Please consider spending the ~hour or so it takes to read this. Yes, this is a repost, but I'm posting it because it hardly grabbed any attention the first couple of times people posted it. [1] [2] Yes, it's long, but it's very much worth the read.
I won’t read articles by scientists who whitewash colonial European exploitation with pseudo-science which claims that Africans are poor because they have genes inferior to the rich white men of Europe. Yeah, the same men who colonized and brutally exploited Africa and India and China and the Middle East. Yeah, those that robbed the world like common bandits while pretending they had a burden to civilize the “savage”. Europeans should leave Africa alone — because they still are exploiting them — and then pay them reparations.
And if the article tells the truth? Why would author's racial preferences matter? You might be surprised how much of modern tech was developed by racists and other bad apples. If you are from the US try reading how your rocket / space industry had been developed for example.
I mean, it's directly relevant: the man regurgitates tired, bad science to justify a racist worldview. His trustworthiness in this domain is compromised.
I only care about one thing whether that virus came out as the result of aforementioned research. I could not care less about author's worldview and whether he eats babies for breakfast.
>I only care about one thing whether that virus came out as the result of aforementioned research
Then you should read what scientists write, not science journalists. If you can't actually understand the science, which is perfectly reasonable given that most of us are laymen, you can read scientific journalists, but then you need to acknowledge that you operate on trust, which would mean you need to take the authors biases into account, and don't pretend you 'only care about the science'.
Wade has been widely criticized on mistakes in scientific accuracy have been pointed out concerning his last books on genetics and race, and he appeared to have some sort of ideological axe to grind. The same may very well be the case here.
It's trivial to misrepresent science in subtle ways to tilt a discussion one way or the other on controversial issues such as this, so author credibility matters.
The point is that you seem to be arriving at that yes/no answer as a result of reading the words of someone whose credibility and impartiality is in question.
Well here is surprise for you. I used to be a scientist myself. Just in a totally different area. From my experience being racist and impartiality to results in one's profession are orthogonal.
All the arguments I see so far are of "but, but he cheats on his wife" quality.
This isn't doubting someone's opinion because of a completely unrelated character trait. Taking your examples, if he was cheating on his wife or eating babies (?) that probably wouldn't have any bearing on this. I think the issue people have is that someone with pretty questionable opinions on race has got some other opinions on a hot topic that has been tinged with racist rhetoric from the right. I can totally see why that'd be enough for some to pass on it and say "nah, no thanks".
There is no clear yes/no answer here. Without a smoking gun either way there is a scale of probability/certainty and everyone who looks into this falls somewhere on that scale based on their experience, ideology, biases, research, etc...
Personally I think lab origin is unlikely as whilst it's possible to describe how it could happen, that's not proof it did actually happen. Too often people mistake theoretical actions for proof of action. The probability of natural origin still ranks higher for me but I wouldn't bet my house on it.
Well, no. I was referring to the question posed related to available knowledge and your article. But your statement makes an assumption that it’s origin is a lab, as that would be the only way that somebody would know for sure. If it’s natural in origin then that person does not exist, or if they did would publish their research and claim the glory. So you’re taking a position on the scale of certainty which is dependent upon your own conclusions based on uncertainty.
Then you should read what scientists write, not science journalists
You can read both. In this case science journalists are both explaining the science (quite well, in this case) and also alledging bad behaviour by scientists, and if he's right (which again, seems to be the case given the evidence presented) then only reading what those very same scientists have written would leave you less well informed.
Yeah, and for that reason we should forever regard him with disdain. Even if he invented everything we use today. We should always bring it up and highlight his racist views.
My problem with this isn’t that a racist position exists. It’s that racism thrives and grows when you don’t point it out in a manner which leaves a stain on the racist. Those who are secretly racist will be emboldened by a publicly accept racist and it will give them some path to expressing or acting on their racist views which they have otherwise suppressed.
So should we read the article? Maybe. But should we share it while saying “hey look what this known racist is saying”? I don’t think so.
This article should definitely be read as an opinion piece, not objective analysis to conclude the truth. Regardless of his personal views it's his methods that introduce a lot of doubt. The author has previously dismissed large swathes of scientific consensus against his publications as ideologically driven. He takes fringe positions and introduces a lot of selection and confirmation bias to support his opinion. He writes very well and some of the ideas are interesting but they should definitely be weighted up against a more balanced analyses.
As I've already said elsewhere I only interested in an answer to whether this virus has been created artificially. The author are you already said has some "interesting ideas". And the real answer to this question if known has definitely nothing to do with this author's views on racial subjects as he is in no position to answer it accurately in a first place. He just raises concerns.
You're citing an article that literally has as its first sentence, "Nicholas Wade is not a racist". As citations go that's not very convincing.
And at any rate, the attempted smearing of anyone who points to problems in establishment thinking as a racist is trivial, completely expected of a certain segment of society and of no importance relative to the topic at hand. Wade's article not only builds an extremely strong case for the "engineered in a lab" theory, but just as importantly, shows that virology as field needs to be shut down. Virologists have been caught engaging in two conspiracies around this topic now - the conspiracy of silence by Chinese state and researchers, and the second was the deception around the letters claiming a lab leak was an absurd conspiracy theory and which boldly claimed there were no conflicts of interest even though they had the biggest conflicts imaginable. That's before we even get to the stupidity of GOF research.
It's a small field with a bad culture, and as the article points out, has in the end contributed nothing to actually fighting COVID. The case for defunding it looks strong and the case for continuing it looks weak.
Those things are all far more important than your allergic reaction to a man who worked for decades at the NYT of all places
> You're citing an article that literally has as its first sentence, "Nicholas Wade is not a racist". As citations go that's not very convincing.
I'm not sure you read past the first sentence of that article, since the second sentence makes it clear that Nicholas Wade is the one making the claim he's not racist. "It's not prejudice; it's science." It's pretty clear the reviewer -- in Scientific American, which I believe does have some bona fides -- is laying out the case that, in fact, it's prejudice, not science, and lays it out in a pretty convincing manner. The book being reviewed, as I understand it, has been pretty widely criticized not only by reviewers, but by scientists arguing that Wade misrepresented their research.
