Yeah. It doesn't sit right with me that Peter Daszak, who has close ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was the driving force behind the February 2020 Lancet letter of scientists "strongly condemning conspiracy theories" like the lab-leak theory – all without disclosing that conflict of interest.
Who is the "They" that you all keep mentioning? I haven't heard anyone push the pangolin theory since, like, March 2020. I listen to the podcast "This Week in Virology" a lot and can only remember them occasionally addressing it as a discarded theory.
It seems to me like people are talking about some Boogeyman here. I need specifics on this "they" because otherwise it just comes across as rhetoric
China has routinely been opaque, blocking investigations over all sorts of things. I don't like it either but I think it's premature to use it as evidence of malice on China's part.
> China has routinely been opaque, blocking investigations over all sorts of things. I don't like it either but I think it's premature to use it as evidence of malice on China's part.
China (and everyone else) doesn't get to have their cake an eat it too. They want to be opaque as national policy, that's their prerogative, but they don't get to do so and expect positive inference regarding what is behind the curtain.
In other words, assuming the worst plausible scenario is the only, or at least a, rational interpretation of possibilities against a policy of intentional opacity.
Is America going to let Chinese investigators start combing through their labs and almost the populace to see if an alternate domestic theory that it originated in the US earlier (after all, there’s been reports that it was in NYC in fall 2019 already).
Can you see how a government might be concerned about keeping an adversary do that because of the sovereignty violation it brings up as well as concerns about spies being part of that group (eg how the CIA used a vaccination program as cover to find Bin Laden in Pakistan)?
It’s not the only rational explanation. It’s just the one you choose to prefer (and it might perhaps be the most plausible given how the Chinese government appears to operate, but it’s not beyond reasonable doubt). Heck, this was the theory behind invading Iraq and looks like the US never did find those WMDs.
I think it's more correct to say that lab leak is a plausible theory. But it's going too far to say it's the most likely theory. I do wish China hadn't clammed up and would have allowed a real investigation. We'll never really know, I suspect.
in which the final claim is "Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2."
Er, that's not really strong support for the naturally occurring hypothesis, it's a refutation against 'naturally occurring is impossible'.
The spontaneous evolution of furin sites is rare in the specific clade of SARS-CoV-2, so if it's support it's very weak. The phylogenetic trees presented in the paper are VERY much loaded to obscure this fact (omitting betacoronaviruses in the alpha-delta tree, and in the breakout betacoronavirus tree, arbitrarily loading up multiple copies of "basically the same" strains which all present a furin cleavage site to make the pie slice of furin site-presenting sequences bigger).
On the other hand, copy-pasting interesting motifs into a different but related genetic entity to achieve GOF is basically "the first strategy you do" as a synthetic biologist. Hell, even I did it (to gain function in a non-pathogenic system) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24934472/ "we substituted one of four amino acids (Asp, His, Asn, Gln) at each of the 12 ligating positions because these amino acids are alternative coordinating residues in otherwise conserved-cysteine positions found in a broad survey of NiFe hydrogenase sequences."
Given there's no other plausible explanation ("bat soup from wet market" theory is completely laughable to anybody who bothers to look closely, and there's no viable path identified that doesn't involve Wuhan labs in one way or another) - it's as much "just a theory" as evolution is "just a theory". Sure, if you work really hard and ignore a lot of facts and have very active imagination, you could imagine some alternative scenario. But the level of proof and agreeing with available facts in this theory would be way lower than in the theory that admits it came through the Wuhan lab. How did it happen - which accident led to it, which rules were bent, who didn't report feeling sick and who was bitten by a bat but didn't want to talk about it out of fear of losing their job, did messing with the virus genome and GoF research play a role and how big the role was - we don't know and probably never will. But calling it the most likely theory is not "going too far" - it's just admitting the evidence we have and looking at it objectively and not trying to fit the facts into predetermined conclusion because we don't like the one that the facts suggest.
i don't understand why the so-called "lab leak theory" of origin for sars-cov2 is treated as some sort of conspiracy theory. it is completely plausible, and things like this have happened in the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak), not due to malice but due to incompetence.
And what kind of legislation would tickle your fancy? Intentional release is already legislated against. How do you legislate the prevention of accidents? Are you specifically talking about disclosure? I can get on board with that, but I'd be shocked if there's not already legislation around that.
Now, the crux, whatever legislation you come up with, how does that apply to a foreign country?
I know basically nothing about foreign policy at all, but just in the "tombert thought experiment" land I'm going to give my "asshole opinion" [1].
-----------
> Now, the crux, whatever legislation you come up with, how does that apply to a foreign country?
Conceivably couldn't we do some kind of trade agreement/embargo on countries that don't follow a minimum level of disclosure/safety protocol? E.g. if country A is shown to have covered up a massive lab leak, we impose some kind of tariff on them for N days.
Obviously there are no easy solutions to problems like this, but I think that would be the place I start, because obviously US law doesn't really apply to places outside of the US; the only thing we could do (at least the only thing that I could think of) that's even close to punitive enforcement would be to apply leverage.
[1] "Opinions are like assholes; everyone's got one and most of them stink"
>Conceivably couldn't we do some kind of trade agreement/embargo
Imagine, if you will, a scenario where one country is manufacturing such a large percentage of products so that an embargo would cause massive disruptions to pretty much everyone everywhere. Now imagine that country being the suspect in a situation where the punishment is that very embargo. What do you do?
Well for starters, the reason a lot of this research was pushed to China was congress had grown tired of finding ways to punish the CDC for lab leaks and mistakes here in the US. It was only recently that the CDC had been allowed to restart a lot of its more dangerous research. So how about the US stop funding dangerous research regardless of where it is at?
Either the lab leak was true and this was a self-inflicted wound, or it was highly suspicious and uselessly dangerous research, as it didn't help us stop the pandemic.
> And what kind of legislation would tickle your fancy? Intentional release is already legislated against. How do you legislate the prevention of accidents?
That's a ridiculous line of reasoning: legislation helps mitigate accidents all the time.
Pilots don't want their bird to fall out of the sky, and yet legislation around pilot training, practices and certification limited the number of accidents.
That same logic also applies to automobiles. You must be licensed to drive, yet accidents happen daily/hourly accross the country. Fatal accidents are frequent. Laws will not save you 100% of the time. Your logic is flawed on the ridiculous side.
> That same logic also applies to automobiles. You must be licensed to drive, yet accidents happen daily/hourly accross the country. Fatal accidents are frequent. Laws will not save you 100% of the time. Your logic is flawed on the ridiculous side.
It sounds like you're claiming that removing the requirement for drivers licenses would not change the percentage of accidents per driver. Are you?
Because there is a whole contingent of people who take the argument in bad faith for xenophobic reasons and there is not a lot of solid evidence in this case to argue in good faith beyond "theoretically possible."
Unfortunately, the unsavory people don't live in a vacuum separate from us. If it ends up being true, then it's true, and whomever is President at the time will do what they can do. If it ends up being false, however, the people (generally Asian Americans) who have been maimed, or killed by those unsavory people in the meanwhile don't get an undo. Continued discussion with no new real evidence, like the situation with Hillary Clinton's emails, is propaganda, pure and simple.
Which was also based on equal amounts of flaky evidence guided by the people that didn't want to associate themselves to the acting President at the time and his party. These people left truth behind, butchered science and sacrificed their integrity.
I think the society would be far better off if we completely cut out politics and make it super boring. Relentless push to put behind this tribal warfare and serve the truth, however uncomfortable it may be.
Lex Fridman's interview with the NIH director was eye-opening. They're acting like children. Of course, you can't see how unpopular it was because Youtube has hidden the dislikes. The cocktail of Big Tech + ruling party is equally as scary to me as Trumpism.
And hiding something because it's believed by bad people is going to make those bad people look like heroes when they turn out to have been right in this particular instance.
If the goal is to make racists look good, that's a great plan.
Personally I rate the plausibility of a lab leak at over 90%. Quick back of the envelope: there is one such lab in China, where there are about 100 cities with over 1 million inhabitants. The probability that a pandemic randomly appeared in any one of them is therefore 1%, or put another way, there is a 99% probability that it appeared in Wuhan because of a link to the lab. There has been no new information in the past two years to change that assessment.
The people smart enough to conduct investigations into this know that the only outcomes will be harsher restrictions on lab research stateside without much consequences for China, and thus they are unmotivated.
This is the unfortunate truth on the psychological side. There is simply no motivation to push the lab leak theory for those scientists involved. Not for the chinese because that would be their death sentence and not for the outside world because funding and restrictions will get a lot harsher. On the other side everyone can live with the other theories because they imply more research funding and no one has to die for political reasons.
Maybe they meant the death sentence for the team of scientists working on coronavirus research at the Wuhan virology lab, that surely must have had to make some kind of statement to the Chinese state if it did exist. I’m sure they have the greatest interest to leave the rest of the country and world in the dark.
We should have leashed very short both politicians and virologists after this disaster, but the blame game has been shifted very skillfully at every point, from anybody worrying about a pandemic, to anybody not worrying about it, to your neighbor who wears the mask wrong, to three guys in the middle of desert who didn't take the vaccine, while nobody with power ever answers about anything.
As an example, notice how much scrutiny Aaron Rodgers or Joe Rogan received, compared with the fact that we've kept the US/Canadian border closed to car traffic while allowing flights in. What seems like an incoherent policy that affects millions gets next to zero attention. But what Joe Rogan does to his own body, now that we should all get the details and a full explanation about.
Well, but we certainly need to do something about this. SARS-CoV-2 is relatively mild compared to other potential lab leaks.
It has nothing to do with taking an anti China stance, as this has happened elsewhere.
It would also be advisable to investigate the early stages of the pandemic as clearly many parties were deliberately hiding information. This led to avoidable casualties and, ultimately, the whole pandemic might have been possible to contain.
>"It has nothing to do with taking an anti China stance, as this has happened elsewhere."
This is a classic collective action problem, not some nationalistic thing (though some will believe or pretend it is). Each specific lab wants relatively lax rules and no consequences for failures, but everyone else needs higher standards.
If I had to guess, it's something along these lines (again I'm just guessing, these are general social sentiments that I observed over the past 2 years):
1. Trump mismanaged the pandemic, this resulted in cognitive dissonance amongst his supporters. (they like him but their brain doesn't like the feeling that it was wrong)
2. A 'convenient' explanation to avoid this dissonance is COVID is a Chinese bio-weapon. They (big bad China) released COVID to make Trump look bad and to kill Americans.
3. Liberals, seeing through this, push back on this generally unsubstantiated claim (at the time and potentially even now) that COVID is a bio-weapon. In the eyes of most, Liberals have taken the side of 'COVID is a natural random mutation, not a lab leak'.
4. Now whether or not it's a lab leak or natural is a political game, where your team wins depending on where the facts finally lie (or if you can manufacture enough support for your 'side').
5. See: Rand Paul v Fauci in various senate hearings about gain-of-function research and funding for a Wuhan lab & generally liberals trying not to talk about it because it would be another example of them 'lying' in the eyes of conservatives (think 'masks don't help' but alllll over again).
I don't buy this, obviously not an unbiased sample, but most individual liberals I know are on board with it being a lab leak. Can't necessarily say that about 'liberal leadership class' in the US, though.
(GP here) I generally agree with this. It's why I wrote 'in the eyes of most'. IMO liberals are bad at defining their own opinions in the court of public opinion, and often are viewed as !Conservative, even if their views are more nuanced.
I've read that most US/western scientists in the field immediately thought that COVID19 was likely a lab leak, and were dumbfounded by the Daszak et al. letter in Science denouncing any discussion of same as unfounded racism.
Anecdotal, of course, but this tracks with the subset of my friends/former colleagues who are researchers in biotech. As an Asian person, I thought the focus on the wet markets to be weirdly racist/exoticist. If anything the lab leak hypothesis is anti chinese-state, but not racist, but the Chinese state loves to conflate being anti-chinese-state with racism in it's propaganda.
This seems like a pretty good take to me. As an American who cares a lot about having compelling reasons for my beliefs and opinions, it's so fucking exhausting.
Lately, I've been getting more comfortable with just saying "I don't know" for the latest controversial topic. It's not great for making small talk though.
It’s like religion in the ancient days. When a plague or earthquake hit people didn’t understand (didn’t want to understand) that these are the effects of a giant mechanical system and not the fault of anyone. The ancients created gods to justify these things, modern people blame the great other.
If you were French in the 1890s you’d love to blame any societal tragedy on Germans, if you were German in the 20s you’d be blaming France, etc.
Yeah. There are still plenty of people in modern times that want a singular scapegoat for an accident. And even people who think natural disasters are a result of god punishing us for allowing people to be homosexual
China needed to buy some time so that there wouldn't be pressure for sanctions due to covid, so all the Chinese shills started calling it a conspiracy theory.
I don’t think so. Not that I believe it’s impossible it originated in China from a lab accident, I think you should have proof before claiming that but okay. But when people started claiming it came from China they weren’t doing so off of hard evidence or being rational. They were doing so because of xenophobia and nationalist pride and it’s just easier to blame these problems on an other than it is to believe shit happens.
Now this year there have been more scientific minded people who have proposed a pretty rational set of circumstances that it could have came from China, but
1. These circumstances are not proven and are little more than a hunch of what could be, and
2. The type of people who push the “Chinavirus” rhetoric aren’t those same scientific minds thinking rationally and instead they’ve had their opinion slightly verified by more recent understanding (again, slightly, because there is no proof.)
> I'm curious why Dr. Collins believes so strongly that a lab leak was unlikely, that is his reasoning, given that he states SARS had leaked on at least a couple different occasions resulting in some deaths, yet was quickly contained. The non-answer to this question, or his reference to an investigation into the intermediary, which he admits has not yet been found and will take much time, are insufficient to address the elephant in the room. It's frustrating hearing "trust the experts and bureaucracy" when throughout the interview so many instances of incompetence and failure exist in history. The question needs to be asked regarding gain of function and yet Mr. Collins is more concerned about the reputation of the scientific community. Both are important, but how can we have a public conversation without probing Senators like Rand Paul? "Public" conversations within the scientific community are referenced by Dr. Collins as well as the achievements of the Human Genome Project, but I don't understand how he can be so defensive of public figures' reputations. Again, how are we to have conversations and trust when the bureaucrats and scientific community don't communicate answers to these huge problems! Excuse us, Mr. Collins, but we just had a major pandemic and this current version of SARS was not contained and you can say you wish China were more forthcoming, but perhaps those three instances of gain of function research in the flu versus your woeful insufficient in my opinion defense of a natural gain of function and leak in the case of SARS covid-2, at least deserves some respectful, humble conversation. Labeling Senators as playing politics is not helpful since, in regards to Dr. Paul, what alternative to asking questions do you propose to serve the public interest? (This is coming from someone who read Dr. Collins book "DNA The Language of Life" having enjoyed this book as one of the best on the topic of science and faith.)
I am sure the Director of NIH didn't get to this position with incompetence. Good men are being turned into a hot mess. I would still trust NIH but they really need to clean up. I want to hold CDC and NIH more accountable than say some lunatic saying "China virus" on Parlor.
> I'm curious why Dr. Collins believes so strongly that a lab leak was unlikely, that is his reasoning, given that he states SARS had leaked on at least a couple different occasions resulting in some deaths, yet was quickly contained.
