. As long as it doesn't have evidence that confidently supports it, it's crap.
The other guy has a high bar for crap theory. A theory without any evidence, to him, is not crap.
It's like arguing over what temperature is hot and what temperature is cold. Pointless. An Eskimo has a different definition of cold and hot then say some guy who lives in a desert. Put them in the same place and let them debate about whether the current temp is hot or cold... That argument ends up being an argument about vocabulary. What is the definition of hot or cold?
The origin and the remedy are entirely uncorrelated (If anything, one would think that a manufactured origin of the virus would make "natural immunity" a LESS likely viable remedy).
This strawman is getting tiresome. You're equating the virus escaping from a lab with the virus being engineered with the virus being a bio-weapon with the release being intentional.
The headline is literally true in a certain, non-colloquial usage of the term "most likely". It's is also true to claim that Covid-19 was more likely not because of a lab leak. That's what "low confidence" means. If you could bet at even odds that it was a lab leak, and the bet could be settled by some omniscient force, you'd be a fool to take the bet.
The fact the chances of it being a lab leak are so high does mean something, and I'd like to see those odds be lower for any future scenario, but to think that implies we can say with confidence "that's what happened" is, as was clearly stated, wrong.
Good luck getting 95% of the American populace to understand any of that nuance.
After seeing lots of Twitter threads about Nate Silver, condemning his lack of "certainty" in his predictions ("It's such a cop out! Since he never says yes or no one way or the other he always has an out when he's wrong!"), I'm even more convinced not just that people don't understand statistics, but they willfully don't want to.
> After seeing lots of Twitter threads about Nate Silver, condemning his lack of "certainty" in his predictions ("It's such a cop out! Since he never says yes or no one way or the other he always has an out when he's wrong!"), I'm even more convinced not just that people don't understand statistics, but they willfully don't want to.
As someone who does understand statistics, it's made me dislike Nate Silver even more than if I didn't. It's been sad to watch his metamorphoses over the years from an interesting numbers guy with nuanced discussions on polling and models, to becoming the exact kind of pundit and talking head he used to make fun of. There's still a little bit of statistics on his site, but the overwhelming majority of content is the same trite punditry you'll find on pretty much any political blog.
> I still respect his models, but I think the rest is the kind of stuff you’re expected to do as part of a media organization.
Exactly. His models are still outstanding. Ironically, I think the signal from his models gets lost in all the noise around the filler content on his site.
I enjoyed "The Signal and the Noise" I think its focus on the problems of fitting models to noise is something that should be more widely understood and he did that really quite well. It's a while ago but I think it was the massive failures of earthquake predictions was how he did it and it was convincing and readable.
I've never read his blog and care stuff all about his political polling predictions.
"The Signal and the Noise" is a great book and it definitely impacted some of the most important choices I made around my career. I think that's part of the reason I'm so annoyed that Nate Silver has gone so far down the punditry rabbit hole.
Part of the problem might be that commentators are going to want to willfully conflate intelligence "confidence" with a more pseudo science-y sounding "confidence score" that sounds like a bastard hybrid of research critique and statistics.
One wouldn't predict that to be the case with all of the scientists here. But given that it is, perhaps we can't fault the American people if they don't understand the nuance.
The truth is that "low confidence" is only meaningful in the context of COVID's origin if it is possible that a conclusion can be made with "high confidence". That doesn't seem to be possible.
Certainly not in the other direction if some agencies are concluding at this stage, even with "low confidence", that COVID was lab leaked. Further, certainly "low confidence" doesn't imply that the inverse conclusion is likely true.
The NYT's choice to over-emphasize the relatively meaningless "confidence score" is understandable given its prior investment in other views.
Rigid historical narratives have been built on less than low confidence intelligence conclusions. A conclusion is the conclusion when one has to be made regardless.
In the case of COVID, a conclusion as to its origin has to be made and yet the scientific evidence isn't likely to get better for either possibility. Short of confessions.
> Further, certainly "low confidence" doesn't imply that the inverse conclusion is likely true.
Not by the strictest definition of "likely", no, but it certainly does imply there's a high enough likelihood of spreading from the wild that a lab leak isn't conclusive. It's not meaningless nor even "relatively meaningless": it's just very difficult to tell where a given virus came from unless there's a smoking gun, and any conclusion in any direction is going to be shaky.
It's not like any other options have high confidence. All theories are low confidence right now because there is no conclusive proof for either. But if you support some, you are the defender of science, and if you support another, you are a filthy conspirologist and get banned from social media. Try explaining that to 95% of the American populace.
I think it has more to do with the fact that one opinion is supported by more conspiracy nuts. Doesn’t mean it isn’t the right answer, but having lots of crazies insisting it is the only possible answer makes more grounded people less credible in the eyes of others.
You have been taught to associate the lab leak theory with low status conspiracy theorists. Your emotional mind has then sought to achieve higher status by siding with the non crazy people. As someone that is not easily swayed it is absolutely stunning to see how social dynamics sway people's opinions. As a younger person I just did understand how the opinions of the people I interacted with were driven by pure emotion, as this is something I fought with before I reached adolescence. I assumed everyone else had. Even those who claim to be 'scientific' are not in pursuit of truth, but social status. This whole thread is just one giant cope by the people who have sided with authority in search of status. They see that the gain in status they achieved through their allegiance being threatened and attack the facts by obfuscating them. DOE thinks it's the most likely scenario, they're not confident, but it's the best they can come up with. The FBI has done the same. That means intelligent rational people in receipt of all the facts have come to a conclusion you cast out and ridiculed in your dopaminergic dash for upvotes. Be better.
Are the pejoratives really necessary? From the beginning the "lab leak" theory satisfied Occam's Razor more than the convoluted "wet market" theory or the "pangolin" theory. Meanwhile, a lot of departments at a lot of universities got a lot of funding to pursue their pet theories.
At the time trump and his people were first pushing lab leak/bio-weapon conspiracies it was without evidence (and Occam's Razor isn't evidence), and worse the actual evidence we did have at the time suggested it wasn't leaked from a lab. That didn't stop the "crazies" from insisting it was true though.
Anyone can have their own theory of things, but what separates Trump and the "crazies" from the rest of us (including many of those who suspected the lab leak theory was true) is that one group accepted the possibility and investigated that, while the others were running around calling for "china to pay" and beating up random Asian people in the streets at a time when the evidence we had for the the lab leak theory was weaker than the evidence we had for other theories.
Even today, while the evidence is inconclusive, what changed was that we have additional evidence that has raised the level of credibility of the lab leak theory.
"Crazies" went all in regardless of evidence or reason, and for that the pejorative is well earned.
Lab leak and bio weapon are two completely different theories, and conflating them means you don't actually bother to learn the argument of the opposing side(s), before dismissing them as "crazies". I think if you attempt to have serious discussion the minimum you should do is to learn what the disagreement is about. If you don't bother to do even that, then what's the point in it? Just booing the outgroup one more time?
> is that one group accepted the possibility and investigated that
I'm not sure what group you mean here, but that was certainly not mainstream media, "The Experts (TM)" and the medical-political establishment. Those spent 100% of the effort on suppressing any possibility of the lab leak theory being seriously considered and investigated and declaring anybody who disagreed "crazies", and 0% of the effort investigating anything. To the honor of the actual scientific community, they managed to fight back and re-legitimize the leak theory, but it took significant time and effort, and significant struggle. And the PR damage (and career damage, etc.) to the people who dared to dissent was already done.
> and beating up random Asian people in the streets
I think mentioning people who considered lab leak theory a viable possibility together with people who beat up Asian people on the street, or even suggesting that there's a connection between the two, they have a common cause, and the former bear any responsibility on the latter - is an extremely dishonest move and you should apologize for making such connection.
> "Crazies" went all in regardless of evidence or reason, and for that the pejorative is well earned.
The "bat soup" propagandists went all in much further than the "crazies" - while the crazies only talked about the possibility of the lab leak (or bioweapon lab, ok) - the non-crazies banned, fired, ruined careers, declared opponents racist, and all that with even less evidence - at least for the lab leak theory there's a lab to leak from. By the time the "bat soup" theory was declared the only truth possible there was nothing to support it evidentially, let alone on the level of the only viable possibility. So "the crazies" earned their name, then "bat soup" propagandists must be named "super crazies on crazy juice while taking crazy pills and bathing in the crazy ocean". Or we can go back to actually discussing the evidence, if anybody is interested in that, of course.
> Lab leak and bio weapon are two completely different theories, and conflating them means you don't actually bother to learn the argument of the opposing side(s), before dismissing them as "crazies".
I never said they were the same thing. They are different, but they were both BS conspiracy theories because they were pushed without sufficient evidence to support them and while ignoring stronger evidence for other theories.
> I'm not sure what group you mean here, but that was certainly not mainstream media,
the mainstream media acknowledged that the science was still primarily, and that there were a lot of questions, but they mostly reported on our best understanding of the facts that we have and not on conspiracy theories that ignored our best understanding of the facts that we had.
> "The Experts (TM)" and the medical-political establishment. Those spent 100% of the effort on suppressing any possibility of the lab leak theory being seriously considered and investigated and declaring anybody who disagreed "crazies", and 0% of the effort investigating anything.
Who exactly is the ""The Experts (TM)" and the medical-political establishment"?
As you yourself acknowledge scientists and governments continued to investigate the origins of the virus including the possibility of a lab leak to find evidence.
> I think mentioning people who considered lab leak theory a viable possibility together with people who beat up Asian people on the street, or even suggesting that there's a connection between the two, they have a common cause, and the former bear any responsibility on the latter - is an extremely dishonest move and you should apologize for making such connection.
I clearly made a distinction between the people who believed a BS conspiracy theory and acted on it (in some cases by beating asian people) and those who accepted it was possible, and investigated that, but followed the available evidence and supported the theory that best fit the facts that we had.
> By the time the "bat soup" theory was declared the only truth possible
Declared by who? When? There was constant questioning of the origin and acknowledgement that there were multiple conflicting theories in mainstream media. I don't know where you were getting your information from, but it sounds like you weren't paying much attention to what mainstream media was actually saying.
The bat origin also had no evidence given that the bats that naturally carry this kind of corona virus are not endemic to Wuhan and are not regularly consumed.
Yet many people insisted that this was the origin.
Congratulations, you have just discovered why almost every claim "there's no evidence about X" is false. Almost every conspiracy theory - and surely almost every side of a scientific debate - has some evidence behind it. Maybe inconclusive evidence, maybe bad evidence, maybe very weak evidence, maybe even evidence later proven to be false or fake - but there's almost always at least something. The reason is simple - the number of possible theories is infinite, but people's attention is finite. So even the dumbest, most gullible person would select the theories to believe in somehow - and those that have zero evidence to lean on would rarely make the cut, because there's just too many of them, so the probability of any of them to land any significant number of supporters is practically zero. Thus, the theories you've heard about likely to have at least some evidence - but there are questions, as you correctly noted. For bad theories, there would be very small and bad evidence and very large and hairy questions. It's not a 100% rule - hence I say "almost" - but it is very often the case.
> but they mostly reported on our best understanding of the facts that we have and not on conspiracy theories that ignored our best understanding of the facts that we had.
Except those weren't conspiracy theories but alternative explanations of the known facts supported by at least as much evidence (not much, not conclusive, but neither had the alternative) as their explanation. Which the press tried to de-emphasize in every way possible, and paint it as if there's absolutely no possible legitimacy behind the alternatives. After 3 years of screaming abuse and calling people "conspiracy theorists" we finally arrived at the point where we find their assertions of there being an only valid explanation are not true.
I have no problem with people believing for a while in a theory that later proven to be false or unsupported. I did it myself - believed in experiments and conclusions that failed to reproduce or have been disproven. It happens to much better people than me. I do have a problem with the same people making claims that people who believed in alternative explanations are crazy, racists, idiots, extremists, terrorists, etc. - and not even apologizing afterwards, just saying "well, we believed in the best theory NYT/WaPo described to us, what do you want?" I think they earned at least some epistemic humility.
> Who exactly is the ""The Experts (TM)" and the medical-political establishment"?
Pretty much everybody you regularly seen on TV and in the newspapers discussing those things and making decisions on those things.
> Declared by who? When?
By the media, the politicians and, for a period, by publications such as Lancet. And in much further degree, by the "I fucking love science" crowd which took delight in mobbing the dissenters and calling them all kinds of names. And continues to do so on other questions, btw.
> There was constant questioning of the origin and acknowledgement that there were multiple conflicting theories in mainstream media.
Nope, there wasn't for a long while, until scientists prominent enough that there was no way to silence them started to raise objections. The most prominent event was probably in September 2021, when Lancet published a rebuttal to their February 2020 article flatly declaring any non-nautural-origin theories to be "conspiracy theories". That's when the idea started to regain legitimacy. Until then, it was The Science (TM) that only natural origin is scientific and all the rest is crazy. And if you don't believe me (which you are right to do, I'm just some jerk on the internet), think about it - why would a team of 16 health experts write an article to Lancet demanding "objective, open, and transparent scientific debate about the origin of SARS-CoV-2" and arguing that scientists "need to evaluate all hypotheses on a rational basis, and to weigh their likelihood based on facts and evidence, devoid of speculation concerning possible political impacts" - if by then such debate was already happening for all this while and the political impacts did not influence it at all? Were they just bored and were Lancet editors dumb for publishing a letter calling for something that is already being done and stating the obvious? Or maybe it wasn't obvious by then and it wasn't done - and this is what not me, a random internet jerk, but experts serious enough to be taken seriously by the Lancet, were worried about enough to write a collective letter?
> I don't know where you were getting your information from, but it sounds like you weren't paying much attention to what mainstream media was actually saying.
Can you show me an article in NYT or WaPo in the period between February 2020 and September 2021 that describes natural origin and lab leak theories as equal possibilities, each of them could yet be proven true and each of them being legitimate alternatives and areas of scientific enquiry? I admit I do not read every article in these publications (mainly because I consider them mostly be utter garbage and in cases where they raise above that level I usually get a referral from one of the places I trust more) but I am willing to accept evidence if presented to me.
> those weren't conspiracy theories but alternative explanations of the known facts supported by at least as much evidence (not much, not conclusive, but neither had the alternative) as their explanation.
This just isn't true. There wasn't anywhere near as much evidence for the lab leak theory as their was for a natural origin which is why the lab leak theory was determined to be unlikely compared to other theories. Even the people who were pushing the conspiracy theory admitted to the lack of evidence.
Tom Cotton, one of the first in politics to push the theory, said himself: "Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says" (https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/18/politics/coronavirus-cotton-f...)
For example there is an early article from a 'low credibility' right biased news website (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-mail/) The Daily Mail, and even they had a microbiologist explain: "at this point there's no reason to harbour suspicions' that the facility had anything to do with the outbreak, besides being responsible for the crucial genome sequencing that lets doctors diagnose it" (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7922379/Chinas-la...)
Same story with this article which was pushing the bio-weapon theory. (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus...). It also stated that evidence was incredibly weak without dismissing it entirely: "In principle, outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility. This could have been the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but so far there isn’t evidence or indication for such incident."
Meanwhile, other theories being talked about at the time were supported by actual science such as genome analysis (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9) and note that here too they weren't totally dismissing any other theories either, only presenting the best evidence we had saying:
"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here...More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another."
> The most prominent event was probably in September 2021, when Lancet published a rebuttal to their February 2020 article flatly declaring any non-nautural-origin theories to be "conspiracy theories".
The opinion piece February did not flatly declare every non-natural origin theory to be a conspiracy. What it said was "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin." which is very different from saying that all theories of a non-natural origin are by definition conspiracy theories. Those same authors made that explicit in a followup article (July 21) saying: "Careful and transparent collection of scientific information is essential to understand how the virus has spread and to develop strategies to mitigate the ongoing impact of COVID-19, whether it occurred wholly within nature or might somehow have reached the community via an alternative route, and prevent future pandemics." They did not dismiss that other options were possible. They were just saying "We want evidence, not conjecture"
> Can you show me an article in NYT or WaPo in the period between February 2020 and September 2021 that describes natural origin and lab leak theories as equal possibilities, each of them could yet be proven true and each of them being legitimate alternatives and areas of scientific enquiry?
They weren't equally supported by the evidence, but there are certainly cases where articles on those (left-biased) sites made it clear that a lab leak was possible and that the origin of the virus was not certain.
> What it said was "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin." which is very different from saying that all theories of a non-natural origin are by definition conspiracy theories
I feel a lot of mental gymnastics here. "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" does exactly this - declares that non-natural-origin theories are conspiracy theories. And it has been widely seen and used as such.
Out of your links: 1. only reports some scientists call for investigating the possibility of lab leak theory, hurrying to emphasize it's "unlikely" and there's no "new evidence". But at least the possibility of research is discussed - so maybe September 2021 is not the turning point, but May 14, 2021 letter to Science was? I think that would be more correct timeframe. 2. talks about "engineering" hypothesis proponent (and his rejection of it ) and is pretty dismissive of lab leak theory, though admits the possibility (month after May 2021) 3. opinion piece which pretty much confirms what I said about "the media has scorned the idea of an accidental lab release as a far-flung conspiracy theory, declaring it “debunked,” “dangerous” or “doubtful.”" and argues for lab leak hypothesis - also 27 May 2021 (weird coincidence, not sure what to think about it, especially given it's 1 day after Biden's order to research the origins of covid) and 4. is basically reporting lab leak theory is now legit, but also says it only happened "in recent weeks" (on May 30, that'd be about two weeks since May 14). I wonder what changed in those "recent weeks" - it doesn't mention any new evidence - so either it still has absolutely no evidence as before, but somehow now it's important to research if though it hasn't been for more than a year - or there's still some evidence which existed all that time but wasn't explored? Also, if that all only happened in "recent weeks" - what happened in many weeks before? You claim both theories were duly and equally investigated - then what exactly happened in "recent weeks" and what all these scientists are calling for if it has been already happening for a year anyway? Why the "leading scientist" needs to "call" for investigating the lab leak theory, if, as you claim, it already was being properly investigated?
> I feel a lot of mental gymnastics here. "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" does exactly this - declares that non-natural-origin theories are conspiracy theories. And it has been widely seen and used as such.
I can see how you'd read it that way, but remember that at that time, there were several conspiracy theories going around. Some were saying it came from the lab, some said it was designed in America, or that it was a bio-weapon and and released intentionally etc. "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" is not the same as "strongly condemn every theory suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" - and again, the same authors did clarify that in the follow up.
It might help if you build a time line of events.
conspiracy theories were going around pretty much immediately, but I mostly saw them spreading in January and and February of 2020. At the time, there wasn't any evidence for it besides "A lab exists" and "We don't like China", while evidence that it jumped to humans from animals was growing.
By March 2020 however it was discovered that China had hidden the first cases of the virus, meaning the outbreak had started ~20 days before they reported it to the WHO and they'd been pressuring doctors to stay quiet. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/coronavirus-wu...) Still, this was not evidence of a lab leak, but it sure caused people to lose trust in China and fueled the theory.
A year later, the lab leak theory was starting to be taken much more seriously because there had been new evidence (although mainly circumstantial). March was when a lot of it happened:
The lab leak theory started out as nothing but a wild conspiracy theory without evidence, some of it was very clearly fueled by anti-Chinese sentiment and some of it was straight up crazy talk (like it being a US manufactured bio-weapon) and all of that never really let up. It fueled attacks on innocent Asian Americans and tainted the theory from the start. It made sense for most of the research to follow the evidence that we had, and for people to be wary about the wild and harmful claims people had been making.
I wasn't the idea of a lab leak that bothered people (outside of china anyway), it was how aggressively the theory was pushed without evidence, and all while ignoring what our best evidence suggested that concerned people. We can see that's true because once evidence (even weak evidence) started to emerge suggesting a lab leak more and more people started to ask for further investigation and this time with good cause!
Gradually over the years, the official story (stories really) coming out of china fell apart and new evidence (although not hard evidence) started to come forward. Again, nothing solid, but China wasn't exactly being helpful.
Research continued as best as it could though with reporters and scientists looking wherever the evidence took them and both the trump and biden administrations investigating to the best of their ability.
Natural-origin theories came and went, with varying degrees of confidence, but we never got a conclusive answer on the natural-origin side of things either. It did not appear to be engineered or lab-grown as some people had claimed, that was investigated, but there was never really a smoking gun.
Now, the government says we have new intelligence that is still not conclusive but makes the possibility of a lab leak the more likely scenario. I haven't seen that evidence, but I'm inclined to believe it until I see otherwise. I hope whatever new data we have gets out so that it can be researched. In any case, people who was spouting off lab leak theories, even the more sensible theories, in the early months of the pandemic shouldn't feel vindicated. Their suspicions were not based on evidence or reached through investigation of the facts. I don't think it hurt the investigation too much though, since the information we need is in China's hands, but it did hurt a lot of people.
The rightmost political commentators in the US almost universally entertained the lab leak theory in the same breath as the bioweapon idea. The implicit or explicit accusation was that there was no other reason to be working with viruses. People love a good mad-scientist story and those without an understanding of public health research, or a xenophobic disbelief that science is even conducted in China, ate it right up.
> Lab leak and bio weapon are two completely different theories
No, they're not. The people who pushed the lab leak hoax originally (and as evidenced by several redcap troll accounts in this thread) all believed that covid-19 was engineered in a lab and released by the chinese government to harm them personally.
Even if it ends up being a case where a natural virus was studied in a lab and accidentally released, it does not validate their views.
> how were the people pushing wet market theory not "crazies" also then.
Because they had evidence that made the wet market theory the one most likely to be true, and a lack of stronger evidence for the lab leak theory. Investigating and supporting the theory that is best supported by the evidence you have isn't crazy, it's science.
When you look at all the facts you have, and then ignore that because it doesn't support what you want to be true, and then you act on what you wish was true instead, that's crazy. That's exactly what Trump and many of his supporters were doing.
We have new evidence now that suggests the lab leak theory is more likely than the wet market one, so once it is released non-crazy people will support the lab leak theory when they could not (and should not) have before.
> The new virus seems to have leapt from wildlife to humans in a seafood and meat market in Wuhan, China, where live animals were slaughtered and sold as food.
> There was a lot of evidence supporting the wet market theory at the time and supporting that it wasn't made in a lab
You do realise that when people say it was a lab leak, they don't necessarily mean it was made in a lab. They are merely saying that the origin of the pandemic was a virus escaping the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology via one of the workers/researchers there.
You’re over-generalizing on “people”. The majority, or at least loudest, of the lab leak proponents also say it was a Chinese-designed bioweapon intentionally released in China to attack the US. They have been moving goalposts, but your more reasonable take is not at all universal.
Except neither bats nor pangolins were sold at the market. That probably should have been one of the first things to check before spending, undoubtedly, millions of dollars.
The idea that someone in the lab down the street was accidentally infected with something from the lab and then went to lunch is far more plausible than creatures from thousands of miles away introduced a disease down the street street from a lab working on viruses that are known to be almost identical to the one of interest.
There’s no issue with pursuing all leads, but obviously some are much more plausible than others.
> Except neither bats nor pangolins were sold at the market.
We know that because…?
"Raccoon dogs, marmots, civets, mink, Siberian badgers and many other furry mammals that could have served as intermediate hosts for the SARS-CoV-2 virus were openly, illegally and profitably sold in the market. The wild and farmed animals were documented to be in poor health, and crowded together in their cages."
The lab leak theory folks had plenty of evidence. The evidence the dept of energy cities is identical to what the supposed conspiracy theorist have said for months / years.
What pejoratives? There are literally conspiracy nuts out there who strongly support the lab leak theory, mostly because China was the enemy du jour before drag queens. There is a lot of absolutely batshit stuff out there, including Trump himself accusing China of intentionally launching covid as a “bioweapon”.
As I said, that environment makes it hard to separate the legit, well-informed, grounded people who also advance real evidence of a lab leak.
My point was that they very loud, very nutty lab leak enthusiasts discredit legit discussion of the real possibility. I think you may have illustrated my point.
Well, if you ban and ostracize people for supporting some idea, then a lot of supporters for this idea would be people who are not afraid of being banned and ostracized - and this category of people has a lot of conspiracy nuts, because they have nothing to lose anyway. You can not use the consequence of the suppression policy as a justification of the same suppression policy.
>I think it has more to do with the fact that one opinion is supported by more conspiracy nuts.
Evaluating an empirical claim based on the aggregate character of those who are supporting it rather than actual steelmanned arguments is poor epistemic hygiene. It's a commonly-used justification for tribal epistemic closure - "the red tribe has lower IQ than average, therefore they are wrong in every disagreement with the blue tribe."
There's an equally-negative opposite of a "conspiracy nut" here - something like "sheeple".