Does that have any bearing on Wade's case for SARS-CoV-2 being a lab-created virus? Certainly not directly; maybe not at all. I read the whole article, and it certainly makes a plausible and compelling case! But like it or not, a lot of the conversation around "the lab creation theory" for SARS-CoV-2 has had a decidedly racial tinge. Having it turn out that this plausible and compelling case has been made by a science writer who had a recent, major work widely criticized for, ah, a decidedly racial tinge is, well... let's say "interesting."
As a final note, gain-of-function research certainly sounds fraught with peril even under the best of circumstances, and these do not sound like they were the best of circumstances. I question whether that means "virology as a field needs to be shut down."
The explicit statement that Nicholas Wade is not a racist appears both as the first sentence - unquoted i.e. this is not reported speech but a statement by the article author - and in the abstract at the top, also not in quotes. But then it starts by mis-representing his argument by saying he "explains why white people are better because of their genes" and in the very next sentence admits that "to be fair" that's not actually what he said at all.
We are left deliberately confused about both what the author of the article and the author of the book actually think. For example you wrote:
Nicholas Wade is the one making the claim he's not racist. "It's not prejudice; it's science."
and you put that statement in quotes to imply that Wade is the one who said it, but in fact, it's the article author who wrote that statement, not Wade!
I don't fully understand where you see a racial tinge in the lab creation theory. The lab is in China but beyond that it has nothing to do with being Chinese. And as Wade and others document, the money came from US research agencies and GOF research is done in multiple countries, so again, I don't see any racial connection. If Wade was actually a racist I guess he'd not miss this golden opportunity to blame the apparently lax Chinese lab practices on their DNA, but he makes no such argument anywhere, not even about culture.
It's not poorly written, it's a rhetorical use of irony. Like Mark Antony repeatedly asserting that Brutus and Cassius are "honorable men" as he describes how they brutally and unjustly murdered Caesar.
Irony is not sarcasm! There's nothing ironic about the way the article is written, especially as it's such an incendiary accusation to begin with - the very place one should not be using neither irony nor sarcasm. Such topics need to be treated with great gravity.
> you put that statement in quotes to imply that Wade is the one who said it, but in fact, it's the article author who wrote that statement, not Wade!
No, I put it in quotes to indicate that it was a quote. And yes, allturtles is correct that the author was engaging in a rhetorical device here, and is clearly (at least, it's clear to me) asserting that, yes, Wade's thesis was essentially racist. I don't think we're going to get anywhere continuing this, though, so let's just agree to disagree.
We don't want to know. That may sound a bit glib but I think it's true. What would be the reaction if we could determine the outbreak was due to an unintentional leak? China cannot reimburse the world for the economic damage covid has caused. It cannot be held accountable for all the lives that have been lost. It cannot compensate the world for the diminished quality of life we've all suffered. But there will be plenty of calls for China to do all of that. If covid is the result of Chinese negligence, the reaction and conflict across the planet over what to do about it is going to be absolutely terrible.
And let's not even begin to think what will happen if there were to be evidence that this was an intentional release.
It's important to know and it's important not to know. Both paths have mostly negative outcomes. The best path is for it to have been natural, second best is accidental. Intentional is unfathomable and has unlimited downside. We should all hope that's not the case here.
>"I can't think of any other aftermath except for WWIII."
Yeah sure. We've just lost 3 million lives, let's kill the rest of the planet as consolation. As fucked up as our politicians are I hope they are not ready to die.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be scary, but I don't think we should be willfully ignorant. I want to know what happened. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
WWIII doesn't make a lot of sense. Nothing about MAD has gone away. And it would then be what, China vs. everybody? How would they even expect to prevail?
More likely result is that most of the world would stop trading with them. Nobody would want to see a Made in China tag on anything. Which would in turn be very bad for the economy in China and lead to unrest.
So the more likely outcome would be civil war in China.
The article doesn't support the case for it being intentional. Negligence at best.
One of the things Wade demonstrates is that China was most likely doing research on CoV viruses in ordinary labs with nothing more than gloves and a white lab coat. The standard photo of Dr Shi is of her in a pressurised bubble suit but that's bsl4 and virologists don't like working in those conditions because it slows them down. So the research grants say the work will be done at much lower safety levels.
I guess at some point you enter a gray area where gross negligence and intentionality blur together. But the bioweapon idea shouldn't take hold because it's obviously wrong on its face: the virus has no characteristics that would make for a good weapon of any kind. For it to be intentional would require some kind of theory involving vaccinations but Europe's irrational shutdowns of their own vaccine programmes throws a wrench in the typical vaccine related conspiracy theories.
I don't believe the lab escape was even remotely deliberate; however:
> the virus has no characteristics that would make for a good weapon of any kind.
Quite the contrary. The virus clearly favors authoritarian societies whose citizens will let their government weld them into their apartments. Just look at the death rate in China compared to the US and Europe. The only free societies that have come out unscathed are isolated islands (NZ, Taiwan).
That said, there is zero chance that the CPC had foreknowledge of this. They got very, very lucky.
> Africa and random Eastern European countries have also been doing okay
Eastern European countries are topping the death-per-capita charts (and the ones that don't are still topping excess-death charts).
African countries are doing "okay" because their ratio of people above age 65 is 2-3% rather than the 20% in Europe, and case numbers are low because they don't have the money to mass test.
Africa and random Eastern European countries have also been doing okay.
Over time, I have seen these numbers level out. Of course, there's still some disparities in how countries manage the epidemic, but it seems more a case of when a country will be hit, not if. The countries that managed their first wave well (Poland, Czechia, Ukraine, Turkey) have been hit harder in the second wave than other countries.
It seems that Covid spread and fatality nicely correlates with how integrated and mobile a country's society is. Which shouldn't be that surprising, I guess. The only countries bucking this trend are in East-Asia (not just South Korea, but Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, etc), probably due to their experiences with earlier outbreaks.
Pretty much any virus 'favours authoritarian societies' to the extent that stricter restrictions and their observance reduces transmissibility. And pretty much any society is a lot less likely to worry about movement restrictions being illiberal in an actual war.
