Huge change of tone from 2 months ago, ok m guessing it's because because they fear that the lab accident theory will gain more traction academically or they fear people will reveal the scale of the damage to the public vs the clearly fabricated stats we have now.
That doesn't mean it didn't come from a lab though. "Coming from a lab" does not = man made. If they were doing research on the bats in this lab, looking to identify potential scary viruses to be ready, it is entirely possible the virus jumped from bat to researcher there and that was our patient 0.
How did it come from a lab? I've heard "workers got sprayed with blood and infected", "someone screwed up"(vague), "mishandled lab waste".
Just saying it "came from a lab", makes it sound man made. If you don't want misunderstandings, you need spell it out and make it absolutely clear. It doesn't even sound like there is a clear narrative about how it "escaped from the lab", just a lot of rumors. Rumors about a rumor, certainly doesn't sound more credible than China's official stance, and their credibility is already very low.
You get it from a bat the same way you get it from another person you touch the bat and touch your face or you clean the cage drop get . You dump out the litter box/tray and huff some particles. You draw a blood sample and a drop of it gets on your visor/goggles. You take it off late and touch your face. It's nothing sexy.
Note that that the Wuhan CDC, the lab ~300m from the market, the lab that was experimenting on bats, is not the BSL4 Wuhan Institute of Virology miles away from the seafood market, that everyone loves taking about. It's probably a level 2 or 3 lab.
Escape from a lab doesn't imply man made any more than tiger escaped from zoo implies that the tiger was born there. SARS escaped from BSL3 labs on China on multiple occasions, that doesn't imply that SARS was man made.
This article from 2014 (it is untainted by coronavirus politics) documents the long history of viral outbreaks from labs throughout the world. This is a known and relatively common phenomena, appearing to occur once every few years.
The story is that "they made a mistake in a lab"...
1. while doing research that has been banned in other nations due to the extreme hazard
2. despite having a history of lab virus escapes that killed people
3. and then they covered it up
BTW, the virus is at least sort of man made. The lab was breeding viruses. There is no evidence that gene editing technology was used, but we do know that the lab has published multiple research papers about making coronaviruses more infectious in humans.
I think there needs to be a damn good justification for purposely making viruses more able to infect and harm humans. Why would you do that????? Mere scientific curiosity is not a proper justification for putting all of humanity at risk.
Here is China making a coronavirus like the one causing the pandemic, even acting on the ACE2 receptor and testing it in human cells, publishing it in early 2008:
This paper is only about engineering a virus using a common backbone virus as a starting point.
That does not mean the virus could not be derived within a lab using recombination methods in other animals and sourcing the starting novel virus from bats. In fact, this type of research was the exact research being done at the Wuhan Virology lab.
> the exact research being done at the Wuhan Virology lab
I would like to see the exact research they tried to do there. Navigating through their published research list, I couldn't locate any, but I am not an expert:
I agree that Daily Mail should not be used as source in informed contexts, however the thebulletin.org link has very well informed comments (at least).
Can anybody explain the downvotes? Daily Mail is a well-known unreliable source, pretty much a tabloid. The article mentioned it poor, as a matter of fact.
The Mail Online is constantly dissed in left-leaning forums like this one, but if you just go read the articles and check the claims they're not usually any less accurate than any other news source (this doesn't mean they're very accurate of course, just that other sources are no better).
This article consists of some publicly known facts, along with some anonymous sources in the British government's emergency committee (the Cabinet leaks like a sieve so this is entirely plausible). It also cites an academic, some report from Beijing News (whilst noting that the report was retracted) and an academic paper that was uploaded and then deleted. It's written in a pretty neutral tone and explicitly calls out cases where its sources may have issues. The article is no different to the sort of speculation routinely found in Bloomberg, the WSJ, NYT, the Guardian etc.
What we're seeing here is just another day in no-platforming land. To the left what is said doesn't matter, who says it is everything. Based on prior experience I'd be willing to bet that virtually none of the people spitting fire over a Daily Mail or National Review link here have even read the articles, let alone rigorously apply the same purported standards to every news link they see posted.
Well said. It's a disturbing trend throughout the internet that the Left completely disregards publications that don't follow the accepted narrative. Those individuals and publications that do follow the narrative - very often entities that the public has placed a significant amount of trust in - are all too eager to agree and encourage this sort of delegitimization.
I don't think they're particularly reputable sources in general either but in this case all the source material is publicly accessible and verifyble. They just happen to be one of the few actually presenting it in English.
If animals to human transmission can happen in a wildlife market, then it can also happen unintentionally in a virology lab researching very same family of virus. In the absence of substantial evidence, both theories are equally plausible to me.
You miss the point entirely. Nothing in the Nature piece is in conflict with the theory that it accidentally escaped a lab were Coronaviruses are studied.
Not that it was a weapon. Not that it was man made. Simply someone working at a research lab, screwed up and released a dangerous virus.
"Despite its name, the geosciences university announced elsewhere on its website that it was carrying out coronavirus research."
incredible journalists repoting on the academy doesn't know what geoscience/geology department studies nowadays. most of them are indistinguishable from sociology thanks to all the urban and policy planing. they also do a great deal od recent history because it's a base for the above.
Given the response articles saying it would be possible to engineer the virus have caused, this doesn't seem that extreme. The "origin" of the virus has become a political issue that fringe extremists in many countries are using to attack other countries.
In lieu of evidence that the “wet market” story is true, the accidental lab release is pretty compelling. Interesting to see how people react to it though - as though the idea is outlandish that a laboratory working with pathogens from actual bats could mishandle things. Is there even any evidence people ate bats at the wet market?
I remember a scientific paper on HN a few months ago by Chinese authors saying Covid came from that lab and that it came from bats that had infected workers there, or that was the assumption. That is my memory of the article. I cannot find that paper anymore. Does anyone remember this?
Tucker Carlson did a piece talking about how the bats that this jumped from do not live within ~900km of Wuhan, but that the lab in Wuhan did testing on the bats that they imported. It definitely seems plausible they were doing research on these bats, and that due to some improper controls it jumped over to a human working in the lab and that was our patient 0.
It definitely seems feasible to me that it could have "come out of a lab" while still being entirely natural in origin and without any ill intent on the Chinese part.
I'm not endorsing this as true, I don't know if it's true or not, but I did find it interesting and worthy of additional research.
Non-US readers should know that Tucker Carlson is a Fox News pundit, and to say that he has credibility issues would be an incredibly charitable interpretation of things.
Yes that is it, thank you! I like that it clears things up like -
> According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31 residents
and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the
market.
I've worked in a lab and Occam's razor for me says the lab that is 280 meters away and studied bat viruses is a lot more plausible than it originating in a wet market. People make stupid mistakes handling waste all the time. There was no need for the Chinese government to throw the wet market under the bus or for people to imply Chinese people ate bats or some other racially motivated theory and there was no need to believe the chinese government created a bioweapon. Most likely is that it was just a horrible mistake and careless handling of biohazardous waste/animals.
> I've worked in a lab and Occam's razor for me says the lab that is 280 meters away
Yeeaah, about that... I looked more myself last time when I mentioned this and couldn't find the reference I originally saw (it was more than a month before my comment a month ago), instead found this:
According to Google Maps and Translate, the pin in the image in that PDF that says "Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention" is actually on a building labeled "New Century Home Appliances Collection and Disposal Station".
Snopes reports that it contained numerous errors, and the authors themselves have said they had no direct evidence for their claims. (Note that it was never peer-reviewed or even accepted for publication anywhere. They just pasted it up on a social media site.)
Not sure why this is downvoted. It is not Indonesia as the previous child (now deleted) alluded to — the easy tell is the distinct lack of Hijabs visible (which are ubiquitous in the largest Muslim country in the world).
Stating it's compelling isn't evidence, just that it is an explanation that appeals to large populations of our species who are hold certain suspicions.
There is, however, a long history of animal to human transmission of diseases.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I have yet to see anyone provide evidence, only twitter rumors, and twitter rumors aren't even regular evidence.
It's just as much China's (or anyone else's in the interest of science) to prove the lab had zero correlation to this incident. If only to appease a crowd.
What? That's not how evidence works. The onus is on the person making the claim to provide positive evidence. Not actively insisting they have to prove a negative.
That's just appeal to perfection, proving a secret military base got away with corona would make you more effective than CIA and MI-6 combined. However, China has hundreds of documents of this base and backgrounds on all scientists, which it can release to no detriment at all, supposing the lab had nothing to do with corona.
Asking for any evidence is appeal to perfection? Or saying that it's unreasonable to demand an extraordinary, serious, world-impacting claim be disproved, while simultaneously not supporting it with any evidence?
Also, I'm just saying any evidence that anything may have escaped by mistake; not that it was intentionally spread. Sure, CIA and such can discover such evidence much more effectively than any commenter here, but in that case, shouldn't you let the CIA / US government make those accusations instead of a random commenter who has no knowledge of the situation or basis for their claim?
>China has hundreds of documents of this base and backgrounds on all scientists, which it can release to no detriment at all, supposing the lab had nothing to do with corona.
What documents, exactly? And how would that help disprove that the virus inadvertently escaped from the lab?
> What? That's not how evidence works. The onus is on the person making the claim to provide positive evidence.
You might have had a point if the Chinese regime wasn't putting it's propaganda machine into overdrive spewing conspiracy theories on how covid19 was created by the US to attack China.
Right now US propaganda is in overdrive mode trying to lay the blame onto China ; there are no other views in mainstream media , and if anyone tries to doubt that, asking for evidence and reminding the world about presumption of innocence, they are instantly labeled chinese bots. So much for freedom of speech and thought
I'd like to remind people it's not just the US - Chinese test (and inhaler) suppliers being sued for highly unreliable (and some even pre-infected) equipment.
How exactly is the Chinese regime not to blame for this mess? Between the blatant cover-up and falsified reports and underreporting deaths by a couple of orders of magnitude and knowingly stating that the virus didn't spread when they knew full well it spread like wildfire and intentionally leaving out demostratedly infected but asymptomatic cases out of the statistics while simultaneously blaming new cases on infected foreigners, how is China's regime not to blame for this whole mess?
And should we now just forget that the Chinese regime has been trying to pin the blame on their covid19 mess on Italy of all places?
Presumption of innocence is a legal matter and this is not a court of law. It might be hard for you to understand but freedom of speech doesn't protect you from getting called out. Nay, it is the affirmative right to do so.
It would also do you well to keep in mind that if we're using the criminal justice system as some standard obstruction of justice itself is a crime, as is destruction/tampering of evidence as well as witness tampering. Physical evidence is not required to convict; strong circumstantial evidence is often sufficent.
They're always spewing propaganda about everything, though. How does that eliminate the need to provide evidence about a claim?
Or are you just saying the best geopolitical response to unsubstantiated propaganda is more unsubstantiated propaganda volleyed right back at them?
This is similar to people who accuse the CIA of orchestrating every big event or crime. They say they don't need to provide evidence, because the CIA is untrustworthy and tries to deceive people. But this is a completely bullshit argument.
Yes, it is. Any argument akin to "I don't need to provide evidence of anything I accuse you of because you lie about things" is complete and utter bullshit. You would basically be just as bad and intellectually dishonest as the CIA, in that case.
You always need evidence, regardless of the nature of the accused person or entity. You could be accusing Stalin himself; you still need evidence
> Yes, it is. Any argument akin to "I don't need to provide evidence of anything I accuse you of because you lie about things"
Either you didn't understood the point or you don't want to address it.
The point is that if China's regime tries to portray the fact that they operate a coronsvirus military research lab a few meters from the outbreak's alledged epicenter as nonsense while at the same time they try to pin the blame on the outbreak on military coronsvirus research work conducted by other nations.
I mean, if a work accident committed by China's military is ruled out as outlandish then why are they pushing conspiracy theories akin to area52 aliens as reasonable and plausible?
I understand the point. I still maintain any totalitarian communist regime is going to spread absurd propaganda in such a situation pretty much no matter what.
The lab escape theory is certainly completely plausible. But it becomes no more or less plausible just because there's "US military conspiracy" propaganda spread by the government.
They easily could've done that to counter all of the accusations hurled at them by US citizens that it's an intentional bioweapon, or due to Trump calling it "the Chinese virus" and constantly trying to associate it with them, or to pull attention away from themselves due to the outbreak starting there and just generally to reduce embarrassment and spread confusion that they hope will improve their reputation, or even specifically because of posts like yours.
If you assume for the sake of argument that the lab hypothetically isn't responsible, but lots of people think it is, this would be one way to provide such a distraction. It would as well if the lab were in fact responsible, but that definitely doesn't mean that's proof the lab is responsible. They have a ton of possible reasons for why they would want to spread this propaganda.
The hypothesis that "they're more likely to spread propaganda about the US military causing it if their lab caused it" carries a ton of implicit assumptions which may or may not be true. It's reasonable to speculate about and discuss, but it alone is evidence of nothing. If there were some leaked document saying something like "hey, since our lab fucked up let's distract people by accusing the US", then it'd be a different story.
Of course, China's government promoting and spreading absurd conspiracy theories needs to be condemned no matter what, but an analysis of the true root cause of the outbreak needs to be totally impartial and objective.
>I mean, if a work accident committed by China's military is ruled out as outlandish then why are they pushing conspiracy theories akin to area52 aliens as reasonable and plausible?
Because the incident isn't about deflection to US.
It was retaliating and warning US against pushing Wuhan conspiracy theory (Tom Cotton) and calling covid19 Wuhan virus (Pompeo) after WHO re-designation. Both these events proceeded the Chinese tweets.
Current US administration has consistently been the instigator of bellicose diplomacy. But people conveniently forget when it comes to China who has been remarkably patient compared to other countries, including US allies.
US is pushing crazy propaganda to deflect blame from their inadequate response. In return, China unleashed one of their mid tier diplomats to troll crazy US rhetoric coming from a Senator and Secretary of State to demonstrate that China is willing to escalate to dirty propaganda games. Hence why it had to be de-escalated by Chinese ambassador to US, a diplomat 2 levels higher than the original foreign ministry spokes person. It also plays well to Chinese domestic audience.
If China wanted to deflect blame, there would be much more plausible ways. The fact that China chose to confront US conspiracy with Chinese conspiracy should be interpreted as signalling to not go full retard. The message and messenger was calibrated for this affect. And what do you know the US backed off on this avenue of attack and has shifted to boosting Taiwan. Also concurrent to the conspiracy tit-for-tat was banning each others journalists. These events have to be evaluated in proper context and timelines.
A brand new account created specifically to complain about how shills trying desperately to deflect attention from China's regime to the US are being downvoted instead of upvoted ?
I haven’t read any of the documents put forward by the Chinese government, but what if that’s the proof of them not making it and providing the negative proof, by showing who _did_ release the Corona virus?
I'm not sure the concept of "onus" is meaningful in this kind of public debate. It's not like everyone has agreed to only believe conclusions reached by particular forms of argument.
This isn't some kind of weird, esoteric form of argument. It's an underlying principle of empiricism that you should try to provide evidence for claims you make rather than making the accused prove something is false.
Someone accuses you of murder and says "prove you didn't do it". You didn't do it, but can't satisfactorily prove such a negative. Maybe you were outside taking a walk and no one can provide an alibi. Does that mean you should be assumed guilty?
I don't think "coronavirus escapes from a lab, in the exact area where the outbreak started, that was studying coronaviruses" is exactly an 'extraordinary claim'. If anything it's the elephant in the room. Are we just supposed to casually ignore that or what….
I think the problem is that when people think of "lab" they think of some sort of devious genetic engineering bioweapons program, and not something considerably more likely but much more mundane like some scientists studying what sort of potentially bad viruses the local bats have.
Umm, they were also combining viruses to create "chimeras". Now, this combinational process could be genetic engineering (which has been ruled out I think) or just combining in a petri dish, which I find compelling.
To create pseudoviruses which are able to infect under lab conditions, but not able to replicate, or to survive in a human or any other organism.
If this were one of those, as has been claimed on the basis of the frequently mis-cited October 2019 WIV paper, anyone in the world would be able to see that by comparing the SARS-CoV-2 sequence accessioned in NCBI's database with one of the many HIV sequences also available there. I've done the alignment myself, against several HIV sequences. So can you; you don't even need a local toolchain, you can pick them and BLAST them right on NCBI's site.
When you do, you'll find the same thing I did: there is no significant similarity between any HIV strain and SARS-CoV-2. So the "escaped chimera" theory is not only implausible on its face given the nature of pseudoviruses, but disproven by genomic evidence, besides.
Thanks for the info. I'm clearly not an expert. But I do still have questions.
1) where did hiv sequences come from? Are they the human immuno deficiency virus sequences?
2) you are suggesting that chimeras are created impotent, and that hybrid viruses cannot be created to be effective otherwise. My question is that whatever combination of pangolin and bat viruses is said to have happened naturally in a host, could it happen in a petri dish too? Could WIV be conducting such research? Or are such petri dish chimeras always unable to jump from human to human. Is it a natural property or choice when creating chimeras?
3) it seems that the virus is like SARS but has receptor proteins similar to a known pangolin coronavirus. Is it also possible for two viruses to leak to a single lab employee, and then combine in the first human host right away. It still can be said to leak from the lab in this scenario.
Thanks for having patience for my uninformed opinions.
These are great questions, and thank you for asking them!
1. Yes. The claim based on the misreading of the 2019 paper is that SARS-CoV-2 is actually a lab-created combination of another coronavirus and the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. If that were true, the genome of SARS-CoV-2 would incorporate large parts of the HIV genome verbatim. It does not; comparing these genomes for identical or nearly identical subsequences via BLAST, by far the tool most widely used for this purpose, shows no such similarity.
2. Viral recombination occurs when multiple related strains of a given virus infect the same cell at the same time. That can be done in vitro, but I haven't seen any papers from WIV describing such experiments. Notably, the frequently cited 2019 paper describes a totally different kind of experiment, which could not under any circumstances have produced a virus with the genome which SARS-CoV-2 has been observed to have.
3. For that to happen would require two different strains of the same virus to independently develop the same mutation allowing them to cross over and infect humans, and to simultaneously infect the same worker in the lab, and to then recombine in such a way as to produce SARS-CoV-2.
That is not impossible, but it is about as likely to occur as it is for every atom in your body to simultaneously transmute into gold.
Thanks for your answer. I'll like to point out that 3 is slightly eased off if the two viruses are already able to jump to humans. In this case, it could be the SARS coronavirus and the pangolin virus whose receptor proteins are similar to ncov19. Then all that is required is for the two viruses to jump over and then recombine. Definitely a possibility.
I find the wet market theory full of such improbabilities too. How is ncov19 relatively close to two known viruses, 1) the sars like bat virus it was 96% similar to, and 2) the pangolin virus with which it has resembling receptor proteins. Seems a lot of coincidence for these two to combine, both of which can jump to humans, and 300 meters from a leading Coronavirus research lab.
I know I'm just repeating the conspiracy theory, but just explaining my position. The virus was found initially at the wet market, and there is no proof of its origin being there. Plus it seems perfectly feasible for it come out of the lab and not be a deliberately engineered virus, atleast not one using the 2019 paper's chimera virus techniques.
Compared to other families of viruses, coronaviruses recombine unusually often and are unusually likely to produce viable new strains that way. Those traits make them unusually capable of producing zoonoses, which is one of the reasons why they're a subject of particular interest among infectious disease researchers.
Those same traits also produce a high degree of similarity between a lot of genomically differentiable strains of coronavirus, especially since spike proteins tend to be strongly conserved
for their direct effect on virulence - a significant mutation there is likely to be maladaptive, if it changes the protein structure enough for cells to no longer uptake a virion that expresses it. So it's not really a surprise to see that two different strains have similar spike proteins, and doesn't really give much basis for inference about relatedness between them.
Another important point is that coronaviruses are so common specifically in bats, which are both extremely plentiful and unusually accommodating hosts for many kinds of viruses including coronaviruses, very often with multiple strains infecting a single host at once. That gives coronaviruses - which, remember, are already good at recombining to produce new strains, every one being possibly able to jump species - more chances at that kind of recombination than they would have otherwise.
Too, bats shed virus in feces the same way humans do, and bat guano is so effective a fertilizer that wars have started over access to supplies of it. So it's not difficult or unlikely to postulate a chain of events like this:
- a recombination event in a bat produces a virus capable of infecting humans,
- which is then deposited in feces used to fertilize a human food crop,
- which is then harvested and taken to a city market to be sold,
- and all it takes for someone to get sick from there is not washing their hands often enough while they're cooking.
To be clear, I'm not saying this is what happened. Nobody knows that yet. But precisely because nobody knows that yet, it's important to consider the relative likelihoods of various ways that the pathogen might have developed into a form that can infect humans, and then reached the point of actually doing so.
That's what I'm doing here. Each stage of this postulated chain of events relies only on things that are already known to frequently occur, and have been so known since long before SARS-CoV-2 was even known to exist.
The result is unprovable, of course, just as with every other theory of this disease's origin that anyone has advanced so far. But it doesn't rely on any unusually small probabilities, and so it seems a lot likelier to me than the combination of a lab accident of a kind known to have happened only a few times in the last two decades, and a simultaneous superinfection of a single researcher with two different strains of coronavirus.
Yeah that’s what I’ve been trying to explain to all my reasonable friends who think that the moment I say “it came from a lab” that means this is a bioweapon that was intentionally released. No, actually, there is a chain of evidence that makes an accidental lab leak more plausible than the theory that the virus jumped straight from an animal in a wet market hundreds of miles away from its normal habitat that just happens to be in the same city as a lab that holds samples of virus from that strain.
If you’re curious you can find it yourself. Half a dozen comments on this thread have links you can check out. This is an anonymous comment thread, not a tribunal. Do your own homework and make up your own mind.
How does an "accidental lab leak" happen without a bunch of people at the lab getting infected? Seems like we'd have some evidence if it was an accidental leak.
2. The person who accidentally leaked it from the lab may not even know it. Research into COVID-19 has estimated up to 20% of people infected may be asymptomatic carriers of the disease who can still spread it to others. Person who works in the lab gets infected, doesn’t get visibly sick, accidentally spreads it to someone in the vicinity of their lab by breathing or coughing or singing or sneezing, virus is now out and they don’t even realize it.
The 1977 H1N1 pandemic is widely believed by scientists to have been an accidental lab release. Evidence as to which lab it escaped from has never been found and we will probably never know. https://mbio.asm.org/content/6/4/e01013-15 “A biosafety lapse in a research laboratory is now most often cited as the cause of the 1977-1978 reemergence of the H1N1 influenza virus strain”
If the lettuce killed people and then everyone who interacted with the people who at the lettuce also got sick and the economy had to be shut down the United States would strictly ban selling lettuce immediately.
If China can enforce the largest lockdown ever and enforce a one-child policy for decades, they can easily ban live animals at markets.
A) COVID-19 doesn't kill everyone it comes in contact with. Depending on where you live, more people in the last 3 months may have become seriously ill from a food-borne illness than from COVID-19.
B)Food-borne illness actually does kill around 150,000 per year worldwide. It is a serious concern, and difficult to track/contain. There are also concerns around regulations being too lax, not enough inspectors, and living conditions of those who harvest food.
C)Maybe China should ban wet markets, but then maybe people should be home for Easter Sunday and not at a church. Now we start to ban "cultural norms" and "ways of life", which people get fussy about.
A) Saying the "last three months" is intellectually disingenuous because the virus hadn't even been introduced to most states three months ago. I'm sure in some areas more people have died in the last three months from ski accidents but that is irrelevant. Name one state where you honestly believe the next three months will have comparable cases of food-borne deaths to Covid-19 deaths.