What most people really struggle with is uncertainty, and they lack the conceptual framework (distributions) and working understanding of how those distributions behave under various scenarios.
One of the better data scientists I've worked with explained to me that his entire job was 'quantifying uncertainty', and after working in the field I definitely believe it. You could play around with RStan for the weekend and gain an intuition for how evidence changes hypothesis and how a hypothesis could be the "most likely" but still "unlikely" in an absolute sense, all with tremendous uncertainty in your prediction.
Still, when you try to communicate the results of a model, uncertainty is simply hard to communicate when people are interest in using your analysis for a snap decision, and the uncomfortable truth is "we can't tell you" is a fine modeling result.
Yeah. In 2016 when people were like "hurr durr experts suck, they predicted Hillary would win and she lost", it was exasperating. If a model predicted an outcome with 60-70% certainty, and the less likely scenario happens, model wasn't necessarily bad. That'd be true even if it was a 90/10 split.
Trump winning can happen in a model that gives him a 30% chance and a model that gives him a 5% chance. What was odd was seeing fans of Nate Silver point out the former, but then trying to say that his model was better because it gave Trump a higher probability of winning (or even saying Sam Wang's model was terrible for having Clinton's chance in the high 90's). That could be the case, but it's not necessarily the case, for the exact reasons they just stated.
1. First, when many pundits were basically saying there was no chance that Trump would win, Silver was particularly highlighting not just that it was in the realm of possibility, but would not even be very surprising if Trump won (e.g. I think Nate does a good job with his "same probability of a team down by 3 points at the beginning of the 4th quarter coming back to win" to clarify to a lay person that this isn't unusual).
2. When making political predictions based on polling that turn out to be "wrong" (i.e. end up going the way of the < 50% option), it's helpful to think of why this might happen. In Trump's case, it was pretty obvious he was a very different type of politician than what came before, so it's worth thinking whether that difference might result in widespread error in some polls. Also, whenever a race is very close, it's obvious that any small movements one way or the other can affect the outcome. In 2016 Trump lost the popular vote by a substantial margin but won the electoral collage by a significant but not huge amount. In fact, the "all or nothing" way the US electoral college system works has the effect of amplifying smaller differences into larger vote outcomes.
I would guess that the vast majority of the population do not take meaningful actions based on election prediction (other than "I might [not] need to actually vote").
There are good reasons to have polls and predictions but they are far from necessary.
Yes, but it is not "needed" in the current form. It is needed the same way you need to predict how global trends will be in 6 months: very important for a lot of people, but not an actionable information for most.
It isn’t always a lack of will. Sometimes it is lacking a worldview that continually perceives through the lenses of statistical probabilities because most of the time, heuristics are Good Enough. Constantly evaluating upon an ever-shifting, -updating net of probabilities is relatively more cognitively demanding.
Those who do reflexively apply probability assessments however, would do well to also perceive when to accept heuristic Good Enough solutions.
My teenager brings up the A&W 1/3lb burger failure when I rant how people are choosing “math ignorance.” Kid’s point being that “fast food lovers[] would never let math intentionally get between them and greater amounts of fast food by choice, and that people simply that dumb.” I’ve dubbed it Hanlon’s Burger.
[] rephrased as their wording was a bit unfair to those that consume large amounts of fast food.
Good luck? The whole point of that headline is to get the American populace to completely miss all the nuance and hate china more then they already do.
Then when they are taken to court for outright bullshitting, that's when they point out the "nuance."
Hold on. I'm not saying the lab leak theory is completely left field. But definitely the intent of this announcement is more of a deliberate political attack then it is a declaration of actual scientific findings. The "least crappy theory" is essentially not news at all. A more accurate title is "inconclusive." But that sort of title doesn't get people all riled up against china.
Doesn't matter if they understand the nuance. The lab leak theory takes a back seat for the following reason:
Lets say it is found out with definite proof that it was a lab leak. Then what? Grandma's dead, china killed her and there is nothing you can do. We are not going to let this ruin trade relations even more ($$$ LOL) so you're just going to have to forget about it.
Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of their head.
If lab leak is confirmed the correct course of action is to design new systems and protocols to prevent such a thing from happening again in the future. Failure to do so will result in more issues down the line. It's basic engineering.
If this kind of research is so important then maybe the nations of the world should buy a cruise ship and implement extreme isolation protocols between interactions, if that's the only way to safely perform that kind of research. Just as an example.
And this is (one reason) why so many are keen to believe Lab Leak - because then it was done by 'bad humans' and so can be fixed, instead of being (another) consequence of our encroachment on the natural world and indeed something that often just happens. Much easier to believe the 'baddies' have been found and 'brought to justice' than having to face up to the world we live in and our effect on it.
I agree but also disagree. There are too many conflicting interests and I don't think you will ever get a straight answer. People also can't look at the lab leak with a critical eye because they think it makes them look like trump lovers. I standby my original assertion that a country in grief will collectively go through the stages of grief of which denial is the first. Similar to 9/11 when we convinced ourselves that our foreign policy had nothing to do with terrorist attacks and 2008 when we convinced ourselves bailing out failing industries was a good idea. 20 and 10 years later and we changed our tunes on those things. In 2033 we will finally accept that a lab-leak was most likely but only after the other 6 stages...
In 2008 we had to bail out the banks, otherwise everything would have gone under. Indeed, I believe that a defining moment of the GW Bush presidency was when he told the head of the Federal Reserve (I think?) to do whatever was necessary, with GWB providing political cover, and thus 'saved the world'. Where we screwed up was in not bringing to account (i.e. prison) many of the people responsible for letting things get as far as they did. We also used monetary policy too much when fiscal policy (i.e. bailing out Main Street) would have been better.
My understanding is that it took a while before the (natural) emergence of SARS and MERS was understood, and so for COVID most probably.
> My understanding is that it took a while before the (natural) emergence of SARS and MERS was understood, and so for COVID most probably.
The proximal host is the animal that transmitted the virus to humans. That host was identified for SARS-1 (civet cats) and MERS (camels) within about a year. For example, here's an article from 2003:
The reservoir host is the animal in which most of the virus's genome evolved. That host (bats for both) took much longer to identify, through Dr. Shi's work at the WIV.
Since SARS-CoV-2 is very similar to SARS-1, we knew its reservoir host (bats) as soon as it was sequenced. We still don't know its proximal host. The proximal host is the critical question in establishing natural zoonotic origin--no one disputes that SARS-CoV-2 evolved mostly in bats, just whether its path into humans involved a research accident.
> And this is (one reason) why so many are keen to believe Lab Leak - because then it was done by 'bad humans' and so can be fixed, instead of being (another) consequence of our encroachment on the natural world and indeed something that often just happens.
In my experience it's rather that "lab leak" means "bad foreigners we're already hating did this to everyone, why won't we nuke them already or something", when the alternative would be to actually think about failing healthcare, vulnerable supply chains, lack of trust in institutions, etc.
"Lab leak" is a cop-out. It should lead to improving procedures in biolabs, but people there are already doing it anyway, because they're smart enough to think about possibilities ("oh, even if it was a wet market issue this time, the next one might be someone here fucking up; let's review the procedures to make that less likely to happen"). For general population, the media and political sphere, it's just a permission to dismiss and ignore any potential fixes ("You say spending more on X would reduce the spread of the virus? It's not like the last one was because of problem with X - it came from a foreign lab, nothing X can do about it!").
"Encroachment on the natural world" is mostly orthogonal to that. We are going to keep encroaching on it anyway, and the way to do it safely is to do those fixes that "lab leak" gives an excuse for not doing.
Scientists can definitely make mistakes. What circles around lab leak that's most interesting was the rampant indictments that discussing it made you a conspiracy theorist, which prevented it being discussed or investigated for over a year after the pandemic started. Around that time, the only thing that was acceptable to discuss was zoonotic origins.
Its not about punishment, its about the 'just world' fallacy where bad things happen because of 'bad' people (whether through malice or incompetence). It allows us to hide from uncomfortable truths - in this case that pathogen spillovers are inevitable, and that our response has been typically woeful.
If a practicing engineer is ultimatrly responsible for a catastrophic outcome of a design they signed off on, I can see a case for shoddy virologists with bad lab practices being held ultimately responsible for what they ultimately leak.
When what you make has the potential to impact billions; no offense, but I expect you to be a bit more hardcore about your adherence to safe practices of your trade.
If this means the only people who end up becoming virologists and doing work that conceivably leads to the creation of pandemic pathogens are the most hardcore mf'ers with a boner for safety, perfectionism , and preserving their own skin; ...I'm actually okay with that.
I'll even sweeten the pot. Lets extend that to Software Engineers and get a PE program for that sorted.
Consistency after all.
Long story short:
"Oopsie" as an excuse stops applying when your body count becomes non-zero.
That sounds like a call for professional licensure and personal financial penalties for failures. Ensuring financial ruin for GoF cowgirls and cowboys and their families would be a good start.
But was it negligence? This is the difference between "a mistake" and "manslaughter".
Without knowing, and a proper investigation, we can't decide. If it was negligence, punishment is used for a variety of reasons. Often, it is the only way to get people to push back against employers.
And fines, are often the only way to get companies to care.
The US isn't capable of preventing its own citizens from acquiring weapons and performing terrorist attacks with them. The idea that we'll be able to enforce controls on labs in foreign countries seems pretty far fetched given that. And as the tech advances, I suspect it will democratize like any other technology so that a lone enthusiast can design their own viruses in a home lab. I'm not particularly an optimist about what it portends.
But it is in the best interest of all countries. Unlike nuclear weapons where the damage can be isolated to one area, highly contagious weapons are impossible to control and will end up hurting themselves as well.
I suspect the world would be better off if all knowledge of nuclear weapons were eradicated. I doubt on a few levels that the damage can really be isolated given proliferation. Baby Boomers were found to have significantly elevated levels of strontium-90 in their baby teeth attributed just to atmospheric testing. That did result in a treaty to ban the practice, but nuclear weapon research continued and continues today. I doubt any country will willingly stop viral research; especially because there are legitimate medical reasons for such research, though I suspect weapon applications are inextricably intertwined as well.
>> We are not going to let this ruin trade relations even more ($$$ LOL) so you're just going to have to forget about it.
> If lab leak is confirmed the correct course of action is to design new systems and protocols to prevent such a thing from happening again in the future
I'm not sure why people choose to assume their simple solutions are somehow insightful. You aren't going to be able to reach into most countries to intervene in any other way than simple sanctions at best. The protocol of "asking country X please knock it off" is not productive, as it's not going to result in any specific change, it hurts trade, and every country is doing it to some degree despite previous agreements on the world stage (basic Game Theory).
This is what the GP described, yet someone still thinks that nobody involved, understands "basic engineering". Very smart people do this kind of work with money and lives at stake. Let's give a little rope to people with big responsibilities, to try to understand the motivations rather than assume they are ignorant.
If, hypothetically, it did leak from a lab, there are two important things that should happen:
1- China has suffered more than enough to revaluate protocols around virus handling. The pandemic has done more to undermine confidence in their government than anything else in decades. They've got plenty of reason to be invested in change if change is warranted
2- The US government could put stronger regulations in place around funding companies that turn around and fund foreign labs (such as ecohealth) unless those projects can demonstrate compliance with new, safer protocols. What you call simple sanctions, I call the power of the purse.
All of this happens only if we determine whether the existing protocols, or lax enforcement of them, gave rise to the spread of the virus.
Just shrugging it off and saying "meh, it's hard so why bother" is a recipe for future man-made disasters.
The issue involves misplaced incentives. Scientists have an incentive to apply for certain grants, and the National Science Foundation and NIH have an incentive to spend their federal funding. Scientists are thus incentivized to draw attention to "black swan" events and ask for funding to prevent these events. And they are incentivized to conduct riskier and riskier research until, let's say, a "human error event" occurs, and here we are.*
*Assuming the lab leak was accidental, rather than intentional
I know, basic engineering, so simple and straightforward right? And when a country says "no", I assume we issue a series of stronger and stronger worded warning letters to them right?
It's pretty sickening that a coronavirus lab in China that the US was completely involved with both financially and through scientific cooperation can be reframed as more nationalistic anti-China bullshit. The US isn't keeping things peaceful with China for the sake of trade relations, it's actually threatening China constantly. The US is keeping quiet about the lab leak theory because it was just as responsible for that lab as China was, and it wants to distract from that fact.
Are you suggesting that a more correct course of action would be some kind of punitive retribution so those of us who survived suffer in the hopes that those most responsible suffer a little more than we do?
The idea that we would hurt our own economic future out of grief/vengeance is bizarre. So yes, everyone does know what you suggest, and we’re all OK with it.
And if it comes to light that it was not a natural disaster- that this funding contributed to it- then we should cut off said funding until better protocols, enforcement and accountability are in place
If it turned out to be not a lab leak, fine, carry on. If it was a lab leak, why on earth should I be complacent about my tax dollars contributing to the next one?
A lot of people seem to think the lab leak premise is the same as the "engineered biological weapon" premise so if that become popular it'll probably only drive a perception of "weak government that betrays the citizens" even more than we've already got...
Yeah, instead it was sheer incompetence and arrogance. They screwed up because they poorly handled the virus while doing something they should never have been doing: gain-of-function research. We need to stop that research, and we can't let them defend it with any nonsense excuses.
Would you please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar? You have a long history of doing this on HN. I don't want to ban you again but if you keep this up, we'll have to.
This is not a flamewar, it is what is called "counter reasoning".
There are people claiming that USA (and only USA) suffered because someone else's incompetence, but I lost a friend during COVID in the USA because of the undeniable underestimation (to say the least) that the Presidency of US showed.
He would have lived if he was in China.
So, please, if you have to ban me, do it, publicly, so a record will remain that in this forum criticizing the US leads to a ban.
There's no better way to prove my point: US is not better than China when their interests and their image is on the line. They would do anything to silent critiques, including killing innocents.
Like they have done to so many people in my Country, for no other reason than being not 100% aligned with their colonial plans.
Please, do what you have to do, I won't stop criticizing the US mentality whenever i deem it necessary. Because, you know, when I was young I was a supporter of the US because they fought against the "single thought", but now they have become it.
If the "hacker news" has become the place where an yet unproven mistake is proof of "incompetence" or worse "a genocidal plan", than HN is no different from VK.
This sort of fulminating rhetoric is obviously not what HN is for. We've banned you for it many times and if you don't stop, we'll have to ban you again. It has nothing to do with criticizing the US or any other country or thing; it has to do with not following the site rules and consistently violating the intended spirit of the place. Plenty of other commenters manage to be critical without doing that, and that's fine.
Lab leak involves bio-engineering because it involves gain of function research. Bio-engineering can be used in a testing setting but it could also be used to make a weapon. I highly doubt China was stupid enough to make a bioweapon and not immunize its citizens first.
The significance of getting people to investigate, and if all things are true, confirm lab leak is that it puts an impetus on the importance of controls and second is a corrective measure for all the people who colluded to suppress lab leak being discussed. I am very interested in seeing those people held accountable in very direct ways, even if they were under false impressions at the time. That starts with all the names on that infamous open letter.
A lab leak doesn’t mean gain of function, bio-engineered virus, or other engineering. It just means that the virus was spread via a lab leak.
> The October 2021 report said that there was a consensus that Covid-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program. But it didn’t settle the debate over whether it resulted from a lab leak or came from an animal, saying that more information was needed from the Chinese authorities.
In what way is gain of function not bio-engineering? You're modifying a virus and subjecting it to human-like tissue to observe the results. Lab leak and gain of function are inexplicably tied.
I don't know what point the quote is getting to. I already said it wasn't a bioweapon.
I heard that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had inserted furin cleavage sites into random types of viruses in the past and that SARS-CoV-2 is unique among coronaviruses for having a furin cleavage site, but this[0] says otherwise:
```
Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2.
```
> Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of their head.
only Americans were touched by covid I guess...
> The first stage of grief is denial.
At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes.
Leak doesn't mean engineering a disease to kill some specific target, anyway, if China did it to kill Americans, it wouldn't be as bad as the Opium wars and the American invasion of China in 1900
The first U.S. multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, made part of his fortune smuggling opium into China.
Remember when they went to war with Iraq on fabricated evidence?
Remember when they wen to war with Afghanistan after 9/11, but Afghanistan had no responsibility whatsoever (again!) and 10 years later they handed the country back to Talibans?
Can we consider 9/11 an accident?
Would it be the same to you?
You know when really nobody talks about it?
When it's the US killing people out of negligence and incompetence and sheer arrogance.
It's not China fault if during covid in USA Trump was President and people really believed that covid wasn't real and a lot of Americans died with a rate double than my Country which was already hit very hard BTW.
It's talked about in many circles in the United States, mind. Not one year has gone by without a rant in my sphere about stupid boutique or ulteriorally motived wars, and a pining for the day the U.S. focuses more on solving domestic problems than foreign.
It just happens that for some stupid reason, neither the Republican or Democratic parties have a great track record of producing candidates that can manage to walk the line of foreign policy that minimally entangles us with very poorly advised foreign intervention.
Which is made all the more difficult when allies don't do their utmost in terms of defense spending. The U.S. doesn't need to always be the first bunch of people everyone looks to when some autocratic idiot starts rattling the saber again. This may even be made easier if we don't export advanced manufacturing business to places that value human life and time at approximately zero because it makes the quarterly reports look better.
After all, it's way harder to be an autocrat when no one will do enough business with you to keep the military sufficiently in your pocket. Or teach you how to make the machines that make arms or advanced weaponry. Or sell you said arms.
To me the post was answering to someone claiming that
- Americans suffered the consequences of COVID because of China, which is arguably not true, they have handled the pandemic badly because of their own faults, incompetence and hubris (and a President in denial).
- The Americans are at the first stage of grieving over this, because they are obviously victims, while truth is they are often perpetrators that just don't care of the consequences of what they do, because if some non American dies, it's probably because they deserve it. During COVID they proved that they also don't care very much if someone of their own dies, because FREE MARKET OH YEAH! FLY EAGLE OF FREEDOM!
Which has honestly been embarrassing, watching from outside.
If you were part of the 96% of the World population which is not American, you would know the feeling.
> If you were part of the 96% of the World population which is not American, you would know the feeling.
I'm not American, nor do I live in America.
And while I have some sympathy for pointing out "the world is not the US", the majority of the comment was bald whataboutism:
> "At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes. Leak doesn't mean engineering a disease to kill some specific target, anyway, if China did it to kill Americans, it wouldn't be as bad as the Opium wars and the American invasion of China in 1900. he first U.S. multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, made part of his fortune smuggling opium into China."
What about "People in the USA are grieving because of China virus created to kill us, but we won't do anything against China because the first step of grief is denial"?
How does this sound?
It's completely normal to me to answer: well my friend, first of all a leak is a mistake, it's not intentional since, you know, the first who paid where the Chinese themselves, it would be pretty stupid to do it intentionally.
But if you really think things go that way because people do not understand who's their enemy (the Chinese who want to kill you by engineering a virus), what about all the countries that the USA has relationships to, to their advantage only, after killing their citizen, without even apologizing?
Should they cut the links too?
What about what the USA and UK did to Chinese people?
There's a reason why they made a cultural revolution and chose communism, and no, being a "democracy" doesn't make your country automatically better.
Spoiler alert: American people have lost many relatives because of their government.
So maybe it's toward them that they should be angry and ask for a change.
Even if it was a lab leak, the right solution would be cooperation, so that it doesn't happen again (because next time could happen to the US...)
> what about all the countries that the USA has relationships to, to their advantage only, after killing their citizen, without even apologizing?
As I said: literally whataboutism. And that is just a distraction tactic used to deflect attention from the issue at hand.
In some limited circumstances it may be a legitimate tactic, for example, when it is relevant to highlight that the person making the accusation has a bias. For the most part, however, even if the person making the accusation is a hypocrite or has double standards, this does not mean that their accusation is false.
It's completely legitimate to have a discussion about US imperialism. But not to try to deflect a discussion about Chinese recalcitrance by deflecting it like this.
If all the other origin theories has "very low" as confidence score, then a lab leak is still the most likely origin with a "low" confidence score.
It would be nice to see the confidence score as a numerical number in order to understand how much lead this theory has to the second most likely origin theory.
This. Low confidence still significant in that it could have been “low confidence transmission from wet market game”, but that’s not the direction this landed on. It’s likely a lab leak, says the report, but there’s too many gaps to support higher certainty.
Exactly - and how many were mocked, ridiculed, cancelled for even floating the idea of the lab leak; it was labeled as a BS conspiracy theory.
Many, even some in this thread, are eager to minimize this story if they participated in ridiculing the fringe voices who kept questioning the official narrative. Better to have this quickly fade into oblivion lest they be outed as having placed their blind faith in false prophets. But Pepperidge farm remembers
I hope this goes to show how dangerous social media censorship is. Social media has completely ruined all their credit as arbiters of truth. I never trusted the group think in the first place and feel fortunate they all so completely and quickly fell on their face. I pray no one trusts their judgment ever again.
At the time it was a BS conspiracy theory. There was some evidence for it, and some evidence against it and it happened that the evidence we had at the time was stronger for the non-lab leak theories.
That's what changed right now. We have new evidence that puts the lab leak theory above the others. Back when Trump was demanding that "China pay" and people were beating up random Asians who were just walking down the street, that wasn't true. Just because we today have the evidence to support the lab leak theory, that doesn't justify Trump's claims or the "blind faith" of his followers who rejected the available evidence to support what they wanted to be true.
Problem was you weren't even allowed to speculate about this and consider that the possibility warranted more investigation without being written off as a "Trumper."
I've seen huge family fights over this very issue and not one person involved was a Trump supporter or a conspiracy theorist but then the names get thrown around because somebody didn't toe somebody else's ideological line.
> Trump was demanding that "China pay" and people were beating up random Asians who were just walking down the street
Unfortunately, random Asian people getting brutalized when they're going about their daily business has been a long-standing problem in a number of cities. Is there any evidence to suggest that the people perpetrating these crimes were even aware of Trump's words, let alone motivated by them, rather than this just fitting the usual pattern of criminality combined with a generalized ethnic resentment?
> Unfortunately, random Asian people getting brutalized when they're going about their daily business has been a long-standing problem in a number of cities.
How on earth did you manage to bridge the gap from 'there was some evidence for it' to 'BS conspiracy theory'. If it has some evidence for it, it is not, by definition a BS conspiracy theory.
You allowed others to do your thinking for you. You allowed your emotions to cloud your judgement, all while under the banner of the holy rationalists. Own it and do better next time. The media is used to manipulate opinion especially in times of national crisis, dont fall for it.
Because initially the "some evidence" amounted to little more than "A lab exists" and "leaks are a thing that has happened". Meanwhile the other theories were being supported by science like genome analysis. As time and investigations went on, more evidence came up, but when it started being spread around the evidence being presented was absolutely so weak that as a theory it was essentially speculation.
You are reading you info second hand. If you had gone to the evidence yourself you would not be saying what you are now saying. Read the academic papers, look up the facts from sources as close to the truth as you can. You can't trust people to give you information untainted by their pov. It was obvious to me at the time just by doing a modicum of research.
It's not just me saying there was no evidence. It's the people and articles that were spreading the conspiracy theory.
"Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says" - Tom Cotton
"at this point there's no reason to harbour suspicions' that the facility had anything to do with the outbreak, besides being responsible for the crucial genome sequencing that lets doctors diagnose it" (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7922379/Chinas-la...)
"In principle, outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility. This could have been the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but so far there isn’t evidence or indication for such incident." (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus...)
Do we need to make a decision on this matter at the moment? If the choices are between low certainly and very low, I’d say we just don’t have enough information to say anything interesting.
Four U.S. agencies say "market origins" - as does the U.S. National Intelligence Council. Two more agencies -- including the CIA -- are undecided. And then there's the "low confidence" Energy Department opinion, and one from the FBI.
So it ultimately depends on how you weight the 75% of groups that don't think there's evidence that it leaked from a lab.
There is way to actually quantify such estimates. Any numbers would just be made up. A qualitative confidence rating like "low" really is the best way to convey intelligence information to policy makers.
Also article mentions FBI has “moderate” confidence it was lab leak. I find that very interesting given it wouldn’t be so much based on scientific analysis but some intelligence collection the FBI has.
Or there aren't objective standards for what "low, medium, and high confidence" actually mean, thereby allowing one agency to look at the evidence and say it's of low confidence and another to look at the same data and say it's moderate confidence.
Or they are coming to different conclusions given the same ambiguous/incomplete information. It could simply be disagreement, or just lack of a standard metric here to compare notes easily.
I read that they did massively increase sharing after 9/11, but there was a reassessment after the Manning leaks. Manning had access to way more information than someone at their level needed for their job, and they concluded this came about from going a bit too far on the post 9/11 sharing and so they dialed it back a bit.