This happens to be a virus which focuses most of its harm on elderly people who can be triaged out of care where resources are stretched in conflict situations, causes relatively few issues for combatants and spreads in an unpredictable manner well beyond the target population. Its clearly insufficient to undermine the actual fighting fitness of the societies which make no effort to stop its spread, but at the same time it goes round the world killing random noncombatants and likely gets back to your own population via neutral countries. Clearly far worse as a bioweapon than many naturally occurring viruses, especially when you apparently don't have an antidote and your potential adversaries can develop one faster
Global power shifts to their favor by slowing down democratic economies, sacrificing parts of their own population and economy in the short term. As a collectivist dictatorship tracking every move of its population a pandemic is easier to handle.
Isn’t it also becoming more and more suspicious that they appear to literally be almost the best country in the world at controlling it. We are talking multiple orders of magnitude better. I struggle to understand how exactly.
Except even if they report fake numbers if there was actually significant outbreaks we would hear about it still. It would leak. Something is super odd.
People fear consequences for not following quarantine state orders much more I guess. They are just more used to abide an omnipotent state, meaning no public backlash or counter movements like in the west.
Not saying they did intentionally leak it, but for an example of what they’ve gained, look at what they’ve been doing in Hong Kong and the South China Seas under cover of COVID. They also were able to quickly rebound and start producing economically while the rest of the world was shut down. I think COVID has been a net positive for China from a strategic standpoint.
Please do not take HN threads straight to flamewar hell. That is a guaranteed way to ruin the thread, especially when the topic is divisive to begin with, and it damages the commons. Personal attacks aren't ok either.
Do you want nuclear war? Seriously, what is the appropriate response if it turned out China did this on purpose? If you cannot give an answer to this, why criticize those who see the inherent danger that you have no solution to?
Punishment should be due only when actual proveable facts can be shown. Otherwise it's just rampant speculation which just feeds into sometimes political power moves. We already have enough of that going on.
I'm a layperson, but AFAIU GoF research in principle is a good thing. It helps us anticipate future viruses, study how they impact humans, and prepare for an eventual outbreak.
It's obviously very risky to do, but we should focus on adopting and enforcing better security practices to minimize the risks, not ban GoF altogether.
I agree that gain-of-function research is very much playing with fire, but who is "we" that could stop doing gain-of-function research? The worst outcome, in my opinion, would be that all of the cautious ethical scientists stop doing gain-of-function research, organizations stop publishing safety guidelines because after all who needs safety guidelines when the research itself is illegal, and the only remaining people doing gain-of-function research are either irresponsible (grad student who doesn't know or doesn't care, and definitely doesn't have the equipment to do it safely) or nefarious (bioweapons research).
I see somewhat of a parallel with security research for computers -- you can try to ban it, and it will probably reduce the total research volume, but it will also decrease the level of openness and harm mitigation of the research that does remain.
The China aspect is probably a red herring. Gain-of-function research was internationally funded, including by the US. The perils had been pointed out for years by virologists [1], some of whom managed to get an editorial in the New York Times against it [2].
If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if), the nation or lab it happened in is just the proximate cause. Deeper responsibility would lie with the institutions and individuals that pushed it despite the risks. No one knows the answer to this (edit: I mean to whether covid escaped from a lab), but it's an open question that deserves credible investigation. Having the investigator be one of the principal funders of the research being investigated is such...bad optics, to put it nicely, that one wonders how anyone thought that would be ok.
You make a very good point (and thanks for the links).
However i would not let China off the hook until we have figured out exactly what happened. If nobody is held "accountable" (for a certain definition of this word) it is bound to happen again and the next time it most certainly will be "biological warfare".
This needs to be treated as seriously and as comprehensively the way we treat Nuclear Weapons.
I really think it's just the other way around. The more people make this about China, the less likely we are to find out the truth. If it's used as a geopolitical chess piece, it will get bogged down forever in political mud, which is kind of where the question is right now anyways. People will decide what they think about it based on how they feel about China. That's crazy.
Whether we like it or not, the narrative has already become about China. That is the reality. Geopolitics, Military brinkmanship, Economic realities all are at play here. In spite of all this muddying, our Scientists/Investigators need to work together to get at the truth. Else the Racists/Jingoists/Warmongers will paint a facade to further their nefarious agendas. Condoning it now will truly open the Pandora's box of "Biological Weapons".
It's too late to keep politics out of this, politics were at the heart of this from the very start. Without politics the consequences of the outbreak would probably have been much less severe.
In the beginning of January 2020, president Trump was already informed by an advisor who had close contacts in Wuhan that the outbreak was much more severe than China made it look like. But he chose not to act on that, because the USA were in the middle of closing a trade deal with China.
However later that month he changed his mind when the first infections in the USA happened, and later even more when a Chinese official came out with a theory that it might actually have been an USA sports team that visited Wuhan in late 2019 that was the source of the Corona outbreak (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-ch...)
So this is not about 'people making this about China', it has been China from the start trying to cover this up and trying to make it about other countries. A more transparent Chinese policy would have given other countries the chance to react early and save thousands of lives.
US politicized first, when soft measures failed a month after warning Wuhan lockdown. There was ample warning, enough that many of PRC neighbors with high traffic contained well with at least some effort in coordination. PRC position up until then was let science figure it out, Wuhan was very covid19 was first discovered but doesn't mean originated there. The brief domestic deflection in early Feb was possible import from ASEAN. Even early PRC "dis"info campaigns emphasized harsh lockdown not lockdown skepticism. Countries that didn't take Wuhan lockdown seriously got burned. Queue west being prominent source of exporting covid world wide by taking lax measures. This is seen in import statistic of every country that rigorously tracked imported covid cases - PRC exported very little cases, and essentially none few weeks after lockdown. North America / Europe, magnitudes more.
Completely agree. Let's say that it was an accidental leak. If you imagine that you were the one that was involved in the leak, how likely is it that you would want be held accountable? There's such a strong motive here for a cover-up, if a leak is the real cause.