B) I'm not disagreeing with you.
C) People should not be at an in-person Easter Sunday. I realize a percentage of churches decided to not close. That being said, wanting to eat bats is not comparable to wanting to practice religion.
Given poor testing/tracking, it probably was floating around in the USA 3 months ago. I am not saying that COVID-19 is not deadlier, but that food-borne illnesses are serious and rife in the food supply, and can lead to death for compromised individuals, yet we have not shutdown our markets or meat processing facilities despite outbreaks of food-borne illnesses being somewhat common. Those illnesses can indeed lead to death for thousands of people each year, especially those with pre-existing health conditions.
Also the cruise industry is notorious for food-borne outbreaks of Norovirus. These cruises typically have multiple incidents every year, and are great vectors for spreading viral infections, yet the cruise industry has never been shutdown.
You think eating bats and going to church are not comparable, because that's your opinion on what's culturally normal. Others might say eating a bat is delicious and going to church is dumb. Both have risks and I am not a fan either. No one should be eating bats or going to church right now, but that's going to offend people on both sides.
> Depending on where you live, more people in the last 3 months may have become seriously ill from a food-borne illness than from COVID-19.
This is a ridiculous claim if I ever saw one as food poisoning or food related diseases have never overwhelmed hospitals anywhere in recent history. Unless you are talking about some remote place where COVID has not landed yet, in which case the comment has no point. And we are not even talking about the past, COVID19 is still pretty much active and killing people still as we speak. We'll draw comparisons when it's over, which is not now.
Because viruses jumping between species is a rare event? People didn't stop raising pigs after the swine flu, despite knowing the virus came from there.
The timing is unfortunate however. The pandemic is NOT being us. The global economy is still actively being destroyed (including China's) and the CCP's first thought is to re-open the wet markets as soon as possible? In what world does that even make sense?
I don't understand what you think keeping the wet market closed accomplishes. There isn't a significant threat that you could get coronavirus from another animal, and the host of other areas where a virus could pass between species weren't ever shut down.
All people are saying is that there's a reasonable hypothesis that this thing came out of that laboratory. There's enough circumstantial evidence to support that theory even if it's not a leading theory.
You’re the one making extraordinary claims. The virus came from a bat sold at a wet market? Where is your evidence? What is the name of the merchant who sold the bat at the wet market? Where is the specific bat from that wet market which was recovered and tested positive for the coronavirus? What specific species of bat was it? Where is your proof that anyone ever sold bats at that wet market (many sources are saying they didn’t)? Why did the outbreak supposedly begin at a wet market 300 meters from a lab that specifically focused on studying coronaviruses? You’re implying that you have very convincing answers to all these questions. Do you?
Failing to disprove one competing hypothesis doesn't lend nearly as much evidence to other hypotheses as you might think. It's very hard to fully trace something like this, especially in such a huge, dense population center.
You don't need to eat bats for them to be a problem. The virus could have jumped via some intermediate host.
Some folks used to be skeptical wrt. the market being a source, because it was officially described as a fish/seafood market and fish are not a very plausible reservoir for this virus. However it's clear by now that all kinds of live animals were sold there, similar to other "wet" markets throughout Mainland China.
Let me extrapolate you logic: major UK facility for chemical and biological weapons research in Porton Down was close to a place where novichok poisoning happened. Your conclusion ... ?
Ironically in censorsed domains, the absence of information is a very clear indicator of truth. It happens everywhere - there are many true things you are not allowed to post on the internet.
You know the old saying, "Just because you read it on the internet, doesn't mean it's true"?
Consider the inverse:
Just because you haven't read it on the internet, doesn't mean it's not true.
Your “lots of interesting articles” were what made it a political football. Before it was picked up by the right-wing propaganda network there was one obviously flawed study and some fringe non-experts promoting it to people anxious for a cure, followed by a bunch of actual experts urging caution.
LOL everyone in China 'disappear' when they decide to not post on social media for X amount of days. Of course you never hear story that they're 'found' by posting or doing something again - despite the fact that they almost always do.
Her name was Huang Yan Ling (黄燕玲) for anyone who might be interested in learning more about the potential patient 0. The evidence is very compelling and this video does a good job at presenting it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU
The the American leadership constantly calling it by the region name you can understand why an authoritarian regime would want to control discussion of the origins by experts. The risk is of their research being weaponized by said demagogues.
Given that this clamping down came about earlier than any discussion of this matter by the American leadership, I don't think that's a good explanation for this.
*Reading this comment again, perhaps I should have phrased it more carefully - I'm not saying that any clamping down that is happening now has come earlier, but that China started clamping down on this from the very beginning.
According to the deleted research center job and notice postings in November and December it allegedly originated in Hunan among bats, and they collected it and brought it back to the Wuhan lab.
Bill Maher has an amusing monologue on that topic [1]. I don't think it is wrong to call it the Wuhan virus, and if the Chinese don't want the bad publicity associated with the virus, they should do something about these wet markets.
Hilariously it was the CCP that pushed the Wuhan virus name in the first place, instead of SARS-like which was what the doctors were calling it, so as to not appear incompetent for having repeated the mistakes of SARS and in order to distance themselves and make sure it's the local baeurucrats that take the blunt of the heat.
Then they went on claiming everything was good again, 0 new cases nationally, so the head honchos could take credit for showing leadership and whatnot. Now they're blaming new cases on foreigners, especially Africans, most of whom never even left the country since this whole ordeal started both to stoke nationalism + rally around the flag effect and so as to evade responsibility for not actually having stopped it yet.
I think this is completely missing the point. I believe it was named the Spanish flu as this is where it was first reported. That we learned later on that it originated from somewhere else is completely irrelevant. The point is that it was named after where it was believed to be first observed.
it is always curious to me that the west, and particularly the united states, refuse to believe their own actions and behavior don't affect the behavior of other countries. the united states has been ignoring this effect for years in practically every conflict for the past 70 years.
people should start taking a stronger look at their own countries. the united states' leadership doesn't even have clear propaganda or a goal. they're just making it all up as they go, which is worse in my opinion.
this toddler-level blame game is a major threat to the national security and economy in the united states.
I was under the impression that they started intentionally calling it the Wuhan virus only after the Chinese government started making propaganda that the virus came form aboard.
Other way around. People started saying it was developed by the Chinese as a weapon almost immediately, and the originator of the "Chinese propaganda" specifically called out such claims before blaming the US.
My understanding is that intentionally misnaming the virus/disease is done to mock perceived political correctness. Particularly after the WHO officially named it SARS-CoV2/COVID-19, if someone on twitter referred to the virus/disease as "Chinese coronavirus"/"Wuhan virus"/etc, someone would usually respond saying that such language was xenophobic. This happens to a few prominent people, screenshots are made, screenshots are shared around, people pile in on one side or the other, the issue quickly becomes partisan. In the end, right-leaning media/individuals/presidents coalesce and intentionally emphasize the Chinese origin as a protest against perceived oversensitivity.
Normally I'm loathe to suggest that things which happen on twitter direct wider social discourse, but I believe this is the most accurate characterization of events in this case.
Bear in mind also, China put out a video in Italy just before the outbreak encouraging Italians to hug Chinese tourists because they were suffering from "xenophobia" due to the virus:
Conservatives in general have developed into an opposition to globalism ("one world government"), a cause the left has championed since the earliest days of the COMINTERN. It's not a huge surprise that they'd emphasise the origins of the virus and nature of the local government there, especially given the recommended course of action is strong border control.
The WHO is an especially clear example of what "one world government" looks like, and there's an established history of criticism of the WHO from conservatives dating back long before COVID-19. For instance in this article:
it's alleged that the WHO changed its own definition of pandemic so swine flu would qualify, massively exaggerated its impact and deadliness vs normal flu, lied about its own change of definitions and that its chief gave a speech using swine flu to promote various hard-left ideas in e.g. this quote (but there are others from the same speech)
"Leaders in sectors with far more clout than health are making a similar point. At the April G20 summit in London, world leaders called for a fundamental re-engineering of the international systems to incorporate a moral dimension and make them responsive to genuine social values and concerns. They voiced a need to invest these systems with values like community, solidarity, equity, and social justice. While this is welcome new thinking for world leaders, this is a familiar vocabulary for public health"
I don't think it actually makes sense to use names based on where a virus was first detected, but it's also pretty common and of course diseases named after the people who first found them is even more common. But there's far more background to this than mere reaction against over-sensitivity. Respiratory viruses have a history of being exaggerated and used to push for certain political ideas.
I don't buy the escaped/released from a lab theories espoused here and on Facebook and the like. Apparently the mutations within the SARS-COV-2 found in humans compared to the bat virus are purely random and hence the thing is not or very unlikely genetically engineered. My source is a recent New Scientist article. So the bloody thing is simply a virus that affects all people, everywhere, without fear or favour. Simply ...
Pretty much all stats I've seen relating to this thing are painfully awful. Here in the UK (in England), care home deaths are not reported in the main death stat etc etc ad nauseam. Scotland reports in its own way as does NI (or not bother) compared to England and Wales. We have minimal testing anyway so who knows what is actually going on?
Anyway, one thing I am absolutely certain of is that whilst the stats in Europe and the US, CA etc are a bit wonky at best they are at least a decent attempt to have a go at reporting the situation.
I think that the CN and other results that are so way off the curve that other nations and territories are reporting are complete fiction and dangerous fiction at that.
Agreed, there's basically no current evidence to suggest it was engineered, and plenty of evidence to suggest it was zoonotic and evolved naturally. One possibility that can't be totally ruled out is that maybe this was one of many viruses collected from local animals which their virology lab had stored for current or future study, and some kind of mistake led to it escaping, perhaps through an employee unknowingly getting infected or taking home something with a contaminated surface.
edit: Rewrote everything below here to make my probability beliefs more clear.
I think it's extremely likely to be zoonotic and not spread by anyone intentionally. As for the chance it was an unintentional lab escape, it's difficult to assess what the probability of that may be.
I don't think you can just simply assume "virology lab in proximity = likely source of outbreak" without looking at a lot of other factors. Wuhan is a massive city and economic hub, a lot bigger than NYC and the surrounding area. From what I've heard, there's basically every kind of facility and institute one could imagine there.
It could be a coincidence that the lab was there due to the size, density, and economic importance of the area.
Or maybe the lab could've been established there because they knew the area was biologically diverse and close to many species of animals carrying viruses which could jump to humans, and that such animals were commonly hunted and sold for food there. If that's true, then it would be a confounding variable, and one would expect outbreaks to be more likely to occur near the lab regardless of whether they originated in the lab.
There appear to be other potentially credible pieces of evidence which may support the lab escape hypothesis, but I think the whole case needs to be analyzed very robustly and carefully, with all of the possible priors and evidence taken into account.
> I think it's probably just a coincidence that there's a virology lab there
Only because you believe it to be purely coincidental of a virology lab being next to the outbreak source location?
I am entirely up for accepting this viewpoint. But, the lack of evidence to suggest an actual source location coupled with the (CCP sourced and pushed narrative of) "overwhelming evidence" that raw bat consumption at the market started it leads me to lean towards a more logical conclusion of a simple lab escape.
Am I being illogical in thinking that a pathogen escape from a virology lab (built in 2017, btw) in the same locale is more likely than a random zoonotic transfer of raw bat consumption (a practice likely being done at the same market for a considerable more amount of time)?
I don't know about illogical, but I think your intuition that zoonotic transfer is unlikely because it hasn't happened in the recent past is not a good one.
But here is the crux of the matter. Is it possible that zoonotic transfer through consumption of bats caused this? Yes. Is it possible that zoonotic transfer via handling of bats inside the virology lab caused this? Yes.
I am not sure why it is so necessary to be so adamant about vigorously dismissing the latter as a possibility.
Most bat consumption in China happens in the South, along with the population in general. The odds of a zoonotic event occuring in Wuhan of all places and within a block of one of the few labs known to have been activity hunting for a virus just like this is too much of a coincidence.
I don't see any evidence to suggest the virus was engineered or released deliberately. why would you deliberately release a bioweapon in a densely populated part of your own country? doesn't make sense.
the lab in wuhan is not just any virology lab though; it's one of only two biosafety level 4 labs in all of china and samples of similar coronaviruses are held and studied there. it may very well be a coincidence; improbable things happen all the time in a world of ~8 billion people. it would be a pretty big one though.
There are still lots of other confounding variables there that you need to factor into the probability.
Maybe I shouldn't say overwhelmingly likely for all of those possibilities - a lab escape isn't that unlikely. But there's no evidence of that. If it's true, we indeed may never discover any evidence, but evidence is still required to actually make the claim. As it is now, it's only worthy of speculation.
edit: I edited my original post to make my beliefs more clear.
So I'm definitely not advocating the lab theory overall, and even if it did come from a lab it could have escaped rather than been deliberately released...but to answer your question, China does/did have problems with A) an aging population, B) a male heavy population, and C) Hong Kong streets full of protesters. This virus "helps" with all of those.
Bioweapons are crappy precisely because of what's happening now. A good weapon discriminates, and lets you kill exactly who you want. By that measure, a virus is about as hamfisted as you can get. Besides, why unleash a pandemic on the whole world when you can just do what China normally does and use conventional military power instead? It's cheaper and easier to get some men in boots with guns to stop a protest than it is to unleash a worldwide pandemic that might last for years or longer.
I can understand the logic to shutting down pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen if you're a party member and your political system is at stake. This type of thing (sadly) happens all around the world.
But I don't see what was to be gained. Take in mind there are a not insignificant number of people who believe that the US planned 9/11 and Pearl Harbor as well. It just seems like in all these cases (9/11, Pearl Harbor, Coronavirus) to not be in the country's interests at all.
9/11 is not a good example here. It allowed US to pass important PRISM-like PATRIOT acts without much opposition from US citizens, just in time for the rise of the Internet.
It also provided a great narrative to start Iraq war and forced them to accept USD for their oil, strengthening the economy.
So it clearly was in both government and (some) citizens interest for 9/11 to happen.
It's not easy to find any Coronavirus-related political narratives for China or any other country yet, because nothing has changed in China politics, but we will wait and see.
I agree it seems incredibly illogical and unlikely that China would deliberately do something like this. But putting on my devil's advocate hat, the "no political motive" angle isn't as strong a rebuttal as it could be. The Chinese government has a long track record of fearing problems that this sort of virus would solve, problems like:
1. A heavy dependency on economic growth for legitimacy, threatened by an impending demographic "time bomb" of the elderly:
2. Also, a long standing fear of general over-population (one child policy)
3. An absolute fear of people gathering in large groups outside to protest and organise via non-electronic means that can't be monitored
From a Machiavellian perspective a virus that leaves the productive workforce untouched, kills primarily the old/infirm, is unlikely to be reliably vaccinatable, which can be used to justify near-endless waves of house arrest, which motivates neighbours to enforce house arrest against each other and in which the only information about whether there's an active resurgence comes via state controlled media .... doesn't look too bad as a tool for controlling the populace.
Actually I have to admit, I only came to understand just how perfect such a virus profile is for a totalitarian regime whilst writing out this comment. Devil's advocacy can take thoughts in surprising directions. I suppose that's why conspiracy theories play out as they do.
I see what you're getting at, but a virus that can infect everyone and easily spread is impossible to use in any sort of directed way. A student could easily catch it from another student at school, then go home and infect their father, who may be an older high-ranking CCP official, for example. It does way more than discourage large gatherings, kills pretty indiscriminately (beyond some factors like age and history of smoking), and of course is a massive hit to the economy and society as a whole. And it'd also be very likely to spread to the rest of the world.
It'd be like trying to deal with overpopulation by setting a computer program to randomly select 20 of your own population centers to nuke, then launching nukes. Then a week later choosing other random cities around the world to nuke. Plus, it'd probably be discovered eventually, and would obviously be the most severe pre-emptive act of war ever known. It would inevitably cause WWIII, leading to much more death and chaos. It's a completely illogical and self-destructive strategy.
Now, if it were a virus that, say, couldn't infect those with a gene found in all Han Chinese people, and which isn't found in any other groups, that would be worthy of some investigation. Or only infected Uyghurs.
I know this is just playing Devil's advocate, but I think the odds are so low as to essentially be zero, unless the CCP has some sort of bizarre motivation that's extremely distant from nearly everyone else's motivation (like trying to end the world and make humans extinct).
Kills pretty indiscriminately? It is far more targeted at the elderly than other diseases I know of. Even the flu harms children and this one doesn't at all. Age and general weakness is by far the strongest signal that someone may die of it.
The hit is massive but it's a relative hit - China probably ends up doing better than the rest of the world because it didn't really lock down everywhere, primarily just Wuhan. And bear in mind, China's government has a long history of doing extreme things that cripple its own economy. That's why places like South Korea and Taiwan were so far ahead (and still are, China's still a poor country). Communism isn't famous for being good for GDP, after all.
Yes, there's a risk of CCP officials getting it of course. The whole 'escape from the lab' theory doesn't suggest it would have escaped at the right time or in the right way. A truly evil government would wait until there was enough vaccine for officials and other important people but not enough for everyone.
I guess any virus theory would assume it must spread all over the world. Given it's not very deadly that doesn't seem like a big deal if the goal is an excuse to establish lockdowns whenever the government requires one for its own stability. Just announce a sudden uptick in cases (a claim which can only come from official stats) and off you go.
I think the biggest reason why the theory doesn't work is that eventually it'd become suspicious because everyone would have had it, and the co-incidence of sudden outbreak at times of civil unrest might become too obvious for everyone. Unless of course the virus is used as an excuse to control mass gatherings permanently.
> why would you deliberately release a bioweapon in a densely populated part of your own country?
Purely as a thought experiment, China's death rate and infection rate seems orders of magnitude less per capita compared to Western countries so maybe it is the perfect bioweapon for the task, minimal self casualties enough for deniability but the other side really takes a beating..
Again this is just a thought experiment and not a serious speculation :)
Dr Shi Zhengli was working on bat Coronavirus research in the US and we closed the program down in the US in 2014 for being too dangerous. She returned to China to continue her research in Wuhan.
She was researching bat Corona viruses? The outbreak started at a market on the doorstep of her lab? Her name is on several papers on bat Corona virus.
Just pointing out that Wuhan was studying viruses exactly like the one tearing through the world right now, lol.
>Just pointing out that Wuhan was studying viruses exactly like the one tearing through the world right now, lol.
Yes, and this is important, but this is also already publicly known. It's not providing any new or interesting information. There're still a lot of other variables and factors to take into account here. Statistics aren't so simple.
For example, Wuhan is a huge city, larger than NYC, and an important economic hub. The area has a very high number of people and is population-dense. Tons of scientific institutions are there, as one would generally expect of such a city. So by that alone, the prior for the lab being there could be pretty high.
Also, maybe the lab was created there and bats were studied there in the first place because the general area was known to already have virus-carrying animals like bats? Perhaps even created there because they considered it very likely the particular bats in that particular area could potentially carry human-transferable viruses? And perhaps also because they knew lots of animals in the area, including bats, were regularly hunted and sold for food, further increasing the likelihood that human-infecting viruses may be found in that area?
If that's true, one would expect outbreaks to be more likely to occur in that area whether or not the lab was involved. It'd be reversing cause and effect - maybe a lab is there because the area is a virus hotzone, rather than the area being a virus hotzone because a lab is there. I saw some other evidence saying coronavirus-carrying bats studied at the lab were taken from elsewhere in China, which could alter this assessment, so one would need to look at all of that more thoroughly, but the point is this isn't such a simple association to make.
A lab escape is totally plausible and wouldn't be shocking, but it needs strong arguments, analysis, and evidence.
I see you making a lot of comments in this thread and I think you make some good points. I’m curious, could you think of an example of “strong evidence” that would support the theory that it was accidentally released from a lab?
The lab needs to admit there was an accident, or an independent group of inspectors need to visit the lab to collect samples, review evidence, and make such a judgement.
Neither of these are actually going to happen. The conspiracy nuts probably prefer it that way.
It's very hard to prove or disprove, and probably even harder with a totalitarian regime, so it's likely just going to be conspiracy theory fodder for years or decades. You might need a whistleblower, leaked/stolen/hacked documents, or a surreptitiously recorded conversation.
Another commenter mentioned a third party inspecting the lab, though if the lab really were the source I think they'd probably be able to fully cover that up before any inspection took place.
I mean, even if they didn't cover it up but are responsible, an inspection may still find no evidence of it (samples or animals containing a 100% or near-100% match of the virus could add some additional evidence, but also isn't proof by itself).
Hell, maybe their leaders don't even know if their lab was responsible or not. If it did happen, maybe it was a fuckup they were totally unaware of and still have no way of tracing retroactively. In such a scenario, maybe an employee made a mistake, got infected, but became a permanently asymptomatic carrier. Then they could've spread it to someone while out on a walk, or in some other way that would be really hard to reliably go back and track.
I will say, from everything I've seen, Chinese citizens are generally also quite concerned and angry about this whole situation. They've actually forced the government to apologize and backtrack on things quite a bit. If there's a highly convincing and credible leak that the virus escaped from the lab mistakenly, and they knew about it and covered it up, I think there would be outrage and possibly massive protests. Yes, I really think they'd be so outraged that huge numbers of them may do this even with an authoritarian regime that's infamous for killing protestors en masse.
Chinese citizens are pretty much no different from anyone else. They would absolutely want to know if their government is covering up that one of their labs accidentally unleashed the pandemic of the century. They're not necessarily going to buy all the propaganda about it if there's serious, clear evidence that this happened. But as it is now, there's no evidence, so they, and us, have no reason to be outraged about this particular accusation. It's something that should be investigated, but even if "unfounded accusations like these are dangerous" sounds like the words of a worried Chinese government censor, it's also true in this case.
No one is being persecuted. It is correct to suspect.
In a murder investigation the police start with those closest related to the victim. If money is missing from a bank vault you start your investigation looking at all those who had access.
When a pandemic starts outside of a lab studying the same kind of virus tearing through the world you start with the lab.
We will likely never know for sure, but it is absolutely reasonable to suspect.
Too put it even more simply, if most most of the world is prepared to do contact tracing on an average person for having been anywhere near the virus, then the lab should not be above due diligence.
The prevailing theory is more or less ‘someone touched a bat’. Like who? Staff at a lab messing with bats?
You're accusing a specific person of involvement in a major pandemic with evidence you admit is flimsy at best, with little to no hope of ever confirming.
No I’m not accusing a specific person, I was pointing out that the US actually funded this research here domestically and the doctor went to Wuhan to continue her research when we closed the program as proof bat Corona virus was being studied there.
We will never be allowed by totalitarian China to collect evidence, so all we have is suspicion. Very justified suspicion.
The flood of attacks came with allegations that the new coronavirus had escaped from her laboratory, which is in the same city, Wuhan, where the outbreak happened.
As the attacks increased, Shi felt forced to respond. On Sunday afternoon she sent a message to all her friends on the social media site WeChat: “I swear with my life, [the virus] has nothing to do with the lab.”
That is true, but there are eight other more populous cities in China.Source: Wikipedia
2) "maybe the lab was created there and bats were studied there in the first place because the general area was known to already have virus-carrying animals like bats"
Not really, the southern provinces of China are much more prone to these outbreaks. Shi Zenghli herself said "“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses.
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...
3) "maybe the lab was created there and bats were studied there in the first place because the general area was known to already have virus-carrying animals like bats?!"
I'm afraid not. The bats used in her experiences were mainly from Yunnan province, over 1000kms away from Wuhan (check the same source).