Organizations like the CIA don't make factual statements, they make strategic statements. Any connection with reality is purely coincidental.
If the CIA came out tomorrow and said they were 100% confident it was a lab leak from China we would have no way of knowing if that's based on facts or political propaganda.
Maybe, in 40-50 years we'll get an answer. Until then, it's too politically and strategically useful to keep it up in the air. At least one goal is for people to be arguing about it.
I have not been inside the CIA, but that could just mean they haven't done any research on that or that their research is ongoing.
An institution will not have assessments on everything at any point in time. Two different institutions might have didferent assessments for a billion reasons, e.g. they could have done the research at different points in time, the underlying evisence could differ, the interviewed experts could have said different things and so on.
Two different instutions reaching different conclusions is not as surprising as it seems.
And for the record, the National Intelligence Council and four other unidentified agencies say with "low confidence" that the virus came about through natural transmission.
This is exactly why I can't give this article, or any of those multiple intelligence agency assessments any real credence. I don't have access to any of the data that went into those assessments. What I do have access to doesn't point very strongly at a lab leak origin, despite its plausibility.
It's perfectly reasonable for the government to support one theory based on non-conclusive evidence that they have and reasonable for the public to support another based on the non-conclusive evidence available to them.
It makes it a lot more likely that public support for the non-lab leak theories will change once we get the chance to see the government's new evidence though.
“The FBI employs a cadre of microbiologists, immunologists and other scientists and is supported by the National Bioforensic Analysis Center, which was established at Fort Detrick, Md., in 2004 to analyze anthrax and other possible biological threats.” -the article
I think if anything COVID has shown us that biological warfare makes as much sense as nuclear: none. In our globally connected world it's mutually assured destruction, and that's without even the need for your enemy to maintain stockpiles of weapons. The virus will find itself within your own borders soon enough.
> The virus will find itself within your own borders soon enough.
Depends on the virus - something with the long incubating periods and frequent lack of symptoms like Covid yes, but something much more quick and deadly (say, Ebola, even though 2-21 days is still potentially slow) could result in quick mass deaths without the opportunity to spread it around.
It is beneficial to the survival of a virus to infect the largest group that it can. A virus targeted to a small group of people has a large "survival benefit" the moment it can mutate to infect everybody.
In addition, it's really hard to target a biological entity at a specific subgroup of humans. From a biological standpoint, all humans are damn near identical.
I was thinking that actually gives the United States a distinct advantage in such (hypothetical) biological warfare, it has the most diverse gene pool on the planet.
Terrorists motivated by religion or ideology sometimes use tactics and weapons that make no sense to rational people. The Aum Shinrikyo cult was developing biological weapons.
> The Aum Shinrikyo cult was developing biological weapons.
Sarin would be classed as chemical, not biological.
It's also worth illustrating that their primary terrorist act killed 15 people, after releasing sarin on 5 different trains during Tokyo's busy rush hour. You would have been more effective just lobbing a single grenade.
The cult used a chemical weapon. They were also developing biological weapons based on botulism and anthrax at the same time but fortunately didn't get a chance to use those.
Science is the collecting and processing of empirical data using peer reviewed methods to reach a conclusion. Which part do you think the FBI is not doing which separates their process from science?
If you repeat a lie often enough, even the at first reluctant will start to believe it. That's how the propaganda machine typically works.
The more these claims based on minimal new evidence are repeated, the more it seems the virus may have potentially been released by nefarious actors as an attack on the population.
It's not implausable for an entity with knowledge and access to a virus being studied, to release a copy of it in the environment surrounding the lab while maintaining a high degree of deniability.
If it is so, then the question that remains is, much like in the case of Nordstream, which nation state has the most incentive to carry it out?
I'm wary of engaging, but this just makes no sense to me. Perhaps you can explain and actually make explicit some of the implied connections.
Previously the 'big lie' was that it was not from a lab. Now that it's assessed to be likely from a lab the new lie is the contention that it was done deliberately? Whose propaganda machine is at work here anyway? The Chinese govt or the US one? Or are they in cahoots now?
>Previously the 'big lie' was that it was not from a lab.
Wasn't the previous news claim specifically that somebody in Wuhan ate a bat or pangolin? Until it was made public that the US was involved in funding the research.
While I won't discount the possibility that the outbreak could be a nefarious plot to plant a virus.I feel the US's response to the pandemic and the massive mistakes made make it less likely. The most likely would be just an accident where a researcher unknowingly got infected while conducting research in a BSL2 lab where they were testing wild SARS like viruses and inserting FCS to gauge the viruses potential threat level
>I feel the US's response to the pandemic and the massive mistakes make it less likely.
It may be unlikely but there have been many instances where the US population becomes a victim of its own government's covert actions. The quality of response doesn't neccessarily prove anything.
> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.
Do we have the genetic sequences from these experiments? Has anyone compared them to the sequences from the pandemic?
I'm not entirely up to speed but I recall hearing something about the US government funding them (without its own knowledge..?), so perhaps that info is not only in China's hands.
(And while we're on the subject, did anything come of the thing about Pfizer engineering the virus, ostensibly for vaccine research purposes?)
> Do we have the genetic sequences from these experiments? Has anyone compared them to the sequences from the pandemic?
I don't know about those specifically, but one of the earliest genetic matches we had is a natural virus called RaTG13 and was studied in the Wuhan lab. I think a closer match has since been found though.
> I'm not entirely up to speed but I recall hearing something about the US government funding them (without its own knowledge..?), so perhaps that info is not only in China's hands.
Yes, indirectly through EcoHealth Alliance, hence the "without its own knowledge" part.
The BANAL viruses collected in Laos are closer than RaTG13. No published virus is close enough that SARS-CoV-2 could readily be derived from it in the lab, though some people have speculated about pathways via accelerated evolution during serial passaging.
I believe the most likely research-related origin involves an unpublished virus. I don't think that's implausible; the WIV was also sampling in Laos, and no research group in the world has published literally everything they're currently working on. Even with no attempt at secrecy, it takes time to write stuff up. It's also possible that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus collected and leaked by the WIV before they were able to sequence it.
As to the grandparent's final question, I'm not aware of any serious claim that Pfizer had anything to do with this. There was a claim that Moderna was somehow involved, based on a genetic sequence that appears both in SARS-CoV-2 and in a pre-pandemic Moderna patent; but that sequence appears in other previously-known organisms too.
Thanks. To clarify my question, the part about Pfizer seems to be that they were engineering virus variants after the pandemic started, and doing so intentionally in a laboratory, not (merely) as a byproduct of overly-specific vaccines exerting evolutionary pressure.
What I heard about that was based on supposed leaked information (Project Veritas). Such information going public would obviously be very bad PR, so it would make sense for it to be secret, if it's real. But also, anyone can record a fake interview (and nowadays, somewhat convincingly replace the faces and voices too), so...
Ah, the video with Jordon Trishton Walker--so not the virus origins, but alleged gain of function work after emergence. I understand that the video is real, and he really is (or was) a "Director of Research and Development" at Pfizer. Most of what he said was scientifically incoherent, though. I'd guess that he got the job for internal political reasons, and that he has almost zero influence on or even understanding of whatever Pfizer is actually doing. I don't love fact check sites in general, but this one has some quotes from researchers that are consistent with my judgment of his expertise:
I'm not aware of anyone developing vaccines targeting laboratory-enhanced viruses. GoF proponents sometimes cite earlier vaccine development as a possible benefit, but even they don't actually fund such work--the mutations that occur in the lab aren't predictive enough of the mutations that will occur in real human spread to justify the speculative investment. The research of concern is pretty much all in academia, basic research with more nebulous intended benefit.
The evidence there is not that that particular group created covid, but that there is a clear history of engineering viruses in exactly the way a lab leak scenario would play out.
No we do not have the sequences, the lab has so far refused to share the sequences in their public database taken down down September of 2019. Plus recently people have discovered through BLAST searches an unreported Chimera virus that got accidentally got sequenced via contaminated agricultural rice sequencing dataset. Which means they had viruses that have not been previously reported. And this makes sense researchers do not publish viruses until they themselves can publish them in a journal. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2....
As I noted in my reply at that time, everyone has always agreed that the overall server remained intermittently accessible until Feb 2020. The particular database "was not accessed from outside of the WIV after 12 September 2019", though.
Right, a database put online in June 2019 - widely claimed to be “suspiciously removed” in Sept 2019, actually wasn’t. It was available into 2020 at which point after a bunch of hacking attempts, they took it down. And certainly “everyone hasn’t agreed” because in every thread about the topic people imply like this 6
Month old database is a smoking gun when it’s self evidently not.
I don't think the server is conclusive evidence of anything, but your representation seems misleading to me. The date when the information became publicly unavailable seems like the relevant one to me, even if the server remained connected to the Internet for a few months afterward.
And you seriously believe their claim that it was taken down due to "hacking attempts"? Given the international importance of the subject, is there really no one anywhere in China who can keep a simple database-backed website running? Or could they not share the information in a form that obviously presents no information security risk, like a dump on a flash drive?
Even if we had them and they were found to be different, that doesn't exclude the possibility that they repeated the same experiment with different source material.
True. And yet, it shows that there is a large scientific community & apparatus willing to experiment with this.
Circumstantial evidence is not proof of wrongdoing, but it is reason to ask more questions. Why were those questions censored? Why were they ruled unacceptable "misinformation"? It seems to me that we were asleep at the switch.
The counter to that is that the experts in coronaviruses knew they were the likely next epidemic and that they were doing their best to characterize the threat as best possible but unfortunately failed before the spillover came. The scientific community knew how close we came between SARS and MERS, a small mutation of either could’ve been much more virulent and pathogenic, so of course they were trying to research.
The question is not whether the research was worth it overall. They denied there was even a possibility that lab leak was the cause of the pandemic.
I'm more than happy to entertain the idea that the research is and was worth it. But we need to have an accurate accounting of recent events. They tried to completely shut that down. Thankfully, lately it seems that they failed.
I still get the impression the 'selectively silence misinformation' crowd is still as emboldened as ever, even in the pursuit of science. Despite it repeatedly failing and backfiring.
COVID helped give Reddit-style control of discourse a glean of urgency/respectability and "it's okay because we had good-intentions" continues to be the go-to justification.
There’s an immense benefit to being specific with both what you mean by lab leak (natural virus leaked or modified one did) and by “they” when you’re talking about coverups because it gets weirdly racist and conspiratorial in a hurry otherwise.
Unfortunately, you seem fundamentally confused about the position of people who are skeptical of zoonotic origin.
Please explain to me how position A) is more racist than position B)
A) Scientists all over the world, including Chinese, Americans, and others, made a fundamental misjudgement about the safety of the Wuhan virology lab, or perhaps viral experimentation generally, and the result was a global pandemic
Versus
B) Chinese people eating & trading wild and exotic meat unintentionally caused a global pandemic due to their consumption
Of course, neither theory is racist. That's a word that used to mean something (and I wish it still did!), but is mostly used today to shut down debate in Western countries.
It is scary to think that educational systems in democracy around the world produce comments like that. The commenter made a good point and your response is simply that you're going to stick with your prior beliefs because what? Part of good rhetoric is entertaining opposing ideas.
Refusing to engage with false dichotomies doesn't mean I'm stubbornly sticking with my priors.. if this is your first dip in the "lab leak" vs "zoonotic origin" pool, welcome, because otherwise you'd know how quickly it turns to shit when people pretend like only two scenarios exist. Don't fret, democracy will survive even I don't choose to engage with this particular round of bad faith argument!
There's no dichotomy here. The OC is merely pointing out that one theory (wet market) was widely accepted despite its obvious racism, while another (lab leak) was dismissed as racist despite being less racist than the wet market one. I believe this is a worthy point of discussion.
I mean... for several years, the notion that Chinese people are unsanitary was conisdered not racist, while the notion that extremely smart Chinese bioscientists may have covered up a lab accident was considered Asian hating. That sort of double think is worthy of questioning and criticism.
Do we know why it is the Department of Energy that works on that? I would have expected a branch of government that's more related to health, granted, I know very little about US gvmt structure.
I don't know the answer to your question, but the DoE does a lot more than just energy. In addition to overseeing energy policy, they oversee the R&D of nuclear weapons and the nuclear weapons program, they oversee the National Laboratories which does a lot of research and development in the areas of technology, health, physics, climate/environment and energy, they started the Human Genome Project, etc.
Well you didn’t just out and expect the US gov officials to say “lol yeah it was us, we were messing around with stuff we shouldn’t have been and is actively outlawed in US territories”, did you?
The connections to eco health alliance were all laid out a long time ago
It wasn't that long ago that just asking the question - or questioning the then narrative - was positioned as a threat to the democracy, racist (i.e., anti China), conspiracy theory, etc.
Low confidence based on available data is 100x better than high confidence based on nothing but some backroom creative thinking, and a mindless media entourage willing to parrot anything tossed in front of them.
It felt like 1984 then; this only magnifies that. And yet, still not an ounce of accountability. That's the lede.
I got banned from a major Coronavirus subreddit for saying in 2021 "we don't know yet how many boosters will be needed or on what schedule". This was seen as a claim that the vaccines don't work, which was patently false (at the time).
Questioning whether the virus emerged organically or came from a lab leak? That was equivalent to claiming the government is run by lizard people and the earth is flat. That's a public shaming and banning with prejudice.
What concerns me is now that the facts are dripping out, the tools (i.e., public shaming) that enabled a false narrative and marginalized traditional common (i.e., asking painfully obvious questions) are still normalized.
We can't just flip a button and undo the "programming" and glorification of group think. The step in the wrong direction can't be reversed.
Feels like we should assume it's a lab leak and push for caution anyways. If it wasn't a lab leak then all we've done is help better prevent that from happening in the future.
> So we have a conclusion: 'lab leak most likely cause,' and a confidence score: 'low'.
These qualifications seem to me to be in conflict. If there's low confidence about the most likely cause, then does that imply that there's low confidence about every possible cause? Could there be high confidence in the least likely cause? That, too, seems contradictory to me.
There are only two theories being seriously considered: lab leak, wet market. Therefore I think it is reasonable to expect a probability of at least 90% that it is one of these two theories and not a third theory that no one is discussing. So if we have over 90% confidence that _either_ "lab leak" or "wet market", and we believe that "lab leak" is the _most_ the likely cause, then it follows that we must estimate the lab leak theory to be true with at least 45% probability. Maybe you could say "low confidence" if you're 45-80% sure, and "high confidence" if you're more certain than that.
>"low confidence,” suggesting its level of certainty was not high
you're analyzing this like it's the press sensationalizing. This is an establishment walking back what they've said in the past, and allowing a pov that this same press and govt literally censored. We shouldn't expect they're going to scream "we were completely wrong because we were biased".
They're now admitting that there is no evidence at all for the hypothesis they've been treating as gospel, and admitting the evidence better fits lab leak (a view we know from Fauci's emails was floated early on and suppressed). That's saying a lot.
We'll still have to wait for "not natural in origin", but that's coming too.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but have the people here on HN who are poo-pooing this also taken stands in the past that allowing this would be a climbdown from? Because I remember when it wasn't allowed to discuss lableak here on HN either.
To retranslate back to English as a relatively direct translation
The cause of COVID, there is a high possibility it spread from a lab.
Notably missing are something like 一番, to mean most. This title is in absolute terms. The reason I found this in the first place was because a Japanese colleague was surprised that it did come from a lab! after an initial moment of doubt before accepting it because WSJ is reputable.
I sent the news deck an email pointing it out but do expect it's intentional. Reading as absolute rather than relative is likely "correct" and a great example of misinformation from the WSJ. Presumably reputable news sources just don't exist anymore, or perhaps they never did :(
What is the substantive difference between "Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says" and "Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says"? The only difference I see is that one notes the pandemic ("Covid-19") while the other notes the agency ("Energy Dept.").
Or is your comment more broadly that both headlines are bad? If so, then I'd disagree. Both headlines give the most important part of the story: a US agency currently believes that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak.
> Both headlines give the most important part of the story: a US agency currently believes that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak.
seems to me you're still leaving out a very important part of the news, which is that the confidence level is "low".
so right now the US government has multiple theories, none of which it is confident. it's just that of the reports that is not confident in, it might be the least not confident in the lab leak idea.
but the WSJ has decided to throw integrity aside and ignore that part in their headline.
You know you're right. Remember when Saddam closed his labs to us? The ones that never had WMDs? What was the "confidence" threshold for invading iraq? I also bet its the same exact people now telling us about more "confidence" levels.
Confidence, high, low, whatever, it means nothing. No one trusts the govt. or media anymore and no one should.
As long as this logic also applied to the “confidence” in the original official narrative that the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory. In the LA area, many in the science/tech communities were on board with the official story and joined in the fun - laughing at the “morons” still considering the possibility of the lab leak.
I suspect many of those are the same ones who are eager to sweep it under the rug, or now turn to conspiracy theory that THIS story is part of a psyop but not the original response from the science/health authorities.
The confidence level for the Covid-19 vaccine being sterilizing was low, but we still ran headlines saying as much. The confidence level for cloth masks being effective was low, but we still ran headlines saying as much. The confidence level for everything when it comes to Covid-19 is low.
The media gave up on integrity a long time ago, especially with respect to the pandemic. You're just noticing it now?
I think the criticism is that saying something is ‘most likely’ implies a sense of it being pretty likely. When the reality is that they are very uncertain.
Both headlines are clickbait compared to the content of the article.
I'm not sure what the better headline would be. "Lab leak possible origin?" Well, yes, in that they haven't ruled it out. But that's not really the same thing as saying that something is "most likely" even if, as the subhead notes, they wouldn't bet the farm on it.
Are these people who are owed a serious apology the ones who actually attacked Asian-Americans? Or simply the ones who stoked racial animus prompting others to attack them?
The people who are owed an apology are the people who did nothing more than to believe that the wuhan coronavirus outbreak originated from the wuhan coronavirus research lab.
Good question! Perhaps 'Deep Trump'? Certainly even the 3 letter agencies are not immune to what at best we might call the reactionary right, at worst proto-fascism.
If you had actually read the article that you are supposed to be commenting on,you would realize that this statement of the title is done in "low confidence"
No one is gonna apologize to you if you are unable to parse information
I think it's different in that I think when the lab leak strategy was first introduced, it was introduced in an explicitly political manner, i.e. by a politician vs an (arguably) apolitical institution. There wasn't evidence presented to support this theory beyond the political pundits footballing the theory around, who were most certainly not medical research experts about this. At least this is how I saw it as a layperson who didn't do any serious research myself, so it all seemed like a load of political bs trying to score points instead of a seeking of actual truth.
So at first it did look like just plain ol' xenophobic politics to me. Only one party, the party that politically campaigned on xenophobia, was the one spreading the theory widely on their mainstream media.
I'm more than happy to accept lab leak theories from actual researchers who understand how to analyze outbreaks and not politicians trying to score points with voters. It just wasn't that at the beginning, probably because the researchers had to take the time to come to their conclusions.
Regular people here without a known political affiliation were ridiculed relentlessly for even mentioning the lableak hypothesis. Same goes for merely questioning lockdowns. I hope many of you are doing some serious reflection.
IDK what you mean by "here". I wasn't ridiculing anyone relentlessly and I didn't see relentless ridicule, mostly because dang generally bans people for bad faith/hostility/etc. So idk what you mean by "many of you", since you're clearly not talking to me.
It was not introduced with any political intent. It was introduced by people noticing that, wait a minute, that wet market you say the virus came from is right next to a huge virus lab, and you expect me to believe that it's a coincidence? The idea that this was a political statement is itself a piece of political propaganda.
And when you add in the fact that virology work on unknown wild SARS like viruses were scheduled for only BSL2. And the vast majority of research published on sampled SARS like viruses was conducted in BSL2 labs it very easy to imagine a researcher unwittingly getting infected from a human mice model carrying a wild virus with a human optimized FCS inserted.
They always softball these bombshells like this so any confidence in official terms is something that pretty much solidifies this as the source of the virus for me.
I’m trying to think of anyone involved had a conscience if they would be tallying themselves to be one of the most prolific murderers in history but then that likely wouldn’t happen since first unofficial hazing ritual you do when entering academia is to develop an air of “that’s not me” attitude about things like this.
IMO, it seems obvious from the behavior of China's government that they know it is a lab leak. If it wasn't a lab leak, then presumably there is an animal reservoir of the virus somewhere in China, but as far as I know they haven't claimed to have found it. But if there is an animal reservoir of the virus in China, then how could the Chinese government ever expect a lockdown to work? A lockdown on travel would only really prevent the virus spreading from people bringing it into the country but obviously wild animals would still be spreading it. Yet the Chinese government claimed that their lockdowns did work. How is that at all compatible with the virus being from wild animals and not being a lab leak? It doesn't make any sense.
There are other Chinese government behaviours also. If it wasn't a lab leak why not publish the Wuhan labs database which was public until the outbreak? I know they say hacking but they could just make a copy and upload it somewhere. Also after Xi's first speech on covid his civil servants put out instructions to improve biosecurity at the virus labs. And lots of little things that seem a bit odd.
The only counterpoints are a) China is highly insular and rarely plays ball on even basic stuff and b) the whole Chinese idea of "saving face" where even when a person in power obviously messes up you still don't take the Western "brutally honest" approach, you do the opposite and pretend everything is still normal out of 'respect' (and in protection) of the person's social standing. The consequences happen quietly behind doors.
China not playing ball is like saying "I won't even give such a suggestion my time, how dare you ask me that".
That said - I fully agree it would have done leagues to help the narratives if they did play ball. Hell, the suggestion is that it was an accident in the first place. That should say enough on it's own if it's true.
Yeah, not so much these days, and probably not ever to extent that you may have meant it. Western folks are learning pretty quickly how well total reality denial has been working for... other regimes.
I am going to say Trump, but if I'm going to do that then I also need to mention an absolute procession of Western political and business leaders. Biden, Obama, Bush, Bush, Clinton, Abbot, Turnbull (he denied mathematics for god's sake), Morrison, Blair, Jobs, Ellison, Gates, Hoover, and so many other names I cbf remembering or looking up.
In fact, I think the "brutally honest" approach is exceedingly rare and always has been, in any arena in any hemisphere.
Does no one else on earth remember the initial videos out of China of people laying dead on the streets? Does no one else remeber the WHO refusing to acknowledge Taiwan is its own state?
I really struggle that anyone is seriously buying a single “truth” that is coming out of China.
I don’t know it was a lab leak, but I agree, if you are at all reasonable you can just see that China thinks it was.
I remember viral videos of big halls and hallways full of spastic people strapped into their beds. I still wonder sometimes what that was all about. Who had an interest in spreading such videos? What outcome did they hope for / get?
Maybe it was a poor attempt at trying to spur action without saying more than they were "allowed" to?
To me the whole idea of "China knew" is an oversimplification. Even if it was a lab leak, given the insane stakes, I can't imagine a majority of the Chinese government, or even a sizable portion of their own government would ever learn that.
People in China may have known and tried to do "something" without being able to outright say what the world (and even their own country's people) was about to be dealing with
> But if there is an animal reservoir of the virus in China, then how could the Chinese government ever expect a lockdown to work?
Because if people avoid contact with the animals and it's a rare type of human-animal interaction to begin with, then it doesn't spread. And if you catch it again, you lock down instantly locally again.
I'm not taking any side on the source of the virus, but I don't think the Chinese government behavior makes either option more likely. Once vaccines had been developed, the Chinese lockdown went on for way longer than reason could ever have dictated, since Covid had turned endemic in the rest of the world. The extreme lockdown was never a good example of rational health policy in any scenario, post-vaccine.
Sure, but don't they have a vast network of contact tracing? Presumably if a bunch of cases showed up that weren't connected to any other cases because of the lockdowns then that would be a really good indication of where the animal reservoir was located. But they haven't found the animal reservoir yet either, even with all of the lockdowns.
If by 'animal reservoir' you mean the intermediary pangolin, or something similar, this 'reservoir' could be as small as 1 animal if it was a spontaneous mutation. Where do you get the idea that there must be a large population of such animals roaming around?
As far as I can tell authoritative source has ever made an on-the-record comment along those lines. But then again it's impossible to prove a negative.
Of course there's a reservoir. That's why there was a lab in the first place. There are many more viruses in those caves. Many many. And tourists literally pay money to go into such caves, and look up to the ceiling to look at the bats. Bats that may at any time shit into their eye with one of these new viruses. And then on top of that people catch them and sell them live to slaughter them at home to eat.
Again, this is all well known and the reason the lab was there in the first place. That's why the techs go into these caves wearing full haz mat. Unlike the tourists who are oblivious.
Not saying it's not a lab leak. But you seem confused about some basics facts...
No there isn't. More than 50K animals tested an no animal reservoir for C19.