This isn't a China thing. It's a human thing. No one wants to be known as the person who destroyed the world like this.
SARS-2-CoV was almost assuredly not natural, and RaTG13 was a keyboard virus. The only question is if it was accidentally leaked or if it was intentional. We'll never know, the CCP destroyed the evidence.
There are many videos and articles on this site about how SARS-2-CoV was not zoonotic. I don't necessarily blame China, but the funders of the research.
You're treating that question as settled. To me that is the mirror image of the media outlets trying to shut down an open question by claiming it's a "conspiracy" that has been "debunked". I would say what's needed is a credible, independent investigation, one that reasonable people can trust. We haven't had that yet.
How is the article not that? Wade is a life long journalist, now independent, who has done extraordinary research, and who had relied heavily on research done by other independents as well, which is itself based strongly on credible micro-biology. Wade is nonetheless careful not to exaggerate his case but point out the mere balance of probabilities.
I'm not sure you can get more credible or independent than his work.
One of the things Wade brings up is that gain-of-function research was justified by its proponents on the grounds that it would help prevent and/or deal with future pandemics. So a good question that needs to be addressed now is: did gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses help us deal with COVID19, and if so, how?
The article in question (assuming it's the same one I read on his blog) actually does tell us these things. The research was largely funded by the United States and the funding would appear most likely to have been signed off by ... Anthony Fauci. So if that's true then the guy ultimately responsible in money terms is the guy who the government put in charge of fighting it, almost certainly without realising. This set of events ensures that whatever the truth, we can never expect an honest investigation of any kind from the governments (plural) that would appear responsible.
> If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if), the nation or lab it happened in is just the proximate cause. Deeper responsibility would lie with the institutions and individuals that pushed it despite the risks.
That's the rational response. The fact that it can be played for political gain means it will be played for political gain, regardless of how rational it is.
Look at the whole mask debacle of the last year. If we assume people can and do act rationally, then both sides wouldn't have played it up as much and made it a defining issue or lied about portions of it, but instead we had both people and organizations/parties using it to rally their base (on both sides) and an authority that decided to use half-truths to trick people into doing what they thought they should do given the resources available at the time (to put it kindly).
That's the reality of the world we lived in for the last 12 months, and I see no reason to assume it's all of a sudden different. I'm not sure that means we shouldn't know, but let's be real clear on what the the likely outcome is if it's found to have escaped from some lab in China, regardless of who funded what or who was working on it, and that's that it would be a complete and utter shit show for the West and China, and possibly the entire world.
> If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if),
It seems like we don't have evidence, but the natural evolutionary experiment that's occurred provides a staggering amount. We can see from the virus phylogeny that:
1. The virus entered the human population in October 2019. All known SARS2 sequences are related in a single clade that, under very soft assumptions about mutation rate, would coalesce in late fall 2019. The first sequences we got, in early 2020, had only a handful of mutations between them. Nothing has ever arisen outside of this clade.
2. The virus entered humans with it's spike protein already fully adapted to the human ACE receptor protein. We can see this because there was not an accelerated evolution in this protein. We did not see changes in the viral genome resulting in a significant phenotypic change until the b.1.1.7 and other "third wave" variants arose. This stands in intense contrast to every other zoonotic transfer we know of. Adaptation always occurs because biology is different enough that different viral configurations provide immediate gain, and through continuous mutation the virus is exploring a huge space of these all the time. The fact that it doesn't mutate rapidly indicates it is near a strong local optimum.
One way of understanding the significance of this is by thinking of the virus as a learned model which is learning a solution to the problem of its own survival. What this evidence shows is that is appeared already optimized. We see this because over an incredible number of update steps (many quadrillions perhaps, with each human infection being like a minibatch, and each viral replication like a step) there was no significant reduction in test loss (viral survival). We randomly picked a perfect initial model. Either that first virus was lucky in a way that is similar to guessing a perfect solution, which has a probability so low as to be fanciful, or it had already in incorporated all the readily-usa le information about the human ACE receptor.
Do we have evidence? What is the probability of this pattern occuring in the case of a natural spillover? It's 1:atoms-in-the universe level. Finding a virus already so optimized to humans by randomly sampling from existing ones is like the kind of collision probability level that we comfortably use to build cryptocurrency castles that assume key non-collision. In the case of a virus optimized by serial passage in the lab? Frankly it's indistinguishable from that.
Except if china covered up that it was a lab leak for political reasons, one can argue the entire pandemic was their fault. Alas, the crime is covering it up, even if all the institutions set the safety standards. No different than any other crime. It’s like hiding a chemical fire when it’s burning down your neighbors house and then they throw water on it and make it worse.
If the evidence is that overwhelming, then why are so few researchers saying so? I can understand things being extremely skewed at the political and policy level - that's expected - and I can understand the media being skewed because I'm familiar with that on other issues. But if your argument is right then this is also basically a total collapse of the scientific community. That's harder to swallow. From your comment I assume that you're either a biologist or trained as such, so I'd like to hear how you explain that.
You're a bit too trustful towards the flawless functioning of the scientific community. Scientists are humans and are prone the same group think errors like everyone else. Historical examples are plenty, e.g. Darwin was ridiculed by his peers about his theory of evolution, or the more recent erratic theory that coronary diseases are purely caused by eating too much fat and not by sugar.
In this case, as the article mentions, there was a conflict of interest as well that might well have motivated some leading scientists in the field to campaign against the theory that the Wuhan lab was the source of the outbreak.
Anyone versed well enough to call this man made likely has a lot of skin in the game and doesn't want to risk being ostracized and cast out. It would probably be a career limiting move.
> What is the probability of this pattern occuring in the case of a natural spillover? It's 1:atoms-in-the universe level.
This is untrue. I'd point to this quote:
“It’s pretty apparent that there’s this evolutionary arms race between the receptor binding domain and ACE2 that’s happening within the bats themselves,” says Tyler Starr, a postdoc in the lab of genome scientist Jesse Bloom at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “Whatever it’s doing is ratcheting up this evolution and sometimes spitting out things that can bind potentially to many different ACE2s, including ours.”[1]
The unique thing about COVID is the transmission and the long incubation time.
