What makes you think it's "extremely unlikely" that this virus was developed in a lab, and who do you think you're agreeing with?
> “It was very unlikely that anything could escape from such a place,” Ben Embarek said during the Feb. 9 WHO press conference, citing the team’s discussions with Wuhan lab officials about their safety protocols and audits. “If you look at the history of lab accidents, these are extremely rare events.”
> Yet lab accidents aren’t rare.
> What’s rare are accidents causing documented outbreaks. But those have happened, including in 2004 when two researchers at a lab in Beijing unknowingly became infected with another type of SARS coronavirus, sparking a small outbreak that killed one person.
> In the weeks since leaving Wuhan, the WHO’s team has been questioned about its independence and depth, including by the Biden administration, amid media reports that China denied the team access to raw data on possible COVID-19 cases that were identified during the earliest part of the outbreak.
> “We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement last month. “It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government.”
Why is the distinction between development and manufacturing relevant here? Have you read the article?
It's why the discourse stays on point and doesn't devolve into flame wars, or that's the theory, anyway. Pretty much everything has been designed to make people stay friendly.
Very Brave New World-esque. Make rules to keep everyone friendly, but meanwhile what you're actually doing is silencing people and making it impossible to have any real discussion.
I better be careful, since I'm only allowed to make 4 comments an hour I have to be very selective of the opinions I share.
Not only that, but they're garbage-collected periodically, meaning that if there's any rule there which isn't 'paying' for the space it consumes on that page, we take it out. It's like a codebase that way: complexity is the enemy, less is more, and deleting is at least as important as adding.
If anyone has a cogent case for deleting one of the guidelines, that would be most helpful. If anyone can think of one that should be added, and can't be derived from what's already there, that would also be helpful.
It's very hard to be intellectually curious when I'm only allowed to post 3-4 comments an hour. What if I'm having a conversation with someone? Why am I not allowed to respond?
We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars. We're happy to take the rate limit off if people give us reason to believe that they understand the site guidelines and sincerely want to use HN in the intended spirit. But it's best to email hn@ycombinator.com and ask us to look into it.
I realize it's annoying to be rate limited, but it's one of the few (crude) software tools we have to try to put off the descent of the forum into flamewar, so dropping the mechanism isn't really an option.
Lab 257 is an amazing book about germ research labs. It fascinated me both with how hard it is to contain diseases under ideal conditions (lab 257 was on an island miles from anything inhabited) and how poor of a job people who should have known better, the actual virologists and people with MDs, did at containing diseases they were researching.
> A discredited 2004 book entitled Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory fueled the conspiracy theories. Archived specimens show that Lyme disease was endemic well before the establishment of Plum Island laboratory. Additionally, Lyme disease was never a topic of research at Plum Island, according to the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Agriculture.
Also important to remember that the WIV had ongoing research in bat coronaviruses. Now that isn't unusual after SARS, but it does slightly make the theory more plausible.
Also, the Obama administration banned gain of function research broadly due to "biosafety incidents" at federal research labs in the US. The announcement explicitly called out research on SARS: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/10/17/doing-d...
In fact, it is very likely that the virus was brought to China by American soldiers during the military Games held in Wuhan, because there have been patients with similar pneumonia in the United States for a long time, but it has not been taken seriously. It just happened that the Spring Festival travel rush in China led to the widespread outbreak of the virus and was widely paid attention to
In the United States, many variants of the new coronavirus have been detected, and the types of these viruses are more complex than those found in China.
Long before the virus was discovered in China, many people died in the United States because of the mysterious e-cigarette. Now it seems that these people are probably suffering from the new crown virus, but no one noticed it at that time.
Please don't. I know it doesn't feel this way, but replying is worse than the original comment.
If people follow the site guidelines and flag such provocations without replying, the thread grounds out. By feeding it, you furnish a circuit and all the current necessary for a prolonged electrocution.
I think it's possible the virus leaked from a lab in China, but it's also possible it was transmitted in the wild a la "wet markets". Either way, regrettably due to Chinese propaganda and tight controls on speech and the press, it is highly unlikely the world will get an open and honest investigation from the Chinese government. The PRC simply cannot be trusted, which sadly has added immense fuel to all conspiracy theories involving that nation.
I think the Wuhan/COVID/Coronavirus can be compared to the Soviet government's response to Chernobyl. Great efforts were made to keep a lid on that disaster from the people, and the world, until it was too great to ignore. Granted, a long time ago, but it's an example of what a totalitarian government (like China) might do in the face of such catastrophe.
My own idea is a combination of the two. I wonder if it leaked out of the lab by a lab employee trying to make some money on the side by selling lab animals to the wet market. (Note well: This is just my "seems kind of plausible" guess. I have no actual evidence to support it. And no, it's not actually "my own" idea - I heard it suggested by someone, who also had no evidence that I recall.)
半混蛋
So you say, it was the janitor, with dead lab animals, in the wet market, making some surplus money?
I assumed it was the gardener, in the dining room, with the hatchet..
Its almost as if the whole human species could not be trusted with dangerous tools and regularly drops the ball.
These wet-market are such a medieval relic and all just because of superstitious nonsense about refrigerated food being bad for your chi.
Homeopathy, TMC and how those shamanistic practices are all called wherever by whomever kill. 2.7 million so far...
Even worser, when you think about all those other "tech" miracles enlightenment zealots insist humanity can be entrusted. We blow a nuclear power plant every ten years, drop the vials like they are hot, but hey more power into each pocket.
Cant wait for the first long-range flying car, getting hacked and used in a remote attack. That surely will be the day, someone will admit that tech is limited,not by what can be done, but by who gets to wield it.
Makes one wonder though, that day i entrusted that vital system for millions, to that upstream repo.. was i the janitor that day..
This is an extremely poor theory formulated by blindly speculating and then skipping the step where one gathers evidence for or against or even considers whether the idea even makes sense in theory.
Nobody would sell lab animals from a virology lab to markets to eat. The consequences are obvious, animals would be accounted for, the risk would be extremely high to the persons future, and the profits small.
It's the kind of ideas you find on racist conspiracy theory blogs and you shouldn't share it here.
Podcasts run on a given domain run by domain experts are certainly a good step above, epistemologically speaking, than a lot of news source on said domain. Obviously you can't be 100% sure any statement about the physical world is true, so you know, believe what you want.
Their main argument in the podcast is that the scientist in the lab says that they were not working on this virus and "even with the central control of china there is no way they could keep that secret". That argument is not going to hold a lot of water with people
They don't cite any evidence to refute a lab accident, and the 'clubby' atmosphere raises suspicion that they dismiss the possibility on the grounds that 'we're all professionals, free to say what we want, free from government coercion, etc', but perhaps that does not reflect reality.
Ok then. Let's watch TWiV 615, where they interview Peter Daszak, the virologist which headed the recent WHO origin seeking mission in China.
Listen to him talk about how easy is to modify coronaviruses in labs and how they are actually doing this, mixing and matching viruses at 29:50:
> Well, coronaviruses are pretty good... you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot what happens in a coronavirus. Zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can bulid a protein, and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this, insert into the backbone of another virus, and do some work in the lab, so you can get more predictive, when you find a sequence.
This reminds me of the conspiracy theory book, Lab 257. There was a lab on Plum Island in the Long Island Sound that studied infectious diseases.
If you trace back the spread of Lyme disease in time, you get two points. One in Connecticut, and one on Long Island, where workers got on the boats to Plum Island.
The lab was studying diseases similar to Lyme disease at the time.
All those are facts.
The conspiracy theory is that Lyme disease was accidentally released by that lab.
> Archived specimens show that Lyme disease was endemic well before the establishment of Plum Island laboratory.
> Additionally, Lyme disease was never a topic of research at Plum Island, according to the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Agriculture.
> The 2010 autopsy of Ötzi the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old mummy, revealed the presence of the DNA sequence of Borrelia burgdorferi making him the earliest known human with Lyme disease.
Unless it's got conclusive evidence of a functional time machine, it's gonna struggle to explain how a town in Connecticut predates a prehistoric mummy.
This has honestly been my unbiased opinion since essentially day 1. I believe that the release was almost certainly a complete accident, but there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus. The denialists, including the WHO and CDC and everyone else, need to get real and own up to what happened and figure out how to stop it from happening again. This has nothing to do with the PRC or anyone or anywhere else, it could have happened at any biological facility in the world and will eventually happen again somewhere unless scientific honesty and cooler heads prevail.
> there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus.
I think that it is at least somewhat likely that it was the result of the lab's activities, but your assertion here has a huge dose of selection bias.
If the virology labs studying coronaviruses were placed randomly around the world, you'd be correct - but they're not. They're placed near locations where novel coronaviruses have crossed the species barrier in the past, and where they are likely to do so in the future.
It would be equivalent to say that lighthouses cause ships to run aground, because many teams when ships run aground it's near a lighthouse.
> They're placed near locations where novel coronaviruses have crossed the species barrier in the past, and where they are likely to do so in the future.
Are they? I'm not aware of this trend, or of any other major species barrier crossings in Hubei. (If you're thinking of the original SARS, that started in Guangdong, two provinces to the south.)
Sensibly, yes, but not their location isn't based on geographic proximity but rather what is a sensible location for the group building and staffing the lab.
Wuhan is around thousand kilometers away from where this virus supposedly originated from.
But the Wuhan lab did receive samples in 2019 from miners who died in 2012 from an infection of a novel coronavirus that resulted in symptoms very similar to COVID-19.
Another selection bias is that we can't say if the virus originated there, but only that it was first detected there. Even if it originated in the countryside hundreds of miles away it makes sense it was detected only after it spread to a city with the labs to discover the virus.
What I mean is that a small countryside hospital won't be able to notice there is a new type of pneumonia, while bigger cities have teams to detect that. It's the same reason why we probably had the virus circulating in europe in january but we only noticed after we started looking for it.
> It would be equivalent to say that lighthouses cause ships to run aground, because many teams when ships run aground it's near a lighthouse.
But if a lighthouse manufactured coral reefs, and the coral reefs on which ships were running aground displayed features of those that a given lighthouse manufactured, it might be more accurate.
I have seen estimates of thousands of wet markets in China and perhaps 10000 in all of Asia. Why the one wet market closest to a lab doing GOF research, and previously questioned on its containment rigor.
Because it is the largest city near the bat habitat - with the largest wet market.
Wuhan is like Chicago in China. It's not some random small town. If an outbreak occurred in some rural area (which it might have previously), it's possible that it just fizzled out.
Take a look at this on a map. Mojiang (where RaTG13, the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2, was reportedly sampled) is closer to Chongqing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, or HK than to Wuhan. Pu'er is roughly Chicago-sized, and it's 150 km away. Kunming is more people than two Chicagos, and it's 200 km away. It makes sense that this first emerged in a city, but Wuhan is far from the obvious geographic choice.
Maybe folks in Mojiand have some immunity because other variants spread there before? Maybe that's why Vietnam (cause Hanoi is close too) have been largely spared. Maybe Wuhan has a bigger market for "wild meat" than rural places - that wouldn't surprise me. Maybe RaTG13 is present in a lot of places. Maybe there are some even closer relatives to sars-cov-2 closer to Wuhan.
Again, none of this is conclusive. It's all speculation. maybe maybe maybe. There are lots of potential ways for this to have happened natually.
FWIW, I do suspect cross-immunity will eventually explain a lot of mysteries of this virus, including why the Asia-Pacific region has been so lightly-hit compared to Europe and the Americas. So I do agree it's possible that weaker population immunity in more distant regions more than offsets less frequent spillover, and paradoxically makes them the more likely regions for an outbreak (although that's not what experts including Zhengli Shi had originally guessed).
But there's lots of other distant cities in China too, and none of them have virology institutes with the world's biggest collection of novel SARS-like viruses. So whatever your prior was for lab accident vs. natural, I do believe the location in Wuhan should significantly increase that. Certainly far from conclusive, but a possibility that requires serious investigation.
