> 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].
>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'?
> This, is damning evidence regardless of any of that. Nothing remotely like this was being presented by mainstream newsmedia, perhaps because nothing remotely like it was being presented to them by the scientists they talked to. There was no version of a lab origin theory that was being presented as worthy of consideration.
You have to acknowledge this is incredibly weak logic. “A thing is possible, therefore it happened.” Is this molecular evidence the Furin Cleavage Site? Cause that was peddled basically as a lie - they occur in nature just fine, it’s also used in research.
I’m unaware of any compelling evidence for the lab leak theory, but I will acknowledge it’s basically impossible to disprove. We don’t know where most diseases arose (or where they came from) - it’s just we mostly don’t care, unlike with COVID.
> For the lab-leak theory to be true, a "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) has to somehow make it into a lab undetected.
That's not a necessary condition and it's ridiculous to think that's the only hinge by which the hypothesis stands. Another far more plausible idea is that a mistake occurred somewhere and it was covered up. This has occurred before in authoritarian regimes before.
An input to a molecular clock is a mutation rate, which I imagine would be hard to quantify given the unknown source and the possibility of gain of function research.
of course it is plausible. a priori there is no reason why lab leak is more likely than natural origin. it just comes down to the evidence of what actually happened.
what you need to show natural origin is transmission in an animal population with an animal that can be linked to the outbreak location. that hasnt been found after 3 years of tremendous effort.
everyone associated with the wiv has millions of lives and trillions of dollars in damages on their heads if it was a lab leak so these people are definitely highly motivated to prove a natural origin. it has been 3+ years and nothing has been found. the more time that passes the less likely it becomes.
> The thing is that whether this came from a lab or not is of limited relevance.
It has plenty of relevance. If lab leaks are the source of the virus, any serious solution will need to include improvements to lab containment and practices. Knowing what happened in a hypothetical lab leak could also help identify the original animal to study. Understanding how viruses hop & adapt from animal hosts to humans begins by studying specific cases of it.
For example, past US lab virus leaks including SARS have led the Obama administration to temporarily suspend and investigate the risks of Gain of Function research in 2014. At least one of the Wuhan labs were conducting Gain of Function research at the time of the outbreak.
> All other viruses from animals were found very soon after an outbreak.
It took a long time to find the animal source for HIV and if memory serves, swine flu took some time to be tracked down.
> obvious now it didn’t
I’m open to the lab leak origin as a possibility, but it seems far from obvious either way. The evidence is still pretty circumstantial. It’s worth further investigation, but I don’t think we should rush to a conclusion.
> That doesn't eliminate the possibility that it was a natural virus which had been collected and subsequently escaped due to bad lab technique but the former is too attractive a conspiracy theory to let go..
For some reason most discussions claiming that the lab leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory focus 90% of their effort arguing against being a bioengineered weapon and little time arguing against the actual strongest lab leak hypothesis: a zoonotic virus was collected and brought to a virology lab, where it was passed through humanized mice, a worker contracted it, and accidentally spread it in the city the virology lab was based.
The fact that people can pick out whackadoodles in Congress who argue for stupid theories doesn't make the strong theory weaker.
>If 90% of people agree to a position to appease a few people in power, then it's not really consensus, it's coercion.
It's a pretty big assumption to assume that's the reason why scientists outside of China believe in a zoonotic origin, rather than it simply being the case that the weight of available evidence leans in favor of a zoonotic origin. That evidence includes the fact that the earliest confirmed cases clustered around the seafood market, and that there were two separate lineages of the virus found in humans, suggesting multiple zoonotic spillover events. We will never know with 100% certainty what really happened. The scientists working on this have always acknowledged that uncertainty and have never said the probability of a lab leak was zero. I just think the reality is a lot more boring than you're making it out to be.
> this whole China Lab theory is literally just tinfoil hat speculation
I feel like that's a bit cold. This is a virus whose closest relatives are known to exist in animals that are the specific animals that they specialise in, in that lab where they also do science around viruses like this one.
Sure, it might not be this but there's a fair bit of co-incidence going on here isn't there? Enough at least to take it beyond the realm of tin foil.
> 1. There is no viral backbone anyone knows of which would have been used in this research
> 2. There is no spike protein anyone knows of which would have been used in this research
> 3. The PRRAR furin cleavage site is not one humans would have tried it is unlike any other known furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses
I believe what you mean to say here is that there is no published literature describing these things. That may be true. But the people doing this work are the ones who would develop and then publish such knowledge, if it were indeed something they were working on.
> It is not particularly suspicious that the thing which we were worried about happening and causing a zoonotic spillover event is the thing which actually happened.
It isn't. What is suspicious is the following:
1. It happened in the city that houses the lab where this research was proposed to take place.
2. The natural reservoir of these viruses is hundreds of miles from this city.
3. The outbreak occurred exactly 2 years after this research was originally proposed, in the city that it was proposed to take place in, in roughly the amount of time one might expect this research to take.
4. Peter Daszak, despite coming out forcefully against the lab leak theory, and purposely downplaying his involvement with the lab in so doing, and being inexplicably selected as a member of the WHO team to investigate the lab origin theory, completely neglected to mention having made this proposal a mere two years prior.
If I were a major virus researcher, and my proposal to investigate the exact thing that just caused a massive global pandemic had been denied by DARPA two years prior, I would be shouting it from the rooftops as vindication. See, had you just let me investigate this, maybe we could have avoided this pandemic! But he didn't do that. He didn't mention it at all, despite its obvious relevance to all that has gone on.