There are plenty of naturally occurring mutations that have occurred that are more contagious than COVID (AIDS R0=~4.5, Ebola=~2.5 are two major ones that spring to mind). And SARS1 had a very similar binding behaviour, and the jumping behavior via civets is very similar to COVID.
If that's true, then there's a straightforward experiment that would boost confidence in the natural-origin theory: culture the earliest available SARS-CoV-2 virus, and see what it's good at infecting other than humans. Surely someone has done this?
It is clear from our analysis that viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been circulating in horseshoe bats for many decades. The unsampled diversity descended from the SARS-CoV-2/RaTG13 common ancestor forms a clade of bat sarbecoviruses with generalist properties—with respect to their ability to infect a range of mammalian cells—that facilitated its jump to humans and may do so again. Although the human ACE2-compatible RBD was very likely to have been present in a bat sarbecovirus lineage that ultimately led to SARS-CoV-2, this RBD sequence has hitherto been found in only a few pangolin viruses. Furthermore, the other key feature thought to be instrumental in the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to infect humans—a polybasic cleavage site insertion in the S protein—has not yet been seen in another close bat relative of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
a) There's no need for there to be an intermediary species. The "What is the probability of this pattern occuring in the case of a natural spillover? It's 1:atoms-in-the universe level" statement in the comment I replied to is just wrong - it's unusual, but nothing like as mind bogglingly impossibly rare are they claim.
b) Genetic analysis indicates that it most likely came from bats directly to humans, but picked up the ACE2 receptors from a Pangolin virus that was passed back to bats, evolved there and then infected humans. To quote the same nature article I lined above:
However, on closer inspection, the relative divergences in the phylogenetic tree (Fig. 2, bottom) show that SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely to have acquired the variable loop from an ancestor of Pangolin-2019 because these two sequences are approximately 10–15% divergent throughout the entire S protein (excluding the N-terminal domain). It is RaTG13 that is more divergent in the variable-loop region (Extended Data Fig. 1) and thus likely to be the product of recombination, acquiring a divergent variable loop from a hitherto unsampled bat sarbecovirus28. This is notable because the variable-loop region contains the six key contact residues in the RBD that give SARS-CoV-2 its ACE2-binding specificity27,37. These residues are also in the Pangolin Guangdong 2019 sequence. The most parsimonious explanation for these shared ACE2-specific residues is that they were present in the common ancestors of SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13 and Pangolin Guangdong 2019, and were lost through recombination in the lineage leading to RaTG13. This provides compelling support for the SARS-CoV-2 lineage being the consequence of a direct or nearly-direct zoonotic jump from bats, because the key ACE2-binding residues were present in viruses circulating in bats.
and:
Although the human ACE2-compatible RBD was very likely to have been present in a bat sarbecovirus lineage that ultimately led to SARS-CoV-2, this RBD sequence has hitherto been found in only a few pangolin viruses.
There is absolutely nothing amazing about covid being able to infect humans, it's exceptional because it can pass from human to human and because it's airborne(ish).
> There are plenty of viruses from animals known to infect humans
Yes, absolutely. AFAIK that's where almost all viruses that infect humans come from.
> it's exceptional because it can pass from human to human
With extremely high efficiency, from the first appearance of the virus! If it were not already optimal, then the initial transmission rate would have been lower, and the genome would have had to rapidly change in the process of surviving. This was seen with SARS1. It's seen with other epidemics. The fact that it isn't seen here is very, very weird. Why did SARS2 not have to adapt to its new host?
> The virus entered humans with it's spike protein already fully adapted to the human ACE receptor protein.
1. Is a partially functional (still infectious) spike receptor protein possible? (you don't know, and present no evidence in this rant)
2. How do you know the virus shows "no accelerated evolution"...partially effective viruses would have a lower replication factor, and not become global pandemic, and would not spread far enough to preserved within the human population as anything of interest.
3. How do you know that a natural virus which was only partially effective at replication didn't in fact encounter favorable conditions when it encountered humans, having accidentally been better adapted for them?
> The fact that it doesn't mutate rapidly indicates it is near a strong local optimum.
4. How do you know that the spike protein - which is highly conserved amongst coronaviruses - can even have a range of mutations and still retain function (allowing viral entry to the cell for infectious purposes)? (you don't, research finds that the spike protein has suboptimal binding to ACE receptors - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7239051/)
> This stands in intense contrast to every other zoonotic transfer we know of.
5. Does it? Because no research is proposing this. Research in fact finds that analysis of similar coronaviruses shows that the spike protein is likely the result of multiple recombinations between a few species (https://academic.oup.com/emph/article/2020/1/290/5956769).
> Do we have evidence? What is the probability of this pattern occuring in the case of a natural spillover?
6. Do you? Apparently not because there's not a single shred of peer reviewed research you care to link to support your position here, and you've done none of the legwork to support the logic part of your conclusions.
> The virus entered humans with it's spike protein already fully adapted to the human ACE receptor protein.
That's not really true. It was adapted to ACE but not perfectly. As the B117 shows it could do better. Coronaviruses mutate slowly and random mutation in the spike protein is a lot more likely to make non-functional than to improve it. It's good enough, not perfect. Evolution likes good enough.
EDIT: but you do raise a good point with how much better than the known coronaviruses' spikes it is. Perhaps there is another intermediate host with ACE2 closer to humans? Sars-Cov-2 infects pretty well lots of animals - almost all the cats, minks, ...
At least in silico, SARS-CoV-2 binds better to human ACE2 than for any other mammal tested. The only other animals in their "very high" category were primates with ACE2 very similar to human:
Evolution doesn't require anything beyond "good enough", but it's surprising for a virus to be better-adapted to humans than to its animal hosts at the moment of its zoonotic jump--before the jump, where could that pressure come from? I don't think this is determinative, but it points weakly in favor of lab origin (e.g., from culture in human cells or in mice genetically engineered to express human ACE2).