People keep saying this, but it's not true; SARS-like viruses haven't been found in nature near Wuhan. In the words of Dr. Shi herself:
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
You've said elsewhere that you think it's reasonable to to suppose they have unpublished samples that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2, indeed that's your central claim. So why do you trust this statement about their sampling results but not the one about not having anything closer than RaTG13 [18.5, p6]?
Honestly, I don't fully. From a standpoint of a lab accident, evidence of natural zoonosis near Wuhan would be exculpatory and they'd have no reason to conceal it. But the CCP also seems to be pushing to exclude any origin whatsoever within China, like with their frozen food theory (which is thoroughly rejected by almost all scientists physically outside China, but which the WHO team nonetheless seems to be considering).
So I think it's entirely possible e.g. that China has confidently determined the non-lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, but that it's from an agricultural practice so reckless that they've decided it's better for their reputation to leave everything shrouded in doubt. It's much more obvious to me that China is concealing something than what they're concealing. (Of course, that's usually how concealing stuff works.)
That said, I still think zoonosis near Wuhan is unlikely. In a pre-pandemic publication with no incentive to lie, the WIV studied antibodies to SARS-like viruses in the blood of people living near bats in Yunnan province. They used blood from people living in Wuhan as a negative control:
> As a control, we also collected 240 serum samples from random blood donors in 2015 in Wuhan, Hubei Province more than 1000 km away from Jinning (Fig. 1A) and where inhabitants have a much lower likelihood of contact with bats due to its urban setting.
I don't really have a stake in this, and no real idea how plausible the lab accident theory is.
That said, don't you think that the location of a lab like that would be highly correlated with the location of dangerous natural viral reservoir? Or put another way, if you wanted to study zoonotic viruses, wouldn't you put your lab in a place like that?
It's also been reported that it wasn't the season for the bat species.
Those in favour of the lab leak hypothesis point out that the virus showed up on the scene with all the evolutionary capability to spread amongst humans i.e with batteries included.
With previous Sars viruses my understanding is that each zoonotic jump was traceable with examples of previous forms in prior animal hosts to corroborate the lineage.
What makes Covid-19 interesting is that these zoonotic jumps or the gain of functions can be accelerated in the lab with the purpose of preparing us ahead of time for a dangerous forms of Sars style viruses. It looks like covid-19 may be that type of strain, not man made, but given the lab conditions for it to gain the capability. It may have escaped.
It's worth exploring the lab leak hypothesis but I would say that it's not politically expedient for any of the scientists or parties involved. We will never really know the truth and that is something we need to grow comfortable with.
You are mixing two theories here:
A) A lab leak
B) Gain of function research.
My understanding is that A) is very much possible because it has happened before (SARS), but we have no evidence yet (and might never acquire).
For B) however, from my limited understanding, there is no strong evidence. We only know about a fraction of existing coronaviruses out there and given we observe one, that has caused a pandemic, the (conditional!) probability that it is well adapted is extremely high (survivorship bias).
If you have a credible source that claims B) please share it.
> What's more, Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists have for the past five years been engaged in so-called "gain of function" (GOF) research, which is designed to enhance certain properties of viruses for the purpose of anticipating future pandemics. Gain-of-function techniques have been used to turn viruses into human pathogens capable of causing a global pandemic.
> This is no nefarious secret program in an underground military bunker. The Wuhan lab received funding, mostly for virus discovery, in part from a ten-year, $200 million international program called PREDICT, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and other countries.
I'm not doubting that at all, see also this statement by a US embassy [1].
What I'm saying is that we don't have strong (any?) evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of gain of function research. It is entirely possible but the majority of the scientists who do gain of function research say it's unlikely (given what we know today, which might change).
Again, a credible source saying the opposite is appreciated.
>What I'm saying is that we don't have strong (any?) evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of gain of function research
There is analysis that suggests that SARS-CoV-2 wasn't engineered. However, if you were intentionally giving it to a bunch of animals in batches with some interspecies mixing, you wouldn't really expect it to look any different than a natural jump.
Isn’t he referring to a lab leak of a virus which was engineered with ‘gains of function’. I’m particularly convinced of this theory because it explains the glaring weakness of the Covid-19 virus to UV radiation (ie sunlight).
If Chinese researches were modifying viral samples to gain functions (evolutionary or otherwise), weakness against sunlight is a believable oversight, considering it wouldn’t have been subjected to it indoors.
If we have no say in whether or not scientists should be creating super viruses (a.k.a. weapons of mass destruction), I'd prefer they do so somewhere like Antarctica or on a space station, not in the middle of a city.
If I wanted to study zoonotic viruses, I would put labs in places filled with universities or government agencies focused on disease, like Boston, Atlanta, Maryland.
Sometimes diplomacy means you smile when you don't want to smile. WHO has to play politics until we get this virus under control (ie, vaccines distributed worldwide). If WHO blames China now, in the thick of things, it would damage the world's ability to further study the origins of the virus and the results of Chinese research. Chinese vaccines are being used and studied in many countries worldwide and that is a good thing. Apart from the obvious benefits of those vaccines, better access to data gives us an inactivated vaccine counterfactual with which to evaluate the mRNA and protein subunit vaccines.
CDC and other US government officials, on the other hand, must ratchet up their criticism of China as well as WHO. I agree with you there. It's alarming that there are so few PR ramifications for China. From the looks of it, either their unsanitary bushmeat consumption got the world sick, or their irresponsible laboratory containment procedures did. Both are a reflection of China's culture, and were only exacerbated by authoritarian crackdown upon the early warnings issued by Chinese medical professionals. The US government shouldn't defend bad practices and systemic problems in the name of multilateral cooperation. That variety of ethical blindness forgives bad faith from our counterparts and damages our hegemony.
> CDC and other US government officials, on the other hand, must ratchet up their criticism of China as well as WHO. I agree with you there. It's alarming that there are so few PR ramifications for China.
The US relies on Chinese manufacturing. If trade ends, the West will suffer. Consumer and industrial goods can't be built, which could incredibly damage the economy.
Manufacturing is shifting to other countries - Vietnam, India, etc. It's been driven by rising costs in China, but we're seeing an acceleration to de-risk the supply chain. TSM is being asked to build fabs in the US. Slowly, the most strategic pieces are being maneuvered.
China is building up its navy to protect itself. If they lose the South China Sea, they could be blockaded and starved of energy, resources, and food. They're building to reach parity with the US Navy or even outgun it, and they're trying to stall long enough that they can win should there be an encounter.
The US and its allies are ramping up criticism of China, and you can see it in diplomatic activity, news, and social media. The rhetoric will grow until they're ready to shift from soft negotiations to taking a hard line.
> China is building up its navy to protect itself. If they lose the South China Sea, they could be blockaded and starved of energy, resources, and food. They're building to reach parity with the US Navy or even outgun it, and they're trying to stall long enough that they can win should there be an encounter.
China has absolutely no chance to meet head-to-head against a US Carrier Strike Group on neutral territory. Absolutely none, and the US has TEN Carrier Strike Groups.
Ex: If China + US decides that we need to fight over in Antartica, the US will win in nearly every feasible encounter.
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China's plan isn't to win or even challenge the Navy on the high seas. Instead, China's plan is to assert military strength with the seas it is close to: asserting military might against Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Korea, and other local minor powers.
Furthermore: Chinese air-forces can launch from Mainland China to support any hypothetical naval operations.
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EX: Its not trying to beat US in a fair fight. China is likely aiming to beat the US in an "unfair fight": any fight close to China's territories + air force + cruise missile range might stand a chance against a US Carrier Strike Group.
A few powerful Chinese ships under the protective cover of cruise-missiles + Chinese airforce is probably the plan. It only will be effective when close to the Chinese coast, but that's all China really cares about.
> China has absolutely no chance to meet head-to-head against a US Carrier Strike Group on neutral territory. Absolutely none, and the US has TEN Carrier Strike Groups.
Right now. But take a look at the shipbuilding output they've achieved. In ten to twenty years, China could easily rival the US Navy.
> In ten to twenty years, China could easily rival the US Navy.
People said this 20 years ago. We've already started to see the CCP losing ground (see HK), and I'm quite bearish on the Party going forward. Jinping is 67, and I expect to see a major power struggle which will leave the Chinese Communist Party crippled when he dies.
>We've already started to see the CCP losing ground (see HK)
How is violating the Sino-British Joint Declaration and getting away with it "losing ground"? The Hong Kong protests failed and Hongkongers now have less freedom than before.
Foreign investment in HK was down 34.4% in 2019 versus the prior year [0]. Apart from the immediate ramifications of a year of protests, Beijing's effort to clamp down on HK was an economic self-own that opens the floodgates for Western hawkishness on Taiwan, Xinjiang, and every other area where China's expansionism overlaps with its economic ambitions. Beijing could have allowed HK to remain as it was, using it to entice the West. Instead, their authoritarian tack has reminded the frog to check the temperature of its bath.
I don't think they got away with much. Even if foreign investment rebounds in HK, Western complacency toward China will not find its voice again for many decades, and in that time, every Chinese treaty negotiation will be viewed as a bad-faith caricature of real diplomacy.
Why do you think so? The CCP and Xi has shown they are more than saavy enough to avoid a power struggle. He has at least 10-15 more years left as well, and the battle for Taiwan will probably take shape within that time frame.
HK they won easily. Western countries like UK and especially Europe are completely useless. Only the US can coordinate and shore up a coordinated response against China.
China has many smaller Missile Destroyers or Frigates, and has far more production than the USA right now. True.
However, smaller ships aren't going to do jack-diddly squat against a Carrier Strike Group in a neutral situation (ie: both sides meet in Antarctica). F-18s have an effective strike range of over 1000-miles.
Submarines might have some theoretical advantages, but the 110,000 ton Ford-class Carriers moves faster than pretty much every submarine on the planet, so Submarines literally cannot speed up fast enough to engage.
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Those smaller Chinese Ships are going to rely upon a lot of Air support + Cruise Missile support from the mainland if they ever wish to actually engage with a US Carrier Strike Group.
Staying within the protective cover of SAM (against air threats), Cruise Missiles (against the CSG themselves)... and providing a launch platform for various missiles, Chinese Destroyers probably can do a job in a hypothetical fight vs US Navy within the confines of the South China Sea.
But once they leave the protective cover of China's mainland... its all over. Swarms of F18s will just launch missiles at all the Destroyers, while the Carrier Strike Group sits back a thousand miles away.
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That's why the question isn't about those small Chinese ships (even though China is making a lot of them). The big question is about the performance of those Chinese Carriers. At 70,000 tons or so, they're much lighter than the 110,000 ton Ford-class carriers.
I don't understand why WHO is selling it's creditiblity in trade for politics. What is there to gain? Perhaps I am too short sighted but I cannot believe that this is ever the right compromise to take.
I also don't understand why they even had the slighest faith in a reliable investigation. After all these months of pushing back on researching accessing the site, they still bowed to their whims. How does this help the argument that it's better to just suck it up?
One thing I am really interested in to read more on is a historians analysis of the parallels one can draw from the period rising up to World War 2, and more importantly, how the rest of the world acted back then. When Germany was dissolving all their democratic processes, and started labellling jews, what did the rest of the world do? What did their neighbours do? Did they just happily keep on conducting business?
I have read slightly into it, but placing the responses of the countries at that time in the right context really requires some solid knowledge of history. If anyone knows interesting articles to read about the responses of the world during that time: I'm very interested.
>I don't understand why WHO is selling it's creditiblity in trade for politics. What is there to gain?
Might have something to do with the fact that the leader of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom, was hand picked by the Chinese communist party and won the position over the US and EU's favored choice.
