I saw posts on Reddit months ago pointing out the virology labs in wuhan studying this exact virus and wasn’t it a coincidence. I am actually quite surprised that US scientists that twice visited the lab sent strongly worded official communications back to the US government stating concerns over safety and the competence of the personnel working at the lab and saying that they needed more assistance.
Now that China has disappeared people who were speaking out, shut down the Shanghai lab that originally published the virus’ genome, and is back to tightly controlling information out of the country, I doubt we’ll ever know for sure if this pandemic was a preventable accident. Either way it is a major black eye for China.
For what it's worth, I saw posts on Reddit saying the opposite: that Bat coronaviruses are BSL-2, not BSL-4, and so it wouldn't make sense to restrict yourself as a researcher by studying them in the most stringent lab.
(I'm not saying this to argue that the lab escape theory is wrong, just to argue that Reddit posts are difficult to appraise.)
Research papers, posted in comments on HN just days ago, show that the lab made hybrid bat-human cells in which to grow viruses. This was BSL-4. Both HIV and coronaviruses were grown. The idea was to breed the viruses until they would replicate well in ordinary human cells.
That's some diabolical research.
To put it in DnD terms: The researchers have high intelligence, low wisdom, and probably low dexterity.
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:
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:
One summary of the overall findings of those articles is something like: there sure are a lot of SARS-like bat coronaviruses in natural reservoirs, and a bunch of them are alarmingly able to spread well in human tissue too, either unmodified or with tiny edits. That doesn't rule out the theory that a lab escape was the source, but it also suggests another SARS-like zoonotic transfer was pretty much a ticking time bomb, and it wouldn't be surprising for it to have happened through that route either.
If there is a known reservoir of pandemic causing virus it should be managed in such a way so as to avoid pandemics.
Seems like not enough lessons were learned from SARS. How many pandemics are going to come from this reservoir before the world gets fed up with the mismanagement of it?
It's not OK to be actively trying to make those edits, especially after a history of lab containment failures.
After the USA banned this research because of the danger, some of it moved out of the country. At least one of the researchers moved from the USA to Wuhan, China. The ban should have been a clear message: such research is unacceptably dangerous.
They didn't. This virus was unknown when it first showed up in patients. The closest known virus to SARS-CoV-2 is 96% similar, which translates to a decade or so of evolution.
> US scientists that twice visited the lab.
Do the cables say that "scientists" voiced concerns? I thought they were diplomats. The Wuhan Institute of Virology works closely with US, French and Australian national labs. A lot of the Wuhan personnel is trained at those foreign labs. The lab has lots of scientific collaborators in the US, and receives grant money from the NIH.
Everything I've been able to find about the lab in Wuhan indicates that it operates at the same stringent technical level as foreign BSL-4 labs, and that there's a lot of exchange with foreign scientists.
I was downvoted in another thread for pointing out that reporters have failed to do their jobs here.
Doctors knew about this back in November-December timeframe, maybe even earlier, and were asking people with cough and chest pains if they had been to Wuhan recently.
This was a public health crisis in China before last Nov/Dec. I would hope that doctors in large cities were asking about travel to China during this time.
You're assuming that there are still reporters out there. Most media companies have transitioned to click-bait. Who's still doing real journalism these days?
Don't forget that we live in an era where being a real journalist is a great way to receive death threats from the public. Lots of people out there don't want to hear the truth, they want to hear conspiracy theories that support their political views.
Doctors in Wuhan didn't know about it until late December, when they noticed a cluster of pneumonia cases. Either cite your sources or stop spreading conspiracy theories.
> “The idea that it was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” the official said.
That’s how I feel. Isn’t it just the darndest coincidence that the worldwide deadly pandemic just happened to originate in the backyard of the only BL-4 research center in China. And they just happened to work with bats, and somehow two years earlier someone bothered to warn US govt. about safety issues there.
It also interesting to observe the level of coverup here. That page about the visit was scrubbed, doctors silenced, etc.
How many vendors at the wet market, the alleged source of the virus, even sold bats or made bat soup and such? How does it compare with other wet market around the country or the world?
Maybe, just maybe, the lab studying viruses in bats was located in a region with many bats, and many viruses? The potential of these viruses jumping to humans was the reason for the lab in the first place, after all.
I imagine Iowa State University does some research into diseases afflicting corn. But if some new corn fungus shows up in Iowa, it’s probably because corn covers half the state, not because the lab is located there.
Geneticists have already explained that the virus is perfectly natural: all the genes are similar to preciously-seen viruses, and genetic engineering leaves tell-tale signatures of the methods. That would seem to diminish any possible role of the lab to just being the place of transmission, something that could have happened just as easily outside the lab, where an expanding human population is in daily contact with the wildlife they’re encroaching on.
That “wet market” theory is indeed far from certain. Bats aren’t eaten as often as people seem to think, and they are usually not eaten raw.
What’s far more likely is simply someone coming in contact with bat shit. Bats like caves, and human dwelling often are even better. They live really close to humans and there is ample opportunity for contamination.
I live in the middle of Berlin, and I have bats catching mosquitos right outside my window in the summer. If bats can make a living here, with climate on the cold side and every building being tightly isolated and passing every inspection German bureaucrats have come up with, imagine how much they enjoy the somewhat wilder structures of a quickly growing city.
It deserves mention that it’s no coincidence these cables happen to be leaked now. It’s an administration trying to deflect blame. Yet they fail to do even that properly: these cables only raise the possibility of this lab being involved in any way. But what they prove definitely is that there was ample warning in time.