“A known, widely researched pathogen was present in a lab” and “a brand new, unknown pathogen was present in a lab” are vastly different scenarios.
Coronavirus research has been going on for a decade at the Wuhan Lab. They sent a staff of half a dozen people to a bat cave in 2013. Dr. Zhengli was a coronavirus researcher there. See [1] for in-depth history of Wuhan Lab.
Well, there's not much evidence for it. And, honestly, there's arguably an aspect of wishful thinking to it. "This was the result of a leak" is much less scary than "this just showed up", because in the leak scenario, the next one probably _could_ be stopped through better procedures, whereas the entirely natural scenario... well, there are some precautions that can be taken, but good luck preventing exiting new viruses from showing up from time to time.
The NIAID claimed that it didn't fund research into BANAL-52 and similar. "the closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 . . . were not studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant"
Making false exculpatory statements tends to show consciousness of guilt, and is often sufficient to convict beyond a reasonable doubt. In other words, not only is there quite a bit of evidence, there's enough evidence that if you could show the NIAID knew about the BANAL-52 research, and if GOF research were a crime, the evidence would be strong enough to start imprisoning people.
Better for whom? Certainly not for the labs. It's far better for the labs to draw their own conclusions from the leak, privately, at their own pace. Also, there's a significant financial disincentive: funding for gain of function research will be severely impacted by recognizing the lab leak as the most plausible explanation.
Right now I'd conclude that you can accidentally release things from labs with virtually no consequences. Just make sure that a similar virus exists naturally somewhere on the same continent, don't share any internal records, don't let your staff talk to the press, and you have plausible deniability.
1) I've seen people call for a ban on research at all on BSL-3+ pathogens.
2) If you "accept that it was a lab leak" you are implicitly accepting that it was not a natural event - which is going to cause you to focus more on long-tailed, low-probability events like lab leaks, and less on zoonotic transmission events.
> ...good luck preventing exiting new viruses from showing up from time to time.
But even with a "natural origin," there are things that could be done. I've heard it said that the real Chinese cover-up in that scenario is the widespread trading of wild animals (with one wild animal vendor even travelling from Wuhan to other markets which China had insisted only sold frozen food and kitchenware).
You still have the same problem in the end: a "lack of transparency" (if not downright dishonesty) from the Chinese government. And also, an obvious avenue for reforming the dangers that helped spread the 2020 pandemic -- which is not being explored because of difficulties in even establishing the facts of the initial outbreak.
I honestly don't know why this idea -- this possibility, this scenario -- isn't getting equal consideration.
The fact that the first(?) major outbreak was in a city with a major virus research lab that researches coronaviruses is pretty strong circumstantial evidence. China's "nothing to see here" handling of it was also suspicious.
Has a virus ever leaked from a lab whose existence (or ability to transmit along humans) had not previously been known? Surely the vast majority of new human-infecting viruses have been novel mutations that happened naturally.
Because it's almost inherently conspiracy fodder, true or not.
It tickles the part of human psychology that looks for threat agents, rather than just threats.
Lots of us here on the more analytical side might have trouble understanding that fully, especially if we relate to Fauci's early 2020 statements which more or less amount to "it doesn't really matter which plausible origin turns out to be the case, either way the task in front of us is to figure out how to mitigate the damage and address the virus."
It could have been a lab leak. It could have been (and now looks more likely to have been [0][1]) natural spillover from increasing contact with zoonotic reservoirs. What's the difference?
The answer to that question on a practical level is re-thinking safety protocols for related research (and perhaps a conversation about the risks of conducting viral research vs the risks of viral ignorance).
On a less practical level, though, the answer is that it prompts inhabiting a narrative where they key issue is human threat agents.
The irony is that many of the people who choose that as the most important thing to pay attention seem slower to consider how human threat agents might use that narrative.
> Because it's almost inherently conspiracy fodder, true or not.
No it's not! Reasonably minded persons consider this entirely plausible.
The way the conversation is being actively steered away from this topic is concerning.
> It could have been a lab leak. It could have been (and now looks more likely to have been [0][1]) natural spillover from increasing contact with zoonotic reservoirs. What's the difference?
There's a huge difference. Each scenario has different lessons to learn, culpability, etc.
> No it's not! Reasonably minded persons consider this entirely plausible.
I didn't say it was implausible. In fact, I have at least one sentence in my comment that acknowledges it is plausible to entertain. It doesn't appear to be plausible as a conclusion (see the two articles I linked, which do include sources who initially wanted to explore the lab leak theory), but it was plausible enough as a hypothesis.
What I said is that even if it is the truth, it evokes conspiracy-oriented thinking in a specific way, and elaborated on the dynamic.
> Each scenario has different lessons to learn, culpability, etc.
"Culpability" -- thank you for reinforcing my point about human threat agents. And also regarding "lessons to learn", or as I put it, managing risks in viral research vs the risks of not doing viral research... which of course is a conversation that goes on anyway.
I have to agree. The desperation to “blame China” seems to be driven by people with fantasies about going to war with China. Not even economic war with China beyond current tensions is possible without completely wrecking the economy in ways that will take all of us but the Bezos of the world down. Very little of this seems grounded in reality or good faith desire to know the truth of the matter.
>There's a huge difference. Each scenario has different lessons to learn, culpability, etc.
Perspective matters. Yes, learning to not have it happen again is an ideal thing. However, from Fauci's point of view at the time and his role, the how/why absolutely didn't matter as he stated.
Imagine if a policeman was saying the same thing about a crime; why investigate, finding the culprit is only conspiracy fodder, let's only take care of the victims.
Not investigating, and hiding the truth is what gives room for conspiracies to grow.
Also how can we better understand and prevent pandemics whithout understanding where they come from. Wasn't the coronavirus research lab founded on that premise?
I don't find the parallel good. Trying to invent a better one, I thought I'd say the coronavirus situation is IMO more like a question of whether, say, some particular volcano's explosion was natural, or human-induced.
As such, one can either focus on generally being more prepared against volcano explosions, or focus on trying to find a person among volcano researchers and tourists who may have done something to tickle the volcano to explode.
I mean, it's sure also not a perfect analogy; but how I see it, focusing on preparedness and handling of a situation that does happen naturally from time to time for sure, sounds to me like a sensible choice to focus effort into. With that said, totally, if there's some possibility it might have been human-induced, it makes sense to try and track and prevent it in the future; thing is, me personally, and I would risk theorizing that also many other people, am strongly afraid of such approach too quickly and too easily turning into a witch-hunt, anti-XYZ propaganda, and stirring hate by unscrupulous people - with scapegoating seemingly socially much easier to turn towards, than tiresome and "boring" epidemologic preparedness and discipline.
A better analogy is a forest fire - perhaps a human triggered it, maybe it was lightening. Whichever caused this specific fire, you cannot build a fire prevention strategy solely around stopping people lighting fires.
It is Hacker News trope really, more and more evidence mounts that it was indeed - a lab leak, there has been lengthy research reports from journalists on this matter, but Hacker News remains in doubt. Which is strange, one kind of expects Hackers to weight everything and see if theory withholds scrutiny.
Same thing happens with that ultrasound attack against US diplomates in Cuba, Hacker news users claim it was just grasshopers while more and more evidence mounts it was a Russian attack.
If you read the links I've posted, you'll note at least two things about them:
1) They include observation from figures who started open to the idea that the lab leak hypothesis was plausible enough to explore, but have concluded that it's unlikely (and explain why)
If you read links you've posted, you'll note that the BSL4 lab in Wuhan, China is ruled out only. Did they rule out «Vector» BSL4 lab in Novosibirsk, RF?
If you yourself read the links you posted, you'd know these two thins are just speculation
1) They do not explain way, Worobey just assumes that first patient was different person, with connection to wet market, while it is known that both WHO and China identified earlier patient without connection to the wet market. If you read long enough you will find that he is being criticized exactly for that assumptions without any proof.
Fine, referring to them as "stupiderati" was over the line. But generally, it is the people who hear "lab leak" and immediately jump to the conclusion that it was 100% deliberate that make it difficult to talk about.
I think the entire attitude of a “them” that can be labeled that way is indicative of the sort of heated rhetoric that makes it hard to discuss things. One could’ve made this entirely blameless by simply describing the behavior without using an amorphous them. Think of it like blameless discussion of a program during a war room scenario.
>i don't understand why the so-called "lab leak theory" of origin for sars-cov2 is treated as some sort of conspiracy theory. it is completely plausible, and things like this have happened in the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak), not due to malice but due to incompetence.
It's remarkable how quickly they settled on bats and everything but this was misinformation that would get you banned from various american tech companies.
I think lots of answers came along from fauci's emails. All of these are not coincidences and China is probably not the source of covid. Hence why there was such a quick reaction to blame china.
> where a chinese national shipped viruses to wuhan
No where in the linked article does it say that Dr. Xiangguo Qiu shipped viruses to Wuhan.
NMLs lips have been sealed and there was never a reason given why they were dismissed. Going as far as saying that they were shipping viruses to wuhan is baseless speculation.
>All of this has led to conspiracy theories linking the novel coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, Canada's microbiology lab, and the lab in Wuhan.
There's no evidence that coronavirus was involved with this lady.
>NMLs lips have been sealed and there was never a reason given why they were dismissed. Going as far as saying that they were shipping viruses to wuhan is baseless speculation.
Like, Wuhan is certainly involved. It's possible coronavirus was already at wuhan and they used these canadian viruses for the 'gain of function' stuff. Oh it's much better than that. Those government officials have outright defied orders requiring them to disclose this information. Even better, we all know how strong unions and such are. They came out originally fighting for this lady and then suddenly they stopped altogether. No fight at all.
And where did this lady go? She has been missing...
Even better? Early on in covid Indian universities looked at the covid make up and found that it wasn't a natural virus. A natural virus would have been spitting out many new variants early on. They made some predictions about where those gain of function points would have been from. But then the censors came along and shut them down.
Ah I didn’t see the other article about her sending viruses to Wuhan. That is a really bad look especially after she was forcibly removed for unspeakable reasons. The look is even worse after she disappeared off the face of the earth. I’m sure CSIS has had many eyes on her for some time.
Nobody associates it with a conspiracy theory just because it gets mentioned. That happens because the people most aggressively pushing it online often make that association themselves. In between demands for expensive new investigations, they often veer off into talk of Dasczak is part of a vast gain-of-function underground and Fauci is helping them cover it up, and Big Pharma is pushing vaccines because they can't make a profit from ivermectin, and something something about discouraging masks at the start of the pandemic, and mask/vaccine mandates are somehow part of a plot to destroy America, and so on ad nauseam. Seen plenty of it right here. Such people might be a small minority of the people who think we should look more closely at virus research standards, but they're an incredibly visible minority and their stridency causes the whole issue to be framed in conspiracy-theory terms.
What? Unless I'm mistaken, There is no GOF underground with Dasczak, it's very above ground. Don't know if Fauci is covering it up, but he certainly hasn't stepped forward to condemn Dasczak, even though the NIH already has condemned EcoHealthAllicance.
It's also kind of insane that Dasczak was a lead signatory to the "this is not a lab leak" opinion piece without disclosing a MAJOR conflict of interest. He should have stayed out of it.
If you don't think a lot of people died early on in the US because the Surgeon General went on TV and said masks were basically useless for the average person, with every talk/news show running pieces about how you'd just touch a doorknob then your eye, and thus are more likely to get infected by wearing a mask, then you either can't remember what happened or are ideologically driven.
I was just pointing out that in his etc etc ad nausea example, at least one point the people he disagreed with were making was right. And they’re partially right about the vaccine motivations which is to make money. Ivermectin doesn’t need big pharma to make it look bad, but if ivermectin worked it wouldn’t be a big change from historical norms for large corporate competition to downplay it. It’s not some weird conspiracy theory to say big pharmaceutical companies have done shady stuff and broken laws to push their drugs.
There are lots of “traditionally done” things that turn out not to be great. There are some good examples of the issues with naming viruses geographically in this article.
Your article says absolutely nothing about the geographical naming causing the prejudice against minorities and it doesn't make sense that the place of origin, which is of public notoriety, would either be forgotten or is the cause of the prejudice anyway.
>i don't understand why the so-called "lab leak theory" of origin for sars-cov2 is treated as some sort of conspiracy theory.
Because wildlife->human is a lot more plausible than that. Consider for instance a novel mutation that arises from [0], transmitted to humans and is coincidentally discovered near a lab that was researching this disease. Would that also be considered a 'lab leak'?
Pretty much everyone involved stands to lose from it proving to be true that a lab leak occurred. China looks bad, the CDC/US looks bad, researchers look bad, EcoHealth Alliance looks bad[1], the lancelet looks bad.[2] Heck even politifact and factcheck.org reported the idea as debunked for the first year or so, and Facebook for around the same time took down content with that angle.[3] It would also likely result in a backlash against interest in GOF research in general.
The only group that stands to benefit are those who benefit by making those groups look bad, who will also unfortunately exaggerate their claims for greater effect.
>The only group that stands to benefit are those who benefit by making those groups look bad
I mean, collectively as humans we stand to benefit from knowing what happened so we can make more informed cost benefit decisions in the future about conducting risky research (if that's what happened).
There's going to be quite a bit more externalizing risk while "privatizing" (even if it's nation states) gains in the future with bio-engineering, so these conversations should be had.
> I mean, collectively as humans we stand to benefit from knowing what happened so we can make more informed cost benefit decisions in the future about conducting risky research (if that's what happened).
You're not wrong, but I think what you're missing is that the risky research was funded (in part) by the us federal government, and no one voted for that in the first place. So even if we were all enlightened, what could we change? So many people still don't even know that there was a lab studying coronaviruses in wuhan.
You could highlight all the research being conducted in future so more stakeholders can weigh in on the risks. You can raise the requirements for conducting such research, or in extreme cases prevent it from being done. The assumption that “nothing can be done” has to be the worst approach, given the multitude of alternatives. Simply trying increases the odds that improvements are found.
People voted for it indirectly and if they knew that the virus originated because of that (I’m not saying it did, I have no idea) it would allow them to pressure politicians in insuring it never happens again.
They voted for it via representative democracy. If it comes out that there was a leak and politicians still want to fund this kind of thing, then they'll get less votes.
Nobody votes for most things in a representative democracy. I don't think you'd be surprised to know that bad press is effective at changing behavior.
The notable exception is Donald Trump, whose superpower is that shame causes him to double down. He's the kryptonite for a representative democracy. Just because of that, I'll never understand why people voted him in.
> I mean, collectively as humans we stand to benefit from knowing what happened so we can make more informed cost benefit decisions in the future about conducting risky research (if that's what happened).
I really don't think so. Knowing what actually happened makes no difference. What is important is knowing what problems exist and what can possibly happen as a consequence of them.
>"I really don't think so. Knowing what actually happened makes no difference. What is important is knowing what problems exist and what can possibly happen as a consequence of them."
Doing a root cause analysis is useful, because it provides you with information about certain modes of failure and their causes. Ignoring past failures, and using a 'tabula rasa' approach will deprive decision-makers of valuable information, and lead to repeating past errors.
That's such a diffuse benefit that you'd need to compare it to other things that benefit literally everyone alive - for example, the environment which sustains our existence - to determine how effective a motivator that is.