"During its 140th meeting in January 2017, the Executive Board of the WHO shortlisted Tedros as the front runner out of six candidates through two rounds of secret voting. He collected the most votes during both rounds.[citation needed] Tedros "was supported by a bloc of African and Asian countries, including China, which has considerable influence with those members" while "the US, UK and Canada... lent their support to... the British doctor David Nabarro." One observer called it "a really nasty" election."
Basically: "Oh, someone else can play the same game we've played for a century with UN, WHO, IMF, etc. - how dare they?"
You say this as if Africa&China was equivalent to US&EU. A bunch of totalitarian dictatorships / warlord states vs. democratic and at least somewhat accountable and transparent free republics.
The somewhat accountable and transparent free republics spent like 200 years completely dicking over Africa & China to the tune of millions dead. Not really a position of moral superiority.
You mean the proxy states, lackeys, and funded warlords and dictators setup by EU in Africa, to safeguard the ex-colonial pocessions and make sure they continue to get their resources and control on the cheap?
Or the several Middle Easter/Asian/African countries bombed, invaded, toppled, etc by the US (3-4 of them in the last 20 years alone).
I recently read a very good book that was not so much a broad overview, but rather a closer look at the American ambassador and his family in Germany in the 1930s. I can wholeheartedly strongly recommend it.
> I don't understand why WHO is selling it's creditiblity in trade for politics. What is there to gain?
You reason about WHO as an institution, while disregarding the principal-agent problem. The leaders of WHO are very strongly influenced by China, and as a result the institution is working to please China, rather than working to fulfill its nominal mission. Its leaders will see ample rewards for corrupting the institution.
I was not aware of the name for the principal-agent problem, thank you for that. I do wonder though if it's just ample rewards. I believe the most efficient mode to let others do your biddings is by threatening harsh backlash on refusals to cooperate, and providing ample rewards on cooperation, this to make the incentive even bigger. So perhaps you can also add to it that WHO leaders will face strong backlash by _not_ corrupting the institution.
> When Germany was dissolving all their democratic processes, and started labellling jews, what did the rest of the world do? What did their neighbours do? Did they just happily keep on conducting business?
The 1936 Olympic Summer Games are a good starting point in my opinion.
How bad of a deal it is to sell your credibility should have been obvious since April 2020.
The lies about masks may have helped with shortages in the short term. The result is now that people rightfully distrust everything their governments say.
Seriously wtf. We're trying to combat disinformation and distrust in info from authorities on the subjects, and the CDC and Fauci comes out with that blatant "noble lie." I can't take these institutions seriously the same way again.
there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus
If it came from somewhere else, why wasn’t the outbreak noticed there first, is the million dollar question. It requires some serious mental gymnastics at this point to believe it didn’t originate in that lab. The only real question is if it was released deliberately.
Because winter is flu season, and most of the time the symptoms are impossible to distinguish, even when you're looking?
Sure, China has way more public health capacity than it used to, but we know that COVID can spread silently in a community for a month without anyone noticing, even when we are looking. It happened in California and Seattle in January 2020. Why wouldn't that have happened in, say, rural China in October?
There were apparently already people with COVID symptoms in Italy back in December 2019. That said, China was already aware of the virus in late 2019. It's all well known.
Well, that's what I mean. Nobody knew COVID was circulating in Italy at the time either. It's easy to miss a new respiratory virus. For it to originate one place and by chance end up exploding in a different metropolitan area doesn't seem unlikely at all.
In fact, simply from a modelling perspective, this is very likely scenario.
If you take an unknown diseases with an R of 2-3, what you will see is a number of smaller clusters, some dying off, before you get the one cluster that becomes the pandemic.
> there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus
Why not? Wuhan is the 43rd largest city in the world. Meanwhile, the earliest cases of CoVid were all connected to the same wet market. Doesn't that have a higher probability being the origin?
Your source cites the WSJ, which itself cites the Wuhan Virology Institute, which is trying to imply that China may not be the origin of CoVid at all, so I don't believe it.
This is as well my strongly held belief, and the most likely cause.
And people making the really odd responses below. They're, not saying it, but insinuating that the lab would be where there is lots of bat coronavirus? The lab is in the city of Wuhan. A city with a population of 11 million people. This isn't some rural town.
There was a lab that studied this type of coronavirus, had published papers on it. And in a country the size of the USA had an outbreak within just a few miles from that lab. Then the govt came and refused to let anyone outside investigate.
To me that leads pretty strongly that it was an accidental lab leak. And they weren't able to control the spread.
My hopeful opinion is that this leads to more stringent worldwide rules for reporting leaks, and checking of safety practices to avoid this happening again
> My hopeful opinion is that this leads to more stringent worldwide rules for reporting leaks, and checking of safety practices to avoid this happening again
A leak that results in 2.7 million worldwide deaths will not result in "more stringent worldwide rules for reporting leaks". It would result in economic reparations and possibly war.
Leak or not, it's in China's interest to prevent the blame from falling on them. The narrative here is an incredibly powerful geopolitical tool.
I'm not sure that this virus even behaves in this way where a BSL-4 worker could become infected. What we know now is that you need a concentration of virus particles over time in order to come down with the disease (in other words, you are most likely to catch it drinking in your friends living room for 4 hours with an infected person, than in a grocery store where an infected person might cough on you in line but there is no long term exposure). I can't imagine where there is a situation in a lab environment where you would have the equivalent of an infected person drinking beer with you for hours in terms of exposure. Even a rip in your PPE wouldn't expose you to very much particulate compared with an infected person spitting in your face conversationally for hours.
I've done security audits and related consulting work upon research labs in my past and the biggest issue they had was - extremist animal activists.
Now I was aware of some reports (nothing official or confirmed) that the Wuham lab was broken into in the summer of 2019.
Interestingly enough their was a lot of political tension at that time involving Hong Kong.
I'm also mindful how China has been rather good at sweeping things under carpets.
So I could speculate how things played out in a way that fits events, but without any smoking gun - it would be just speculation and joining dots that may or may not of been there.
Though even if it was something along the lines of what I'm thinking happened (animal activists with HK connections being politically motivated/manipulated and possibly no idea what type of lab it was beyond they may be hurting animals), the lab was researching virus's from the wild - seeing how they mutate and progress in an effort to see what lays ahead.
So lab event or no lab event - this virus was already in existence in some form and was not a case of if, but when.
One thing I do know, it sure did shine a spotlight upon how connected the World is and also how fragile many supply lines are.
Molecular dating studies place a hard limit on index cases at October 2019. Anything earlier and the virus should have mutated more than it has.
Someone who broke into a Wuhan coronavirus research lab in summer 2019 and broke containment of our hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 precursor virus samples would have been infected too early for our timeline.
I mean, yeah, five out of 6 cited experts have ties to EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has funding ties to one of the two virology labs in Wuhan, but that's, like, just a coincidence. If it wasn't, I'm sure NPR would mention it.
And then Peter Daszak himself went to Wuhan with WHO team to investigate and didn't find anything conclusive. Peter fucking Daszak. You're not going to tell me that someone who was interviewed and cited on this subject by NPR, CNN, CBS, Slate, Democracy Now, Washing Post and The Guardian could be full of shit, right?
A proper investigation would not include Peter Daszak at all, due to his immense conflicts of interest on this topic, and his behaviour since the outbreak occurred.
The whole thing is a bureaucratic cya masterpiece. We deny the wuhan lab leak but, just in case, we also deny we had any means to actually investigate it
I have no strong opinions on this matter, but I'm having difficulty understanding the sarcasm here. Can someone translate for me? Is the un-sarcastic version of parent's argument that most of the claims against this being a leak were put forth by a single organization, EcoHealth Alliance, which has an agenda for convincing people that this is not a leak?
I'm with you, the parent's sarcasm is really malformed. They're claiming that EcoHealth has conflicts of interests that led them to disavow the WIV lab theory.
It doesn't seem to me like parent is disputing the factual accuracy of the argument, but rather saying that the sarcasm was not well constructed (possibly because of the multiple negatives, which require a certain amount of gymnastics to understand), and is thus not as effective as it could be.
> EcoHealth Alliance, which has an agenda for convincing people that this is not a leak?
Exactly that. The first paper which discredited the lab leak theory published in The Lancet early last year by a number of scientists was later found out to have been organized behind the scenes by EcoHealth, which also asked for it's name not to appear on the paper.
You're also forgetting that these people are scientists. Scientists only look at the facts and are completely unbiased - they aren't like normal humans, who might be worried about their entire livelihoods being cancelled (or worse) if the world realises their research is too dangerous to exist. And scientists who work for political organisations are the most unbiased of all. /s
"Look, dude," RNA mutates due to many environmental factors.
It's why living organisms typically now use DNA and only short-term usage of RNA for copying purposes, certainly not as the primary data store.
RNA mutations mimicking proteins are precisely how a non-living entity can, like a bike-thief trying combinations randomly, unlock the lipid or protein sheaths on animal cells and gain direct access to the inputs of a genetic reproduction machine inside the cell.
So, aside from the fact that these folks only have some circumstantial evidence and woo to suggest a lab hypothesis, (not EVEN a theory, not EVEN a hypothesis, nay, mere speculation with a vested political axe to grind, hello) and that fact that all factual evidence of how all previous cross-species virus hops occurred point to this being a relatively common occurence (1918 avian-porcine-human connection occurred in Kansas by the way, not "Spanish")
I subscribe to this theory. I didn't subscribe to it originally because it seemed to dystopian. However on reading the recent politico article (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...) really changed my opinion about it. To be clear I think it would have been an accident at a Chinese government lab that was underfunded and overworked. Seems to me like the likeliest candidate. I don't think the current US administration wants to point the finger at the Chinese government since it will cause a lot public anger. That and the Chinese government most certainly covered all their tracks by now.
I'd also assign a small but non-zero probability to the US not wanting to point the finger because they prefer the scenario where the general population comes to believe that the lab accident was responsible, but no hard evidence is ever produced.
Why? Because it seems like US institutions and people (right up to Fauci) were involved in this research and may not want the domestic blowback.
Conveniently the CCP don't want a paper trail either.
I'd be pretty sure the various scenarios have already been gamed out in both countries.
Edit: Not sure why this is being downvoted, but just in case it’s a reflex because I mentioned Fauci: yes, he was head of NIAID, and yes, the NIH did fund this type of research at the WIV. The grants are public information.
Both led by Peter Daszak who is now also the lead WHO investigator. The same person who decided the WHO didn’t need to see the deleted virus databases, and the same person who co-ordinated the Lancet statement which minimised the lab leak theory early on (and let to it being considered a conspiracy theory).
Here he is on This Week In Virology, describing this sort of work. It’s worth watching the whole thing, but gets most interesting from minute 27 onward:
For example he confirms it’s easy to modify these viruses in the lab, and mentions collaborating with Ralph Baric at UNC. Baric invented Remdesivir (with Gilead) - the “cure” that turned out not to work very well. His lab was doing gain of function experiments before the ban. Shi Zhengli (“bat woman” from Wuhan) worked very closely with Baric and Daszak.
Seems like there continues to be more to this story. Still doesn't change my opinion that that is likely the source of the outbreak. I will adjust my priors as more information becomes available. It does complicate things quite a bit - would be great to know how much funding the US portion is vs the Chinese.
I agree the Wuhan lab leak remains the most likely explanation. I think these additional details support that theory, as they verify that this activity was indeed taking place in Wuhan, while also helping explain the unusual behaviour of all the people who should be investigating but seem instead to be constantly deflecting.
Agree seems like we have the incentives lined up and the least plausible scenario without new information. Likely will never get to the bottom of this.
What about that article convinced you? All I saw was some concern about safety protocols 2 years before the outbreak, some content free insinuations, and a whole lot of "we don't have any evidence."
It's not a crazy theory by any means, but, if it happened, then there's evidence. So, where is the evidence? Literally, where is there any actual evidence it happened?
Really? Why would there be evidence TODAY? Those bats have likely been destroyed, and all records of sequences taken from them have likely long since been shredded and burned.
