> The majority of US spy agencies think it escaped from the lab across the street from the Wuhan wet market. The UK is no longer discounting this theory
Seems plausible. And yet when people started dropping like flies from a nerve agent just down the road from the UK's top nerve agent lab: definitely just the hand of Russia again.
I wasn't going to post more but since some other people are taking an amusing point seriously enough to try and bury:
- No victims in the UK were Russian dissidents; in fact most were not even Russian.
- Skripal was a Russian military intelligence officer working for MI6.
- He did not live in swinging London or some random backwater, as a typical Witsec might, but in the top British military county of Wiltshire.
If an American working for China's intelligence service and living right next door to the Wuhan lab was one of the first victims of Covid-19 anyone insisting it could only mean the US carried out an attack would be written off as a conspiracy loon.
What's more believable? The CPC state media, or the right-wing media complex that both of your articles was churned out from?
From the first article:
> The Daily Caller cited a senior intelligence official earlier Saturday who stated the majority view among U.S. spy agencies is that COVID-19 is natural and that it was accidentally leaked out of a Wuhan lab.
The Daily Caller: "The Daily Caller is a right-wing news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C. It was founded by now Fox News host Tucker Carlson and political pundit Neil Patel in 2010."
The second article references the Daily Mail.
Until an official report comes out from the government, I'd be cautious with your reading of "journalism."
Yes, if you read your articles instead of just the titles they referenced John Roberts as well. Basically, they all just reference each other, almost as if they are pushing a narrative or something.
There is no substance. It's an anonymous guy saying something. Misinformation is dangerous regardless of who it comes from - including China and far left or far right media. Such a confident report would likely have other sources that aren't from the right wing mill machine - but if you actually look at the other sources, they all say a completely different take, I'll let you look yourself.
I'm very anti-China, especially with regards to how they run their country and treat their people. I hope that all of the world's governments, when THIS IS CONTAINED, investigate the cause. It may be that it did leak from a lab. Or it didn't. I wish our government and media would focus instead on containing it first and then figure out the cause.
You can do both. Like I also mentioned, UK isn't ruling it out. I simply posted those sources to bring awareness to the other side to the theory, it was lacking in OP's article. One reason it was lacking is because my links are newer. I was providing developing information, we'll see if it's real, but it looks interesting.
Are you arguing that we can't talk about the origin at the same time as figuring out solutions to the virus?
The article is about the origin, it seems appropriate to mention these things.
> What's more believable? The CPC state media, or the right-wing media complex that both of your articles was churned out from?
The right-wing media complex, hands down.
Furthermore, you should be asking why a left-leaning media outlet (Washington Post) is reporting essentially the same facts, but puts an emphasis on there being "no evidence" of an accidental release. You should be asking why they aren't mentioning that the CCP had potential evidence destroyed.
You're linking an image of Google Maps, from a random PDF that someone posted on a website that anyone can post to without any peer review. The Google Maps image doesn't even say anything that means "Wuhan CDC." In fact, one of the buildings in the cluster is labeled a tire shop by Google Maps.
If you search on Google Maps for the Wuhan Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, you instead find a building about 1.5 km from the seafood market. If the random PDF you linked doesn't even get the location of the building right, how can I trust its other claims? But further, when I look at the web page of the WHCDC, it looks like they're mainly a community health institution, not a research institute. The people studying coronaviruses are 15 km away, in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But if they're doing research, there should be publications, just as there are for the WIV. When you search bioRxiv for papers from them, all you turn up are papers from Jianghan University Medical School, which is even farther away from the market. The random PDF you're linking to appears to be wrong on a number of counts: both on where and what the Wuhan CDC is.
In short: Random PDFs from websites that anyone can upload to are not reliable sources of information.
> If you search on Google Maps for the Wuhan Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, you instead find a building about 1.5 km from the seafood market.
There is not just one building, this is the one mentioned:
Remember that Google is effectively not operating in China anymore, so their information is bound to be outdated and incomplete.
> But further, when I look at the web page of the WHCDC, it looks like they're mainly a community health institution, not a research institute. The people studying coronaviruses are 15 km away, in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Scientists at the Wuhan CDC are studying live bats and bat coronaviruses:
Here's where the PDF map says is the WHCDC offices. This is incorrect, isn't it? Both of the offices are not "across the street", but at least 3km away.
> Here's where the PDF map says is the WHCDC offices. This is incorrect, isn't it? Both of the offices are not "across the street", but at least 3km away.
It isn't incorrect. The Baidu Maps link[1] shows the WHCDC office also shown at the location in the PDF map, next to the hospital - a few hundred meters from the seafood market[2].
> Remember that Google is effectively not operating in China anymore, so their information is bound to be outdated and incomplete.
Yes, but the PDF that the GP comment scrounged up online used Google Maps. If you look at Baidu or Bing Maps, you see that the Wuhan CDC has many local offices. It appears to mainly be a community health organization that deals with things like vaccinations and awareness. What you're pointing to is not the central offices of the Wuhan CDC.
> are studying live bats
No, they're not. All the papers I've seen only discuss samples collected from bats in the countryside, and standard practice is to deactivate any virus in the samples before working with them.
Where the research described in the video you show is unclear to me, but it's not taking place in some little satellite community health center across the street from the seafood market.
It's really alarming how much of this Internet scavenger-hunting is being passed off as legitimate evidence, by people like "Project Evidence" (or whoever is behind it). People desperately want answers about the virus, and there are political actors taking advantage of that.
> Yes, but the PDF that the GP comment scrounged up online used Google Maps. If you look at Baidu or Bing Maps, you see that the Wuhan CDC has many local offices. It appears to mainly be a community health organization that deals with things like vaccinations and awareness. What you're pointing to is not the central offices of the Wuhan CDC.
You said they got the location wrong. They didn't, you just failed to find the office at that location. You don't actually know what the WHCDC does, or where it does its work, but you think you know better than the authors of the paper, who have worked in Wuhan.
> No, they're not.
Yes, they are. Did you even read the paper? They're reporting that hundreds of live bats were hosted at the WHCDC. I haven't seen anyone come out and disprove these claims, so they're most likely not just made up.
> All the papers I've seen only discuss samples collected from bats in the countryside, and standard practice is to deactivate any virus in the samples before working with them.
"I didn't see it, therefore it does not exist" - your way of reasoning.
> It's really alarming how much of this Internet scavenger-hunting is being passed off as legitimate evidence...
That paper was authored by researchers familiar with the matter, it's not "internet scavenger hunting". I'm not saying it's "legitimate evidence" either, but your "debunking" is a joke.
> You said they got the location wrong. They didn't, you just failed to find the office at that location
They used Google Maps, which doesn't actually list that as the location.
When you look for the main offices of the Wuhan CDC, on Google Maps, Baidu Maps or Bing Maps, you find a different location several kilometers away. I'll grant that a different map service, Baidu Maps, shows a small satellite community health center at the given location.
> Yes, they are. Did you even read the paper?
What paper? Nobody has posted any paper yet. All I've seen is a PDF from a website that anyone can upload to, which the authors subsequently deleted because they said they couldn't vouch for its claims.
> They're reporting that hundreds of live bats were hosted at the WHCDC. I haven't seen anyone come out and disprove these claims, so they're most likely not just made up.
Some random people on the Internet uploaded a PDF, so their claims are probably true? Is this the standard of evidence we've reached?
> That paper was authored by researchers familiar with the matter
I still don't know what paper you're talking about. Are you talking about the non-peer-reviewed PDF that was uploaded to a site anyone can upload to, and subsequently deleted by the authors?
The paper was retracted because, according to the authors, it did not offer "direct proof", but it was properly sourced as to the claims it made regarding the bat studies. Perhaps there has been some pressure from the authorities as well, that would not be unheard of.
Is it peer-reviewed and scientifically validated? No. Is it actual evidence that the virus originated in a lab? No.
It is simply a collection of facts that support the hypothesis that the virus could have come from a lab. The wildlife market origin is also just a hypothesis, supported by a handful of facts.
Yet, it is only the lab escape theory that is so quickly dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Why?
As for the political dimension, the actual origin does not really matter. The crimes of the CCP during the original outbreak are a matter of public record, they are not even being denied.
There is no paper. That's a word that implies a certain level of research, expertise and peer review. This is a "document" written up by non-experts, which engages in unfounded speculation with the barest of reasoning. The document even appears to get some basic facts wrong, like the location of the WHCDC lab and the presence (or rather, non-presence) of bats in the lab.
It was deleted ("retraction" isn't even really the right word, because we're not talking about a scientific paper) because it was wild speculation. There was not only no "direct proof," there was no piece of compelling evidence that pointed to a lab leak in the first place.
It's being dismissed by virologists as a conspiracy theory because it's just that: there's no evidence for it, and if you know anything about zoonosis and actual lab methods in virology, it's a wildly implausible hypothesis. It also requires one to believe that some highly respected scientific figures in virology, like Shi Zhengli, are blatantly lying.
It's not being as widely dismissed in the media as it should be, the reason being that a good part of the political class is intent on pushing it. Trump and Pompeo are promoting this theory in order to deflect criticism and turn anger about the US government's disastrous handling of the virus against a foreign enemy.
I've started noticing the phrase "CCP" being used more and more among people who are set on demonizing China. I think it's being used for the shock value, and because it taps into long-standing anti-Red sentiment in the US. I'll say this, though: whatever crimes the Chinese government committed, their handling of CoVID-19 turned out to be incomparably better than the US government's handling of the virus. Trump has now said that the deaths that will be caused by opening up are worth it. The Chinese government didn't passively watch as 70,000 of its citizens (increasing every day) died.
> There is no paper. That's a word that implies a certain level of research, expertise and peer review.
No it doesn't. Lots of junk papers get published by clowns, with or without peer review. They're still referred to as papers. The document I linked to follows the form of a scientific publication, so I'm calling it a paper.
Either way, whatever you call it makes no difference as to the content.
> The document even appears to get some basic facts wrong, like the location of the WHCDC lab and the presence (or rather, non-presence) of bats in the lab.
It doesn't get basic facts wrong. You got the facts wrong. There is a facility at the specified location, there is research on bats at the WHCDC. It's unclear whether such research took place at that particular facility, but you would expect that if there wasn't then it would simply be (truthfully) denied. Even if there wasn't any research there, an employee working on another facility could've visited it.
> It's being dismissed by virologists as a conspiracy theory because it's just that: there's no evidence for it, and if you know anything about zoonosis and actual lab methods in virology, it's a wildly implausible hypothesis. It also requires one to believe that some highly respected scientific figures in virology, like Shi Zhengli, are blatantly lying.
Wildly implausible? Well let me quote Shi Zhengli herself then:
"“I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
It's correct that Shi Zengli later categorically denied that it came from her lab, the Institute of Virology, but only after looking into the specifics of the virus and those at her lab, not because a lab accident would've been implausible.
As for the "lab methods" at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (from their website, now deleted):
I'm not saying she is lying, but she would have good reasons to do so, saving face for herself and the whole country is tremendously important.
> It's not being as widely dismissed in the media as it should be, the reason being that a good part of the political class is intent on pushing it. Trump and Pompeo are promoting this theory in order to deflect criticism and turn anger about the US government's disastrous handling of the virus against a foreign enemy.
That's the crux of it, you can't allow this hypothesis to be plausible because your political enemy espouses it. Honestly, I don't see how it makes a difference. From a foreign perspective, an accident is an accident, whether it occurred in a wet market or laboratory.