This is not the behavior of someone with nothing to hide. Whether or not this virus originated in this lab, it's pretty clear that Peter Daszak is up to something he'd rather the world not discover.
> The only thing I find somewhat frustrating about this is that lab leak is nearly impossible to disprove.
A population of animals infected with virus genetically ancestral to the earliest human infections would absolutely disprove any theories of genetic engineering. For example, the discovery of BANAL-20 has pretty strongly excluded any theories that SARS-CoV-2's spike evolved in hACE2 mice (but not that the spike evolved naturally and was used in a laboratory recombinant, as in the unfunded DEFUSE proposal). Such a population wouldn't absolutely disprove theories of research-related spillover without lab manipulation of the virus (e.g., a researcher sampling bat caves gets infected in the field). It would significantly weaken those though, especially if that population was far from any known pre-pandemic sampling trips.
In the previous two coronavirus spillovers (SARS-1, MERS), animals (palm civets and raccoon dogs, camels) infected with virus near-identical to the human virus were discovered within about a year. For MERS we also see genomic evidence of multiple spillovers, separated by an evolutionary distance that makes cryptic zoonotic spread essentially certain. For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting. That was the goal of the original pangolin papers; but that turned out to be multiple reports all derived from the same batch of smuggled pangolins, making it much more likely that humans infected those pangolins in the same way that many humans infected their housecats.
The absence of that evidence doesn't mean SARS-CoV-2 is certainly of unnatural origin; the zoonotic path for some unquestionably natural viruses (e.g. Ebola) is still unknown. It's not what anyone expected, though.
> Is there anything we can do about wet markets?
Reckless agricultural practices need to be stopped. The West is guilty too; there's less taste for exotic mammals here, but routine use of antibiotics in healthy animals may be remembered as a crime against humanity. That's a lot harder than stopping a tiny subset of government-funded research with no clear benefits, though. So it seems reasonable to me to work first on that much more achievable goal.
>"Professor Andrew Rambaut, from the University of Edinburgh, also said that furin cleavage site “strikes me as unusual”."
>"He added: “I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan.”"
This pair of quotes has a completely different meaning from the original quote it sliced up:
>"I am also agnostic on this – I do not have any experience of laboratory virology and don’t know what is likely or not in that context. From a (natural) evolutionary point of view the only thing here that strikes me as unusual is the furin cleavage site. It strongly suggests to me that we are missing something important in the origin of the virus. My inclination would be that it is a missing host species in which this feature arose because it was selected for in that host. We can see this insertion has resulted in an extremely fit virus in humans – we can also deduce that it is not optimal for transmission in bat species."
>"... [this ellipsis (...) is from the house.gov transcription] The biggest hinderance at the moment (for this and more generally) is the lack of data and information. There have been no genome sequences from Wuhan for cases more recent than the 6 beginning of January and reports, but no information, about virus from non-human animals in Wuhan. If the evolutionary origins of the epidemic were to be discussed, I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan."
To emphasize the very last part: Rambaut is talking about genome sequences from human patients in Wuhan -- not laboratory data from the suspect WIV. But the Telegraph quote implies the opposite.
(Also, obviously I'm not picking any "side" here: dishonesty in the Telegraph doesn't vindicate dishonesty in NIH leadership, and vice-versa).
> 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.
This is an absurd equivalence. Viruses spill over from nature all the time. There are millions of people coming into contact every day with animal populations that harbor myriad SARS-related coronaviruses. Every known novel virus that has entered the human population has done so through spillover. This is the default hypothesis, which must be overwhelmingly favored at the outset of any discussion. Everything we know so far is perfectly consistent with this default assumption, and there is precisely zero evidence of a lab leak.
> If you read the Nicholas Wade article
I've read it, and it is appalling that an article by someone who does not understand the subject they are writing about is getting so much circulation.
> there is solid evidence of a cover-up
There is no evidence at all of a cover-up of a lab leak. Everything we know so far points to the lab not even having had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic. It appears to be a completely novel virus, not closely related to anything else known before, which is precisely what you'd expect for a novel virus that spilled over from an unknown animal population. If there were a major outbreak of a virus that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had (such as WIV-1), that would be a different matter, but there isn't.
>Isn't the simplest solution that COVID also came from animals?
No, you don't get to leave information out of consideration and call your conclusions the simplest theory. Most viruses are from animal spillovers. Also SARS has been leaked from labs on more than one occasion.
>It might be more strange if it was nowhere near a wet market.
It's not strange that it was near a wet market. It is strange that it was near a lab studying coronaviruses that was at least thinking of doing GoF research of the kind needed to create COVID-19 if indeed it was created.
The spillover theory leaves too many unexplained coincidences for it to be the simplest theory.
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.
> And at the end you seem to be proposing the fact that they haven't faked a zoonotic origin is evidence that it was lab-created? That sounds backwards.
You actually sort of can make that argument, yeah.
At this point, with the lab leak theory having become a lot more popular over the past year or so, the Chinese government would kill to be able to point to an animal reservoir. If they can't find it, the incentive for them to try to fake it is huge. My initial assumption is that if they haven't faked a zoonotic origin, it's probably because they can't, not because they don't want to. By assuming this, I'm assuming that they have basically looked in all the places possible by now, which seems reasonable because they have a lot of manpower and we're 2+ years into the pandemic. If they can't get the virus to infect bats/pangolins/etc, that indicates that the virus didn't originate in the wild and hence supports the lab leak theory
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].
[1] https://www.republik.ch/2021/06/05/herr-drosten-woher-kam-di... [German]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_5
reply