Then, why wasn't evidence uncovered earlier? Surely the theory had just as much plausibility a year ago as today.
Are you asking me to believe a theory for which all the evidence was either not uncovered or destroyed? Why is that more plausible than origin from outside the lab?
I mean, isn't that obvious? The Chinese did not allow anyone to investigate WIV because they don't want to be blamed.
I agree that conclusions should not be drawn without evidence - but by the same token, you cannot rule this out as a possibility because no effort was put into investigating it.
If you put two columns: zoonotic transfer, lab leak. And you list circumstantial evidence for both. Your zoonotic transfer column will be terribly empty in comparison. There is no patient 0, and the wet market was not the source, and we still do not have a zoonotic chain established. All those facts could be added to the lab leak hypothesis instead. For the most prominent clue of a biological attack is Single cause of a certain disease caused by an uncommon agent, with lack of an epidemiological explanation.. If you look at the history: SARS-1 naturally arose once in China. SARS-1 escaped a lab twice in the few years after. Chinese spies infiltrated Western gain-of-function virus-and-cancer-research labs, then smuggled back vials to China in a sock in their check-in luggage.
The evidence is with the intelligence agencies of Western nations. Trump and Pompeo (Pompeo was sanctioned by China hours after new President took office) did not make up their "China Virus" as some racist dog whistle. They were informed.
The WHO, when pressured by the UK for China not sharing information, nor allowing access to a team for investigation, said: Now is not the time to point fingers. We need China cooperation for now. The UK replied that it then has to assume the worst possible and prepare for a pandemic. It did.
Actual tangible evidence is rare, but it is pretty damning that: China blocks Australian-led world-wide investigation into the origins of COVID -- re-sentencing Australian prisoners to death penalty and messing with trade relations to hurt Australia's economy. They'd do that for a natural zoonotic-base virus that was out of their control? Phone location records show containment procedures around Wuhan lab around October 2019. Former military analysts in Israel pose the lab leak hypothesis as plausible, betting their reputation on it.
It is not too fair to ask actual tangible evidence, if evidence could mean a hot war or severely strained relations during a pandemic where people need to work together. And what is your tangible evidence for the popular zoonotic hypothesis? Just some experts saying that zoonotic base is most likely when interviewed for a popular news outlet? The most likely hypothesis should be the easiest to find actual support for. Why not?
I think a lot of criticism on the drastic measures to contain a relatively low CFR virus would be dispelled if the general public knew what the decision-makers then knew: a strange novel virus which seems extremely adapted to infect humans, and shows more similarities to the lab viruses worked with in biowarfare, than with captured and documented cave bats. Similar to the "airborne COVID" -- first publicized by the head of the WHO -- we seem to be managing the factual information flow to avoid panic, geopolitics, and xenophobia. It is right now not important that the general public knows it is dealing with an engineered virus or lab leak. Or at least... other things are more important right now.
So, you're saying I should just believe it escaped from a lab because reasons? And you're asking me to believe the administration of a president who lied publicly 30,000 times over 4 years and who may soon be facing criminal charges? Sorry, but that's just not good enough. Actual evidence in the zoonotic origin column greatly surpasses that in the lab leak column. I'll go with what I can see, thanks.
Believe whatever you want. If you believe the zoonotic origin, ok sure, but your circumstantial evidence for that is weaker than the circumstantial evidence for a lab leak.
Yes. You are supposed to believe the administration of a president when they claim: The virus came from China. Whether deliberate or accidental, it likely originated in a laboratory. If you don't, I reckon you have bigger problems than a pandemic. If you can't trust your government on such critical matters, if you really believe the US government would stand for the secretary of State spreading lies, then you should probably flee to China and ask asylum there.
> Sorry, but that's just not good enough.
But experts saying: "Virus is likely zoonotic, but we have no idea" is good enough? Again, demanding others to proof that a teacup is orbiting Venus is reasonable. But not when you can't even show the existence of teacups or Venus yourself.
> Actual evidence in the zoonotic origin column greatly surpasses that in the lab leak column.
There is no actual evidence. Actual evidence of zoonotic origin would establish the transmission chain and identify patient 0. There is none. You have "Bats can be the original carrier". So your hypothesis could be true. It is circumstantial. Any actual evidence would instantly kill one of the hypothesis. So you share some responsibility there.
For an example of how to turn the BBC article into circumstantial evidence for a lab leak, is to study the franticness that went on with sequencing and publishing. Wuhan lab published the sequencing of bats captured in 2017 in 2020. It was complete PR management campaign, with scientists blaming "Mother Nature" not their research, information black-outs, and sharing of "secret" sequences years after the fact in support of zoonotic chain, while blocking any outside investigation into the origin which would support/not support the zoonotic origin.
For myself, the biggest circumstantial evidence I've seen is the manipulation of discourse on social media by state-sponsored trolls and bots. Whenever the downvote bots, US #metoo, charges of racism, and astroturfing begins, there is usually a big thing they are trying to hide. Even when discarding lots of evidence tainted by politics, this one remains. What would be the motive?
Another thing of note. A large percentage of the opposition to the lab leak hypothesis seems to stem from anti-Trump sentiment. In January 2020 the media first mentioned and entertained the lab leak hypothesis (interviewing military intelligence analysts) and seemed to treat it in a factual manner. Intelligence community knew that COVID was a thing before December (and China knew), even when China was saying the first case came in January. Then China deployed 1000s of online trolls and their diplomats would start spouting "no-you!" conspiracy theories, such as "US military brought COVID to Wuhan during Military World Games". In response, Trump started referring to COVID as the "China virus", and told reporters he thought the lab leak was likely, just not sure about accident or deliberate. Then with the anti-Trump sentiment this messaging was attacked for its crude irresponsible generalization (there are many Chinese origin people in US, just wanting a good life, without being spat on for importing the "China Virus") and interpreted purely as a political play by Trump to get the racist vote and being strong against China. So any mention of the "China Virus", and soon after, the lab leak hypothesis, became an indirect vote for far-right Conservatives or the basis of a racist conspiracy theory. Full circle when popular news started listing "COVID is leaked bioweapon research" as a conspiracy on par with Bill Gates being the Anti-Christ.
Very similar things happened with hydrochloroquine. HCQ was known effective for SARS-1, and prelim research showed it also was effective for SARS-2 (less grave symptoms developed) in the middle of February. Just did not help when the patient was already severely sick, so was not a cure, as touted by trigger-happy Trump months later. But then all of HCQ was discredited as being useless snake oil, and responsible for killing Americans when they drank aquarium cleaner. It was a political hit job on science, to punish Trump playing lose and politics. None the wiser or the healthier.
Finally. When the virus was not yet a pandemic (but clearly on the way there), the right prepper movement started talking about masks, self-treatment in case of hospital crisis, and food and vitamins (vitamin D and selenium were chosen for their effects against other viruses) to keep immune system healthy. Meanwhile in the US, progressive politicians held mask-less photo opportunities at China Town restaurants to signal their support and that fear is unreasonable. Democrat politicians, former presidents, and public health officials were stating to not buy N95 masks for these were not effective and wearing them would signal you were ill. Then Trump went muh-freedom-america on masks, and the progressive-left opposition to not mask wearing grew overnight.
On all these flip-flops, the US held conflicting positions, and any science was an afterthought. I classify your objection to the official US position on lab leak as lies as part of this politics game. It makes you think of your entire government as a single "bad" figure, blatantly lying or skipping over their intelligence agencies and geopolitics experts, because their irrational hatred for China feels deserving of a big lie. Trump and Pompeo fabricating the lab leak hypothesis seems like a bigger story than the Trump-Ukraine scandal. If you have any actual evidence for that (or strong circumstantial evidence beyond Trump playing loose with facts) then it is your duty to inform the American public of that radical conspiracy.
So the Chinese government 100% scrubbed down any data and silenced anyone working there. They stonewalled the WHO and world at large during the beginning of the out break, likely to cover their tracks.
What changed for me is how much circumstantial evidences exists and probably a stronger signal: there hasn’t been another plausible starting point. When something smells this fishy there’s likely a reason. It’s starting to feel like, Occam’s razor - ie that a lab leak is the simplest explanation.
The Politico article is extremely dishonest. Josh Rogin has been claiming for a year now that US diplomats raised red flags about the WIV's safety. He wrote an article to this effect a year ago, based on diplomatic cables he had seen. Then the Washington Post obtained the full cables, and it turned out that Rogin had seriously mischaracterized them. They do not claim that the WIV has unsafe practices - only that its newest lab is still (2 years before officially opening) training personnel and can't yet run at full capacity. It asks the US government to continue its training program for WIV scientists. Yet Rogin continues to misrepresent the cables.
Also - i did do a check on Josh Rogin and it does seem he has done some underhanded reporting practices in the past. Not saying that discredits him completely but does muddy his work. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
That said - it doesn't yet change my priors about the likely source of outbreak which seems most plausibly at WIV.
Covid is the COrona VIrus Disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is somewhat, but not extremely closely related to the SARS-CoV-1 virus, which caused the original SARS disease.
The other thing to note is this virus hops to new species super fast. its already in pretty much every mammal we interact with now. You going to tell me this super fast spreading - super species hoping virus was waiting in a cave somewhere and never spread?
My favorite conspiracy theory bend on this is that it’s the best place to intentionally release it too, especially if WIV is absolutely not studying anything like COVID-19 because it looks so appealing to dig into the bio safety level four lab, but there’s probably nothing there so it will be eventually dismissed.
All that said I think it is really unlikely and a pointless effort as government bureaucracies wouldn’t be able to even formulate a reaction to an intentional or even accidental release so I think we will not try too hard to imply that for political reasons.
The WHO will never look where they don't want the answer to be found and will actively work against it.
The chair of the WHO (Tedros Adhanom) [1] was a communist rebel (Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front) fighter in north africa and his career has been sponsored and guided by China for this reason.
They won't suppress findings made internally because it would be too hard to cover up - but they will 'do the least' with respect to finding answers.
Only the US has enough power and wherewithal to even try to do something, but they'll be kept out direct, so it boils down to how sophisticated the US clandestine efforts are in China.
My completely speculative guess is that US operating ability in China is 'really bad' and that they've already barked up that tree and found nothing conclusive.
I'm also waiting for people to admit that the dubious ban of Zero Hedge from Twitter (later reinstated) for bringing up this theory and "doxxing" the lab head was all made in bad faith (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/01/twitter...). It's crazy how words like "doxxing" can lose all coherent meaning and be used to describe this blog post, where they simply posted the publicly listed information of the public face of the lab, fully visible from the Wuhan lab's own website. This authoritarian act of censorship and the biased news media coverage that followed led to further censorship, where discussions exploring the possibility of accidental lab leaks were banned on places like Medium or other social media. This is why free speech matters as a fundamental principle and this is why we must hold all tech platforms accountable to protect free speech.
> but there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus.
What better place to put a lab studying bat viruses than near a place where they originate?
It's very possible and shouldn't be dismissed at all. But we will never know since the CCP has already covered its tracks (not saying it was on purpose, but a clearly an accident covered by the CCP).
The trend of circumstantial evidence continues to favor the lab leak hypothesis. In contrast there is no new circumstantial evidence favoring the natural origin hypothesis.
Reported last year...
US investigating 'hazardous event' in Wuhan lab in October
Alleged 'hazardous event' occurred days before Wuhan Military World Games in October
Plus, genetic drift research shows virus first cases in October.
How soon before stuff like this is marked as misinformation if it isn't coming from established media outlets? You know, dangerous conspiracy theories, and all that. Real world consequences, etc. and so forth.
Not OP, but I'm assuming he was arguing that, given that the major social media platforms have said they will remove any Covid information that is misleading, would they even allow posts like this "suggesting the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak is plausible".