4) "A lab escape is totally plausible and wouldn't be shocking, but it needs strong arguments, analysis, and evidence."Just read the papers authored by Shi Zenghli, they are all available online. Start at this one:
Pre-print [ https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.22.914952v1 ]:
"We then found a short RdRp region from a bat coronavirus termed BatCoV RaTG13 which we previously detected in Rhinolophus affinis from Yunnan Province showed high sequence identity to nCoV-2019. We did full-length sequencing to this RNA sample. Simplot analysis showed that nCoV-2019 was highly similar throughout the genome to RaTG13 (Fig. 1c), with 96.2% overall genome sequence identity."
Then, pay a visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology website:
"(...) is equipped with a general office, scientific research planning office, organization & personnel department, finance department, graduate student office , with five functional management departments, logistics support center, network information center, public technical service center (including analysis and testing center, experimental animal center, BSL -3 laboratory, isotope room, etc.), Virologica Sinica (English version), Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Virology and other support departments."
SARS-CoV-2 very likely had a laboratorial origin, not from cell cultures, but from the interaction between bats and their lab animal technicians. Considering how easily viruses mutate and recombine to acquire new genes, the RaTG13 coronavirus is very plausibly the origin of SARS-CoV-2, for instance in one or several of these circumstances:
a) Transmission chains in research animal facilities involving different species animals, including - but not necessarily restricted to - bats;
b) Bidirectional transmission chains between lab animals and their handlers;
c) Transmission of the RaTG13 coronavirus from a lab animal to a susceptible handler, with subsequent mutation and transmission chains within humans.
And this was certainly what Wuhan virologist Shi Zheng-Li, China's foremost coronavirus expert, was thinking when she candidly aknowledged to Scientific American's Jane Qiu, ' "If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?” '.
5) "You're accusing a specific person of involvement in a major pandemic with evidence you admit is flimsy at best"
Actually, this possibility was first raised by two Chinese authors, in February 2020, who uploaded an articl...
It's not at all a coincidence that there's a lab there. George W. Bush started an anti-pandemic project called PREDICT whose purpose was to collect specimens from bats and other mammals to identify ones that could transfer from bats to humans[1]. They trained and supported the lab in Wuhan. To me if you're looking for zoonotic transfer, one of the most likely places to look is someplace that's actively out there collecting viruses that are zoonotically transferrable.
I still think the program would have been worthwhile even if it did leak the coronavirus. If China thinks the same, I can see why they would try to prevent a backlash against studying viruses.
Let's dig into this a bit more though. The WIV's location on Google Maps apparently changed after the incident [1]. I don't know if it was a legitimate correction or what, but for the sake of argument let's suppose that the old location was correct. Then the lab is 8.6 miles from the wet market, or ~14 km.
It looks like the population density in that area is around 10,000 people per km^2, so there are around 400k people in a 14km radius, or about 1/3,000 of China's population.
If we assume
P(virus from WIV) = 0.01
P(outbreak in 14km radius | virus from WIV) = 1
P(outbreak in 14km radius | virus not from WIV) = 1/3,000
Then Bayes' rule gives P(virus from WIV | outbreak in 14km radius) ~= 97%. Even if we reduce our prior to 0.001 (0.1%), the result is still ~75%.
So while I have no idea if the virus was a random mutation or what, I strongly suspect that it's somehow connected to the WIV.
You can apply the same logic to a specific license plate number seen near a murder meaning that the car's owner was almost surely the murderer. That isn't a high enough standard of evidence as any specific event is unlikely in hindsight.
A pandemic was likely to start somewhere densely populated and first be detected in a city centre. Somewhere densely populated was likely to have a specialised biological research lab. That it was BSL4 instead of BSL3 is evidence but it isn't particularly compelling.
More to the point; it doesn't really make much of a difference whether it came from a Chinese lab or not. Horrible pandemics have happened before and will happen again.
In the murder scenario, we would have something like
P(individual is guilty) = 1 / 7 billion
P(individual's car on same block | individual is guilty) = 1
P(individual's car on same block | individual is innocent) = 50 / 7 billion
P(individual is guilty | individual's car on same block) = 1 / 50 (from Bayes' rule)
You might disagree with the priors, but I'm pretty sure the argument is sound.
The soundness of the argument isn't the issue. The problem is the world model where P(Virus starts in Wuhan) = 1.
That probability is only 1 in hindsight, where the probability of everything is 1 because it has already happened. In foresight the probability was not 1. And whatever city the virus started in was going to have a BSL-2+ facility studying infectious diseases. I'm probably sitting within 2-4km of a BSL-3 facility studying infectious diseases as I type this, because I am in a city.
The fast that WIV is BSL-4 is significant, but it isn't going to get you to 97%. Even 75% is high. Particularly if WIV is located where it is because there are good local sources of coronaviruses to study.
I don't quite follow your point. My model assumed implicit knowledge that the virus originated somewhere in China, but not in Wuhan. Maybe I should have made that more explicit.
We could change the model to not have any implicit assumption about location. Then instead of dividing by the population of China, we'd divide by the world population. The result should be the same, assuming we appropriately adjust our prior probability P(virus from WIV) to account for the fact that there are more BSL-4 facilities worldwide than in China.
Well, I'm not qualified to explain this so I'm probably wrong in the detail, but a sketch of the thinking:
P(Came from WIV|Global Epidemic starts in Wuhan) ~= 97%
However, P(Started Near a BSL Rated facility|Global Epidemic) is also high (not going to estimate it).
But you have assumed that P(Global Epidemic starts in Wuhan) = 1; which is not true. P(Global Epidemic starts in Wuhan) is probably quite low and they got unlucky because it had to start somewhere. In this context, that assumption is tantamount to flipping a coin then saying "P(Heads) = 1". It isn't, P(Head) = 0.5 but it does happen sometimes.
If we assume P(Global Epidemic starts in Wuhan) = 1 (because it did happen) then P(Came from WIV) is either 0 or 1, because it either did or didn't happen in the same way that the virus started in Wuhan.
The best I can come up with is that probability is very sensitive to what you assume is happening to generate results. In this case, you're assuming that the WIV in particular is important which I suspect links the pandemic implicitly to Wuhan. That isn't a math error, but it is not going to give you a useful result.
This isn't an error of logic so much as an error in scenario construction - it is ignoring possibility that the virus appeared near a random BSL rated facility, which is probably very high since a new virus would likely be detected first in dense urban centers where that sort of infrastructure tends to be. If the virus is likely to appear near a BSL facility, then the fact it appeared near a specific BSL facility shouldn't be leading you to the sort of answer you got.
maybe someone can correct me, but AFAIK, BSL4 is required for handling SARS-related coronavirus samples, at least in the US. this would make the distinction between BSL3 and BSL4 pretty significant. while there probably are BSL3 labs in most major cities in the world, there are only two BSL4 facilities in china and WIV is one of them.
Your prior is also exactly what you're trying to calculate, though. I don't think you can just try different numbers picked from a hat for that value.
Also, it isn't accounting for lots of other highly relevant, potentially confounding variables.
And those assumptions make no sense to me at all. Can you write them out much more explicitly?
I think it's totally plausible it was a lab escape, but this analysis seems extremely oversimplified and naive, and I'd even say a misuse and abuse of Bayes' theorem. A full Bayesian analysis is a good idea, though. I'd like to see a much more robust and detailed one from someone.
> Your prior is also exactly what you're trying to calculate, though.
Maybe I should have been more explicit, but they're not the same. The prior here is the probability that the virus originated from WIV, knowing only that the virus originated in China, and not accounting for the location of the outbreak. I'm trying to calculate an adjusted probability given the outbreak location.
> I don't think you can just try different numbers picked from a hat for that value.
My goal was not to convince anyone that a prior of 1% or 0.1% is appropriate, but rather to suggest a framework in which people can insert their own priors.
And sure, it's a simplified analysis, but it's better than just asserting whatever our intuitions say about coincidences.
> The prior here is the probability that the virus originated from WIV, knowing only that the virus originated in China, and not accounting for the location of the outbreak.
Makes more sense, but as you say, there's really no way of knowing what number is appropriate there. I'm not a statistics expert, but I'd say it's inextricably tied up with what you're trying to calculate the probability of in the first place. The whole point is we don't have a prior for WIV being likely to have a virus escape the lab, or a coronavirus, or this specific virus.
I think you'd need to break it down into priors like: probability any Chinese lab has any virus escape, probability this particular lab has any virus escape, probably this particular lab had any virus escape around this time frame, probability this particular lab had a sample of SARS-CoV-2, and a lot more things.
>And sure, it's a simplified analysis, but it's better than just asserting whatever our intuitions say about coincidences.
It certainly can be much better in general, and I'm a huge fan of Bayesianism, but it can also sometimes provide a very misleading impression to others. I'm somewhat tempted to try to do a deep dive into a Bayesian analysis of this, but I'm not really qualified, and it would be a ton of work, and there would be some priors that would be nearly impossible to know (number and density of animals of certain species in the area, what pathogens they may have, what animals and viruses the lab may have collected or been interested in collecting, what and how many animals are hunted in the area, what and how many hunted animals are sold at local wet markets, how such animals are handled or prepared, etc.)
I think to assess this with any serious confidence, we're probably going to need something like leaked/stolen documents or a whistleblower.
Now this is an interesting abuse of Bayes' theorem, because there's an extremely similar conspiracy theory going around in China of this form: it's known that CIA agents specifically visited Wuhan before the virus broke out, and the CIA claims to have known about this disease before anybody in China did. So...
P(virus from CIA) = 0.01
P(outbreak in 14km radius | virus from CIA) = 1
P(outbreak in 14km radius | virus not from CIA) = 1/3,000
Then Bayes' rule gives P(virus from CIA | outbreak in 14km radius) ~= 97%.
But wait a second! How can there both be a 97% chance that the CIA did it, and a 97% chance that WIV made it? The reason is that both of these calculations are total bullshit.
What do you mean by P(virus from CIA)? Do you mean the probability that the CIA planted the virus in the WIV? If so, then
> How can there both be a 97% chance that the CIA did it, and a 97% chance that WIV made it?
There's no contradiction there. If the CIA planted the virus in the WIV, then it's simultaneously true that the CIA planted the virus and that the WIV was the source of the outbreak.
- there's a 97% chance the CIA planted it in the seafood market
- there's a 97% chance the CIA planted it in the WIV
- there's a 97% chance the WIV made it
Now it's obvious that something is going wrong here. There is no conceivable way these probability assignments can make sense. But your math was formally correct! What a mystery.
I threw out 1% as a seemingly reasonable prior probability that the outbreak came from the WIV, given an implicit assumption that the virus originated in China. Obviously I didn't put much thought into the exact number, but 1% seems within the realm of reason to me, given that the WIV is the only BSL-4 facility in China.
It doesn't make sense to apply the same prior to "the CIA planted COVID-19 in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market", because there are many such markets in China, and only one BSL-4 facility. You might think 1% is a reasonable prior for "the CIA planted COVID-19 in some market in China", but then it wouldn't make sense to adjust the probability based on the outbreak location as I did.
What you're doing is like starting with a prior probability of 10% that a random individual lives in Maui, and 10% that a random individual lives in Kawaii. Then you learn that an individual lives in Hawaii, and you try to adjust both probabilities based on Hawaii's population in relation to the world population. Bayes' theorem gives ~99.8% each for P(Maui | Hawii) and P(Kawaii | Hawaii). The results are obviously impossible, but the argument wasn't structurally wrong, you just started with bad priors. You should have started with P(Kawaii) ~= 0.001%, giving P(Kawaii | Hawaii) ~= 5%, which is correct.
> It doesn't make sense to apply the same prior to "the CIA planted COVID-19 in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market", because there are many such markets in China, and only one BSL-4 facility.
I didn't make an error. The way the conspiracy theory goes in China is that the Military World Games [0] were held in Wuhan just before the outbreak. In other words, they knew the US military was in Wuhan specifically (in fact, right next to the seafood market), just like you know that WIV is in Wuhan specifically. The two conspiracy theories really are equally credible, by which I mean they're both bullshit.
The reason is because of this assumption you made:
P(my favorite conspiracy theory) = 0.01
P(outbreak in 14km radius | my favorite conspiracy theory is false) = 1/3,000
Because 1/3000 is so much lower than 1/100, you're essentially assuming from the start that your favorite conspiracy theory (insert "WIV" or "CIA" or whatever else here) is a much better explanation than all other possible explanations combined, because all of them combined can only total up to a likelihood of 1/3000. In other words, you rigged the game to support your conspiracy theory from the start. I was trying to point out how similar rigging can be used to justify any conspiracy theory.
Yes, I assumed that if the virus is not from the WIV, then all areas of China (weighted by population) would be equiprobable candidates for the outbreak location. Of course this is an imperfect model, but I think it's a reasonable one.
This alternate conspiracy seems way more farfetched to me (why would US intelligence need such any such event to get an agent into China?), but if someone believed that it should be given a non-negligible prior, then they should revise my assumption that
> P(outbreak in 14km radius | virus not from WIV) = 1/3,000
I.e. their revised value should be at least as large as their prior for the alternate conspiracy.
What part of the argument are you disputing exactly? Are you claiming that applying Bayes' theorem in this way is somehow invalid, or are you just taking issue with the assumption quoted above?
Thanks for using Bayes theorem. Although it does not provide evidence, it should guide us to where we should look for evidence.
I am also very surprised at people throwing probabilistic equivalence between foreign-agent conspiracy, and an accident in a lab. It seems that the latter is so much more probable.
The Wuhan Center for Disease Control, which routinely sent viral samples to WIV, is only 300 meters from the wet market. The 300 meter radius circle surrounding the Wuhan Center for Disease Control is 0.33 square miles. China is 3,705,009 square miles. The chances of this happening so close to the Wuhan Center for Disease Control is therefore 1 in 11.2 million.
This idea of the mutations being 'random' is pretty meaningless. A real question is whether or not something is intentionally engineered to pass these kinds of 'randomness' tests.
Just because it's not engineered doesn't mean it didn't come from a lab. It could be a natural virus that was collected and escaped. The original SARS escaped no less than 3 times from chinese labs following the outbreak.
Furthermore, gain-of-function research doesn't have to be by genetic engineering. The controversial experiment of a few years back which I vaguely remember was more like natural selection.
It could be lots of things. The focus on a possible escape from containment as the source seems odd given that - among other more likely causes - bat guano is also widely used as fertilizer, and bats, like humans, shed coronaviruses in their feces. Except that where we do so only occasionally and only when actively infected, bats' generally higher viral load and the high intraspecific transmissibility of a lot of these viruses means they do it much more frequently.
Except this started in the heart of a city the size of New York, near a market not known to have sold bats, within half a kilometer of a lab known to have been doing research collecting bats from neighboring provinces near villages with people confirmed contracted SARS like viruses from bats per their own state media documentary.
No one knows where this started. We know where the first confirmed case was reported, but that's not the same thing.
I carry no brief for the CCP. But I do find it difficult to say nothing in the face of what looks like a struggle among a variety of factions, none openly declared, to establish a narrative of responsibility for a world-altering catastrophe, with no closer or more consistent reference to facts of any kind than is judged useful in support of whatever claim is being pushed at the moment - and, most notably, with the only reference to potentially contradictory facts being to claim either that they're unfounded, or presented with ulterior intent, or both.
Last time I saw something play out that looked like this, it followed the World Trade Center attack and resulted in the Iraq war. That was a catastrophe from both a humanitarian perspective and one concerned with enhancing the geopolitical power of the US - but it was, at least, relatively minor in both respects. This one, if it plays out similarly, seems likely to be much worse.
And aside from all of that, what the hell, is your time of no value? If you're going to peddle what may very well prove to be war propaganda, at least you should have the self-respect to refuse to do it for free.
We absolutely do know where it started. Prehaps not precisely in physical space but that 13 of the first 41 cases had no connection to the seafood market is very strong evidence that whatever the source may be, it was socially and physically proximate to the market just like the lab but not likely the market itself.
To compare this to Iraq is absolutely preposterous and fallacious. The two have absolutely nothing in common and nobody here is suggesting we invade China over it but sure as hell they ought to be held accountable.
Do you not think people come from out of town, sometimes from quite far out of town, to sell food at a city market? That's how they work here in Baltimore, and anyone who's ever been to Lexington Market, or even seen a picture of what the crowds are like there (1), can have no trouble imagining how effective a transmission vector it would be for any contagious pathogen hitching a ride in an out-of-town vendor there. Why should things work differently in Wuhan?
"Held accountable" is a rhetorical phrase that was much used then, too. (2) So it's an interesting thing to find in an argument that this situation and that one are totally unalike.
This market is not known to have sold bats and by all accounts it did not. Consuming bats is a southern thing not a central thing.
Your theory also doesn't along with the evidence, that the first known cases had a significant population with no known connection to the market, 27 with connection, 14 without; and that other than the market there are no other obvious connections. If it were just some hawker you'd expect a much stronger connection to the market. And over a longer period.
I had a theory around guano used for fertilizer acting as a fomite, but found some research an hour ago that suggests SARS doesn't remain viable via that route, so SARS-CoV-2 probably doesn't either.
Do we know that bats are the only (or only likely) nonhuman host? Was there a significant population of cases with a known connection to the lab?
Pangolins Malasia I think are the next closest source genetically. China imports from there as well as Africa for TCM so but the known strains from bats are still match much much better.
You have previous known infections in the villagers who interact with bats and then travel to say the Wuhan live market. We study these viruses because we know they infect humans. The Spanish flu was a bird flu. There were no biosafety level 5 labs back then. We get viruses from other animals all the time.
Also the only lab that handles this stuff in Wuhan is less than a couple hundred meters from the wet market that Chinese authorities claimed was the epicenter.
I'd believe this is a story of grave incompetence, and brazen managerial failure at a biolab. The intern gets bled on, bitten, or just breathed on by the test bat, gets a bit sick but comes into work anyway. After it seems to pass, she heads down to the market on the way home, and spreads the disease to one of the live animals, including humans, in the vicinity.
Boom, outbreak.
Could be as simple as that, with it being a pretty tenacious virus.
The proven conspiracy follows, when authorities up to the top sought to cover up this embarrassment, then to make sure that the damage was global so that they wouldn't be at a relative disadvantage, and could maybe start claiming that it came from somewhere else (as they are now doing).
Can you find your source for the market being a couple hundred meters away? This tweet has a map showing it's twenty miles away, but the source is the Daily Mail:
Why would genetic engineering (or lack there of) be a necessary sign here? The Wuhan lab regularly collected and studied various naturally occurring coronaviruses from all over China. It is perfectly possible that a collected sample from nature might have been leaked by accident.
Dr Shi Zhengli was working on bat Coronavirus research in the US and we closed the program down in the US in 2014 for being too dangerous. She returned to China to continue her research in Wuhan.
It is neither fiction, nor dangerous to speculate that this outbreak started at the Wuhan lab.
It may not have been engineered.
However, the bats are brought to Wuhan lab from hundreds of miles away to be studied. It is also very possible that a bat carrying the natural virus being studied at the lab escapes or infected a person.
Natrualy occuring viruses escape from labs all the time, particularly in China. Infact SARS is known to have escaped twice in Beijing.
That the virus originated zoonotically does not precude a lab accident + leak theory of origin in fact we know that one of the labs actively experimenting on bats there was within half a kilometer of the market. You combine that with a significant fraction of the first known hospitalized cases having no direct connection to the market it should be obvious that the source is unlikely to have been the market itself but rather something close to it with the market just acting as a regional landmark or amplifier.
It's like you walk past a bunch of kids playing with fireworks by the trail and an hour later the forest is on fire having started in the same area as you saw the kids. You obviously can't know for sure it was them without more evidence, it could have been a cigarette butt from a carless smoker, but you be a fool to think it that just because there was no accelleant involved that it couldn't have been the kids.
One of the researchers at that lab was also effectively dissapeared. I don't believe the conspiracy crowd saying this was some kind of weapon, but there's reasonable evidence to suggest that this is a case of embarrassing government incompetence (which the CCP loaths) followed by attempts to cover up said incompetence while a solution was persued.
I simply stated a fact which is easily verifiable by checking news from its government, so why the downvotes, I hope it's not that we have CCP watchers here at HN.
We are getting a small influx of CCP troll commenters in these comments now, so I would not be surprised if a few CCP (or CCP sympathetic) accounts have enough karma to downvote.
This is very valid clarification on what I will just name "lab theories". There is a huge differentiation in: 'purposely bio-engineered and intentionally-released' theories, vs. 'someone collected bats in the wild for research, brought them to the Wuhan lab, and there was an accidental pathogen escape during the research.'
The former is entirely dramatic, while the latter is neither dramatic, unreasonable, illogical, or "conspiracy".
Since that post was made, there has been widespread reporting that US intelligence agencies are quite sure that China's numbers regarding the infection have been fabricated and underreported by quite a large amount. [0]
Keep in mind that the Chinese government doesn't have to be pursuing a centralized disinformation campaign for it to occur. It would appear that at least a decent amount of the misinformation is occurring because local officials are covering up the extent of the damage from the party for fear of retaliation. In this case, its entirely plausible for large-scale cover-up to be occuring in China, without the national CCP driving it or even being aware of the extent that its occuring.
1. I'm well aware of that. Is that the only new evidence that's come to light since the piece I linked to though? Would have expected something more solid than unnamed sources from inside national security (see: big hack)
2. I'll grant that that's possibility in the exact same sense in which I grant the centralized cover-up theory to be a possibility, and in which I grant both the lab creation and the lab accident origin theories to be possibilities. But I'm not interested in possibilities. What I'm interested in is positive evidence supportive of this or that theory.
> 1. I'm well aware of that. Is that the only new evidence that's come to light since the piece I linked to though? Would have expected something more solid than unnamed sources from inside national security (see: big hack)
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of stories produced by national security forces, but there are far more reasons to be skeptical of stories being produced by the CCP. If it's a question of who to believe, I don't know why one would pick the Chinese government.
> 2. I'll grant that that's possibility in the exact same sense in which I grant the centralized cover-up theory to be a possibility, and in which I grant both the lab creation and the lab accident origin theories to be possibilities. But I'm not interested in possibilities. What I'm interested in is positive evidence supportive of this or that theory.
I just gave you positive evidence, and you dismissed it as propaganda. CIA sources are saying that is exactly what is happening on the ground. But if you need more, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence coming from non-intelligence sources. About a month ago on the "This Week in Virology" podcast, one of the visiting virologists who is an expert on coronaviruses said that China had come out and said they won't be conducting any widespread serology testing, which would be necessary for determining how widespread the outbreak got. He said the only reason for not doing this is if you didn't want to know the answer. The implication being that China knows its much worse than has been reported and they don't want the world or their own people to know, as it challenges the narrative of a competent response. And secondly, its been widely reported that China is not including asymptomatic patients in their infection counts, which is absurd, given that we now know they make up anywhere from 20-50% of infections, and are capable of spreading the disease. Again, the only reason for this is if you want to make it seem like there are fewer infections than there actually are.
We know that the lab was adding functionality to bat coronaviruses, making them able to infect human cells. This can be done without gene editing technology. We've been doing that in the opposite direction for decades, passing viruses through non-human cells in order to make weakened ones for live-virus vaccines. To make a virus worse for humans, simply pass it through human cells. This is what the lab was doing.
It's extremely hazardous research. The USA banned it.
If you do that and then you have a lab accident, your level of culpability is at neither extreme. You didn't gene-edit the virus and release it on purpose. You didn't just get infected while studying bats.
While it's true that Chinese scientists were investigating SARS, the above assertion is not supported by the evidence provided.
My best guess of where the confusion came from was the insertion of a temporary mammalian plasmid into HeLa cells in order to produce bat ACE2 for study.
