Yes, the cover up and hostility towards the lab leak hypothesis may actually be the strongest evidence for it.
Which is to say, not much. But we have no evidence for the natural origin story, and it's a somewhat strange coincidence that the initial outbreak was near a lab studying these very same kinds of viruses. Granted you might put such a lab in places where there are lots of bat viruses to be found, but that's still a much, much larger area than the city of Wuhan. The closest known wild virus came from a source 800 miles away. Draw a circle over a map of China including both Wuhan and that bat cave and you can see that quite clearly.
Combine that with the fact that Sars cov1 escaped labs in China to infect researchers not once, but at least twice, and the Bayesian calculation swings heavily to the lab leak hypothesis.
The smoking gun is that labs in Wuhan were studying different coronaviruses in bats at the time the virus emerged. One of those labs was right near the seafood market which had one of the first documented outbreaks.
It's all circumstantial evidence of course, but that's really all you're going to get with a country like China. We can be damn well sure that they would never admit to the virus originating from a lab leak. To me, this is the clearest and most likely source of the outbreak.
I'm being very precise to avoid conflating lab leak and natural origin. There is a possibility those are the same thing. The virus could have been discovered in nature, brought to a lab, and leaked. I personally find this whole debate pretty boring, but it really worries me how frequently people mix this up. These two things are not exclusive. Argument in favor of one does not invalidate the other.
Re: a few specific points.
>The early cases are clustered around the market. I know the market and the lab are "close" on a global scale, but the details matter. They are 30km apart, about a 45 minute drive in traffic. Looks about as clear as John Snow's map of cholera outbreaks in London.
This is a bit of a trap. From that article:
>What about cases near the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is more than 10 miles from the market? "There are no cases around the WIV," Worobey says. "If the outbreak did start in the lab, the bottom line is, it would be odd for it not to be spreading from there rather than from elsewhere."
The thing here to consider is that, lets say someone gets an accidental exposure. There's an incubation period, in which you are not shedding. Then you move around. Epidemiological data only shows where the first human-to-human transmission happened, not where the animal-human jump happened. Since you aren't immediately infectious after contracting the virus.
Re:
>"What is the chance that a big Chinese city like Wuhan would have a lab doing the kind of research that has come under suspicion? The answer is, the vast majority of the biggest cities in China have labs involved in such research. If COVID had emerged in, say, Beijing, there would be no fewer than four such labs facing suspicion."
SARS-CoV (the original) notoriously escaped a Beijing lab, not once, but twice.
SARS-CoV also has the added advantage of being much easier to track, because the symptoms are so severe. With SARS-CoV-2, the symptoms are so mild, it's unlikely most people would think it was anything but a cold. Whether someone that worked at a virology institute would think that is a matter of some debate, but people have died from laboratory exposures before because they thought they had a benign illness, so it certainly has happened.
The problem is, people aren't having a genuine discussion. The communication goes something like this: someone says something about lab leak, and gets shut down by saying "the science says animal origin was more likely". The scientists are saying "the data says this was likely an animal to human transmission". But if you dig in on either of those points, things get shakier and shakier. The data that the virus evolved in animals, strong. The data that the virus evolved in any one specific species - less strong. The data that the virus evolved in an animal species that was in the wet market, even weaker. The data that the virus evolved in an animal species at the wet market, and then jumped from animals to humans at the wet market? Basically non-existent - circumstantial at best.
The only piece of data in that tree that would directly contradict the lab leak hypothesis is that last little bit of data. But it all gets wrapped up and packaged into the wordplay of "the data says the virus jumped to humans from animals", probably unintentionally by some, intentionally by others. The wet market hypothesis began because SARS had been found to transfer at a wet market in the past. But, that data has never been super convincing to begin with (this type of data never is, it was a full year after SARS-CoV 1 that antibodies were detected in civets), and there was no direct evidence of the wet market with SARS-CoV-2, so the hypothesis started out as pattern matching with an n=1 (SARS-CoV the original). Whereas, pattern matching with n=4 (or more) for lab leak works just as well.
Also frustrating is that not being able prove one hypothesis doesn't de facto validate the other. The hypotheses aren't even totally orthogonal! Only in very specific cases are they orthogonal, and those cases contain the weakest evidence of all the evidence in all categories.
The featured article is talking more about the conversation, and the nuances of the conversation, than it is the absolute truth of the matter. There will never be an answer, other than that "both are possible".
Re: the "spirit" of your point, if you will, which I interpret at something like "there are many more species than just humans, therefore most viruses evolve in other species and jump to humans", I certainly agree, but then we went and tipped the scales pretty badly by rounding up these viruses and putting them in close proximity to humans. And while we've been recording data, there have been far more lab leaks than there have been zoonotic events. So that argues that in the 20th and 21st centuries, we have, artificially, changed that calculation.