" Claims that it was created by an individual, government, or country
Excluding claims that it was studied in, came from, or leaked from a lab without specifically calling it man-made"
So discussing possibility of a lab leak is not a problem, it's the deliberate bioweapon aspect that they're banning.
"The goal of this policy is to remove common viral hoaxes that have been repeatedly debunked by independent fact-checkers."
The editor's note says there is no evidence that this is the case. There is no strong evidence about anything regarding what are the origins of the virus. But it's still entirely within the realm of possibility that it could be true.
Sure, things aren't black and white and I never said they were. But Facebook will ban you for suggesting that it's possible that the virus is man-made, right? So they're the 'extremists' here.
How are these Fact Checkers to decide on a complicated and political question like a Wuhan lab leak hypothesis? They have a claim to truth, based on what credentials or mechanisms, that the rest of us don't have access to?
That's exactly it. They're not trying to crack down on misinformation, they're just trying to create a monopoly wherein established outlets are able to filter what's True and grey out what is False or Misleading.
They're fact-checking goddamn memes. Recently they "fact-checked" a meme with Joker on it and text "The truth will set you free. Except on Facebook, where it will get you a 30 day ban", and called it "missing context". Now the entire fanpage is gone.
No, I was echoing the mainstream media and many articles - including on this very site - pushing and wishing and demanding a crackdown on misinformation. And I sarcastically asked the crowd whether this article means only mainstream media outlets are allowed, permitted, to suggest conspiracies.
Yes, this is my issue as well. If you contradict the experts, you're a crackpot... but then a couple months later the experts start to say the things the crackpots had been saying... and then it's acceptable.
While the headline talks about covid, I found other bits of the article scary. For instance the supposed lax handling of pathogens like smallpox. While I would trust the worldwide scientific community for covid origin theories, I cannot look past the egregious safety violations reported in the article (if true).
>While I would trust the worldwide scientific community for covid origin theories
Which scientific community are you referring to? There are countless scientists who have been arguing against the risks of gain of function research for many years. Why are pro-gain of function scientists deathly silent now about the supposed benefits of their research?
I had the same thought. Maybe it's just the crowd I run with, but criticism of gain-of-function research (certainly including informed speculation of a lab escape for this coronavirus) seem very mainstream to me.
I believe grand-parent was talking about a lab leak, not necessarily with gain of function research being involved, and scientists dismissal.
Which is not a dismissal at all. What scientists are saying is that both zoonotic transfer and lab leak are plausible, but that we don't have evidence for the latter (yet!) and the former is more likely.
In many media articles this simplifies to 'scientists say virus origins are zoonotic'.
That’s curious. I wonder if the frozen seafood origin hypothesis holds any merit, or if it’s just an attempt by the CCP to divert attention from what seems to be the far more likely lab leak hypothesis... I’m inclined to believe that the CCP is being disingenuous.
Please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN—especially on divisive topics. The guidelines are clear on this, and we ban accounts that break them repeatedly. Given that we've had to warn you half a dozen times now, it's time for you to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this.
My apologies, I was simply trying to make a sarcastic observation regarding the ridiculousness of one of the CCP's bogus explanations for the virus origin.
As someone else who has been unfairly flagged on this thread, I will stand up for jtdev. A quick scan of their profile and posts show they have been here 2-3 years. They have a small number of on topic submissions about CEOs, technologies and science. Their posts are normal enough. There's the obvious theme that they're not in the Woke club though.
The issue isn't how long an account has been on HN or the good posts it makes—it's the bad posts. This shouldn't be hard to understand; it's the same principle by which people who always stop at red lights and are nice to supermarket cashiers still don't get to rob banks.
> Although they only emerge under artificial conditions in influenza viruses, these furin cleavage sites are found within several branches of the coronavirus family tree. However SARS‐CoV‐2 is the only lineage B coronavirus found with one, and the only other coronaviruses known to have them are only at most 60% identical to this novel coronavirus.
I'm not waynesonfire, but seriously, what is up with people making deliberately misleading claims (e.g. highlighting it is not found in influenza viruses, even though covid virus is not influenza), and then providing a link that specifically debunks the implication they are trying to make.
It's like people just depend on nobody following the links they post.
I am curious to know if this guideline applies only when responding to HN comments, or if it should be applied to source material in article links as well. I've noticed a lot more conspiracy-theorizing comments lately and it's hard to engage when the whole premise of a given comment is accusing someone else of misrepresenting facts.
It totally applies to the articles too. That wasn't in my mind when we introduced that guideline but it turns out to apply just as nicely at that level.
Do you expect it to be unusual for coronaviruses that manage to cause a pandemic? Even if it is rare, as long as it is not unique, those priors are unbalanced.
It's really only unusual for lineage B coronaviruses:
> Although they only emerge under artificial conditions in influenza viruses, these furin cleavage sites are found within several branches of the coronavirus family tree.
Even the original quote, "In fact, no influenza virus with a furin cleavage site has ever been found in nature" leaves out something important:
> the fact remains that every highly pathogenic avian influenza virus, defined by having a furin cleavage site, has either been found on commercial poultry farms that create the pseudo‐natural conditions necessary for serial passage, or created in laboratories with gain‐of‐function serial passage experiments.
That is, the authors are defining "in nature" not to include commercial poultry farms.
Serious coronaviruses have jumped into people like, twice in the last 20 years entirely naturally[0], and so many more people have contact with animals outside of labs than within labs (orders of magnitude!), that it seems much more likely that SARS-CoV-2 jumped the same way than any lab-leak idea. Like, it's physically possible, and it would be important to know if that's what happened- people shouldn't dismiss it!- but I don't know how much it should be entertained as a real likelihood.
[0] natural insofar as humans intruding onto wildlife is natural
The link between the Wuhan lab and the virus is circumstantial, sure it's strange the virus shows up in a city with the only level 4 biolab in China where they research corona viruses, but only if the virus did originate from Wuhan. I don't think we know all the corona viruses in the wild and who was patient zero was.
In a bizarre world where you were presumed guilty, could you do anything? If you submitted evidence that you were on another continent at the time of the crime, doesn't that prove you didn't do it? (Assuming the crime is something you must be physically present to do)
Outside of some noteworthy scummy politicians and a few partisan media outlets. I really haven't seen much in the way of MSM media pushing that theory as fact.
It doesn't matter if they're pushing this far-fetched hypothesis as "fact" or not, they're pushing it by continuously regurgitating such speculative FUD without evidence.
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. I've spent a lot of time, energy, and words asking people not to do that in the opposite direction [1]. It applies just as much the other way around. Name-calling, flamebait, and nationalistic provocations take the internet straight to hell. We're trying to avoid that fate here, or at least stave it off [2] a little longer.
Perhaps other MSM publications. The specific article here talks about US accidents in high-standards labs, and posits that those same accidents can happen in other countries. It's not attacking China at all. What you're describing doesn't apply to the discussion in this article or this thread, just seems non-productive.
What country you're in when you make a comment doesn't affect whether it's a good HN comment or not.
Your comment wasn't a good comment for HN because it used name-calling ("yellow journalism", "hating on", "FUD"), and because it was clearly a step further toward conflict between countries in the thread, which is what I mean by nationalistic flamewar.
I'm sure it felt like you were just being defensive and I completely get that, but comments here need to be more substantive and less flamebaity, no matter how wrong or unfair other commenters are, or you feel they are. That's not easy, but it's something we all need to work on, regardless of which side we're on.
Also, I don't think it's accurate to describe this specific article, or most of the comments in this thread (with some bad exceptions) as attacking China. We try to watch out for that and have scolded and moderated many commenters who have crossed that line (including some in this thread). HN's Chinese users, and users with Chinese family backgrounds, are absolutely welcome here, just as welcome as anybody else, and we don't tolerate slurs. You can see some of the long history of this here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
IMO it's very likely to have originated in a lab leak. It doesn't matter much however since there is no evidence, and any evidence of such will likely be covered up.
Being culpable for a disaster on this scale would be unprecedented in the economic reparations, so much so that we'll likely never find the origins.
>Being culpable for a disaster on this scale would be unprecedented in the economic reparations
I duno if that would ever really happen. I think much like a lot of things, concerns about Uyghurs it would just dissolve into the diplomatic and economic seas.
> it's very likely to have originated in a lab leak
What evidence is informing this belief? i.e. what is your model for assigning "P>0.5" to the probability here? For example do you think the SARS outbreak circa 2002 was also a lab escape?
Do you feel that I was misquoting you because you don't think of it as a belief as you prefaced it with "IMO", or do you take issue with me translating "very likely" to "P>0.5"? (Or maybe something else?)
I wasn't trying to be confrontational about it, just trying to understand why that's your opinion. In particular I was curious about your "very likely", because my priors are that most infectious diseases are not caused by lab leaks, and that there's no particular evidence of a lab leak here (though as you say plenty of reason to believe such evidence would be suppressed). But it's not my field so I'm not strongly attached to those priors.
I'd certainly agree with the article's premise that the lab theory should not be dismissed out of hand, but I think that's a different conclusion than saying "it's very likely to have originated in a lab leak". My takeaway from the article is "it's possible, but still not very likely", though I suppose I'd give a higher % of probability now than before reading the article.
I think that's how so many conspiracy theories spread. "IMO, I think it's very likely that the moon landings were faked. It doesn't matter since there is no evidence of the fake landings and any evidence of such will likely be covered up, like the way they got scientists to pretend that there are retroreflectors on the moon".
As long as people believe that evidence is covered up, then they can believe anything.
It's easier to believe in a grand conspiracy to make one seem special and part of a tribe than accept the banality, incompetence, chaos, and coincidences of reality.
Surely they’ve been receiving reports on progress, if so I’m sure there could be a match.
Similarly, I believe there were scientists in India who determined the capsule which deploys the virus into cells looks exactly the same as the HIV mechanism.
New coronavirus pandemics like this aren’t novel. It’s thought many of the boring common cold coronaviruses we don’t think much of started as an outbreak sometime in the past crossing animal-human boundaries
One common cold coronavirus that circulates around had a common ancestor in 1890. Suspiciously timed with the Russian “Flu” pandemic of 1890-1891[1]
(Not that we can just discount the Wuhan lab theory, but a naturally occurring pandemic like this not that weird historically)
New coronavirus pandemics like this are novel. Not because it's a coronavirus, but because of how highly adapted and highly transmissible it has been since it was first "discovered". Other such viral outbreaks in recent decades were not nearly as transmissible
Like John Lennon sang, “All I want is the truth, just give me some truth”. Very hard to come by these days, especially if it has anything to do with ‘The Orange Man’.
Peter Daszak, member of the WHO Covid origins team, was also the project lead for the US funded gain of function research of novel coronaviruses that was going on at the Wuhan BSL4 lab.
There is historical precedent of authorities blaming local meat markets to cover up a lab leak.
I'm not a virologist but every TWiV episode I listened to, there was convincing talk about natural reservoirs being the most likely source of the virus.
AFAIR they also expect similar events to happen increasingly all over the world due to side effects of the climate crisis and global heating.
>I'm not a virologist but every TWiV episode I listened to, there was convincing talk about natural reservoirs being the most likely source of the virus.
In no way whatsoever does that detract from a potential lab leak. The vast majority of viruses used in gain of function research are taken from natural reservoirs.
Peter Daszak was also signatory to this weird paper "in support of Chinese scientists".
> We sign this statement in solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China who continue to save lives and protect global health during the challenge of the COVID-19 outbreak. We are all in this together, with our Chinese counterparts in the forefront, against this new viral threat. The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.
Scary piece of propaganda, considering it was China who started rumours and misinformation, and tying the lab leak hypothesis to not supporting health professionals. All-in-all, a grave conflict of interest for a supposed objective investigation into the origins.
The virus acquired the traits that made it infectious to humans either through natural selection or bio-engineering.
If it was through natural selection, then it was likely such virus was going to cause a pandemic whether it was leaked by the lab or not, since presumably there's a natural reservoir of the virus.