> I've started noticing the phrase "CCP" being used more and m...
It doesn't look at all like any legitimate scientific paper I've ever seen. It's wild speculation by non-experts, written up in an amateurish way.
There is no indication that there's a lab in that location, much less that they work on bats. The WHCDC is primarily a community health organization, and some tiny satellite office is not where they're doing research, if they even do any significant research in their own labs.
You're promoting a conspiracy theory that has zero evidence (someone online claiming they have bats in a building that doesn't even appear to be a lab is not evidence), I think for political reasons that you've made quite clear - your views on China.
About your use of the phrase "CCP," I say you're using it for shock value because I don't think you're actually specifically talking about the CCP. You're talking about the actions of government officials, policemen, etc. What is added by alluding to the political party? This is the same as with the WHO. Suddenly everyone acts like an expert on the WHO, when they actually know next to nothing about it. I think 99% of the people going on about the "CCP" couldn't tell you the first thing about it. They actually mean, "My mental picture of the evil Chinese government."
I paid close attention to how the Chinese government handled the outbreak. I think it would have been nearly impossible to contain, even with the most aggressive early response. The US and Mexico were unable to contain H1N1 in 2009, which is a less transmissible disease than CoVID-19. Containing a highly contagious respiratory virus is incredibly difficult. This is being underscored as we learn just how early the virus spread internationally. There was community spread in California in mid-January, and there is now a paper claiming the existence of a case in France in late December, before the virus was even discovered.
I am sure that the government in Wuhan resisted taking measures that could have slowed the spread of the virus early on, because they worried about the effects those measures would have on the economy. That is not something that is peculiar to China, however. Just look at how many governments around the world downplayed the virus, even as the epidemic grew exponentially within their borders. In Wuhan, there was about a week of downplaying, before the central government stepped in and forced extreme measures on the city, which turned out to be highly effective. You're criticizing those measures ("Draconian"), while also severely mischaracterizing them. Months in, most of the US still hasn't suppressed the outbreak properly, and now the President and much of the political establishment is suggesting that maybe it's better to let people die than to harm the economy.
In the end, I think one would have to be blind, or blinded by political ideology, to deny that China handled the outbreak better than the US did.
> There is no indication that there's a lab in that location, much less that they work on bats.
What do you expect, the bat sign at the front door?
> The WHCDC is primarily a community health organization, and some tiny satellite office is not where they're doing research, if they even do any significant research in their own labs.
Listen to yourself, Mr. Science. This claim is speculation. You do not know how the WHCDC works, you couldn't even find their facility on map, you couldn't figure out that they are doing research on bats, that they have a major bat researcher on their staff, who co-authored papers along with Shi Zhengli.
Note that I never claimed they were doing research at that facility, because I don't know. I was merely correcting your claims that they authors of that "document" got the location wrong and that there is no bat research at the WHCDC.
> You're promoting a conspiracy theory that has zero evidence (someone online claiming they have bats in a building that doesn't even appear to be a lab is not evidence), I think for political reasons that you've made quite clear - your views on China.
Why are you conflating my views on China and my views on the government and ruling party?
> About your use of the phrase "CCP," I say you're using it for shock value because I don't think you're actually specifically talking about the CCP.
What's the "shock value" in that?
> You're talking about the actions of government officials, policemen, etc. What is added by alluding to the political party?
All government in Mainland China is subordinate to the CCP and its political philosophy. A common CCP strategy is to defer responsibility for mistakes down the chain of command. That's how the local officials in Wuhan got purged, while the higher-ups got away scot-free. It would be ridiculous for me to blame the policemen, which are at the very bottom of the chain of command, for what they have been ordered to do.
This is in stark contrast to the US, where the political parties do not actually rule the entire legislature, executive and judiciary parts of the government. Yet you have no problem blaming the situation in the US on Trump and its administration, even though they have far less power.
> I think it would have been nearly impossible to contain, even with the most aggressive early response.
It was effectively contained in Hong-Kong and Taiwan, both of which are China, but neither of which are ruled by the CCP. I guess we'll never know.
> The US and Mexico were unable to contain H1N1 in 2009, which is a less transmissible disease than CoVID-19.
Sure, but it only was discovered after it had already spread for a while in both countries, whereas the CCP had a golden opportunity to inform the community and quell the spread early. Instead, it chose to destroy evidence and silence whistle blowers.
> There was community spread in California in mid-January, and there is now a paper claiming the existence of a case in France in late December, before the virus was even discovered.
If that's true, fair enough, the cat was already out of the box.
> I am sure that the government in Wuhan resisted taking measures that could have slowed the spread of the virus early on, because they worried about the effects those measures would have on the economy.
They didn't just "resist taking measures", they arrested people for "spreading the rumor" that there was another SARS-like outbreak even though they knew there was an outbreak. If the government didn't suppress information, people could've taken measures for themselves.
> In Wuhan, there was about a week of downplaying, before the central government stepped in and forced extreme measures on the city, which turned out to be highly effective.
You don't know that they were effective, none of the numbers published are ind...
> What do you expect, the bat sign at the front door?
I expect any evidence whatsoever. One piece.
> you couldn't even find their facility on map
I correctly pointed out that the WHCDC is located 3 km away.
> you couldn't figure out that they are doing research on bats
I still haven't seen any evidence that any WHCDC lab keeps bats, much less that they keep bats at a small satellite office away from the main campus. The papers on sample collection state that samples are brought back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
> they have a major bat researcher on their staff, who co-authored papers along with Shi Zhengli.
He collects samples in the countryside. That isn't evidence that he's keeping live bats 300 m from the seafood market. The fact that he's co-authoring papers with Shi Zhengli actually suggests that the samples are going to the WIV, which would make perfect sense. From everything I've seen, they're the ones that store samples of bat coronaviruses.
> What's the "shock value" in that?
Because it plays into American anti-Communist hysteria, a very powerful force going back to the McCarthy era in the 1950s.
> All government in Mainland China is subordinate to the CCP and its political philosophy.
Which is what? Honestly, do you think that even 1% of the people who have suddenly, in the last month or so, started going on about the CCP can even name one member of the Politburo, other than Xi Xinping? What percentage of these people know who Deng Xiaoping or Zhou Enlai was? I think people are just using this phrase because it sounds ominous ("the Communists are coming!").
> Sure, but it only was discovered after it had already spread for a while in both countries
When H1N1 was discovered, it was still geographically isolated to part of Mexico and the Southwestern US. It took a month for the first confirmed cases to pop up in Europe. Chinese labs only discovered the existence of SARS-CoV-2 in late December, by which point the virus had already been circulating for at least a month, and was possibly already spreading internationally (see the claimed French case).
> the CCP had a golden opportunity to inform the community and quell the spread early.
Again with the "CCP." What specific actions should have been taken by which specific Party organs in order to contain the outbreak at the source? I'm interested in your detailed knowledge of how the Party organs function.
> Instead, it chose to destroy evidence and silence whistle blowers.
It alerted the WHO the day after doctors first posted information about cases to social media. Two things can be true at once: local authorities cracked down on doctors for what they considered rumor mongering, and they also sent an official notification to the WHO.
As for "destroyed information," I can guess what you're alluding to, but I think you're going out on a limb. The reports were that once they discovered that patient samples contained a SARS-like coronavirus, the government ordered low-security labs to either transfer their samples to high-security labs or to destroy them. They also quickly shared the genome with the international scientific community, which doesn't align with your depiction of their behavior.
> If the government didn't suppress information, people could've taken measures for themselves.
The government alerted the public on 31 December, which is before the doctors were ordered to stop posting to social media. I think the local government downplayed its seriousness in mid-January, out of fear of the economic consequences. That appears to have ended once Zhong Nanshan visited Wuhan. Then the hammer came down.
> How exactly?
This is what the quarantine centers looked like: [1][2]. That's where people with mild cases were sent. Describing that as "open-floor internment centers where people had no protection" strikes me as inaccurate and really just an att...
As it is, you have no evidence one way or another, so it's neither proven nor disproven, nor is it officially denied.
> I correctly pointed out that the WHCDC is located 3 km away.
You incorrectly claimed that the WHCDC is not located at that spot. The WHCDC is an organization with several facilities in Wuhan, one being at that location.
> I still haven't seen any evidence that any WHCDC lab keeps bats, much less that they keep bats at a small satellite office away from the main campus. The papers on sample collection state that samples are brought back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Here's the paper regarding the bats collected by the CDC:
They report that they collected bats, not samples from bats. You can tell that it must have been live bats, because surgery under anesthesia was performed on them. All of the authors have CDC-affiliation, none have affiliation with the Institute of Virology.
> Because it plays into American anti-Communist hysteria, a very powerful force going back to the McCarthy era in the 1950s.
I don't think so, especially considering that China is better at capitalism than the US these days. How else am I supposed to refer to the ruling party, when they are called the Communist Party of China?
> What specific actions should have been taken by which specific Party organs in order to contain the outbreak at the source? I'm interested in your detailed knowledge of how the Party organs function.
What difference does it make? Like I said, the government is subordinate to the party, not the other way around.
> The reports were that once they discovered that patient samples contained a SARS-like coronavirus, the government ordered low-security labs to either transfer their samples to high-security labs or to destroy them. They also quickly shared the genome with the international scientific community, which doesn't align with your depiction of their behavior.
"On 1 January 2020, a genetic sequencing company was notified by the Wuhan Municipal Health Committee that further sequencing of novel coronavirus samples were no longer allowed, existing samples must be destroyed and all data must be kept secret."
"Must be kept secret", in other words, covered up. It's true that that nine days later - a long time during an outbreak of a novel disease - the genome was posted online. That was only after the higher-ups at the CCP decided that a coverup was no longer feasible.
> This is what the quarantine centers looked like: [1][2]. That's where people with mild cases were sent. Describing that as "open-floor internment centers where people had no protection" strikes me as inaccurate and really just an attempt at demonization.
Your pictures show people in an open-floor facility, close to each other, with no protection. We know that these people were interned there against their will and by force, if necessary. Not just mild cases, suspected cases. So, what part exactly strikes you as "inaccurate"?
> Coupled with universal symptom checks, centralized quarantine is very effective at reducing the reproductive number of the virus. That's how they got down to R ~ 0.3 in Wuhan.
Of course, totalitarian measures were successful and the numbers, which are above suspicion, prove it. Pardon my sarcasm.
> I think the country whose leadership decided to sacrifice 70,000+ of its citizens' lives to the economy has no moral standing to criticize others' handling of the outbre...
The paper you cite says nothing about bringing bats back to Wuhan, much less keeping them there. The paper says they follow a standard procedure described in reference 47. While I don't have access to that reference, another paper [1] that uses the same standard procedure states that
> Captured animals are anesthetized, identified, weighed, measured, sampled (e.g., blood and oral swab), marked with a unique number, and released at the exact site of capture.
I don't see quarantine measures during an acute public health emergency as "totalitarian." You're just demonizing China (excuse me, I mean the "CCP") for what was actually a very effective public health measure that saved lives.
> It's true that that nine days later - a long time during an outbreak of a novel disease - the genome was posted online.
Has any genome of a novel pathogen ever been released more quickly? I was under the impression that this was record speed: just two weeks from discovery of the first cases to the whole world having the full genome.
> You're free to condemn the Trump administration's handling of the situation, but perhaps you should take into account that the US is a free country and the president has limited powers.