So that is the basis for what? Is that a fact that changed your mind about the origins of covid?
We know that lab leaks happen. Scary stuff. Even how many lab leaks there are here in the U.S. The paper you link to describes several lab leaks during a period of time while SARS was being widely studied.
Its quite a leap from knowing there are lab leaks to implying that covid, or any other virus, leaked from a lab. There's relevant genetic evidence indicating that the earliest covid-19 cases were 600 miles south of Wuhan [0]. Also it is estimated, based on antibody testing, that there are millions of people every year who get infected with various bat coronaviruses [1].
More/better evidence is needed to prove a lab leak, given that nature does things like this all the time.
We have tons of direct evidence for 'Natural Origin' and there is no other competing theory that matches the evidence. While some details are still murky - our actual 'Origin' resembles something around the bounds of that theory.
We have no evidence of a 'Lab Leak'. It's just conjecture.
While lab leaks do happen with some frequency, animals do spread disease to humans (i.e. Zoonotic transfer) far more often and this has been going on since the dawn of time.
The previous SARS crisis was sparked in this manner, which is why, during the initial phases of the pandemic, this theory was 'most likely' even though it was also conjecture.
Moreover, it's another good example of how 'facts change'. The only reason the 'Lab Leak' theory has material credence or plausibility is because of the lack of evidence for it's competing theory i.e. no trail of Zoonotic transfer as of yet found.
If you have actual evidence about something, then make your public claim so that it can be scrutinized.
Otherwise, don't spread false information, especially on highly public channels.
I mean, I have no expertise in any of this, but I was under the impression that there was already evidence of a natural pipeline, though again I don't know the details, but it involved bats and/or pangolins. Also, given the name of the virus is sars-cov-2, I would think that a sars-cov-1 might already have happened and could perhaps qualify as another example of a similar virus with a natural origin.
I have to say I'm pretty skeptical of the whole lab leak theory thing - and it's hard to pin down what a lab leak means - there seems to be a spectrum of theories that range from a virus sampled from natural origins that escaped a lab in Wuhan to a fully lab created artificial virus, and plenty of theories in between.
But at the end of the day, it seems like most people just want it to be true for some reason; perhaps they want to blame China for the pandemic or they just want some explanation that's more satisfying than a random mutation of a virus at the wrong time and the wrong place brought the world to its knees and is still causing downstream affects throughout the global economy through to today and probably will for years to come.
Many in this thread have remarked on there being two version of "lab leak", 1) that it was manipulated in a lab, then escaped, or 2) that it was a natural virus that escaped from the lab.
The evidence is that it is a natural virus, so 1) is excluded by scientific data. As to 2), the problem is that there is no evidence that SARS-CoV2 was ever at the Wuhan Lab before the pandemic, and also that the first people to become infected were also not at the lab. There is however evidence that the market was the origin of the pandemic.
So, there's no evidence for either version of "lab leak", and evidence against them. It's as simple as that.
> And none of the above is definitive proof that COVID-19 originated from a bat at either the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Definitive proof would require much broader access to information about what happened in those facilities in the time period before the epidemic in the city.
> But it is a remarkable coincidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was researching Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats before the pandemic outbreak, and that in the month when Wuhan doctors were treating the first patients of COVID-19, the institute announced in a hiring notice that “a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.” And the fact that the Chinese government spent six weeks insisting that COVID-19 could not be spread from person to person means that its denials about Wuhan laboratories cannot be accepted without independent verification.
Engber:
> Arguments in favor of the “lab-leak hypothesis” remain grounded, as they ever were, in the mere and highly suspicious fact that a coronavirus likely borne by bats, likely from a cave in southwest China, emerged 18 months ago, quite suddenly, in a city very far from southwest China—where researchers had assembled an archive of cave-bat-borne coronaviruses.
As Geraghty recounts yesterday (https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/even-xavier-...), many in the media, rather than assessing the facts themselves, just resulted to name calling against a conservative-leaning but measured writer. I also haven't seen Geraghty (and again, other more measured writers) claim to have definitive proof of the lab-leak theory (as some conspiracy theorists might claim), only that it is a possibility that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. It is illogical, irresponsible and unscientific to say "well, this theory was picked up by racists, therefore we should dismiss it" rather than evaluating a possibility on it's own merits.
I can't speak to this article, because I don't have the technical knowledge to evaluate it.
I think that if you don't accept that it's a reasonable possibility that this escaped from one of the labs in Wuhan, you're being unscientific. The evidence for it having come from the lab is:
1. The Wuhan Institute of Virology published papers in the past two years about their experimentation with chimeric coronaviruses. Viruses similar to this one were without question present in that lab.