1,049 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 360 ms ] threadWhile I agree that it’s extremely unlikely that a lab developed this virus, it’s far more plausible for one to have manufactured it.
> “It was very unlikely that anything could escape from such a place,” Ben Embarek said during the Feb. 9 WHO press conference, citing the team’s discussions with Wuhan lab officials about their safety protocols and audits. “If you look at the history of lab accidents, these are extremely rare events.”
> Yet lab accidents aren’t rare.
> What’s rare are accidents causing documented outbreaks. But those have happened, including in 2004 when two researchers at a lab in Beijing unknowingly became infected with another type of SARS coronavirus, sparking a small outbreak that killed one person.
> In the weeks since leaving Wuhan, the WHO’s team has been questioned about its independence and depth, including by the Biden administration, amid media reports that China denied the team access to raw data on possible COVID-19 cases that were identified during the earliest part of the outbreak.
> “We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement last month. “It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government.”
Why is the distinction between development and manufacturing relevant here? Have you read the article?
I better be careful, since I'm only allowed to make 4 comments an hour I have to be very selective of the opinions I share.
Everything on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html is derived from (a) HN's core value of intellectual curiosity, which is the sole thing we're optimizing for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), and (b) well over 10 years of experience operating this place.
Not only that, but they're garbage-collected periodically, meaning that if there's any rule there which isn't 'paying' for the space it consumes on that page, we take it out. It's like a codebase that way: complexity is the enemy, less is more, and deleting is at least as important as adding.
If anyone has a cogent case for deleting one of the guidelines, that would be most helpful. If anyone can think of one that should be added, and can't be derived from what's already there, that would also be helpful.
I realize it's annoying to be rate limited, but it's one of the few (crude) software tools we have to try to put off the descent of the forum into flamewar, so dropping the mechanism isn't really an option.
If not, what does it take to earn a permaban?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
For example, the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) escaped from the lab twice, both in 2003 and 2004.
And only 2 years later we have an outbreak
https://www.amazon.com/Lab-257-Disturbing-Governments-Labora...
Warning: this book is non-fiction and is scary.
It may be scary, but it's not non-fiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_257#Discredited_consp...
> A discredited 2004 book entitled Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory fueled the conspiracy theories. Archived specimens show that Lyme disease was endemic well before the establishment of Plum Island laboratory. Additionally, Lyme disease was never a topic of research at Plum Island, according to the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Agriculture.
https://twitter.com/mattwridley/status/1351198664950128641?s...
https://gillesdemaneuf.medium.com/the-good-the-bad-and-the-u...
> Account created 2 minutes ago
Interesting.
It's understandable that many people believe it.
It's not just paid trolls ("wumao") who believe this, but even normal people are susceptible to spreading such falsehoods.
a.k.a. Please don't feed the you know what.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If people follow the site guidelines and flag such provocations without replying, the thread grounds out. By feeding it, you furnish a circuit and all the current necessary for a prolonged electrocution.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Link?
"Did the coronavirus leak from a lab? These scientists say we shouldn’t rule it out."
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/18/1021030/coronavi...
I think the Wuhan/COVID/Coronavirus can be compared to the Soviet government's response to Chernobyl. Great efforts were made to keep a lid on that disaster from the people, and the world, until it was too great to ignore. Granted, a long time ago, but it's an example of what a totalitarian government (like China) might do in the face of such catastrophe.
I assumed it was the gardener, in the dining room, with the hatchet..
Its almost as if the whole human species could not be trusted with dangerous tools and regularly drops the ball.
These wet-market are such a medieval relic and all just because of superstitious nonsense about refrigerated food being bad for your chi.
Homeopathy, TMC and how those shamanistic practices are all called wherever by whomever kill. 2.7 million so far...
Even worser, when you think about all those other "tech" miracles enlightenment zealots insist humanity can be entrusted. We blow a nuclear power plant every ten years, drop the vials like they are hot, but hey more power into each pocket.
Cant wait for the first long-range flying car, getting hacked and used in a remote attack. That surely will be the day, someone will admit that tech is limited,not by what can be done, but by who gets to wield it.
Makes one wonder though, that day i entrusted that vital system for millions, to that upstream repo.. was i the janitor that day..
Nobody would sell lab animals from a virology lab to markets to eat. The consequences are obvious, animals would be accounted for, the risk would be extremely high to the persons future, and the profits small.
It's the kind of ideas you find on racist conspiracy theory blogs and you shouldn't share it here.
https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/
Yeah, because people prefer to hold their pet conspiracy theories.
Funny, we have thousands of people in certain countries in three letters organizations who can keep secrets just fine.
Listen to him talk about how easy is to modify coronaviruses in labs and how they are actually doing this, mixing and matching viruses at 29:50:
> Well, coronaviruses are pretty good... you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot what happens in a coronavirus. Zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can bulid a protein, and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this, insert into the backbone of another virus, and do some work in the lab, so you can get more predictive, when you find a sequence.
https://youtu.be/IdYDL_RK--w
If you trace back the spread of Lyme disease in time, you get two points. One in Connecticut, and one on Long Island, where workers got on the boats to Plum Island.
The lab was studying diseases similar to Lyme disease at the time.
All those are facts.
The conspiracy theory is that Lyme disease was accidentally released by that lab.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_257#Discredited_consp...
> Additionally, Lyme disease was never a topic of research at Plum Island, according to the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Agriculture.
These are facts, too, in your link. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#History
> The 2010 autopsy of Ötzi the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old mummy, revealed the presence of the DNA sequence of Borrelia burgdorferi making him the earliest known human with Lyme disease.
Unless it's got conclusive evidence of a functional time machine, it's gonna struggle to explain how a town in Connecticut predates a prehistoric mummy.
I think that it is at least somewhat likely that it was the result of the lab's activities, but your assertion here has a huge dose of selection bias.
If the virology labs studying coronaviruses were placed randomly around the world, you'd be correct - but they're not. They're placed near locations where novel coronaviruses have crossed the species barrier in the past, and where they are likely to do so in the future.
It would be equivalent to say that lighthouses cause ships to run aground, because many teams when ships run aground it's near a lighthouse.
Are they? I'm not aware of this trend, or of any other major species barrier crossings in Hubei. (If you're thinking of the original SARS, that started in Guangdong, two provinces to the south.)
The world’s foremost institute for tropical medicine is in London, England. So that debunks that idea.
It's further evidence that these things get sited sensibly, not randomly.
But the Wuhan lab did receive samples in 2019 from miners who died in 2012 from an infection of a novel coronavirus that resulted in symptoms very similar to COVID-19.
https://nypost.com/2020/08/15/covid-19-first-appeared-in-chi...
That’s a complete coincidence though and you’re bigoted for thinking there could possibly be a connection! /s
But if a lighthouse manufactured coral reefs, and the coral reefs on which ships were running aground displayed features of those that a given lighthouse manufactured, it might be more accurate.
Wuhan is like Chicago in China. It's not some random small town. If an outbreak occurred in some rural area (which it might have previously), it's possible that it just fizzled out.
Wuhan is a great place for a virus to spread.
Again, none of this is conclusive. It's all speculation. maybe maybe maybe. There are lots of potential ways for this to have happened natually.
But there's lots of other distant cities in China too, and none of them have virology institutes with the world's biggest collection of novel SARS-like viruses. So whatever your prior was for lab accident vs. natural, I do believe the location in Wuhan should significantly increase that. Certainly far from conclusive, but a possibility that requires serious investigation.
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli...
So I think it's entirely possible e.g. that China has confidently determined the non-lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, but that it's from an agricultural practice so reckless that they've decided it's better for their reputation to leave everything shrouded in doubt. It's much more obvious to me that China is concealing something than what they're concealing. (Of course, that's usually how concealing stuff works.)
That said, I still think zoonosis near Wuhan is unlikely. In a pre-pandemic publication with no incentive to lie, the WIV studied antibodies to SARS-like viruses in the blood of people living near bats in Yunnan province. They used blood from people living in Wuhan as a negative control:
> As a control, we also collected 240 serum samples from random blood donors in 2015 in Wuhan, Hubei Province more than 1000 km away from Jinning (Fig. 1A) and where inhabitants have a much lower likelihood of contact with bats due to its urban setting.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/
So while it's possible that natural zoonosis did occur in Wuhan, I believe that would require the WIV staff to be genuinely mistaken.
The hypothesized bat in question, if it was really a wet-market outbreak, was imported from hundreds of miles away.
Those in favour of the lab leak hypothesis point out that the virus showed up on the scene with all the evolutionary capability to spread amongst humans i.e with batteries included.
With previous Sars viruses my understanding is that each zoonotic jump was traceable with examples of previous forms in prior animal hosts to corroborate the lineage.
What makes Covid-19 interesting is that these zoonotic jumps or the gain of functions can be accelerated in the lab with the purpose of preparing us ahead of time for a dangerous forms of Sars style viruses. It looks like covid-19 may be that type of strain, not man made, but given the lab conditions for it to gain the capability. It may have escaped.
It's worth exploring the lab leak hypothesis but I would say that it's not politically expedient for any of the scientists or parties involved. We will never really know the truth and that is something we need to grow comfortable with.
My understanding is that A) is very much possible because it has happened before (SARS), but we have no evidence yet (and might never acquire).
For B) however, from my limited understanding, there is no strong evidence. We only know about a fraction of existing coronaviruses out there and given we observe one, that has caused a pandemic, the (conditional!) probability that it is well adapted is extremely high (survivorship bias).
If you have a credible source that claims B) please share it.
> What's more, Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists have for the past five years been engaged in so-called "gain of function" (GOF) research, which is designed to enhance certain properties of viruses for the purpose of anticipating future pandemics. Gain-of-function techniques have been used to turn viruses into human pathogens capable of causing a global pandemic.
> This is no nefarious secret program in an underground military bunker. The Wuhan lab received funding, mostly for virus discovery, in part from a ten-year, $200 million international program called PREDICT, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and other countries.
What I'm saying is that we don't have strong (any?) evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of gain of function research. It is entirely possible but the majority of the scientists who do gain of function research say it's unlikely (given what we know today, which might change).
Again, a credible source saying the opposite is appreciated.
[1] https://ge.usembassy.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-in...
There is analysis that suggests that SARS-CoV-2 wasn't engineered. However, if you were intentionally giving it to a bunch of animals in batches with some interspecies mixing, you wouldn't really expect it to look any different than a natural jump.
I thought UV resistant organisms were usually referred to as extremophiles because it's so infrequent
Tell me about that lab in the Congo again.
CDC and other US government officials, on the other hand, must ratchet up their criticism of China as well as WHO. I agree with you there. It's alarming that there are so few PR ramifications for China. From the looks of it, either their unsanitary bushmeat consumption got the world sick, or their irresponsible laboratory containment procedures did. Both are a reflection of China's culture, and were only exacerbated by authoritarian crackdown upon the early warnings issued by Chinese medical professionals. The US government shouldn't defend bad practices and systemic problems in the name of multilateral cooperation. That variety of ethical blindness forgives bad faith from our counterparts and damages our hegemony.
The US relies on Chinese manufacturing. If trade ends, the West will suffer. Consumer and industrial goods can't be built, which could incredibly damage the economy.
Manufacturing is shifting to other countries - Vietnam, India, etc. It's been driven by rising costs in China, but we're seeing an acceleration to de-risk the supply chain. TSM is being asked to build fabs in the US. Slowly, the most strategic pieces are being maneuvered.
China is building up its navy to protect itself. If they lose the South China Sea, they could be blockaded and starved of energy, resources, and food. They're building to reach parity with the US Navy or even outgun it, and they're trying to stall long enough that they can win should there be an encounter.
The US and its allies are ramping up criticism of China, and you can see it in diplomatic activity, news, and social media. The rhetoric will grow until they're ready to shift from soft negotiations to taking a hard line.