I definitely agree that there's good reason to know what actually happened, if for nothing else for the sake of long term trust in institutions. Instead of group, something more like organizations and institutions with the ability to investigate and hold people accountable would probably be more accurate.
I want to disagree with you and say it doesn’t matter, but you’re definitely right hiding bad situations is in the playbook of the authoritarian and should have no place in our society.
It matters in the same way that understanding why a plane crashed matters. If you can't figure out why a plane crashed then you can't improve flight safety much.
This is a helpful apolitical perspective. We need to improve social safety. But the pandemic is different in scope. It's not that the plane crashed. Rather, our technology "may have" allowed us to accidentally make a pandemic. It's as if no plane crash had ever occurred before, and now we made one happen. If we understand what really happened, we might see this event as bringing us into a new era in our evolution. The fact that we can imagine this to be the case even while firmly denying it to be what happened it's a firm sign that the times have changed.
That’s because it’s a mechanical device owned by a single large international company.
You can’t “engineer away” a virus.
The airplane analogy only makes sense of you say the result of investigation is to apply international sanctions against countries who continue to manufacture unsafe aircraft and fly them domestically…
…but, you have a) arguably no business telling them what to do in their own country and b) how are you even going to know, since those aircraft never visit your country?
Ie. yeah, great concept, but it’s so disparate from what we’re actually talking about it’s meaningless in this context.
It won’t fix things, or make things better knowing where it came from.
If the virus is caused by risky research, you can stop doing risky research.
>arguably no business telling them what to do in their own country
Aren't there international standards for dealing with viruses? Also, some of the research in the Wuhan lab was funded by the US. So the US did have business telling them what to do in some cases regardless of international standards.
The genie is out of that bottle - the research has been done, and can be replicated by less honest actors. Under these circumstances, continuing this kind of research to understand how to combat viruses created by rouge actors might be the right thing to do.
I agree they leave a lot to be desired, but they're both at least perceived as somewhat reliable and trustworthy - factcheck is used by Facebook for example. I'm sure lots of people have pointed to those sites as proof, unfortunately.
because organizations are made up of people and people are imperfect. Eventually someone is bound to screw up large enough to put an organization's survival at risk. And the natural response by other members to try and suppress knowledge to ensure survival. That of course just makes things worse.
Because of politics. And because a person's self-preservation does not necessarily align with, or rely upon, the proper functioning of the organization.
> The only group that stands to benefit are those who benefit by making those groups look bad, who will also unfortunately exaggerate their claims for greater effect.
Assuming there was a lab leak, the root cause to me would seem to be organizations overestimating the benefit from GOF research compared to the risks. Why that happened is a bit harder to answer. A couple potential explanations are a leak was actually a one in a million chance (this seems unlikely given past issues)[1], there is some extreme benefit we just haven't seen yet (also seems somewhat unlikely) or organizations are likely to accept risks if it means everyone gets to keep their jobs and grants keep coming in.
How to fix that problem is difficult, as gain of function research is complicated and obscure enough to be off the radar of most people until something goes wrong, so questioning scientific orthodoxy is somewhat impossible for the average person. I'm not sure what can be done about it, other than those with respectable credentials advocating for transparency and and regular people maintaining a healthy sense of curiosity.
What looks bad is having millions of people die and not learning how to prevent it in future. This should be a blameless post-mortem. Shit went wrong, this is how we fix it. Truth and reconciliation, not hide-behind-feels. The people who want to apportion blame grow stronger from all this cat and mouse.
If one or more parties are "responsible" then public sentiment (amplified by social media) will bring the pitchforks.
That translates to political support and basically guarantees the election or increased support for certain types of politicians and response, which in turn will impact diplomacy.
It would take some supreme social engineering to get society at large to accept the idea of a blameless post mortem. It's really not part of the broader cultural lexicon. Even companies struggle and they are much smaller and simpler systems.
Responsibility and liability are intrinsically linked in the public mind.
..the point of the grandparent post is that if we emphasise _liability_, it's less likely we'll get any information.
This is a common understanding in industries dealing with safety. If you want to _punish_, focus on blame. If you want to focus on _helping ensure the problem doesn't happen again_, remove the threat of blame.
Also, mentioning reparations brings up ideas of ...current US political discussion... and is likely to polarise this discussion. Please try and keep this productive.
The other problem is the damage they have done to the institutions and the publics trust. Even if it's a natural event they all have to go. Who can trust them to tell the truth the next time. They have burned those bridges.
>It would also likely result in a backlash against interest in GOF research in general.
If general GOF research caused this pandemic, then maybe there should be a backlash against it. Lot's of science doesn't happen because it's too dangerous to human lives, even if the theoretical benefits outweigh the costs.
The only group that benefits are those who want to know the truth, and that is dangerous cause the truth will make the liars look bad? I mean, no offense but that sounds like something a sociopath would say.
I wouldn't say the truth itself is dangerous, but it is dangerous to the organizations involved. Those who benefit from the truth such as you or I do not have the ability to uncover it, and the institutions that could have the ability to do so don't benefit from doing so. There's no impartial oversight group outside of regular citizens, who unfortunately lack the ability to hold their institutions to account for a variety of reasons. The (potential) truth is dangerous to the parties involved, so they have an incentive not to investigate or ignore the possibility. They might even give some not completely self serving explanations/rationalizations if asked, such as keeping the peace or not causing a panic.
If for example there was a leak, and it was purely the fault of one country, I would imagine there would be vigorous finger pointing.
> If for example there was a leak, and it was purely the fault of one country, I would imagine there would be vigorous finger pointing.
I imagine by the same account, if a person is murdered, it was purely the fault of one murderer, that there would be vigorous finger pointing.
However, if they don't come forward and citizens, media, and prosecutors have to determine who killed someone; not only should they be required to pay significantly more if they have assets, but the punishment should be harsher because they deliberately withheld the truth causing their victims families more suffering.
Because it's completely untestable and short of someone "admitting" it we will never know for sure.
So whether you believe it or not depends entirely on you're prejudices. I'm prejudiced not to but others may feed differently.
And it makes absolutely no difference at all. You still need a vaccine, you still need lockdowns and quarantines and to manage your healthcare. And we should all be taking action on China whether it's incompetence (around food hygiene) or incompetence (around bio hazard management).
This is why I hate the whole Lab Leak thing. It's people "straining out a knat and swallowing a camel". It's a distraction and it unnecessarily complicates messaging and discussion that can be pretty vital.
It absolutely makes a difference, because we need to stop this from happening again. We can't just accept that labs are going to continue to release dangerous viruses and then just deal with the effects every time.
Uh... are you forgetting about a thing called H1N1? Granted, it wasn't as dangerous as COVID, but that originated in the good ol' US of A. I wouldn't be so quick to jump to harsh ideas just for the sake of it - this could have happened in any country really - all you need is human interaction with animals and enough time.
> Because it's completely untestable and short of someone "admitting" it we will never know for sure.
What a weird assertion.
It would be perfectly testable in any democratic country. Set up an independent commission, give access to the lab's complete files, perform a lot of tests on samples held there. That's exactly what would happen. Opposition parties would be demonstrating non stop demanding answers.
Instead this is China, a communist dictatorship with, on top of that, a strong culture of never losing face. It's only untestable because of that, not for epistemological reasons.
So it's testable, but only if we overthrow the CCP, make China a functional democracy, change Chinese culture to encourage openness, seize the records before they destroy them (which them might already have) and if we can't find those records or they say nothing incriminating, we accept tthat they're innocent because abcence of evidence is evidence of abcense?
In the context of a scientific hypothesis, "untestable" means that it can't be tested, not that someone doesn't want it to be tested. The fact that someone really really really doesn't want it to be tested does not make it untestable. It makes it untested but eminently testable.
> They know their cushy careers and research grants are gone if they normalize the lab leak.
These sorts of comments on HN are always fascinating to me.
Scientific researchers make $20K/yr for 6 years of their 20s, often working 60 hour - 80 hour weeks. If they are successful, around the age of 30 they will then make between $40K and $60K in a temporary, term-limited position (post-doc). This might repeat several times -- each more stressful than the last -- until they land a permanent job. Still working like dogs the whole time, btw. That final permanent job, which very few will ever actually get, probably pays between $60K and $100K. A very lucky few among the lucky few might make up to $200K by the time they turn 40, but most will never surpass $150K in their lives.
My undergrad mentees all make $160K+ as 22 year olds, often get to $300K pretty quickly, and will max out in the >$500K range some time in their 30s.
Software folks accusing life scientists of getting fat off of research grant money is really something else.
I've often found that when people take a "follow the money, man" position on an argument, they are not in fact following the money. e.g., the arguments I used to see against anthropogenic global warming based on essentially the same idea you're pushing back on -- that it was a fraud perpetrated by climate scientists so they'd keep raking in the donations and grants. When I inquired as to why "follow the money" wouldn't in fact suggest far greater skepticism of oil companies in the debate, I never got much of a response.
Your analysis should start with the people who got the final permanent job, as those are the ones whose careers are at risk. And your comparison of a "cushy career" should be compared to the median American, who earns $36K, not the extreme outliers you mentor. $60K to $100K for high-status intellectual work is something most people would cling onto.
> Your analysis should start with the people who got the final permanent job
LOL. I was being generous to you be doing otherwise.
Faculty running successful large wet labs at R1s could jump to the private sector and make millions/yr minimum. Those people are the equivalent of a Director in the tech world. (Or, at the very very least, a Staff/Principal. But really more like Director/VP).
Look at what faculty who run large DARPA-funded labs in CS make when they jump to industry. They usually enter as either Principal/Staff or more commonly as Director. Those are very high six / low 7 figure positions. It's comparable in biotech.
To be perhaps excessively blunt, you have no fucking clue who you're talking about.
> should be compared to the median American, who earns $36K
WTF? Why are we comparing STEM PhDs to the median American?
The average virologist has a STEM undergraduate degree, a PhD, significant additional training, knows their way around complicated lab equipment, has experience designing/debugging complicated experiments, and is usually not such a half-bad programmer either.
(And, again, those are the losers. The average successful PI has all of that plus is leading a group of 10-20 employees in complicated R&D. Possibly also has an MD.)
Even the losers could easily find jobs that leverage those skills or mildly retool to get a high-class software job. In either case, they would earn much more than $36K in any number of industries. Because they have significant experience and training. Unlike the median American.
> not the extreme outliers you mentor.
My mentees are not extreme outliers. They come from a no-name university with an unexceptional CS program. $160K is not an outlier total comp in tech. It's pretty darn normal. National statistics say that the average Software Eng salary is $110K. Salary. Not Comp. Salary. Throw in typical stock/bonus and you get to $160K pretty easily.
But even that $110K number is a shitload more than the $20K virology phd candidates are paid (often for 60-80 hours of lab work each week).
My undergrad mentees are a much better group to compare STEM PhDs against than this "median American" thing you're suggesting:
1. In some cases it's a direct comparison. Many non-CS STEM PhDs are at least as qualified for entry-level software jobs as CS undergrads from unexceptional places. Or can be in very short order. Lots of lab work these days involves significant programming. All lab work involves building a the skills and mindset that make for excellent debugging. And soft engs with domain expertise are valuable.
2. Software isn't the only industry that pays well; the biotech industry also pays quite well. The sorts of people working in virology weblabs are almost certainly able to get WAAY better paying jobs at Biogen or Amgen or whatever.
3. Lots of virologists are MD/PhDs. I don't have to tell you that MDs make more than $35K/yr, right?
> $60K to $100K for high-status intellectual work is something most people would cling onto.
Sure. But -- and this is the point -- it's NOT a good monetary or social status outcome for the people who actually fucking QUALIFY for those jobs. Which, again, isn't the "median American".
Literally no one working on NIH grants is maximizing their earning potential. If you can't concede this point, then you're choosing willful ignorance and there's not much point in having a conversation.
In the lab where I did my postdoc, the folks who went on to work for Amazon, Rackspace and Facebook are doing way better than those of us who went to work for universities, the CDC, etc. monetarily.
I have, what is for an academic a great job, and it pales in comparison to what I could make if I retooled for industry.
Heck, I left academia for industry and ended up publishing fewer, but better and more cited papers. It was the first time I was finally given freedom to explore an idea, significant capital, and management support for my ideas (thank you bill c, alan e and urs h).
I'm 10 years closer to retirement as well, able to own a house in the bay area, etc etc. However, I'm quite aware few who go into industry were given the level of research freedom I was.
Fauci is the highest-paid US government employee. That's even ignoring the fact that he will make tens of millions of dollars after he ceases to be a government employee. The previous head of the FDA, Gottlieb is with Pfizer already. I find it bizzarre how people instantly forgot how profoundly evil US Big Pharma was considered even a couple of years ago. These people will let diabetics die for a buck, and yet I'm now supposed to treat them as the second coming of Jesus, and pretend they can do no wrong.
And I can guarantee you Daszak and a bunch of other hangers on make a lot more than "20K". In fact 20K might not be enough to get him out of bed in the morning.
> Fauci is the highest-paid US government employee.
...And? What's your point?
As a Chief Medical Officer at a pharma company, which he more than qualifies for, he's be making 10+ million/year. E.g., darryl sleep, the CMO of Amgen, made $20 million last year. You make this point yourself.
So Fauci is greedy because he.... didn't sell out? This take is so astoundingly ignorant that it's hard to believe it's made in good faith.
My point is, until we ban the immediate popping up of these figureheads on Big Pharma boards (something Trump tried and failed to do, and Biden won't even try), there's a massive conflict of interest, and everything they say and do should be regarded with a lot of suspicion. Pay them twice as much,
but then say "you can't take money from the companies you're charged with regulating, directly or otherwise, for 5 years or you go to jail". The situation we have right now is just dumb and corrupt AF across the board. Fauci generated somewhere near half a trillion dollars of revenue for Pfizer just on COVID alone, and there's nothing whatsoever in US law preventing him from collecting a de-facto deferred bribe after he leaves NIAID. Happens to every single one of these figureheads, without any exceptions. I strongly suspect that's why they take these relatively unexciting jobs in the first place - for the potential to earn something more "exciting" that they wouldn't be able to get otherwise.
If you think they have your interests in mind, I suggest you reconsider. At best, your interests might sometimes align with those of their true masters. But if they don't, who gives a shit - Pfizer has legal immunity now.
I largely agree that moving between gov't and private sector should be illegal or at least highly constrained, particularly in leadership or decision-making positions. But I also think you're unserious and insincere.
> Pay them twice as much, but then say "you can't take money from the companies you're charged with regulating, directly or otherwise, for 5 years or you go to jail"... Happens to every single one of these figureheads, without any exceptions.
You know how I can tell you're an unserious? You're criticizing Fauci for doing exactly what you want -- staying a well-but-not-unfairly-paid civil servant for his entire career. If Fauci was going to cash out, he could have done so decades ago. He's been at the top for a long time.
Which, BTW, is FAR more common than not. The people you're describing are not the median or normal outcome.
I don't think you have thought seriously about your criticism here, and I don't think you're commenting on this issue in good faith.
People in academia are smart enough, they made that choice voluntarily and nobody held a gun to their head.
It's a voluntary trade-off for lower pay to work in the field you want.
There is a difference between churning out code you really hate for 500k/yr, and doing what you are interested in for 80/10/150k. The vast majority people in software aren't aching to reinvent the wheel, but in a new js framework every year, they just do it for the money.