2. The lab is about 25 miles from the seafood market.
3. The true source of the virus couldn't have been the seafood market. We know this because four of the original cases have no apparent connection to the seafood market. The Chinese government has not identified a source of the virus given this information.
4. SARS has leaked from other Chinese research labs in the past.
5. H1N1 probably leaked from a Chinese lab in 1976 and caused a pandemic.
6. China covered up the virus in its initial stages as it tried to contain it, which would be expected if the virus originated from the lab.
I'd like to point out that the lab-leak theory is still being dismissed by portions of the mainstream media. (I'm not taking a side here -- just pointing out that this hasn't been settled yet.)
Today the Los Angeles Times published an article headlined "The lab-leak origin claim for COVID-19 is in the news, but it's still fact-free."
What's missing from all this reexamination and soul-searching is a fundamental fact: There is no evidence — not a smidgen — for the claim that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory in China or anywhere else, or that the China lab ever had the virus in its inventory... No one disputes that a lab leak is possible. Viruses have escaped from laboratories in the past, on occasion leading to human infection. But "zoonotic" transfers — that is, from animals to humans — are a much more common and well-documented pathway. That's why the virological community believes that it's vastly more likely that COVID-19 spilled over from an animal host to humans...
"We cannot prove that SARS-CoV-2 [the COVID-19 virus] has a natural origin and we cannot prove that its emergence was not the result of a lab leak," the lead author of the Nature paper, Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, told me by email. "However, while both scenarios are possible, they are not equally likely," Andersen said. "Precedence, data, and other evidence strongly favor natural emergence as a highly likely scientific theory for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, while the lab leak remains a speculative incomplete hypothesis with no credible evidence." Co-author Robert F. Garry of Tulane Medical School told several colleagues during a recent webcast: "Our conclusion that it didn't leak from the lab is even stronger today than it was when we wrote the paper." As the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski sums up the contest between the lab-leak and zoonotic theories, "the likelihood of the two hypotheses is nowhere near close to equal."
And Wired also ran a piece last week with a similar skeptical headline. "The Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory Is a Tale of Weaponized Uncertainty." Its subheading? "Scientists almost never say they’re sure, and it could take years to pin down the pandemic's origins. Until then: People are trying to scare you."
Yes, a lab leak of a virus collected from nature is the most plausible of these lab theories.
But the epidemiological evidence points to covid-19 originating outside wuhan entirely, that's why I find that theory less likely, among other reasons. See here:
Also if they had collected it in nature, it would have been in their freezers, or likely that people involved in that research would have been patient zero etc. See here:
Wuhan institute of virology also aren't the labs I'm worried about. They were built and designed by very reputable people in the virology community. Not saying you should trust them, but at least recognize that the people who are most qualified to distrust them think it's unlikely.
>Does this imply covid-19 has been circulating in humans a long time?
No, it implies it was relatively stable passing amongst several species of bats (and other related mammals) before a single or a few crossover events into humans recently.
It's behaving exactly like we would expect a zoonotic transmission to behave. It's not very well adapted to bats, it's not very well adapted to humans. It's sort of "promiscuous" likely because it has infected several different species over several decades before arriving in humans.
If this did come from a lab, it was an accident. I think it’s unreasonable to consider the spread in China intentional, as there’s no reasonable motivation to do so.
The main difference from SARS is we know there is a virology lab in Wuhan researching coronaviruses right across from the wet market considered the epicenter.
I don’t know enough about the reaction to SARS to know how similar it was, but my understanding was they were similarly draconian internally, and were trying to keep it relatively quiet, but I am not aware of any arrests of doctors early on in SARS outbreaks.
The plausibility of Covid escaping from a lab does not make all viruses plausibly escaped from labs. The reason it’s more plausible for covid are the initial reactions and the proximity of the epicenter to a virology lab studying covid.
I fail to see how it’s xenophobic to consider the lab leak plausible. If anything a natural spread relies on the assumption that the wet market was engaged in unhygienic practices and that someone foreign may have eaten an infected bat.
This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1]
This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world. We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.
You don't need to "dismiss the possibility" to say it's unlikely. There's really zero evidence this kind of research has been done a) at all in this lab b) on this Virus c) the virus leaked. Nor is it even clear the virus originated in Wuhan at all.
"Lab leak hypothesis" sometimes includes the "gain of function" theme and sometimes it doesn't. I find neither very likely, neither has any evidence to back it up. I still think the zoonotic hypothesis is the most likely truth, if not for the fact that we know this has happened so often in history. Any other hypothesis needs extraordinarily good evidence to convince me otherwise.
For those with a bit more background in the sciences, there's an increasingly massive amount of evidence to support Zoonotic origin. Philipp Markolin has a good rundown:
Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing (e.g. whether it's a natural virus that escaped or an engineered one, how different lineages showed up at the market, which lab it allegedly escaped from since the WIV campus is much further from the market compared to the CCDC, etc etc).