The game is being played right now.
China has absolutely no chance to meet head-to-head against a US Carrier Strike Group on neutral territory. Absolutely none, and the US has TEN Carrier Strike Groups.
Ex: If China + US decides that we need to fight over in Antartica, the US will win in nearly every feasible encounter.
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China's plan isn't to win or even challenge the Navy on the high seas. Instead, China's plan is to assert military strength with the seas it is close to: asserting military might against Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Korea, and other local minor powers.
Furthermore: Chinese air-forces can launch from Mainland China to support any hypothetical naval operations.
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EX: Its not trying to beat US in a fair fight. China is likely aiming to beat the US in an "unfair fight": any fight close to China's territories + air force + cruise missile range might stand a chance against a US Carrier Strike Group.
A few powerful Chinese ships under the protective cover of cruise-missiles + Chinese airforce is probably the plan. It only will be effective when close to the Chinese coast, but that's all China really cares about.
Right now. But take a look at the shipbuilding output they've achieved. In ten to twenty years, China could easily rival the US Navy.
People said this 20 years ago. We've already started to see the CCP losing ground (see HK), and I'm quite bearish on the Party going forward. Jinping is 67, and I expect to see a major power struggle which will leave the Chinese Communist Party crippled when he dies.
How is violating the Sino-British Joint Declaration and getting away with it "losing ground"? The Hong Kong protests failed and Hongkongers now have less freedom than before.
I don't think they got away with much. Even if foreign investment rebounds in HK, Western complacency toward China will not find its voice again for many decades, and in that time, every Chinese treaty negotiation will be viewed as a bad-faith caricature of real diplomacy.
[0] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/wir2020_en...
HK they won easily. Western countries like UK and especially Europe are completely useless. Only the US can coordinate and shore up a coordinated response against China.
However, smaller ships aren't going to do jack-diddly squat against a Carrier Strike Group in a neutral situation (ie: both sides meet in Antarctica). F-18s have an effective strike range of over 1000-miles.
Submarines might have some theoretical advantages, but the 110,000 ton Ford-class Carriers moves faster than pretty much every submarine on the planet, so Submarines literally cannot speed up fast enough to engage.
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Those smaller Chinese Ships are going to rely upon a lot of Air support + Cruise Missile support from the mainland if they ever wish to actually engage with a US Carrier Strike Group.
Staying within the protective cover of SAM (against air threats), Cruise Missiles (against the CSG themselves)... and providing a launch platform for various missiles, Chinese Destroyers probably can do a job in a hypothetical fight vs US Navy within the confines of the South China Sea.
But once they leave the protective cover of China's mainland... its all over. Swarms of F18s will just launch missiles at all the Destroyers, while the Carrier Strike Group sits back a thousand miles away.
--------
That's why the question isn't about those small Chinese ships (even though China is making a lot of them). The big question is about the performance of those Chinese Carriers. At 70,000 tons or so, they're much lighter than the 110,000 ton Ford-class carriers.
I also don't understand why they even had the slighest faith in a reliable investigation. After all these months of pushing back on researching accessing the site, they still bowed to their whims. How does this help the argument that it's better to just suck it up?
One thing I am really interested in to read more on is a historians analysis of the parallels one can draw from the period rising up to World War 2, and more importantly, how the rest of the world acted back then. When Germany was dissolving all their democratic processes, and started labellling jews, what did the rest of the world do? What did their neighbours do? Did they just happily keep on conducting business?
I have read slightly into it, but placing the responses of the countries at that time in the right context really requires some solid knowledge of history. If anyone knows interesting articles to read about the responses of the world during that time: I'm very interested.
Might have something to do with the fact that the leader of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom, was hand picked by the Chinese communist party and won the position over the US and EU's favored choice.
Basically: "Oh, someone else can play the same game we've played for a century with UN, WHO, IMF, etc. - how dare they?"
Or the several Middle Easter/Asian/African countries bombed, invaded, toppled, etc by the US (3-4 of them in the last 20 years alone).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Garden_of_Beasts
You reason about WHO as an institution, while disregarding the principal-agent problem. The leaders of WHO are very strongly influenced by China, and as a result the institution is working to please China, rather than working to fulfill its nominal mission. Its leaders will see ample rewards for corrupting the institution.
The 1936 Olympic Summer Games are a good starting point in my opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_Summer_Olympics
The lies about masks may have helped with shortages in the short term. The result is now that people rightfully distrust everything their governments say.
If it came from somewhere else, why wasn’t the outbreak noticed there first, is the million dollar question. It requires some serious mental gymnastics at this point to believe it didn’t originate in that lab. The only real question is if it was released deliberately.
Sure, China has way more public health capacity than it used to, but we know that COVID can spread silently in a community for a month without anyone noticing, even when we are looking. It happened in California and Seattle in January 2020. Why wouldn't that have happened in, say, rural China in October?
If you take an unknown diseases with an R of 2-3, what you will see is a number of smaller clusters, some dying off, before you get the one cluster that becomes the pandemic.
Why not? Wuhan is the 43rd largest city in the world. Meanwhile, the earliest cases of CoVid were all connected to the same wet market. Doesn't that have a higher probability being the origin?
https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-did-not-start-at-wuhan-...
Lab Leak: A Scientific Debate Mired in Politics — and Unresolved [March 22, 2021]
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/947620
https://www.outline.com/XCTFJJ (registration-wall bypass)
This claim has less weight if China does not share the raw data.
[1] https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/who-experts-want-more-data-f...
And people making the really odd responses below. They're, not saying it, but insinuating that the lab would be where there is lots of bat coronavirus? The lab is in the city of Wuhan. A city with a population of 11 million people. This isn't some rural town.
There was a lab that studied this type of coronavirus, had published papers on it. And in a country the size of the USA had an outbreak within just a few miles from that lab. Then the govt came and refused to let anyone outside investigate.
To me that leads pretty strongly that it was an accidental lab leak. And they weren't able to control the spread.
My hopeful opinion is that this leads to more stringent worldwide rules for reporting leaks, and checking of safety practices to avoid this happening again
A leak that results in 2.7 million worldwide deaths will not result in "more stringent worldwide rules for reporting leaks". It would result in economic reparations and possibly war.
Leak or not, it's in China's interest to prevent the blame from falling on them. The narrative here is an incredibly powerful geopolitical tool.
Their manufacturing economy does not benefit from being locked down on a regular basis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#Biosafety_leve...
Now I was aware of some reports (nothing official or confirmed) that the Wuham lab was broken into in the summer of 2019.
Interestingly enough their was a lot of political tension at that time involving Hong Kong.
I'm also mindful how China has been rather good at sweeping things under carpets.
So I could speculate how things played out in a way that fits events, but without any smoking gun - it would be just speculation and joining dots that may or may not of been there.
Though even if it was something along the lines of what I'm thinking happened (animal activists with HK connections being politically motivated/manipulated and possibly no idea what type of lab it was beyond they may be hurting animals), the lab was researching virus's from the wild - seeing how they mutate and progress in an effort to see what lays ahead.
So lab event or no lab event - this virus was already in existence in some form and was not a case of if, but when.
One thing I do know, it sure did shine a spotlight upon how connected the World is and also how fragile many supply lines are.
Someone who broke into a Wuhan coronavirus research lab in summer 2019 and broke containment of our hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 precursor virus samples would have been infected too early for our timeline.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296...
I mean, yeah, five out of 6 cited experts have ties to EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has funding ties to one of the two virology labs in Wuhan, but that's, like, just a coincidence. If it wasn't, I'm sure NPR would mention it.
And then Peter Daszak himself went to Wuhan with WHO team to investigate and didn't find anything conclusive. Peter fucking Daszak. You're not going to tell me that someone who was interviewed and cited on this subject by NPR, CNN, CBS, Slate, Democracy Now, Washing Post and The Guardian could be full of shit, right?
/s
Exactly that. The first paper which discredited the lab leak theory published in The Lancet early last year by a number of scientists was later found out to have been organized behind the scenes by EcoHealth, which also asked for it's name not to appear on the paper.
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/ecohealth-allian...
RNA mutations mimicking proteins are precisely how a non-living entity can, like a bike-thief trying combinations randomly, unlock the lipid or protein sheaths on animal cells and gain direct access to the inputs of a genetic reproduction machine inside the cell.
So, aside from the fact that these folks only have some circumstantial evidence and woo to suggest a lab hypothesis, (not EVEN a theory, not EVEN a hypothesis, nay, mere speculation with a vested political axe to grind, hello) and that fact that all factual evidence of how all previous cross-species virus hops occurred point to this being a relatively common occurence (1918 avian-porcine-human connection occurred in Kansas by the way, not "Spanish")
umm sure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_hydrolysis
Why? Because it seems like US institutions and people (right up to Fauci) were involved in this research and may not want the domestic blowback.
Conveniently the CCP don't want a paper trail either.
I'd be pretty sure the various scenarios have already been gamed out in both countries.
Edit: Not sure why this is being downvoted, but just in case it’s a reflex because I mentioned Fauci: yes, he was head of NIAID, and yes, the NIH did fund this type of research at the WIV. The grants are public information.
Part 1, from 2014-2019, for 3.7M:
https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8674931
Part 2, from 2019 until it was cancelled in April 2020:
https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9819304
Both led by Peter Daszak who is now also the lead WHO investigator. The same person who decided the WHO didn’t need to see the deleted virus databases, and the same person who co-ordinated the Lancet statement which minimised the lab leak theory early on (and let to it being considered a conspiracy theory).
Here he is on This Week In Virology, describing this sort of work. It’s worth watching the whole thing, but gets most interesting from minute 27 onward:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYDL_RK--w
For example he confirms it’s easy to modify these viruses in the lab, and mentions collaborating with Ralph Baric at UNC. Baric invented Remdesivir (with Gilead) - the “cure” that turned out not to work very well. His lab was doing gain of function experiments before the ban. Shi Zhengli (“bat woman” from Wuhan) worked very closely with Baric and Daszak.
https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan...
It's not a crazy theory by any means, but, if it happened, then there's evidence. So, where is the evidence? Literally, where is there any actual evidence it happened?
Really? Why would there be evidence TODAY? Those bats have likely been destroyed, and all records of sequences taken from them have likely long since been shredded and burned.
There's not that much evidence involved here.
Are you asking me to believe a theory for which all the evidence was either not uncovered or destroyed? Why is that more plausible than origin from outside the lab?
I agree that conclusions should not be drawn without evidence - but by the same token, you cannot rule this out as a possibility because no effort was put into investigating it.
Domain expert scientists on the lab leak hypothesis: https://thebulletin.org/2020/06/did-the-sars-cov-2-virus-ari...
The evidence is with the intelligence agencies of Western nations. Trump and Pompeo (Pompeo was sanctioned by China hours after new President took office) did not make up their "China Virus" as some racist dog whistle. They were informed.
The WHO, when pressured by the UK for China not sharing information, nor allowing access to a team for investigation, said: Now is not the time to point fingers. We need China cooperation for now. The UK replied that it then has to assume the worst possible and prepare for a pandemic. It did.
Actual tangible evidence is rare, but it is pretty damning that: China blocks Australian-led world-wide investigation into the origins of COVID -- re-sentencing Australian prisoners to death penalty and messing with trade relations to hurt Australia's economy. They'd do that for a natural zoonotic-base virus that was out of their control? Phone location records show containment procedures around Wuhan lab around October 2019. Former military analysts in Israel pose the lab leak hypothesis as plausible, betting their reputation on it.
It is not too fair to ask actual tangible evidence, if evidence could mean a hot war or severely strained relations during a pandemic where people need to work together. And what is your tangible evidence for the popular zoonotic hypothesis? Just some experts saying that zoonotic base is most likely when interviewed for a popular news outlet? The most likely hypothesis should be the easiest to find actual support for. Why not?