And what difference would it make? Short of an intentional release (which only the most deluded conspiracy nuts believe), it’s negligence at best. That doesn’t change the fact that the federal government ignored dozens of warnings and wasted eight to twelve weeks.
9/11 was very obviously intentional, and the national security establishment still got raked over the coals for it. Imagine 9/11, but with ten similar attacks in other countries starting in late May, Interpol declaring it a “world-wide threat”, and a bunch of small terrorist attacks in Washington State at the end of July.
This is a very disappointing thread on Hacker News.
First, the article is title "State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronavirus." Immediately sensationalizing the title to imply this coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan lab is not good.
Did the coronavirus leak from the Wuhan lab? Maybe, there's some evidence to suggest it's a possibility, but jumping on conspiracy theories, or unproven claims (e.g. "it was the wet market" -- it may have been, but many of the original infectees were not involved with the wet market) is just spreading fake news. Haven't we had more than enough of that over the last few years?
But how fast they jumped on all these -CIA term used to discredit people with valid concerns- when they said that. Now ever the MSM writes about it. I won't read WSJ anyway.
29 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 60.1 ms ] threadNow that China has disappeared people who were speaking out, shut down the Shanghai lab that originally published the virus’ genome, and is back to tightly controlling information out of the country, I doubt we’ll ever know for sure if this pandemic was a preventable accident. Either way it is a major black eye for China.
(I'm not saying this to argue that the lab escape theory is wrong, just to argue that Reddit posts are difficult to appraise.)
That's some diabolical research.
To put it in DnD terms: The researchers have high intelligence, low wisdom, and probably low dexterity.
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: 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
There are more. The ASM's virology journal published more of generally the same kind of stuff. I can't find the link right now.
Seems like not enough lessons were learned from SARS. How many pandemics are going to come from this reservoir before the world gets fed up with the mismanagement of it?
After the USA banned this research because of the danger, some of it moved out of the country. At least one of the researchers moved from the USA to Wuhan, China. The ban should have been a clear message: such research is unacceptably dangerous.
They didn't. This virus was unknown when it first showed up in patients. The closest known virus to SARS-CoV-2 is 96% similar, which translates to a decade or so of evolution.
> US scientists that twice visited the lab.
Do the cables say that "scientists" voiced concerns? I thought they were diplomats. The Wuhan Institute of Virology works closely with US, French and Australian national labs. A lot of the Wuhan personnel is trained at those foreign labs. The lab has lots of scientific collaborators in the US, and receives grant money from the NIH.
Everything I've been able to find about the lab in Wuhan indicates that it operates at the same stringent technical level as foreign BSL-4 labs, and that there's a lot of exchange with foreign scientists.
Doctors knew about this back in November-December timeframe, maybe even earlier, and were asking people with cough and chest pains if they had been to Wuhan recently.
How many people could have had the information to confirm that in November/December?
That's not at all what the original title was, matter of fact not even what the original article was about.
That’s how I feel. Isn’t it just the darndest coincidence that the worldwide deadly pandemic just happened to originate in the backyard of the only BL-4 research center in China. And they just happened to work with bats, and somehow two years earlier someone bothered to warn US govt. about safety issues there.
It also interesting to observe the level of coverup here. That page about the visit was scrubbed, doctors silenced, etc.
How many vendors at the wet market, the alleged source of the virus, even sold bats or made bat soup and such? How does it compare with other wet market around the country or the world?
I imagine Iowa State University does some research into diseases afflicting corn. But if some new corn fungus shows up in Iowa, it’s probably because corn covers half the state, not because the lab is located there.
Geneticists have already explained that the virus is perfectly natural: all the genes are similar to preciously-seen viruses, and genetic engineering leaves tell-tale signatures of the methods. That would seem to diminish any possible role of the lab to just being the place of transmission, something that could have happened just as easily outside the lab, where an expanding human population is in daily contact with the wildlife they’re encroaching on.
That “wet market” theory is indeed far from certain. Bats aren’t eaten as often as people seem to think, and they are usually not eaten raw.
What’s far more likely is simply someone coming in contact with bat shit. Bats like caves, and human dwelling often are even better. They live really close to humans and there is ample opportunity for contamination.
I live in the middle of Berlin, and I have bats catching mosquitos right outside my window in the summer. If bats can make a living here, with climate on the cold side and every building being tightly isolated and passing every inspection German bureaucrats have come up with, imagine how much they enjoy the somewhat wilder structures of a quickly growing city.
It deserves mention that it’s no coincidence these cables happen to be leaked now. It’s an administration trying to deflect blame. Yet they fail to do even that properly: these cables only raise the possibility of this lab being involved in any way. But what they prove definitely is that there was ample warning in time.
And what difference would it make? Short of an intentional release (which only the most deluded conspiracy nuts believe), it’s negligence at best. That doesn’t change the fact that the federal government ignored dozens of warnings and wasted eight to twelve weeks.
9/11 was very obviously intentional, and the national security establishment still got raked over the coals for it. Imagine 9/11, but with ten similar attacks in other countries starting in late May, Interpol declaring it a “world-wide threat”, and a bunch of small terrorist attacks in Washington State at the end of July.
First, the article is title "State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronavirus." Immediately sensationalizing the title to imply this coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan lab is not good.
Did the coronavirus leak from the Wuhan lab? Maybe, there's some evidence to suggest it's a possibility, but jumping on conspiracy theories, or unproven claims (e.g. "it was the wet market" -- it may have been, but many of the original infectees were not involved with the wet market) is just spreading fake news. Haven't we had more than enough of that over the last few years?