Research grant money is still money, even if the academics decide to take a trade-off others don't.
How would you like to NEVER receive grant money again? Gonna bite the hand that feeds you?
> There is a difference between churning out code you really hate for 500k/yr, and doing what you are interested in for 80/10/150k.
LOL, no.
Industry is way better than academia on the qualitative stuff.
First, STEM PhDs who qualify for R1 faculty positions but who instead go into industry are not doing shit with javascript frameworks. What kind of insane company would waste such specific and highly developed skills on that kind of nonsense?
Second, people running wet labs aren't "doing what they want". They're doing contract work for funding agencies. In terms of both freedom and enjoyment, it's much closer to a mid-level manager body-shop position at Accenture than a "life of mind". FAANG IC life is luxurious by comparison.
My friends in academia are constantly tweaking/justifying what they work on. I do what I want, make 5x-10x more, and have way better resources/staff.
And that's all before giving a 2 hour lecture to 500 kids while wearing an N-95, then going home and giving the same lecture to another 200 kinds on zoom.
I've exaggerated only a little about js frameworks. I've had a PhD from Geoff Hintons group do manual QA once for a few months. Far worse things occur on the regular, nobody really cares about highly theoretical concerns such as "waste of potential" in practice.
Some FAANGs even have a policy of hiring talent just to deny it to competition. Figure out what they'll do after you hire them, no real planning on that part.
However, the larger point remains: people in science labs for some reason stay in the lab. Why? Maybe they just like complaining or suffering? Maybe so, but if they want to - they can quit any time, but they for some reason remain.
I had a friend from Fermilab who left to do quant finance on wallst, only to return to physics because he found finance boring, even though very well paid. Much better paid than FAANG.
You just happen to like what you are working on at FAANG. Not everyone does, and plenty burn out and leave the field entirely.
Most of the people pushing the lab leak hypothesis have the specific goal of fomenting anti China sentiment. Trump ignored covid despite the extensive advice of experts and then tried to distract from his failure by trying to foment war with China. This argument is an extension of that.
What Trump believes or uses for his political gain does not magically become incorrect by virtue of being believed or used by Trump. I don't think you're trying to suggest anything as silly as that, but still worth explicitly pointing out.
Trumpian tempests should remain in a teapot of their own, and lab leak theory should be discussed on its own merit. Xenophobia innuendos and "but Trump" dog whistles are unhelpful in sussing out the truth.
> What Trump believes or uses for his political gain does not magically become incorrect by virtue of being believed or used by Trump.
OTOH, I will tell you that I definitely look at what my daughter says with a far more critical eye than I do what my son says, because my daughter has a track record of lying and my son does not.
Everyone I've seen discussing it treats it as possible. The "conspiracy theory" part comes in when people claim or speak as if it's proven when it absolutely is not. There is no smoking gun evidence for it, but it can't be ruled out either.
That in itself is kind of scary though. It means a lab leak could happen silently and we may never correctly attribute it.
that whole saga was so fascinating. the culprit ended up (likely) being one of the scientists involved, with the motive of justifying funding into anthrax research. because of the incredibly low mutation rate of anthrax, they couldn't identify the strain by DNA testing.
they had to do new science to fingerprint strains based on the quantities of different populations in the samples vs. the bottles - an investigation the culprit himself was involved in. as they uncovered the flask responsible and the very limited number of people who could get their hands on it, the attacker killed himself.
By cherry-picking that particular lab leak, you're making it look like this only happens in 'other' countries. Plenty of lab leaks have happened right here in the US.
If the lab leak was real, covering it up to the extent they did requires a literal conspiracy (not to mention hypothetical function gain research). In the absence of concrete evidence, it is quite literally a conspiracy theory.
What does it even supposed to mean? The lab theory is not that humans conspired to spread the virus, but it happened due to negligence. What's happening then is a cover-up, not a conspiracy.
Cover-up is the default mode of handling failure in an aspiring Communist state. When a major accident happens that can be covered up, it will be covered up.
The above mentioned Sverdlovsk outbreak was presented as natural as well: the official culprit was cough a wet market nearby cough. Took 13 years and the dissolution of USSR to admit the cover-up.
The problem with literal conspiracies is that the probability of public disclosure increases exponentially with the number of people who are "in" on the conspiracy. This is why a priori one typically assigns low likelihood to them (especially if they require a large number of conspirators).
You mean the literal proposal to put furin cleavage sites on coronavirus collected in the wild, filed for a grant in 2018, which was rejected for being too dangerous. Also, SARS-Cov-2 is the only beta coronavirus with a furin cleavage site. And if you have ever been anywhere near academic grant process, you'll know that you use a previous grant to do the next grant work, as preliminary results.
So tell me it is just a coincidence that just after writing this grant proposal in 2018 to take coronavirus in the wild and putting furin cleavage sites on them, the first beta coronavirus with a furin cleavage site turns up in the same place right next to the lab, right after they moved their sister BSL-2 lab.
Furin cleavage sites aren't as exclusive as you are making them out to be. It has already been established that such sites occur in other corona viruses.
I'm under the impression that the viral precursor they were expecting to find in animal populations has not been found (and that if it were a natural occurrence it would have been found) and that at least one researcher at the Wuhan lab had previously proposed gain of function research like this before. I'm sure stranger coincidences have happened but with that in mind I think its fair to elevate a lab leak theory from 'premature/purely political in intent' to 'reasonable'.
Watergate was an actual conspiracy, that consisted in trying to hide Nixon's shenanigans. Real conspiracies exist. Most of the time if not always, their aim is to hide something inconvenient, not to produce some dramatic evil result. The very plausible conspiracy here is that the Chinese government and some foreign individuals are trying to hide an accident. An entirely implausible conspiracy would be that the virus was deliberately leaked, which makes no sense however you slice it, based on both motive and technical aspects.
Because political ideals. The left treats this as a conspiracy because:
(1) Trump initially blamed COVID on China and the ethos of the left is that Trump isn't ever allowed to be right, and "resist" means unconditionally doing the opposite. So once Trump said it, half the country unplugged their brains.
(2) It's no fun to blame a lab in Wuhan when the left could instead blame DeSantis/Republicans/Unvaxxed.
(3) The US is kinda wimpy about a real fight over this, regardless of who is in office. Xi would tell Biden (or whoever) to pound sand if the US ever really tried investigating this and seeking some sort of retribution. Again, the path of least resistance is to stick one's head in the sand and find a convenient scapegoat like Joe Rogan or whatever.
(4) Too many people have already definitively declared it impossible so they're pot committed to their position even if it's wrong, no different than mask efficacy (zero). There have been a couple issues where one side went all-in so there's no reversal or even slight walking back because the repetitional risk is too high.
I'm pretty sure there was a conspiracy. Not a conspiracy to create a pandemic, but a conspiracy to hide an accident due to incompetence. Not all conspiracies are myths, just consider Watergate: there was a conspiracy to hide Nixon's shenanigans. The only difference is that one happened in a dictatorship while the other happened in a democracy with a free press.
Oh I agree, at a bare minimum there's nothing even remotely wacky about the lab leak theory. I'm just explaining why half the country has counterintuitively decided to brand it as lunatic fringe conspiracy rather than it being self-evidently plausible if not likely.
The irony in this statement is palpable. You're so obviously ready to confirm your priors that you'll actively go out of your way to avoid other plausible explanations.
I'm a democrat and I definitely think a lot of left-leaning scientists really made themselves look like idiots by saying that claiming China had a lab leak was "racist". It was always a reasonable (IE, not impossible or even extremely unlikely) hypothesis, and only some of the people who suggested it were doing so out of racial hatred for China.
it's too bad this was downvoted because it's probably the best explanation.
I'm not totally sure about 3, my guess is that we have collected far more useful intelligence that our agencies have released, but nothing sufficient to make a geopolitical claim about China, and the cost of being wrong with such an accusation is huge.
Well I'm guessing that because of your political ideals you're committed to the wrong position that masks are ineffective so studies like this won't convince you, https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-068302
No, it's my commitment to objective analysis and not bizarre herd behavior combined with religious/cult undertones that led me to this conclusion.
I always love when someone posts like one single "study" that almost always doesn't even qualify as amateur hour (eg data mining) and thinks it's some sort of mic drop, as if there aren't 25 disconfirming studies or data points for every one thing saying masks have even a faint amount of efficacy.
The link was to a rigorous meta-analysis in one of the top medical journals of several studies with combined n=389k that concluded that masks showed a 53% reduction in covid-19 incidence.
I don't understand why lab leak isn't, like, the first or most important investigative line. It's just a matter of asking and checking - thoroughly - every person and every machine involved with the lab in that timeframe. After all, "the disease is the same name as the lab!" [1]
iirc it is because it heavily implicates both Peter Daszak, who was the head of the UN investigation of the Lab Leak theory, who orchestrated the Lancet letter denouncing the Lab Leak theory, who has now been shown to have conducted gain of function research on bat coronaviruses at the WIV, and Fauci who provided funding for this through Daszak's EcoHeath Alliance and NHAID after there was some sort of restriction on that kind of research stateside. On top of that China is completely uncooperative with the effort and wouldn't provide any evidence to implicate themselves.
> ...the so-called "lab leak theory" of origin for sars-cov2
That isn't what this article is about.
I thought the article actually did a real public service by moving the discussion beyond whether Covid did or didn't emerge from the Wuhan market. Because either way, it's much much more important to say, "how could we, in the future, prevent the scenario of a lab leak from happening."
It keeps the discussion focused on what's important.
Not only it is plausible, it's very very likely. What are the odds that a lab that works on gain of function of Corona viruses is the exact place where the epidemic started?
The "exact place" the epidemic was discovered is in Wuhan, which is also where the lab is. That's a correlation, and clearly worth investigating, but it's not in and of itself proof.
I was originally dismissive of the "lab leak hypothesis", in no small part because of how quickly it got caught up in politics. I'm less so now, but I do think it's important to remember that when we ask "how likely is it that a novel coronavirus epidemic would start in a city that also has a laboratory working with novel coronaviruses and it just be a coincidence," the answer may be "not very" if the city with the laboratory is the size of, say, Frederick, Maryland (78,000), but "maybe more than you think" if it's the size of New York City (8.8M).
The lab leak idea bears further investigation, but "authorities have been too dismissive of that" shouldn't lead us to assume "well, it was obviously a lab leak."
Also: how many laboratories working with novel coronaviruses are there in the world? How concentrated are they?
I don’t know the answer, but it could well be that a significant fraction of the population of China (or the USA) lives in a city with such a lab, making it not too unlikely that the first patient will be found in such a city.
Wikipedia has a list of all the biosafety level 4 facilities.
The answer is around 30 active sites that deal with threats as serious as the Wuhan facility. Of those, less than half work on viruses, and even fewer do GOF work.
Malice is also completely plausible. Biowarfare is like chemical and nuclear warfare, it's not new, it has been used before, and it probably will be used again.
Not to mention the stupidity of developing what would surely be the least useful bioweapon in history (most people of fighting age get mild and brief symptoms or no symptoms, but it's infectious enough to get back to your own population and kill similar proportions of your own vulnerable before you figure out how to deal with it)
> In this case, the malice explanation demands stupidity because it was released in their own city.
Lenin said that "if for the sake of Communism it is necessary for us to destroy 9/10ths of the people, we must not hesitate". Tito killed 1% of his country's population. Stalin killed or starved 20 million. Mao killed or starved 60 million. Pol Pot killed or starved 25% of his country's population.
When everyone thinks the other guy is responsible for something and no one really is, when promotion is mainly determined by office politics, when departments that should work together compete with each other, you get levels of stupidity that is difficult to achieve by an individual.
Government entities tend to be even worse. At least companies have a clear goal they can always refer to: profit. Governments follow the whims of the political ideas of the moment.
It never really was. Reasonable conversations were being had, just not on polarized platforms. People's knee-jerk reactions to downvoting and "cancelling" every thing that mentioned it, in good faith or bad, last year was a direct response to the powers-that-were choosing the "China did it (maybe on purpose)" narrative to misdirect peoples anger and frustration.
If those same people would have said things like "obviously, it's _possible_ it was leaked from a lab, we're going to work on finding that out and let you know what we find as we do. In the mean time, here's what we're going to do about the immediate problems we're facing..." and ended it there, there wouldn't have been any backlash. That's what going on now, and that's why this post (good or bad, I can't say, I can't access it) wasn't flagged into oblivion the second it hit the front page.
When one slightly orange tinted guy can effectively ban discussion of any topic on all platforms by vaguely mentioning it, the problem is not that guy, it is everybody else.
I think part of the push back from the lab leak theory is that it's often accompanied by lab created and leaked. I'm far from an expert, but from what I understand, there are 0 signs it was lab created. Now isolated from the wild in a lab and then leaked is still considered possible, but they just don't know.
Might be a better match in some ways as it was a previously unknown pathogen, from a previously unknown family of viruses, isolated only after several lab workers got sick.
“ 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.”
It even happened with a coronavirus in China before!
Sorry to grand-stand a bit, but I think the narrative is missing the point of the 'lab leak theory'.
The 'lab leak' is actually a bit of a misnomer. What they really mean is that it was created/modified/bred intentionally, versus just being discovered in some bat cave or whatever.
It's not the leaking per se that is what worries people--it's the idea that this has a human-created origin. It's an experiment or weapon which was accidentally leaked to the world.
I think to some extent our media has developed an attitude towards inconvenient ideas that they are conspiracies. They can't discuss stuff like that without emphasizing how totally not true they are. I am not saying it is or isn't true but that the media will tend to suggest inconvenient stuff is not true.
NYT and others denied the lab leak theory because Trump put them in an impossible position by constantly stirring up racial tensions regarding COVID. His actions led to real violence against Asian Americans and promoting the lab leak would have furthered it.
It’s a conversation we could have easily had with proper leadership. The first thing Bush did after 9/11 was go on TV and essentially say to everyone: “hey, don’t be racist towards Muslim Americans because of this attack; they are fellow Americans and have nothing to do with this” and it was largely effective.
The pushback on the lab leak theory happens because proponents of the lab leak theory are pushing that theory in bad faith. If there's a lab leak, then they can excuse mis-handling of the USA COVID response.
no, the set of all hypotheses taken together form a distribution (determined by the prior probability). For example, if you proposed that space aliens delivered COVID to us, I would say that is lower probability than any lab leak because we have zero evidence for space aliens, and it's certainly not required to explain anything about COVID that we've observed.
A couple reasons, from the perspective of an infectious disease epidemiologist who isn't particularly a fan of Gain of Function studies:
1) "The lab leak theory" is actually a collection of theories, from the fairly reasonable possibility of an accidental release as part of a lab accident down to a engineered Chinese bioweapon. What any individual means by "lab leak" tends to be whatever is serving their political purposes as the time, and they borrow evidence from each other in a way that's really flawed, etc.
2) There's a lot of personal attacks built into the evidence - whether or not Ralph Baric is a likable guy, for example, fed into a lot of whether or not his lab was "involved".
3) A lot of the advocates for the lab leak hypothesis don't come from epidemiology/public health/virology, but from the intelligence community, the tech world, etc. who tended to reach for "Oh, it's obviously this..." and who reacted poorly to the idea that it might not be that simple and straightforward. Both sides of that exchange burned a lot of good will with each other early on enough that the engagement has, I think, spiraled somewhere not particularly productive.