While this could potentially be viewed as adding functionality to human cells in order to make them susceptible to bat coronaviruses, the above assertion doesn't follow. (and unfortunately we have no ability to genome-edit humans)
There are no sources. I've personally looked into tens of claims about people being "disappeared" in China over the past few years, and literally every time the only evidence has been "they haven't tweeted for 12 hours". The person reappears soon after, but by that point the lie's damage is done, and nobody ever hears the correction.
It comes from the fact there's a Wuhan Center for Disease Control that's across the river from the Institute for Virology and much closer to the wet market. Which is mentioned in the fine Daily Mail article, which gets a whole lot of basic facts correct, or nearly so (it differs in the distance it claims between the Center and the wet market, and the number of days that it took for the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center to be closed by the Chinese Communist Party for "rectification" after they broke the embargo on publishing genome sequences; would that any Western researchers show as much courage as those did).
And that Wuhan CDC has BSL-3 labs, although the Daily Mail passes on the entirely plausible rumor that bat coronavirus research was being done at both locations in BSL-2 labs. Lots of scientists all over the world do research in labs that aren't really at the level that should be used for what they're doing, the higher the level, the more obnoxious and difficult it is to do anything. A security/convenience trade-off we should be all to familiar with.
The theory of lab involvement doesn't seem particularly likely, no. But government censorship makes it appear much more likely, in my mind.
It's unlikely that we'll ever really know. RNA sequences don't come with the signatures of their authors.
But, every time you see someone saying that the lab theory has been "debunked", you should immediately think fake news. There is no way to rule this theory out--rather, it's balance of probabilities.
Bloody hell. The responses to my post are not the best and this is an example from the first one:
"That the virus originated zoonotically does not precude a lab accident + leak theory of origin"
Really? A lab spends some time analysing whether a virus is a natural progression from another virus via natural selection instead of deliberate manipulation. They write it up etc. At least spell "preclude" correctly in a rebuttal.
Certainly China would not be the only place misreporting results. For example note the strange Japanese effect where confirmed cases suddenly started increasing after the olympics were cancelled (another reason could be that everyone who tested positive had to go to hospital and so there were incentives not to test people to save hospital space).
Alternatively they could be accurately reporting results but just systematically not testing infected people for one reason or another.
It’s not clear to me that they are totally wrong though they seem quite unbelievable. I think I don’t want to think about that question as I’m not sure the answer would be much use to me.
One thing that is certain is that we can expect to see a lot of different people trying to set/change the narrative of how this outbreak happened. Any state that instituted a large lockdown will want people to believe that it was worth it and that it was necessary. One might ask why there isn’t much talk of Taiwan and Hong Kong where the outbreak was controlled without oppressive lockdowns (before cases from external arrivals became a big problem). One reason could be Chinese politics about those places.
In the US it seems plausible that being able to rewrite the history of the outbreak in the first few months of the year will be very important to Trump’s re-election. It also seems plausible that it won’t matter that much; his approval ratings are basically their highest ever.
I think some leaders will also want to move the blame away from themselves. A lab-escape story would be very useful to those people as it gives some people to directly blame (whoever let it out of the lab), rather than blaming the failures of leadership during a natural disaster.
> I don't buy the escaped/released from a lab theories espoused here and on Facebook and the like. Apparently the mutations within the SARS-COV-2 found in humans compared to the bat virus are purely random and hence the thing is not or very unlikely genetically engineered.
Only the conspiracy theorists claim it was an "engineered bio-weapon". The most likely explanation is that it just escaped involuntarily from the lab. Why from the lab, and not the wet market?
- that lab was specifically researching coronavirii in bats
- there are reports researchers there got splashed with blood and fecies of bats [0]
- the researcher in question (Huang Yan Lin), the likely patient zero, disappeared without a trace, both physically and online [0]
- the horseshoe bats that most likely hosted the virus weren't even sold on the wuhan wet market, according to several eye witnesses
- there are no known horseshoe bat colonies in a 900km diameter around wuhan
- the lab is just 280 meters away from the wet market, so the market was a very convenient scape goat
And why was COVID-19 not engineered? Simple, it is not necessary to explain the pandemic potential. All of this is not new and there were warnings about exactly this happening:
- it was long known that horseshoe bats were a dangerous reservoir of SARS-CoV like virii [1]
- there were US simulations held on how to respond to a respiratory virus with chinese origin in 2019 [2]
- there were WHO warnings on how respiratory RNA virii are prime candidates for the next pandemic [3]
I've not been able to find that if we've technology to edit RNA.
I see that DNA changes are possible through CRISPR.
But it seems changing RNA could be possible if you've extracted similar virus from some animal then you replicated virus in a culture, after that you wait for the virus to mutate on its own or create condition to increase mutation rate for example radiation etc...
So the biological footprint being similar to the one which exists in nature doesn't really remove the possibility that the virus might be man made.
My favorite theory is that the Wuhan virus lab created the virus and used bats in experiments. One bat escaped and infected other bats that eventually ended up on the wet market in Wuhan. Edit: a more plausible theory is that one researcher got bitten by an infected bat and chose to hide this fact.
> By all accounts the jump to humans appears to have been natrual.
Is it natural if you put a bat coronavirus and a pangolin coronavirus in a petri dish? Because the receptor proteins are similar to a pangolin coronavirus based on the above study.
It’s also “natural” to take your mare over to the prize stallion to get impregnated. Humans can control all the conditions around the “natural” process.
As a Chinese living in US. Please be mindful that a lot of people do not distinguish China the government, and the Chinese people, living in or outside of China mainland.
This type of news, are of course worth discussion.
But meanwhile, please refrain from politicizing beyond the facts. Think about not letting what a few political figures have started, i.e., politicizing the event without considering the impact, into actual hate crimes targeted at minority groups.
We’re in a worldwide lockdown because of rhetoric from the CCP and Chinese surrogates that calls any criticism or discussion of their role in this racism or white supremacy.
We’ve had 20k American deaths so far, I think we get to discuss this.
Foreigners all over the world are likely to be targeted as long as they stand out. For instance, in China, Africans are being kicked out of their homes and forced to sleep on the street (because no hotel/apartment will accept them), countless stores, including a McDonald’s restaurant, are refusing to serve foreigners (blacks are in particular targeted).
Please be mindful that it’s not just Chinese or Asians being targeted, and that the racism foreigners are experiencing in China right now is far worse than what the Chinese are experiencing elsewhere.
If we're to shift the conversation towards hate crimes targeted at minority groups, I think it's fair to consider hate crimes perpetrated by government mentioned in the article, crimes which are perpetrated for much the same reasons as the suppression of coronavirus research.
Tinfoil hat: I'm not keeping active track, but I passively perceived a sheer drop in mentions of the fact that Wuhan has China's first "biosafety level 4" laboratory, coinciding with an increased lambasting of the US's handling of their infections in the general media ("The Wuhan virus is now the American virus"), along with a streak of random US-critical posts ("What is the worst thing the US government has done?") being massively updated on Reddit (which has a major investment from Tencent.)
This is from the country which forces foreign companies to remove flags of countries it likes to bully (Taiwan, Japan) from their products. It's not inconceivable that they are filtering the narrative about themselves in something actually serious, such as this pandemic.
There’s a lot of value in paying/blackmailing the moderators. You can clearly certain subreddits, such as r/worldnews, becoming increasingly pro-China. The mod team played a huge role in this, as they have been perma banning people who post a lot of anti-China comments. I’ve for instance had several accounts banned (one simply for sarcastically saying “Thanks China”) - there were also a thread on r/China where plenty of people mentioned they had been banned for similar reasons.
If you follow r/WatchRedditDie then you can see this anti-China censorship on a daily basis.. for instance, this is on the frontpage right now: https://i.imgur.com/RuHpkC5_d.jpg
r/China is very much an echo chamber of its own though. These days the line between criticizing the Chinese government and full blown sinophobia is getting rather thin.
/r/China used to be fairly moderate, well, much more than it is now, but then most of the foreigners that posted from China left (either China, or lost access to reddit, or just lost interest) and now it is just a bunch of CPC hate.
The line between criticizing the CPC and full blown sino-phobia isn't thin at all, it has always remained pretty thick. It is the people crossing the line that have changed.
You only need a small force to build the momentum to get people to shitpost for free. But they do it on every major website. I'm sure the US and other major countries do similar things on VK and Weibo. Only difference is VK and Weibo have more control by the government and our companies believe that they should not be in the business of determining what legally is free speech and what isn't.
talk is cheap, be the man you're claiming to be please, go out, mingle, get close to lots of your relatives. and remember, the government are telling you to wash your hands, so don't do that. show them how you're not gonna take any crap from the elites.
On 1/22, Xi jinping and CCP blocked internal transportation such as railways, subways, ferries, trains and domestic flights in and out of Wuhan. But still let international flights in and out of Wuhan. If the coronavirus wasn’t weaponized with that intent I don’t know what is.
Those international flights were allowed to let countries evacuate their own citizens out. If they were banned, you would be making the exact same complaint but reversed: "China held other countries' citizens hostage in Wuhan." Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I'm annoyed with the connection between SARS-CoV-2 and bioweapon. This is such a garbage bioweapon for two reasons: This doesn't kill military aged men and it cannot be readily shut off. American scientists have nailed down when the cross over event occurred and how it happened. The world's top virologists also have said multiple times that this is not a bioweapon, people who have studied viruses for decades. But people who aren't even in the medical field keep peddling the narrative that this is a bioweapon. Amazing.
Here's the list of agents that are better than SARS:
So far I'm dissapointed with the comments to my post. I can't tell if some of these are trolls or not, but generally they don't add much to the discussion.
These hypotheticals are specious, sure they sound like lucid idea but with even a slight amount of criticism they'd fall apart. I'm going to posit some ideas here. Why didn't China weaponize H5N1? It has a higher Ro and CFR. It is commonly found throughout Southeast Asia and is what most pandemic experts thought was going to be the next pandemic. How would a virus get through a biosafety level 4 lab? If anyone else here has experience in biosafety labs I'm all ears, but I'd be shocked that a virus would be able to escape from something like that; not that mistakes don't happen but this isn't exactly a durable pathogen. Then we have the issue of every single advanced military in the world wouldn't even touch The Coronavirus family. I'm going to go ahead and assume that the people who are making bioweapons are good at their jobs and can recognize what makes a good bioweapon and what doesn't. Finally, there are just so many better options for bioweapons. The US invests massive amounts in making precision weapons because when you're a military power hitting a precise location is what's key. COVID is like a cluster bomb that has 90% duds.
But after all of this, instead of random people on the internet, we have experts who have time and time again said that COVID is not a bioweapon:
It probably walked out of a Wuhan lab, with a lab tech or equivalent as the unaware infected carrier; which doesn't make it a bioweapon at all. It may have been sampled by China's large effort to search their territory for viruses, and then it was studied in Wuhan. It's most likely a mistake of incompetence. There is precedence in that it has happened multiple times in China with SARS since the original outbreak in 2003. Incompetence of this sort would also perfectly explain the regime's response to destroy evidence and try to cover it up.
That's not a disprovable statement so I won't try to argue that it didn't happen that way, but pandemics have happened in the past. We should expect that they continue to happen even in the absence of bioengineering accidents. And we should be ready for them.
The most credible evidence has been gathered and presented in a youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU . The youtuber was a long time china immigrant before being forced to move abroad.
This entire video is translating open-source conspiracy theories that Chinese netizens conjured up under lockdown. You know what else was conjured up under lock down? US engineered weapon from Fort Detrick disguised as vape pneumonia that later infected Wuhan via international military games. Both theories has exactly the same credibility and validity.
It's ridiculous that people think laowhy and serpenza are credible China-watchers. They're travel bloggers and now clickbait video generators. The amount of people who get all their information and opinions on China from these two is worryingly staggering. There is an incredible amount of subject matter experts that specialize and operate in China. Literal billions are poured into NGOs, think tanks and other intelligence sources with boots on the ground. Granted much of it is not great, but they're infinitely more reliable than a couple youtubers who got kicked out of China and have no professional prospects outside of click bait conspiracy theory.
Also notice how he has recent videos about China killing his dreams, his move out of China and his wife divorcing him. Do you think that would cloud his judgement? Why isn't there a video on netizens work on the US engineered virus conspiracy theory? Youtubers =/= credible sources.
You are saying that both theory have the same credibility. I don't agree, because you can actually go see the sources linked in the video description. So why don't you go see the sources? Is your claim that laowhy86 is divorced, and that his judgement is clouded, substantiated? I didn't think so, so to me it looks like plain old smear.
This lab accident, on the contrary, is NOT unsubstantiated claims, and acting as it is some frivolous theory is unfair at best. I, while perhaps inducing worryingly staggering feelings to you, looked at the sources and concluded that the info was credible. So it has nothing to with the occupation of laowhy86.
You are appealing to the authority of billions poured into NGO, as if corruption never happens, as if money magically makes people competent, as if organizations never suffered from political bloat. As if for example there was no video proof that the WHO was ignoring Taiwan input for policial reasons – a country that has better epidemics statistics than the majority of us–. Are we also all stupid to entertain the idea that, when a WHO leader does not hear the journalist on skype exactly when she asks a question about taiwan, this is just a bad stratagem to elude the question?
The Wuhan lab leak theory has as much credible endorsement as Fort Detrik - i.e. none. Both are replete with connect the dot sources conjured by Chinese /r/conspiracy equivalents, the latter complete with corresponding proof drawn from US media sources. And if you believe CIA's recent allegations evidence of virus in Wuhan dating back to November... then the timeline actually syncs up with the US military games theory. Both are credible depending on what one choose to belief. It's just that neither is believed by most experts, but they however endorsed through political posturing and perpetuated by "useful idiots".
laowhy86, bitter expats doing China-bad for clicks is well trodden career pivot. You can see clearly in his youtube timeline when he transitioned from prosaic China musings to anti-CPC bashing after he left the country. His authority or lack of absolutely has to do with the fact that he's a youtube travel blogger and not subject matter expert - again of which there are many - who has not endorsed such theories. I'm not appealing to a singular authority, but a community of China watchers where conspiracy theories are dismissed as conspiracy theories. Unless your conspiracy is that they all got bought off - including anti-China institutions - and are collectively incompetent. Or alternatively, a youtuber is endorsing conspiracy for clicks. Which is more likely? Which is the kind of thing a stupid person would entertain?
Re: Taiwan, they released the alleged emails that they had information on H2H on Dec31st. Never mind there's no way they would be able to verify such information since they only had their first imported case on Jan21st. There's Taiwanese interviews in early Jan where their own CDC deputy director stated it was impossible to verify H2H until new cases happen after Jan14th. Their Dec31st email turned out to be the exact correspondence provided by Wuhan medical officials to the WHO and other medical community prior - they are treating novel corona patients in isolation wards which is standard practice. AKA it was nothing. Also elevating Taiwan was part of a coordinated US propaganda push to undermine the WHO including that interview (by HK news no less) that attempts to discredit the WHO via ambush questions that's outside of the organization's let alone a scientist's purview. Identifying propaganda and manufactured consent is media literacy 101. Believing your countries propaganda over a competing narrative is understandable, but believing a youtuber over general consensus of experts is less so. That's Alex Jones territory.
Regarding laowhy86 and serpentza, you're being disingenuous at best. Everything you say about them is false. Their channels are not about view whoring conspiracy theories. It's pretty obvious why they've been negative recently: they are no longer living in China, because they were being harassed by police. When they lived in China, they had to watch everything they said, so they kept the message upbeat. I don't think they claim to be experts about infectious disease, nor do they claim with certainty that this is cause of the outbreak.
Have you spent much time in China? Have you lived there, or is your knowledge all second hand?
I said this specific video is peddling conspiracy theory, otherwise they're nothing more than ex-travel bloggers who has recently pivoted to click-bait China bashing after they were pressured out of the country. Yes I was an expat in China in the mid 90s to mid 00s and still have ongoing dealings there.
The point is they are not only not experts in infectious disease, they're not experts in any particular Chinese subjects at all. Living in China is not itself a remarkable qualification. If I were to ask people to find me two youtubers from China who moved to US to do travel blogs that I should base most of my opinions about China on, it would be an impossibly asinine exercise because US is a large, complex country. So is China. That's why you have thousands of institutions and entire industries of specific experts trying to grasp the larger realities. This industry exists for Chinese affairs, yet a surprising amount of people insist on posting generalized, personal reflections of a couple youtubers instead of relevant subject matters for each respective topics which, again exists.
You accept the validity of arguments based on who the speaker is, I accept them based on the documentation.
You can say he is bitter or a nutcase, it does not make it so.
About the video, so far you are only able to say that laowhy86 is a youtuber, and therefore he wrong.
So far I've said that the documents linked in the video description corroborates the theory, making this theory credible.
How long will you continue to shoot the messengers instead of listening to what is said? Apart saying gratuitously that youtubers cannot possibily be right, you have not addressed the content of the video. I guess when you can't criticize the content, criticize the form, it is easier.
I will stop now, because I believe you are not writing in good faith. If a youtuber's documented demonstration does not deserve anyone's consideration by nature, because he is necessarily wrong, then certainly by your logic, as stranger writing on hacker news, you don't either deserve anyone's consideration, and you are wrong too.
however, you'll note by the downvotes no one here wants to be reasonable. it's a trend i've noticed on hacker news. this site claims a lot to be unbiased and evidence based, but i have noticed when it comes to china, all reason floats out the window. it's a dangerous effect because there are actual problems that are exacerbated and confused by propaganda and unfounded claims from the other side, which also hides problems with the other side. it's just not good for anyone and creates a cess pool of misinformation.
i don't know regarding investments. but just to be clear, the trend i have noticed is a clear anti-chinese sentiment on hacker news. it comes up a lot.
i think it's simply because a lot of americans are on hacker news, and there is a gross level of anti-chinese sentiment in the united states in general, probably more-so from educated people.
Last I looked, about half of the HN community is in the US. Since that includes many expats, presumably less than half of HN users are American. An overwhelming majority are from Western countries though.
It's anti-CCP sentiment, no one here is hating on HK, or Taiwan, or the ethnically Chinese diaspora, or even the average people in China. The HK protests were just last year and are still going. The 996 movement got a lot of notice and support here. Multiple articles have been posted here about pollution and the Uyghur re-education camps. Anyone well informed and educated are hyper aware of whats been going on in China from the environmental pollution, to Internet censorship, to civil liberties and human rights violations and they treatment of ethnic and religious minorities. You can't be principled and oppose these things in your own country, rail against an administration that does these things, and then give another country a free pass.
They're currently kicking black people out in the streets out of their homes and giving them no where to go because of a ban on foreigners, even though those foreigners never left the country during the pandemic and are no more risk at spreading the disease than anyone else. It's racism, pure and simple.
I mean, many of the things we're seeing in China currently are the kind of things that were happening in Germany in the 30's that were warning signs.
Just calling out things that are well documented in the news is enough to get down voted mysteriously, maybe the wǔmáo's have become aware of this community.
Please don't use HN for nationalistic flamewar. Or ideological flamewar.
Also in the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): please don't post insinuations about astroturfing to HN. The data is clear that this is almost always in the eye of the beholder, i.e. people imagine it as an explanation for things they dislike, and they're far more likely to notice those than other things. For a great deal of past explanation, see these links:
I didn't realize such selectively enforced standards were a thing? Should I report any post that criticizes government actions for nationalism?
So is criticizing a any government's actions in an comment section about an article criticizing the same government is nationalism? I didn't realize being in support of common human rights was a controversial ideology. I apologize for my actions and welcome the new mod community standards.
I hope this statement will please current and potential YCombinator investors.
Everyone who feels passionately on a topic accuses us of selectively enforcing standards against them. That's the bias I linked to upthread. If you look at those examples, the pattern is quite plain. For example, if you held the opposite view you'd be accusing me of anti-China racism (people have done so) rather than pro-Communist shillage or whatever.
Users who post thoughtful, substantive comments on either side of this issue don't run into problems with moderation. The point is that this is a site for curious conversation, not ideological or political battle. We can't have both, for the same reason you can't have a tank battle in a flower garden.
I have zero idea what will please Y Combinator's investors. From my point of view, the only thing that matters is keeping Hacker News interesting, because that's what keeps the community thriving, and that's what's most in YC's interests. I realize that people have reason to be skeptical about such claims, but being able to run HN that way is why I'm willing to do this job. Most other places on the internet, this wouldn't be possible, because the site would need to make money directly (e.g. by selling ads) or to push growth at all costs, either of which would kill HN as we know it.
HN is in a sweet spot that way, compared to how other sites of its kind need to operate. The reason is mostly a historical accident of how HN and YC grew up together, plus the fact that YC's business benefits more from HN being the way it is than it would from a different sort of community. The aren't many businesses in whose interest it would be to fund a site like this.
I had a problem with recent actions by their government, it was directly relevant to the discussion on the article.
Someone conflated that with race, which is holding an ethno-nationalist view of China, where as I differentiate between the government and the people. I've actually been to China, as such I have a personal investment in the place, and met a few of the minority groups and are aware its not one homogeneous culture, so to think all Chinese are the same or even the same race to me is ignorance. I called that out.
When I linked to several articles pointing out the hypocrisy of the CCP position, which was being echoed by who I was replying to, that all criticism is due to racism which is a propaganda position (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/29/chinas-latest-tactic-call-am...) and no sensible person would use that as a defense. So its not a thoughtful, or substantive comment to say all criticism is anti-Chinese or bigoted. But you're doing this one sided enforcement of rules?
I follow the stuff in China close to the ground, I'm hyper aware of the tactics used to counter criticism. I got turned on to the people to get on the ground reporting right here on Hacker News. To see moderators allowing shallow "any criticism of China is racism" but harp on me for pointing out obvious human rights violations, well it does call in to question the bias here.
So I ask you, why call out my statement, and not the person making blanket statements that people are anti-Chinese (as in race) when calling levying criticism. I fail to see that as thoughtful or substantive.
No, and what you're all observing is the most routine of all phenomena on an internet forum when the topic is divisive. People make diametrically opposite interpretations of the exact same threads based on their pre-existing positions.
No normal person would, but accidents do happen especially if you’re lax with protocol and also there crazy people like Amerithrax incidents back in early 2000s where presumably someone with access seems to have had a grudge or something.
That said, it’s one possibility among others, though the animal reservoir theory is the most viable and accepted at this time.
i feel it's a totally dangerous thing to be claiming such things though. it's an incredibly unlikely possibility and strong evidence should be provided before spreading rumors. we have no way of knowing who started these rumors in the first place.
people making baseless claims about the virus, which is happening everywhere and in particular is coming from the u.s., will only seek to harm things for everyone in the long run. it will cause governments to clam up (already happening) and has politicized the virus. now, experts' opinions and life work, like that found in the above article, will continue to be ignored in the chaos that is ensuing.
if the experts on zoonotic viruses are to be believed (why wouldn't you?), then it is clear that there are systematic problems that are leading to the increasing crossover of these zoonotic viruses. by politicizing the virus and hyper focusing on its political enemy, the u.s. is making this thing much, much, much worse (in addition to increasing the current spread within its own borders) and will lessen the impact on preventing future outbreaks. we as a species already struggle to address the issues that cause these outbreaks (overpopulation, encroachment on habitats, socioeconomic issues, etc.), and these actions of rumors and associated behavior, found on this site even, will bury the actual problems, turning everything into a childish and chaotic argument.
If it affected their own people less, gaining a net advantage over other nations. A totalitarian/authoritarian state will always be able to manage an epidemic more effectively than a democratic one.
Disclaimer: I don’t believe this, just playing devil’s advocate
Yep, China has recovered while the rest of the world is still crippled. I wouldn't put it past China to cause harm to their own citizens to gain a position of power.