This sounds a plausible explanation, but I see one problem: there’s a big fear that the vaccines don’t work on the more infectious strains (South African, Brazilian, Indian, ...). Vaccines target the spike protein. So surely if the spike protein doesn’t evolve (and isn’t responsible for the increased virality of these strains), then the vaccines should still work against it?
The vaccines do work on variants [0] with different degrees of efficacy. This actually demonstrates that the virus - after infecting millions of people over a year - hasn't significantly changed the spike protein.
Also: major changes in he spike protein could impact the ability of the virus to infect humans, so -- there is that.
I remember an article from about a decade ago where a virologist was saying that China shouldn't be trusted with the highest danger (lvl 4?) labs (IIRC at the time when Westerners were about to or starting to help them build them) because Western labs themselves could barely (or not) be trusted with something as dangerous, and (s)he expected the Chinese to not be able and/or not be willing to fully respect the procedures involved.
This article suggests that lvl2 protocols were indeed used for lvl4 biohazards.
Right, but the Western sponsors of the work would have been aware of this. This whole thing was a major dispute among virologists, major enough to end up in a NYT editorial. That makes the lab escape scenario an international failure, not a national one.
Also, even if it was an accidental release by china the situation the world finds itself in is at least as much the US' (and much of the rest of its sphere of influence's) fault for the extremely poorly coordinated response to the situation last year. China at least did something about its domestic spread.
The US is a major global center of trade and travel, and in the end, much of the spread around the world is because there was basically no attempt to stop it from spreading through there.
I get what you say, but if we ignore how things happened, it's more likely to happen again.
A similar, though obviously still very different, example that came to my mind is Chernobyl. The incident made bad reactor designs and their consequences visible to all, and in the long run, it improved nuclear reactors' safety. How would you feel that after Chernobyl, there was no research on why it happened, and people would have said "well, what's happened happened, there is no way to change that, so why investigate"?
If we never figure out (and we don't even attempt) how the virus came to be (wet market, lab accident, intentional release, eating raw exotic animal, or just a normal mutation, I don't know, I'm not an expert, but saying the options I heard so far), the same circumstances will be continue to be available, and sooner or later, another (potentially worse) pandemic will hit us.
However, as you mentioned, there are negative effects of knowing things, so I wish whenever we do find out what and how happened, nations could do a "blameless post-mortem" (in case it was unintentional).
>but if we ignore how things happened, it's more likely to happen again.
This is legitimate reason to have a good investigation and find out the real cause of the virus. From pure technical point of view it is absolutely right.
However because of the cognitional defects of our cave man brain due to the quick social and technology progress outpaced the nature evolution process, the OP's strategy shows wisdom. Let me explain:
There are 3 cases that can present the same reason:
1.Your case which I think it's sincere request for improvement of the procedure to avoid future disaster.
2.There's a known hidden agenda based on some ideology but asking for investigation. A good example is what Dick Cheney and a group of his associates did. They had no interests to understand truth. A reason for investigation is a excuse for fool people
3.(This one is difficult to understand) There's an unintentional hidden agenda mixed with the legitimate reason that the guy who ask for truth might not be aware of hidden agenda. There are a lot of example in another community not available to English reader. The closest example is Australia Prime minister Morrison. It's very controversial and speculative. Most HNers' won't have the necessary insight to understand this example but I believe presenting a weak example is better than nothing.
With case 2 and especially 3, OP's strategy is better than yours. That's why I said OP's shows wisdom: Avoid conflicts and more loss as a whole.
Sometime a correct conclusion in the scope of leaf could be a wrong conclusion in the scope of tree. But maybe correct again in the scope of Forest. I'm not claiming my conclusion is better than yours. I might be in the "tree" level. I'm saying you are looking at a pure technical point of view. OP's thinking is bigger.
China can't reimburse the world. You're right. But China is poised for economic hegemony in large parts of the world and has an alarmingly authoritarian government with disregard for human rights. Their handling of COVID ought to be a reason for countries to push back against their attempts at hegemony.
And before anyone accuses me of racism: I am speaking about the Chinese government, not Chinese people, who are the first victims of the government.
There is value in just the truth being known, even if nothing comes of it.
The Truth and Reconciliation tribunals the UN puts on (e.g. South African apartheid) are a good example. Just achieving a common understanding of what happened has value all by itself.
The second main reason we are where we are is that many western countries did nothing, some even less than nothing by actively spreading the virus by hosting religious or political events.
If we are playing the blame game we should be playing it right.
It is easy to claim the opposite using this binaric logic: The US has lost the covid war to China with the most deaths in the world. The desperate fear of China's economic dominance which seems unstoppable alongside the fact that they do not invade and bomb countries (so if we do that to them we will have a really big propaganda job to convince people). So how do we convince China is really bad? Oh I know. Leak a deadly virus near their lab. Frame them. Keep it in your back pocket in case the cultural genocide framing fails. This is why these polemics lead nowhere. Rather, we have no evidence conclusive either way. The desire to speculate from our side, only feeds anti-Asian attitudes.
If this was intentional, then I don't know what we can or should do.
China may not be able to fully compensate the world financially, but if you win a billion dollar lawsuit against me, you won't get your money, but you will still get my car and anything else I own.
The growing prevalence of this line of thinking explains the current "post truth" environment, wherein we are assaulted with disinformation from previously trustworthy institutions.
Yes we do. China won't be held accountable anyway, as many major power weren't held accountable for many atrocities they did. But knowing the truth still has value. And telling the truth when we know it also has value - as does lying when we know the truth has a negative effect too.
> By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: They were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.
Not to get all political but this totally reminds me of Mitt Romney on Jan 6th evening when he said something to the tune of: “an (election) audit won’t satisfy, them only telling them the truth will”… how he or anyone at a news studio knew the truth when nobody else did was baffling to me
Something which hasn't been able to be answered for me on this yet:
Where are all the bats infected with this virus? It it came from a bat, it would have had to be circulating in the bat population a LOT to mutate enough to jump to humans, right?
So...why not go find a bad, identify the parent virus, and close this whole thing out?
That is one of the points in the article in favour of a lab leak hypothesis. People have been searching for an animal host (not necessarily a bat, could be an intermediate host) for over a year now and haven't found anything. The animal host for SARS1 was found in four months.
