By that standard the 'Natural Origin Theory' is conjecture. Unless you believe the third or fourth official Chinese explanation: a bat urinated in a researcher's mouth... while he was totally not in a lab funded by the US for gain of function research.
This article attempts and fails to keep a neutral point of view on this theory. Instead, it heavily implies that a wuhan lab leak is the most likely source, citing Occam's razor as a rationale. Just because we haven't identified with certainty the cross animal with bats doesn't mean the most likely explanation is a massive Chinese coverup.
That something fundamentally wrong with that article. There's two separate "lab leak" theories, one that the virus was genetically engineered, and the other theory is that it came from bats, but was accidentally leaked from the lab.
The article merges the theories together, and then uses scientist's support of natural origin to dismiss both. Having it come from a wild bat doesn't suddenly rule out the lab that was doing research on wild bats.
Actually occam's razor would say that the many many many more instances of bat-human contact throughout the Chinese countryside are likely responsible, not a lab leak.
Did you know that people use Bat Guano (literally bat shit) eyedrops to cure visual ailments in rural china? Among other risky practices. Bat guano is often handled with bare hands and used to fertilize fields without proper sanitary practices. The many tens of thousands of these events that happen everyday are a MUCH more likely scenario.
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.
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.
This article misrepresents the lab theory. At least in its most common version, the lab theory is not "it came from a lab, not bats". It is "it came from bats, was being used for research, and got out accidentally". The article omits this, creating the impression that animal origin is evidence against the lab theory, when of course both could be true.
They wouldn't have left this out by accident. It's an obvious omission once you know about it and it changes the meaning of the story. I have no opinion about whether the virus came from a lab or didn't (how the hell would I know), but when I see someone trying to manipulate me this way, it makes me angry and suspicious and pushes me toward the other side. I've had no interest in the criticisms of Bloomberg reporting before now, but this article incriminates itself.
Lab leak does not imply "man made" at all. Chinese virology labs are quite far from safe and stuff leaks out all the time. There's a whole lot of circumstantial evidence that this virus came from a bat to begin with and was not created in the lab.
There is no clear yes/no answer here. Without a smoking gun either way there is a scale of probability/certainty and everyone who looks into this falls somewhere on that scale based on their experience, ideology, biases, research, etc...
Personally I think lab origin is unlikely as whilst it's possible to describe how it could happen, that's not proof it did actually happen. Too often people mistake theoretical actions for proof of action. The probability of natural origin still ranks higher for me but I wouldn't bet my house on it.
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.
So the best guess is that it came from wild bats, and there was a lab right next to the initial outbreak site that was studying wild bats. That could just be a coincidence, but it's a pretty remarkable coincidence and at the very least deserves further investigation.
It could have been just an innocent mistake. A researcher got the disease while collecting bats out in the wild, but the lab never got a sample of the disease. The researcher was asymptomatic and unknowingly spread it to another person while stopping by the local market on their way home. So as far as anybody can tell, it came from the marketplace.
I don't know what really happened, but I think I'm being more reasonable that most people about this. There's three other major lines of thinking, all politically motivated and all wrong in my opinion.
#1: Many of the Western "liberals", especially the media, dismissed any kind of "lab-leak theory" as right wing conspiracies for most of 2020. I honestly think just because Trump and the right were promoting it, the "liberals" were against it.
#2: The Western conservatives and Trump filled in all the blanks in the "lab-leak theories" with their own personal agendas. This turned sane and objective lab-leak theories into conspiracy theories. What the other lab in Wuhan was doing is interesting, but not necessarily connected.
#3: The Chinese government considers any lab-leak theories as anti-Chinese propaganda, and aggressively launches it's own counter-propaganda. In my opinion, the Chinese government doesn't want to know the truth, and the biggest and most racist anti-Chinese organization of them all is the Chinese government itself, based upon what's currently happening in HK and to the Uighurs, among other human rights issues.
I'm by no means against China, their government is just as hypocritical as the US, and both get in the way of any kind of truly objective and scientific approach to these issues. Seems like there's so much "noise", so much cognitive dissonance and emotional charge, that we're incapable of discussing these things sanely.
Maybe I'm a little behind on this stuff, but I thought that it hasn't been conclusively proven either way (lab leak or naturally occurring). The lab-leak hypothesis was shouted down in mainstream media early on because they didn't want to offend China, but I don't think it's ever been conclusively proven that it wasn't a lab leak. However, there hasn't been sufficient evidence to back that hypothesis either.
I agree it's not conclusive, so I shouldn't have said "false", but the FBI says it was most likely a lab leak [1].
Your article starts by calling it a "false myth" so they're clearly still in the political partisanship trap whatever the outcome of some bet. Anybody who's certain it was of natural origin is just being fooled by the news and some prominent scientists who made some intentionally misleading statements.
No new evidence for natural origin has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been, and you are making an isolated demand for rigor.
If you read the Nicholas Wade article, the PLOS blog, or even this article, you will know the evidence is not pointing in any one direction at the moment, but there is solid evidence of a cover-up and blame shifting by the Chinese government and the virology / national defense establishment.
In many ways the more people try to make arguments for natural spillover the less likely it seems.
The theory, which the scientists pushing natural spillover argue is the best evidence, say:
1) no scientists think the bat would have come from near Wuhan
2) there were raccoons and civets and the wet market - though no bats
The amount of steps needed for it to appear in Wuhan, before any of the dozens of large cities with wet markets closer to the bat population, is a lot.
The number of steps needed for a lab researcher to get it while dissecting a bat or bat excrement is small.
The final quote seems to cover this:
>But Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and a persistent critic of attempts to diminish the likelihood of a laboratory leak, said that this was a straw-man argument.
Dr. Ebright said it was possible that a W.I.V. lab worker might have contracted the coronavirus on a field expedition to study bats or while processing a virus at the lab. The new paper, he argued, failed to address such possibilities.
“The review does not advance the discussion,” Dr. Ebright said.
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...
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.
The fact that the virus just popped out of nowhere more or less without the normal pedigree is strong evidence against a natural origin theory. It's pretty clear at this point that it was a lab escape, in my opinion.
It's the other way around. The problem with the natural development theory is there's no evidence for it. Meanwhile lots of evidence was discovered and collected by internet based investigators. At this point the overwhelming preponderance of evidence supports the idea that it came from the Wuhan lab.
"The market theory was always more likely and more dooming for China, though"
No, the most likely possibility from day 1 was that a novel coronavirus emerging right next to a lab doing experiments on novel coronaviruses came from that lab. It was always nonsensical to claim otherwise.
reply