4) It got coopted by crackpots and conspiracy theorists, as well as those interested in abdicating their own role in the pandemic.
5) The biggest reason, in my mind, is that it is a "fast" solution that gets a lot of press, and for which the alternative explanation - the one that has been true for the last two coronavirus outbreaks - is something that will take the better part of decades to resolve, if it ever does. It's also by and large not relevant for the current state of the pandemic. That creates the sense that there's a whole mountain of evidence behind it, when in reality it's a theory that is going to be rather difficult and expensive to falsify, one way or the other.
We can’t talk about the lab leak theory for the same reason a third of the country refuses to get vaccinated: it became a politicized issue somewhere along the way, at which point people’s brains turn off and their emotions and tribalism take over.
It is trope-y enough to lend some suspicion. That is most conspiracy theories are about some sort of "reassuring" narrative that it takes evil people who you already expect to create big problems. As opposed to the world being a chaotic uncontrolled and uncontrollable place. That isn't hard disproof of course but it is a resemblance to other conspiracy theories.
The lab leak theor(y/ies) (is a/ are) "the hoofprints may have come from zebras" sort of situation - possible but not the most likely in absense of other evidence.
Add to this how fabricated the "wet-market" theory just feels. Perhaps it may be a viable theory, but it smells like such BS, the kind of bad-but-effective theory you know you could get away with thanks to classic "ooh weird foreigner food racism." No one's going to stop to ask, uh, why NOW?
Doesn't seem fabricated to me. Zoonotic disease transmission is the norm. Add population growth, rampant development encroaching on habitats, stresses and migrations due to climate disaster, and the "why now?" seems pretty obvious.
Because it was useful politically for the media to treat it that way. They had one goal and this was something that needed to be done to achieve that goal.
Nobody should be afraid. Fear is not an emotion to cultivate. Enjoy your life until you meet the grim reaper, regardless of whether that happens tomorrow or in 50 years.
I think we have to accept at this point that pandora's box has been opened with our ability to now directly synthesize genetic material and modify organisms. It wont be long before anarchic hackers can start doing this just to troll the world. There's sort of a parallel with computing, where viruses were never really a problem until everyone had access to the technology. I can see a future where we all need to get regular "security upgrades" installed to our immune systems in the form of an mRNA cocktail tailored to the latest bio threats that have been released.
yes honestly I'm surprised that so much attention is devoted to lab leaks and state actors who at least have a self-preservation instinct compared to explicit bioterrorism by groups with an ideological death wish.
Not sure we're super far away from the moment where these technologies become cheap and simple enough to cause mayhem. Ever since the sarin gas attack in tokyo in the 90s I've honestly wondered how this isn't already a much bigger issue.
I think it's because it's vanishingly rare that someone actually wants to see the world burn to the extent that they're willing to spend years of personal effort to that end to enact a plan that will kill them and everyone they know and love.
If it ever becomes possible to achieve personal or political gain through the development of bioweapons I suspect we are in extremely deep trouble.
The worst (best?) possible odds of someone landing in the middle of the "socially isolated/sociopath + suicidal" and "smart enough to use newly simplified genetic technology" venn diagram is 1 in 8 billion-ish. I'd put money on there being more than that if I thought I would survive to collect.
I was (pleasantly!) surprised that nobody from ISIS traveled to Africa during the Ebola epidemic to infect themself, then flew back to NYC to hang out in Times Square. Doesn't require much brains, just the willingness to commit suicide and the motivation to kill a bunch of people, both of which ISIS had in spades.
if you invent the pathogen along with its vaccine, you can vaccinate yourself and the group you care about, while killing off the undesirables. you could also make genocidal weapons by designing a virus that recognizes a certain genetic sequence and inserts itself only there (or the converse, use that as a safety by inserting a gene for an inhibitory protein.)
monstrous things are achievable with a bit of engineering.
As a note, please do not try this at home. There would be a large amount of selective pressure for the virus to change the genetic sequence it recognizes / is inhibited by, and suddenly you've got a virus that can infect the "wrong" people. Likewise a vaccine puts significant selective pressure towards immune escape.
>I think it's because it's vanishingly rare that someone actually wants to see the world burn to the extent that they're willing to spend years of personal effort to that end to enact a plan that will kill them and everyone they know and love.
The point is that's what has kept us safe so far. But when the complexity of bioterrorism gets to the level of script kiddies, there's plenty of people that are intelligent enough and driven to do it with nothing to lose. The difference with nuclear or chemical attacks is that those both require massive industrial capacity and complex delivery mechanisms. Think of the mayhem when a single hacker can modify a flu virus to infect the entire world.
>I can see a future where we all need to get regular "security upgrades" installed to our immune systems in the form of an mRNA cocktail tailored to the latest bio threats that have been released.
I think it's inevitable, along with a medical infrastructure that tailors therapies to individual genome. The world is going to become a very dangerous place to the portion of our population that can't afford the latest updates.
if the FDA switches to approving drug development/manufacturing processes, rather than the final products themselves, mRNA vaccines could be made on-demand, quickly enough to do this.
for instance, CAR-T immunotherapy is such a process. no patient's dose is the same, since it involves removing T-lymphocytes from the patient, genetically modifying them in a bespoke way, and putting them back in. if the process itself weren't approved, you'd need to run clinical trials on every individual dose.
pipeline approvals are probably at least a decade away, though it'd be very smart if the government would get it all ready in case we need it.
As an added bonus, if you're having a slow quarter or two, you can arrange for new demand for your products to suddenly spring up in some random corner of the world.
What kind of sick editors get off on a headline that starts with "You Should Be Afraid" anyways? There are far more constructive phrasings, but no, they shamelessly want the fearful clickbait.
I'm not so worried about humans maliciously trying to destroy the world. There are few who would do so intentionally.
Far more worrying is when people do what is easiest for them, regardless of the cost to their neighbour.
A mask collects particles, including the COVID-19 virus. Please can we work together to pick up the masks from the street?
Worms will eat the masks. Bats will eat the worms. And the bats will give COVID back to us.
We're not responsible for world-scale Epic issues: plastic in the ocean, climate change, pandemics. We are fully responsible for the Issues we see. Please, let's clean the streets while we cycle/walk dogs/skateboard and the butterfly effect will help to fix the bigger problems too :)
I haven't seen any science on this, but I'd guess there is about a 0% chance of human->mask->worm->bat covid transmission. Do you have any basis for this fear? Obviously mask pollution is a bit of a problem, but not so much for risk of covid contamination.
Don't worry about worms, it's already in deer and I would assume a large number of other non-human animal populations already. It's obviously still in bats as well, SARS-CoV-3 is inevitable unless there's some sort of mass killing of bats, but it might not end up being very bad or transmissible.
Bats are extremely far down the list of things we have to worry about, when we continue to have millions of infected people who proudly and angrily spew virus-infested air particles uncontrolled into their communities because they think they know better.
Biologists are able to generate highly specialized viruses for research for decades now, i m sure it was possible before covid. I think going forward you should be afraid of nature. We have evolved global transportation / shipping / tourism beyond the carrying capacity of modern epidemiology / bacteriology to keep up with spreading pathogens. SarsCov2 might be just one of many , since human population has not peaked in numbers yet.
It has been now almost 2 years and still no closure or definitive explanation about where Covid came from? It would seem as if nothing changed . You have all these investigators ,scientists, and reporters but no progress it seems.
TBH this is not a scientifically very interesting question. It's quite likely that if one wanted to make this virus they could have. It doesnt appear to be the pinnacle of bioengineering so scientists are not curious to find out how they did it, if they did. And lab standards are already stringent, so leaks will keep happening. I don't believe the virus was leaked, not because it couldn't have but because it's equally probable that it's natural. And i 'd hate to see even slower progress in biology because of new safety standards that limit the number of people who can work in a wet lab.
> And lab standards are already stringent, so leaks will keep happening. I don't believe the virus was leaked, not because it couldn't have but because it's equally probable that it's natural.
So you're not interested in knowing whether it was a leak, or if it was, whether it was accidental, and you're not at all interested in making bio labs more secure (which one might be, if one knew it was a lab leak!)?!
So... no need to improve, just let it keep happening?
And you don't think there's any interest in the science behind making a custom virus, or spreading it?
OK, fine, you're not interested. Ah, but:
> so scientists are not curious to find out how they did it, if they did
All scientists? Most? A significant number of them?
Are you saying no one should be curious about this, or just that you aren't?
> It's a politically interesting question though.
Ah, so do investigate? I can't tell what you meant.
How many level 4 biosafety labs exist in the world where this type of dangerous research is carried out? 15. How many are in China? 2, one of which is in Wuhan the epicenter of the origination of the virus. Lab leak theory should have been the default root cause until proven otherwise by independent researchers (which China won't allow in).
How many pandemics, out of all the pandemics that have ever happened throughout history, have been due to a lab leak? Wouldn’t the default assumption be the one that had been the cause most of the time?
Yes the factors you raise the likelihood of a lab leak theory, or they could just be circumstantial. Without more, the fact that pandemics throughout history have a natural origin weighs heavily in favor of our current pandemic having a natural origin.
Why? You’d need to know the independent probability of a natural origin pandemic to figure this out. Surely to figure this out you would need to look at history to make this calculation. How else would you estimate that value?
Well then restrict the analysis to modern time when labs have existed. How many pandemics since labs have existed have been the result of leaks before Covid? If the answer is that more pandemics have been the result of lab leaks as opposed to natural causes, then I would lean toward lab leak being the default assumption for Covid. But if some overwhelming fraction of the pandemics in modern times were due to natural causes, I would have to choose natural causes to be the default assumption. The proximity to a lab is interesting, but to understand how to weigh that factor it might be useful to know how close labs were to the epicenters of other pandemics that had turned out to have a natural cause. Mere proximity of one thing to the source of an event is an interesting clue, but it can't tell us much on its own. This could been a coincidence or it could be causal. To me, it certainly wouldn't weigh heavily in the face of overwhelming evidence that pandemics are natural events that occur from time to time.
It's like trying to blame an earthquake on a dance party that happened in proximity to the fault line. Okay, maybe, but are dance parties known to cause earthquakes? Do earth quakes happen absent dance parties? Can a dance party theoretically cause an earthquake? I'm not sure, maybe if it were vigorous enough. But if all you've got proximity and a narrative about how it could have happened, without any other proof, then I'm going to default with what I know about pandemics -- they just happen, and so did Covid. I also don't have any proof and just a narrative, but I am reassured by examples of naturally occurring pandemics in the past, and a dearth of lab-leak caused pandemics. I don't see any reason it couldn't be a lab leak, and could easily be convinced with hard evidence. But again, this thread was about default assumptions absent evidence.
It is also about doing dangerous research in imperfect conditions with no oversight, shady behavior like moving the dataset offline, hiding the testing status of kab members, or how the sister lab changed locations to move right next door to the wet market in fall.
It is also about how sars-cov-2 is unique in being the only beta coronavirus with a furin cleavage site, which allows it to be more infectious. It is also a coincidence to that in 2018 Wuhan was part of a failed grant to collect coronavirus in the wild and put furin cleavage sites on them. Failed grant sure, but everyone who works in academia knows that you start working on a grant for preliminary results even before it is filed. And who knows, maybe China funded this dangerous research.
The only problem in all this is how lab-leak was declared to be a settled conspiracy last year. And the only reason was because an orange idiot vouched for it.
Maybe reverse it. What is the likelihood, given that a pandemic has arisen, that it will arise in a city where a lab leak is a possible origin (having the laboratories and the research going on)? I'm going to guess that it is very unlikely.
It is indeed unlikely, because it's much easier to detect an outbreak in a controlled setting like a lab before it infects a critical mass of the population. Indeed, lab leaks have happened before and were contained before it reached more than a handful of people.
Much more likely that covid was rip-roaring uncontrolled through the Wuhan population well before the first official diagnosis, so it was already unstoppable. The real conspiracy is that China massively fucked up its handling of the outbreak because their government is generally incompetent and they don't want people prying too hard into any of it because it would be highly damaging to its world image for everyone to know just how incompetent they are. The labs have proven to be much better at this than some unelected cabal of autocratic government bureaucrats.
The coronavirus lab is in Wuhan because it's a big city in a region where historically a lot of coronoviruses originate, so it makes sense that they'd be researching them there.
That's not true though, the lab is in Wuhan due to it's proximity to major universities. The SARS like coronaviruses that they studied are in provinces in the south such as Yunnan, Guangdong, and bordering countries like Laos. That's why researchers from the lab always went on field sampling missions to Yunnan and Laos.
The reason the lab is Wuhan has nothing to do with where these viruses originate, it's there for the same reason there is a BSL4 lab in NYC.
The only thing I am afraid of is ideas being disregarded because they don't help you politically.
Reality is what reality is. Whether this was leaked by a lab in China or not should not depend on which side of the election we are on. Ivermectine is not effective or not based on which side of the political spectrum you are on.
And if it doesn't work, that doesn't mean we make fun of those who believe it does, it means we try something else. It took thousand of failed attempts to find the one bacteria that could effectively attack TB.
If you want to reject reality and substitute your own, I won't stop you. Don't force it upon me.
If such labs and research are dangerous, shouldn't we, you know, be more careful in working with them, especially in a country which is notorious for hiding data, cutting various corners and preferring good looking lies to the ugly truth, and being in control to doing the right thing?
And shouldn't we ensure that people who work with such labs when and if it is necessary to do so are fully, 100% transparent and subject to public oversight? And if they, say, lie to the public and/or use weasel phrasing to hide their actions and mislead the overseers and the public about what kind of research is conducted in the dangerous labs and how it is financed and supported - shouldn't there be some consequences to it? I mean, beyond ones for lying to the Congress, which has become so routine now nobody even bats an eye at it?
Regardless of covid's source. Are we ready for something that is truly bad? It sure is a good thing that covid turned out to not be anywhere near as deadly as the spanish flu as they touted it to be.
Trump put in travel restrictions for china in february of 2020 and was called xenophobic and fear mongering over what wasn't yet a pandemic. Sorry but the democrats went on the offensive attacking trump for doing what everyone did.
Trump had a pandemic playbook on how to react to a pandemic and didn't use it? Is it possible because of the political attacks on him?
It's pretty obvious that politics got in the way bigtime. I have no expectations this will be different next time.
Then we had clearly political decisions made all throughout. By May 2020 we had the data in that people like Dr. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College said covid is the equivalent of the Spanish Flu of 1918.That was wrong and we still reacted like it was indeed still dangerous. When in reality it was less dangerous than the normal flu season(largely due young children being unharmed).
The number of political abuses is so high that society right now would not accept another pandemic. That they are almost certainly full of shit at this point.