Disclaimer: Also don't believe this, just playing along.
> Disclaimer: Also don't believe this, just playing along.
everybody keeps saying this, but just stop. it doesn't help and it confuses. all you do is bolster people who skip over your "disclaimer", even if you actually do believe your disclaimer.
It doesn't need to be a deliberate release of a bioweapon to be considered biological warfare. The simple act of knowingly obscuring the transmissibility and extent of the virus, leading to rampant international spread, is biological warfare.
if that's your definition of biological warfare, then you need to consider to yourself that the u.s. government is then waging biological warfare against its own people.
> Biological warfare [...] is the use of biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, insects, and fungi with the intent to kill or incapacitate humans, animals or plants as an act of war.
Knowingly allowing the spread of a highly contagious, lethal virus fits the definition. The only point of contention is whether the party's actions were due to incompetence or malice.
It could have escaped from the Wuhan lab and not been a bioweapon. The lab was studying viruses very similar to this one. It’s entirely possible that it leaked out of the lab by way of an accident. In fact, there is precedent for this happening in 2004. [0]
Honestly I’m not sure how Occam’s razor doesn’t suggest that it was released accidentally from one of the only labs in the world studying coronaviruses in bats, given that the lab was within 10km of patient zero.
Also, experts have not reached nearly the level of consensus regarding the origin of the virus as your comment implies. [1] While consensus seems to be against bioweapon, there is much debate as to whether the origin was lab accident or “wet market” as claimed by CCP.
I'm going to go ahead and say probably not. Viruses that originate in animals spread to humans all the time. One time I had a patient who got pneumonia from lactobacillus gasseri. Do you know where that is commonly from? The lower reproductive system in women; the vagina. Pathogens find themselves all the time in humans that have an n=1. Why don't we constantly have pandemics? Because human to human spread requires very specific genetic changes for that to occur.
How often does this happen because someone was doing research on Coronavirus and it accidently got released from a biosafety level 4 lab? Not often. How often do novel Coronaviruses spread from bats to something to humans? All the damn time.
No one is saying its a bioweapon, merely shoddy containment in a facility that did viral research, the research could have been entirely altruistic, its still their fault for letting it out of the lab and then hiding the fact, arresting doctors and journalists and letting it spread. When they could have been letting other countries take precautions to prepare for it and shut down travel out of the country sooner instead of telling the world there is no real danger, no human to human transmission, and everything is fine.
On the other hand, prefaced with the fact that it isn't one, or was still under research if that, bio-weapons are just as effective when they disrupt an economy and infrastructure and a virus targets the elders or those at an age of those most likely in leadership positions. So it doesn't have to kill military aged people to be effective. Again, this is likely not one, but the disruption its caused and economic hit its taken is in line with how modern wars are fought. They only need to overwhelm medical facilities, its like the case with mines, they don't kill so much as maim, because maiming soldiers puts a greater strain on an army to keep them alive, transport them and treat them (even though they'll never return to the battle field), then if they were simply dead. You kill a soldier, they're down a man, you maim/disable a soldier, they're down a man, two other soldiers needed to evacuate him, they're down transport needed to get them back to a medical center, and several medical personnel needed to treat them and get them stable. You want to cripple an army, you don't kill it, you make it so the soldiers barely survive and need assistance, or you take out their resources, this virus does a good job of both.
A virus only has to severely disable economies and create a strain on resources to be effective at crippling an opponent, if its not especially deadly, it can spread further, if it puts enough soldiers in hospital beds, especially senior leadership, its effective. Even if this isn't a bio-weapon, it actually would be pretty effective as one assuming you already had the vaccine, which no one does.
>Even if this isn't a bio-weapon, it actually would be pretty effective as one assuming you already had the vaccine, which no one does.
Not even close, not even a little close. With proper containment COVID-19 is easily contained. This isn't that great, especially when you look at countries who are handling this well: Taiwan. Bioweapons are notorious for being quick and lethal. As per the CDC on bioterrorism:
>When the potential agents are reviewed for these characteristics, anthrax and smallpox are the two with greatest potential for mass casualties and civil disruption
If you give me a normal amount of resources and competent public health professionals COVID-19 does not scare me. It's CFR is below 1% with adequate protocols (Standard, honestly).
China is so interconnected to the rest of the world, especially the US, the worst thing for them is to shut down both their and the US economy. Why would they test a weapon that disrupts the entire globe when you could have a weapon that has a narrow focus of a small region?
It's easily contained by shutting down the economy and social distancing...
You didn't read a thing I said did you? You're calling whats happening now, easy? Did you even read what happened to the naval ship that got infected?
This has had pretty disastrous effects for the economy of the entire world, there are food riots overseas right now, the unemployment rate is skyrocketing. The social disorder alone, cops are arresting doctors providing supplies to the homeless, yelling at women not wearing a mask while walking their dog, arresting people playing in a park near no one else, by world leaders being put in the ICU. Get your head out of the sand.
None of this is easily contained. Ebola is easily contained, this you don't even know you're sick when you're walking around spreading it for days.
>If you give me a normal amount of resources and competent public health professionals COVID-19 does not scare me.
Weirdly, no countries seem to have this, since they're all getting ravaged, at least those with high population density. The only country's with high population density not getting ravaged is Taiwan, which has an extreme mistrust of the CCP, and speak/read Chinese so had intelligence from the Chinese Internet on what was really going on far before most country's public did. They reacted sooner by shutting down travel, and sounded the alarm bells, but the WHO didn't listen to them, because they were too busy pretending they weren't a country.
I'm saying that the response to COVID-19 is easy. You know why? Because all it would have taken is surveillance and proper quarantine. I'm going to say it again: if you give me a normal amount of resources and a normal team I would be able to manage anyone with COVID with reasonable success. Now it starts getting tricky with any serious comorbidities and luckily we have nephrology to manage electrolytes. Shutting this thing down is not challenging. What's challenging is when you have incompetent leadership that ignores expert advice.
> they are filtering the narrative about themselves
It's not a tinfoil hat worthy context. We know for a fact that they're doing that.
China ordered a book written [1] espousing the glorious success of Xi and the CPC in vanquishing the virus, before the world even knew for certain it was tranmissable person to person and just how dangerous it was.
They invented an outlandish narrative about the US military attacking Wuhan with the virus and then freely spread that 5G-is-the-cause level of insanity all over Twitter (with the open blessing of Twitter, by way of their refusal to remove the disinformation campaign).
Wow. It's incredible that it doesn't even take supporting the outgroup to be accused of shilling -- these days even failing to laser focus on condemning the outgroup is enough.
Reddit is having a lot more posts about America just because there's a lot going on in the country right now. In late February there were tons of posts about Italy. In early February there were tons of posts about China. The posts about China that got to the top then were all negative, and they're still all negative today, they just make up a smaller fraction because there's more going on elsewhere.
I'd argue that Reddit has a more US centric voice because... it has a more US centric userbase. [0] I don't think it is because there is more going on in the US but more that people tend to be focused on the things that are closer to them.
that's a tinfoil hat indeed. you have no evidence of anything, so you're spreading baseless rumors just like others. i find it unacceptable on a site that supposedly has rules against these things. nothing you've said can be verified or unverified, and your link is to wikipedia, edited by who knows who.
take a step back and notice the level of anti-chinese posts and comments on hacker news and wonder if you yourself are being fed propaganda.
It's been my experience that everyone who prefaces their comment with statements like this usually are lying. "I'm not X, but ... "
> along with a streak of random US-critical posts ("What is the worst thing the US government has done?") being massively updated on Reddit
Anyone can go on reddit and see the very opposite. This is what I don't understand about propagandists, why lie about something that can be verifiably proven false? Go on worldnews or any major subreddit, what are the ratio of pro and anti-chinese submissions? What are the ratio of pro and anti-china comments? The exact opposite of what you claim.
> This is from the country which forces foreign companies to remove flags of countries it likes to bully (Taiwan, Japan) from their products.
You obviously know why they do for taiwan. As for japan, lets see some examples. If "removing" flags is called "bullying", then your definition of "bullying" is rather naive.
> It's not inconceivable, and certainly probable, that they are filtering the narrative about themselves in something actually serious, such as this pandemic.
No shit. Just like you are filtering a narrative. Just like the US government is filtering a narrative. We are involved in a major trade war.
You are doing the exact same thing you claim "china" is doing.
1 Difference in Receptor Usage between Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Coronavirus and SARS-Like Coronavirus of Bat Origin http://archive.is/M9IRO
Posting a tendentiously selected collection of links in the hope of deniably constructing a false chain of inference among your audience still qualifies as deliberately lying by omission. Especially when you do it with a throwaway account obviously constructed for the purpose.
I'm not so sure I buy the Reddit controlled by CCP (or heavily influenced) argument. Simply because in /r/China, /r/ChineseLanguage, and /r/HongKong I see frequent posts that are highly critical of the CCP and China in general. They have many upvotes and it doesn't look like people are being banned or posts are being removed. It is nowhere like /r/Sino.
I'm not trying to defend the CCP here, but just trying to say that maybe Reddit isn't a CCP propaganda weapon. I'm sure there's some influence, but I see these arguments go quite far.
Honestly the much simpler explanation is coordinated voting. If the Donald Trump-related sub-Reddit can coordinate their voting sufficiently that Reddit needs to step in to stop it, then I'm sure a country with access to Project Management tools can get large numbers of state employees or patriots to click on voting buttons.
All the anti-China subs has grown multitudes more users than Sino since last year, easily enough to drown out pro-Chinese voices. Statistically, we should see more anti-Chinese bots and manipulation occurring.
Also all available research doesn't suggest CPC has foreign manipulation toolset on western social media, except last years twitter "disclosure" about state level manipulation on HK without any explanation and attribution. Turned out to be ~200 twitter accounts, which... ok could be from Chinese state or bored PRC nationalist script kiddies.
Also 50c doesn't operate abroad, they don't engage in argumentation, only lazy platitudes about positive Chinese news items - they don't draw attention to negative news. All the shill accusations doesn't account for this fact that 50c glorifies instead of defends China. The latter pattern requires too much effort. Official 50c are mostly state employees trying to meet msg quotas on domestic social media. Also China would not waste English proficiency trolling on reddit, English speakers with proficiency to trick western audiences are making bank working in industry and not the state. Chinese foreign propaganda MO is pouring a few hundred billion buying ad space in foreign news papers. And lately they've been growing twitter and other microblogging platform accounts for their diplomats to troll US. See US bioengineered weapon.
E: Just to add the parsimonious explanation about the amount of pro-Chinese perspectives is that the vast amount of Chinese diaspora is engaging online discussions since they are witnessing the effects of western propaganda targetting their country. There is a ridiculous amount of biased reporting out there. Increased sinophobia etc, it's in their interests to clear the air which occasionally leads to doubling down on nationalist rhetoric.
Because academic research can't be rushed. One of the requirements for an advanced degree is publishing papers, and if coronavirus related can easily bring attention and get the paper published, students would try taking the fast track. This is not good for research in general.
There was a huge debate back in late Jan. early Feb. on Chinese social network about a paper didn't get peer-reviewed spreading all over places with misinformation. Hence the Fudan University post in Chinese was to tighten the publish review, and nothing about delaying the research.
This guardian news only showed the story without context, which is pretty misleading.
They have been very successfully control who. With the same technique controlling access, we might never know and any whistleblower ... china not open up and free, we are playing Russian or shall we say china lottery. With humanity fate.
No freedom of press and academic research and human rights, china pose a danger to humanity. And regards to they might kill themselves, noticed that they have kill 30m+ in Great Leap Forward. Not even one Memorial Or Day is in. How many 30m we have outside china.
Wuhan virus is the 2nd wake up call. Hard to wake up people who pretend to sleep. I would try again WakeUp.
This[0] claimed it's bio-engineered. Disclamer: epochtime is Falungun media channel, Falungun is prosecuted by CCP, so it's more conspiracy theory. For example, the India paper has been refuted by US scientists. I personally believe its accidental leak.
Because academic research can't be rushed. One of the requirements for an advanced degree is publishing papers, and if coronavirus related can easily bring attention and get the paper published, students would try taking the fast track. This is not good for research in general.
There was a huge debate back in late Jan. early Feb. on Chinese social network about a paper didn't get peer-reviewed spreading all over places with misinformation. Hence the Fudan University post in Chinese was to tighten the publish review, and nothing about delaying the research.
This guardian news only showed the story without context, which is pretty misleading.
It’s disingenuous to suggest that China has inserted a chain of government committees in between researchers and journals, for the purpose of improving the veracity of the research. Given the CCP’s history of censorship boards, it looks like a case of the usual CCP strategy of filtering the release of information in order to save face.
Oh really? There was a huge debate on Chinese social media about peer review and academic research? LOL okay and on the 4th of June 1989 Chinese students had tea at Tiananmen square. Its not even that people like you are ignorant, you're just a piece of shit asshole who's happy to be pimped out.
I'm trying to be a good bayesian reasoner here but the particulars of this specific case are all so tangled and piecemeal. The conspiracy theorists among us are having an absolute field day with the current events and it's easy to see why.
According to my bayesian analysis, I believe that the most likely cause of this virus is a wet-market infection, followed by a slip-up at a lab, with—by high margin, in very very last place at, say, 1% probability, that this was concocted by a nefarious player (the CCP being a favorite candidate). The conspiracy theorists (my Facebook friends especially) seem to rank the likelihood of this list in reverse (i.e. clearly this was concocted by the chinese government). With how secretive and disingenuous the CCP is even on a good day, it's easy to see why their argument has a few credence points (like any good conspiracy).
But I can't reconcile that there's not much for the CCP to gain on the world stage by releasing this thing. The US was already so politically tumultuous, and the 2016 Russian disinformation campaign was so much more effective at breaking our democracy apart, with the added benefit of not sending our economy into a global recession as a byproduct. What has the CCP gained here? Xi's power as a leader has only weakened, and their position as the world's factory is now only slipping faster.
So this is kind of like 9/11 to me. The people who would be the most likely to profiteer off a tragedy like this would have not in any capacity been able to pull it off, and the ones who are powerful or otherwise sophisticated enough to pull it off don't have much incentive to anyways. So that's why bayesian reasoning leads me to believe that yes, we know these viruses jump from animals to humans from time to time, and this seems to likely be one of those instances. What am I missing?
Not when whatever is happening also causes the political, social and economic collapse of your own nation state. There are simpler ways to compete with a rival superpower, ways much less prone to exploding in any perpetrator's face. One of them is simply, well, doing nothing but outpacing them economically through more or less usual means. Not too hard to consider for a productive country with 5 times the population of its main rival.
You're assuming that political elites all care more about the general population (which as you've noted, there is a large, expendable surplus of) than consolidating and increasing their own power.
To clarify, I don't think COVID19 was a Chinese conspiracy, just making note of historically self evident incentive structures that others seem naively oblivious to.
I'm totally willing to entertain that argument, but their exports have suffered tremendously and any forecasters could have predicted that a global slowdown would hurt such an interconnected country like China the most. So I am just unable to connect the dots here as to what the conspiracy theorists think the motive is.
Conspiracy theories that end up actually being true generally have one thing in common: they have wide consensus as to what the actual facts of the case really are. You could sort of make this argument for the conspiracy that Jeffrey Epstein's death was not a suicide but rather a cover up. In that theory, most theorists posit that high powered individuals whom Epstein had dirt on arranged to have him killed before he could get to trial and expose them. That's actually not a completely crazy theory, in the realm of how crazy some conspiracies really get.
Whereas, the 9/11 truthers cannot internally reconcile why the US government may have flown our own planes into the trade towers. No good singular theory emerges probably because not one exists. And of the theories that are floated, they all end up being conflicting and self-cancelling. I think time will prove that the same is true for COVID19.
Wow the amount of account's quite obviously botting for the CCP in this thread is concerning. What is HN moderation doing to keep these unwanted accounts out?
Now things are starting to settle down, everyone can get back to being their usual selves, whether it is a totalatarian surveillance state or a conspiracy theorist.
This is basically the end game for China. Either they buy off everything while their economy is still running, or they face isolation. They fd us all way too hard this time
People want cheap goods. They don't care if their Nike shoes come from a slaveshop, just like we don't really give much thought that most of the milk we drink come from cows in very miserable conditions.
It's business as usual for China. As long as they keep on making those affordable goods, other countries will consume.
If Apple moves off their entire production from China to US, and still is competitive, then I'll be a believer.
384 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadhttps://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/30/asia-pacific/sc...
www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/all-signs-point-to-china/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8188557/amp/Did-cor...
https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/experts-know-the-new-coronav...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22771035
There is an article on Nature one month ago on this topic:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
> Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus
Also, people quickly forget that humans have been selectively evolving plants and animals for thousands of years without touching the actual genomes.
Just saying it "came from a lab", makes it sound man made. If you don't want misunderstandings, you need spell it out and make it absolutely clear. It doesn't even sound like there is a clear narrative about how it "escaped from the lab", just a lot of rumors. Rumors about a rumor, certainly doesn't sound more credible than China's official stance, and their credibility is already very low.
Note that that the Wuhan CDC, the lab ~300m from the market, the lab that was experimenting on bats, is not the BSL4 Wuhan Institute of Virology miles away from the seafood market, that everyone loves taking about. It's probably a level 2 or 3 lab.
Escape from a lab doesn't imply man made any more than tiger escaped from zoo implies that the tiger was born there. SARS escaped from BSL3 labs on China on multiple occasions, that doesn't imply that SARS was man made.
https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-lab...
1. while doing research that has been banned in other nations due to the extreme hazard
2. despite having a history of lab virus escapes that killed people
3. and then they covered it up
BTW, the virus is at least sort of man made. The lab was breeding viruses. There is no evidence that gene editing technology was used, but we do know that the lab has published multiple research papers about making coronaviruses more infectious in humans.
I think there needs to be a damn good justification for purposely making viruses more able to infect and harm humans. Why would you do that????? Mere scientific curiosity is not a proper justification for putting all of humanity at risk.
that's frightening. Do you have any more information about those papers?
https://jvi.asm.org/content/82/4/1899
Here they are again, years later, still playing with extremely hazardous coronaviruses that act on the ACE2 receptor in humans:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711
This one gene-edits the host cells to have both human and bat traits, making it easier to breed bat viruses into becoming human viruses:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00705-010-0729-6
It's not correct to call insertion of a plasmid to be gene editing of a host cell, though this could be arguably pedantic.
I'm curious how you concluded that what they did made it easier to breed bat viruses into becoming human viruses?
That does not mean the virus could not be derived within a lab using recombination methods in other animals and sourcing the starting novel virus from bats. In fact, this type of research was the exact research being done at the Wuhan Virology lab.
I would like to see the exact research they tried to do there. Navigating through their published research list, I couldn't locate any, but I am not an expert:
http://www.whiov.cas.cn/kycg_105248/lwqk/index.html
What a lot of people are trying to do is execute the classic psychological trick; make the problem go away by finding someone safe to blame.
Won't work for SARS-COV2. It doesn't care.
This article consists of some publicly known facts, along with some anonymous sources in the British government's emergency committee (the Cabinet leaks like a sieve so this is entirely plausible). It also cites an academic, some report from Beijing News (whilst noting that the report was retracted) and an academic paper that was uploaded and then deleted. It's written in a pretty neutral tone and explicitly calls out cases where its sources may have issues. The article is no different to the sort of speculation routinely found in Bloomberg, the WSJ, NYT, the Guardian etc.
What we're seeing here is just another day in no-platforming land. To the left what is said doesn't matter, who says it is everything. Based on prior experience I'd be willing to bet that virtually none of the people spitting fire over a Daily Mail or National Review link here have even read the articles, let alone rigorously apply the same purported standards to every news link they see posted.
Not that it was a weapon. Not that it was man made. Simply someone working at a research lab, screwed up and released a dangerous virus.
incredible journalists repoting on the academy doesn't know what geoscience/geology department studies nowadays. most of them are indistinguishable from sociology thanks to all the urban and policy planing. they also do a great deal od recent history because it's a base for the above.
It definitely seems feasible to me that it could have "come out of a lab" while still being entirely natural in origin and without any ill intent on the Chinese part.
I'm not endorsing this as true, I don't know if it's true or not, but I did find it interesting and worthy of additional research.
> According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the market.
I've worked in a lab and Occam's razor for me says the lab that is 280 meters away and studied bat viruses is a lot more plausible than it originating in a wet market. People make stupid mistakes handling waste all the time. There was no need for the Chinese government to throw the wet market under the bus or for people to imply Chinese people ate bats or some other racially motivated theory and there was no need to believe the chinese government created a bioweapon. Most likely is that it was just a horrible mistake and careless handling of biohazardous waste/animals.
Yeeaah, about that... I looked more myself last time when I mentioned this and couldn't find the reference I originally saw (it was more than a month before my comment a month ago), instead found this:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/%E6%96%B0%E4%B8%96%E7%BA%A...
https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto...
According to Google Maps and Translate, the pin in the image in that PDF that says "Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention" is actually on a building labeled "New Century Home Appliances Collection and Disposal Station".
14-15km appears to be the actual distance from the market to the lab: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Wuhan+South+China+Seafood+Wh...
There is one building 4km away called the Wuhan CDC&P, but looking at the surrounding buildings that appears to be an office, not a lab: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Wuhan+South+China+Seafood+Wh...
IMO despite the faked image, the same city is still suspicious, especially with stories like this coming out now: https://news.yahoo.com/suspected-sars-virus-and-flu-found-in...
https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/01/covid-19-bioweapon/
Snopes reports that it contained numerous errors, and the authors themselves have said they had no direct evidence for their claims. (Note that it was never peer-reviewed or even accepted for publication anywhere. They just pasted it up on a social media site.)
https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/01/covid-19-bioweapon/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V7fyjaFOwQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market
The lack of hijabs is due that it is recorded in the North Sulawesi province of Indonesia, where the majority is christian.
Stating it's compelling isn't evidence, just that it is an explanation that appeals to large populations of our species who are hold certain suspicions.
There is, however, a long history of animal to human transmission of diseases.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I have yet to see anyone provide evidence, only twitter rumors, and twitter rumors aren't even regular evidence.
Also, I'm just saying any evidence that anything may have escaped by mistake; not that it was intentionally spread. Sure, CIA and such can discover such evidence much more effectively than any commenter here, but in that case, shouldn't you let the CIA / US government make those accusations instead of a random commenter who has no knowledge of the situation or basis for their claim?
>China has hundreds of documents of this base and backgrounds on all scientists, which it can release to no detriment at all, supposing the lab had nothing to do with corona.
What documents, exactly? And how would that help disprove that the virus inadvertently escaped from the lab?
You might have had a point if the Chinese regime wasn't putting it's propaganda machine into overdrive spewing conspiracy theories on how covid19 was created by the US to attack China.
How exactly is the Chinese regime not to blame for this mess? Between the blatant cover-up and falsified reports and underreporting deaths by a couple of orders of magnitude and knowingly stating that the virus didn't spread when they knew full well it spread like wildfire and intentionally leaving out demostratedly infected but asymptomatic cases out of the statistics while simultaneously blaming new cases on infected foreigners, how is China's regime not to blame for this whole mess?
And should we now just forget that the Chinese regime has been trying to pin the blame on their covid19 mess on Italy of all places?
It would also do you well to keep in mind that if we're using the criminal justice system as some standard obstruction of justice itself is a crime, as is destruction/tampering of evidence as well as witness tampering. Physical evidence is not required to convict; strong circumstantial evidence is often sufficent.
Or are you just saying the best geopolitical response to unsubstantiated propaganda is more unsubstantiated propaganda volleyed right back at them?