Are there really reddit-ors who still think C19 was natural when ALL of the current evidence including genetic markers points to lab leak?
Yes, we can't say with absolute certainty, but the case for lab leak is MUCH stronger than for natural. Plus, why has China still not released the nature and details of the experiments that were conducted in that lab? You know why.
Anyone who doesn't see that lab leak is the most likely source is just being contrarian for their own ego or political reasons.
Natural and lab leak are not exclusive. In fact we do have evidence for genetic markers being of natural origin. See the work of William Gallaher, 'A palindromic RNA sequence as a common breakpoint contributor to copy-choice recombination in SARS-COV-2'. As well as: https://virological.org/t/the-sarbecovirus-origin-of-sars-co...
The lacking evidence for a natural origin right now is just that a natural reservoir hasn't been discovered. The potential natural mechanisms for those genetic markers seem reasonably understood though.
This is a dumb argument. Sick animals were probably culled immediately by the farms to avoid getting blamed.
As a 2-decade genetic engineer: there are no genetic "markers" pointing to a lab leak, there's really no sign of unnatural manipulation in the sequence.
Indeed, the government cracked down on wild animal farming at the beginning of the pandemic.
When you hear that "X thousand animals were tested," it's not the types of wild animals that are the likely culprit. It's cows, pigs, sheep and the like. It's a complete red herring.
Passage through humanized mice wouldn't leave signs of unnatural manipulation. It's still pretty suspicious that COVID was so transmissible between people from the outset, and no evidence of it circulating in local populations was found.
The question was not "why was it a pandemic", yhe question is, why was it so transmissible when earlier outbreaks, like SARS, had relatively much poorer transmission? That's the typical profile of new viruses.
The virus becoming more infectious over time is exactly my point. That's typical. What's not typical is the virus already being so infectious right from the start. Normally a zoonotic transfer circulates poorly in the human population before it mutates to become more infectious for the host. COVID-19 was already excellent at infecting humans from the earliest points we've found. That's very, very unusual.
A million deadly new viruses, and one breaks through. Finding exactly that one is kinda hard! But finding bats with multiple scary coronaviruses at the same time is trivial.
Staring yourself blind on this specific strain of coronavirus misses the forest for the tree (yes, singular tree). There's literally a forest of nasty shit out there and you're saying "but the scientists couldn't find this one specific tree when they went looking in the Amazonas". Of course they didn't. C19 is highly contagious in humans, not in bats. For bats it's just one out of a million things that don't bother them.
> Anyone who doesn't see that lab leak is the most likely source is just being contrarian for their own ego or political reasons.
I disagree. I think those who can't accept natural origins as a hypothesis underestimate the size and variation of the viruses out there in nature.
Evolutionary theory SUGGESTS it is a lab leak. When a virus "makes the jump" from animals to humans, it tends not to be very good at first. Then, over time, the virus would evolve to get better and better at spreading among humans. You'd have likely years of the virus spreading fairly slowly. You know how each progressive strain has become more capable of spreading but less deadly compared to the generation before it? One would expect to have seen strains prior to alpha which would have been significantly less infectious.
Covid, conversely, was EXTREMELY good at spreading among humans right from the start. This experience coincides with the exact category of experiments we know were funded in Wuhan, which include using directed evolution to get bat corona viruses to be able to infect human cells. They literally trained these corona viruses to be able to infect human cells.
Is this definitive? Of course not, nothing is definitive.
If you're interested in how these types of coverups play out in the real world, I recommend investigating the 1977 influenza pandemic. 700,00 people died due to a Russian lab leak and the entire scientific community kept it a secret from the public because they didn't want to embarrass Russia during the cold war. It took 30 years for the scientific community to come clean.
The 1977 flu pandemic was unique because it killed the young more than the old. This is because the old people had been through the 1950s H1N1 outbreak and had immunity.
This study from 1978 shows that the 1977 flu was genomically very similar to the H1N1 from the 1950s. This strain vanished off the face of the Earth for 20+ years and then re-emerged largely unchanged. The odds of that are basically zero. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/?page=1
This 2014 report from the center for arms control and non-proliferation reveals that relevant scientists in the late 70s knew it was a leak but hid it.
As this paper reports, the academic community didn't begin to acknowledge the lab origin until around 2008 and didn't begin to do so in an official capacity (academic papers) until 2009. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/
I think the people so eager to say it wasn’t a leak are often strawmaning that the argument is intentional leak.
I don’t care if it was a 1 in a billion accident. If it happened, it did so at a lab doing gain of function research on coronaviruses, and that was being funded by money originating in the USA. So…
I think I know how to prevent the next global event that someone is surely working on.
> I think the people so eager to say it wasn’t a leak are often strawmaning that the argument is intentional leak.
Exactly. But even an unintentional leak or accident carries with it a HUGE global political problem for the country where the pandemic appeared to originate. It could also carry with it problems for countries that may have funded such research too. Hence, denials and cover up activities start happening.
Frankly, this theory has staying power because countries and agencies have acted exactly like they are covering something up.
If "patient zero" was someone who was there in a work capacity and got infected while doing that, yes. If they were a tourist who happened to work at the lab then no.
My pet theory is that one of the people who procure live samples for the lab was infected already from their most recent trip and they went to have some food at a local Wuhan market.
Well its been years, why haven't they found the reservoir yet then? They would obviously want to since it would prove that it wasn't a lab leak, yet as far as I know they haven't claimed to have found it yet.
One argument against the cross-species transmission theory is that Chinese horseshoe bats (the reservoir for SARS and possibly SARS-CoV-2) don't really live in Wuhan. They live mainly in the south of China, see for example this map[1] from the paper "Bat Coronaviruses in China"[2]. This is where SARS was found in the wild, and where it first emerged as an epidemic[3].
It's not impossible that it would emerge in bats in Wuhan and spread to animals and then humans from there, just not very likely. Of course we know very little about the start of this pandemic so it's possible that an animal was infected in the south and transported to Wuhan, but that would mean that it happened without producing cases along the way.
We have a huge sampling error problem since SARS clearly came from Yunnan, so much of the research and characterization focus has been in the South -- but bats and bat coronaviruses are endemic to all of China. Hence the caution on relying on this type of thought-process to make sweeping conclusions.
Not true, it took them a few months. In this paper published in 2003:
> "Civet cats, a raccoon dog, and a ferret badger in an animal market in Gunagdong, China, were infected with a coronavirus identical to the one that causes SARS in humans save for an extra 29-nucleotide sequence" which demonstrated that these animals had a very close ancestral virus circulating within their populations.
You're mistaking ancestral origin with proximal origin. It took a decade to find the bat virus that infected the civet cats, but the intermediate host responsible for the spillover was found within months.
In general I am of the opinion that all species have a place in nature, but when it comes to bats, I tend to think that their especially high viral load and elevated metabolism makes them a breeding ground for pandemics and I wouldn't mind if they were eradicated. Other species can fulfill their niches in the ecosystem.
But it took months to find the intermediate host: Paper from 2003 finding the virus that spilled over into humans in an animal sampled in the market https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs.
Just like we in the US have 6 federal agencies doing separate investigations barely sharing anything and coming to different conclusions.
Despite Beijing’s absolute power over everything there, the National Standing Committee has lots of people to please too and thats just in Beijing. There are provincial governments and stuff too.
IMO also it is obvious. And that was before a friend told me that his wife, who worked with the lab director, said it was a lab leak and that the Chinese govt had ordered all the lab notes destroyed.
I agree. But I still don't think it adequately explains why the Chinese lockdown effort was so much more intense than everywhere else's. That is, unless they also know something about its function that the rest of the world doesn't know.
Depends on your goal. If you want to minimize deaths then you don't have a lot of options. If you want to maximize profit then letting people just die is cheaper, assuming you aren't counting medical expenses.
Locking people up for a year is probably going to cause many other problems that will lead to early deaths, so I don't see that as necessarily a good way of minimizing deaths. We're already seeing that Covid has disrupted many aspects of peoples' social lives, probably leading to a decrease in the birth rate, for instance, plus causing other health issues like depression.
Just letting the disease run rampant doesn't necessarily maximize profit either: if all your workers get sick and a bunch of them die, that's going to cause a huge impact on your profits, even in the relatively short term, let alone the long term when there's a labor shortage and a decrease in demand.
You would be hard pressed to find more than a handful of deaths attributed to "being in lockdown", especially when compared against the 6.5 million extra deaths from COVID.
Economists tend to see workers as replaceable cogs, so deaths aren't a major factor until it starts affecting the labor supply. To maximize income in cases like this the best strategy is to get your entire workforce sick at once, take the two weeks off, then hire enough people to replace the 5% that died so you can get back to work as fast as possible. Also, make sure to suspend all health benefits for the two weeks to make sure nobody tries to use expensive hospital stays. You probably think this sounds extreme, but it's a real strategy (apart from suspending health insurance) that some powerful people were very angry about not being able to implement due to government interference.
If you can’t understand that slowing the spread (exponential growth factor) in a pandemic is priority number 1, and can’t understand that lockdowns serve that purpose then take up knitting or pottery or something and stop commenting on pandemics.
China is a highly population dense country with incredible means of public transit, and millions of people moving back and forth every day: these factors all serve to increase the exponential spread of the virus. Slowing the rate of infection helps reduce hospital and equipment overload, gives more time to develop a vaccine, and increases each individual’s chances of survival when they do become ill.
^ If you can’t understand the above then pottery and knitting.
The This Week In Virology podcast has been talking about the lab leak concept since the early days of the pandemic, with various experts opining on the likelihood. In [1], the expert discusses how the virus itself does not seem engineered; it’s most likely a naturally created virus.
However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan, quite legitimately - and they produce good science from this work. But because this is China, if a lab accident happened, it won’t be getting reported in the media. It’s a state secret.
The Energy Department gave a low probability to their assessment, but this is still a bombshell. Imagine the legal liability for China in international courts if the evidence is solid enough for litigation.
> However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan
No it isn't. The were studying SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1.
They sequenced RaTG13 but that is too far away from SARS-CoV-2 with a thousand random mutations across its genome. And there's no evidence that they ever recovered culturable virus from RaTG13 or were able to culture it--there's a vast gap between sequencing a virus and culturing it.
We also know about their SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1 work because they published it. Before the pandemic they had no reason to keep work on RaTG13 secret.
This is a case of Schrodinger's BSL4 lab. We know they built chimeras of other viruses because they told the world about that, we know they sequenced RaTG13 because they published that sequence, but there's a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor backbone that they found, which for some reason they picked to be the backbone in a new set of experiments, which they had perfect secrecy over and nobody has ever found any evidence of it.
The obvious solution for this conundrum is that they did study it, but didn't publish it because the screw-up happened and all evidence was promptly destroyed. In a totalitarian state, the secrecy is the default mode. You can get exceptions and publish stuff, sure, but only once you asked and received permission. If you didn't - or in the period between you asking and permission being issued something happened - no evidence will be seen by anybody.
The effort required to culture virus like this is fairly large, and it requires them to keep it secret in 2019 before there was any need to keep it secret. Nobody talked about it to collaborators, no sequences were leaked out, etc.
They somehow had tighter controls than Apple developing a new iPhone, before they had any reason to.
Again, you think keeping something secret needs a reason. That's not how totalitarian state works. In such state, not keeping something secret needs a reason. Everything else is secret by default. And the standard mode of action on any disaster is to deny it, lie and hide the evidence. It's not special for pandemic, it happens every time.
Yes they absolutely have tighter controls than Apple, and the reason is they live in a totalitarian state and Apple doesn't.
It's not like the 2016 article was some kind of a spy leak. They were allowed to cooperate on things that lead to this publication - because in 2016, there was a reason to allow it - NIH grants alone would probably be a good reason. As soon as they learned about the screwup (that likely happened somewhere in 2019) all evidence of the works related to the leak that hasn't been published has been hidden or destroyed. Thus, we can't expect any publications about that work, at least not from 2019 onwards. You're fishing for some contradiction, but there's none - publications do not suggest absence of censorship, publications only suggest the censors had no problems with it being published. And indeed, they couldn't know in 2016 that their research in 2019 would lead to a massive screwup with a global consequences. If they were an open society, there would be a constant trail of evidence leading to the moment of the screwup - communications, orders, articles, chats, etc. In a totalitarian society, all these were under tight control by default - and as soon as it turned out they are dangerous - which became clear sometime in 2019, when the Chinese government learned about the possible leak - all this information, already tightly controlled by default anyway, was disappeared or at least made inaccessible to outsiders. It is possible it still exists somewhere in the dungeons of the Great Firewall - who knows. The point is this is why information control exists - to make such things possible. In an open society, this would be completely infeasible - tracking back everything connected to a certain research program and making it as if it didn't exist. In a closed, tightly controlled society - yes, plausible.
How long had they been working on either of those before publishing? You're giving the end points of the research, the person you're replying to is saying the end point wasn't reached, hence it was still secret.
See if you can determine that for yourself by e.g. reading the second paper as far as the first sentence of the second paragraph and then looking at the publication date.
I'm not interested in reading those papers, especially as what's relevant are the dates, which means the burden is on the person presenting them to get the dates right, no one else. More importantly, they were missing the point, which was my point.
Your point? I'm not sure if you had one. Next time, just post the date up instead of some snarky RTFM that doesn't even fit the thread.
Maybe we should stop supporting the study of dangerous viruses in facilities that don't maintain adequate levels of transparency.
Regardless of what actually happened in this case (FWIW I still believe a natural origin was most likely), the Chinese authorities covered up everything to do with the lab and destroyed potential evidence before a proper investigation could take place. In court cases we have a norm that evidence you destroy is treated as evidence against you, for good reason.
> In court cases we have a norm that evidence you destroy is treated as evidence against you, for good reason.
Destruction of evidence is considered only evidence of consciousness of guilt and cannot be used to prove guilt alone. The court also has to consider that an innocent person may commit destruction of evidence to avoid wrongful prosecution from situations that look damning.
Another point is that in the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2002-2004 the Chinese government acted similarly:
> Early in the epidemic, the Chinese government discouraged its press from reporting on SARS, delayed reporting to WHO, and initially did not provide information to Chinese outside Guangdong province, where the disease is believed to have originated.[19] Also, a WHO team that travelled to Beijing was not allowed to visit Guangdong province for several weeks.[20] This resulted in international criticism, which seems to have led to a change in government policy in early April.
There was no BSL4 lab in Guangzhou and they didn't sterilize the market there right away, so in that case they were able to eventually track the virus to its origins--yet the reaction of the Chinese government was basically the same.
Americans have a fairly severe problem with assuming that other nations and people's will react with transparency to the US if they have nothing to hide. This is the same problem we saw with Hussein and the way that he tried to block the weapons inspectors and it turned out by his own admission that it was due to him not wanting to appear weak in the view of Iran and Hussein was preoccupied with Iran: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/02/saddam-hussein...
I'm not making an argument regarding this instance, but to have a theory that you can't disprove really makes it not a theory and impossible to engage with.
Unfortunately, unless whoever destroyed evidence screwed up (happens all the time, security services have enough idiots and slackers), or somebody kept some evidence and then will defect, yes, it is likely we'll never have the proof. That's why they do it.
Not sure how you made this conclusion... But of course we need to look if there's new evidence - that's what I just said, that there could be new evidence, but if there won't be then we couldn't know for sure.
Because we can now say that there was any evidence we want but the totalitarian state destroyed it. We can now make any argument where the state destroying evidence fills in the gap of the theory.
The circumstances that make the theory unfalsifiable (lack of transparency/controls in Chinese biological research) are the issue here. Due to the lack of transparency we will likely never have definitive proof for the origin one way or the other.
At a minimum the US government should not be funding any biological research in places without adequate transparency/controls.
It's not, because all it would take to falsify it would be to do an exhaustive search of the lab's documentation and a comprehensive interview of lab employees.
We can't do it because of the CCP, not because of epistemological reasons.
What about the request to use gain of function research to add furin sites to coronaviruses? That seems to me the smoking gun, since this lab asked for funding to do exactly that.
It’s a bit like Jaime Meitzl (sp?) said - for the first time in history you find a unicorn (furin binding site in a coronavirus) next to a lab that asked for funding to make regular horses into unicorns. But the lab says it’s “natural origin”.
The PRRAR FCS not a known FCS prior to the pandemic so it is unlikely the lab would have genetically engineered it and they would have used something like RRXRR instead.
Other coronaviruses have an FCS and they have evolved multiple different times, independently:
The fact that we knew that adding an FCS to a virus would likely enhance its ability to produce a pandemic really isn't a smoking gun that we actually did it, because we're just studying and copying what nature is already doing (who is actually a much better geneticist than we are, with vastly greater tools).
And since you want to talk about suspicious "unicorns" how about the idea that a lab worker was infected in the lab, and then the only thing that they did was visit the wet market. They didn't infect anyone they lived with, or go to any restaurants, or go visit grandma and this Typhoid Mary/Mike has no existence outside of working in the lab and visiting the wet market. And this idea gets worse if you include more workers in WIV having supposedly been exposed.
What fits with the facts better is that they genetically engineered the virus in perfect secrecy and deliberately let it loose in the wet market, which is just insanity--nobody gains anything from doing that, but it is also impossible to argue against.
Why would it have happened only in the market? Seems to me that it’s plausible they just managed to cover up other points of origin for the pandemic in Wuhan and that the market was the first super spreading event.
If your only defense is that this is not the most commonly used way to add a FCS to coronaviruses, that seems pretty thin.
HKU4 contamination in agricultural samples in the Country that HKU4 was discovered in does not pose a particularly controversial question as to how it got there.
While it is in the same group of beta coronaviruses that MERS is in, the HKU4 virus was first found in Kowloon and the "HK" stands for "Hong Kong" (although it would be a mistake to assume that says much more than where it was found and not what its range is throughout China)
And coronaviruses undergo recombination (XBB.1.5 is a recombinant which is all over the news) and that produces "Chimeric" viruses in nature. Finding evidence of "gene splicing" in samples and determining it must be humans ignores the fact that nature does it better than we do, and really points at how politically biased that article is.
They want you to believe that WIV imported MERS-like viruses from Saudi Arabia and were fucking around with them in the lab, and not that those viruses are found all over China naturally and nature fucks around them constantly in much higher volume than we can.
Did you notice the bit where it's a cDNA clone of an RNA virus and do you understand the implications of that?
This is an engineering product.
As for politics, sure there is a lot of that going around but you can verify this finding yourself with freely available software using the published sequences.
I don't think much of the "takedown" so far. Interested to discuss specifics if I'm not getting something.
Cadhla (who works for EcoHealth alliance BTW) points out that it was Wuhan University who registered the rice sequence bioproject PRJNA601977 - which is not hugely relevant since the source of the contamination could be from anywhere (that happened to have a HKU4 reverse genetics system...).
Andreas points to incomplete sequence coverage (not unusual in a contamination scenario) and claims it might be "not dangerous work" because the sequence gap leaves open the possibility that the missing bit was non-functional. True but weak. It's 33 NTs of highly conserved sequence, what does he really think was in that gap? I know what Fat Tony would say.
Her claim that a reverse genetics systems for HKU4-like COVs was previously disclosed seems weird since AFAIK it was this team that had previously disclosed it. It's possible I am not understanding what she is saying as it makes no sense to me.
Earlier in the pandemic I read a report talking about the possibility of the virus being something they sampled, and that it leaked when they accessed the sample presumably to start sequencing/analyzing it.
The theory was that it was a virus they'd have sampled from immunocompromised miners working in the same caves that the bats with the most closely related viruses inhabit. They had some references to a report with something like that happening some time prior.
It's so far the only theory I've read that seems to match the evidence.
The evidence doesn't seem to indicate that it was engineered, or that it was a product of gain of function research on animals. I think there would have been more solid evidence pointing in that direction by now, if that was the case. They would have published something related to it, or non-Chinese researchers connected to the lab would have known something.
Yet there's no evidence of any related animal resorvoir, and the virus was very well adapted to humans from the very start. And everything points to the virus passing through the lab somehow. Those things put together seems to point at them having sampled a virus that already made the jump to humans, and that somehow during the sampling, or retrieving the sample from storage, the virus escaped.
There's many thousands more contact between bats and humans involved in mining (literally how RaTG13 and the Mojiang mine, bat guano collection for farming and just tourism:
There's a lot of economic activity in China that is close to bat habitats and there's evidence that cross reactivity to sarbecoviruses exists in a significant amount in rural china.
The researchers collecting samples were a very tiny slice of the human-to-bat-virus exposure that is going on in China all the time.
And we know that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't last very long on surfaces, it isn't transmitted by fomites. It needs to be aerosolized and breathed in. It isn't likely that the researchers were collecting live viable virus in the samples that they brought back to the lab. What they were sequencing was overwhelmingly going to be "dead" mRNA.
The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened. They didn't start spreading it around their apartment building, they didn't infect people in restaurants, didn't infect elderly relatives who wound up in the hospital, etc.
It makes "more" sense that they deliberately genetically engineered the virus and released it in the wet market entirely on purpose.
> The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened.
Except that SARS-CoV-2's epidemiological dynamics are well-known to be overdispersed? Almost all lineages die out, and a few explode due to repeated super-spreader events. It's therefore unlikely that the first cluster will be discovered at the site of introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 was presumably first introduced to other continents at airports and seaports; but that's not where the first clusters were found.
Explain the coincidence of why it happened to be in a wet market and not a restaurant or other gathering where people congregate. Just happened to be the one place to make it look exactly like zoonosis and extraordinarily similar to SARS-1.
If you think SARS-CoV-2 arose naturally in the same city as the world's biggest laboratory collection of sarbecoviruses (which I do agree is possible), then you must agree that weird coincidences do happen sometimes? A wet market is crowded and poorly-ventilated, so it's a great place for a respiratory virus to spread, regardless of how it got introduced.
There's also the question of ascertainment bias, whether cases were found in the wet market simply because that's where the authorities looked. I assume you've seen those endless debates, which seem basically unresolvable to me given the limited information available.
The pandemic happening in the same city as WIV isn't really that much of a coincidence. The virus needed a large densely packed city to really take off. Wuhan is the biggest city in central China. The catchment area around Wuhan for where a virus would follow the animal trade to the city is probably large. Wuhan is also a good candidate for a centrally located lab. That only seems like a 5-10% low probability chance, which happens (it is also the second time it happened in China and the first time looked like this one, only it hit Guangzhou where there was no lab).
The infected lab worker causing exactly one massive superspreading event in the wet market without infecting anyone else, making it look exactly like zoonotic spillover, without leaving any other contacts around Wuhan is much less believable to me. That sounds like a thousand to one odds or much worse.
> The infected lab worker causing exactly one massive superspreading event in the wet market without infecting anyone else,
That's indeed unlikely, but it's a strawman. As I've noted repeatedly above, most lineages die out. If the introduction into humans occurred outside the market (naturally or otherwise), then it's quite likely that patient infected others outside the market; those lineages just died out. I remember Trevor Bedford showing genomic evidence of all the failed introductions into Seattle before the spread finally went exponential, early in the pandemic.
Pekar et al. is basically a more sophisticated version of your argument, with numerical models of the phylogenetic and epidemiological dynamics. I don't think it's convincing (since they chose their power law pretty arbitrarily), but at least they acknowledge and purport to model that stochasticity.
If you are not a native English speaker, you may want to know that you are pretty drastically misreading parents comment. He is not saying "I know this specific virus is present" but "the lab studied SARS related coronaviruses" which you in fact seem to agree with.
they collected dozens if not hundreds of samples of various viruses. not all the work gets published. in fact majority of scientific effort doesn't get published. experiments either don't work or you don't get interesting results etc... doubly so if a global pandemic started before you were done with your current project
The Wuhan institute was celebrated as an improvement over the facilities at which dangerous viruses had previously been studied in China. The 2004 SARS outbreak originated in a lab: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/
That WaPo article isn't about the quality of research at the WIV, it's an attempted (failed) debunking of the "fringe theory" that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab. It has nothing to say on what good science they produced, perhaps because there wasn't any. Virology appears to spend its time fiddling with viruses based on the claim that doing so will help create vaccines, except, their work doesn't seem to have contributed to any vaccine development.
This is news to me. The article you referenced opens by saying [0]:
> The World Health Organization has confirmed that breaches of safety procedures on at least two occasions at one of Beijing's top virology laboratories were the probable cause of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) there last month, which infected nine people, one of whom died.
This seems to be saying they traced the illness in nine people there at the lab back to two leaks at the lab, not that the entire disease outbreak originated in a lab.
There a lot of other studies, referenced in this wikipedia article [1], which explain that the first SARS virus originated in bats:
> Phylogenetic analysis of these viruses indicated a high probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and spread to humans either directly or through animals held in Chinese markets.