This might be a valid excuse if Trump had been begging for states to take appropriate measures, and the states had resisted. Instead, Trump downplayed the virus for two months, while it spread exponentially. The Federal government also has a great deal of power and a large role in dealing with public health, and it performed terribly in that role. But I'm not going to blame Trump alone. There is plenty of blame to go around at many levels of government in the US.
> I'm not "the country". You're having a conversation with an individual. I can criticize anything I want, I don't need moral license.
Indeed. But you're claiming that the government that decided to let 70,000 of its citizens die, and which has now decided to let the virus run its course, had a superior response to the country that decided to take much more drastic action to save lives.
> Does that mean more people will die? Of course! It's a trade-off.
The trade-off China chose was much further to the "save lives" end of the scale. Because they much more effectively suppressed transmission, they also were able to safely reopen more quickly, without endangering people's lives.
The sources listed in the description of this video seem somewhat reliable. While I'm not completely sold on the lab being the source I think the odds that it was are still pretty high for me.
"In 2018, wet markets were noted to have remained the most prevalent food outlet in urban regions of China despite the rise of supermarket chains since the 1990s.[66]"
Later in the article, about Hong Kong, they say "Most neighbourhoods contain at least one wet market.[12]"
So there are hundreds / thousands / tens of thousands of wet markets in China.
How many level 4 bio labs are in China? 1, in Wuhan.
It seems incredibly naive to me for anyone to believe that a virus just happened to naturally jump from animals to humans at a wet market in Wuhan, when that event could have happened in thousands of other wet markets. But it didn't; it happened in Wuhan. The unique thing about Wuhan is the level 4 bio lab.
There are more people in Wuhan City than in New York City.
Would you immediately jump to conspiracy theories if an outbreak of a novel flu started in Galveston Texas? Or Atlanta? Or Boston?
And that's just some of the BSL-4 facilities in the US. Coronaviruses can be studied in BSL-3 labs, which China has tons of, basically one in every major city (much like the US).
There are two labs in Wuhan which performed experiments with bats and bat coronaviruses under unsafe conditions, where animal-to-human transmission could have occured - one being the Wuhan CDC and the other being the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Those are the kind of bats that most likely evolved COVID-19, which are native to southern China, not Wuhan. That's factual, not a conspiracy theory.
The CCP has ordered the destruction of evidence at those places and imposed gag orders on the scientists involved. Again, just facts, not a conspiracy theory.
The CCP has furthermore suppressed the spread of information on the initial outbreak and has been uncooperative regarding investigation on the origin of the virus. A large amount of the initial cases had no connection to the Wuhan seafood market. Factual.
Note that none of these facts support the conspiracy theory that the virus has been engineered or intentionally released.
Correct, but note that they don't really support the idea that the virus was accidentally released from the lab either.
> A large amount of the initial cases had no connection to the Wuhan seafood market. Factual.
But misleading. The article you cite notes the much likelier cause: the long incubation period means that those who did come into contact with the market infected others.
> The CCP has ordered the destruction of evidence at those places and imposed gag orders on the scientists involved.
Correct, but the Wuhan CDC is also where most of the early analysis of covid was being done after it was discovered. The CCP also silenced doctors in hospitals, they generally tried to cover up covid in general. Keeping the scientists working on it silenced isn't any different than how they treated hospital workers.
> Correct, but note that they don't really support the idea that the virus was accidentally released from the lab either.
Let's suppose we had to decide between two scenarios, which one of these two sounds more probable?
A virus endemic to bats from southern China was first transmitted to a researcher working at one of two specialist centers in central China, while performing research on bats and/or bat coronaviruses, under a questionable safety regime.
A virus endemic to bats from southern China was first transmitted to a human in the wildlife market in central China where no bats are sold, presumably through an intermediate host such as a pangolin.
Which of these two scenarios is preferable to the ruling party of China?
Which is feeding the narrative that "human encroachment on nature is dangerous" (bad thing is dangerous), as opposed to "scientific research can be dangerous" (good thing is dangerous)?
> The article you cite notes the much likelier cause: the long incubation period means that those who did come into contact with the market infected others.
How is that more likely? The finding is that there is no epidemiological link to the seafood market in 13 out 41 patients, including the earliest known patient.
Your interpretation is the opposite of what the paragraph regarding the incubation period says:
"Lucey says if the new data are accurate, the first human infections must have occurred in November 2019—if not earlier—because there is an incubation time between infection and symptoms surfacing. If so, the virus possibly spread silently between people in Wuhan—and perhaps elsewhere—before the cluster of cases from the city’s now-infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was discovered in late December. “The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace,” Lucey asserts."
> A virus endemic to bats from southern China was first transmitted to a human in the wildlife market in central China where no bats are sold, presumably through an intermediate host such as a pangolin.
How likely is it that a virus endemic to bats in southwestern china was first transmitted to humans in a wildlife market in southeastern china where bats are not sold?
Well that's exactly what happened with SARS-1. The disease was passed to humans via civets. And in Wuhan the carrier seems to have been pangolins. Seems completely believable, given that it happened once already.
> How likely is it that a virus endemic to bats in southwestern china was first transmitted to humans in a wildlife market in southeastern china where bats are not sold? Well that's exactly what happened with SARS-1.
Patient zero in SARS-1 was a farmer from Guangdong, the same area where the novel coronavirus is suspected to have emerged among bats, where farmers have been found to carry bat coronaviruses. Wuhan is more than 600 miles away from that area.
The initial outbreak of SARS-1 was literally where you would expect it to be, among the population where you would expect it to occur. Civets were suspected as transmitters, but that link is neither proven nor necessary to explain the initial outbreak.
> Seems completely believable, given that it happened once already.
I'm not asking if it is believable. Both scenarios are believable. The "pathogen escapes from lab" scenario happened before as well.
I'm asking, which of these appears more likely?
Which of these would you be more inclined to believe, if you want to be as far away from right wingers as possible? Which scenario caters to your pro-environmental and pro-science stance?
> Patient zero in SARS-1 was a farmer from Guangdong,
Correct.
> the same area where the novel coronavirus is suspected to have emerged among bats,
Incorrect, that's Yunnan.
> where farmers have been found to carry bat coronaviruses.
Yunnan.
> Wuhan is more than 600 miles away from that area.
I suggest you go find Yunnan, Guangdong and Hubei on a map.
Bat caves in Yunnan are full of potentially dangerous coronaviruses, but the farmers living close to the caves are already immune to the strains they're in frequent contact with, so the only way for an outbreak to get big is by long-distance transportation carrying the virus somewhere else.
The area where these bats live encompasses Yunnan, Guangxi and Guangdong. I quote:
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
> Bat caves in Yunnan are full of potentially dangerous coronaviruses, but the farmers living close to the caves are already immune to the strains they're in frequent contact with...
They're not going to be immune to newly evolved coronaviruses.
>... so the only way for an outbreak to get big is by long-distance transportation carrying the virus somewhere else.
All it needs is for someone who is infected to travel to the nearest population center.
That's inaccurate. Bat coronaviruses that were close to SARS-COV-1 were indeed found in a cave in Yunnan, but that doesn't mean SARS-CoV-1 literally evolved right there or that it first spread to humans in the region - who then somehow carried it to Guangdong, where the actual outbreak occured.
SARS-CoV-1 was also found in civets in Guangdong sold at a wildlife market. It is unknown whether the first human transmission went through civets or through bats, but the local civets probably didn't take a trip to Yunnan to get infected.
Either way, it doesn't make a difference whether it is Yunnan, Guangxi or Guangdong, those are the areas where these bats live and where you would expect a human transmission to occur.
You wouldn't expect it to occur in Wuhan. That's not my personal assessment, that's the assessment of the virologist that personally led the expedition to that Yunnan cave - I quoted her in my previous reply.
> Bat coronaviruses that were close to SARS-COV-1 were indeed found in a cave in Yunnan, but that doesn't mean SARS-CoV-1 literally evolved right
Actually my understanding is that that is, in general, the scientific consensus on the matter (including from the scientist you quoted in your prior reply)
> or that it first spread to humans in the region - who then somehow carried it to Guangdong
Correct, this is unlikely. The leading theories are that an intermediate animal, like a civet for CoV-1 and perhaps pangolins for CoV-2 were the infection vector.
> Either way, it doesn't make a difference whether it is Yunnan, Guangxi or Guangdong,
Well yes, yes it does. Guangdong and Wuhan are similarly distant from Yunnan. If, as the consensus appears to be, the virus started out in Yunnan, traveling to Wuhan via an animal intermediary is no less likely than traveling to Guangdong via an animal intermediary.
> You wouldn't expect it to occur in Wuhan.
I made no such claim. I made the claim that the transmission vector for Cov-1 and cov-2 were similar. That they both started in Yunnan and travelled east hundreds of miles via some method, likely a combination of bat migration/movement, civet/pangolin migration/movement, and human movement of captured animals.
If you read the updated article, you'd find that she no longer believes the virus could have leaked from her lab, since
> its genetic sequence does not match any her lab had previously studied.[0]
Of course, she could be pressured into silence by the Chinese government.
That is not my understanding, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, given a statement of hers to that effect.
> Guangdong and Wuhan are similarly distant from Yunnan
Yes, but Guangdong and Yunnan are bat country, unlike Wuhan.
Could it have spread through other wildlife? Yes. I'm not ruling that out at all, I never have. I'm pointing out that somehow the dominant narrative is the one that appears relatively unlikely even in the assessment of a leading expert.
> I made the claim that the transmission vector for Cov-1 and cov-2 were similar. That they both started in Yunnan and travelled east hundreds of miles via some method, likely a combination of bat migration/movement, civet/pangolin migration/movement, and human movement of captured animals.
As a reminder, this is your original claim:
"Bat caves in Yunnan are full of potentially dangerous coronaviruses, but the farmers living close to the caves are already immune to the strains they're in frequent contact with, so the only way for an outbreak to get big is by long-distance transportation carrying the virus somewhere else."
> If you read the updated article, you'd find that she no longer believes the virus could have leaked from her lab
It may well be true that it didn't come from her lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is several miles away from the seafood market.
However, the Wuhan CDC is right next to the seafood market and they performed experiments with hundreds of live bats there[1]. A likely vector could've been improperly disposed lab garbage.
As for the claim that the Wuhan cdc is tight next to the seafood market, I direct you to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23096524 which thoroughly and completely debunks those claims.
> I'm not sure who you're quoting, but it's not me.
Indeed, I oversaw that it was "yorwba" who put that comment into "our" thread, not you. My apologies.
> As for the claim that the Wuhan cdc is tight next to the seafood market, I direct you to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23096524 which thoroughly and completely debunks those claims.
That's not a "thorough and complete" debunking, that's an erroneous assessment regarding the functions and location(s) of the Wuhan CDC, based on a cursory glance at websites.
A little bit more research would've revealed that the Wuhan CDC indeed was performing experiments on bats and that it has several facilities (including one near the seafood market).
They prove that, contrary to what that comment you linked says:
1. There is a WHCDC facility at the location claimed, close to the seafood market
2. There was research on bats at the WHCDC
In other words, the person who "thoroughly debunked" the paper just didn't have a clue where to look.
I'm getting tired discussing this. The "lab escape hypothesis" is not a debunked conspiracy theory. It's a plausible scenario. Pathogens - including SARS-CoV-1 - have escaped from labs several times.
The wildlife market transmission is a plausible scenario as well, it just seems "out of place" in Wuhan. That doesn't mean it's wrong, of course.