This is similar to people who accuse the CIA of orchestrating every big event or crime. They say they don't need to provide evidence, because the CIA is untrustworthy and tries to deceive people. But this is a completely bullshit argument.
Is it though? I think that it makes a lot of sense.
You always need evidence, regardless of the nature of the accused person or entity. You could be accusing Stalin himself; you still need evidence
Either you didn't understood the point or you don't want to address it.
The point is that if China's regime tries to portray the fact that they operate a coronsvirus military research lab a few meters from the outbreak's alledged epicenter as nonsense while at the same time they try to pin the blame on the outbreak on military coronsvirus research work conducted by other nations.
I mean, if a work accident committed by China's military is ruled out as outlandish then why are they pushing conspiracy theories akin to area52 aliens as reasonable and plausible?
The lab escape theory is certainly completely plausible. But it becomes no more or less plausible just because there's "US military conspiracy" propaganda spread by the government.
They easily could've done that to counter all of the accusations hurled at them by US citizens that it's an intentional bioweapon, or due to Trump calling it "the Chinese virus" and constantly trying to associate it with them, or to pull attention away from themselves due to the outbreak starting there and just generally to reduce embarrassment and spread confusion that they hope will improve their reputation, or even specifically because of posts like yours.
If you assume for the sake of argument that the lab hypothetically isn't responsible, but lots of people think it is, this would be one way to provide such a distraction. It would as well if the lab were in fact responsible, but that definitely doesn't mean that's proof the lab is responsible. They have a ton of possible reasons for why they would want to spread this propaganda.
The hypothesis that "they're more likely to spread propaganda about the US military causing it if their lab caused it" carries a ton of implicit assumptions which may or may not be true. It's reasonable to speculate about and discuss, but it alone is evidence of nothing. If there were some leaked document saying something like "hey, since our lab fucked up let's distract people by accusing the US", then it'd be a different story.
Of course, China's government promoting and spreading absurd conspiracy theories needs to be condemned no matter what, but an analysis of the true root cause of the outbreak needs to be totally impartial and objective.
Because the incident isn't about deflection to US.
It was retaliating and warning US against pushing Wuhan conspiracy theory (Tom Cotton) and calling covid19 Wuhan virus (Pompeo) after WHO re-designation. Both these events proceeded the Chinese tweets.
Current US administration has consistently been the instigator of bellicose diplomacy. But people conveniently forget when it comes to China who has been remarkably patient compared to other countries, including US allies.
US is pushing crazy propaganda to deflect blame from their inadequate response. In return, China unleashed one of their mid tier diplomats to troll crazy US rhetoric coming from a Senator and Secretary of State to demonstrate that China is willing to escalate to dirty propaganda games. Hence why it had to be de-escalated by Chinese ambassador to US, a diplomat 2 levels higher than the original foreign ministry spokes person. It also plays well to Chinese domestic audience.
If China wanted to deflect blame, there would be much more plausible ways. The fact that China chose to confront US conspiracy with Chinese conspiracy should be interpreted as signalling to not go full retard. The message and messenger was calibrated for this affect. And what do you know the US backed off on this avenue of attack and has shifted to boosting Taiwan. Also concurrent to the conspiracy tit-for-tat was banning each others journalists. These events have to be evaluated in proper context and timelines.
Someone accuses you of murder and says "prove you didn't do it". You didn't do it, but can't satisfactorily prove such a negative. Maybe you were outside taking a walk and no one can provide an alibi. Does that mean you should be assumed guilty?
I think the problem is that when people think of "lab" they think of some sort of devious genetic engineering bioweapons program, and not something considerably more likely but much more mundane like some scientists studying what sort of potentially bad viruses the local bats have.
If this were one of those, as has been claimed on the basis of the frequently mis-cited October 2019 WIV paper, anyone in the world would be able to see that by comparing the SARS-CoV-2 sequence accessioned in NCBI's database with one of the many HIV sequences also available there. I've done the alignment myself, against several HIV sequences. So can you; you don't even need a local toolchain, you can pick them and BLAST them right on NCBI's site.
When you do, you'll find the same thing I did: there is no significant similarity between any HIV strain and SARS-CoV-2. So the "escaped chimera" theory is not only implausible on its face given the nature of pseudoviruses, but disproven by genomic evidence, besides.
Please don't spread disinformation.
1) where did hiv sequences come from? Are they the human immuno deficiency virus sequences?
2) you are suggesting that chimeras are created impotent, and that hybrid viruses cannot be created to be effective otherwise. My question is that whatever combination of pangolin and bat viruses is said to have happened naturally in a host, could it happen in a petri dish too? Could WIV be conducting such research? Or are such petri dish chimeras always unable to jump from human to human. Is it a natural property or choice when creating chimeras?
3) it seems that the virus is like SARS but has receptor proteins similar to a known pangolin coronavirus. Is it also possible for two viruses to leak to a single lab employee, and then combine in the first human host right away. It still can be said to leak from the lab in this scenario.
Thanks for having patience for my uninformed opinions.
I'm sure I'm missing
1. Yes. The claim based on the misreading of the 2019 paper is that SARS-CoV-2 is actually a lab-created combination of another coronavirus and the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. If that were true, the genome of SARS-CoV-2 would incorporate large parts of the HIV genome verbatim. It does not; comparing these genomes for identical or nearly identical subsequences via BLAST, by far the tool most widely used for this purpose, shows no such similarity.
2. Viral recombination occurs when multiple related strains of a given virus infect the same cell at the same time. That can be done in vitro, but I haven't seen any papers from WIV describing such experiments. Notably, the frequently cited 2019 paper describes a totally different kind of experiment, which could not under any circumstances have produced a virus with the genome which SARS-CoV-2 has been observed to have.
3. For that to happen would require two different strains of the same virus to independently develop the same mutation allowing them to cross over and infect humans, and to simultaneously infect the same worker in the lab, and to then recombine in such a way as to produce SARS-CoV-2.
That is not impossible, but it is about as likely to occur as it is for every atom in your body to simultaneously transmute into gold.
I find the wet market theory full of such improbabilities too. How is ncov19 relatively close to two known viruses, 1) the sars like bat virus it was 96% similar to, and 2) the pangolin virus with which it has resembling receptor proteins. Seems a lot of coincidence for these two to combine, both of which can jump to humans, and 300 meters from a leading Coronavirus research lab.
I know I'm just repeating the conspiracy theory, but just explaining my position. The virus was found initially at the wet market, and there is no proof of its origin being there. Plus it seems perfectly feasible for it come out of the lab and not be a deliberately engineered virus, atleast not one using the 2019 paper's chimera virus techniques.
Those same traits also produce a high degree of similarity between a lot of genomically differentiable strains of coronavirus, especially since spike proteins tend to be strongly conserved for their direct effect on virulence - a significant mutation there is likely to be maladaptive, if it changes the protein structure enough for cells to no longer uptake a virion that expresses it. So it's not really a surprise to see that two different strains have similar spike proteins, and doesn't really give much basis for inference about relatedness between them.
Another important point is that coronaviruses are so common specifically in bats, which are both extremely plentiful and unusually accommodating hosts for many kinds of viruses including coronaviruses, very often with multiple strains infecting a single host at once. That gives coronaviruses - which, remember, are already good at recombining to produce new strains, every one being possibly able to jump species - more chances at that kind of recombination than they would have otherwise.
Too, bats shed virus in feces the same way humans do, and bat guano is so effective a fertilizer that wars have started over access to supplies of it. So it's not difficult or unlikely to postulate a chain of events like this:
- a recombination event in a bat produces a virus capable of infecting humans,
- which is then deposited in feces used to fertilize a human food crop,
- which is then harvested and taken to a city market to be sold,
- and all it takes for someone to get sick from there is not washing their hands often enough while they're cooking.
To be clear, I'm not saying this is what happened. Nobody knows that yet. But precisely because nobody knows that yet, it's important to consider the relative likelihoods of various ways that the pathogen might have developed into a form that can infect humans, and then reached the point of actually doing so.
That's what I'm doing here. Each stage of this postulated chain of events relies only on things that are already known to frequently occur, and have been so known since long before SARS-CoV-2 was even known to exist.
The result is unprovable, of course, just as with every other theory of this disease's origin that anyone has advanced so far. But it doesn't rely on any unusually small probabilities, and so it seems a lot likelier to me than the combination of a lab accident of a kind known to have happened only a few times in the last two decades, and a simultaneous superinfection of a single researcher with two different strains of coronavirus.
2. The person who accidentally leaked it from the lab may not even know it. Research into COVID-19 has estimated up to 20% of people infected may be asymptomatic carriers of the disease who can still spread it to others. Person who works in the lab gets infected, doesn’t get visibly sick, accidentally spreads it to someone in the vicinity of their lab by breathing or coughing or singing or sneezing, virus is now out and they don’t even realize it.
The 1977 H1N1 pandemic is widely believed by scientists to have been an accidental lab release. Evidence as to which lab it escaped from has never been found and we will probably never know. https://mbio.asm.org/content/6/4/e01013-15 “A biosafety lapse in a research laboratory is now most often cited as the cause of the 1977-1978 reemergence of the H1N1 influenza virus strain”
US supermarkets sold lettuce that killed people. Should those supermarkets be shut for good?
If China can enforce the largest lockdown ever and enforce a one-child policy for decades, they can easily ban live animals at markets.
B)Food-borne illness actually does kill around 150,000 per year worldwide. It is a serious concern, and difficult to track/contain. There are also concerns around regulations being too lax, not enough inspectors, and living conditions of those who harvest food.
C)Maybe China should ban wet markets, but then maybe people should be home for Easter Sunday and not at a church. Now we start to ban "cultural norms" and "ways of life", which people get fussy about.
B) I'm not disagreeing with you.
C) People should not be at an in-person Easter Sunday. I realize a percentage of churches decided to not close. That being said, wanting to eat bats is not comparable to wanting to practice religion.
Given poor testing/tracking, it probably was floating around in the USA 3 months ago. I am not saying that COVID-19 is not deadlier, but that food-borne illnesses are serious and rife in the food supply, and can lead to death for compromised individuals, yet we have not shutdown our markets or meat processing facilities despite outbreaks of food-borne illnesses being somewhat common. Those illnesses can indeed lead to death for thousands of people each year, especially those with pre-existing health conditions.
Also the cruise industry is notorious for food-borne outbreaks of Norovirus. These cruises typically have multiple incidents every year, and are great vectors for spreading viral infections, yet the cruise industry has never been shutdown.
You think eating bats and going to church are not comparable, because that's your opinion on what's culturally normal. Others might say eating a bat is delicious and going to church is dumb. Both have risks and I am not a fan either. No one should be eating bats or going to church right now, but that's going to offend people on both sides.
This is a ridiculous claim if I ever saw one as food poisoning or food related diseases have never overwhelmed hospitals anywhere in recent history. Unless you are talking about some remote place where COVID has not landed yet, in which case the comment has no point. And we are not even talking about the past, COVID19 is still pretty much active and killing people still as we speak. We'll draw comparisons when it's over, which is not now.
All people are saying is that there's a reasonable hypothesis that this thing came out of that laboratory. There's enough circumstantial evidence to support that theory even if it's not a leading theory.
Some folks used to be skeptical wrt. the market being a source, because it was officially described as a fish/seafood market and fish are not a very plausible reservoir for this virus. However it's clear by now that all kinds of live animals were sold there, similar to other "wet" markets throughout Mainland China.
Currently the "jump host" hypothesis suggests the pangolin as an intermediate host from bats. Not enough evidence to be 100% sure, though.
You know the old saying, "Just because you read it on the internet, doesn't mean it's true"? Consider the inverse: Just because you haven't read it on the internet, doesn't mean it's not true.
Lots of interesting articles on how it might help. Media decides it’s a political football. No more articles
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/13/how-false...
https://news.google.com/search?q=hydroxychloroquine
*Reading this comment again, perhaps I should have phrased it more carefully - I'm not saying that any clamping down that is happening now has come earlier, but that China started clamping down on this from the very beginning.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEfDwc2G2_8
Then they went on claiming everything was good again, 0 new cases nationally, so the head honchos could take credit for showing leadership and whatnot. Now they're blaming new cases on foreigners, especially Africans, most of whom never even left the country since this whole ordeal started both to stoke nationalism + rally around the flag effect and so as to evade responsibility for not actually having stopped it yet.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic#Hypotheses_a...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3SjtG5lwOI
Maybe we should stop listening to these people?
people should start taking a stronger look at their own countries. the united states' leadership doesn't even have clear propaganda or a goal. they're just making it all up as they go, which is worse in my opinion.
this toddler-level blame game is a major threat to the national security and economy in the united states.
Normally I'm loathe to suggest that things which happen on twitter direct wider social discourse, but I believe this is the most accurate characterization of events in this case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNMdg4morQs&feature=youtu.be
That video ... didn't age well, shall we say.
And here's a virologist claiming political correctness slowed Italy's response to the virus:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/italy_political_correctness_ch...
Conservatives in general have developed into an opposition to globalism ("one world government"), a cause the left has championed since the earliest days of the COMINTERN. It's not a huge surprise that they'd emphasise the origins of the virus and nature of the local government there, especially given the recommended course of action is strong border control.
The WHO is an especially clear example of what "one world government" looks like, and there's an established history of criticism of the WHO from conservatives dating back long before COVID-19. For instance in this article:
https://www.forbes.com/2010/02/05/world-health-organization-...
it's alleged that the WHO changed its own definition of pandemic so swine flu would qualify, massively exaggerated its impact and deadliness vs normal flu, lied about its own change of definitions and that its chief gave a speech using swine flu to promote various hard-left ideas in e.g. this quote (but there are others from the same speech)
https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/2009/euro_regional_committee...
"Leaders in sectors with far more clout than health are making a similar point. At the April G20 summit in London, world leaders called for a fundamental re-engineering of the international systems to incorporate a moral dimension and make them responsive to genuine social values and concerns. They voiced a need to invest these systems with values like community, solidarity, equity, and social justice. While this is welcome new thinking for world leaders, this is a familiar vocabulary for public health"
I don't think it actually makes sense to use names based on where a virus was first detected, but it's also pretty common and of course diseases named after the people who first found them is even more common. But there's far more background to this than mere reaction against over-sensitivity. Respiratory viruses have a history of being exaggerated and used to push for certain political ideas.
Pretty much all stats I've seen relating to this thing are painfully awful. Here in the UK (in England), care home deaths are not reported in the main death stat etc etc ad nauseam. Scotland reports in its own way as does NI (or not bother) compared to England and Wales. We have minimal testing anyway so who knows what is actually going on?
Anyway, one thing I am absolutely certain of is that whilst the stats in Europe and the US, CA etc are a bit wonky at best they are at least a decent attempt to have a go at reporting the situation.
I think that the CN and other results that are so way off the curve that other nations and territories are reporting are complete fiction and dangerous fiction at that.
edit: Rewrote everything below here to make my probability beliefs more clear.
I think it's extremely likely to be zoonotic and not spread by anyone intentionally. As for the chance it was an unintentional lab escape, it's difficult to assess what the probability of that may be.
I don't think you can just simply assume "virology lab in proximity = likely source of outbreak" without looking at a lot of other factors. Wuhan is a massive city and economic hub, a lot bigger than NYC and the surrounding area. From what I've heard, there's basically every kind of facility and institute one could imagine there.
It could be a coincidence that the lab was there due to the size, density, and economic importance of the area.
Or maybe the lab could've been established there because they knew the area was biologically diverse and close to many species of animals carrying viruses which could jump to humans, and that such animals were commonly hunted and sold for food there. If that's true, then it would be a confounding variable, and one would expect outbreaks to be more likely to occur near the lab regardless of whether they originated in the lab.
There appear to be other potentially credible pieces of evidence which may support the lab escape hypothesis, but I think the whole case needs to be analyzed very robustly and carefully, with all of the possible priors and evidence taken into account.
Why are you so sure it is overwhelmingly likely?
> I think it's probably just a coincidence that there's a virology lab there
Only because you believe it to be purely coincidental of a virology lab being next to the outbreak source location?
I am entirely up for accepting this viewpoint. But, the lack of evidence to suggest an actual source location coupled with the (CCP sourced and pushed narrative of) "overwhelming evidence" that raw bat consumption at the market started it leads me to lean towards a more logical conclusion of a simple lab escape.
Am I being illogical in thinking that a pathogen escape from a virology lab (built in 2017, btw) in the same locale is more likely than a random zoonotic transfer of raw bat consumption (a practice likely being done at the same market for a considerable more amount of time)?
EDIT: change "less likely" to "more likely"
I am not sure why it is so necessary to be so adamant about vigorously dismissing the latter as a possibility.
the lab in wuhan is not just any virology lab though; it's one of only two biosafety level 4 labs in all of china and samples of similar coronaviruses are held and studied there. it may very well be a coincidence; improbable things happen all the time in a world of ~8 billion people. it would be a pretty big one though.
Maybe I shouldn't say overwhelmingly likely for all of those possibilities - a lab escape isn't that unlikely. But there's no evidence of that. If it's true, we indeed may never discover any evidence, but evidence is still required to actually make the claim. As it is now, it's only worthy of speculation.
edit: I edited my original post to make my beliefs more clear.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/chinas-corporate-debt-is-big...
Historically, China has not been above harming their own citizens. There is probably still a substantial "Greater Good" philosophy there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests
But I don't see what was to be gained. Take in mind there are a not insignificant number of people who believe that the US planned 9/11 and Pearl Harbor as well. It just seems like in all these cases (9/11, Pearl Harbor, Coronavirus) to not be in the country's interests at all.
It's not easy to find any Coronavirus-related political narratives for China or any other country yet, because nothing has changed in China politics, but we will wait and see.
I don't really think the leaders would take that risk, considering all the unpredictable side effects, but there certainly was something gained.
1. A heavy dependency on economic growth for legitimacy, threatened by an impending demographic "time bomb" of the elderly:
https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/asia/article/21...
2. Also, a long standing fear of general over-population (one child policy)
3. An absolute fear of people gathering in large groups outside to protest and organise via non-electronic means that can't be monitored
From a Machiavellian perspective a virus that leaves the productive workforce untouched, kills primarily the old/infirm, is unlikely to be reliably vaccinatable, which can be used to justify near-endless waves of house arrest, which motivates neighbours to enforce house arrest against each other and in which the only information about whether there's an active resurgence comes via state controlled media .... doesn't look too bad as a tool for controlling the populace.
Actually I have to admit, I only came to understand just how perfect such a virus profile is for a totalitarian regime whilst writing out this comment. Devil's advocacy can take thoughts in surprising directions. I suppose that's why conspiracy theories play out as they do.
It'd be like trying to deal with overpopulation by setting a computer program to randomly select 20 of your own population centers to nuke, then launching nukes. Then a week later choosing other random cities around the world to nuke. Plus, it'd probably be discovered eventually, and would obviously be the most severe pre-emptive act of war ever known. It would inevitably cause WWIII, leading to much more death and chaos. It's a completely illogical and self-destructive strategy.
Now, if it were a virus that, say, couldn't infect those with a gene found in all Han Chinese people, and which isn't found in any other groups, that would be worthy of some investigation. Or only infected Uyghurs.
I know this is just playing Devil's advocate, but I think the odds are so low as to essentially be zero, unless the CCP has some sort of bizarre motivation that's extremely distant from nearly everyone else's motivation (like trying to end the world and make humans extinct).
The hit is massive but it's a relative hit - China probably ends up doing better than the rest of the world because it didn't really lock down everywhere, primarily just Wuhan. And bear in mind, China's government has a long history of doing extreme things that cripple its own economy. That's why places like South Korea and Taiwan were so far ahead (and still are, China's still a poor country). Communism isn't famous for being good for GDP, after all.
Yes, there's a risk of CCP officials getting it of course. The whole 'escape from the lab' theory doesn't suggest it would have escaped at the right time or in the right way. A truly evil government would wait until there was enough vaccine for officials and other important people but not enough for everyone.
I guess any virus theory would assume it must spread all over the world. Given it's not very deadly that doesn't seem like a big deal if the goal is an excuse to establish lockdowns whenever the government requires one for its own stability. Just announce a sudden uptick in cases (a claim which can only come from official stats) and off you go.
I think the biggest reason why the theory doesn't work is that eventually it'd become suspicious because everyone would have had it, and the co-incidence of sudden outbreak at times of civil unrest might become too obvious for everyone. Unless of course the virus is used as an excuse to control mass gatherings permanently.
Why would you starve tens of millions of people just to test some crackpot theories of agriculture? Doesn’t make sense
Purely as a thought experiment, China's death rate and infection rate seems orders of magnitude less per capita compared to Western countries so maybe it is the perfect bioweapon for the task, minimal self casualties enough for deniability but the other side really takes a beating..
Again this is just a thought experiment and not a serious speculation :)
Yeah. Just a coincidence.
Just pointing out that Wuhan was studying viruses exactly like the one tearing through the world right now, lol.
Yes, and this is important, but this is also already publicly known. It's not providing any new or interesting information. There're still a lot of other variables and factors to take into account here. Statistics aren't so simple.
For example, Wuhan is a huge city, larger than NYC, and an important economic hub. The area has a very high number of people and is population-dense. Tons of scientific institutions are there, as one would generally expect of such a city. So by that alone, the prior for the lab being there could be pretty high.
Also, maybe the lab was created there and bats were studied there in the first place because the general area was known to already have virus-carrying animals like bats? Perhaps even created there because they considered it very likely the particular bats in that particular area could potentially carry human-transferable viruses? And perhaps also because they knew lots of animals in the area, including bats, were regularly hunted and sold for food, further increasing the likelihood that human-infecting viruses may be found in that area?
If that's true, one would expect outbreaks to be more likely to occur in that area whether or not the lab was involved. It'd be reversing cause and effect - maybe a lab is there because the area is a virus hotzone, rather than the area being a virus hotzone because a lab is there. I saw some other evidence saying coronavirus-carrying bats studied at the lab were taken from elsewhere in China, which could alter this assessment, so one would need to look at all of that more thoroughly, but the point is this isn't such a simple association to make.
A lab escape is totally plausible and wouldn't be shocking, but it needs strong arguments, analysis, and evidence.
Neither of these are actually going to happen. The conspiracy nuts probably prefer it that way.
Another commenter mentioned a third party inspecting the lab, though if the lab really were the source I think they'd probably be able to fully cover that up before any inspection took place.
I mean, even if they didn't cover it up but are responsible, an inspection may still find no evidence of it (samples or animals containing a 100% or near-100% match of the virus could add some additional evidence, but also isn't proof by itself).
Hell, maybe their leaders don't even know if their lab was responsible or not. If it did happen, maybe it was a fuckup they were totally unaware of and still have no way of tracing retroactively. In such a scenario, maybe an employee made a mistake, got infected, but became a permanently asymptomatic carrier. Then they could've spread it to someone while out on a walk, or in some other way that would be really hard to reliably go back and track.
I will say, from everything I've seen, Chinese citizens are generally also quite concerned and angry about this whole situation. They've actually forced the government to apologize and backtrack on things quite a bit. If there's a highly convincing and credible leak that the virus escaped from the lab mistakenly, and they knew about it and covered it up, I think there would be outrage and possibly massive protests. Yes, I really think they'd be so outraged that huge numbers of them may do this even with an authoritarian regime that's infamous for killing protestors en masse.
Chinese citizens are pretty much no different from anyone else. They would absolutely want to know if their government is covering up that one of their labs accidentally unleashed the pandemic of the century. They're not necessarily going to buy all the propaganda about it if there's serious, clear evidence that this happened. But as it is now, there's no evidence, so they, and us, have no reason to be outraged about this particular accusation. It's something that should be investigated, but even if "unfounded accusations like these are dangerous" sounds like the words of a worried Chinese government censor, it's also true in this case.