> In 2004, scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention of the University of Hong Kong and the Guangzhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention established a genetic link between the SARS coronavirus appearing in civets and humans, confirming claims that the virus might have transmitted from the animal species to humans.
In the last 15 years people have fallen ill of the plague, cowpox, meningococcus, h5n1, anthrax, and zika due to lab leaks in the Unites States [2]. These are just the leaks where people got sick and/or died, all lab workers I believe. There were others affecting animals, and others where nobody got sick. None of that means these labs originated these diseases. The origin of a disease is separate from a localized outbreak.
Sometimes, answers are more clear when questions are more clear.
“Why is the US waiting to secure a convincing case that produces useful diplomatic leverage instead of indulging public speculation by making an early call that wastes the opportunity?”
There’s a lot to lose by making a case that other nations can dismiss, and a lot to gain by having a case that they can’t. If there was a culpable lab leak, the game comes down to China making it easy for its partners to plausibly deny while others try to collect thorough enough evidence that they can’t. The tidbits that feed conspiracy circles might be 100% right and very convincing to individuals, but are too thin to put world leaders on the spot. For now.
Here's a 2015 paper on successful gain of function work done at the University of North Carolina under the leadership of Ralph Baric. The work involved characterizing a synthetically constructed chimeric virus comprising a SARS-CoV backbone and a bat SARS virus spike.
It received special permission to continue despite a prohibition on gain-of-function research (Refer to the section: Biosafety and Security).[0]
Quoting:
Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.
And from the footnote describing author contributions:
[SHI Zhengli] provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids
As everyone knows by now, Shi is the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[1]
It's pretty clear that Shi subsequently continued that gain-of-function work at Wuhan.
My question is, what is the correlation between the spike sequence Shi supplied
for the 2015 paper and that of the early variants of SARS-CoV-2?
There is also a 2013 paper, written by Peter Dazak and Shi Zhengli, "Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor".[2] Peter Daszak has been centrally involved in the US funding of the Wuhan Institute, in his capacity as president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York.[3]
"a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV itself."
You're commenting on a report that the (US Government's) DoE is saying it was lab leaked, so... the US isn't actively supporting any cover up, or they're doing a profoundly terrible job.
Just to clarify, because the nuance is getting lost, they are not suggesting it was lab made. A naturally occurring virus can be studied and then accidentally leaked from a lab.
But yes, there's no indication that the US is trying to cover anything up. And China is secretive about all sorts of things, they're an authoritarian government.
American Virologists feared that their field would be blamed for the pandemic, and used motivated reasoning to convince themselves that the field could not be responsible for the pandemic. And the US was gripped by Trumpism, so anything in any way connected to Trump automatically became verboten.
Some of the leading voices in opposition to the lab leak hypothesis such as Peter Daszak had close academic connections (collaboration, grants etc.) with the BSL4 lab in Wuhan.
Maybe they don't have enough evidence to support the lab leak hypothesis. Or maybe they want to prevent China from supplying weapons to Russia for the time being and they're playing the cautios stance while they don't have enough evidence. We will find out eventually in five to ten years or so. The lab leak hypothesis is quite probable.
As a thought experiment, who would have access to the most information in the world outside of the sitting POTUS? The richest man in the world? Surely Trump of all people would be the most qualified to make such a claim.
Trump was... not an ordinary president. In particular, he didn't pay very much attention to his briefings. He may have had access to the information, but there's less indication that he used that access, and plenty of indication that he frequently shot his mouth of contrary to the facts. Whether he did so in this case is not proven, but the parent's argument doesn't work for the particular president in question.
While he may have been less than attentive to these things, he would use every bit of information that was available to him to advance his agenda and he had people around him who read/in those briefings who knew and support his agenda. Certainly his agenda pre-pandemic as it related to China was pretty much an economic war for lack of a better description.
If your intention is to motivate Americans away from Chinese products, what better way to do it then to use a scary virus that seemed to emerge from China to that end.
I don't think Trump is patient enough to sit and read. It's more likely he wanted people to tell him what's important that he needs to know about.
I'm speculating of course but if you think about it, can you imagine him sitting patiently reading documents first thing in the morning? He would get bored so quickly he would end up on twitter to complain or gloat.
Everybody remembers it. Some try to crimestop it, but everybody knows it happened. The right thing would be to admit the screw up, apologize to people who were unjustifiably accused and suppressed, and try to do better next time. But I don't see much readiness to do this, unfortunately.
Because what good does it do to actually dealing with the outbreak? I assume the government just made a decision that it was politically less desirable to do for a number of reasons. Mainly, probably the continuing attempts at thawing of relations with China.
If China is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again. Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to the world
The genie is more or less out of the bottle on that one. If it is a lab leak there is no stopping it from happening again and China is not doing anything special. There are hundreds of these labs all over the world, they have containment breaches all the time [1], and given the way of international politics it is effectively impossible to shut them all down. Probably undesirable as well given that labs like those are the reason we had the medical knowledge to create a vaccine.
I strongly disagree that they are not doing anything special. They are literally going out into remote bat caves and harvesting coronaviruses and bringing them into large population centers to study.
What they were doing was downplaying the severity of the problem until it was sufficiently widespread that it was not just a China problem. I'm not saying that was the plan from the start, but it definitely morphed into that.
If USA is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again. Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to the world
The money for WIV risky reasearch mostly came from the USA.
I actually completely agree. We SHOULD know the true origin and causes; I just have zero faith anyone in the US will put pressure on China or accuse them publicly. That was more the gist of what I was getting at.
No idea if it's possible to still find the source, but the doctor of patient zero also got infected (and died/"disappeared" afterwards like her boss at the wuhan hospital).
Patient zero was a virologist that seems to have been censored off the Chinese internet afterwards, and I can't find the links anymore :-/
In the beginning of sars-cov-2 breakout there was an article shared on wechat that later got censored in varying degrees of translations/"hacks" to avoid censorships, they wrote it in emojis and stuff to trick the censorship algorithm. All of them were referencing Ai Fen's video and photo of the diagnostics report of patient zero that she recorded and spread on WeChat to warn others.
Maybe someone else has an archive link or screenshots or anything. Impossible to google the source due to the apparent emoji noise.
No, Li was a former study colleague of the boss of the Wuhan hospital and the leader of the research lab, and received the information about it in the afternoon the same day.
He got popular with the video that he recorded, but it did not contain the photo of the medical report of patient zero.
I wonder if ChatGPT was trained on that data before it was censored? I guess it would be impossible to go backwards from ChatGPT output to the data used to generate it.
Nothing seems certain at this point, but, let’s say the pandemic was actually caused by a lab leak. That’ll mean the world was brought to an economic standstill and millions of people died because of the errors and carelessness of some people…will there be consequences? What will be the assurance that such deadly mistake won’t occur again?
If it was actually a lab leak, then it’ll definitely rank as the most costly and fatal mistake in the 21st Century. I can hardly wrap my head around it; human error causing damage on a mythical scale. Scary stuff.
The only reason to not say it was a lab leak is to avoid embarrassing those responsible, China first and America second.
But little by little people will start accepting that.
What should the consequences be? At the very least a tightening of the controls around labs doing bio research. Of course, this amounts to nothing if someone is allowed to outsource research to labs in countries that don't follow the stringent procedures. So, anybody who does such outsourcing shares the full responsibility if things go wrong.
What about Covid itself? China and America need to provide reparations. How much? Clearly in the trillions, maybe double digit trillions.
How about those who obstructed the investigations? I think they should face justice, and it's not unreasonable to expect that some would go to prison for their obstructions.
Both in China and America? For sure in America, where the arm of justice has a long reach. In China, if Xi wants a well functioning Party, yes, he should sent those who obstructed to jail, for if he tolerates that, his Party will go in decay.
The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years. Allow the development of vaccines for extant viruses, but completely ban all Dr Frankenstein activities with viruses. No more "invent a virus in a lab to beat nature to the punch" horse shit, with is flagrant weapons development under the cover of civilian research. As soon as the virus started circulating through the population, did these researchers share their knowledge and help develop a vaccine? No, they buried their involvement and covered up everything they knew. They were no help at all, and never intended to be. Burn their books which describe how it is done, and silence the people who already understand it with the threat of criminal imprisonment for sharing their knowledge. Encourage major religions to amend their rules with strong taboos against this research, and institute harsh economic sanctions against any nation that doesn't participate in this ban.
Does this seem extreme? It shouldn't. This field of research has the power to kill billions and no demonstrable upside. It is even more dangerous than nuclear weapons; because at least a technician at a nuclear weapon production facility would be hard pressed to release his work on the global public of his own initiative. Smuggling a virus out of any lab is trivial, all it takes is a single madman's willingness to sacrifice himself as patient zero.
We're the villagers in an "evil wizard" scenario. The wizards have been meddling in dangerous forces beyond the understanding of common people, and it's getting people killed. The solution is to storm the wizard's tower and throw the wizards off the top of it.
> The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years.
This kind of sloppy hyperbole is tremendously damaging, feeding the false narrative that we must choose between the benefits of modern virology--smallpox wasn't eradicated until 1977!--and the catastrophic risks of experiments on novel potential pandemic pathogens.
Almost all modern virological research involves either existing pathogens already present in humans, or novel pathogens in systems incapable of replicating in humans. The WIV's research was a narrow exception, and one that was controversial long before this pandemic. For example, here's David Relman asking Ralph Baric a question about those risks, back in 2014:
That narrow area carries almost all the risk of a catastrophic research accident, and has yet to deliver any significant benefit. It could be banned with minimal impact on almost all modern virological research. That narrow regulation is what we need, and there are people (like the new NGO Protect Our Future) working to draft and enact it. Your conflation between modern virology in aggregate and that narrow area doesn't help them, and I hope you will stop.
Hackernews now advocating for burning books, wow. This is the end result in allowing political ragebait threads instead of focusing on tech and startups.
That's as dense as claiming we should punish the Cambridge Analytica incident by reverting the entire humanity's computing technology by a century. There are numerous perspectives in which you and I are the evil wizards simply because we're in this move-fast-and-break-things industry. Don't burn the field just to punish a few.
No one is going to pay any significant reparations for a couple.
1. Too many first world countries do not want to open up that can of worms because it might come back to bite them in the ass over the various things they have inflicted environmentally on the rest of the world.
The US and Europe for example are responsible for the overwhelming majority of greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere--yes some other countries are now emitting comparable amounts to current US/EU emissions, but because CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years the US/EU emissions from the past 200 years still massively dominate and will for a long time.
2. Calculating the reparations amount due to a given country would require an analysis of how much of their losses were due to their poor handling of COVID. There's too much risk that such analysis could conclude for many countries that their net losses were way higher than they would have been had the country handled it better.
If you suffer $X loss but then only get say 1/10 $X in reparations because that analysis concluded that 90% of your loss could have been avoided if you'd handled it better, your citizens aren't going to be happy their government got the 1/10 $X in reparations. No, your citizens are going to be annoyed their government botched things making COVID 10 times worse than it had to be.
We need treaties tightly regulating all biolabs around the world. Any countries not agreeing with the treaties should be blacklisted from entering entering or exiting countries that are part of the treaty, perhaps even restricting trade as well.
The decontamination protocols and entry / exit procedures for every biolab should be unified, worldwide, with strict and regular third-party circular auditing around the world. This allows labs to maintain their secrets; only the perimeter / filter are subject to this.
That would be the sensible course of action as a matter of Earth defense.
America founded research at the Wuhan lab [1], and more precisely exactly the research that lead to the virus outbreak.
EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak have been working with Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology], for more than 15 years. Since 2014, an NIH grant has funded EcoHealth’s research in China, which involves collecting faeces and other samples from bats, and blood samples from people at risk of infection from bat-origin viruses. Scientific studies suggest that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus most likely originated in bats, and research on the topic could be crucial to identifying other viruses that might cause future pandemics. The WIV is a subrecipient on the grant.
It would be very fortunate if American scientists and people in power are involved. At least then there is some hope of actually finding out what happened and seeking justice.
> That’ll mean the world was brought to an economic standstill and millions of people died because of the errors and carelessness of some people…will there be consequences? What will be the assurance that such deadly mistake won’t occur again?
If history is any indicator, no, and there isn't any.
But if you're interested in establishing precedent for reckless behaviour damaging the world economy, and the health of millions of people, I understand that would open the developed world to a mountain of liability in the arena of climate change.
There's a reasonably high chance that SARS-2 covid virus leads to a minor or moderate decrease in average lifespan (due to the effects on the vascular system and wreacking havoc on all sorts of organs) and that it will continue to circulate in humanity forever.
If that's the case it'll just slowly outscale any singular event like the Iraq War over multiple human generations of deaths and damage.
Based on what exactly? According to Wikipedia, the Iraq War produced a total death count of 25,071 and a total wounded count of 117,961. Also according to Wikipedia COVID-19 has produced a death count of 6,868,964 and an infection count of 674,809,997.
I'm all for complaining about US tactics, but it's 100% incorrect to try and claim that the Iraq War was "worse" than COVID-19.
Iraq only produced a death count of 25k? Do Iraqis not count?
Also almost all of the violence post war should be somewhat attributable to the invasion; we broke the basket to secure oil rights (and some argue to also keep the petrodollar as the world reserve currency)
The cost was way more than the cherry-picked stats you present
You seem to assume no Iraqis were killed, which is pretty odd.
In "costly and fatal", I also include that the Iraq War arguably marks the end of the US as the world's only superpower. Both in terms of cost and moral status, it was a huge abdication of status.
> What will be the assurance that such deadly mistake won’t occur again?
Whatever assurances you want will be a fantasy.
There has never been accountability among the elite class and there won't be, because whatever mistakes they make only affect everybody else.
It's like a video game - imagine the game characters you 'mistreat' asking what consequences you will be facing. You'd cackle at game designers having thought of such an amusing feature and proceed to go right back to doing as you please.
What’s even more difficult to wrap your head around should be the poor response to the pandemic; the lack of regard for the vulnerable (citizens) and the poor (nations).
>millions of people died because of the errors and carelessness of some people…
Which people? Should a lab tech in China receive consequences because religious people in America believed in the promises of their pastor and went to church and were sickened?
Let me play the game. If covid was caused by a lab leak, I think the right question to ask is: who benefits (did benefit) by the leak? And remember that number of dead people is something that governments don’t care about (i.e., governments easily go into war every now and then: it’s clear they couldn’t care less about civilians).
Even if we accepted the idea that "governments don't care", it's still made up of people that act out of self interest. How would they protect themselves and their loved ones from the same fate that they so callously cast upon the rest of us? I think Hanlon's Razor applies:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect"
> How would they protect themselves and their loved ones from the same fate that they so callously cast upon the rest of us?
A good question, but worth noting that they do seem to have in fact done so. I struggle to think of a single-higher up of any significance who was felled by SARS-CoV-2, despite the fact so many of them are octogenarians. Colin Powell maybe, but his blood cancer was clearly the more proximate cause of his death. A few in Iran, but, well.
The worlds billionaires, combined, made more money in 2020-2022 than the previous 20 years combined. When there’s that much money involved, one must be a little suspicious.
I dunno actually, who has actually been arguing that it couldn’t be a lab leak? I’ve generally seen people arguing the position: there’s no evidence for it having been a leak. This second hand story about a low-confidence classified report doesn’t push me much in either direction. It is possible, though.
What do we do if it leaked? Dangerous thing are handled in labs. We should double check the handling protocols based on the unknown possibility that it was a leak, just to be safe. I bet there are more dangerous things than COVID in all sorts of labs.
The lab leak hypothesis makes the most sense. The lab in Wuhan which researches coronaviruses conducts experiences on animals, including bats. Like other labs, there are dedicated personnel for hydrating and feeding the experimental animals. Notably, there are "wet markets" in Wuhan where live animals are sold, including bats, which harbor coronaviruses. Someone who is working in the facility in charge of maintenance of experimental animals has a choice of either sacrificing the animals as per protocol, or selling them to a wet market to make extra money. The most likely scenario was that someone sold the animal, most likely a bat, to a wet market, which happened to contain a virulent coronavirus strain that then infected humans.
Did I just read this correctly? “janitor steals a highly modified and virulent bat and sells it for $10 in a wet market”
Why reach so hard to link this to a Wuhan wet market vs a generic leak? They didn’t sell bats at the market as far as I have read, and what’s the difference? Lab leak is a lab leak.
Indeed, you don't need such a complicated theory. 3 doctors researching a coronavirus end up in a regional hospital, but before they get ID'd with a virus they interact with others in the local community helping it quietly spread among people with stronger immune systems.
It's a 45min drive between the Hunan market <> WIV building:
Not necessarily. If you look at the nature of superspreading events, it's quite often confined to a single site as opposed to infecting people they meet as they travel. In addition, most of the transmission comes from a minority of infected people, look up "overdispersion".
I don't understand the mental gymnastics to discredit the lab leak hypothesis. The fact that the lab and epicenter of the virus are in the same geographic area make it the likely scenario and warrants the most investigation. The efforts to look past this seem artificial.
A big problem was that Trump was into this theory early on: the Chinese virus, from Wuhan. Let's time travel back to May of 2020 for example: "Trump claims to have evidence coronavirus started in Chinese lab but offers no details" [1].
According to the Swamp, Trump cannot be right about anything ever, therefore the virus' origin is unknown and don't call it the Chinese flu because that's racist - even if the early Chinese accounts of the disease literally called it the "Wuhan pneumonia". This became Woke dogma the minute Trump said the opposite.
This whole thing has been disgusting and if we were a serious society thousands in leadership positions would have been fired or resigned in disgrace. Instead, Hollywood made fan films about people who quite easily fit the definition of having committed crimes against humanity, Tedros still has a job, and the WHO won't see any reform - it will see a major expansion of its power. I fear for the next pandemic, because if it's anything deadlier than COVID it might legitimately end civilization given the amount of incompetence we've now entrenched into our civilizational safeguards.
I think this is the problem. Many are claiming a lab leak is the most likely / probable simply because of the proximity of the lab. We should investigate absolutely, but just saying the lab is there so a leak is the most likely doesn’t make sense.
> I don't understand the mental gymnastics to discredit the lab leak hypothesis.
I’m not sure I beleive in Dead Internet Theory so much as I believe in some form of unknowing indoctrination theory.
That if you take the people with these hardline defensive of authority opinions away from the internet for a bit, explain a new event to them, when they get back on the internet, none of the people they normally deal with have the same opinion of what they learned about “offline” at first.
I think we unintentionally have created a mind control device.
You don't need to "discredit" the hypothesis very much, because it shouldn't have any real "credit" to begin with. The only evidence for it at all seems to be the proximity of the Wuhan lab to the first known outbreak, plus the fact that 3 researchers got sick in November (i.e. flu season) with some unknown virus. If you ask me, that plus $5 might buy you a cup of coffee.
it's a hell of coincidence that out of all chinese cities the outbreak started in the one city housing the premiere institute dedicated to researching coronaviruses... so there is no smoking gun evidence, but it's a reasonable hypothesis... anyway, no one apart from the chinese ministry of state security will ever know for sure one way or another
This is definitely the most sensible explanation, since it's quite well known that Wuhan is the most important transportation hub in China since even before the lab was a distant dream in some postdoc's imagination.
And China does have the world's largest annual human migration, in the Spring Festival.
If I was in the planning department at whichever ministry that made the final decision on placement, putting the most prestigious and well funded lab studying dangerous human transmissible viruses at the world's most likely place to originate such a virus is an obvious choice.
i.e. during a few weeks every year Wuhan could easily be 10x more likely to be ground zero then any other city ever.
So you discredit an incredibly likely theory that a rapidly spreading epidemic from an origin city in a totalitarian state with a highly specific lab focusing on coronaviruses, based on lack of credit?
It's called "lack of available evidence." You can't use the fact that there isn't evidence of a thing happening in order to give the theory weight. When the evidence comes out, if it exists, and if it ever does come out for general consumption, then my opinion is subject to change.
Why not just say it came from North Korea? There's just about as much publicly available evidence for that as there is that it came from a lab leak in China.
> You can't use the fact that there isn't evidence of a thing happening in order to give the theory weight
I can and I will, because of the fact that there is some evidence that the Chinese Government made efforts to hide evidence around Covid 19’s origins and their history regarding uncomfortable truths.
You can not argue in good faith on grounds of evidence or no evidence if not all parties are playing open and fair. A totalitarian Government with an overarching system of controlling it‘s population and information is certainly not supporting good scientific research and discovery.
> it’s unreasonable to assume it’s all because a freak mutation with some bats.
I don't think this holds. Such freak mutations happen all the time.
Note that this doesn't discredit lab leak either. It's entirely possible they were testing a new, entirely natural strain they found in some weird cave somewhere. And because that lab had terrible safety protocols (which has been documented extensively), possibly some got out.
It's not really possible to rule out or confirm the lab leak hypothesis without inside information that we are unlikely to ever get. Other than as vague "intelligence report says this", which you can hardly trust.
Your claims:
- The true origin of COVID-19 is known and being kept a secret [citation needed]
- It’s unreasonable to assume a pandemic can be caused by a natural occurring genetic mutation [citation needed]
- Global knowledge that the virus came from a Chinese lab (accidentally? intentionally?) would cause a world war [citation needed]
75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. How many of those do we have start to finish routes from animals to humans? And if we don't have that route, how many of those are we suspecting of being lab leaks?
If they wrote in their conclusion that it was "low confidence" I think they have good reason for saying that.
> 75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. How many of those do we have start to finish routes from animals to humans? And if we don't have that route, how many of those are we suspecting of being lab leaks?
None, as far as I know. Nor should it be particularly surprising that no animal origin for COVID-19 has yet been found. The animal origin for SARS was only discovered in 2017: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 The first outbreak was in 2002. We're less than 4 years away from the first known outbreak of COVID-19, so dismissing a wild animal origin at this point is extremely premature at best.
> On each visit, vendors were asked what species they had sold over the preceding month and in what numbers, along with the prices (US$1:RMB¥6.759) and origin of these goods (wild caught or captive bred/ farmed).
It might be true that no bats were sold in Wuhan wet markets, but this methodology doesn't seem the slightest bit credible.
Imagine if you were selling bats (is that legal in China?) from a likely illegal source (probably illegal in China?). Would you give honest information about the animals you were selling, particularly knowing how criminals can be treated in China?
You might as well ask suspected drug dealers how much crack they're selling in schools: you'll get the same quality of answer.
I am not a lawyer from China and I doubt many posters here are either.
When you have imperfect information, trying to understand a complicated world can never be perfect, but we all still do that anyway because we have to. There's no other way to reason about the world because we're always going to have imperfect information about so many topics.
But I can use my limited knowledge of China, and a reasonable understanding of human nature, to understand that the polling methodology seems unlikely to yield trustworthy results.
Until proven otherwise, I think it is a perfectly reasonable to think that people in China who might deal in some quasi-legal trades wouldn't be perfectly honest in a poll due to concerns about what might happen to them if they admit to something that might be seen as illegal.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop. You can't abuse HN like this, regardless of how stupid someone else's theory is or you feel it is.
Release a plague you can’t control through the wet market next to your virology lab, knowing that it will spread among your own people and those of your allies first, and then also probably circle back, hoping that it will be worse for the other guys, sure (somehow) that the war that you started out of nowhere is to your own net benefit.
I doubt it. It was almost immediately clear that the world’s reliance on China for some things was a problem. I think this was a pretty clear outcome, because before COVID there were people already harping on that single point of failure.
This is going to hurt China’s long term influence. Countries are diversifying their strategic supply chains, on shoring capacity for thinks like chip fabs. This weakens China’s geopolitical clout because they won’t be able to control the bottleneck.
Note:
Wuhan was closed to interprovincial traffic very early on. The International Airport, however, was left open.
There's a hanful of ways you can look at that:
Wuhan International couldn't be closed without consent from Beijing.
Beijing didn't grant it because
A) Poor information propagation
Or
B) Someone made a weighty geopolitical decision that in order to best serve China's interests, it was time to make this everyone's problem, leaving the International Airport open as a result.
Or
C) some combo of the two.
I don't know your particular balance in regards to the actual Overton Window as extended to humanity as a whole, but I damn well know where it registers on mine.
Every country understands the concept of Quarantine. There would not have been even a blink of an eye within diplomatic channels. At least I don't think so. It also doesn't jibe with the tight lipped behavior of the Chinese Government, and the iron fist they dropped on their academic establishment that under no circumstances were virological materials to be widely published without Party approval.
The clamp down on information exchange does not strike me as the actions of a group with everyone else's best interests in mind. And given that we have hitherto been pretty chill with China on the whole, I really think if they had gone "screw it, international travel lockdown"; you'd have seen materials and humanitarian relief being flown in in order to help out with citizens stranded overseas. We may not even be having this conversation, because to be frank, how China did decide to react just doesn't make any sense except in the context of someone with something to hide.