That's a bit confusing because the OP makes an opposite point: "The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months."
In 2003 it was merely suspected that covers were the intermediate. It wasn't confirmed until 2006. Read further down:
"In late 2006, scientists from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention of Hong Kong University and the Guangzhou Centre for Disease Control and Prevention established a genetic link between the SARS coronavirus appearing in civets and humans, bearing out claims that the disease had jumped across species.[62]"
It goes on to state that the bat link was confirmed in 2017.
It's pretty unclear exactly what was proved in 2003 and in 2006. But the point remains: for COVID19, after a year of searching we don't even have a suspect animal host.
Sars reemerged twice between 2003 and 2006, once in 2004 from civets and once in 2005 from an accidental lab release. Another potential outbreak in 2005 was prevented by preemptively culling civets when a high titre of SARS coronavirus was discovered. And civets eventually lead to the actual source on bats.
> In late May 2003, studies were conducted using samples of wild animals sold as food in the local market in Guangdong, China. The results found that the SARS coronavirus could be isolated from masked palm civets (Paguma sp.)
and
> The SARS epidemic began in the Guangdong province of China in November 2002 ... Chinese government officials did not inform the World Health Organization of the outbreak until February 2003.
That's six months from the start of the outbreak, and less than four months from WHO being informed, not three years.
That is what exactly I think the Wuhan labs was studying, given that SARS did jump from another animal to human very recently. What would happen if these things mutate naturally and infect humans? They add gain-of-function genes to a near relative, study how it infect cells and come up with a plan to treat it. Except someone dropped some stuff on their shoe and went out shopping to the wet market.
I did plenty of these gain-of-function experiments in my postgrad studies. Mice tumours cells given genes to super-express certain cell adhesion molecules. Without this kind of approach, it is difficult to impossible to study these reactions. You just gotta be careful.
The bats , horseshoe bats, located in caves approximately a thousand kilometers away have often carried these viruses. [0] And at least 6 times since the year 2000 the collection of these bats have led to humans getting sick. It just takes some fecal matter dust.
So a very likely explanation is some low level employees grabbed some bats, got their suits and vehicles contaminated didn't clean things properly, drove down to the Wuhan laboratory, and rested in town spreading virus contaminated dust or if they were already sick, their virus filled respiration about.
No lab leak needed, just the regular practices when "Wuhan Institute of Virology in China sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across the country", and those doing so were being sloppy, as they have been known to be repeatably.
It's a possible explanation, but that doesn't mean it's "very likely". In that case it would be easy enough to drive back down to the cave and collect the missing evidence of bat origin. Better yet, you'd never have to disclose the low-level employee part, so there'd be no political fallout. Easy win.
Also, my understanding (quite possibly wrong) is that while humans can get sick from bats, as cave workers did in Southern China, those viruses aren't contagious in the sense that the sick humans go on to infect others. "Since no case of an epidemic caused by direct bat-to-human transmission has yet been demonstrated, it is thought that the transfer to humans more probably took place via an intermediate host species in which the virus could evolve and move towards forms likely to infect human cells." [1] If that's right then your explanation of spilled bat samples is incomplete: it doesn't explain what caused the bat samples to adapt into a form that could spread among humans. That sort of puts us back at square 1. Another way of saying this is that if your explanation is likely, then we'd have expected the pandemic to have started where the bats are - through sick cave workers or something similar. But in fact it started far away.
The leader of the Wuhan team went there with a team to collect samples and animals.
In the early days of Covid, those samples were re-examined and it turned out that the genome of the Covid strain was very similar to the Covid 19 virus. So the conclusion was taken that those bats must have been the origin where Corona somehow started. Somehow nobody at that time thought much about the fact that those samples were kept in Wuhan, exactly where the outbreak started.
Bats have a very unusual immune system in that they can harbor viruses without the virus killing the bat or the bat killing the virus.
It's one of the things that makes them ferociously good incubators for a cross-species mammalian plague. The other things are that they fly (so can cover larger distances than most mammals) and have communal living (so can transmit to each other very readily).
Since this is a common misconception, I'll note that humans didn't evolve from apes or chimpanzees. We share a relatively close common ancestor with them.
Ape is a broad enough term (& fuzzy) that depending on context humans could be considered included or excluded from the category, meanwhile chimps & that common ancestor do fit into the category
Hence I didn't say we evolved from chimpanzees, even though it'd've suited the snow clone better
PSA: As user "mromanuk" points out below (and links to relevant articles), the author of this article "Nicholas Wade" is a racist. So exercise caution while reading this article. Don't accept his narrative but do your own research from any "actual scientific data" leads in the article.
As were most events for months, plenty of political rallies and other bullshit that should not have been happening and heavily contributed to the spread.
If we apply Occam's razor [1] decision between "Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses" and
"Wuhan, there is a wet market where under certain conditions virus can jump from bat to monkey to person" is relatively straightforward
But then, we should probably also apply Hanlon's razor [2]
"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
Nobody has spoken of malice. It could have been a simple case of one lab worker getting infected. That would count towards stupidity.
Rhetorically speaking, Hanlon's razor doesn't quite have the same weight as Occam's, if only because people tend to view behavior they don't understand as stupid. But I'll add another "razor": don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to self-interested.
I'd say it's a possible manifestation of self-interest, but that it isn't always self-interest. There are people that hurt others without any apparent self-interest. When it gets out of control, we call them sociopaths or psychopaths. But that's a minor point.
My point was more that the dichotomy stupidity vs. malice seems to imply that e.g. playing music, or having dinner is either stupid or bad. Many things get done out of self-interest without being malicious, or without malicious intent.
I assume practically every city in China has wet markets. I wonder how many cities have facilities that do virus research. It might actually be more than you'd assume; I have no idea what sort of research might happen at universities, You also have to weigh this with SARS Classic originating in China.
Presumably they specialised in coronaviruses because of the proximity to a bat population with coronaviruses, making sample gathering much easier? Are there other areas with significant coronavirus hosts? Are there other labs that specialise in coronaviruses to the same extent? The two seem linked to me, although I have no background in this area.