In a murder investigation the police start with those closest related to the victim. If money is missing from a bank vault you start your investigation looking at all those who had access.
When a pandemic starts outside of a lab studying the same kind of virus tearing through the world you start with the lab.
We will likely never know for sure, but it is absolutely reasonable to suspect.
The prevailing theory is more or less ‘someone touched a bat’. Like who? Staff at a lab messing with bats?
We will never be allowed by totalitarian China to collect evidence, so all we have is suspicion. Very justified suspicion.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3049397/bat-...
The flood of attacks came with allegations that the new coronavirus had escaped from her laboratory, which is in the same city, Wuhan, where the outbreak happened.
As the attacks increased, Shi felt forced to respond. On Sunday afternoon she sent a message to all her friends on the social media site WeChat: “I swear with my life, [the virus] has nothing to do with the lab.”
1) "Wuhan is a huge city"
That is true, but there are eight other more populous cities in China.Source: Wikipedia
2) "maybe the lab was created there and bats were studied there in the first place because the general area was known to already have virus-carrying animals like bats"
Not really, the southern provinces of China are much more prone to these outbreaks. Shi Zenghli herself said "“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...
3) "maybe the lab was created there and bats were studied there in the first place because the general area was known to already have virus-carrying animals like bats?!"
I'm afraid not. The bats used in her experiences were mainly from Yunnan province, over 1000kms away from Wuhan (check the same source).
4) "A lab escape is totally plausible and wouldn't be shocking, but it needs strong arguments, analysis, and evidence."Just read the papers authored by Shi Zenghli, they are all available online. Start at this one: Pre-print [ https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.22.914952v1 ]: "We then found a short RdRp region from a bat coronavirus termed BatCoV RaTG13 which we previously detected in Rhinolophus affinis from Yunnan Province showed high sequence identity to nCoV-2019. We did full-length sequencing to this RNA sample. Simplot analysis showed that nCoV-2019 was highly similar throughout the genome to RaTG13 (Fig. 1c), with 96.2% overall genome sequence identity."
Then, pay a visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology website:
"(...) is equipped with a general office, scientific research planning office, organization & personnel department, finance department, graduate student office , with five functional management departments, logistics support center, network information center, public technical service center (including analysis and testing center, experimental animal center, BSL -3 laboratory, isotope room, etc.), Virologica Sinica (English version), Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Virology and other support departments."
SARS-CoV-2 very likely had a laboratorial origin, not from cell cultures, but from the interaction between bats and their lab animal technicians. Considering how easily viruses mutate and recombine to acquire new genes, the RaTG13 coronavirus is very plausibly the origin of SARS-CoV-2, for instance in one or several of these circumstances:
a) Transmission chains in research animal facilities involving different species animals, including - but not necessarily restricted to - bats; b) Bidirectional transmission chains between lab animals and their handlers; c) Transmission of the RaTG13 coronavirus from a lab animal to a susceptible handler, with subsequent mutation and transmission chains within humans.
And this was certainly what Wuhan virologist Shi Zheng-Li, China's foremost coronavirus expert, was thinking when she candidly aknowledged to Scientific American's Jane Qiu, ' "If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?” '.
5) "You're accusing a specific person of involvement in a major pandemic with evidence you admit is flimsy at best"
Actually, this possibility was first raised by two Chinese authors, in February 2020, who uploaded an articl...
I still think the program would have been worthwhile even if it did leak the coronavirus. If China thinks the same, I can see why they would try to prevent a backlash against studying viruses.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-04-02/coronavirus...
Let's dig into this a bit more though. The WIV's location on Google Maps apparently changed after the incident [1]. I don't know if it was a legitimate correction or what, but for the sake of argument let's suppose that the old location was correct. Then the lab is 8.6 miles from the wet market, or ~14 km.
It looks like the population density in that area is around 10,000 people per km^2, so there are around 400k people in a 14km radius, or about 1/3,000 of China's population.
If we assume
Then Bayes' rule gives P(virus from WIV | outbreak in 14km radius) ~= 97%. Even if we reduce our prior to 0.001 (0.1%), the result is still ~75%.So while I have no idea if the virus was a random mutation or what, I strongly suspect that it's somehow connected to the WIV.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/exdvt6/google_...
A pandemic was likely to start somewhere densely populated and first be detected in a city centre. Somewhere densely populated was likely to have a specialised biological research lab. That it was BSL4 instead of BSL3 is evidence but it isn't particularly compelling.
More to the point; it doesn't really make much of a difference whether it came from a Chinese lab or not. Horrible pandemics have happened before and will happen again.
That probability is only 1 in hindsight, where the probability of everything is 1 because it has already happened. In foresight the probability was not 1. And whatever city the virus started in was going to have a BSL-2+ facility studying infectious diseases. I'm probably sitting within 2-4km of a BSL-3 facility studying infectious diseases as I type this, because I am in a city.
The fast that WIV is BSL-4 is significant, but it isn't going to get you to 97%. Even 75% is high. Particularly if WIV is located where it is because there are good local sources of coronaviruses to study.
We could change the model to not have any implicit assumption about location. Then instead of dividing by the population of China, we'd divide by the world population. The result should be the same, assuming we appropriately adjust our prior probability P(virus from WIV) to account for the fact that there are more BSL-4 facilities worldwide than in China.
P(Came from WIV|Global Epidemic starts in Wuhan) ~= 97%
However, P(Started Near a BSL Rated facility|Global Epidemic) is also high (not going to estimate it).
But you have assumed that P(Global Epidemic starts in Wuhan) = 1; which is not true. P(Global Epidemic starts in Wuhan) is probably quite low and they got unlucky because it had to start somewhere. In this context, that assumption is tantamount to flipping a coin then saying "P(Heads) = 1". It isn't, P(Head) = 0.5 but it does happen sometimes.
If we assume P(Global Epidemic starts in Wuhan) = 1 (because it did happen) then P(Came from WIV) is either 0 or 1, because it either did or didn't happen in the same way that the virus started in Wuhan.
The best I can come up with is that probability is very sensitive to what you assume is happening to generate results. In this case, you're assuming that the WIV in particular is important which I suspect links the pandemic implicitly to Wuhan. That isn't a math error, but it is not going to give you a useful result.
This isn't an error of logic so much as an error in scenario construction - it is ignoring possibility that the virus appeared near a random BSL rated facility, which is probably very high since a new virus would likely be detected first in dense urban centers where that sort of infrastructure tends to be. If the virus is likely to appear near a BSL facility, then the fact it appeared near a specific BSL facility shouldn't be leading you to the sort of answer you got.
Also, it isn't accounting for lots of other highly relevant, potentially confounding variables.
And those assumptions make no sense to me at all. Can you write them out much more explicitly?
I think it's totally plausible it was a lab escape, but this analysis seems extremely oversimplified and naive, and I'd even say a misuse and abuse of Bayes' theorem. A full Bayesian analysis is a good idea, though. I'd like to see a much more robust and detailed one from someone.
Maybe I should have been more explicit, but they're not the same. The prior here is the probability that the virus originated from WIV, knowing only that the virus originated in China, and not accounting for the location of the outbreak. I'm trying to calculate an adjusted probability given the outbreak location.
> I don't think you can just try different numbers picked from a hat for that value.
My goal was not to convince anyone that a prior of 1% or 0.1% is appropriate, but rather to suggest a framework in which people can insert their own priors.
And sure, it's a simplified analysis, but it's better than just asserting whatever our intuitions say about coincidences.
Makes more sense, but as you say, there's really no way of knowing what number is appropriate there. I'm not a statistics expert, but I'd say it's inextricably tied up with what you're trying to calculate the probability of in the first place. The whole point is we don't have a prior for WIV being likely to have a virus escape the lab, or a coronavirus, or this specific virus.
I think you'd need to break it down into priors like: probability any Chinese lab has any virus escape, probability this particular lab has any virus escape, probably this particular lab had any virus escape around this time frame, probability this particular lab had a sample of SARS-CoV-2, and a lot more things.
>And sure, it's a simplified analysis, but it's better than just asserting whatever our intuitions say about coincidences.
It certainly can be much better in general, and I'm a huge fan of Bayesianism, but it can also sometimes provide a very misleading impression to others. I'm somewhat tempted to try to do a deep dive into a Bayesian analysis of this, but I'm not really qualified, and it would be a ton of work, and there would be some priors that would be nearly impossible to know (number and density of animals of certain species in the area, what pathogens they may have, what animals and viruses the lab may have collected or been interested in collecting, what and how many animals are hunted in the area, what and how many hunted animals are sold at local wet markets, how such animals are handled or prepared, etc.)
I think to assess this with any serious confidence, we're probably going to need something like leaked/stolen documents or a whistleblower.
But wait a second! How can there both be a 97% chance that the CIA did it, and a 97% chance that WIV made it? The reason is that both of these calculations are total bullshit.
> How can there both be a 97% chance that the CIA did it, and a 97% chance that WIV made it?
There's no contradiction there. If the CIA planted the virus in the WIV, then it's simultaneously true that the CIA planted the virus and that the WIV was the source of the outbreak.
Using your exact logic three times:
- there's a 97% chance the CIA planted it in the seafood market
- there's a 97% chance the CIA planted it in the WIV
- there's a 97% chance the WIV made it
Now it's obvious that something is going wrong here. There is no conceivable way these probability assignments can make sense. But your math was formally correct! What a mystery.
It doesn't make sense to apply the same prior to "the CIA planted COVID-19 in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market", because there are many such markets in China, and only one BSL-4 facility. You might think 1% is a reasonable prior for "the CIA planted COVID-19 in some market in China", but then it wouldn't make sense to adjust the probability based on the outbreak location as I did.
What you're doing is like starting with a prior probability of 10% that a random individual lives in Maui, and 10% that a random individual lives in Kawaii. Then you learn that an individual lives in Hawaii, and you try to adjust both probabilities based on Hawaii's population in relation to the world population. Bayes' theorem gives ~99.8% each for P(Maui | Hawii) and P(Kawaii | Hawaii). The results are obviously impossible, but the argument wasn't structurally wrong, you just started with bad priors. You should have started with P(Kawaii) ~= 0.001%, giving P(Kawaii | Hawaii) ~= 5%, which is correct.
I didn't make an error. The way the conspiracy theory goes in China is that the Military World Games [0] were held in Wuhan just before the outbreak. In other words, they knew the US military was in Wuhan specifically (in fact, right next to the seafood market), just like you know that WIV is in Wuhan specifically. The two conspiracy theories really are equally credible, by which I mean they're both bullshit.
The reason is because of this assumption you made:
Because 1/3000 is so much lower than 1/100, you're essentially assuming from the start that your favorite conspiracy theory (insert "WIV" or "CIA" or whatever else here) is a much better explanation than all other possible explanations combined, because all of them combined can only total up to a likelihood of 1/3000. In other words, you rigged the game to support your conspiracy theory from the start. I was trying to point out how similar rigging can be used to justify any conspiracy theory.0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games
This alternate conspiracy seems way more farfetched to me (why would US intelligence need such any such event to get an agent into China?), but if someone believed that it should be given a non-negligible prior, then they should revise my assumption that
> P(outbreak in 14km radius | virus not from WIV) = 1/3,000
I.e. their revised value should be at least as large as their prior for the alternate conspiracy.
What part of the argument are you disputing exactly? Are you claiming that applying Bayes' theorem in this way is somehow invalid, or are you just taking issue with the assumption quoted above?
I am also very surprised at people throwing probabilistic equivalence between foreign-agent conspiracy, and an accident in a lab. It seems that the latter is so much more probable.
Just to give you an example, this is an active area of research that Raytheon is engaged in: https://www.raytheonintelligenceandspace.com/news/feature/ri...
Whether or not the virus is human engineered or not is orthogonal to whether or not it escaped from the nearby lab.
It is known that the lab was studying these sorts of viruses.
The same lab was responsible for a SARS outbreak in the year following the big SARS outbreak.
Mistakes happen.
EDIT. I was mistaken about the specific lab that was the source of the 2004 SARS outbreak. The lab responsible for that outbreak was in Beijing.
And then there's the behavior of the CCP.
I carry no brief for the CCP. But I do find it difficult to say nothing in the face of what looks like a struggle among a variety of factions, none openly declared, to establish a narrative of responsibility for a world-altering catastrophe, with no closer or more consistent reference to facts of any kind than is judged useful in support of whatever claim is being pushed at the moment - and, most notably, with the only reference to potentially contradictory facts being to claim either that they're unfounded, or presented with ulterior intent, or both.
Last time I saw something play out that looked like this, it followed the World Trade Center attack and resulted in the Iraq war. That was a catastrophe from both a humanitarian perspective and one concerned with enhancing the geopolitical power of the US - but it was, at least, relatively minor in both respects. This one, if it plays out similarly, seems likely to be much worse.
And aside from all of that, what the hell, is your time of no value? If you're going to peddle what may very well prove to be war propaganda, at least you should have the self-respect to refuse to do it for free.
To compare this to Iraq is absolutely preposterous and fallacious. The two have absolutely nothing in common and nobody here is suggesting we invade China over it but sure as hell they ought to be held accountable.
"Held accountable" is a rhetorical phrase that was much used then, too. (2) So it's an interesting thing to find in an argument that this situation and that one are totally unalike.
(1) https://www.wypr.org/sites/wyprmain/files/styles/x_large/pub...
(2) https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/28/iraq.brianwhit...
Your theory also doesn't along with the evidence, that the first known cases had a significant population with no known connection to the market, 27 with connection, 14 without; and that other than the market there are no other obvious connections. If it were just some hawker you'd expect a much stronger connection to the market. And over a longer period.
Do we know that bats are the only (or only likely) nonhuman host? Was there a significant population of cases with a known connection to the lab?
I'd believe this is a story of grave incompetence, and brazen managerial failure at a biolab. The intern gets bled on, bitten, or just breathed on by the test bat, gets a bit sick but comes into work anyway. After it seems to pass, she heads down to the market on the way home, and spreads the disease to one of the live animals, including humans, in the vicinity.
Boom, outbreak.
Could be as simple as that, with it being a pretty tenacious virus.
The proven conspiracy follows, when authorities up to the top sought to cover up this embarrassment, then to make sure that the damage was global so that they wouldn't be at a relative disadvantage, and could maybe start claiming that it came from somewhere else (as they are now doing).
https://twitter.com/dystopia992/status/1220735100192620546
It is neither fiction, nor dangerous to speculate that this outbreak started at the Wuhan lab.
It may not have been engineered.
However, the bats are brought to Wuhan lab from hundreds of miles away to be studied. It is also very possible that a bat carrying the natural virus being studied at the lab escapes or infected a person.
That the virus originated zoonotically does not precude a lab accident + leak theory of origin in fact we know that one of the labs actively experimenting on bats there was within half a kilometer of the market. You combine that with a significant fraction of the first known hospitalized cases having no direct connection to the market it should be obvious that the source is unlikely to have been the market itself but rather something close to it with the market just acting as a regional landmark or amplifier.
It's like you walk past a bunch of kids playing with fireworks by the trail and an hour later the forest is on fire having started in the same area as you saw the kids. You obviously can't know for sure it was them without more evidence, it could have been a cigarette butt from a carless smoker, but you be a fool to think it that just because there was no accelleant involved that it couldn't have been the kids.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18224451-700-chinas-s...
The former is entirely dramatic, while the latter is neither dramatic, unreasonable, illogical, or "conspiracy".
https://old.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/fnvvh8/some_th...
Keep in mind that the Chinese government doesn't have to be pursuing a centralized disinformation campaign for it to occur. It would appear that at least a decent amount of the misinformation is occurring because local officials are covering up the extent of the damage from the party for fear of retaliation. In this case, its entirely plausible for large-scale cover-up to be occuring in China, without the national CCP driving it or even being aware of the extent that its occuring.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/us/politics/cia-coronavir...
2. I'll grant that that's possibility in the exact same sense in which I grant the centralized cover-up theory to be a possibility, and in which I grant both the lab creation and the lab accident origin theories to be possibilities. But I'm not interested in possibilities. What I'm interested in is positive evidence supportive of this or that theory.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of stories produced by national security forces, but there are far more reasons to be skeptical of stories being produced by the CCP. If it's a question of who to believe, I don't know why one would pick the Chinese government.
> 2. I'll grant that that's possibility in the exact same sense in which I grant the centralized cover-up theory to be a possibility, and in which I grant both the lab creation and the lab accident origin theories to be possibilities. But I'm not interested in possibilities. What I'm interested in is positive evidence supportive of this or that theory.
I just gave you positive evidence, and you dismissed it as propaganda. CIA sources are saying that is exactly what is happening on the ground. But if you need more, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence coming from non-intelligence sources. About a month ago on the "This Week in Virology" podcast, one of the visiting virologists who is an expert on coronaviruses said that China had come out and said they won't be conducting any widespread serology testing, which would be necessary for determining how widespread the outbreak got. He said the only reason for not doing this is if you didn't want to know the answer. The implication being that China knows its much worse than has been reported and they don't want the world or their own people to know, as it challenges the narrative of a competent response. And secondly, its been widely reported that China is not including asymptomatic patients in their infection counts, which is absurd, given that we now know they make up anywhere from 20-50% of infections, and are capable of spreading the disease. Again, the only reason for this is if you want to make it seem like there are fewer infections than there actually are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22881922
We know that the lab was adding functionality to bat coronaviruses, making them able to infect human cells. This can be done without gene editing technology. We've been doing that in the opposite direction for decades, passing viruses through non-human cells in order to make weakened ones for live-virus vaccines. To make a virus worse for humans, simply pass it through human cells. This is what the lab was doing.
It's extremely hazardous research. The USA banned it.
If you do that and then you have a lab accident, your level of culpability is at neither extreme. You didn't gene-edit the virus and release it on purpose. You didn't just get infected while studying bats.
Source?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22875438
While it's true that Chinese scientists were investigating SARS, the above assertion is not supported by the evidence provided.
My best guess of where the confusion came from was the insertion of a temporary mammalian plasmid into HeLa cells in order to produce bat ACE2 for study.
While this could potentially be viewed as adding functionality to human cells in order to make them susceptible to bat coronaviruses, the above assertion doesn't follow. (and unfortunately we have no ability to genome-edit humans)
Source?
He believes this scientist was the first person infected, who it spread from.
With Wuhan's population it would not surprise me if there are millions who live or work closer to the institute than the market.
And that Wuhan CDC has BSL-3 labs, although the Daily Mail passes on the entirely plausible rumor that bat coronavirus research was being done at both locations in BSL-2 labs. Lots of scientists all over the world do research in labs that aren't really at the level that should be used for what they're doing, the higher the level, the more obnoxious and difficult it is to do anything. A security/convenience trade-off we should be all to familiar with.
THE documentary movie on the origin of CCP virus(Coronavirus, an investigative report with scientists interviewed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMJ0EmMfb3U&t=
It's unlikely that we'll ever really know. RNA sequences don't come with the signatures of their authors.
But, every time you see someone saying that the lab theory has been "debunked", you should immediately think fake news. There is no way to rule this theory out--rather, it's balance of probabilities.
"That the virus originated zoonotically does not precude a lab accident + leak theory of origin"
Really? A lab spends some time analysing whether a virus is a natural progression from another virus via natural selection instead of deliberate manipulation. They write it up etc. At least spell "preclude" correctly in a rebuttal.
Alternatively they could be accurately reporting results but just systematically not testing infected people for one reason or another.
It’s not clear to me that they are totally wrong though they seem quite unbelievable. I think I don’t want to think about that question as I’m not sure the answer would be much use to me.
One thing that is certain is that we can expect to see a lot of different people trying to set/change the narrative of how this outbreak happened. Any state that instituted a large lockdown will want people to believe that it was worth it and that it was necessary. One might ask why there isn’t much talk of Taiwan and Hong Kong where the outbreak was controlled without oppressive lockdowns (before cases from external arrivals became a big problem). One reason could be Chinese politics about those places.
In the US it seems plausible that being able to rewrite the history of the outbreak in the first few months of the year will be very important to Trump’s re-election. It also seems plausible that it won’t matter that much; his approval ratings are basically their highest ever.
I think some leaders will also want to move the blame away from themselves. A lab-escape story would be very useful to those people as it gives some people to directly blame (whoever let it out of the lab), rather than blaming the failures of leadership during a natural disaster.
Only the conspiracy theorists claim it was an "engineered bio-weapon". The most likely explanation is that it just escaped involuntarily from the lab. Why from the lab, and not the wet market?
- that lab was specifically researching coronavirii in bats
- there are reports researchers there got splashed with blood and fecies of bats [0]
- the researcher in question (Huang Yan Lin), the likely patient zero, disappeared without a trace, both physically and online [0]
- the horseshoe bats that most likely hosted the virus weren't even sold on the wuhan wet market, according to several eye witnesses
- there are no known horseshoe bat colonies in a 900km diameter around wuhan
- the lab is just 280 meters away from the wet market, so the market was a very convenient scape goat
And why was COVID-19 not engineered? Simple, it is not necessary to explain the pandemic potential. All of this is not new and there were warnings about exactly this happening:
- it was long known that horseshoe bats were a dangerous reservoir of SARS-CoV like virii [1]
- there were US simulations held on how to respond to a respiratory virus with chinese origin in 2019 [2]
- there were WHO warnings on how respiratory RNA virii are prime candidates for the next pandemic [3]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU (starts at ~3:00) [1] https://twitter.com/_benoux_/status/1245381552672059392?s=20 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Contagion [3] https://twitter.com/bmiloy/status/1238541860542377984/photo/...
- there are no known horseshoe bat colonies in a 900km diameter around wuhan
If you have sources for these, you will have convinced me that it's more likely that it originated from the lab than the market.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https:/www.resear...
I see that DNA changes are possible through CRISPR.
But it seems changing RNA could be possible if you've extracted similar virus from some animal then you replicated virus in a culture, after that you wait for the virus to mutate on its own or create condition to increase mutation rate for example radiation etc...
So the biological footprint being similar to the one which exists in nature doesn't really remove the possibility that the virus might be man made.
Is it natural if you put a bat coronavirus and a pangolin coronavirus in a petri dish? Because the receptor proteins are similar to a pangolin coronavirus based on the above study.
I fully support crushing them under the heal of our boot.
As a Chinese living in US. Please be mindful that a lot of people do not distinguish China the government, and the Chinese people, living in or outside of China mainland.
This type of news, are of course worth discussion.
But meanwhile, please refrain from politicizing beyond the facts. Think about not letting what a few political figures have started, i.e., politicizing the event without considering the impact, into actual hate crimes targeted at minority groups.
Thanks!
We’ve had 20k American deaths so far, I think we get to discuss this.
Please be mindful that it’s not just Chinese or Asians being targeted, and that the racism foreigners are experiencing in China right now is far worse than what the Chinese are experiencing elsewhere.
http://shanghaiist.com/2020/04/13/even-mcdonalds-is-now-turn...
If we're to shift the conversation towards hate crimes targeted at minority groups, I think it's fair to consider hate crimes perpetrated by government mentioned in the article, crimes which are perpetrated for much the same reasons as the suppression of coronavirus research.
This is from the country which forces foreign companies to remove flags of countries it likes to bully (Taiwan, Japan) from their products. It's not inconceivable that they are filtering the narrative about themselves in something actually serious, such as this pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#Co...
If you follow r/WatchRedditDie then you can see this anti-China censorship on a daily basis.. for instance, this is on the frontpage right now: https://i.imgur.com/RuHpkC5_d.jpg
The line between criticizing the CPC and full blown sino-phobia isn't thin at all, it has always remained pretty thick. It is the people crossing the line that have changed.