In my opinion, the simplest explanation of this is: a worker at the Wuhan facility was accidentally infected (mistakes happen) and it was able to spread. It was not intentional.
An intentional leak would be an attack. I don’t recall that being on the table during the early part of the pandemic. I’m sure there was a least one person suggesting it but I recall the lab leak theory being the most ridiculed was some kind of accident or mistake at the lab resulting in an infected worker. …probably asymptomatic to boot.
It’s so fascinating to me to see someone formulate a hypothesis based on nothing “I think they did[purposely leak a global pandemic-causing virus]”, and then immediately turn around and relish in China’s failure at the thing you claimed they did. Like, do I do this too, and I’m just not aware of it?
I still don't understand how in 2020 people were branded as racist sinophobes for saying that the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, probably originated from the coronavirus research lab in Wuhan. I know suspicion isn't fact, but that should have always been the leading theory to be disproved. Instead, IIRC Twitter and FB were flagging any post that said "lab leak."
> I know suspicion isn't fact, but that should have always been the leading theory to be disproved
The leading theory should be the thing that has never happened before (lab leak causes epidemic or pandemic) instead of the thing that has happened dozens of times before (animal virus jumps to humans and causes epidemic or pandemic)?
That is the nature of a "dog whistle" - it has a legitimate meaning, and some people use the legitimate meaning. That legitimacy gives malicious people plausible deniability. Social media sites cannot tell the difference, and quite often it's very hard for people to tell the difference as well. Social media sprays weed killer on all the discussions because they don't want their app covered in weeds; not having flowers is too bad, but weeds are worse (not my personal view).
Absent of other information, why is this the most probably explanation? It’s possible sure, but the best we could’ve said, especially back then is we don’t know. Viruses from animals jump to humans all the time, and have caused other outbreaks before many times, why is this one special?
There was very clearly something exceptional about it, since we shut down much of the world for a year.
> Absent of other information, why is this the most probably explanation?
Again, the simple fact that the most severe viral outbreak in decades originated near a research facility for that same kind of virus, was reason enough to push lab-leak to the top of valid theories.
Because we had a racist president who said stuff like "China virus" in a stupid and demeaning way--i.e. what may have been a valid and reasonable argument or position had its credibility ruined by being taken up by Trump and his ilk for their own ends.
Naming something by its origin it's not racist. The tone you're talking about is a completely subjective statement, and it has no place in a serious discussion.
Using that name should've never been controversial and making it controversial was creating drama where there was none. The fact that people are still hurt about Trump saying that years ago shows how unprepared we are to have a discussion about anything.
He also used "Kung Flu." Come on, anyone with a brainstem could see he was promoting anti-Asian sentiment and did nothing to denounce anti-Asian hate crimes at home.
This just willfully tone deaf as to what was going on and being implied then. The other component of it was this kind of "blame China" attitude he was trying to engender to deflect blame, and that's another reason why the theory never caught on.
(Also to be clear, it's not even that the China stuff made him racist; he clearly established himself as a racist, and then he said that stuff, which I agree wasn't necessarily racist. But of course, he wasn't speaking in a vacuum, he was speaking in the context of himself and his whole presidency, which led everyone to naturally assume the worst of it.)
You really like using that word, racist. The problem is that's just your opinion. But you seem to be heavily focused on it. I think this is more of a you problem.
News companies and social media content moderators, who dislike Trump and overwhelmingly donated to his opponent, decided that the lab leak was not credible.
I mean, indirectly defending China by completely discrediting and demonizing any discussion the origins of a life-changing pandemic... to own Trump? is just... a bit pathetic honestly. It ironically completely ruins the credibility of those who were so keen to completely stonewall a super important issue just because they are so drunk on partisanship that Trunp being right isn't even a possibility. Peak Blue MAGA
The timing of this is interesting, given that China is now considering giving weapons to Russia for use in Ukraine.
It seemed that from 2020 until recently, the intelligence community was trying to lower tensions with China. That's shifted now with China's increasing support Russia's war in Ukraine and China's increasing pressure in Taiwan.
It's now in the US's interests to try and isolate China geopolitically. So, we're shooting down balloons and blaming them for Covid, rather than turning a blind eye.
I don't think it's against US interests for China to sell weapons to Russia.
Post-WW2, the traditional way in which powerful nation states test their conventional (non-nuclear) capabilities has been through proxy warfare. The US would probably love it if China sold some of their weapons to Russia, so that US/NATO equipment can be tested against it. Conversely, the Chinese would probably not mind testing their "on paper" capabilities "in the field". The caveat here being that the US can probably upgrade/adapt to whatever is learned about Chinese equipment.
In other words, there is no substitute for actual operational experience, and both sides benefit from selling weapons to the various parties in Ukraine, in order to get said experience.
How would the US fare if China cut off exports? Seems like it would at best be extremely disruptive. So how much leverage does US really have to "isolate" China?
There has been SO much lost faith in media and authorities because of the coverage, laws and regulations re this, it's so so bad... People not vaccinating their young children with vaccines we know to work and have no side effects for 30+ years.
Locking young children inside for years and stumping their social growth. Or teenagers and adults too, leading to unmeasurable mental health problems.
Agree, now try and reason that there are a TON of people that have been through the last three years and haven’t come out even a tiny bit more skeptical of governments, media, and authorities.
Without meaning to take a position either way, as a non-American, why does the Energy Department have a position on this?
I’m aware that the Energy Department has sone degree of responsibility for the US nuclear arsenal, but even taking that into account, it seems out of scope.
Firstly, the DOE has expertise in areas such as biosecurity, biodefense, and biological threat reduction, and is responsible for managing national laboratories and supporting research in various scientific fields.
Just one example of this is the HAMMER facility at Hanford, WA, where DOE can train people to deal with all manner of disasters. https://hammer.hanford.gov/
Given the potential for a laboratory-originating virus to pose a significant threat to national security, the DOE may be interested in studying the origins of SARS-CoV-2 to better understand the risks associated with biosecurity and to inform its efforts to prevent and respond to biological threats.
Secondly, the DOE has collaborated with other agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in conducting research related to COVID-19. The origins of SARS-CoV-2 are an important aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic and understanding its origins can inform public health responses and the development of treatments and vaccines.
Finally, the DOE has a stake in global scientific cooperation and the international research community. The origins of SARS-CoV-2 are an area of intense global interest, and understanding the virus's origins is important for future pandemic prevention efforts. By contributing to the scientific understanding of the virus's origins, the DOE can help to advance international collaboration and cooperation in addressing global health threats.
If your point is that the department of energy is badly named, you are 100% correct. It's more like the "department of applied science towards security, energy, and nuclear bombs"
DOE and the national labs have done extensive work with biological weapon detection systems and various forms of analysis related to delivery systems. E.g.
>"A team of scientists at DOE's Sandia National Laboratories recently revealed their involvement in the more than six-year investigation led by the FBI surrounding anthrax spores that killed five people in the fall of 2001. Their work, using transmission electron microscopy, was the first to link the spores from several of the letters as coming from the same source."
Actually as a side question, why does the reporting on this story in particular use the somewhat unusual phrase “US Energy Department?” It is the Department of Energy, right?
I seems like a little nitpick, but there are lots of agencies in the US, sometimes there’s a little nobody agency with a name similar to a big deal one… as a style thing, reporters should stick to the common names for big agencies, so we can be sure they aren’t mixing things up.
I think in cases where there are two large agencies that can be abbreviated to the same acronym people who work for those agencies tend to use names that don't lend themselves to that abbreviation. So in this case it's the Energy Dept and Education Dept rather than something that might be turned into the ambiguous DoE.
I wondered if WSJ must have a style guide that tells their writers to use this construction but there seems to be a mix of both (Energy Department and Department of Energy). Yes, DoE is the correct name, but I see ED used commonly in journalism.
The placement of the national labs in DOE is mostly a historical artifact of the time they were born. They cover most sciences these days and it isn’t uncommon to hear people with DOE jokingly refer to it as the “department of everything”.
It's a little perplexing to me that we're getting evaluations from spy agencies and the Department of Energy. I know the latter specializes in nuclear energy in particular, and this has experience with proliferation and adversarial information-gathering.
They also supervise biological weapons laboratories (presumably for the same reason), but what they're being asked to do here is to validate a premise (natural or engineered?) whereas their actual expertise is in tracking pathogens already known to be weaponized. This may be why they expressed their findings with “low confidence”, which is mentioned in the WSJ report but given less weight than it deserves.
A big problem in the pandemic response is that there are powerful strategic incentives for people to express a false degree of very high confidence about this , and indeed many other topics, so as to maximize insecurity and anxiety across a large population, which makes it easier to herd. This was an issue prior to the emergence of COVID-19, and strongly correlated with a drop in vaccine uptake and localized outbreaks of infectious diseases like measles that were previously considered easily managed under existing public health regimes.
The DOE (as a research agency) does a lot of biological and genomic research and is well qualified to do this kind of research, as other comments here have pointed out. It's not uncommon for researchers in different agencies to collaborate with each other, all labs have different areas of expertise and it would be naive to say any one from one agency is more "qualified" than another. The moniker at the top is not so meaningful.
The "low confidence" has a particular meaning in the world intelligence, and the DOE is also apart of the intelligence community given they run most of the US national research laboratories.
Appreciate the context. There's so much jargons and different branches of departments that it's hard for a layperson to understand the significance of assessments such as these. I would have been in agreement with OP's reasoning had I not come across this.
I wonder how the classified intelligence report responds to the fact that the early cases clustered around the Huanan Market not the Wahun Institute of Virology...
Do people typically gather in the parking lot of the WIV in large numbers? What was the reproductive rate of the initial version? What was the probability of an infection turning into a severe enough case to register to epidemiologists months later? For a relatively low reproductive rate or severity, you will need a lot of human contact to have detectable cases. The fact that the initial detectable cases are clustered within a nearby population center that manifests many close contacts should be expected.
"Near" is a relative term. In the context of all the places in China this novel virus could have popped up, it is definitely near. It's also a 45 minute drive from WIV (as stated in another comment). In the context of a location that will attract people from all over the city, it is also near.
It's widely accepted that the Huanan market cases are an early super-spreader event and not the first human infections. Basically we don't know who and where the first infected humans were. We do know lots of people got infected at the market and that became the first time a new pneumonia was noticed in hospitals.
The market was an early superspreading event (or actually multiple superspreading events), I don't know why people conflate spread at the market with a spillover at the market. I guess it made more sense when the virus was thought not to be airborne.
Why is this a WSJ exclusive, why was it leaked, why is this only coming out now, why are various government agencies disagreeing with one another, why “low” confidence…
This ratchets up the credibility of the claim for me, but there are a lot of strangely unanswered questions that leave me skeptical, still.
It's credible to you because you want it to believe. The article doesn't say what the department of energy thinks went into that supposed lab and what came out of it. Which is a major piece of the puzzle I'd say.
Er, it's credible to me because it's the Department of Energy.
I don't "want" to believe it, and generally believe folks who were touting it as fact up to this point were cranks. Even now it's still extremely murky, and as I said, there are a lot of unanswered questions.
why is it credible to you when you can as easily find contrary positions from other us govt agencies? what makes a "low confidence" doe take more credible than the other agencies to you
Hm, so the way I'm using "credible" here is as, "able to be believed". So I find the DoE and therefore the idea credible. It doesn't mean I do believe it, or that I find other, contradicting positions "uncredible" (incredible? lol).
The DoE is just an institution I trust, and if they're willing to publish this, I'm willing to listen to what they have to say.
I always wondered why there is is much resistance to the idea of lab leak and why the origin of a virus is this political. My conclusion is that this topic happens to go to the root some very important disagreements we are having as a culture.
At the core I see this as being about individual freedom vs big government. If your attitudes are pro-government you really want the most destructive virus of all time to have "spilled over" from nature. Finally, a job only a state can do. "We" need to protect habitats! Fight Climate change! Lock people in their homes and force injections to "protect" everyone. "Well you know, it's not like we WANT to do this but this virus is forcing our hand".
If this is lab leak than it means that your government (not only the Chinese government, US government is implicated here as well) is murderously incompetent to start with and then covered it up with constant lies and gas-lighting and then took all your civil liberties, got everyone who disagreed banned from social media (and I hope that was the worst they did). All the while getting people deeply scared with targeted propaganda and making anyone who just wanted to lead their lives normally out to be a stochastic granny killer.
But of course, if lab leak turned out the be the truth, we would still not see even 1/1000000th of the vitriol directed at anti-maskers be directed at the people ACTUALLY literally responsible for all these deaths as well as the health-, social- and economic mass destruction.
It's always been this way: when government does it, millions of corpses is just so much spilled milk on the way to Utopia.
Labeling something as "misinformation" is asymmetric: being right 90% or even 99% isn't good enough.
Being wrong about a misinformation label, even if there's nuance about confidence levels, or even moving from "misinformation" to "probably wrong, but maybe" does more damage than all help done by all of the other correct labelings.
And this is precisely why BSL4 labs exist. And accidents also happen at BSL4 labs. But in the west, at least we have reasonably transparent and trustworthy governments, with some notion of accountability for enforcing rules.
Forget the government. Do we have transparent and trustworthy lab staff?
After working in a BSL3 lab, I've seen some fairly poor working practices including someone infecting themselves, presumably due to sloppy working practices. There is a reason why lab leaks are common, if not vastly less consequential than the lab leak under discussion. It's because people are people, and they make mistakes, whether that's accidental or deliberately breaking the rules. It does make one question whether we can work on dangerous pathogens safely. I'd have to say, after direct experience of work on multiple diseases of varying types, that for many of them I have serious doubts. When it comes to Gain of Function, I think it should be banned worldwide. We aren't capable of working to the required level of stringency to guarantee safety.
To provide a concrete example, look at the German researcher who infected herself with Ebola. In a BSL4 facility. Not even involving GoF research, just the regular virus. Even top researchers slip up. This one made the news due to the severity, but how many are quietly buried, or not even reported within the organisation at all for fear of the consequences. It happens, and I've seen it first-hand.
My source of information is the hundreds of hours of This Week in Virology episodes I have listened to since March 2020, so with that in mind as my bias: Reputable western scientists who have worked with Wuhan virologists professionally have a lot of respect for the Chinese scientists and the Wuhan lab generally.
But the fact that many virologists have professional friends at the Wuhan lab does not rule out that the lab was being poorly managed or that an error might have been swept under the rug by the CCP.
My personal opinion synthesizing all that I have read and heard on this topic for three years is that the lab leak is plausible because China is an autocracy and does not have the rule of law. It’s in the CCP’s interests and within their capabilities to hide a lab leak quite successfully.
> It’s in the CCP’s interests and within their capabilities to hide a lab leak quite successfully.
tbh the general impression given by China's known attempts to cover anything up tend to give the opposite impression, precisely because of their default to autocracy. This is a government party that generally covers up stuff by banning it from being talked about, regards "she regrets making that comment and wants to stay at her home and not play tennis or talk to the media any more" as a reasonable coverup, and made such a clumsy attempt to silence the doctor first raising the alarm COVID symptoms that be became a hero inside China and the officials responsible got their wrists slapped. Allowing lab staff to communicate with the outside world and release papers on COVID origins considered plausible by uninvolved overseas virologists would be an uncharacteristic way for the Chinese government to act if they suspected there was something to be uncovered...
Can someone please explain, why the department of energy is dealing in genetic research?
I thought they are mainly dealing in nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. What is the overlap between things nuclear and genetic research? The USA doesn't have a biological weapons program since 1972, says wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_biological_weapo...
> Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.
So each US government agency independently publishes their own conclusions...?
That's inevitable when most science is funded by people in power; you don't get funded if you're the kind of person who tells people in power what they don't want to hear.
It may well turn out that the main promoters of that idea, Daszak, Fauci and associates may have been responsible for funding the research. When I first heard that idea I thought is was a conspiracy theory myself but then things like the Defuse proposal leaked out. (https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...)
It may not be that we now love conspiracy freaks (as you put it) because they're so open minded, but that now it doesn't matter anymore to sidetrack the conversation from "how can we fix it" to "whodunnit". Different period in the pandemic, rather than a shift in mindset from whether pointing fingers without evidence is helpful.
As a non-American, the whole thing seems crazy to me.
It seems like Trump said it from the start, and the media negated him based on political views, not facts.
And now, only years later, there is a reconciliation with the facts.
Now, I'm not that aware of the politics or the media in the US. But I think the way I see it may be the way many others saw this story roll.
Whether or not it's true - it is a big reason that many people don't trust the media. And this may be the bigger story for us all going forward.
Trump said that not because he had some particular insight, but it was just a way to deflect blame, and that's why it was super amplified across the right wing, but lacking any sort of evidence or proof. Also back then there was a strong suggestion that it was bioengineered at Wuhan on purpose to tank the western economies.
Note that he also said covid wasn't a serious thing several times. If that's the case even if there was a lab leak it wasn't a big deal? Note that both of those were to benefit his administration and deflect blame from his admin's response in Feb 2020 to not take covid seriously.
Trump was a stopped clock on this. I don't think that's paren't point. The point, to me, is that the entire establishment treated the lab leak hypothesis as misinformation for no better reason than that Trump had endorsed it. That is, on no better evidence. And then aggressively censored it.
>The point, to me, is that the entire establishment
And the Energy Department that the sole source behind this story isn't part of the so called establishment? Especially under the Biden admin which people who use words like 'the establishment' and 'deep state' consider the establishment.
Looks like 'the establishment' wants to blame China now, hence the story must be fake and there was no lab leak?
And all those with different opinions were cancelled... Doctors quickly learned to tow the line or you lost your job and license while the masses cheered. Hard to find "valid dissent" when you punish and disqualify everyone who tries.
And yet, these people seemed to have conducted their research without trouble. Weird, how approaching a problem scientifically and not bombastically elicits a more measured response...
I don't understand "these people", your response is somewhat ambiguous. If you are referring to skeptics... Then I find your conclusion inaccurate. The response is not "measured". Shunned and ridiculed is what I have mostly observed.
Society generally had adopted intolerance and seeks to punish detractors. Both sides are doing this. Again, this is not... measured...
My impression is that Trump started calling it the "China virus" and then there was an increase in physical attacks on people of Asian-appearing ancestry in the United States and that's when and why the pushback started.
When Trump made accusations of a lab leak, there were few facts pointing to that conclusion. Furthermore, the statements he made were dangerous to Asian Americans in the US. Later, as more facts came to light, the lab-leak theory became more plausible.
Guessing right in the absence of evidence shouldn't grant a person any kind of vindication in retrospect
“The virus accidentally leaked from a highly sophisticated lab in China” is somehow racist and dangerous, but “Chinese people can’t stop eating weird stuff at a wet market and the virus jumped to humans from there” isn’t.
Just clarifying my take (can't comment on what others think): I think the "Chinese people eat weird stuff" narrative is also racist and dangerous. It's not a dichotomy, and in the absence of evidence, I would rather avoid both.
My personal belief over the last few years has been "it could be zoonotic transmission through food, it could be a lab leak, it could be something else. I don't know, so let's wait and see."
Also, as a side note: non-Chinese people eat weird things too (and even worse - sometimes live with animals inside their homes). For example, the Black Death in Europe and the 1918 Flu pandemic which likely started in the US both had a significant zoonotic component.
“People eating weird things” isn’t the only alternative theory to “lab leak!!!”
A farmer handling infected guano (which is used for fertilizer) could’ve been patient zero. A scientist studying bats in a cave could’ve been exposed, and I guess that could count as a lab leak, I guess, but it’s not as sexy as “mad scientists were manually recombinating viruses for the interest of authoritarian regimes!”
To be fair the lab leak theory implies those working at the lab knew what they were doing, had a decent idea of the risks, continued to do so anyway, then were incompetent enough to allow the leak to occur. Or worse, deliberately released it.
Viruses spread from animals to humans with some regularity all over the world and such an occurrence doesn't imply incompetence among those who should know better etc.
I love this reaction, because Trump, of all people, was getting some of the least useful briefings of any modern US president, due to his inability to pay attention.[0][1][2]
So it's entirely possible that just watching the news casually would leave you better informed than the US president during the years of 2017 to 2021.
I'm always fascinated by the dichotomy of the evil hitler hyper-competent sub 100IQ billionaire who became president illustrated in every one of these types of comments.
You could literally just read his executive orders to figure out what you said is false.
No, it isn't entirely possible(any more than anything else is technically possible). In the rolling stone article:
> "Clapper agreed with Gistaro, telling Helgerson, “Trump doesn’t read much; he likes bullets.” Instead, during the Trump administration, the briefer would summarize aloud key points since the last briefing and provide three documents (none more than a page) about new developments abroad. This was all part of an effort to make the PDB “shorter and tighter, with declarative sentences and no feature-length pieces.”
> “Trump had his own way of receiving intelligence information—and a uniquely rough way of dealing publicly with the IC,” Helgerson wrote, “but it was a system in which he digested the key points offered by the briefers, asked questions, engaged in discussion, made his own priority interests known, and used the information as a basis for discussions with his policy advisers.”"
> "These and other difficulties agencies encountered under Trump led Helgerson to conclude that, “The system worked, but it struggled.”"
He clearly had access to more information than any civilian, and was engaging with it.
Or someone at the briefings said there was a possibility that the origin of the virus was a lab leak and that was the only thing he actually heard and just said that the origin of the virus was a lab leak.
As president, the guy said a lot of things that were outright untrue [1]. By 2020, he had lost any expectation of credulity just on the virtue of his being president in my eyes, and in those of many other Americans.
Now, if he had claimed the virus originated as a Chinese lab leak, and the intelligence community came out supporting that contribution, then that would have been a different story. Information from these sources didn't start becoming public until 2021, and was still mixed at that point[2].
Trump presented it as an intentional biological attack from China. This is why everyone was running as fast as possible from "lab leak". Nobody wanted to add WW3 to our problems with an unknown pandemic looming at the horizon.
> It seems like Trump said it from the start, and the media negated him based on political views, not facts.
Trump's insinuations were that the virus was engineered as a bioweapon and intentionally leaked from the lab in Wuhan. This is not the same as the virus being studied in the lab and leaking. Just because the statements involved the work "leak" doesn't make them equivalent.
And there seems to be a lot of traditional sabotage using infectious agents in farming, like how triads were infecting pig farms with African swine fever in 2019 (1). Maybe they didn't just use African Swine fever and thought they found something better. There was an explosion of pig farming this century(2), and underhanded tactics should be suspected. (1) https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3042122/chi... (2) https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aca16b
Ridiculous. First of all, those triads would be stupid, if they had done that with Sars-CoV-2, knowing it will hit them, too and wreck all their earning potential.
Secondly, bioterrorism (or whatever you want to call this) using a pandemical Virus is really hard. You have to find a virus that is able to cause a pandemic, and they are really really rare, but never did so (otherwise it can't do that because of the immunity). Sars-Cov-2 was only so dangerous because it was novel. So those triads would have found this needle in a haystack, and they aren't exactly known for running world-class virus finding operations. It's easy to find and smuggle some infectious ASV material. Maybe slightly harder to do so for EBV or the like. Much harder to find a completely novel virus.
I strongly suspect that the three-letter agencies have good intel to conclusively show that this is the case, but they have decided to hold back on it for the sake of US-China relations.
I'm not sure what world you're living in but we've been shooting missiles at Chinese military objects and restricting their access to semiconductors. I have little doubt that if the CIA or FBI had information it was actually a Chinese plot they would have released it by now.
Naw. Nobody wins from increased instability. Seems to me the playbook is obvious. You see in politics all the time. Everyone knows the truth but pretends otherwise until the proper time when things have settled down and the truth can be allowed to be free.
We are coming to the time when people are forgetting what lockdown were like and just want to move on with live. The near future is when the lab leak hypothesis can become the de facto default of scientists and intel agencies.
Same applies for the vaccines. 4 months of study for top level review of vaccines as a metastudy. 6 months of journal review for meta analysis of existing papers. 6 months of journal review, 4 months to parse the data.
Already, before the narrative can change, 20 months need to pass since the end of the dataset. If you want relevent data on covid and vaccine outcomes, then it's Jan 2021-Dec 2022.
First two years of preliminary data won't be finalized and combined and analyzed to a sufficient degree to potentially flip the narrative until about September 2024.
Want real data on covid and the vaccine? 5 years worth? You can have it in September 2027.
Why bother having the CIA release shit when you can just have the scientists do your dirty for you and time slide relevent information into 2024+?
> I'm not sure what world you're living in but we've been shooting missiles at Chinese military objects
Only after several days of failing to resolve the balloon matter diplomatically. Shooting it down was not their first resort, and that's probably because diplomatic considerations with China were being weighed against the domestic political situation. When the diplomatic situation can be kept relatively smooth and normal by keeping the public in the dark, that's the 'rational' choice.