China is a bad actor and definitely contributed to the conspiracy madness around the virus by being so shut-down and performing such a half-assed investigation but unfortunately they would have done the same whether the virus came to be via the same animal trade that caused the last SARS outbreak or if there was some secret Wuhan project.
If you take it like that, the it seems like the lab leak theory is even more probable. For the lab leak to work, we have all the entities we need: the bat fever a few years ago, ongoing studies on those coronaviruses, outbreak near the lab, very suspicious lab behavior, Chinese coverup.
If you take the other hypotheses, it goes like this: some bat coronavirus -> jumps to an unnamed animal -> jumps to a human. There is an unknown entity in this equation, which is the third party animal. This is necessary for the theory to work.
If you make me chose between a theory that has all the elements and one that might or might not find a mythical animal in the future...I think Occam's razor favors the one with all known elements. Otherwise, ad-absurdum, you can win any argument stating it's Occam's razor: you just introduce a single magic black box which can substitute any number of entities.
I am not doing this to blame China. I blame China for the opacity of the response, which at times seemed like they didn't care what happens with everyone else. I can blame China regardless of how this virus appeared. I also blame our top scientists, which covered their asses instead of coming out with everything they know and work for the greater good.
What I do want is better bio-labs safety protocols, something that can be monitor by third party inspectors, say from UN, just like we have for nuclear facilities. Lab leaks happen, it's not a Chinese thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
I don't think you're being very good faith right now.
Clearly a lab studying coronaviruses is interesting. Clearly its possible that the lab could have had a leak. Clearly it's possible a farmer could have wandered into a cave, or run into a bat in the wild. Clearly it's possible that it didn't originate in China.
There is certainly enough evidence to investigate the lab being a possibility. It definitively being responsible or not is definitely of interest. There was a lot of cover up at the beginning, which implies to me a party who knows they are responsible.
From everything I've read on the topic, the best going theory that I understood is that in order for the lab to perform tests on coronavirus found in bats, coronavirus samples are collected from bats. A person must collect these bats from caves, not in Wuhan. A person might have collected the samples improperly or with insufficient gear, resulting in contracting and then spreading the disease.
That's not a "controversial" (read: conspiracy) theory, that's not an act of the state being evil. That's something that could happen anywhere in the world. That's something that could happen on accident. That's something that could be prevented by improved process/standards/equipment. By denying the possibilities of such things, it makes it look like there was a coverup or an explicitly guilty party. Everyone should want to know the nature of it's origin. It should obviously be a possibility.
> Occam's razor says it's another one of those.
To me occam's razor says that Wuhan is a first apparent epicenter. So it stands to believe it's the first place with major outbreak. Wuhan has a lab that studies this very disease specifically for it's epidemic properties. The most simple occam's razor explanation to me is that it has to do with the lab.
Although reasonable, one theory ("the bat coronavirus was transported by scientists to the lab that studies bat coronaviruses") involves no illigal activity. On the other hand the counter-theory ("there was illegal bat trafficking from a small mine in Yunnan") involves speculation that something happened that we don't know about. Strictly speaking, the lab leak theory has more observed evidence. Presumably the Chinese government would have identified and explained if they found bat traffickers.
We know the lab was aware of RaTG13 - they produced a sequence quickly that no-one else had seen. I know nothing about the situation but it would be interesting to know where exactly the sample was being sequenced. I doubt they did it in the mine, samples must have been transported to some lab.
I used to think 99% chance zoonotic, but the fact the similar virus was known to the lab was enough to drag me to thinking it is probably a toss up. Lab leaks do happen, this lab was studying bat coronaviruses. It is possible.
Right, and combine this with a history of lab leaks both in China and the west (which the article outlines) and a lab leak scenario is perfectly plausible. It is however hard to tell whether it was a lab origin because serial passage is also the route the virus would have taken if it naturally evolved outside a lab to infect humans.
The first outbreak being down the street from the Wuhan virology lab is in fact evidence. Not conclusive by any means, but it's an event that is more likely to occur if the lab leak theory is true than if it's false.
Which is to say, not much. But we have no evidence for the natural origin story, and it's a somewhat strange coincidence that the initial outbreak was near a lab studying these very same kinds of viruses. Granted you might put such a lab in places where there are lots of bat viruses to be found, but that's still a much, much larger area than the city of Wuhan. The closest known wild virus came from a source 800 miles away. Draw a circle over a map of China including both Wuhan and that bat cave and you can see that quite clearly.
Combine that with the fact that Sars cov1 escaped labs in China to infect researchers not once, but at least twice, and the Bayesian calculation swings heavily to the lab leak hypothesis.
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