> “Yeah but you can’t trust any of those numbers coming out of China. It’s gotta be way worse than they’re letting on”
talk is cheap, be the man you're claiming to be please, go out, mingle, get close to lots of your relatives. and remember, the government are telling you to wash your hands, so don't do that. show them how you're not gonna take any crap from the elites.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You're a good contributor otherwise, so I don't want to ban you, but at some point it becomes unfair to all the other users we've banned for less.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7937943/amp/Air-pas...
武汉天河国际机场于23日13时关闭离港。航空公司方面，国泰港龙航空、春秋航空、吉祥航空、中国南方航空、中国东方航空、全日空等航司取消或调整多班来往武汉的班机[29]。1月24日天河机场本场仅允许国际航班进港并当日空返，另有两架运送救灾物资的顺丰航空货机抵港[30]
Note that the international airline is allowed in but leave empty.
天河机场自4月8日起恢复运营，暂不恢复国际航班和北京往返航班[58]
Until April 8, international airlines are still not restored, i.e. all airlines are stopped during lockdown.
Source: Wikipedia https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E5%86%A0%E7%8B%80%E7%97%8...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7937943/amp/Air-pas...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Here's the list of agents that are better than SARS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioterrorism#Types_of_agents
Edit:
So far I'm dissapointed with the comments to my post. I can't tell if some of these are trolls or not, but generally they don't add much to the discussion.
These hypotheticals are specious, sure they sound like lucid idea but with even a slight amount of criticism they'd fall apart. I'm going to posit some ideas here. Why didn't China weaponize H5N1? It has a higher Ro and CFR. It is commonly found throughout Southeast Asia and is what most pandemic experts thought was going to be the next pandemic. How would a virus get through a biosafety level 4 lab? If anyone else here has experience in biosafety labs I'm all ears, but I'd be shocked that a virus would be able to escape from something like that; not that mistakes don't happen but this isn't exactly a durable pathogen. Then we have the issue of every single advanced military in the world wouldn't even touch The Coronavirus family. I'm going to go ahead and assume that the people who are making bioweapons are good at their jobs and can recognize what makes a good bioweapon and what doesn't. Finally, there are just so many better options for bioweapons. The US invests massive amounts in making precision weapons because when you're a military power hitting a precise location is what's key. COVID is like a cluster bomb that has 90% duds.
But after all of this, instead of random people on the internet, we have experts who have time and time again said that COVID is not a bioweapon:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/01/29/experts-debu...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9?fbclid=IwA...
https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-not-human-made-in-la...
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/18/politics/coronavirus-cott...
https://www.ft.com/content/a6392ee6-4ec6-11ea-95a0-43d18ec71...
It's ridiculous that people think laowhy and serpenza are credible China-watchers. They're travel bloggers and now clickbait video generators. The amount of people who get all their information and opinions on China from these two is worryingly staggering. There is an incredible amount of subject matter experts that specialize and operate in China. Literal billions are poured into NGOs, think tanks and other intelligence sources with boots on the ground. Granted much of it is not great, but they're infinitely more reliable than a couple youtubers who got kicked out of China and have no professional prospects outside of click bait conspiracy theory.
Also notice how he has recent videos about China killing his dreams, his move out of China and his wife divorcing him. Do you think that would cloud his judgement? Why isn't there a video on netizens work on the US engineered virus conspiracy theory? Youtubers =/= credible sources.
This lab accident, on the contrary, is NOT unsubstantiated claims, and acting as it is some frivolous theory is unfair at best. I, while perhaps inducing worryingly staggering feelings to you, looked at the sources and concluded that the info was credible. So it has nothing to with the occupation of laowhy86.
You are appealing to the authority of billions poured into NGO, as if corruption never happens, as if money magically makes people competent, as if organizations never suffered from political bloat. As if for example there was no video proof that the WHO was ignoring Taiwan input for policial reasons – a country that has better epidemics statistics than the majority of us–. Are we also all stupid to entertain the idea that, when a WHO leader does not hear the journalist on skype exactly when she asks a question about taiwan, this is just a bad stratagem to elude the question?
Please.
laowhy86, bitter expats doing China-bad for clicks is well trodden career pivot. You can see clearly in his youtube timeline when he transitioned from prosaic China musings to anti-CPC bashing after he left the country. His authority or lack of absolutely has to do with the fact that he's a youtube travel blogger and not subject matter expert - again of which there are many - who has not endorsed such theories. I'm not appealing to a singular authority, but a community of China watchers where conspiracy theories are dismissed as conspiracy theories. Unless your conspiracy is that they all got bought off - including anti-China institutions - and are collectively incompetent. Or alternatively, a youtuber is endorsing conspiracy for clicks. Which is more likely? Which is the kind of thing a stupid person would entertain?
Re: Taiwan, they released the alleged emails that they had information on H2H on Dec31st. Never mind there's no way they would be able to verify such information since they only had their first imported case on Jan21st. There's Taiwanese interviews in early Jan where their own CDC deputy director stated it was impossible to verify H2H until new cases happen after Jan14th. Their Dec31st email turned out to be the exact correspondence provided by Wuhan medical officials to the WHO and other medical community prior - they are treating novel corona patients in isolation wards which is standard practice. AKA it was nothing. Also elevating Taiwan was part of a coordinated US propaganda push to undermine the WHO including that interview (by HK news no less) that attempts to discredit the WHO via ambush questions that's outside of the organization's let alone a scientist's purview. Identifying propaganda and manufactured consent is media literacy 101. Believing your countries propaganda over a competing narrative is understandable, but believing a youtuber over general consensus of experts is less so. That's Alex Jones territory.
Have you spent much time in China? Have you lived there, or is your knowledge all second hand?
The point is they are not only not experts in infectious disease, they're not experts in any particular Chinese subjects at all. Living in China is not itself a remarkable qualification. If I were to ask people to find me two youtubers from China who moved to US to do travel blogs that I should base most of my opinions about China on, it would be an impossibly asinine exercise because US is a large, complex country. So is China. That's why you have thousands of institutions and entire industries of specific experts trying to grasp the larger realities. This industry exists for Chinese affairs, yet a surprising amount of people insist on posting generalized, personal reflections of a couple youtubers instead of relevant subject matters for each respective topics which, again exists.
You can say he is bitter or a nutcase, it does not make it so.
About the video, so far you are only able to say that laowhy86 is a youtuber, and therefore he wrong.
So far I've said that the documents linked in the video description corroborates the theory, making this theory credible.
How long will you continue to shoot the messengers instead of listening to what is said? Apart saying gratuitously that youtubers cannot possibily be right, you have not addressed the content of the video. I guess when you can't criticize the content, criticize the form, it is easier.
I will stop now, because I believe you are not writing in good faith. If a youtuber's documented demonstration does not deserve anyone's consideration by nature, because he is necessarily wrong, then certainly by your logic, as stranger writing on hacker news, you don't either deserve anyone's consideration, and you are wrong too.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3050872/chin...
She’s still missing and her whereabouts are unknown
"The line between disorder and order lies in logistics." -Sun Tzu
COVID has been a logistical nightmare. For everyone.
For the record, no--I don't believe anybody 'engineered' it [or has used it]* as a bioweapon.
*Edit for clarity
however, you'll note by the downvotes no one here wants to be reasonable. it's a trend i've noticed on hacker news. this site claims a lot to be unbiased and evidence based, but i have noticed when it comes to china, all reason floats out the window. it's a dangerous effect because there are actual problems that are exacerbated and confused by propaganda and unfounded claims from the other side, which also hides problems with the other side. it's just not good for anyone and creates a cess pool of misinformation.
i think it's simply because a lot of americans are on hacker news, and there is a gross level of anti-chinese sentiment in the united states in general, probably more-so from educated people.
They're currently kicking black people out in the streets out of their homes and giving them no where to go because of a ban on foreigners, even though those foreigners never left the country during the pandemic and are no more risk at spreading the disease than anyone else. It's racism, pure and simple.
https://www.france24.com/en/20200411-if-you-re-black-you-can...
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3079497/us-w...
I mean, many of the things we're seeing in China currently are the kind of things that were happening in Germany in the 30's that were warning signs.
Just calling out things that are well documented in the news is enough to get down voted mysteriously, maybe the wǔmáo's have become aware of this community.
Also in the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): please don't post insinuations about astroturfing to HN. The data is clear that this is almost always in the eye of the beholder, i.e. people imagine it as an explanation for things they dislike, and they're far more likely to notice those than other things. For a great deal of past explanation, see these links:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I didn't realize such selectively enforced standards were a thing? Should I report any post that criticizes government actions for nationalism?
So is criticizing a any government's actions in an comment section about an article criticizing the same government is nationalism? I didn't realize being in support of common human rights was a controversial ideology. I apologize for my actions and welcome the new mod community standards.
I hope this statement will please current and potential YCombinator investors.
Users who post thoughtful, substantive comments on either side of this issue don't run into problems with moderation. The point is that this is a site for curious conversation, not ideological or political battle. We can't have both, for the same reason you can't have a tank battle in a flower garden.
I have zero idea what will please Y Combinator's investors. From my point of view, the only thing that matters is keeping Hacker News interesting, because that's what keeps the community thriving, and that's what's most in YC's interests. I realize that people have reason to be skeptical about such claims, but being able to run HN that way is why I'm willing to do this job. Most other places on the internet, this wouldn't be possible, because the site would need to make money directly (e.g. by selling ads) or to push growth at all costs, either of which would kill HN as we know it.
HN is in a sweet spot that way, compared to how other sites of its kind need to operate. The reason is mostly a historical accident of how HN and YC grew up together, plus the fact that YC's business benefits more from HN being the way it is than it would from a different sort of community. The aren't many businesses in whose interest it would be to fund a site like this.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Someone conflated that with race, which is holding an ethno-nationalist view of China, where as I differentiate between the government and the people. I've actually been to China, as such I have a personal investment in the place, and met a few of the minority groups and are aware its not one homogeneous culture, so to think all Chinese are the same or even the same race to me is ignorance. I called that out.
When I linked to several articles pointing out the hypocrisy of the CCP position, which was being echoed by who I was replying to, that all criticism is due to racism which is a propaganda position (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/29/chinas-latest-tactic-call-am...) and no sensible person would use that as a defense. So its not a thoughtful, or substantive comment to say all criticism is anti-Chinese or bigoted. But you're doing this one sided enforcement of rules?
I follow the stuff in China close to the ground, I'm hyper aware of the tactics used to counter criticism. I got turned on to the people to get on the ground reporting right here on Hacker News. To see moderators allowing shallow "any criticism of China is racism" but harp on me for pointing out obvious human rights violations, well it does call in to question the bias here.
So I ask you, why call out my statement, and not the person making blanket statements that people are anti-Chinese (as in race) when calling levying criticism. I fail to see that as thoughtful or substantive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
That said, it’s one possibility among others, though the animal reservoir theory is the most viable and accepted at this time.
for example, this article is a great read: http://nautil.us/issue/83/intelligence/the-man-who-saw-the-p...
people making baseless claims about the virus, which is happening everywhere and in particular is coming from the u.s., will only seek to harm things for everyone in the long run. it will cause governments to clam up (already happening) and has politicized the virus. now, experts' opinions and life work, like that found in the above article, will continue to be ignored in the chaos that is ensuing.
if the experts on zoonotic viruses are to be believed (why wouldn't you?), then it is clear that there are systematic problems that are leading to the increasing crossover of these zoonotic viruses. by politicizing the virus and hyper focusing on its political enemy, the u.s. is making this thing much, much, much worse (in addition to increasing the current spread within its own borders) and will lessen the impact on preventing future outbreaks. we as a species already struggle to address the issues that cause these outbreaks (overpopulation, encroachment on habitats, socioeconomic issues, etc.), and these actions of rumors and associated behavior, found on this site even, will bury the actual problems, turning everything into a childish and chaotic argument.
Disclaimer: I don’t believe this, just playing devil’s advocate
Disclaimer: Also don't believe this, just playing along.
everybody keeps saying this, but just stop. it doesn't help and it confuses. all you do is bolster people who skip over your "disclaimer", even if you actually do believe your disclaimer.
note that i don't agree with your definition.
> Biological warfare [...] is the use of biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, insects, and fungi with the intent to kill or incapacitate humans, animals or plants as an act of war.
Knowingly allowing the spread of a highly contagious, lethal virus fits the definition. The only point of contention is whether the party's actions were due to incompetence or malice.
and if you are so up in arms about this, what are you going to do about the u.s. waging biological warfare on its own people?
Honestly I’m not sure how Occam’s razor doesn’t suggest that it was released accidentally from one of the only labs in the world studying coronaviruses in bats, given that the lab was within 10km of patient zero.
Also, experts have not reached nearly the level of consensus regarding the origin of the virus as your comment implies. [1] While consensus seems to be against bioweapon, there is much debate as to whether the origin was lab accident or “wet market” as claimed by CCP.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/sars/media/2004-05-19.html
[1] https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/experts-know-the-new-coronav...
How often does this happen because someone was doing research on Coronavirus and it accidently got released from a biosafety level 4 lab? Not often. How often do novel Coronaviruses spread from bats to something to humans? All the damn time.
On the other hand, prefaced with the fact that it isn't one, or was still under research if that, bio-weapons are just as effective when they disrupt an economy and infrastructure and a virus targets the elders or those at an age of those most likely in leadership positions. So it doesn't have to kill military aged people to be effective. Again, this is likely not one, but the disruption its caused and economic hit its taken is in line with how modern wars are fought. They only need to overwhelm medical facilities, its like the case with mines, they don't kill so much as maim, because maiming soldiers puts a greater strain on an army to keep them alive, transport them and treat them (even though they'll never return to the battle field), then if they were simply dead. You kill a soldier, they're down a man, you maim/disable a soldier, they're down a man, two other soldiers needed to evacuate him, they're down transport needed to get them back to a medical center, and several medical personnel needed to treat them and get them stable. You want to cripple an army, you don't kill it, you make it so the soldiers barely survive and need assistance, or you take out their resources, this virus does a good job of both.
A virus only has to severely disable economies and create a strain on resources to be effective at crippling an opponent, if its not especially deadly, it can spread further, if it puts enough soldiers in hospital beds, especially senior leadership, its effective. Even if this isn't a bio-weapon, it actually would be pretty effective as one assuming you already had the vaccine, which no one does.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU
Not even close, not even a little close. With proper containment COVID-19 is easily contained. This isn't that great, especially when you look at countries who are handling this well: Taiwan. Bioweapons are notorious for being quick and lethal. As per the CDC on bioterrorism:
>When the potential agents are reviewed for these characteristics, anthrax and smallpox are the two with greatest potential for mass casualties and civil disruption
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/5/4/99-0411_article#r6
If you give me a normal amount of resources and competent public health professionals COVID-19 does not scare me. It's CFR is below 1% with adequate protocols (Standard, honestly).
China is so interconnected to the rest of the world, especially the US, the worst thing for them is to shut down both their and the US economy. Why would they test a weapon that disrupts the entire globe when you could have a weapon that has a narrow focus of a small region?
You didn't read a thing I said did you? You're calling whats happening now, easy? Did you even read what happened to the naval ship that got infected?
This has had pretty disastrous effects for the economy of the entire world, there are food riots overseas right now, the unemployment rate is skyrocketing. The social disorder alone, cops are arresting doctors providing supplies to the homeless, yelling at women not wearing a mask while walking their dog, arresting people playing in a park near no one else, by world leaders being put in the ICU. Get your head out of the sand.
None of this is easily contained. Ebola is easily contained, this you don't even know you're sick when you're walking around spreading it for days.
>If you give me a normal amount of resources and competent public health professionals COVID-19 does not scare me.
Weirdly, no countries seem to have this, since they're all getting ravaged, at least those with high population density. The only country's with high population density not getting ravaged is Taiwan, which has an extreme mistrust of the CCP, and speak/read Chinese so had intelligence from the Chinese Internet on what was really going on far before most country's public did. They reacted sooner by shutting down travel, and sounded the alarm bells, but the WHO didn't listen to them, because they were too busy pretending they weren't a country.
I'm saying that the response to COVID-19 is easy. You know why? Because all it would have taken is surveillance and proper quarantine. I'm going to say it again: if you give me a normal amount of resources and a normal team I would be able to manage anyone with COVID with reasonable success. Now it starts getting tricky with any serious comorbidities and luckily we have nephrology to manage electrolytes. Shutting this thing down is not challenging. What's challenging is when you have incompetent leadership that ignores expert advice.
It's not a tinfoil hat worthy context. We know for a fact that they're doing that.
China ordered a book written [1] espousing the glorious success of Xi and the CPC in vanquishing the virus, before the world even knew for certain it was tranmissable person to person and just how dangerous it was.
They invented an outlandish narrative about the US military attacking Wuhan with the virus and then freely spread that 5G-is-the-cause level of insanity all over Twitter (with the open blessing of Twitter, by way of their refusal to remove the disinformation campaign).
[1] https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202002/26/WS5e56238da3101282...
Reddit is having a lot more posts about America just because there's a lot going on in the country right now. In late February there were tons of posts about Italy. In early February there were tons of posts about China. The posts about China that got to the top then were all negative, and they're still all negative today, they just make up a smaller fraction because there's more going on elsewhere.
https://i.imgur.com/dwEpRnb.png
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/325144/reddit-global-act...
take a step back and notice the level of anti-chinese posts and comments on hacker news and wonder if you yourself are being fed propaganda.
It's been my experience that everyone who prefaces their comment with statements like this usually are lying. "I'm not X, but ... "
> along with a streak of random US-critical posts ("What is the worst thing the US government has done?") being massively updated on Reddit
Anyone can go on reddit and see the very opposite. This is what I don't understand about propagandists, why lie about something that can be verifiably proven false? Go on worldnews or any major subreddit, what are the ratio of pro and anti-chinese submissions? What are the ratio of pro and anti-china comments? The exact opposite of what you claim.
> This is from the country which forces foreign companies to remove flags of countries it likes to bully (Taiwan, Japan) from their products.
You obviously know why they do for taiwan. As for japan, lets see some examples. If "removing" flags is called "bullying", then your definition of "bullying" is rather naive.
> It's not inconceivable, and certainly probable, that they are filtering the narrative about themselves in something actually serious, such as this pandemic.
No shit. Just like you are filtering a narrative. Just like the US government is filtering a narrative. We are involved in a major trade war.
You are doing the exact same thing you claim "china" is doing.
To bully them?
https://www.google.com/search?q=Japan+and+Taiwan+flags+remov...
1 Difference in Receptor Usage between Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Coronavirus and SARS-Like Coronavirus of Bat Origin http://archive.is/M9IRO
2 Officials punished for SARS virus leakhttps://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-07/02/content...
3 Chinese researcher escorted from infectious disease lab amid RCMP investigation https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/chinese-researcher-e...
4 https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus-l...
5 https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-lab...
6 https://www.nature.com/news/inside-the-chinese-lab-poised-to...
I'm not trying to defend the CCP here, but just trying to say that maybe Reddit isn't a CCP propaganda weapon. I'm sure there's some influence, but I see these arguments go quite far.
Also all available research doesn't suggest CPC has foreign manipulation toolset on western social media, except last years twitter "disclosure" about state level manipulation on HK without any explanation and attribution. Turned out to be ~200 twitter accounts, which... ok could be from Chinese state or bored PRC nationalist script kiddies.
Also 50c doesn't operate abroad, they don't engage in argumentation, only lazy platitudes about positive Chinese news items - they don't draw attention to negative news. All the shill accusations doesn't account for this fact that 50c glorifies instead of defends China. The latter pattern requires too much effort. Official 50c are mostly state employees trying to meet msg quotas on domestic social media. Also China would not waste English proficiency trolling on reddit, English speakers with proficiency to trick western audiences are making bank working in industry and not the state. Chinese foreign propaganda MO is pouring a few hundred billion buying ad space in foreign news papers. And lately they've been growing twitter and other microblogging platform accounts for their diplomats to troll US. See US bioengineered weapon.
E: Just to add the parsimonious explanation about the amount of pro-Chinese perspectives is that the vast amount of Chinese diaspora is engaging online discussions since they are witnessing the effects of western propaganda targetting their country. There is a ridiculous amount of biased reporting out there. Increased sinophobia etc, it's in their interests to clear the air which occasionally leads to doubling down on nationalist rhetoric.
There was a huge debate back in late Jan. early Feb. on Chinese social network about a paper didn't get peer-reviewed spreading all over places with misinformation. Hence the Fudan University post in Chinese was to tighten the publish review, and nothing about delaying the research.
This guardian news only showed the story without context, which is pretty misleading.
No freedom of press and academic research and human rights, china pose a danger to humanity. And regards to they might kill themselves, noticed that they have kill 30m+ in Great Leap Forward. Not even one Memorial Or Day is in. How many 30m we have outside china.
Wuhan virus is the 2nd wake up call. Hard to wake up people who pretend to sleep. I would try again WakeUp.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gdd7dtDaYmM
There was a huge debate back in late Jan. early Feb. on Chinese social network about a paper didn't get peer-reviewed spreading all over places with misinformation. Hence the Fudan University post in Chinese was to tighten the publish review, and nothing about delaying the research.
This guardian news only showed the story without context, which is pretty misleading.
According to my bayesian analysis, I believe that the most likely cause of this virus is a wet-market infection, followed by a slip-up at a lab, with—by high margin, in very very last place at, say, 1% probability, that this was concocted by a nefarious player (the CCP being a favorite candidate). The conspiracy theorists (my Facebook friends especially) seem to rank the likelihood of this list in reverse (i.e. clearly this was concocted by the chinese government). With how secretive and disingenuous the CCP is even on a good day, it's easy to see why their argument has a few credence points (like any good conspiracy).
But I can't reconcile that there's not much for the CCP to gain on the world stage by releasing this thing. The US was already so politically tumultuous, and the 2016 Russian disinformation campaign was so much more effective at breaking our democracy apart, with the added benefit of not sending our economy into a global recession as a byproduct. What has the CCP gained here? Xi's power as a leader has only weakened, and their position as the world's factory is now only slipping faster.
So this is kind of like 9/11 to me. The people who would be the most likely to profiteer off a tragedy like this would have not in any capacity been able to pull it off, and the ones who are powerful or otherwise sophisticated enough to pull it off don't have much incentive to anyways. So that's why bayesian reasoning leads me to believe that yes, we know these viruses jump from animals to humans from time to time, and this seems to likely be one of those instances. What am I missing?
Is causing the social, political, and economic collapse of an arch rival nation state not the natural perogative of empire scale nations?
To clarify, I don't think COVID19 was a Chinese conspiracy, just making note of historically self evident incentive structures that others seem naively oblivious to.
Conspiracy theories that end up actually being true generally have one thing in common: they have wide consensus as to what the actual facts of the case really are. You could sort of make this argument for the conspiracy that Jeffrey Epstein's death was not a suicide but rather a cover up. In that theory, most theorists posit that high powered individuals whom Epstein had dirt on arranged to have him killed before he could get to trial and expose them. That's actually not a completely crazy theory, in the realm of how crazy some conspiracies really get.
Whereas, the 9/11 truthers cannot internally reconcile why the US government may have flown our own planes into the trade towers. No good singular theory emerges probably because not one exists. And of the theories that are floated, they all end up being conflicting and self-cancelling. I think time will prove that the same is true for COVID19.
It's business as usual for China. As long as they keep on making those affordable goods, other countries will consume.
If Apple moves off their entire production from China to US, and still is competitive, then I'll be a believer.