I think a lot of criticism on the drastic measures to contain a relatively low CFR virus would be dispelled if the general public knew what the decision-makers then knew: a strange novel virus which seems extremely adapted to infect humans, and shows more similarities to the lab viruses worked with in biowarfare, than with captured and documented cave bats. Similar to the "airborne COVID" -- first publicized by the head of the WHO -- we seem to be managing the factual information flow to avoid panic, geopolitics, and xenophobia. It is right now not important that the general public knows it is dealing with an engineered virus or lab leak. Or at least... other things are more important right now.
Example: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55998157
Yes. You are supposed to believe the administration of a president when they claim: The virus came from China. Whether deliberate or accidental, it likely originated in a laboratory. If you don't, I reckon you have bigger problems than a pandemic. If you can't trust your government on such critical matters, if you really believe the US government would stand for the secretary of State spreading lies, then you should probably flee to China and ask asylum there.
> Sorry, but that's just not good enough.
But experts saying: "Virus is likely zoonotic, but we have no idea" is good enough? Again, demanding others to proof that a teacup is orbiting Venus is reasonable. But not when you can't even show the existence of teacups or Venus yourself.
> Actual evidence in the zoonotic origin column greatly surpasses that in the lab leak column.
There is no actual evidence. Actual evidence of zoonotic origin would establish the transmission chain and identify patient 0. There is none. You have "Bats can be the original carrier". So your hypothesis could be true. It is circumstantial. Any actual evidence would instantly kill one of the hypothesis. So you share some responsibility there.
For an example of how to turn the BBC article into circumstantial evidence for a lab leak, is to study the franticness that went on with sequencing and publishing. Wuhan lab published the sequencing of bats captured in 2017 in 2020. It was complete PR management campaign, with scientists blaming "Mother Nature" not their research, information black-outs, and sharing of "secret" sequences years after the fact in support of zoonotic chain, while blocking any outside investigation into the origin which would support/not support the zoonotic origin.
Very similar things happened with hydrochloroquine. HCQ was known effective for SARS-1, and prelim research showed it also was effective for SARS-2 (less grave symptoms developed) in the middle of February. Just did not help when the patient was already severely sick, so was not a cure, as touted by trigger-happy Trump months later. But then all of HCQ was discredited as being useless snake oil, and responsible for killing Americans when they drank aquarium cleaner. It was a political hit job on science, to punish Trump playing lose and politics. None the wiser or the healthier.
Finally. When the virus was not yet a pandemic (but clearly on the way there), the right prepper movement started talking about masks, self-treatment in case of hospital crisis, and food and vitamins (vitamin D and selenium were chosen for their effects against other viruses) to keep immune system healthy. Meanwhile in the US, progressive politicians held mask-less photo opportunities at China Town restaurants to signal their support and that fear is unreasonable. Democrat politicians, former presidents, and public health officials were stating to not buy N95 masks for these were not effective and wearing them would signal you were ill. Then Trump went muh-freedom-america on masks, and the progressive-left opposition to not mask wearing grew overnight.
On all these flip-flops, the US held conflicting positions, and any science was an afterthought. I classify your objection to the official US position on lab leak as lies as part of this politics game. It makes you think of your entire government as a single "bad" figure, blatantly lying or skipping over their intelligence agencies and geopolitics experts, because their irrational hatred for China feels deserving of a big lie. Trump and Pompeo fabricating the lab leak hypothesis seems like a bigger story than the Trump-Ukraine scandal. If you have any actual evidence for that (or strong circumstantial evidence beyond Trump playing loose with facts) then it is your duty to inform the American public of that radical conspiracy.
What changed for me is how much circumstantial evidences exists and probably a stronger signal: there hasn’t been another plausible starting point. When something smells this fishy there’s likely a reason. It’s starting to feel like, Occam’s razor - ie that a lab leak is the simplest explanation.
That said - it doesn't yet change my priors about the likely source of outbreak which seems most plausibly at WIV.
not buying it.
https://jglobalbiosecurity.com/articles/10.31646/gbio.41/
All that said I think it is really unlikely and a pointless effort as government bureaucracies wouldn’t be able to even formulate a reaction to an intentional or even accidental release so I think we will not try too hard to imply that for political reasons.
The chair of the WHO (Tedros Adhanom) [1] was a communist rebel (Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front) fighter in north africa and his career has been sponsored and guided by China for this reason.
They won't suppress findings made internally because it would be too hard to cover up - but they will 'do the least' with respect to finding answers.
Only the US has enough power and wherewithal to even try to do something, but they'll be kept out direct, so it boils down to how sophisticated the US clandestine efforts are in China.
My completely speculative guess is that US operating ability in China is 'really bad' and that they've already barked up that tree and found nothing conclusive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tedros_Adhanom
What better place to put a lab studying bat viruses than near a place where they originate?
That's a pretty frequent occurrence.
Reported last year...
US investigating 'hazardous event' in Wuhan lab in October Alleged 'hazardous event' occurred days before Wuhan Military World Games in October
Plus, genetic drift research shows virus first cases in October.
Note Facebook has previously explicitly banned posts "falsely claiming the virus is man-made". Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/02/08/965390755/facebook-widens-ban...
And the virus being man-made is not a possibility?
https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...
Sure, things aren't black and white and I never said they were. But Facebook will ban you for suggesting that it's possible that the virus is man-made, right? So they're the 'extremists' here.
Hidden camera investigation of Facebook moderators (ie fact checkers)
Which scientific community are you referring to? There are countless scientists who have been arguing against the risks of gain of function research for many years. Why are pro-gain of function scientists deathly silent now about the supposed benefits of their research?
Which is not a dismissal at all. What scientists are saying is that both zoonotic transfer and lab leak are plausible, but that we don't have evidence for the latter (yet!) and the former is more likely.
In many media articles this simplifies to 'scientists say virus origins are zoonotic'.
Is this likelihood differential being calculated using data, or is it just a hypothesis?
I don't think at this point it is credible to assign probabilities to either hypothesis (which are assumed to be exclusive here).
EDIT: The downvotes to me represent people who want to silence discussion on the matter.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please also don't go on about downvotes. As the site guidelines say, this never does any good and it makes boring reading.
The issue isn't how long an account has been on HN or the good posts it makes—it's the bad posts. This shouldn't be hard to understand; it's the same principle by which people who always stop at red lights and are nice to supermarket cashiers still don't get to rob banks.
role of furin cleavage site in covid:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-020-0184-0
"In fact, no influenza virus with a furin cleavage site has ever been found in nature,"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7435492/
Where did this mutation come from?
> Although they only emerge under artificial conditions in influenza viruses, these furin cleavage sites are found within several branches of the coronavirus family tree. However SARS‐CoV‐2 is the only lineage B coronavirus found with one, and the only other coronaviruses known to have them are only at most 60% identical to this novel coronavirus.
It's like people just depend on nobody following the links they post.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I am curious to know if this guideline applies only when responding to HN comments, or if it should be applied to source material in article links as well. I've noticed a lot more conspiracy-theorizing comments lately and it's hard to engage when the whole premise of a given comment is accusing someone else of misrepresenting facts.
Thanks for all your hard work, regardless!
It's unusual even for coronavirus.
> Although they only emerge under artificial conditions in influenza viruses, these furin cleavage sites are found within several branches of the coronavirus family tree.
Even the original quote, "In fact, no influenza virus with a furin cleavage site has ever been found in nature" leaves out something important:
> the fact remains that every highly pathogenic avian influenza virus, defined by having a furin cleavage site, has either been found on commercial poultry farms that create the pseudo‐natural conditions necessary for serial passage, or created in laboratories with gain‐of‐function serial passage experiments.
That is, the authors are defining "in nature" not to include commercial poultry farms.
I just haven't seen any evidence of it that I think 'proves' it.
[0] natural insofar as humans intruding onto wildlife is natural
In this case, that the lab was not responsible.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200317175442.h...
In a bizarre world where you were presumed guilty, could you do anything? If you submitted evidence that you were on another continent at the time of the crime, doesn't that prove you didn't do it? (Assuming the crime is something you must be physically present to do)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26545902.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Edit: criticize justly and specifically, not nationalistically. Attacking any group using stretched/thin arguments makes the accusers look weak.
Your comment wasn't a good comment for HN because it used name-calling ("yellow journalism", "hating on", "FUD"), and because it was clearly a step further toward conflict between countries in the thread, which is what I mean by nationalistic flamewar.
I'm sure it felt like you were just being defensive and I completely get that, but comments here need to be more substantive and less flamebaity, no matter how wrong or unfair other commenters are, or you feel they are. That's not easy, but it's something we all need to work on, regardless of which side we're on.
Also, I don't think it's accurate to describe this specific article, or most of the comments in this thread (with some bad exceptions) as attacking China. We try to watch out for that and have scolded and moderated many commenters who have crossed that line (including some in this thread). HN's Chinese users, and users with Chinese family backgrounds, are absolutely welcome here, just as welcome as anybody else, and we don't tolerate slurs. You can see some of the long history of this here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Being culpable for a disaster on this scale would be unprecedented in the economic reparations, so much so that we'll likely never find the origins.
I duno if that would ever really happen. I think much like a lot of things, concerns about Uyghurs it would just dissolve into the diplomatic and economic seas.
True. And not just economic reparations, you can imagine diplomatic relations and all would be severely impacted.
What evidence is informing this belief? i.e. what is your model for assigning "P>0.5" to the probability here? For example do you think the SARS outbreak circa 2002 was also a lab escape?
I've worked in several labs, created several viruses (non-pathogenic) myself. People are careless, did you read the article?
I wasn't trying to be confrontational about it, just trying to understand why that's your opinion. In particular I was curious about your "very likely", because my priors are that most infectious diseases are not caused by lab leaks, and that there's no particular evidence of a lab leak here (though as you say plenty of reason to believe such evidence would be suppressed). But it's not my field so I'm not strongly attached to those priors.
I'd certainly agree with the article's premise that the lab theory should not be dismissed out of hand, but I think that's a different conclusion than saying "it's very likely to have originated in a lab leak". My takeaway from the article is "it's possible, but still not very likely", though I suppose I'd give a higher % of probability now than before reading the article.
As long as people believe that evidence is covered up, then they can believe anything.
https://asiatimes.com/2020/04/why-us-outsourced-bat-virus-re...
Surely they’ve been receiving reports on progress, if so I’m sure there could be a match.
Similarly, I believe there were scientists in India who determined the capsule which deploys the virus into cells looks exactly the same as the HIV mechanism.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Scientists-slam-Ind...
This kinda matches people testing positive for HIV in an Australian vaccine trial:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/world/australia/uq-corona...
One common cold coronavirus that circulates around had a common ancestor in 1890. Suspiciously timed with the Russian “Flu” pandemic of 1890-1891[1]
(Not that we can just discount the Wuhan lab theory, but a naturally occurring pandemic like this not that weird historically)
1 - https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-the-coronavir...
There is historical precedent of authorities blaming local meat markets to cover up a lab leak.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1292819714935271424
I'm not a virologist but every TWiV episode I listened to, there was convincing talk about natural reservoirs being the most likely source of the virus.
AFAIR they also expect similar events to happen increasingly all over the world due to side effects of the climate crisis and global heating.
In no way whatsoever does that detract from a potential lab leak. The vast majority of viruses used in gain of function research are taken from natural reservoirs.
> We sign this statement in solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China who continue to save lives and protect global health during the challenge of the COVID-19 outbreak. We are all in this together, with our Chinese counterparts in the forefront, against this new viral threat. The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339367143_Statement...
Scary piece of propaganda, considering it was China who started rumours and misinformation, and tying the lab leak hypothesis to not supporting health professionals. All-in-all, a grave conflict of interest for a supposed objective investigation into the origins.
If it was through natural selection, then it was likely such virus was going to cause a pandemic whether it was leaked by the lab or not, since presumably there's a natural reservoir of the virus.
Sort yourselves out, "hackers".