There are many variations of the "lab leak" theory for Covid-19. For example:
1. Was the sample found or engineered? Or found then engineered?
2. Was it a deliberate leak or accidental?
Here are some open questions that haven't been answered or examined (at least publicly) to a sufficient degree:
1. If Covid-19 jumped from an animal species to humans, possibly through another animal, then why hasn't it been found in the wild? For example, SARS was relatively quickly found in the wild. To date there's been no equivalent discovery of the lineage of human-transmissible Covid-19. An alternative theory, that Covid-19 spread to humans at a wet market, would strongly suggest that Covid-19 would be found in the wild;
2. The Chinese had a database of Covid strains that was taken offline in late 2019. To the best of my knowledge, no independent third-party has been able to examine the contents of this database and see if it relates to Covid-19;
3. Covid-19 seems to be related to bat coronavirus strains from hundreds of miles away. How was the jump made? Through what species? and
4. We don't really know who Patient Zero was.
None of this adds up to positive evidence of any variation of the "lab leak" theory but given that there is no alternative theory that holds up to serious scrutiny or doesn't have serious flaws or unanswered questions, it has to stay in the running.
My suspicion is the Chinese government doesn't know either but, more importantly, they don't want to know because absolutely no good can come from that becoming public. There is literally no upside. This applies on the individual level too. If you're a manager of a lab or even just a lab technician, do you really want to be held responsible, even just in the public eye, for "starting" Covid-19? God, no. That may well be bad for you, your family, the government and countless others.
So there's a concerted effort to not know.
And the WHO's response to all this has been utterly anemic from the early days of the pandemic where China's pronouncements were taken at face value to the late joint investigation with laughably narrow frames of reference.
The whole gain of function boost was created to prevent a 2nd SARS and was shifted to china, as funding dried up, the further the event wandered into the "distant" past.
Covid is neither a bioweapon nor a step-ladder for totalitarians worldwide. Its simply necessary un-bribeable politics and change, despite systemic dysfunction.
That massive turn-around in society we need, we always demand and secretly fear, its upon us now and no lobbyist can put that djinn permanently back into the bottle.
One variant and we are back into our walls, condemned to bread and games and the realization, that infinite growth is unnecessary.
So compared to the massive disaster ahead, with billions of dead, this is quite a gentle steering maneuver. Sure those who are mentally not agile enough to travel to this different world currently born, well they will stay behind and swept away with the refugee crisis yet to come.
The rest of us - we will stay peaceful, although loosing it all, with just a cellphone to dream and play on in some tattered tent.
And this is the best outcome, and if you weight the future billions against the current million dead, even a moral one.
What do you mean by massive disaster ahead? Are you stating there is a massive disaster ahead, or COVID has steered us into a direction that adverts that?
I'm not sure everyone only talks about climate change as if it's about as rapid as an asteroid impact.
Yes, climate is an issue, but unnecessary hyperbole only seeds more distrust, just as denying that masks help in the beginning damaged credibilty of COVID-19 related information later on.
Think he/she is referring to climate change. COVID is a good way to gain a mental understanding of what to expect when climate change finally hits as it will be much worse. I do think the odds of "billions" of dead is one of the less likely outcomes but maybe millions yes.
How do you exactly compare extremely slow, glacial environmental changes on geological timescales to a pathogen that engulfed the entire world in weeks?
What can anyone gain from such a comparison except baseless soundbites intended for fear mongering?
>Sure those who are mentally not agile enough to travel to this different world currently born, well they will stay behind and swept away with the refugee crisis yet to come.
CS people always underestimate the difficulty of this stuff. I used to be a genetic engineer: Even in the best of times doing real field science on the lineage analysis of sars-cov-2 would take many many years. In a time of acute political hostility it will take much longer.
You argue it's just political expediency not to look, when the truth is that it is brutally difficult work to "prove" any exact zoonotic sequence even if the political will is there in abundance. (It took a ~decade for sars-1, and the story's still a bit unclear with ebola.) The global scientific community does want to figure this out, but the lab-leak circus has made the job infinitely harder.
We do know of very close sarbecovirus relatives in Yunnan and Laos. Given the early epidemiological nexus of the wet markets there is every reason to believe this arose out of a reservoir in the fur or meat industry... but given the amount of animal culling that has occurred, it could be a real challenge to figure out the exact intermediate host, especially given the enormously broad mammalian host range of sars-cov-2 and the number of animal species commonly sold in those wet markets.
It wouldn't be hard, from a technical or scientific point of view, to give access to the labs' files to an independent commission of inquiry. That's what democracies do, but obviously not communist dictatorships. If there was a leak, it could be easily found, and if there wasn't, while the absence of evidence would not be definite proof, it would lower the plausibility for the hypothesis.
> It wouldn't be hard, from a technical or scientific point of view, to give access to the labs' files to an independent commission of inquiry.
And if those files are shared, and nothing is found, you'd just move the goalposts, and claim the data was doctored.
Supposing the lab was not at fault - what incentive is there for anyone to attract a bunch of media attention, and possibly lose face, in order to vindicate themselves in an inquiry that won't actually change anyone's mind?
> That's what democracies do, but obviously not communist dictatorships.
Democracies also hold inquiries over and over again until they get the political results they want. How many Benghazi commissions have we had, by now? [1] How many people changed their mind thanks to them? [2]
> And if those files are shared, and nothing is found, you'd just move the goalposts, and claim the data was doctored.
Really? That's what you're going for?
Would you be insulting me the same way if the suspicion was on, say, a private laboratory in the United States? Would you imply that I'm a conspiracy theorist nutjob if I were to demand an inquiry? Should we stop all trials because there's always some people who refuse to believe the verdict even it was reasonable when the trial was obviosly fair? How is this situation different?
It seems to me that you're the one who's exhibiting the same kind of denial and mental gymnastic as the average 911 or JFK truther.
I'm not a biologist, I'm an engineer with training in industrial safety and I've studied industrial accidents long before this happened. Industrial accidents happen. They happen less and are less deadly in industries where risk is taken seriously and where open access to information and public oversight is present. The debate on gain of function research that has been revealed to have happened before this pandemic, whether such research happened in Wuhan or not, shows to me that not only was risk not taken seriously enough by the virology community as whole, but that open debate and oversight was almost entirely absent.
> Given the early epidemiological nexus of the wet markets there is every reason to believe this arose out of a reservoir in the fur or meat industry...
I can make the same argument for lab origin: "given the early epidemiological nexus of a government virology laboratory in the same city as the index cases, many of whom worked at the lab..."
The rest of your comment boils down to "science is hard and often ambiguous"...which it is, but is not an argument either way, and certainly not a reason to leap to one conclusion or the other.
BTW: the close relatives in Yunnan and Laos aren't actually that close. But it all depends on how you define "close", which just begs the original question. I wouldn't call the known relatives dispositive.
An epidemiological nexus is much smaller than an entire city and the details of the early cases matter. Aside from the contact-tracing, investigators were able to get positive PCR recovery of sars-cov-2 from -environmental samples- at the wet markets, indicating an incredible degree of contamination there. If the nexus were in fact WIV we'd expect a very different pattern of early cases (eg conference travel - a lot of researchers from WIV were at a Nipah conference in Singapore just before the outbreak!)
You could of course argue that the authorities just covered up any damning links, but the early outbreak was pretty chaotic and information wasn't well controlled... and in any case at that point we're not longer capable of arguing based on any evidence at all.
My point is simply that a lack of fully verified lineage analysis is completely unsurprising and not at all evidence in favor of conspiracy.
I used to engineer viruses... By natural standards the Laos samples are extremely close - the mosaicity of coronaviruses in these bats complicate matters - but likely within a decade of a common ancestor to sars-cov-2. Closer than any other sample that we know WIV were working with beforehand (again, people claim they were hiding what they were doing, except there was no reason whatsoever to do so before the pandemic).
Though "not close" for sure in the sense that even if they did have these strains, you would never evolve sars-cov-2 from them in a dish, there simply wouldn't be enough passages to do so. And that's sort of the point - the evolutionary "risk surface area" of zoonosis is many orders of magnitude larger than this nutty lab-leak idea, and we know that these coronaviruses jump all the time from close animal contacts, having caused two other epidemics in the last 20 years...
> Aside from the contact-tracing, investigators were able to get positive PCR recovery of sars-cov-2 from -environmental samples- at the wet markets, indicating an incredible degree of contamination there.
So? It's a market. People go there, in large numbers. Is it really surprising that you'd find traces of a widely circulating respiratory virus in a place where large numbers of people congregate?
> By natural standards the Laos samples are extremely close
RaTG13 is closer than the BANAL viruses, and we already knew about it. You have to look at specific genes and squint and make hand-wavy arguments about how SARS-CoV2 evolved from recombination of ~5 different viruses to make any sort of claim that this is strong evidence of natural evolution.
I'll give you this: the RBD of BANAL-20-52 is the closest match yet for the RBD of SARS-CoV2. Still no furin cleavage site, though.
> the evolutionary "risk surface area" of zoonosis is many orders of magnitude larger than this nutty lab-leak idea
I love this. The evolutionary story is too complicated and improbable to imagine, but sure, the idea of making a few relatively simple additions to a known virus is "nutty". And hey...it's not like there was a lab in Wuhan writing grants about similar transformations or anything.
You have to be kidding. Look, I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but you're simply in love with a theory and dismissing all evidence to the contrary.
Really? I'd like to hear more about this. What exactly looks so "suspicious" that it can't be explained by typical recombination events that are known to occur naturally in RNA viral genomes?
The beta coronavirus class has a paucity of naturally occurring furin cleavage sites relative to the other coronavirus clades. I'm just saying that copying sequence from genomes a few species over is very common strategy for engineering projects.
Irony is that this paper is highly doctored to make it look (from the figures) like the opposite point, without outright lying, like they loaded the dendrogram of beta coronaviruses with a ton of sequences that are distinct but "basically from the same collection", to make the pie slice of betas with furin cleavage sites look much much bigger than it should be. Also, the betas are excerpted from the dendrogram of all coronaviruses...
It's pretty complete, and exactly like what I would expect a DARPA/NIH grant to look like. I can't imagine a group of nonexperts drafting this document - correctly - just to make up a conspiracy theory - I'm not a virologist but I am a molecular biologist and biochemist and skimming the leaked document all of the technobabble looks correct to my understanding of science.
The trouble with the synthetic furin hypothesis and all this DRASTIC stuff on that grant, etc. is that all of this work would certainly be done in known viral vectors... you would never go messing around testing spike proteins in some totally random virus backbone whose in-vitro behavior hadn't been worked out before in your assay cell lines.
So, maybe I missed something, but none of the experimental designs I've seen in those grants would ever plausibly lead to the SARS-COV-2 sequence. Again, pre-pandemic there was no reason to be sneaky about this stuff if it were actually being done... I don't know why anyone would waste their time on some uncharacterized, completely markerless viral vector for these RBD and proteolysis tests.
Sigh... maybe if we -had- been doing those experiments earlier we would have discovered this new clade and been more ready for it. That grant looks spooky to some people precisely because it was so prophetic.
I don't think those grants would have led to the SARS-CoV-2 sequence either, because the base strain is different. BUT let's be real here. You don't ask for money and do the experiment. You do the experiment and then ask for continuation money. So it is a "generally accepted grantsmanship strategy" that WIV would have been working on viruses adjacent to that in the grant with the same techniques, and adjacent techniques that would lead to the natural next step. If that natural next step infected a postdoc that was careless that one time when he/she was pulling a 9-9-6 workweek... It's all so terrifyingly plausible to anyone who has been there on the front lines doing lab work.
You're really into stacking these hypotheticals. Why would anyone bother developing a pile of fiddly new vectors? cui bono? Vector development sucks, I've done it in simpler virus families. And why do it completely markerless? Remember that the other odd thing about this grant was that a lot of the genetic work was supposed to be done in the US. If it were already being done we'd probably have had those sequences in -our- databases!
My (recent) experience with viral development is that it can be done in radical multiplex. You don't make one vector at a time. You mix five together, let or encourage them to recombine, then use sequencing, screens and molecular assays to sort out the details of which of the trillions you create has your desired phenotype and why. If this group was thinking about adding a furin cleavage site, they could do so using a template homologous to the appropriate regions of diverse natural viruses, then use selection in cell culture or animal models to establish where it landed and what effects it had on infection.
It's highly unlikely that an established group would write a proposal that didn't describe their current research trajectory.
Although you have made a lot of arguments against it, I still don't know why it seems so unreasonable to you that SARS-CoV-2 might have laboratory origins. I think it's just that your prior expectations run against this. To me it's much easier to imagine than a natural spillover, given the modern urban circumstances and very unusual viral features and phenotype. Maybe my work experience is more aligned with this possibility than yours?
I specialized in high throughput synthetic biology and in applications adapting vectors and pathogenic proteins to subvert the human immune system (for immunooncology mostly). So I have all the background needed for supervillain thinking here :p Of course you can do multiplex markerless construction - but it’s a huge pain in the ass at these lengths and it still leaves open the question of what the point of such work would be.
I feel like I’m taking crazy beans - 20 years ago a satbecoronavirus from a wet market nearly started a global pandemic - hell my colleagues at the time were the ones that identified it as a coronavirus! We have epidemiological evidence this happened again. Absolutely nothing about this sequence is obviously synthetic or even unusual for coronaviruses. How is zoonosis not the null hypothesis?
No, you use money/resources from a previous grant to do exploratory work on the next grant while you are writing it. Sometimes you double-dip, so you write up a grant for one place, change parameters and personell slightly for another, etc. Have you ever actually worked in a research lab?
I wouldn't believe it if you told me COVID-19 was produced via carefully planned work. IMO, COVID-19 could only have been produced via exploratory work.
Look, fact of the matter is, I have consumed ~2M USD of resources on a seven year PhD that did not have grant money attached to it. Despite my important results, my grad school PI did not pursue further work in the direction I piloted. And as a postdoc I've steered DOE funded bioengineering project away from a strategy I knew would be unfruitful towards results that garnered three papers in as many years, but were very much not "in the proposed work of the grant" (though very much in the spirit of it). Ultimately we rewrote the grant to reflect the effect magnification I got and we were rejected for renewal, haha. Moreover, at the end, we did the experiment we were actually funded for, and found no effect.
Grants and science writ large are not the ideal spherical cow you think it to be.
Per the CCDC 33 of 585 environmental samples taken early Jan. were positive, and 31 of those were concentrated near the live-animal region of the Huanan market. Environmental PCRs aren't magic, they have a finite level-of-detection, RNA viruses don't survive very long in the wild...
There's no handwaving and I'm not positing a particular evolutionary history - the sarbecoronaviruses are clearly understudied and we don't have a good survey of what's out there, we just know about a few close relatives. These are known to be highly mosaic viruses!
"few relatively simple additions to a known virus"
Which additions and which known virus? There are a huge number of random mutations between the above mentioned strains and SARS-COV-2, there's no plausible story for lab manipulation here from those strains. ...have you ever worked with viruses before?
There are billions of animals in the chinese markets, each a test tube... this is the cauldron of evolution, not a few dinky petri dishes in one lab, man.
I'm in love with parsimony, and the history of human disease is the history of zoonosis. If extraordinary claims are going to be made, the burden is on those with the radical new theory to offer up a shred of molecular or epidemiological evidence, not just stories about conspiracies.
(Chinese original has been deleted, but I remember seeing it at the time and running it through google, scroll down for English translation in the comments)
which reports a case with symptoms starting 24th December, and reports of the hospitals in Wuhan already having multiple cases. Patient didn't visit the market, but did work near.
With what we now know of disease progression, and infectiousness, this pushes the initial date back at least a month, probably two or more.
...but that report doesn't contradict anything. The current earliest known case is a Huanan market seafood vendor who contracted the disease on Dec -11-. Dec 24 is way late in the existing epidemiological timeline. (And no one is saying the above is the provable first case, just the first recorded case.)