> There are two labs in Wuhan which performed experiments with bats and bat coronaviruses under unsafe conditions
First of all, they conducted experiments with deactivated samples of bat coronaviruses, not with live virus or with bats.
Second of all, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a world-class BSL-4 lab. They do not operate under "unsafe conditions."
> native to southern China, not Wuhan
A couple of things:
1. It is widely suspected that there was an intermediate host species between bats and humans, just as was the case in the last two major coronavirus outbreaks, SARS and MERS.
2. Nobody knows where, exactly, the virus first spilled over into the human population. Wuhan is just the first place where it was detected. A virus like this can spread for quite a while, particularly in the middle of flu season, before it is detected. There's nothing to say it didn't emerge in some rural village in Yunnan first.
> A large amount of the initial cases had no connection to the Wuhan seafood market. Factual.
With human-to-human transmission, this is entirely consistent with the first outbreak (or super-spreading event) occurring at the market.
> The CCP has ordered the destruction of evidence at those places
Did the CCP order that, or did the Chinese government order that? I've noticed a trend in which people who make extremely anti-China posts refer repeatedly to the "CCP." I strongly suspect that these people are just using that terminology for the shock value.
Beyond that, the news report (from Caixin) that I believe is the origin of your claim about destruction of evidence says that after the virus was identified, low-security Chinese labs were ordered to either transfer their samples to high-security labs or to destroy them. I recall this being a safety measure, in other words, though you could ascribe other motives if you wanted to.
Great question. If an outbreak of smallpox happened in Atlanta, 10 miles from the BSL-4 center, would you be so quick to call out any questions regarding said center as 'conspiracy theories'?
Smallpox and a flu-like virus aren't comparable. So I reject your premise.
Like I said, if a novel flu-like virus appeared in Atlanta, would your first guess be that it leaked from the CDC facility? That's what you're faced with, not smallpox.
Do you have a source for how many research labs in China were actively working on bat coronaviruses? From what I can garner in the Western press, WIV is their #1 such research lab.
If a new flu virus, quite more virulent that the usual flu, popped up in Atlanta 10 miles from the BSL4 facility and the closest known relative is endemic in polar bears, yeah, I'd be asking questions. Both about BSL4 and about the zoo. And maybe there are private citizens raising polar bears in Atlanta. I'd ask about them too. Especially if it were already known that polar bear viruses can be quite dangerous, see SARS episode 1.
But then again, these discussions are by now futile. It is obvious that the conversation has been politicized. One side will try its best to dismiss and discredit the slightest mention that there was ongoing bat coronavirus research in Wuhan, including WTF moments like creating chimera viruses for the specific purpose of infecting humans. The other will overhype all the scary innuendo that can possibly be created around WIV, whether it relates even remotely to SARS-CoV-2 or not.
I don't have the energy to elaborate the full decision tree in every post. Have fun!
Much like smallpox isn't equivalent to a flu-like virus, polar bears aren't equivalent to bats/civets/pangolins in terms of how close they are to Atlanta. I don't know why you feel the need to exaggerate every time you compare to Wuhan, but it isn't interesting.
The bats from which RaTG13, the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2, was isolated, live in a cave in Yunnan, 1000 miles from Wuhan. To the best of my knowledge, they do not naturally occur anywhere near Wuhan. Pick your own North American animal that satisfies this constraint and answer the question.
Couple more points:
* Asking questions is a legitimate activity, even if the answer turns out to be negative. It's the fundamental mechanism for truth finding. I'm appalled, but not surprised, at the aggressive censorship strain that is spreading like wildfire in our society. Not only some people know all the correct answers, they know all the correct questions as well.
* Think hard about the wisdom of proliferating BSL4 centers in the middle of population centers of the size of NYC. That single fact is a scandal in itself.
Yes, but "just asking questions"[0] is also a rhetorical trick common enough to have a name, especially when the questions are leading, as some of yours are. That isn't to say that you're intentionally being nefarious, but hiding behind "I'm just asking questions" doesn't absolve one of responsibility for applying their own logical thinking.
> To the best of my knowledge, they do not naturally occur anywhere near Wuhan.
As I mentioned elsewhere, this is exactly the same story as with SARS-CoV-1. Bats from Yunnan are the source of a virus first found in humans in Guangdong, around 1000 miles away. So we have literally the exact same thing happening, in essentially the same area, in modern times. Given that, I have a question for you:
Which is more likely: that SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 had essentially the same transmission path, or that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a government lab, but as far as we know, none of the early infections were related to said lab, meaning that it would have had to spread into the community without any of the lab employees getting infected (this reduces the reasonable escape paths significantly)
> * Think hard about the wisdom of proliferating BSL4 centers in the middle of population centers of the size of NYC. That single fact is a scandal in itself.
Yeah, I'm not seeing the issue here. We stick nuclear reactors in population centers, and I'm unaware of any known leaks from BSL-4 labs anywhere ever, so they have a better track record.
The wisdom, by the way, is that you need researchers and infra to support BSL-4 labs. You can't stick them out in the middle of nowhere, they usually need things like attached universities.
I'm on record in this very comment section of pointing out that the SARS-CoV-2 transmission paths is likely via a non-bat species traveling between Yunnan and Wuhan. That doesn't mean that WIV gets a cart blanche or that asking for transparency and independent verification of their activity is a 'rhetorical trick' or a 'conspiracy theory'. The impact is too large to leave stones unturned.
> As of your first point, there may be another natural virus, as of yet unidentified, possibly carried by a different species, that brought the disease to Wuhan. From the virologist chatter I hear, the genetic difference between RaTG13 is too large to have RaTG13 a recent direct precursor of SARS-CoV-2, either through genetic manipulation, or via culturing.
That strain is said to be characteristic to large horseshoe bats from Yunnan
Bats in China don't seem to live so far north, and away from the coast. More so, for larger species.
The very few bats known to live near cities, are all small insectivorous species. SARS carrying bat species don't normally like living near humans.
Bats are not considered food, even by nouveau riche weird meat eaters in China.
The above mean that there should be no bats sold on wet markets. First responder reports confirm that.
1. So, out of where did the SARS strain very close to the wild virus came out from in the middle of a 10 million people megalopolis?
2. From where did the story about bats came out from to begin with?
3. It is now near certain that first reports of influx of respiratory patients happened as early as November, and it had nothing to do with the seafood market. If so, how media were first able to connect the dots to the market, and do it so quickly, and confidently?
4. The first report incriminating the market came out few weeks after first evidence of the government sending censorship directives, and instructions on outbreak handling to provincial authorities.
5. It means that a low key regional newspaper broke out a report at the same time when even a squeak about sars outbreak got people into trouble.
6. The amazing synchronicity with which top tier national medias republished the story of an obscure regional newspaper is clearly unnatural.
7. The way how zealously Chinese media came out to blast earliest reports doubting this outbreak originating from the seafood market even before that became news in the West stands out. Are all of them subscribed to the same obscure American academic journal?
8. Chinese government is no stranger to manufacturing bizarre hoaxes
Normally, this is not what Chinese government would cover up. The concealment of original SARS outbreak only happened after the fact of its existence becoming public.
What was covered up in 2003 was not its existence, but the lacklustre emergency response after it became clear that they completely screwed up.
Similarly, other natural disaster coverups only happened after it becoming clear that somebody screwed up.
I.E.: the Wenzhou train collision. The cover up was made not for screwup of signalling system designers, but to make the emergency response look "adequate." The guy wanted to render it a "small, manageable derailment accident," and not to show hundreds people dying on his hands while he did nothing.
I struggle with similar questions. Probably we'll never know.
As of your first point, there may be another natural virus, as of yet unidentified, possibly carried by a different species, that brought the disease to Wuhan. From the virologist chatter I hear, the genetic difference between RaTG13 is too large to have RaTG13 a recent direct precursor of SARS-CoV-2, either through genetic manipulation, or via culturing.
Alternatively, everything that came out of China since Jan 2020 is pure BS. As of yet, there is no independent verification of the origin of RaTG13, which conveniently was found 'lying around in a freezer' in Jan 2020, stored there all the way back in 2013. Nor there is independent verification of the genomic sequences of all the other viruses that are 'lying around in a freezer'. Nor are the Chinese authorities very open to international collaboration on this matter.
The sharp politicization of this issue is worrisome in itself.
RaTG13 wasn't exactly "lying around." The Wuhan Institute of Virology searches out and catalogs bat coronaviruses. They have a "library" of a few hundred frozen viruses. Most of them probably receive very little in-depth study after initial categorization.
> Nor are the Chinese authorities very open to international collaboration on this matter.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology actually engages in a large amount of international collaboration. The international collaborators of the WIV (among them are some of the most prominent coronavirus and emerging infectious diseases researchers), in the United States and elsewhere, have been defending the institute against the various conspiracy theories circulating online (and being promoted by the US President). The researchers at the WIV receive training at national labs in the US, France and Australia. In other words, the WIV is tightly hooked into the international research community. It's not some secretive place that the outside world can't peer into.
> possibly carried by a different species, that brought the disease to Wuhan
SARS and MERS were both transmitted to humans through an intermediate host species. It's reasonable to believe that SARS-CoV-2 also went through an intermediate host. It's also not certain that the initial spillover occurred in Wuhan. It could easily have begun in the countryside and only blown up when someone brought it to Wuhan, which is a major transportation hub.
I want to know how they identified a new viral pneumonia back in late November with just a handful of cases.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but since the initial symptoms are flu like wouldn’t it require a statistically significant number of additional cases, deaths or symptoms in order to alert the health officials that something new was taking place, and an investigation was warranted?
In late November they had less than 15 cases but they had already identified it as a new virus. How would they know to look for a new virus with so few cases? Unless they had prior knowledge about a new virus that was accidental released, which prompted them to start looking.
Taiwan is a good calibration point. There, they managed to trace all cases down to a single arrival from the mainland.
From that, it looks quite believable that it would've taken 3-4 full generations of reinfections to take the count to 200 hospitalisations.
I think, 200 hospitalisations should've been around the same number for the signal to attract attention by Chinese disease surveillance, if it wasn't picked up by the purpose made SARS screening network.
If we believe the news that Hubei already saw hundred extra deaths in January, and that hospitals were already near full in mid January, then the number of infections should've been already above 1000 at Jan 1.
They didn't identify the new case in November. There is a report of a case that was retrospectively dated to mid-November, by searching through patient records and probably by re-testing samples. But that retrospective analysis was done months later.
The virus was not identified until the end of December, which is more than a month after the case in mid-November.
> The unique thing about Wuhan is the level 4 bio lab.
This is dangerous (and wrong) thinking. Wrong in the sense that, even if the conclusion were true, the reasoning is faulty.
There are many characteristics which, in hindsight, would look suspicious. One of this characteristics is the presence of a bio research lab. Other interesting factors would have been the presence of particular chemicals in the air/water, presence of certain types of bats, the presence of certain climate quirks, the presence of nuclear powerplants etc.
Let's say Wuhan was the only region which had a particular species of bats. Would you immediately conclude that the virus _must_ have come from that bat species?
You have a conclusion and are looking for reasoning to support it.
Being "ultra skeptical" for some non-scientific reasons is also a very dangerous way of thinking. Keeping in mind several factors, such as China being a developing country (and likely having lower standards of biosecurity than say US or Germany), poor conditions in that particular lab (cited by US observers), proximity of the lab etc. at least suggests that there is some non-negligible probability it came from that lab.
FWIW, my stance is that there is way too little information to draw any conclusion with sufficient conviction. This is a highly politicised issue so the bar for proving something is, imo, higher.