How would that improve anything for the US, though? Shooting down balloons helps us because it gets rid of spy equipment in our skies (and lets us get our hands on it). Restricting access to semiconductors keeps us on better technological footing than China.
If they release evidence of a lab leak, China will deny it and relations will deteriorate. How do either of those things help the US? It's not going to make China a pariah in the world (and even if it did, that may or may not be a good thing) - the world is already very clear on their profound human rights abuses of Uyghurs, but nothing happens because they're too economically important.
We'd maybe gain some theoretical moral high ground, but that doesn't make the world safer or better.
One of those agencies - the FBI - has long held that Covid-19 is the result of a lab leak: “The FBI previously came to the conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with “moderate confi-dence” and still holds to this view.” (from the WSJ article)
They have not found the origin of the virus after testing every animal they could possibly test.. what was being done in the lab is still hidden => most likely it came from the lab.
So the deadliest epidemic since Spanish flu has been caused by gain of function research supported in part by US, with people responsible in control of fighting the pandemic when it started. Said people then labeled leak theory a conspiracy theory and tried to suppress it. If there is any justice in the world they should all be dragged in front of the judge and spend rest of their life in a cell. But there isn't and they attached themselves to useful political masters who will protect them.
I have extremely low confidence that we will ever be satisfied about the pathway that led to the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic.
I feel strongly that it was not tied to malicious intent, but other than that, I don't have strong feelings. Malicious intent would require significant actual evidence to convince me.
What annoys me is how many people seem to think "lab leak" is the same as "man made virus." Though maybe I'm reading too much into things people say on social media.
Why? It’s a distinction without a difference. It is a man made pandemic whether they “made” the virus themselves or not. It is of very little consequence at this point if it was engineered or not.
I think the problem you should all be addressing is not which theory was correct but why people who mentioned this possibility as a theory were downvoted on this plat form.
Regardless of which theory is correct this behaviour affects everyone negatively.
I personally am willing to wait and hear out alternatives. I think the "smoking gun" evidence is long destroyed if it ever existed. But maybe the truth is out there.
On the other hand, it seems like there are people who not only insist the Lab Leak Theory could be wrong, they don't WANT it to be right. Why is that? Why are they so concerned the theory might be true and what is the implication?
> Why is that? Why are they so concerned the theory might be true and what is the implication?
That's a very naive question.
Most governments don't like to admit they made a mistake or were wrong. The Chinese government especially, since saving face and avoiding embarrassment is crucial in Chinese culture. All their energy is spent in making sure this never happens domestically or abroad, and they will do anything in their power to suppress any information that would imply otherwise. Having a totalitarian government is convenient in that sense.
On the other hand, a lab leak would also hurt US' reputation, given the NIH funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, and could be directly involved in the incident.
So, at the end of the day, it's all about optics and politics. There are many political and economic reasons for those involved to deny the allegations.
The WHO investigation in 2020, and subsequent report, was a complete sham. The CCP has the WHO in their back pocket. Nothing they say has any relevance in the matter.
If you're looking for definitive evidence, you're unlikely to find any. But there have certainly been many instances of the WHO acting in favor of China's best interests, and there are many criticisms of their SARS-CoV-2 research and report.
Is it possible that a worldwide pandemic was created in a laboratory and we were powerless to stop it? Yes. Is that a problem? Yes!
Is it possible that a novel animal virus became viable in humans and became a worldwide pandemic that we were powerless to stop? Yes. Is that a problem? Yes!
The best outcome is: figure out how to combat both the origin of novel viruses under any cases and how to eradicate them under any conditions. We can't prevent future pandemics by chasing after only a single root cause.
How does that stop the next pandemic any better than prison stops recidivism or new criminals? How can a billion people be held accountable for the actions of a few unelected researchers?
When you “punish” a nation, you are primarily punishing its most vulnerable people. Who then hate you and turn to their leaders for protection.
Meanwhile and especially in China, the leadership has to save face and look like they’re doing something, so at minimum they will retaliate in kind.
The larger issue too is that the west seeing themselves in a superior position where they can punish a nation as big as China like it was an unruly child is the attitude of someone whose understanding of international politics is 40 years out of date. It ain’t like that anymore.
I would say the most important aspect of this news, as it will almost certainly never be solved one way or another, is for how research is conducted going forward. Clearly, the general population will be averse to this kind of research being conducted, let alone funded, by their own governments. However, said governments and others want to continue this kind of research, so I think the lack of transparency we've seen these past few years will only increase. For example[1]:
> an NIH official said EcoHealth Alliance had not been able to hand over lab notebooks and other records from its Wuhan partner that relate to controversial experiments involving modified bat viruses, despite multiple requests.
Because deliberately releasing a virus that is so infectious that it will cause a global pandemic and will inevitably hit your own country is a bloody stupid thing to do. Everyone loses, unless you already have a vaccine that you can sell.
And if you are trying to insinuate that it might have been the Chinese that released it, it becomes even more bloody stupid, because you would obviously never release it on your own soil right outside your own biolab which would immediately be under suspicion of being the source. You'd release it at NY Grand Central Station or the Atlanta International, and no one will be able to figure out what happened.
I believe that you have missed the potential significance of Xi's use of massive authoritarian control. Not using vaccines could have been a test to see whether his control would give him a critical advantage over other countries lacking his control. Were a weapon so powerful that the rest of the world could not control it with vaccines, China might come out the most powerful country in the world. If so, then he has learned that the strategy would not work.
Regarding your other arguments, Xi controls what the rest of the world knows about China. He could hide whatever he wanted to.
You seem to be implying that I am "bloody stupid." You are wrong.
1) You're facing a demographic crisis due to your aging population and your next closest rival has a population of which half are under 30,
2) the virus primarily kills the elderly,
3) your approach to increasing influence and power is to increase your relative position and your relative position is decreasing after decades of increasing, and
4) you can cause an economic crisis for your rivals when they shut public life, and consequently their economies, down, and thus increase your relative position in the world.
I won't comment on any western motivations for going along with it.
That's not definitive because you're assuming motivation, it could be that someone didn't want a vaccine, and you're assuming all research was publicized to us. This was the fastest vaccine ever developed in human history, it's worth noting.
Don't get me started on how stupid and racist "wet market" ALWAYS was.
The question would be "why now?" There have been markets like this for, what, thousands of years? Why was this one special (unless, you know, it was near the lab where they made the viruses)
100% percent plays on "lololol look at the backwards bat eaters." So dumb.
While I agree with the sentiment that the term wet market is quite pejorative, the sequence of events is very common and is what happened with the first SARS. New viruses make the leap to humans all the time. It’s evolution baby.
But, if I'm understanding it correctly, "very common" cuts both ways here? Namely, zillions of "wet markets" and virus jumps and "evolution" takes care of killing the other viruses as well?
Someone linked me this website last year https://peterdaszak.com/ . I thought it must have been run by a crazy person at first, but it's turning out to be more and more correct. I'm not sure of the whole Nazi angle, however.
I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I always found it it little odd that the guy who became the de facto pandemic era “leader” in the U.S. was also the same guy that personally approved funding for the lab in Wuhan.
How is "top" virologist measured? If it's simply by years of power, this is accurate I suppose. However I think "most powerful" is a better term than "top".
Like it or not this is how scientific output is usually measured. He is a prolific scientist in his field and has been for decades, well before COVID happened.
> In a 2022 analysis of Google Scholar citations, Dr. Fauci ranked as the 44th most-cited living researcher. According to the Web of Science, Dr. Fauci ranked 9th out of 3.3 million authors in the field of immunology by total citation count between 1980 and April 2022. During the same period, he ranked 22th out of 3.3 million authors in the field of research & experimental medicine, and 715th out of 1.4 million authors in the field of general & internal medicine.
2019 and prior Google Scholar shows him cited about 8,000 times per year. In 2020+ that only jumped to 10,000, so his ridiculous statistics here are not entirely (or even mostly) due to COVID related stardom.
1) That’s a big assumption you’re making, even if it was a lab leak (which is itself a big leap from what’s known today)
2) It also wouldn’t be “weird” at all. That’s like saying you find it weird that a firefighter got burned or a nuclear safety researcher caused a nuclear safety incident.
No it's not. Not at all. Everything risk is increasing exponentially. BSL-4 labs are expanding 1 per year, or around 2% extra risk. CRISPr and CRISPr cas9 are only 10 and 20 years old. How much added risk is that per year? 10,000%?
Then to send money to actively seek out bat viruses in the place thought to harbor the worse or most diverse viruses?
And to do all that in partnership with a hostile enemy who most certainly isn't going to tell you all the extras they have planned above and beyond the controllable.
No, I think you are dead wrong. The default assumption from now on is lab leak unless proven otherwise, because that's the risky world we live in. Period. No getting around it. And the risk gets higher every year.
There are literally tens of thousands of BSL-3 labs in the world. They aren't sitting empty doing nothing. They are busy trying to "save us".
I can't really tell what position you're arguing against here. I personally find the risk of GoF research to probably net out to "not worth it," but that's an entirely different conversation than "did Fauci cause this."
And no, it's nowhere near acceptable to just assume that every new virus is a lab leak. Especially when the subtext of this line of inquiry is usually that we're going to "hold 'them' accountable" somehow. Combine those two thoughts and you get something like, "anywhere that a novel virus appears in suddenly gets smacked by the international community," and I'm not sure you could create a stronger disincentive to early pathogen detection and alerting if you tried.
P.S. There's almost certainly not anywhere close to "tens of thousands" of BSL-3 labs. Probably in the few hundreds to maybe thousand or two, but that'd be a stretch, and "tens of thousands" is not supported by any data I can find: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/mapping-biosafety-le...
Incorrect. Lab leak is de facto default from now on in the world we live in. Even if you disagree, it will be in 5 years. The tech, the databases, the labs, the money. It's all increasing. Every single year the risk of a lab leak goes up, to the point where we are expecting a covid per decade out of the labs. But hopefully the rest of the world is more ethical than the chinese and their new and novel virus creation strategy and we get relatively harmless versions of the flu etc. Rather than pathogens with zero prior human cohabitation.
Funny how all the datapoints, including new and novel to humans get ignored.......
At face value, no one thought it strange that the Energy Department had any authoritative say in the matter? This is like sourcing your nuclear armaments statistics from a PubMed publication..
In my mind, the lab leak theory is tipping over towards being the more likely explanation. I was never dismissive of it, but initially I gave it fairly low probability- now I give it fairly high probability.
One interesting question is, however: if that was one random virus the Chinese government was mucking around with, what else have they got in those labs? And, what greater monstrosities have we got in our labs? I feel pretty sure the United States government has viruses in their labs that would make covid 19 look like hay fever.
I’ve been in a virology lab leak, I’ve been in a lab hood explosion, I’ve been in a radioactive leak. This is on the island of Manhattan.
Stuff happens. Some lab techs, it’s their first week in the lab, the person next to them? Decades of experience.
Accidents happen lots in laboratories. It not something we called the NYTs about. We cleaned it up, made sure safety protocols were in place. And went back to work the next day.
As an off-topic side note, I saw this trending on Twitter and just assumed it was the latest conspiracy on the site. Seeing it on HN lends it a lot more credibility.
I used to watch Twitter for a source of breaking news. It's a shame that it seems like 90% of trending stories there need verified with a second source now, and that the nuance you get from doing so (for example, the "low confidence" expressed by the US) seem to still be entirely missing from Twitter's trending discourse.
Only those completely ignorant of modern biology labs - and particularly the capabilities of such labs with state scale funding - can be indignant or surprised at such an obvious finding.
Viruses are manipulated in countless labs around the world on a daily basis, and have been for years. Gain of Function research, as dangerous as it is, has been part of that. This isn't guessing or surmise, it's absolute fact that's trivial to check.
This is what happens when an incident is intertwined with politics, and people have made political allegiance a core part of their personality: all sorts of mental gymnastics to split hairs, discredit scientists, and backpedal so they can cling to their beliefs. It seems liberals will do the exact same things they criticize conservatives of, and without any sense of the irony.
A lot of people will be "awww, shucks, it's too late now, what does it matter? What would we do different?"
Well, for one, we should remember to completely crucify the oh-so-helpful people who wanted to censor anything as misinformation or disinformation. They were wrong. They'll need to be reminded that they suppressed the truth, and they'll need reminding constantly, for at least a decade. "Hey, remember that time when everyone banded together to suppress the truth?"
More reminders would be in order: everyone who immediately started gibbering about racist xenophobes is gonna have to walk that back.
Anyone who wanted to have word games about what "gain of function" really means needs a long and grinding reminder.
We should assess our remaining faith in the WHO in light of their repeated mistakes, spoken with that total confidence. You know what I am talking about. "Mere mortal, you are not an epidemiologist, we told you that this wasn't airborne."
The people who over-confidently tried to control the narrative, beat others down, shut them up, and so forth? Jostling them with the truth of their mistakes, again and again, might help for it not to happen next time.
This is not a surprising conclusion given the way things have gone. The collapse of the natural origin theory (which was based on various schemes involving co-infection of bats, pangolins, civets with various wild-type viruses which didn't pan out) and the refusal of the Wuhan Institute of Virology to have an open investigation, along with the fairly shady behavior of the Ecohealth Alliance partnership that was partially funding the WIV (not disclosing conflicts of interests in those early Nature and Lancet letters claiming a natural origin), all result in a 'so what else could it be but a lab leak' circumstantial conclusion, even if positive evidence remains hidden.
What kind of lab leak is an interesting and important question, however. There may be four scenarios:
1) Collection of a wild-type virus that somehow evolved in a bat species, followed by accidental infection of a lab worker. This seems the least likely, as the viral lineages of the betacoronaviruses that would have had to fuse in the wild to form Sars-CoV-2 (sarbecovirus w/o furin site and marbecovirus w/ furin site) infect different bat species from different regions;
2) Collection of a multitude of wild-type viruses as well as a variety of bat species, then having accidental genetic fusions due to coinfection of the laboratory bats with a variety of different viruses (like what seems to happen on pig farms with avian / human / swine flu), which might be more plausible, though would indicate incredibly sloppy lab management;
3) 'Natural' mutational pressure via deliberately cultivating wild-type bat viruses in human cell cultures or in mice etc. expressing human genes, and looking for rare mutations that arose and gained the ability to infect human cells (things like this were done in the Soviet bioweapons program according to defector Kanatjan Alibekov, see "Biohazard") or to become more infectious than it already was;
4) Direct gene manipulation of wild-type (or possibly mutated) viruses using CRISPR technology, in which parts of the wild-type template virus are excised and replaced with specifically synthesized new sequences designed to bind to human receptor sites to facilitate entry to human cells by the virus. It'd be likely they synthesized a variety of such chimeric viruses and then ran them through human cell cultures to see which were the most infectious. They were doing this kind of work at Wuhan, based on prior CRISPR-based work done in the USA c.2015, and it seems most likely that a lab worker got infected then passed it to the local community, then onto the trains and airplanes.
Notably, 2-4 all could be called 'gain of function' research, which is a sloppy term that nobody in the field seems to use. It's all pretty reckless and poorly justified research, and people have been warning for about a decade since these precise gene swapping technologies became widely available that this kind of outcome was likely if not inevitable. It's also basically indistinguishable from offensive biowarfare research, even if that wasn't the goal (claims that this was deliberate are nonsensical, it looks like a "oopsie, we caused > $10 trillion in economic damage and killed millions of people by accident" event).
International collaborations to fight infectious disease should still be supported however, that's how smallpox was eradicated. Just not this kind of thing, please.
Wow we are really never going to learn anything from the pandemic. Listen to yourself, "done under the normal overly cautious test protocols". The lesson we need to learn from the pandemic origin is that we need to be "more" cautious with bleeding edge medical research. The cost/benefit is not there for a lot of research if there is a tiny chance a mistake can kill millions people unintentionally.
> On the upside, we advanced mRNA vaccine technology faster than it ever could have been done under the normal overly cautious test protocols.
that's not quite true. they didn't change anything fundamental in the test protocols they just compressed them a bit and cut out some red tape by submitting some things early instead of at the end of the trials like it would normally be done. it also reached the endpoints faster because they could get significant data because the virus was so contagious; it's not like some other virus that spreads much slower like say aids.
The FDA is filled with antivaxxer sympathizers who throw lots of blocks and hurdles into vaccine testing. Many of the procedures can be shortened with absolutely no loss of safety. A lot of amazing vaccines have been killed under these protocols.
The wild variant was a lab leak with an extremely high probability, and the only question left is if it was deliberate or accidental. Meanwhile, I personally am almost certain that Omicron was purposely engineered and released to replace Delta.
> But there has been no threat to public health, no injuries to employees and no leaks of dangerous material outside the laboratory, Ms. Vander Linden said.
In the US common law, that is the thing that you need to say in case you face any court case whatsoever in the future. Any objective details that you give about the situation may be used as evidence against you in a court case by the prosecutors. Therefore you always need to start from 'nothing ever happened' and then negotiate down the responsibility as much as you can.
Immediately in that period the retirement homes in the area and later the state, started experiencing 'mystery pnemonia cases' in which a lot of elderly have died.
This is without the fact that the US govt. fighting the Army in the court to shut down a bioweapons lab should already signal the severity of the affair.
For anyone who follows the US corporate & regulatory space in regard to public interest lawsuits, that article at NYT not only being up today, but also having been branded 'published in 2019' to attract attention says a lot:
That article basically says that there was a leak in a bioweapons lab in the US due to failure of security measures, but the government has properly acted and even took the army to the court to shut it down. It basically exonerates the US admn. legally by hooking up the army, and actually the administration that very specific lab with all the responsibility, meanwhile signaling to all international observers including the decision makers in countries around the world that it was not the US govt. who did it. Therefore the US govt. cannot be sued for that even inside the US.
So the very article is a legal precaution per US law itself.
...
"Whataboutism"
Any claim/proposition has to be made on an objective framework. Otherwise they become hollow smears.
> Immediately in that period the retirement homes in the area and later the state, started experiencing 'mystery pnemonia cases' in which a lot of elderly have died.
> Shouldn't an outbreak happen before the lab is shutdown instead of months later, during the flu season?
The shutdown was done on court order for the reason that the lab's security systems were failing. It is unknown for how long. Its possible that the leak happened before the government started acting.
> A lot of elderly that died is 3?
Thats the start of the f'kin pandemic. Not its entirety. Youre being disingenious here.
Its the disease getting out that's important.
> You're right, this "US lab leak" (kuch) is way worse than the one from Wuhan that infected the world with millions of casualties.
And now the jig is up. So you are very probably an American conservative, who just repeats the smears others for the screw-up of your deregulated, budget-cutting, 'innovating' government. Like that army lab 'innovating' with its security measures after your former president Trump cut all budgets by 75%.
> What are you even suggesting even? It's starting to get ridiculous. Oh yeah, your source was probably this
Dont be an a-hole. There are other sources there if you had taken two seconds to investigate. Covid was found to be in the sewers of Italy by september 2019, and in the severs of Barcelona by october 2019. They are congruent with the Fort Detrick leak.
And in regard to China: I'd take China's word over the word of the lying fcks of your establishment any day. The lying fcks who lied to the entire world about nonexistent WMDs for eight years cannot be the arbiter of truth, less, any authority about who is lying.
....
Basically its another case of your psychopathic establishment smearing others for its own f*ck up and you people are TOTALLY on board with it. They just popped this smear out 2 days ago. And you are literally screaming on top of your lungs like a religious zealot as if the pope of your church told you to do.
You have not learned ANYTHING from the Iraq affair. You people are beyond redemption. When the nuclear war that your establishment is pushing with these lies and smears come and you die in fiery plasma, you will have made it happen yourself. Nobody else.
There is no rational debate with religious, nationalist zealots. EVERY single discussion with an Angloamerican nationalist ends this way - by the person peddling the lies of its lying, backstabbing establishment.
> I'm not even American, lol. I guess you dropped another ball on that one.
I didn't. If you act like one, talk like one, you get treated like one.
> Whataboutism
The burden of providing an objective basis for allegations belongs to the accuser. You accuse someone of something, its your job to provide that objective framework. If you dont, people will ask 'what about' and call you out.
Let me put this in street speak: You dont get to lie and smear others as a liar.
> trump, Iraq, religious, ...
Again, if you walk like a duck, talk like a duck, act like a duck, for all intents and purposes, you get treated as a f'king duck.
...
Stop stanning for lying, murdering f*cks and propagating their lies. That's that.
> It spread in July 2019 and then Covid went napping for 8 months ( according to unity1001) to spread from the US
Holy hell. I told that it was found to be in Barcelona sewers in oct 2019. Sept 2019 in Italy.
It did not 'hibernate' and then 'came around' in february. It already spread and the government whose lies you are peddling was trying to suppress its presence even in february with Trump's court ordering the Seattle doctor that found the covid in US to shut up.
> China is lying.
They arent lying. You are buying into bullsh*t because of your inherent baseless bias. American conservative, Indian nationalist - doesnt matter which. The bait used for deceiving such people is always the same: They sell lies against whomever they hate.
Your bias against China even helped you totally avoid actual written words to the extent that you have come back to say "covid went napping".
No it didnt go napping you fool. Its just that you selectively ignored written words to back your bias.
> the closest SARS-CoV-2 bat-borne genome still remains the one from R. affinis, RaTG13 (China, 20135,6), with 96.1% identity at the whole-genome level.
The Chinese biolab is in walking distance from the market, where the first infection was found. It has multiple awards for it's work in coronaviruses.
Additionally, the huge overlap in the genome marker >96%.
Should be easy, in case you have some common sense, no? :)
Your version:
Deadly COVID had an outbreak in the US, then napped for 8 months, traveled a bit over the world, re-appeared in Wuhan, from the US... to 1 person - patient Zero.
Then! Patient Zero went to a cave ~40 miles further, back in time and infected some bats with an earlier version of deadly COVID SARS 2.. rofl
Or my version ( where time travel doesn't exist):
You are obviously not aware of the fact that multiple coronaviruses exists ( eg. The common cold is one), explains multiple variants since 2010.
It further evolved in a bat cave in China ( see: the similar genome), could have gone through a biolab in China and then spread from China or through animal-to-human transfer ( since bats are a Chinese delicassy) and then spread from China.
That also explains SARS ( also a coronavirus) coming from China.
Simple, right?
Ps. About Italy. Your entire claim is not proof, since this is what the research mentions:
> In addition, we cannot exclude that the observed sero-reactivity could be an unknown antigen specificity in another virus to which subjects were exposed containing an epitope adventitiously cross-reactive with an epitope of SARS-CoV-2.
If you can still read, this means that they haven't found proof of SARS COVID in Italy in 2019 ( or elsewhere), they found proof of a similar antigen that is triggered by COVID, but that's not exclusively attributed to COVID SARS 2!
Glad to be of assistance for you!
I'd trust biomarkers to track COVID origins fyi :)
So, I generally lean towards the lab leak being the most likely cause. That said, why does anyone give a shit what the Department of Energy thinks about this? What makes this department qualified to even put forward a hypothesis?
This is such a politically loaded question that I doubt we'll ever know. Chinese government won't ever admit to it - even claim it came from somewhere else per the article - and other governments want to be able to pin it
It has given a head-start on understanding the way certain viruses spread and change, and provided a basis for developing treatments and vaccines. If Sars-COV-2 really spread because of a lab leak, the irony of ironies is that treatments and vaccines could be developed so fast precisely because this type of virus had been studied.
Why does the HN title say "US agency" but the NY Times headline says "Energy Department"? Did the NY Times change their title or was the OP trying to obscure the Energy Department part?
Why is this story referring to the Department of Energy as the “Energy Department”? And why is that agency performing this investigation? This doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Lots of cringy posts here. It was obvious a lab leak was the most likely. It’s useful that so many people discredited their intelligence by making outlandish assertions to the contrary, often going so far as to accuse anyone who disagreed as being in various ways substandard persons. These people seem to want to double down. A foolish consistency is what I expected, but it’s still pretty funny to read these comments and see the mental gymnastics.
Almost all of you were wrong about this, and almost none of you can admit it. I hope many of you will take this opportunity to ask yourself what other stories you’ve taken from the press that have left you misinformed or lied to. The conspiracy theorist, aka skeptics, followed a simple formula, question everything. The NPC’s followed another, trust the experts. Many of you write like experts on this forum. You should know better than most that title is baseless.
I feel like it doesn't matter how it happened, China caused it either by incompetent lab operation or incompetent food hygiene operation.
This has happened multiple times now. And at this point it's predicable, so it's not a matter of debate. So it's time to hold China accountable or at least take some preventative action like limiting direct flights and screening people whole been to China more closely.