If you want to argue like that there's also this publication from Italy claiming that the first antibodies were detected in September 2019.
The comment above says I would just do X, and bringing up RaTG13 and BANAL-52 as an argument as if it's all trivial. They share 96.2% and 96.9% similarity with sars-cov-2. There are seemingly unrelated animals sharing that much. The linked study also doesn't mention any of that.
I'm not going to argue one way or the other, but I'm starting to get really annoyed at people posting random studies they half understand to argue one way or the other. Covid-19 discussions hackernews(or reddit for that matter) are like the Joe Rogan of nerds. It's ridiculous, people here should know or act better.
One strain of BANAL (52) has a high DNA sequence similarity to SARS-CoV2. Nonetheless, RaTG13 is closer overall (as you can see in the phylogenetic analysis in the paper I posted), and there are enough differences that you have to make complex assumptions about how multiple viruses crossed over evolutionary time. Possible? Yes. Parsimonious? Not necessarily.
Also, nobody reasonable is arguing that BANAL-52 is not evolutionarily related to SARS-CoV2. Of course it is. But that could be true even if it were a precursor of some virus that was later engineered in a lab.
To fully convince me of a natural origin hypothesis, you'd have to find a virus in an animal reservoir that had a highly similar RBD with a furin cleavage site -- or something within a few point mutations of a furin cleavage site.
I’m actually not fine with people posting random studies and then also making random claims from undereducated interpretation. That’s not the process of science, mostly because in the process of science you’re expected to be educated first before you can enter a discussion, otherwise you’re not discussing heavily niche subjects with peers you’re just introducing noise and that drowns out the actually useful educated niche. As a layman that is trying to find what the actual, educated in virus research and virus forensics folks are discussing and saying, this sort of undereducated claim is more noise for me to try and sift. It’s very annoying and a waste of my time.
> Per the CCDC 33 of 585 environmental samples taken early Jan. were positive,
The first cases were at least in November, and quite probably earlier. The virus was in circulation in Northern Italy by December. We know this from multiple lines of evidence.
Are you seriously posting a link to a one-off phylogenetic molecular clock estimate as experimental evidence of italian priority? The other Italian claims of priority are highly disputed by basically everyone - but have I missed anything - are there any actual sequenced, dated samples from Italy in December? That's the standard of evidence here, not some crappy antigen test or unsequenced amplification hit. No one believes the Dec 11 case to be "the first", just the first well attested case.
No. I'm seriously posting a paper by the director of the University College of London Genetics Institute.
The same twitter thread (again, same person: director of UCL UGI) shows a Lancet article placing the first documented hospitalization on December 1, and a different source documenting a case in China in mid-November:
So yes, there are multiple lines of evidence. This isn't even remotely controversial. You're arguing that the sky is red, and your only counter-argument to the evidence otherwise is incredulity.
> are there any actual sequenced, dated samples from Italy in December? That's the standard of evidence here, not some crappy antigen test or unsequenced amplification hit.
I mean, you're inventing "standards of evidence" here, but as long as you're asking: yes. Dated, PCR-confirmed wastewater samples in Italy were purified by gel electrophoresis and sequenced.
One of the parties did an appeal to authority as a way to _prove_ they entered _relevant_ evidence.
This is obviously entirely misguided, and if you start making such basic logical mistakes it is expedient to inquire about the posters background to know if they've reached the limit to their ability to create reasoned arguments.
There are nuances, but at it's core either it was valid for them to make that appeal and it is valid for us to request their credentials (which is essentially an appeal to authority--"who has the better credentials?"), or it was not valid for them to make that appeal and it is not valid for us to request their credentials. I lean towards the latter view.
Logical mistakes don't weaken a person's entire argument (we don't want to just see who's "winning"), or even weaken the line of reasoning they were invoked to support -- they just fail to provide evidence.
One of the parties called into question the validity of a paper the other party posted, and the other party rebutted by implying that as the director of an established institution, the paper's author has something to lose. I find that argument weak, but the initial questioning of validity also provided no evidence or made any strong arguments as to why the paper was not valid.
Appeals to authority are useful not as logical arguments but as a way to avoid wasting time on drivel, and I don't believe that to be the case here.
No one is arguing that the earliest known case on Dec 11 is when sars-cov-2 "began". We know it must be older than that. More recent reviews of chinese epidemiology don't mention the hubei patient, the Dec 11 case seems to be consensus earliest verified case.
And yes, for a data point of this importance a random environmental sewage PCR handled over half a year later is of dubious provenance. If you've never done a ton of environmental PCR work you'd be amazed how easy it is to contaminate everything, but whatever. Given how contagious sars-cov-2 is, if it really were present in Italy in early December... we'd probably have more definitive proof of it's presence much earlier than Jan 31.
Ok, fine. We're agreed then: the virus was obviously circulating widely by December, which means in all likelihood, it could have been found in pubic places in Wuhan China. Like, say...a public market.
I'm not saying it had to happen that way, just that finding shreds of viral RNA in a market, in December, in Wuhan, is in no way dispositive evidence of the market being the origin of the virus -- any more than finding flu virus in the ball pit at a McDonalds means that the flu came from Ronald McDonald.
> And yes, for a data point of this importance a random environmental sewage PCR handled over half a year later is of dubious provenance. If you've never done a ton of environmental PCR work you'd be amazed how easy it is to contaminate everything, but whatever.
"They could have made a mistake, so I'm going to ignore all evidence which disagrees with my prior beliefs."
Millions of old people in dense cities turn out to be a fantastically sensitive instrument for detecting the presence of sars-cov-2 in a population. You’d have to explain nearly two months of cryptic transmission that left no hospital reports or verifiable samples…
You do realize these papers pointing to an international nov-dec timeline only -weaken- any link to WIV at all, and have in fact been heavily leaned upon by Chinese conspiracy theorists as evidence this disease has -western- origins?
> You do realize these papers pointing to an international nov-dec timeline only -weaken- any link to WIV at all, and have in fact been heavily leaned upon by Chinese conspiracy theorists as evidence this disease has -western- origins?
Chairman Pooh? Is that you?
The CCP can fuck right off with this idiocy. Seriously. Nobody with half a brain is falling for it.
You don't get to suppress information and/or not look for it in the first place, then claim that the lack of information is indicative of something.
Then why did the Chinese shut down access to the covid database for instance if there is nothing there? Edit : You can downvote this, but that doesn’t answer this question that I am seriously curious about?
Thank you for bringing some perspective to the discussion, at the same time, I have no illusion that it is going to help to convince people that want to believe in the lab leak theory of anything else. Wanting to assign blame for all this is a very strong desire in many and the Chinese government through its acts and omissions has unfortunately made it a lot easier for people to continue to be deluded about this. Some of the arguments made are so incredibly weak that they shouldn't be made at all, and yet, they are supporting this whole house of cards of criminal intent gone wrong. It's a pretty sad statement as to the degree of understanding that people in general have about these matters, if they studied the subject (by reading textbooks, not watching youtube videos) we might be able to sidestep some of this.
> Wanting to assign blame for all this is a very strong desire in many and the Chinese government through its acts and omissions has unfortunately made it a lot easier for people to continue to be deluded about this. Some of the arguments made are so incredibly weak that they shouldn't be made at all, and yet, they are supporting this whole house of cards of criminal intent gone wrong.
Nobody so far in the thread has said anything about "criminal intent". That's just you, interjecting your pre-existing biases into the discussion.
It's entirely possible that a laboratory was doing completely legal experiments with no malicious intent, and an accident happened. In fact, it's so possible, that reasonable people who understand the evidence have concluded that we're unlikely to ever know the truth.
That's where I sit on the matter.
> It's a pretty sad statement as to the degree of understanding that people in general have about these matters, if they studied the subject (by reading textbooks, not watching youtube videos) we might be able to sidestep some of this.
Thanks - I don't expect to change anyone's mind. I just don't want to give into the cynicism that evidential reasoning is pointless. I don't want to tell anyone what to think... but given that I have the professional background, I feel some moral duty to at least try to outline why most biologists assign low probability to a lab-leak.
I think one big missing element for the reasoning behind all this is that people seem to intuitively assign the wrong prior to the chances of a zoonotic event, they miss that fully 2/3rds or so of our pathogens are zoonotic in origin, and that's only the ones that we can trace back, the remainder is either an open question or settled to have originated in our species or passed on as part of our heritage prior to humanity budding off from our ancestors.
I'm uncertain why it does not seem to be discussed that maybe the leak was sabotage by a lab worker who got paid really well by a foreign muckracking service to take it from the lab and disperse it.
Environmental samples from the wet market only show that infected humans were there. Given the centrality of markets in human social networks it seems very normal that an outbreak in the city would eventually focalize in the market. Without samples from animals in the market, the evidence for spillover happening there is extremely weak, and not even circumstantial, because it's indistinguishable from what we would expect given a spillover anywhere in Wuhan.
The problem with relying so heavily on argument from coincidences is that one then incurs the epistemic responsibility to seek out and explain alway other coincidences in the neighborhood putatively pointing to alternative explanations (a step people often forget, but is essential for the validity (insofar as one can speak of validity) of one's argument from coincidences). And such coincidences are always easy to find, since coincidences are cheap. (To take just one example, the pandemic happened shortly after the World Military Games, which US servicemen attended, at a time when the relations between the two countries were at their worst in recent times, and who came from a country one of whose household names novelists once publicly fantasized about all the world's nations coming together and use biological weapons to wipe out the entire population of China, based on none other than the desire to curb China's peaceful rise (cf. Unparalleled Invasion)) Do these "coincidences" need explaining away? Do they need to create a presumption in favor of the bioattack theory? If not, what is it about spatial proximity coincidence that gives it such power to confer that sort of presumption?
The technical difficulties don't really matter because that's not the actual problem. The problem is that even access to the data that's required has been denied. Independent audits have been denied.
Who was patient zero for COVID-19 in the United States, where did they travel from, and where did they travel to? When did the first case arrive in the country?
Why isn't access to this data available? Why would access to this data be denied? Why isn't the United States sharing this information with independent auditors? With its journalists? With the world?
Is there an ulterior motive to this secrecy?
If the US can't, or refuses to figure out who its patient zero was, why do you expect China to be more successful at this sort of endeavor?
Perhaps it's because figuring these sorts of things out is a little bit harder than one might think.
I think you're missing the point, the US does not have direct access to databases that could be related to these facts and yet suddenly took them offline.
Covid is a fart in a room and China was first smeller so first stinker.
Waste water samples from other countries show it was around months before China went official so were those other country's just keeping quiet?
Besides, its not like you can stamp Made in China, Made in US on viruses so Covid is resigned to the conspiracy theory books, and even if someone came forward to own up that it was some state biological weapon, the country in question can just play the mental health card on the whistle-blower. Very few people can afford to step out of line because it would put their family at risk and even if they could afford, there is always the getting knocked over by a bus risk.
So many ways Covid can be plausibly spun, its probably just best to keep abreast of the news, reduce risks where possible and get on with life so you don't have any regrets or at least have lived life as fully as humanly possible however that might be.
Other countries weren't the first one with crematorium running 24/7 with staff breaking down on social media. Also other countries did not censor the event then detained a doctor who just posted a warning txt to his colleagues in private chat. Let's not even go into the whole deny WHO visitations years after.
I especially like the kicker, alpha variant isn't even the one found in Wuhan. Good job on whoever made that happen.
You dont have much experience of national health care systems do you?
China is a developing country it doesnt have the established early warning systems in place that developed countries have for monitoring potential health risks and they dont have the contingencies or over engineering in place that other countries have.
Simple example for you to understand, take the new VW Golf R, officially its 320hp and 420nm 1550kg, power to weight ratio is worse than the Seat Cupra Leon R at 300hp and 400nm 1392kg, yet why is it performing better than the Seat. You can watch the mystery here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycKWQBCpwMg
but let me tell you, sandbagging technology, ability, performance, what ever you want to call it is a valid technique, I believe its even mentioned by this Chinese philosopher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War
So are we "watching" a magic trick of sorts and if so who is the magician in this case? Is it Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics?
I find many GP's to be "useful idiots", they know what they have been taught, I love pushing them towards jihard aka cognitive dissonance when I have to interact with them but if you are clever enough, you could create a system which could even keep them in the dark. Try to think how clever terrorists might work, so take a look at the security services around the world like the CIA for example. Look at the things they have done in the past! Shocking! Shocking I Say!
I don't think anyone is underestimating the difficulty. Even if we had boots on the ground one day 1 we might not know more than we do now. But NOT having boots on the ground at all, is negligence. For a year it was verboten to discuss the possibility of a lab leak. It was deemed fake news... If it is so difficult, then how did they KNOW? The answer was, no one knew, but it was still forbidden to discuss it
That is the problem here.
The fact that lab leaks have occurred, and that ground zero appears to be near one of the only labs researching this... Well that is enough suspicion to investigate. But apparently that was crazy talk.
Aren't you the guy who claimed to have 20 years of experience engineering viruses, then someone checked your linkedin to call your bluff? Did you take your website link off your profile so you can pretend to be important?
BANAL-52 is 96.8% identical to SARS-CoV-2. That is not particularly close. You need to get above 99% to even come close to zoonotic origin on this.
We also know that coronavirus samples from bats from Laos were shipped to WIV. Those samples have not been released. Hardly require decades to release that sort of data.
Thanks for your comment, I appreciate your willingness to share a contrarian perspective.
Question, how would a virus that spreads primarily indoors and rarely spreads outdoors accumulate enough viral load over enough hosts to spill over into humans? It seems like this would be difficult in an open-air wet market.
The enormous set of circumstantial evidence combined with Occam's Razor pretty much rules out anything with the wet market. The world is well beyond that at this point.
>If Covid-19 jumped from an animal species to humans, possibly through another animal, then why hasn't it been found in the wild? For example, SARS was relatively quickly found in the wild.
On the other hand, Ebola's animal reservoir remains uncertain. The implication of the question is that all animal reservoirs are easily and quickly discovered, but just because that's true for some examples doesn't mean its universally true, and doesn't mean that lack of a known animal reservoir is strong evidence against the existence of one.
Long story short; if lab leak happened CCP will never admit it and if US intelligence community has some information or evidence of the lab leak they will keep it classified for decades. I can't wait to read news papers in 2039 and find out the true origin of Covid-19 pandemic.
We all know what's going on - CCP intentionally released covid to strengthen their military position vis-a-vis other modern nations. China has such a large population that they can field an army even with half the population in bed with covid.
Mao made this clear in a conversation decades ago. Someone suggested that a nuclear war might start. Mao essentially replied he had no fear of nuclear war, since afterwards China would still have more people than the rest of the world and that afterwards China would be the dominant power. Decades later the CCP decided to flip the switch, release covid (which is less destructive than nuclear war but very disruptive) and see what happens.
The leak might have been accidental, but allowing it to spread was definitely not accidental. Most people in the West don't realize that this is not China's first full-scale run-in with SARS. They had similar, but local pandemic over a decade ago. Ask a Chinese person who was there, they'll tell you - the similarities are quite profound. Back then it stayed local. This time it was allowed to escape. I'll let you fill in the blanks as to "cui bono". We won't really know who made the decisions and how it was done for another 50 years. Maybe we'll get to know by the time FDA releases vaccine testing data.