The post I was replying too had high conviction in the 'lab-grown' theory.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'non-scientific' reasons.
Interesting how it's turned around. A few weeks ago one of my HN accounts was banned for a neutral note that the lab hypothesis shouldn't be disregarded. Now it's openly talked about on WaPo.
Maybe not even the WIV Level 4 lab, which is 20 miles from the wet market, but the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control & Prevention lab is only 300 yards away, and would be a plausible shopping location for an accidentally infected research assistant, or even proximity to improperly destroyed refuse from the lab:
> It seems incredibly naive to me for anyone to believe that a virus just happened to naturally jump from animals to humans at a wet market in Wuhan, when that event could have happened in thousands of other wet markets.
I think it's naive to believe that a spillover event is more probable in a high-security research lab than out in the real world. Do not underestimate the sheer amount of contact between humans and infected animals. Coronaviruses are not rare - for the animals that host them, they are just another common cold. Farmers, butchers, villagers who live near bat populations, people who frequent wet markets, and all sorts of other people are constantly coming into contact with animals that are sick with coronaviruses.
There are estimates that a few million people in Southeast Asia are infected with bat coronaviruses each year. In other words, spillover events are occurring thousands of times each day. We're just lucky that the vast majority of them do not lead to global pandemics, because they are not well adapted to humans and do not transmit efficiently from person to person, or because the epidemic never reaches a major population center. There are probably even pandemics that go completely unnoticed, because the symptoms caused by the viruses are no worse than the common cold.
So compare what's happening every day to thousands of people in Southeast Asia to a few people working under extreme safety precautions in a high-security lab.
> So compare what's happening every day to thousands of people in Southeast Asia to a few people working under extreme safety precautions in a high-security lab.
If you go off what other virologists have said, that this virus looks like a random wild virus. Then what are the chances the virus escaped from a bsl-4 lab while a researcher was cataloging it. Bs any of the millions as you say random farmers, butchers, etc randomly getting infected. Yeah odds favor the latter.
Also the Wuhan seafood market looks exactly like the kind of enclosed place with lots of people we now know to avoid during the pandemic. So the only notable thing there is it's was a big enough cluster to be noticed. Looking from common origins is something every public health official does day in day out.
All this lab talk lacks nuance and is being abused as propaganda. You say "it came from a lab" and imply that it's some manufactured bio terrorism thing.
It's disappointing to see that, no matter how this virus emerged, we don't see universal condemnation of the CCP handling the outbreak.
It's also disappointing that the WHO isn't being harshly criticized by either sides, despite the fact that it was instrumental in downplaying the outbreak in line with CCP interests.
A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Donald Trump.
Would love a good Bayesian statistical analysis with different priors. Of all the places covid could have arisen, what are the chances it was randomly so close to this lab? 10%?
Are we throwing out statistics and common sense because we don’t have a YouTube video showing a researcher physically transferring it out of a lab? No idea...
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadhttps://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/majority-of-us-spy-a...
The UK is no longer discounting this theory:
https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/25214/20200406/uk-fear...
Similar to the Russian DNC hacking, I trust our intelligence agencies over the CPC state media in this case.
Seems plausible. And yet when people started dropping like flies from a nerve agent just down the road from the UK's top nerve agent lab: definitely just the hand of Russia again.
- No victims in the UK were Russian dissidents; in fact most were not even Russian.
- Skripal was a Russian military intelligence officer working for MI6.
- He did not live in swinging London or some random backwater, as a typical Witsec might, but in the top British military county of Wiltshire.
If an American working for China's intelligence service and living right next door to the Wuhan lab was one of the first victims of Covid-19 anyone insisting it could only mean the US carried out an attack would be written off as a conspiracy loon.
From the first article: > The Daily Caller cited a senior intelligence official earlier Saturday who stated the majority view among U.S. spy agencies is that COVID-19 is natural and that it was accidentally leaked out of a Wuhan lab.
The Daily Caller: "The Daily Caller is a right-wing news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C. It was founded by now Fox News host Tucker Carlson and political pundit Neil Patel in 2010."
The second article references the Daily Mail.
Until an official report comes out from the government, I'd be cautious with your reading of "journalism."
Yes Fox and more so The Daily Caller are right leaning, but you're attacking the source not the substance.
China runs hard labor camps, they're not on the same level of trust of even the most right-wing/liberal media sources.
It seems like a very confident report, citing an exact 17 agencies. I'm sure you'll see confirmation soon.
Funny that anonymous sources are attacked when it's a "right-wing" journalist.
Read up on John Roberts and see if you trust him based on his previous reporting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts_(journalist)
Remember to do this for all news sources! Pay attention to their sources, follow-up when they are anonymous.
There is no substance. It's an anonymous guy saying something. Misinformation is dangerous regardless of who it comes from - including China and far left or far right media. Such a confident report would likely have other sources that aren't from the right wing mill machine - but if you actually look at the other sources, they all say a completely different take, I'll let you look yourself.
I'm very anti-China, especially with regards to how they run their country and treat their people. I hope that all of the world's governments, when THIS IS CONTAINED, investigate the cause. It may be that it did leak from a lab. Or it didn't. I wish our government and media would focus instead on containing it first and then figure out the cause.
Are you arguing that we can't talk about the origin at the same time as figuring out solutions to the virus?
The article is about the origin, it seems appropriate to mention these things.
Interesting DHS report: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/05/03/intelligence-report-c...
The right-wing media complex, hands down.
Furthermore, you should be asking why a left-leaning media outlet (Washington Post) is reporting essentially the same facts, but puts an emphasis on there being "no evidence" of an accidental release. You should be asking why they aren't mentioning that the CCP had potential evidence destroyed.
If someone said to me that the World Trade Center is just across the road from Madison Square Garden I'd find it hard to take them seriously.
https://img-prod.tgcom24.mediaset.it/images/2020/02/16/11472...
If you search on Google Maps for the Wuhan Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, you instead find a building about 1.5 km from the seafood market. If the random PDF you linked doesn't even get the location of the building right, how can I trust its other claims? But further, when I look at the web page of the WHCDC, it looks like they're mainly a community health institution, not a research institute. The people studying coronaviruses are 15 km away, in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But if they're doing research, there should be publications, just as there are for the WIV. When you search bioRxiv for papers from them, all you turn up are papers from Jianghan University Medical School, which is even farther away from the market. The random PDF you're linking to appears to be wrong on a number of counts: both on where and what the Wuhan CDC is.
In short: Random PDFs from websites that anyone can upload to are not reliable sources of information.
There is not just one building, this is the one mentioned:
https://map.baidu.com/poi/%E6%AD%A6%E6%B1%89%E5%B8%82%E7%96%...
Remember that Google is effectively not operating in China anymore, so their information is bound to be outdated and incomplete.
> But further, when I look at the web page of the WHCDC, it looks like they're mainly a community health institution, not a research institute. The people studying coronaviruses are 15 km away, in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Scientists at the Wuhan CDC are studying live bats and bat coronaviruses:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovnUyTRMERI&feature=youtu.be...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Wuhan+Jiang'an+Center+for+...
> Scientists at the Wuhan CDC are studying live bats and bat coronaviruses:
Yes, but not in the two buildings you're linking to.
It isn't incorrect. The Baidu Maps link[1] shows the WHCDC office also shown at the location in the PDF map, next to the hospital - a few hundred meters from the seafood market[2].
[1] https://map.baidu.com/poi/%E6%AD%A6%E6%B1%89%E5%B8%82%E7%96%...
[2] https://map.baidu.com/search/%E6%AD%A6%E6%B1%89%E5%8D%8E%E5%...
> Yes, but not in the two buildings you're linking to.
I have no source that either proves or contradicts that - do you?
Yes, but the PDF that the GP comment scrounged up online used Google Maps. If you look at Baidu or Bing Maps, you see that the Wuhan CDC has many local offices. It appears to mainly be a community health organization that deals with things like vaccinations and awareness. What you're pointing to is not the central offices of the Wuhan CDC.
> are studying live bats
No, they're not. All the papers I've seen only discuss samples collected from bats in the countryside, and standard practice is to deactivate any virus in the samples before working with them.
Where the research described in the video you show is unclear to me, but it's not taking place in some little satellite community health center across the street from the seafood market.
It's really alarming how much of this Internet scavenger-hunting is being passed off as legitimate evidence, by people like "Project Evidence" (or whoever is behind it). People desperately want answers about the virus, and there are political actors taking advantage of that.
You said they got the location wrong. They didn't, you just failed to find the office at that location. You don't actually know what the WHCDC does, or where it does its work, but you think you know better than the authors of the paper, who have worked in Wuhan.
> No, they're not.
Yes, they are. Did you even read the paper? They're reporting that hundreds of live bats were hosted at the WHCDC. I haven't seen anyone come out and disprove these claims, so they're most likely not just made up.
> All the papers I've seen only discuss samples collected from bats in the countryside, and standard practice is to deactivate any virus in the samples before working with them.
"I didn't see it, therefore it does not exist" - your way of reasoning.
> It's really alarming how much of this Internet scavenger-hunting is being passed off as legitimate evidence...
That paper was authored by researchers familiar with the matter, it's not "internet scavenger hunting". I'm not saying it's "legitimate evidence" either, but your "debunking" is a joke.
They used Google Maps, which doesn't actually list that as the location.
When you look for the main offices of the Wuhan CDC, on Google Maps, Baidu Maps or Bing Maps, you find a different location several kilometers away. I'll grant that a different map service, Baidu Maps, shows a small satellite community health center at the given location.
> Yes, they are. Did you even read the paper?
What paper? Nobody has posted any paper yet. All I've seen is a PDF from a website that anyone can upload to, which the authors subsequently deleted because they said they couldn't vouch for its claims.
> They're reporting that hundreds of live bats were hosted at the WHCDC. I haven't seen anyone come out and disprove these claims, so they're most likely not just made up.
Some random people on the Internet uploaded a PDF, so their claims are probably true? Is this the standard of evidence we've reached?
> That paper was authored by researchers familiar with the matter
I still don't know what paper you're talking about. Are you talking about the non-peer-reviewed PDF that was uploaded to a site anyone can upload to, and subsequently deleted by the authors?
Is it peer-reviewed and scientifically validated? No. Is it actual evidence that the virus originated in a lab? No.
It is simply a collection of facts that support the hypothesis that the virus could have come from a lab. The wildlife market origin is also just a hypothesis, supported by a handful of facts.
Yet, it is only the lab escape theory that is so quickly dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Why?
As for the political dimension, the actual origin does not really matter. The crimes of the CCP during the original outbreak are a matter of public record, they are not even being denied.
It was deleted ("retraction" isn't even really the right word, because we're not talking about a scientific paper) because it was wild speculation. There was not only no "direct proof," there was no piece of compelling evidence that pointed to a lab leak in the first place.
It's being dismissed by virologists as a conspiracy theory because it's just that: there's no evidence for it, and if you know anything about zoonosis and actual lab methods in virology, it's a wildly implausible hypothesis. It also requires one to believe that some highly respected scientific figures in virology, like Shi Zhengli, are blatantly lying.
It's not being as widely dismissed in the media as it should be, the reason being that a good part of the political class is intent on pushing it. Trump and Pompeo are promoting this theory in order to deflect criticism and turn anger about the US government's disastrous handling of the virus against a foreign enemy.