I don’t know what the truth is here, and I don’t know if I’ll ever know. Ultimately, I don’t think it is that important.
What concerns me much more, is that this issue has become overly politicised - not just out of concern for the possible geopolitical implications, or a desire to not offend Beijing, but also by being tied up with US domestic political divides.
People like to focus on China’s handling of this, but it is important to remember that the source of the possible leak was research done in collaboration with the US.
Westerners (including, but not just Americans) should be holding their own governments responsible for reckless biological weapons research.
Look at the other intelligence community reports are rated as and what "low confidence" means in intelligence community assessments. The fact that the DOE is taking the time to revise their previous stance is a very big deal in our quest to understand the origins of the new coronavirus.
This was considered "fake news" and heavily reprimanded all throughout the pandemic in the media attached to the Western consensus, hilarious how they're starting to do a 180 on it (next is doing a 360, I guess).
There were separate things going on which were flagged commonly: various conspiracy theories about bio-weapons or intentional leaks, Trumpian racism of the “king flu” persuasion, general evidence-free speculation that the Chinese government knew about it for a long period of time (claimed early cases as far back as the summer or fall of 2019), and discussing the possibility of a lab leak of a collected sample during analysis.
Sober discussions of the last case were fine: there was tons of that in the scientific literature and it was recognized as a likely scenario along with the wet markets since both are commonly discussed risks. If you came in hot, all hyped up on Fox News talking points, saying it was only as bad as the flu, or babbling about HCQ or Ivermectin, you’d get flagged since it was clearly not a scientific argument or contributing anything of value.
I never saw lab leak called fake news. I saw it called irrelevant, not important, unlikely, not knowable , but never "fake". Just want to see the source, that's all
"Facebook will no longer take down posts claiming that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured, a company spokesperson told POLITICO on Wednesday, a move that acknowledges the renewed debate about the virus’ origins.[...] The findings have reinvigorated the debate about the so-called Wuhan lab-leak theory, once dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory"
Sadly I doubt this will lead to any contrition, apologies, humility, self-reflection, or change among certain "experts", government officials, or the throngs of sheep and parrots who were led along by them.
Don’t take this too seriously, this has been a Rupert Murdoch position that his papers have trumpeted for a long time now. Don’t forget that the WSJ is just as much under his umbrella as the New York Post is.
Well thanks to ChatGPT which that was the so-called 'supposed' revolution that will change everything, hailed by the media and on HN, without advanced detectors it will be even worse.
I guess it is useful to creative liars, bull-shitters and people who are masters of manipulation.
I love the quote in this discussions about finding unicorns next to the unicorn factory. In addition to that argument, I find the following points in support of the lab leak hard to refute.
Biologically -
(1) The earliest available copies of SARS-CoV2 from 2019/2020 are incredibly stable genetically. When a virus makes the jump from one species to the next it tends to undergo rapid evolution as it adapts to a new host. We have zero evidence that this happened as if it sprung forth already adapted to the supposed new host, humans.
(2) This "novel" virus infects an unbelievably large number of different cell types in the human body across *all* major organ systems.
Thus, this "novel" virus jumped to humans perfectly adapted to infect dozens of different cell types across every main organ systems via multiple receptor paths via random chance? Sure.
Couple those two facts with the following ...
(3) WIV has been studying coronaviruses for 20 years in case of a pandemic. When one such pandemic arises, do they rise to the occasion? Do they jump in with their research? Do they help develop new therapeutics? Nope, they go completely dark and destroy evidence. If China were trying to vie as a superpower on the world stage, this was the exact wrong step to take.
(4) The WIV lab in question had been part of a team that submitted a DARPA proposal in 2018. WIV's role in the proposal was to generate new chimeric Coronavirus backbones, insert different types of spikes, and trial furin cleavages in those spikes. They would then passage them through humanized mice, collect the ones that successfully reproduced, and sequence them. My jaw hit the floor when I read the proposal, which is floating around the Internet to be read by all. One might object and say that you can't trust everything on the Internet, which is very true. I came from this world. My friend is at DARPA and was on the team who reviewed (and rejected) the proposal. Please note that typically one proposes research that is not only possible but has already been successfully completed.
Note that there are dozens of other facts that also support this position that I won't regurgitate here.
Why does this matter? Beyond crimes against humanity and preventing this from happening again, you really need to consider how events unfolded to understand the impact this grand lie had. SARS and MERS were scary but not very good at spreading; therefore, past outbreaks were quickly extinguished. If the public had been told that this virus was likely engineered to infect people, one could imagine that the entire response to the pandemic would have been quite different.
ps longCOVID is simply a persistent coronavirus infection and most of the infections appear to be persistent (some are asymptomatic until they aren't).
I'm fairly confident posts like these are artificially weighted to fall off the front page..that seems to happen when a COVID related post gets popular on HN. This post has more points and comments than the majority of stuff on the front page but it's currently on page 3.
I've casually noticed something similar over the past ~18 months with posts related to COVID.
Yeah, an opinion I share, and if enough people share that opinion, HN is designed to react.
I'm not going to stop flagging this kind of content, and dang is here to overrule me/others when he feels the need to, which is also how HN is designed.
The post is up, the system is working as intended. We all have roles to play here, no need to worry!
Is “because I think they become too toxic” a good reason to flag a post? I flag spam, shitposts, unsubstantiated or patently false articles. You, like other people, are abusing your flagging powers.
I find it interesting that this story was picked up by the WSJ and has not yet hit the NYTimes. The WSJ editorial staff is well known to have a conservative bias, but their newsroom editors are considered to be quite centrist.
That NYT doesn’t think this story is newsworthy is itself newsworthy.
It’s a WSJ exclusive, negotiated by the journal. You can read that fact in red above the headline. What it gave the deep state in return for the exclusive is unknown
Why? What's the thinking in that decision? This kind of post draws out the lowest quality comments and attracts accounts that comment only on this kind of post.
I should clarify, I'm not suggesting you are censoring, or "site sponsored censorship", rather censorship from users via downvotes. They both accomplish the same thing I could understand why somebody might misunderstand me that you are censoring.
The Nordstream 2 thread was also interesting, with tons of users trying to appeal to you specifically to do site censor the story, or tone policing. I remember you stuck to your guns.
To be fair in this instance, this is a wild story that does have all the hallmarks of a wacky conspiracy theory straight out of a Bond film. Some secret Chinese laboratory is doing some secret stuff with some super spreading disease and then whoops it gets leaked and shuts the entire world down.
Also keep in mind where the info was coming from in the US: it was being introduced by Trump. This is someone who regularly spouses countless baseless conspiracies whenever he needs some sort of ammunition to blame a group he doesn't like. There is plenty of fair reasons to not have believed this story.
It's not some secret Chinese laboratory. It's a well known institute, a pretty famouse one in fact. It's the place that identified the source of the 2003 sars pandemic.
As an American progressive, here's how I feel about it. I have no doubt that others will have a different take.
I don't think it was tribalized by American media; I think covid hit when much of the world, not least the US, was embroiled in tribalism. I wanted to know whether it had come from a lab leak, but at the time a lot of the lab-leak rhetoric was packaged along with racist and nationalist vitriol, to the point where people who appeared to be of Asian descent were being attacked in the street.
So sensible people who suggested the virus may have come from a lab were out-shouted by people saying things like The election was stolen, Jews will not replace us, China virus, execute Fauci, being asked to wear a mask in Starbucks is like the Holocaust. I can forgive people for not wanting to try to pick out valid points from that particular torrent of bullshit. I think the resistance to the lab leak theory was less that people were dismissing science and more that the zone had been flooded and they were up to their neck in it.
Huh? The previous President of the US frequently called it the "China Virus".
> GOP conspiracy to bring down Biden
Biden wasn't President for the first year of the pandemic, not sure how that works out.
> Are American progressives so fragile in their identity that they avoid agreeing with conservatives for fear of guilt by association?
I personally don't care whether the virus was man-made or natural. It bares next to zero importance on my life. At the end of the day what are we really arguing about? Lab practices in China? The Chinese should be better about lab safety and wet markets. But there was a pandemic which has killed millions of people. It seems like the people most invested in this question are also the ones most invested in downplaying the pandemic, which is just evil.
>I personally don't care whether the virus was man-made or natural
That's really surprising to me, because in my opinion the answer truly does matter, and sticking my head in the sand feels defeatist. I suppose that's a difference of opinions, though.
How does it really matter though? What are in the Western world going to do in retaliation? Are we going to start a war with China over their bio-lab programs?
The scientists said it wasn't a lab leak. The science, from the very start, could have been interpreted either way.
In fact the only real evidence, and all of it tenuous and circumstantial, is in support of a lab leak. There is actually not a single piece of direct evidence AFAIK for zoonotic origin, except that that route is possible (ie no mutations that would be impossible naturally, etc) and the overwhelmingly usual route for novel pathogens.
The source of the problem is all the terrible leaders, whether they be the media, politicians, etc. You've focused solely on the "media", but a large part of the anti-science tribalism flowed from the infantile president trying to point the finger at anyone else, rather than accepting the existence of and dealing with the problem. When that much nonsense is being pumped into the zeitgeist, priors get massively screwed up - anything resembling the nonsense is dubious, so anything opposing the nonsense is duvious, and so on.
Also it's not particularly appropriate to use the label "conservative" for those trying to buck societal institutions. The actually conservative position was to follow public health advice.
Agreed, there is one issue of release. That we can never prove. China, not China. Intentional, not. GoF funded with US dollars or not.
There is imo a bigger issue with response. And if ANYONE thinks the response was even remotely correct or good then they need to put their screen down for a good long while.
What will make this information dangerous is if people misconstrue “lab leak” to mean “human designed”. The report specifically says it was not from a bioweapons program. I’m sure they took pains to verify that because the implications of THAT conclusion would be explosive.
You’re already seeing that exact type of confusion strewn about this comment section.
Some people interpreting “lab leak” to mean deliberately designed, others to mean deliberately released, others to mean an accident involving a natural research virus.
So yeah this whole conversation will continue to go nowhere because in reality it is full of conspiracy theorists who make the conversation impossible to have.
The research out of this lab didn't help develop the vaccine, so what were they doing in the first place? Weapons research, it's as simple as that. As soon as the virus started circulating through the public, that was their chance to shine! They could have released everything they knew and jump-started vaccine development.. but they didn't. They covered it up, because fighting bugs was never their interest in the first place.
Why should anybody believe otherwise? Principle of charity? Please.
Even if I were to accept the (ridiculous) premise, it's still wrong.
Wuhan Institute of Virology did actively contribute to the development of the Vero vaccine by Sinopharm.
Regarding the premise, there's no reason to believe that a lab working on coronaviruses (quite common) that did not happen to contribute directly to a successful vaccine development effort (profoundly uncommon) was necessarily working on a bioweapon.
FWIW, there are ~59 operational BSL-4 labs in the world, and only a BSL-3 is necessary to work on potentially airborne diseases like coronaviruses. According to this study[1] of published research papers, there are probably about 150 BSL-3 labs in the United States alone. Are those all bioweapon programs because they didn't contribute to the vax development programs?
The most dangerous interpretation of "lab leak" is the one backed by the most evidence - that they were artificially enhancing viruses so they could develop vaccines against them. The Pfizer guy who got caught on camera by Project Veritas said they were considering doing the same thing.
Selling people vaccines for viruses the scientists created specifically to create vaccines for, is about the worst conflict of interest you can imagine and one with global implications, not just for US/China relations.
Gain-of-function research serves a legitimate purpose, but if this lean stemmed from GoF work, that is not apparent from the SARA CoV-2 genome. See my link elsewhere in the comments to a TWiV podcast episode that discusses the lab leak hypothesis, and the analysis of the genome sequence suggesting it is not the result of human engineering work.
,, Gain-of-function research serves a legitimate purpose''
While this is true, at this point we have evidence that even the highest level security lab can have lab leak with devastating results.
The main problem is not that, but that people can't really talk about it publicly, as the rules should be stricter (for example an international body should be checking the procedures of other countries...the problem is not with the rules, but not enough verification of keeping the rules).
The discussion during the pandemic only lead to the "human designed" blame game, so the similarities are striking. It is a view that everyone can share, regardless of political affiliations, a perfect way to get a mob going. It is interesting to discuss how the views on this has changed though.
The human designed blame game is different from the “bio weapons” blame game mentioned in the parent. I get people are discussing human designed but that’s different from bioweapon.
I am not very good at bio, so I equate the three to some part. The lab leak story is really bad in itself on a political level, I do not know how we can have a sane discussion about it.
I would hate to live in a world where, when people randomly guess something correctly, they feel vindicated and emboldened to say other random guesses that are as completely unfounded as the one they happened to get correct.
Well you live in that world, and it's always been that way. This propensity is the fundamental cause of gbling addiction and superstitious behavior.
But I'd point out, this wasn't a random guess. There has been a whole lot of circumstantial evidence for a long time, it's not quite a smoking gun but better than a guess for sure.
If you want the US to care, it's probably better not to mention that they're Muslims though. I've noticed they just call them Uyghurs and suspect that's the reason.
I'm pretty sure the person referencing "ethnic genocide" was referring to China's internment and genocide of their Muslim population in western China, not COVID.
I think their point is that if genocide wasn't enough to motivate us to change our relationship with China, then a revelation about COVID originating from a Chinese lab probably isn't going to do much to move the needle either.
Thankfully I exist in 2023. I would not have, and will never, support apartheid or genocide of Black Americans. China is perpetrating this as we speak.
I would like to remind you that the USA are selling billions in weapons every year to Bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, responsible of the killing of the journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, dismembered in a Saudi consulate in Turkey by killers sent by the prince, who is using those weapons to bomb people in Yemen.
Unfortunately people in US don't even know where Yemen is or that there is a war that they are supporting together with a bloody dictator. Because they do not want to intervene directly, if a single US soldier dies, everybody at home will know about this war, started in 2015, with the excuse of the terrorism, it only created newborn real terrorists that have fallen in the hands of Iran and Al-Qaeda. They send drones though, at least 370 thousand people have died, mainly for the consequences of war (famine, lack of drinkable water, diseases, displacement). A war that the US have no intention of stopping.
You know who's doing one of the best jobs in the area? China and Russia. Yes, those China and Russia. They recognize the international recognized government and have no contacts with the factions close to Iran. They also haven't killed or armed anybody. Their diplomacies have been constantly at work together with EU members for a cease-fire. Unlike the US. They know that an unstable Yemen is detrimental for China, even though people are dying, they do not care: there is money to be made.
Thanks for reminding us how dangerous ignorance is.
That may be a neat concept for a science fiction novel, but it seems more likely that someone at the Wuhan BSL4 was working with coronaviruses (as they do) and somehow contracted the virus themselves. They may have been working with lab animals, such as bats. The virus didn’t have to come with a sinister intention.
Looking at this another way, until today, the most common hypothesis was that the virus crossed into humans because of contact with wild animals. A lab leak probably also involved contact with wild animals. It’s just now the Energy Dept. has gotten their hands on intelligence supporting this notion in particular.
It’s not such a crazy idea because it had a large unexplained evolutionary gab in generic sequences from other variants that I believe is still pretty unexplained. The “conventional” theory is an immune suppressed HIV patient, but I’ve read that idea has a lot of holes in it.
Lab leak of what even? There is nothing magical about virological labs. They don't create new virus out of nothing. Most of the time there is a "lab leak" the virus already had all the potential it had before. In all the cases I can remember, the only reason the "lab leak" was even a significant event (as opposed to a bucket spilling into the ocean) is when the lab was geographically distinct from the endemic occurrence or the virus had been largely eradicated before.
The main problem with "lab leak hypotheses" is that they aren't clear about what went into that supposed lab and what came out of it. Was there an obscure bat virus? Was there something already infectious to Humans (but somehow undetected by other scientists)? Are we alleging genetic editing? "Gain of Function" (which is easier said then done)? That Sars-CoV-2 genome which first hit Wuhan was already a finely tuned killing machine, much more finely tuned than anything a lab could produce intentionally. All of this makes speculation about the Virus having passed through a laboratory somewhere incredibly pointless, except for trying to undermine scientific consensus.
What do you exactly mean that Gain of Function is "easier said than done"? We routinely engineer changes in viruses for all sorts of purposes. Even I can do it [baculovirus expression cassette vectors--takes less than a day from engineering the cassette to getting expression products]. The tools to do this can be ordered from a catalogue, and it's never been easier to manipulate genomes. You design and order the primers you need and get them a couple of days later.
That's just one type of technology that can be used with ease. There are many others. Baculovirus and adenovirus systems are in common use. Making a custom system for a different virus isn't hard, it just takes a bit more time and effort. I was taught multiple techniques to do this in the late '90s and they weren't new even then. Genetic modification started in viruses--the M13 bacteriophage. It's only got easier and more sophisticated since then. The Wuhan researchers already have multiple papers published which involved making modified viruses, and were specifically funded to perform Gain of Function research. You seem to be claiming this is out of the question, but this seems counter to what is possible, their existing track record, and the grants they were working under at the time.
Why are you underplaying what went on here, and maybe wilfully misdirecting? A lot of this stuff is already well documented, since it's been going on for many years. You can find their papers with a few searches, and they have already been reported on multiple times over the last couple of years.
Then you don't understand viral evolution or genomic epidemiology. "Gain of function" genomes just aren't that viable. Modifying genomes always means the virus becomes less effective in most ways - except one. It's so much not like "programming" it isn't even funny.
Posing "Gain Of Function" experiments as the origin of Sars-Cov-2 also forgets to answer the question of what exactly the starting genome was. At the very least it was completely unknown outside that mystery lab. And there is zero signature anything has been done to it despite natural selection. And when we're talking evolutionary experiments, now you need to explain a couple thousands of hosts (and mice don't really cut it, ferrets and upwards more probably...) at the very minimum, if not hundreds of thousands, which are a lot harder to hide.
Biology is really hard. That's why it took millions of hosts to finetune Sars-Cov-2 to the menace it eventually became. That's not going to happen in a lab any time soon because we don't have the tools. We have tools to assemble and modify some genes, but the chance of actually creating a pandemic that way, accidentally or intentionally is next to zero. Yes, it is out of the question that Wuhan researchers created Sars-Cov-2 through "Gain Of Function research, especially related to those "papers" that are often cited to spread this misinformation.
I don't think it's me spreading baseless misinformation, it's you. Take a long hard look at what you wrote, what I wrote, and then think critically about the problem from all of the angles.
I have a degree in Molecular Biology and a PhD in immunology, and I've worked in infectious disease research. Most of what you wrote is dangerous and inaccurate nonsense.
What exactly you think is wrong with my reasoning? Just throwing a PhD around gets you nowhere with me, you might as well invoke some Pokemon cards. "Gain of Function" experiments involve viral particles that sometimes aren't even infectious to actual living hosts any more, hard to believe they are viable as "practical" diseases.
In my practical understanding, maybe you have some new groundbreaking and unpublished methods of inventing completely novel but extremely viable viruses from scratch, laboratories have to take in a virus before they leak it. That's still the part of the "lab leak hypothesis" that is the sketchiest. Sars-CoV-2 has no known remotely immediate ancestors in any database. Meaning the supposed laboratory X had to do everything in secret before they knew it had to be kept secret. And there was some secrecy after the fact, but the typical Chinese face saving idiocy doesn't buy you the liberty to claim anything you want. Also there is no "designing" of diseases without a sophisticated and large scale industrial process, and it's hard to believe China would chose anything like SARS-CoV-2 for that... There have been some experiments around making a virus more adapted to one host species or integrating some novel proteins. That's about it. All the experiments concentrate on single aspects of a virus because evolving a complete virus is just so combinatorically complex (and pointlessly dangerous). If a lab passes a bat virus through Human cell cultures, yes, it gets more adapted to Human cell cultures, but less virulent. Most genetic manipulation will also result in a virus that loses lots of its function. It is virtually inconceivable that a lab takes in a virus that is incapable of infecting Humans (or causing a pandemic) and then leaks a virus that is capable of infecting Humans and causing a pandemic. There is nothing in that lab selecting the particles for their "pandemic potential", and we know that "pandemic potential" is a trait that virus rarely achieve.
If Sars-Cov-2 DID "leak" from a lab, my opinion is that it did so without any intentional modifications. And then there would still be the question where did they find it and when would it have reached Humans without help.
It's definitely an effective way to tackle China's emerging age pyramid problems. However, it's hard/impossible to prove that. I think it's easier to argue that the Chinese government is guilty of interfering with investigations, destroying evidence, and have a too lax security policy for their virology institutes.
The DOE runs national labs with research into biology. In fact, they funded the human genome project earlier than the NIH (who later swooped in after realizing they were missing out). They also have labs that work on biosafety. Lots of scientists.
Even for the people that have always thought so, this must be uncomfortable. This is only the 1st engineered virus which brought the world upside down. We may be living in a biological war already, or at least some potential for weaponization.
No one is claiming this was an "engineered virus" (and the evidence for is really thin, FWIW). The finding in the linked article is only that a lab leak is the most probably origin of the pandemic.
That's the problem with this discourse. Everyone has gone full absolutist and views even relatively sane, nuanced positions as evidence for nonsense like "we may be living in a biological war already". The fact that those of us in the "it's probably a natural virus" camp may have been wrong about WIV involvement doesn't validate your favorite conspiracy theory!
The article does not say it's not an engineered virus either.
What's the hypothesis here, that the virus naturally arose only inside the lab where it infected one person? Or if it occured naturally in the wild, how come that it infected only one person inside the lab , since it's easy to infect
Considering everything in the current US regime would be pushing against this to be the conclusion and it is still the finding, I suspect the "low confidence" is a managerial stamp based on high level skepticism of likely inscrutable work from lower analysts.
There are two theories:
- the covid19 was created naturally and just happen to happen near the only place on Earth (or one out of two or three places?) that study covid19-style viruses;
- the covid19 was created in the lab and leaked outside because of negligence and/ or sloppy procedures.
Your choice which theory you believe. But a lot of powers in this world have vested interests to make you believe in “nothing to see here theory”.
Except that coronaviruses are wide spreader on all continents. But even if we look at the closest known relatives of covid19, we are literally looking at half of Asia (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2).
It will always be dismissed by those who have a political interest in seeing things differently.
Authortiarianism and coordinated censorship between govs, big health and big tech made it so that anything countering the mandated narratives was heavily supressed and punished.
That's why the online world and the real one varied, no matter how many names and attacks the "mono narrative" mob used against those of us who dissented.
There will be no acknowledgement of the atrocities and human right abuses in the name of covid. No admission of guilt or bad faith. Just pretende that "we were wrong for the right reasons" and anyone who was right, if it's even admitted, "did so for the wrong reasons"
The fact that my comment gets downvoted with no reply is par for course.
I know that HN etiquette will then complain and say "don't talk about downvotes" but that has been effectively another way to suppress dissent all along.
Make dissent hard and when the barrier is still passed, make it hard to view, if you can't outright censor it.
Now we also get SNL being able to "slightly criticize the narrative" when they were so for it for such a long time [1] although the link will still call it a conspiracy, the ever so useful label to anything that requires dismissal without arguments.
The Energy Department is no longer a Trump organ. I don’t see why the senior bureaucrat who oversees it - who is a Biden appointee - would be doing anything to help out Trump here.
“Jennifer M. Granholm was sworn in as the 16th Secretary of Energy on February 25, 2021.”
Biden admin might strategically decide to do the lab leak investigation as part of their anti-China plan. That would be a balance decision, but I could see it coming down on lab leak investigation.
I've read that some american scientists were working or were distantly involved in research projects at this lab.
I still entertain the conspiracy theory that Trump, since he hated China, could have had the capacity to ask the CIA to "cause problems in China", and this lab would have been one way to do harm.
Of course the US would not be really held responsible as long as chinese lab workers were pushed to be negligent, for example to manipulate virus in lower security lab settings, and no scientist was really able to know it would cause a pandemic.
Of course it's impossible to prove, which is why it's a conspiracy theory. Of course the cause was negligence. I'm just ashamed to have this theory in my head, but there are still legitimate scientists who have unanswered questions. It is still quite puzzling, when you read about the subject, to read that they searched for "gain of function", because there was nothing really good to learn, and it was always a pandora box which was very risky to explore.
I guess governments could ask China for financial reparations for this negligence, but I don't think it is worth the drama.
If this were likely, the US would have shut borders way faster. It was a statistical likelihood it would arrive quickly given the number of China to USA travelers.
I thought it was xenophobic and dangerous to suggest that it was a lab leak? does this mean it's OK to talk about it?
Sarcasm aside, this is ridiculously overdue. It was never xenophobic to want inquiry into Covid being a lab leak. The outrageous politicization of finding the source of the outbreak is shameful.