The canonical super-spreading event was in Hong Kong, and it killed 81 people in Taiwan, 43 people in Canada, 33 people in Singapore, and caused cases in the U.S., France, Sweden, etc.
Indeed, the reason the vaccine was developed so swiftly for SARS-CoV-2 is because people (including my one time graduate advisor) could see that after the emergence of both SARS and MERS that it was unlikely the world was done with epidemic cornaviruses.
At a minimum, according to my Chinese source, Beijing was also affected (though Shanghai was not). They had to wear masks, sanitize, distance, close schools, economy tanked, etc. It lasted for about a year and we never heard much about it. That is, what you saw in other countries hardly even qualifies as an epidemic, unlike what my friend saw in China itself.
Wisely, the Chinese government appointed the same guy as last time to deal with the pandemic, but the dude is now 85 years old, so my friend is not sure what they're going to do next time.
Ironically, we also appointed "the same guy", but our guy is so inept he let swine flu run completely unchecked and kill tens of thousands of people (a performance he tried but failed to repeat when he, in the beginning of the pandemic told the US public "there's no need to wear masks"). He's also famous for telling people that AIDS can spread through "household contact" [1], and for suggesting that people take a fast tracked drug (AZT) as an AIDS prophylactic which was later found to have severe side effects [2]. Does this remind anyone of anything? How he managed to last 30+ years in the government given this "track record" is a mystery to me.
And if you believe stats coming out of China, you might also be interested in some Louisiana swamp land I have available for sale.
I would also expect traffic patterns and frequencies were a bit different in 2002 as compared to 2019. It is likely that with China having had a rise in general wealth, more travelling was done, which made containing the virus harder.
It would be great to hear "this is why this thing didn't come from the lab: these are the strains under research, it doesn't match what was found. These are the security measures we have in place, here's all the audit data. WHO, please validate."
That would be helpful. Not this "yeah, we have this lab in the same area, why are you asking? It's fine. No you can't look, that's disrespectful."
This is fishy. Even if this pathogen specifically, didn't come from the lab, someone somewhere messed up(or is doing something messed up right now) and don't want people poking around.
Or they simply don't have data to prove conclusively it was not leaked, because it wasn't logged correctly.
And being a paranoid communist autocracy, they'll naturally take the "limit information" approach over "release everything and let external parties determine a verdict".
China will not, if possible, willingly put itself in a position which admits any likelihood of losing face. If they couldn't rule out the possibility themselves and/or cover up completely that it was in fact a leak, they won't let anyone in - not because it happened, but because it might have.
That reasoning is so, so, so weak. 'This might embarrass us so you can't look' is _not_ a valid defense; anyone who says it is can be assumed to be complicit.
If it 'might' have happened, then there needs to be an investigation.
We're talking about millions dead worldwide, and tens of trillions in damages. Inequality has spiked and second-order deaths may well outnumber direct COVID-19 deaths already. And years on we haven't had an investigation into the single most likely source - that's insane, dangerous, divisive and inexcusable.
> My suspicion is the Chinese government doesn't know either but, more importantly, they don't want to know because absolutely no good can come from that becoming public. There is literally no upside.
Sure, the airplane crashed and a lot of people died, but what good can come of the reason becoming public? There is literally no upside because that side got destroyed in the crash.
Or we can be rational and find out how we can prevent these disasters in the future.
They presumably mean an animal reservoir in China that predates the pandemic. Zoos are obviously a case of human to animal transmission, not animal to human.
That said, we don’t know where Ebola hangs out between outbreaks, and we’ve been trying for decades. It’s clearly hard.
You have two #1's, and 2 #2's, so it's a bit hard to respond to any of those clearly.
I will first address the second #1, and note that your point is very hard to understand here. COVID-19 has been found in multiple places "in the wild." It's been found in racoon dogs, which were known to be sold at the Wuhan wet market. It even seems to be endemic in certain geographic areas of the U.S. deer population now, which makes me think this thing is never going away.
Regarding your point #3, I think 100s of miles for an animal reservoir of a closely related virus, where the animal is capable of flight, is not so far?
Regarding your point #4, I just don't get it. Yes, we don't know who patient zero is. Are you trying to imply that patient zero is being obfuscated by the government for some nefarious reason?
Regarding your first point #1, as a (former) protein engineer, I can assure you that viral engineering is just not a thing. It is not currently possible according to the brightest minds to just engineer a virus to have any particular infectious biological behavior in a host. Generally, we can engineer viruses to knockout core functions and thereby weaken them or render them non-replicative or non-infective. Sometimes we can engineer viruses to change their tropism (the cells they infect). But taking say a bat virus and combining with a different virus (SARS?), adding a few key mutations, and ending up with a weapon or something is just science fiction.
Could we use directed evolution? Maybe, but you can't just apply some sort of selective pressure in a cell culture that is applicable to actual human infectivity/morbidity/etc.
IMO The only "lab leak" hypothesis that makes any sense at all, was that someone just **ked up, the dice rolled horribly badly (like the worst outcome out of 10^64 possible outcomes), and it all went pear shaped. But it's a lot more likely an infected racoon dog at the wet market scratched or breathed on someone.
> IMO The only "lab leak" hypothesis that makes any sense at all, was that someone just *ked up, the dice rolled horribly badly (like the worst outcome out of 10^64 possible outcomes), and it all went pear shaped.
This is really not that unlikely. Probably someone designed something like 2^10-ish different recombinant grafts from related coronaviruses, with various design parameters, and the selective pressure was "oh it was actually infectious enough to infect the careless postdoc pulling the 100 hour workweek". Surely 1 out of 2^10 is likely to be more transmissible than the parent bat strain.
These days (aka 10 years ago) with molecular biology, 2^6 is not unreasonable to do by hand, by a well-trained undergrad intern, in three months. Oh and hey... out of 2^6 we discovered one GOF with higher normalized output than its parent. Citation (disclaimer, I supervised the intern, so it's possible I'm a three-sigma-above-median intern manager): https://bmcbiochem.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2...
I lean towards the accidental lab escape theory, given the work the Wuhan lab was known to be doing, while only being a level 3 lab, and that the first cases originated in a nearby market, it feels like it satisfies Occams shaving implement.
As for why there were no previous wild outbreaks, that I can't answer,except that the people who found the origins of SARS in horseshoe bats in Yunnan didn't find the virus itself, but rather it's genetics spread across diverse strains of coronaviruses in one cave, with analysis showing the varying strains could mix. [1]
So, maybe Covid-19 is an amalgam of a novel coronavirus that was being studied, that had never reached the level of serious illness in the wild to be distinguishable from a common cold, and another coronavirus it met in Wuhan, whether in the lab or in the dense population, and became far more potent.
And of course, there's the allegations of gain of function work in the Wuhan lab.
I agree that we'll never know the truth, the CCP would never accept the loss of face of it was their researchers who accidentally unleashed it.
So, a good book just came out last week by a MIT-Harvard Broad Institute genomics scientist that outlines all the lab leak vs zoonotic evidence (right up till the Pasteur Institute Laos study - whose underlying data wasn’t public in time for printing). Covers everything else we know so far - all about furin cleavage, the market-based arguments, and especially the ‘DEFUSE’ grant application document to DARPA.
It’s titled Viral and it’s written by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley (he was the author of ‘How Innovation Works’.)
> None of this adds up to positive evidence of any variation of the "lab leak" theory but given that there is no alternative theory that holds up to serious scrutiny or doesn't have serious flaws or unanswered questions, it has to stay in the running.
There is a very strong alternative theory that the virus evolved in human-animal interactions in fur farming. China is the biggest fur producer outside the EU, which results in very similar incentives to not properly investigate.
Denmark culled its whole mink population after human-mink transmission and the evolution of the cluster 5 variant [2].
5. A wild strain would have spit out many new variants early on as it mutates to become accustomed to us.
>None of this adds up to positive evidence of any variation of the "lab leak" theory but given that there is no alternative theory that holds up to serious scrutiny or doesn't have serious flaws or unanswered questions, it has to stay in the running.
The virus derives from somewhere. If wild, we would have known it was wild. It's not wild anymore, that boat has moved on.
So where else? Now that we know it was a lab leak because of good old occams razor. We can look at the very quick response to label lab leak as a conspiracy theory. Who pushed that. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095418/
How did Trump of all people blame a lab leak in wuhan so quickly as well? Trump didn't know there was a lab there.
>My suspicion is the Chinese government doesn't know either but, more importantly, they don't want to know because absolutely no good can come from that becoming public. There is literally no upside.
A wuhan lab in china received money from the US government to do gain of function research on coronaviruses and they started using the variant that is 96% similar to covid only a few years before. The american politicians who at exactly the same time they started doing this work warned that safety at the wuhan lab was poor.
If it was a lab leak, why then is the person responsible for covid publishing about it like they didnt know. The exact person who is responsible.
> 1. If Covid-19 jumped from an animal species to humans, possibly through another animal, then why hasn't it been found in the wild? For example, SARS was relatively quickly found in the wild. To date there's been no equivalent discovery of the lineage of human-transmissible Covid-19. An alternative theory, that Covid-19 spread to humans at a wet market, would strongly suggest that Covid-19 would be found in the wild;
It took about 13 years to discover the source of SARS:
I want to take the contrarian take to most people in this thread.
Sure, lab leak could be true and with all the available evidence, could very well be true but the confirmation of of it being true may have more far reaching domestic and geopolitical ramifications that may do more harm than good.
It seems like there's some game theory going on within the political sphere of many western governments in that increasing anti-China sentiment by confirming lab leak could further put us down the path to an eventual confrontation (read: war) with China, in which we lose a lot more.
The only thing we gain by admitting to lab leak is the truth but is the truth (that we've pretty much deduced at this point) worth worsening relations not only politically but gives anti-Chinese factions in the west more evidence as a prelude to war?
From my perspective China did an amazing job at handling COVID, it is other countries that fucked up by not taking it seriously - not doing quarantining properly, waiting until domestic spread was out of control to take half-hearted and unenforced measures to slow the spread. In comparison China took quarantining and contact tracing very seriously and was effective at stopping their domestic spread early in the pandemic.
You could blame China for most hypotheses for Covid’s origins: lab-leak from gain of function research, unsanitary wet markets, or not following proper cleanliness procedures for field research. But I think those things (besides lab leaks) could have happened in literally any developing country, and most probably would have done even worse at containing it than China.
What I don’t think you can blame China for is the virus escaping their country. They would be (rightly) be under a ton of fire from the international community if they had not allowed non-citizens to leave their country at the start of the pandemic.
Typical process: arrest first, threaten you/family, send you back into public with your head down, and if you really make someone mad in the CCP they have a mock trial and imprison you.
We are talking about Li Wenliang. He wasn’t arrested, threatened, or imprisoned. He had “a talk”, similar to how NSA had “a talk” with a US YouTuber who apparently was not patriotic enough.
The case you are describing is about spreading false news; think Bannon or Alex Jones.
If lab leak is confirmed, depending on how deep you want to root out those who are responsible, then much of the virology community from US and those who fund them are equally to blame, if not more. There is no "Chinese Science" or any country-specific brand of science in the world nowadays, there is just Science. And in both methodologies/techniques and funding, much Science leads back to the US.
Wasn't the US just buying access to the results? If you're gonna defuse a bomb regardless, what difference does it make if I give you $20 to send me pics? It's still up to you to take proper safety precautions.
Millions people died from COVID. It’s true origins is one of the most important question we must answer, however uncomfortable the truth may be. And yes, if there are those responsible, they should face consequences.
I’d like to know the answer of where it came from and I’m open to possibility of it being a lab leak. But actually knowing how it happened is basically irrelevant to the planning we need to do for the next one. There will be future viruses, they could come from many different sources, we need to be prepared irrespective of the source.
>The only thing we gain by admitting to lab leak is the truth but is the truth (that we've pretty much deduced at this point) worth worsening relations not only politically but gives anti-Chinese factions in the west more evidence as a prelude to war?
IMO yes, not because it might give anti-China warhawks a casus belli, but in spite of that.
Since the start of this whole ordeal, instead of taking a step back and do some serious introspection about the risks of their research conduct, these misguided virologists and their institutions have doubled down on GoF research. And if that was indeed the ultimate cause triggering the cascade of events leading to the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, which I personally think is the most probable scenario given all the circumstantial and genetic evidence we have, then it is absolutely worth it to prevent another lab leak. The next one might not be as mild as this one.
I wonder which would realistically be worse... full blown war with China or a real, Black Plague/Spanish Flu (I know, not Spanish) level pandemic? Not disagreeing with you, genuinely just interested in the thought experiment. I guess maybe there's a line after which the level of "bad" is kind of irrelevant anyways.
We are already in a war with China. Modern warfare is fought with propaganda, economics, and infiltration of institutions. The Chinese call it "Unrestricted Warfare". The fact that most people don't know any of this means we could very well be losing this war.
This article briefly mentions SARS-CoV-2, but at length it discusses Ebola and others quite a bit more. This article isn't about what happened with COVID-19, but about whether we should have BL4 labs at all.
In my opinion, we absolutely should. Awful diseases like Ebola are effective at what they do, so they're great places to learn about molecular biology and genetics. It seems feasible that we can manage the risk well enough to get a net expected benefit.
Fauci funded "research" that ripped vocal cords out of puppies so the "scientists" wouldn't have to hear them scream in pain as they were EATEN TO DEATH by horseflies.
He also funded "research" that poured acid on monkeys' brains to 'induce terror'.
and you people still trust this raging piece of shit? He should be fucking shot.
LOL, they still are trying to sell the narrative that it "may not have come from a lab" with freaking bat caves a thousand miles away from Wuhan, and confirmed gain of function experiments at the lab. NYT is a joke.
Everyone who downvoted you should be forcibly restrained and have thin slices of their flesh cut off every single day so they can be cooked and fed bacon strips of themselves until they die.
The lab leak theory is taboo because it helps Trump style populism, which elites in China, EU and USA oppose.
The lab leak theory also attracts nut job conspiracy theorists because it helps Trump style populism.
We might never know what happened, but after two years my money is what a brilliant Chinese colleague (graduated from the top university in China said) told me (before we took COVID seriously)
“The bio lab is two miles from the wet market. I’ve worked with Chinese scientists. I’ve worked with US scientists. The safety culture in China is terrible.
Its a lab leak”
To anyone who thinks thats racist, its not so I don't care. Culture is not race - Ill never forget an Eastern European friend who disabled one of the gas alarms in his lab because they annoyed him when they went off. His excuse: “we didn't have working fume hoods at home”. His PI, from the same country, shrugged the whole thing off with a laugh.
Some people don't believe the 'Lab Leak' explanation. They believe the 'Wet-market' explanation.
Well, wet markets are open. Wet markets are weapons of mass destruction.
In April 2021, the World Health Organization called for a total ban on the sale of live animals in food markets in order to prevent future pandemics.
Hasn't happened.
Given the ongoing damage caused by COVID-19, lives lost, economic, mental health, educational, is this OK?
I am going to make an extreme suggestion. Given the risks, I don't know what else is feasible: As long as wet-markets are open there needs to be mandatory quarantine of any traveler from China, or traveler from a country that doesn't enforce mandatory quarantines on travelers from China.
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