I've started noticing the phrase "CCP" being used more and more among people who are set on demonizing China. I think it's being used for the shock value, and because it taps into long-standing anti-Red sentiment in the US. I'll say this, though: whatever crimes the Chinese government committed, their handling of CoVID-19 turned out to be incomparably better than the US government's handling of the virus. Trump has now said that the deaths that will be caused by opening up are worth it. The Chinese government didn't passively watch as 70,000 of its citizens (increasing every day) died.
No it doesn't. Lots of junk papers get published by clowns, with or without peer review. They're still referred to as papers. The document I linked to follows the form of a scientific publication, so I'm calling it a paper.
Either way, whatever you call it makes no difference as to the content.
> The document even appears to get some basic facts wrong, like the location of the WHCDC lab and the presence (or rather, non-presence) of bats in the lab.
It doesn't get basic facts wrong. You got the facts wrong. There is a facility at the specified location, there is research on bats at the WHCDC. It's unclear whether such research took place at that particular facility, but you would expect that if there wasn't then it would simply be (truthfully) denied. Even if there wasn't any research there, an employee working on another facility could've visited it.
> It's being dismissed by virologists as a conspiracy theory because it's just that: there's no evidence for it, and if you know anything about zoonosis and actual lab methods in virology, it's a wildly implausible hypothesis. It also requires one to believe that some highly respected scientific figures in virology, like Shi Zhengli, are blatantly lying.
Wildly implausible? Well let me quote Shi Zhengli herself then:
"“I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...
It's correct that Shi Zengli later categorically denied that it came from her lab, the Institute of Virology, but only after looking into the specifics of the virus and those at her lab, not because a lab accident would've been implausible.
As for the "lab methods" at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (from their website, now deleted):
https://i1.wp.com/metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/PRI...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
I'm not saying she is lying, but she would have good reasons to do so, saving face for herself and the whole country is tremendously important.
> It's not being as widely dismissed in the media as it should be, the reason being that a good part of the political class is intent on pushing it. Trump and Pompeo are promoting this theory in order to deflect criticism and turn anger about the US government's disastrous handling of the virus against a foreign enemy.
That's the crux of it, you can't allow this hypothesis to be plausible because your political enemy espouses it. Honestly, I don't see how it makes a difference. From a foreign perspective, an accident is an accident, whether it occurred in a wet market or laboratory.
> I've started noticing the phrase "CCP" being used more and m...
There is no indication that there's a lab in that location, much less that they work on bats. The WHCDC is primarily a community health organization, and some tiny satellite office is not where they're doing research, if they even do any significant research in their own labs.
You're promoting a conspiracy theory that has zero evidence (someone online claiming they have bats in a building that doesn't even appear to be a lab is not evidence), I think for political reasons that you've made quite clear - your views on China.
About your use of the phrase "CCP," I say you're using it for shock value because I don't think you're actually specifically talking about the CCP. You're talking about the actions of government officials, policemen, etc. What is added by alluding to the political party? This is the same as with the WHO. Suddenly everyone acts like an expert on the WHO, when they actually know next to nothing about it. I think 99% of the people going on about the "CCP" couldn't tell you the first thing about it. They actually mean, "My mental picture of the evil Chinese government."
I paid close attention to how the Chinese government handled the outbreak. I think it would have been nearly impossible to contain, even with the most aggressive early response. The US and Mexico were unable to contain H1N1 in 2009, which is a less transmissible disease than CoVID-19. Containing a highly contagious respiratory virus is incredibly difficult. This is being underscored as we learn just how early the virus spread internationally. There was community spread in California in mid-January, and there is now a paper claiming the existence of a case in France in late December, before the virus was even discovered.
I am sure that the government in Wuhan resisted taking measures that could have slowed the spread of the virus early on, because they worried about the effects those measures would have on the economy. That is not something that is peculiar to China, however. Just look at how many governments around the world downplayed the virus, even as the epidemic grew exponentially within their borders. In Wuhan, there was about a week of downplaying, before the central government stepped in and forced extreme measures on the city, which turned out to be highly effective. You're criticizing those measures ("Draconian"), while also severely mischaracterizing them. Months in, most of the US still hasn't suppressed the outbreak properly, and now the President and much of the political establishment is suggesting that maybe it's better to let people die than to harm the economy.
In the end, I think one would have to be blind, or blinded by political ideology, to deny that China handled the outbreak better than the US did.
What do you expect, the bat sign at the front door?
> The WHCDC is primarily a community health organization, and some tiny satellite office is not where they're doing research, if they even do any significant research in their own labs.
Listen to yourself, Mr. Science. This claim is speculation. You do not know how the WHCDC works, you couldn't even find their facility on map, you couldn't figure out that they are doing research on bats, that they have a major bat researcher on their staff, who co-authored papers along with Shi Zhengli.
Note that I never claimed they were doing research at that facility, because I don't know. I was merely correcting your claims that they authors of that "document" got the location wrong and that there is no bat research at the WHCDC.
> You're promoting a conspiracy theory that has zero evidence (someone online claiming they have bats in a building that doesn't even appear to be a lab is not evidence), I think for political reasons that you've made quite clear - your views on China.
Why are you conflating my views on China and my views on the government and ruling party?
> About your use of the phrase "CCP," I say you're using it for shock value because I don't think you're actually specifically talking about the CCP.
What's the "shock value" in that?
> You're talking about the actions of government officials, policemen, etc. What is added by alluding to the political party?
All government in Mainland China is subordinate to the CCP and its political philosophy. A common CCP strategy is to defer responsibility for mistakes down the chain of command. That's how the local officials in Wuhan got purged, while the higher-ups got away scot-free. It would be ridiculous for me to blame the policemen, which are at the very bottom of the chain of command, for what they have been ordered to do.
This is in stark contrast to the US, where the political parties do not actually rule the entire legislature, executive and judiciary parts of the government. Yet you have no problem blaming the situation in the US on Trump and its administration, even though they have far less power.
> I think it would have been nearly impossible to contain, even with the most aggressive early response.
It was effectively contained in Hong-Kong and Taiwan, both of which are China, but neither of which are ruled by the CCP. I guess we'll never know.
> The US and Mexico were unable to contain H1N1 in 2009, which is a less transmissible disease than CoVID-19.
Sure, but it only was discovered after it had already spread for a while in both countries, whereas the CCP had a golden opportunity to inform the community and quell the spread early. Instead, it chose to destroy evidence and silence whistle blowers.
> There was community spread in California in mid-January, and there is now a paper claiming the existence of a case in France in late December, before the virus was even discovered.
If that's true, fair enough, the cat was already out of the box.
> I am sure that the government in Wuhan resisted taking measures that could have slowed the spread of the virus early on, because they worried about the effects those measures would have on the economy.
They didn't just "resist taking measures", they arrested people for "spreading the rumor" that there was another SARS-like outbreak even though they knew there was an outbreak. If the government didn't suppress information, people could've taken measures for themselves.
> In Wuhan, there was about a week of downplaying, before the central government stepped in and forced extreme measures on the city, which turned out to be highly effective.
You don't know that they were effective, none of the numbers published are ind...
I expect any evidence whatsoever. One piece.
> you couldn't even find their facility on map
I correctly pointed out that the WHCDC is located 3 km away.
> you couldn't figure out that they are doing research on bats
I still haven't seen any evidence that any WHCDC lab keeps bats, much less that they keep bats at a small satellite office away from the main campus. The papers on sample collection state that samples are brought back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
> they have a major bat researcher on their staff, who co-authored papers along with Shi Zhengli.
He collects samples in the countryside. That isn't evidence that he's keeping live bats 300 m from the seafood market. The fact that he's co-authoring papers with Shi Zhengli actually suggests that the samples are going to the WIV, which would make perfect sense. From everything I've seen, they're the ones that store samples of bat coronaviruses.
> What's the "shock value" in that?
Because it plays into American anti-Communist hysteria, a very powerful force going back to the McCarthy era in the 1950s.
> All government in Mainland China is subordinate to the CCP and its political philosophy.
Which is what? Honestly, do you think that even 1% of the people who have suddenly, in the last month or so, started going on about the CCP can even name one member of the Politburo, other than Xi Xinping? What percentage of these people know who Deng Xiaoping or Zhou Enlai was? I think people are just using this phrase because it sounds ominous ("the Communists are coming!").
> Sure, but it only was discovered after it had already spread for a while in both countries
When H1N1 was discovered, it was still geographically isolated to part of Mexico and the Southwestern US. It took a month for the first confirmed cases to pop up in Europe. Chinese labs only discovered the existence of SARS-CoV-2 in late December, by which point the virus had already been circulating for at least a month, and was possibly already spreading internationally (see the claimed French case).
> the CCP had a golden opportunity to inform the community and quell the spread early.
Again with the "CCP." What specific actions should have been taken by which specific Party organs in order to contain the outbreak at the source? I'm interested in your detailed knowledge of how the Party organs function.
> Instead, it chose to destroy evidence and silence whistle blowers.
It alerted the WHO the day after doctors first posted information about cases to social media. Two things can be true at once: local authorities cracked down on doctors for what they considered rumor mongering, and they also sent an official notification to the WHO.
As for "destroyed information," I can guess what you're alluding to, but I think you're going out on a limb. The reports were that once they discovered that patient samples contained a SARS-like coronavirus, the government ordered low-security labs to either transfer their samples to high-security labs or to destroy them. They also quickly shared the genome with the international scientific community, which doesn't align with your depiction of their behavior.
> If the government didn't suppress information, people could've taken measures for themselves.
The government alerted the public on 31 December, which is before the doctors were ordered to stop posting to social media. I think the local government downplayed its seriousness in mid-January, out of fear of the economic consequences. That appears to have ended once Zhong Nanshan visited Wuhan. Then the hammer came down.
> How exactly?
This is what the quarantine centers looked like: [1][2]. That's where people with mild cases were sent. Describing that as "open-floor internment centers where people had no protection" strikes me as inaccurate and really just an att...
As it is, you have no evidence one way or another, so it's neither proven nor disproven, nor is it officially denied.
> I correctly pointed out that the WHCDC is located 3 km away.
You incorrectly claimed that the WHCDC is not located at that spot. The WHCDC is an organization with several facilities in Wuhan, one being at that location.
> I still haven't seen any evidence that any WHCDC lab keeps bats, much less that they keep bats at a small satellite office away from the main campus. The papers on sample collection state that samples are brought back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Here's the paper regarding the bats collected by the CDC:
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
They report that they collected bats, not samples from bats. You can tell that it must have been live bats, because surgery under anesthesia was performed on them. All of the authors have CDC-affiliation, none have affiliation with the Institute of Virology.
> Because it plays into American anti-Communist hysteria, a very powerful force going back to the McCarthy era in the 1950s.
I don't think so, especially considering that China is better at capitalism than the US these days. How else am I supposed to refer to the ruling party, when they are called the Communist Party of China?
> What specific actions should have been taken by which specific Party organs in order to contain the outbreak at the source? I'm interested in your detailed knowledge of how the Party organs function.
What difference does it make? Like I said, the government is subordinate to the party, not the other way around.
> The reports were that once they discovered that patient samples contained a SARS-like coronavirus, the government ordered low-security labs to either transfer their samples to high-security labs or to destroy them. They also quickly shared the genome with the international scientific community, which doesn't align with your depiction of their behavior.
"On 1 January 2020, a genetic sequencing company was notified by the Wuhan Municipal Health Committee that further sequencing of novel coronavirus samples were no longer allowed, existing samples must be destroyed and all data must be kept secret."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...
"Must be kept secret", in other words, covered up. It's true that that nine days later - a long time during an outbreak of a novel disease - the genome was posted online. That was only after the higher-ups at the CCP decided that a coverup was no longer feasible.
> This is what the quarantine centers looked like: [1][2]. That's where people with mild cases were sent. Describing that as "open-floor internment centers where people had no protection" strikes me as inaccurate and really just an attempt at demonization.
Your pictures show people in an open-floor facility, close to each other, with no protection. We know that these people were interned there against their will and by force, if necessary. Not just mild cases, suspected cases. So, what part exactly strikes you as "inaccurate"?
> Coupled with universal symptom checks, centralized quarantine is very effective at reducing the reproductive number of the virus. That's how they got down to R ~ 0.3 in Wuhan.
Of course, totalitarian measures were successful and the numbers, which are above suspicion, prove it. Pardon my sarcasm.
> I think the country whose leadership decided to sacrifice 70,000+ of its citizens' lives to the economy has no moral standing to criticize others' handling of the outbre...
> Captured animals are anesthetized, identified, weighed, measured, sampled (e.g., blood and oral swab), marked with a unique number, and released at the exact site of capture.
I don't see quarantine measures during an acute public health emergency as "totalitarian." You're just demonizing China (excuse me, I mean the "CCP") for what was actually a very effective public health measure that saved lives.
> It's true that that nine days later - a long time during an outbreak of a novel disease - the genome was posted online.
Has any genome of a novel pathogen ever been released more quickly? I was under the impression that this was record speed: just two weeks from discovery of the first cases to the whole world having the full genome.
> You're free to condemn the Trump administration's handling of the situation, but perhaps you should take into account that the US is a free country and the president has limited powers.
This might be a valid excuse if Trump had been begging for states to take appropriate measures, and the states had resisted. Instead, Trump downplayed the virus for two months, while it spread exponentially. The Federal government also has a great deal of power and a large role in dealing with public health, and it performed terribly in that role. But I'm not going to blame Trump alone. There is plenty of blame to go around at many levels of government in the US.
> I'm not "the country". You're having a conversation with an individual. I can criticize anything I want, I don't need moral license.
Indeed. But you're claiming that the government that decided to let 70,000 of its citizens die, and which has now decided to let the virus run its course, had a superior response to the country that decided to take much more drastic action to save lives.
> Does that mean more people will die? Of course! It's a trade-off.
The trade-off China chose was much further to the "save lives" end of the scale. Because they much more effectively suppressed transmission, they also were able to safely reopen more quickly, without endangering people's lives.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2640244/
The sources listed in the description of this video seem somewhat reliable. While I'm not completely sold on the lab being the source I think the odds that it was are still pretty high for me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market#China
"In 2018, wet markets were noted to have remained the most prevalent food outlet in urban regions of China despite the rise of supermarket chains since the 1990s.[66]"
Later in the article, about Hong Kong, they say "Most neighbourhoods contain at least one wet market.[12]"
So there are hundreds / thousands / tens of thousands of wet markets in China.
How many level 4 bio labs are in China? 1, in Wuhan.
It seems incredibly naive to me for anyone to believe that a virus just happened to naturally jump from animals to humans at a wet market in Wuhan, when that event could have happened in thousands of other wet markets. But it didn't; it happened in Wuhan. The unique thing about Wuhan is the level 4 bio lab.
Would you immediately jump to conspiracy theories if an outbreak of a novel flu started in Galveston Texas? Or Atlanta? Or Boston?
And that's just some of the BSL-4 facilities in the US. Coronaviruses can be studied in BSL-3 labs, which China has tons of, basically one in every major city (much like the US).
The CCP has ordered the destruction of evidence at those places and imposed gag orders on the scientists involved. Again, just facts, not a conspiracy theory.
The CCP has furthermore suppressed the spread of information on the initial outbreak and has been uncooperative regarding investigation on the origin of the virus. A large amount of the initial cases had no connection to the Wuhan seafood market. Factual.
Note that none of these facts support the conspiracy theory that the virus has been engineered or intentionally released.
Source?
> A large amount of the initial cases had no connection to the Wuhan seafood market. Factual.
But misleading. The article you cite notes the much likelier cause: the long incubation period means that those who did come into contact with the market infected others.
> The CCP has ordered the destruction of evidence at those places and imposed gag orders on the scientists involved.
Correct, but the Wuhan CDC is also where most of the early analysis of covid was being done after it was discovered. The CCP also silenced doctors in hospitals, they generally tried to cover up covid in general. Keeping the scientists working on it silenced isn't any different than how they treated hospital workers.
Let's suppose we had to decide between two scenarios, which one of these two sounds more probable?
A virus endemic to bats from southern China was first transmitted to a researcher working at one of two specialist centers in central China, while performing research on bats and/or bat coronaviruses, under a questionable safety regime.
A virus endemic to bats from southern China was first transmitted to a human in the wildlife market in central China where no bats are sold, presumably through an intermediate host such as a pangolin.
Which of these two scenarios is preferable to the ruling party of China?
Which is feeding the narrative that "human encroachment on nature is dangerous" (bad thing is dangerous), as opposed to "scientific research can be dangerous" (good thing is dangerous)?
> The article you cite notes the much likelier cause: the long incubation period means that those who did come into contact with the market infected others.
How is that more likely? The finding is that there is no epidemiological link to the seafood market in 13 out 41 patients, including the earliest known patient.
Your interpretation is the opposite of what the paragraph regarding the incubation period says:
"Lucey says if the new data are accurate, the first human infections must have occurred in November 2019—if not earlier—because there is an incubation time between infection and symptoms surfacing. If so, the virus possibly spread silently between people in Wuhan—and perhaps elsewhere—before the cluster of cases from the city’s now-infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was discovered in late December. “The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace,” Lucey asserts."
How likely is it that a virus endemic to bats in southwestern china was first transmitted to humans in a wildlife market in southeastern china where bats are not sold?
Well that's exactly what happened with SARS-1. The disease was passed to humans via civets. And in Wuhan the carrier seems to have been pangolins. Seems completely believable, given that it happened once already.
Patient zero in SARS-1 was a farmer from Guangdong, the same area where the novel coronavirus is suspected to have emerged among bats, where farmers have been found to carry bat coronaviruses. Wuhan is more than 600 miles away from that area.
The initial outbreak of SARS-1 was literally where you would expect it to be, among the population where you would expect it to occur. Civets were suspected as transmitters, but that link is neither proven nor necessary to explain the initial outbreak.
> Seems completely believable, given that it happened once already.
I'm not asking if it is believable. Both scenarios are believable. The "pathogen escapes from lab" scenario happened before as well.
I'm asking, which of these appears more likely?
Which of these would you be more inclined to believe, if you want to be as far away from right wingers as possible? Which scenario caters to your pro-environmental and pro-science stance?
Correct.
> the same area where the novel coronavirus is suspected to have emerged among bats,
Incorrect, that's Yunnan.
> where farmers have been found to carry bat coronaviruses.
Yunnan.
> Wuhan is more than 600 miles away from that area.
I suggest you go find Yunnan, Guangdong and Hubei on a map.
Bat caves in Yunnan are full of potentially dangerous coronaviruses, but the farmers living close to the caves are already immune to the strains they're in frequent contact with, so the only way for an outbreak to get big is by long-distance transportation carrying the virus somewhere else.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...
> Bat caves in Yunnan are full of potentially dangerous coronaviruses, but the farmers living close to the caves are already immune to the strains they're in frequent contact with...
They're not going to be immune to newly evolved coronaviruses.
>... so the only way for an outbreak to get big is by long-distance transportation carrying the virus somewhere else.
All it needs is for someone who is infected to travel to the nearest population center.
SARS-CoV-1 was also found in civets in Guangdong sold at a wildlife market. It is unknown whether the first human transmission went through civets or through bats, but the local civets probably didn't take a trip to Yunnan to get infected.
Either way, it doesn't make a difference whether it is Yunnan, Guangxi or Guangdong, those are the areas where these bats live and where you would expect a human transmission to occur.
You wouldn't expect it to occur in Wuhan. That's not my personal assessment, that's the assessment of the virologist that personally led the expedition to that Yunnan cave - I quoted her in my previous reply.
Actually my understanding is that that is, in general, the scientific consensus on the matter (including from the scientist you quoted in your prior reply)
> or that it first spread to humans in the region - who then somehow carried it to Guangdong
Correct, this is unlikely. The leading theories are that an intermediate animal, like a civet for CoV-1 and perhaps pangolins for CoV-2 were the infection vector.
> Either way, it doesn't make a difference whether it is Yunnan, Guangxi or Guangdong,
Well yes, yes it does. Guangdong and Wuhan are similarly distant from Yunnan. If, as the consensus appears to be, the virus started out in Yunnan, traveling to Wuhan via an animal intermediary is no less likely than traveling to Guangdong via an animal intermediary.
> You wouldn't expect it to occur in Wuhan.
I made no such claim. I made the claim that the transmission vector for Cov-1 and cov-2 were similar. That they both started in Yunnan and travelled east hundreds of miles via some method, likely a combination of bat migration/movement, civet/pangolin migration/movement, and human movement of captured animals.
If you read the updated article, you'd find that she no longer believes the virus could have leaked from her lab, since
> its genetic sequence does not match any her lab had previously studied.[0]
Of course, she could be pressured into silence by the Chinese government.
[0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...
That is not my understanding, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, given a statement of hers to that effect.
> Guangdong and Wuhan are similarly distant from Yunnan
Yes, but Guangdong and Yunnan are bat country, unlike Wuhan.
Could it have spread through other wildlife? Yes. I'm not ruling that out at all, I never have. I'm pointing out that somehow the dominant narrative is the one that appears relatively unlikely even in the assessment of a leading expert.
> I made the claim that the transmission vector for Cov-1 and cov-2 were similar. That they both started in Yunnan and travelled east hundreds of miles via some method, likely a combination of bat migration/movement, civet/pangolin migration/movement, and human movement of captured animals.
As a reminder, this is your original claim:
"Bat caves in Yunnan are full of potentially dangerous coronaviruses, but the farmers living close to the caves are already immune to the strains they're in frequent contact with, so the only way for an outbreak to get big is by long-distance transportation carrying the virus somewhere else."
> If you read the updated article, you'd find that she no longer believes the virus could have leaked from her lab
It may well be true that it didn't come from her lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is several miles away from the seafood market.
However, the Wuhan CDC is right next to the seafood market and they performed experiments with hundreds of live bats there[1]. A likely vector could've been improperly disposed lab garbage.
[1] https://img-prod.tgcom24.mediaset.it/images/2020/02/16/11472...
As for the claim that the Wuhan cdc is tight next to the seafood market, I direct you to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23096524 which thoroughly and completely debunks those claims.
Indeed, I oversaw that it was "yorwba" who put that comment into "our" thread, not you. My apologies.
> As for the claim that the Wuhan cdc is tight next to the seafood market, I direct you to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23096524 which thoroughly and completely debunks those claims.
That's not a "thorough and complete" debunking, that's an erroneous assessment regarding the functions and location(s) of the Wuhan CDC, based on a cursory glance at websites.
A little bit more research would've revealed that the Wuhan CDC indeed was performing experiments on bats and that it has several facilities (including one near the seafood market).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovnUyTRMERI&feature=youtu.be...
https://map.baidu.com/poi/%E6%AD%A6%E6%B1%89%E5%B8%82%E7%96%...
1. There is a WHCDC facility at the location claimed, close to the seafood market
2. There was research on bats at the WHCDC
In other words, the person who "thoroughly debunked" the paper just didn't have a clue where to look.
I'm getting tired discussing this. The "lab escape hypothesis" is not a debunked conspiracy theory. It's a plausible scenario. Pathogens - including SARS-CoV-1 - have escaped from labs several times.
The wildlife market transmission is a plausible scenario as well, it just seems "out of place" in Wuhan. That doesn't mean it's wrong, of course.
First of all, they conducted experiments with deactivated samples of bat coronaviruses, not with live virus or with bats.
Second of all, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a world-class BSL-4 lab. They do not operate under "unsafe conditions."
> native to southern China, not Wuhan
A couple of things:
1. It is widely suspected that there was an intermediate host species between bats and humans, just as was the case in the last two major coronavirus outbreaks, SARS and MERS.
2. Nobody knows where, exactly, the virus first spilled over into the human population. Wuhan is just the first place where it was detected. A virus like this can spread for quite a while, particularly in the middle of flu season, before it is detected. There's nothing to say it didn't emerge in some rural village in Yunnan first.
> A large amount of the initial cases had no connection to the Wuhan seafood market. Factual.
With human-to-human transmission, this is entirely consistent with the first outbreak (or super-spreading event) occurring at the market.
> The CCP has ordered the destruction of evidence at those places
Did the CCP order that, or did the Chinese government order that? I've noticed a trend in which people who make extremely anti-China posts refer repeatedly to the "CCP." I strongly suspect that these people are just using that terminology for the shock value.
Beyond that, the news report (from Caixin) that I believe is the origin of your claim about destruction of evidence says that after the virus was identified, low-security Chinese labs were ordered to either transfer their samples to high-security labs or to destroy them. I recall this being a safety measure, in other words, though you could ascribe other motives if you wanted to.
Like I said, if a novel flu-like virus appeared in Atlanta, would your first guess be that it leaked from the CDC facility? That's what you're faced with, not smallpox.
If a new flu virus, quite more virulent that the usual flu, popped up in Atlanta 10 miles from the BSL4 facility and the closest known relative is endemic in polar bears, yeah, I'd be asking questions. Both about BSL4 and about the zoo. And maybe there are private citizens raising polar bears in Atlanta. I'd ask about them too. Especially if it were already known that polar bear viruses can be quite dangerous, see SARS episode 1.
But then again, these discussions are by now futile. It is obvious that the conversation has been politicized. One side will try its best to dismiss and discredit the slightest mention that there was ongoing bat coronavirus research in Wuhan, including WTF moments like creating chimera viruses for the specific purpose of infecting humans. The other will overhype all the scary innuendo that can possibly be created around WIV, whether it relates even remotely to SARS-CoV-2 or not.
I don't have the energy to elaborate the full decision tree in every post. Have fun!
Couple more points:
* Asking questions is a legitimate activity, even if the answer turns out to be negative. It's the fundamental mechanism for truth finding. I'm appalled, but not surprised, at the aggressive censorship strain that is spreading like wildfire in our society. Not only some people know all the correct answers, they know all the correct questions as well.
* Think hard about the wisdom of proliferating BSL4 centers in the middle of population centers of the size of NYC. That single fact is a scandal in itself.
Yes, but "just asking questions"[0] is also a rhetorical trick common enough to have a name, especially when the questions are leading, as some of yours are. That isn't to say that you're intentionally being nefarious, but hiding behind "I'm just asking questions" doesn't absolve one of responsibility for applying their own logical thinking.
> To the best of my knowledge, they do not naturally occur anywhere near Wuhan.
As I mentioned elsewhere, this is exactly the same story as with SARS-CoV-1. Bats from Yunnan are the source of a virus first found in humans in Guangdong, around 1000 miles away. So we have literally the exact same thing happening, in essentially the same area, in modern times. Given that, I have a question for you:
Which is more likely: that SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 had essentially the same transmission path, or that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a government lab, but as far as we know, none of the early infections were related to said lab, meaning that it would have had to spread into the community without any of the lab employees getting infected (this reduces the reasonable escape paths significantly)
> * Think hard about the wisdom of proliferating BSL4 centers in the middle of population centers of the size of NYC. That single fact is a scandal in itself.
Yeah, I'm not seeing the issue here. We stick nuclear reactors in population centers, and I'm unaware of any known leaks from BSL-4 labs anywhere ever, so they have a better track record.
The wisdom, by the way, is that you need researchers and infra to support BSL-4 labs. You can't stick them out in the middle of nowhere, they usually need things like attached universities.
[0]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
Your turn.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23072574
> As of your first point, there may be another natural virus, as of yet unidentified, possibly carried by a different species, that brought the disease to Wuhan. From the virologist chatter I hear, the genetic difference between RaTG13 is too large to have RaTG13 a recent direct precursor of SARS-CoV-2, either through genetic manipulation, or via culturing.
That strain is said to be characteristic to large horseshoe bats from Yunnan
Bats in China don't seem to live so far north, and away from the coast. More so, for larger species.
The very few bats known to live near cities, are all small insectivorous species. SARS carrying bat species don't normally like living near humans.
Bats are not considered food, even by nouveau riche weird meat eaters in China.
The above mean that there should be no bats sold on wet markets. First responder reports confirm that.
1. So, out of where did the SARS strain very close to the wild virus came out from in the middle of a 10 million people megalopolis?
2. From where did the story about bats came out from to begin with?
3. It is now near certain that first reports of influx of respiratory patients happened as early as November, and it had nothing to do with the seafood market. If so, how media were first able to connect the dots to the market, and do it so quickly, and confidently?
4. The first report incriminating the market came out few weeks after first evidence of the government sending censorship directives, and instructions on outbreak handling to provincial authorities.
5. It means that a low key regional newspaper broke out a report at the same time when even a squeak about sars outbreak got people into trouble.
6. The amazing synchronicity with which top tier national medias republished the story of an obscure regional newspaper is clearly unnatural.
7. The way how zealously Chinese media came out to blast earliest reports doubting this outbreak originating from the seafood market even before that became news in the West stands out. Are all of them subscribed to the same obscure American academic journal?
8. Chinese government is no stranger to manufacturing bizarre hoaxes
Normally, this is not what Chinese government would cover up. The concealment of original SARS outbreak only happened after the fact of its existence becoming public.
What was covered up in 2003 was not its existence, but the lacklustre emergency response after it became clear that they completely screwed up.
Similarly, other natural disaster coverups only happened after it becoming clear that somebody screwed up.
I.E.: the Wenzhou train collision. The cover up was made not for screwup of signalling system designers, but to make the emergency response look "adequate." The guy wanted to render it a "small, manageable derailment accident," and not to show hundreds people dying on his hands while he did nothing.
As of your first point, there may be another natural virus, as of yet unidentified, possibly carried by a different species, that brought the disease to Wuhan. From the virologist chatter I hear, the genetic difference between RaTG13 is too large to have RaTG13 a recent direct precursor of SARS-CoV-2, either through genetic manipulation, or via culturing.
Alternatively, everything that came out of China since Jan 2020 is pure BS. As of yet, there is no independent verification of the origin of RaTG13, which conveniently was found 'lying around in a freezer' in Jan 2020, stored there all the way back in 2013. Nor there is independent verification of the genomic sequences of all the other viruses that are 'lying around in a freezer'. Nor are the Chinese authorities very open to international collaboration on this matter.
The sharp politicization of this issue is worrisome in itself.
> Nor are the Chinese authorities very open to international collaboration on this matter.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology actually engages in a large amount of international collaboration. The international collaborators of the WIV (among them are some of the most prominent coronavirus and emerging infectious diseases researchers), in the United States and elsewhere, have been defending the institute against the various conspiracy theories circulating online (and being promoted by the US President). The researchers at the WIV receive training at national labs in the US, France and Australia. In other words, the WIV is tightly hooked into the international research community. It's not some secretive place that the outside world can't peer into.
> possibly carried by a different species, that brought the disease to Wuhan
SARS and MERS were both transmitted to humans through an intermediate host species. It's reasonable to believe that SARS-CoV-2 also went through an intermediate host. It's also not certain that the initial spillover occurred in Wuhan. It could easily have begun in the countryside and only blown up when someone brought it to Wuhan, which is a major transportation hub.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but since the initial symptoms are flu like wouldn’t it require a statistically significant number of additional cases, deaths or symptoms in order to alert the health officials that something new was taking place, and an investigation was warranted?
In late November they had less than 15 cases but they had already identified it as a new virus. How would they know to look for a new virus with so few cases? Unless they had prior knowledge about a new virus that was accidental released, which prompted them to start looking.
From that, it looks quite believable that it would've taken 3-4 full generations of reinfections to take the count to 200 hospitalisations.
I think, 200 hospitalisations should've been around the same number for the signal to attract attention by Chinese disease surveillance, if it wasn't picked up by the purpose made SARS screening network.
If we believe the news that Hubei already saw hundred extra deaths in January, and that hospitals were already near full in mid January, then the number of infections should've been already above 1000 at Jan 1.
The virus was not identified until the end of December, which is more than a month after the case in mid-November.
This is dangerous (and wrong) thinking. Wrong in the sense that, even if the conclusion were true, the reasoning is faulty.
There are many characteristics which, in hindsight, would look suspicious. One of this characteristics is the presence of a bio research lab. Other interesting factors would have been the presence of particular chemicals in the air/water, presence of certain types of bats, the presence of certain climate quirks, the presence of nuclear powerplants etc.
Let's say Wuhan was the only region which had a particular species of bats. Would you immediately conclude that the virus _must_ have come from that bat species?
You have a conclusion and are looking for reasoning to support it.
The post I was replying too had high conviction in the 'lab-grown' theory.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'non-scientific' reasons.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8009669/Did-coronav...
I think it's naive to believe that a spillover event is more probable in a high-security research lab than out in the real world. Do not underestimate the sheer amount of contact between humans and infected animals. Coronaviruses are not rare - for the animals that host them, they are just another common cold. Farmers, butchers, villagers who live near bat populations, people who frequent wet markets, and all sorts of other people are constantly coming into contact with animals that are sick with coronaviruses.
There are estimates that a few million people in Southeast Asia are infected with bat coronaviruses each year. In other words, spillover events are occurring thousands of times each day. We're just lucky that the vast majority of them do not lead to global pandemics, because they are not well adapted to humans and do not transmit efficiently from person to person, or because the epidemic never reaches a major population center. There are probably even pandemics that go completely unnoticed, because the symptoms caused by the viruses are no worse than the common cold.
So compare what's happening every day to thousands of people in Southeast Asia to a few people working under extreme safety precautions in a high-security lab.
If you go off what other virologists have said, that this virus looks like a random wild virus. Then what are the chances the virus escaped from a bsl-4 lab while a researcher was cataloging it. Bs any of the millions as you say random farmers, butchers, etc randomly getting infected. Yeah odds favor the latter.
Also the Wuhan seafood market looks exactly like the kind of enclosed place with lots of people we now know to avoid during the pandemic. So the only notable thing there is it's was a big enough cluster to be noticed. Looking from common origins is something every public health official does day in day out.
It's also disappointing that the WHO isn't being harshly criticized by either sides, despite the fact that it was instrumental in downplaying the outbreak in line with CCP interests.
A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Donald Trump.
Are we throwing out statistics and common sense because we don’t have a YouTube video showing a researcher physically transferring it out of a lab? No idea...