So we'd a priori expect coronavirus to originate in the area with coronavirus hosts, whether it was through the lab or the market...
It's been written everywhere that the horseshoe bats most likely to carry coronaviruses live in Yunnan province, more than 1000 km away. It's where the closest COVID relative was found as well.
Also while there are other species of bats near Wuhan, they are in hibernation in winter.
Is going out with butterfly nets to catch some bats a common routine activity among virologists? I'd say if not then the proximity of the research lab to where any bats can be found is not of much relevance - if needed, any bats can be obtained, but they are likely not the most definite factory for locating a major research center.
A "wet market" is simply a market where you can buy meat, fish, and vegetables.
Every neighbourhood in every city in Asia has a wet market. Well other than Japan and Singapore, I guess. I live in Asia and there are two wet markets within walking distance of my house.
Wet markets are as omnipresent as convenience stores in America.
I keep repeating this since it seems like folks ignore this quite crucial piece of data which completely changes the whole Wuhan covid narrative - Covid was backdated in blood samples in September 2019 in Italy. They didn't have earlier samples still kept on ice, so its entirely possible it would be there earlier.
Since its rather trivial to compare viruses and I haven't seen mention about it being a different variant, I assume its still the same virus as original Wuhan ones.
Even to my rather ignorant eyes this makes Wuhan just a place it got spread to wider public, and not much more. Definitely not some patient-0 situation and most probably not even ground-0 one. Now I don't claim to understand why it didn't explode in those early days like it did afterwards, but this fact can't be ignored when evaluating this topic. I wonder why there isn't a single mention of this in article.
It is worth noting that this was claimed in exactly one publication from researchers that are not experts in the field. The publication has meanwhile earned an expression of concern [1] by the publisher that unfortunately does not give much more details. It is also quite strange that the paper was published in a journal about cancer research.
The other big inconsistency is that the epidemic did not become nonticeable in Italy until late February 2020. If COVID was already present in September 2019, why didn't it spread rapidly like it did anywhere else?
> If we apply Occam's razor [1] decision between "Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses" and "Wuhan, there is a wet market where under certain conditions virus can jump from bat to monkey to person" is relatively straightforward
Heh, what is the Razor or other applicable language construct when someone gives two options and then suggests there's one they think is obviously correct, without saying which one or why - leaving it completely opaque or confusing to the casual reader?
I legit do not know which of the two cases here you think Occam's Razor applies straightforwardly. I can make easy cases for both sides being the simplest explanation.
e.g., "it seems simplest that the leading world centre would have excellent safety protocols and thus the chaotic wet market in a region known for those viruses is more likely the source", vs "it seems simplest that human error in a research environment studying these viruses compared to a wet market where, if that was a likely vector, we'd surely be seeing these things way more often", kind of thing.
> it seems simplest that the leading world centre would have excellent safety protocols
There’s an unnecessarily large assumption being made here. We can look at the Wuhan institute’s past and the history of comparable labs to get an estimation of lab leak frequency.
Similarly, there’s a whole bunch of context around things like: what kind of samples did the lab have in its freezers when covid was discovered? In the wetmarket case, what’s the transmission chain from a reservoir through to the market have to look like?
Once you compile all this context, then Occam’s Razor becomes a good tool. But before that it’s just a shot in the dark (kinda like you hint at). I’m not sure any single HN comment is really capable of giving sufficient context for this particular case.
If you knew that US state department had flagged safety concerns with Wuhan and claimed knowledge of infected lab workers, would that change your idea of the “leading world center”
Occam's razor in terms of scientific theories means choose the theory with the fewest variables, not just compare guesstimated probabilities or something. From that, I would guess the poster means the lab leak is preferred as it has only one variable related to the possibility of a leak of viruses that are already there.
> If we apply Occam's razor [1] decision between "Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses" and "Wuhan, there is a wet market where under certain conditions virus can jump from bat to monkey to person" is relatively straightforward
The conclusion that "the coronavirus originated in Wuhan therefore the Wuhan Institute caused the virus" could be backwards even if the correlation is real. It could be the virology institute is in Wuhan because there are bat coronaviruses near there.
There's no razor to apply, both hypothesis are plausible at this point based on available evidence and without any speculation whatsoever.
And still without any speculation, one of those hypothesis could potentially be confirmed if only the main suspect did let us look at the crime scene. In any criminal trial, said suspect would get a guilty verdict from the jury in minutes.
> In any criminal trial, said suspect would get a guilty verdict from the jury in minutes.
No, since in a criminal trial the standard is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That hasn't been met here.
This article certainly makes a prima facie case which would be enough to trigger discovery in a civil case. A reasonable person could also think that it has provided proof on the balance of probabilities, which would be enough for civil but not criminal liability.
I thought according to the crossover theory the virus was not theorised to have crossed from animal to person in the wet market, but was in humans already at that point and that was just the first “superspreader” site
Hanlon's razor does not apply here. The theory outlined in the article does not suggest the lab leak was intentional, but rather an accident. To me, Occam's razor strongly suggests an accidental lab leak.
There is an interesting peer reviewed paper published last month with analysis of existing facts about the origin of covid-19. A part from their conclusion:
More than a year after the initial documented cases in Wuhan, the source of SARS-CoV-2 has yet to be identified, and the search for a direct or intermediate host in nature has been so far unsuccessful.
The low binding affinity of SARS-CoV-2 to bat ACE2 studied to date does not support Chiroptera as a direct zoonotic agent. Furthermore, the reliance on pangolin coronavirus receptor binding domain (RBD) similarity to SARS-CoV-2 as evidence for natural zoonotic spillover is flawed, as pangolins are unlikely to play a role in SARS-CoV-2′s origin and recombination is not supported by recent analysis.
At the same time, genomic analyses pointed out that SARS-CoV-2 exhibits multiple peculiar characteristics not found in other Sarbecoviruses.
A novel multibasic furin cleavage site (FCS) confers numerous pathogenetically advantageous capabilities, the existence of which is difficult to explain though natural evolution...
I looked into these lab origin theories for the furin cleavage site last year. The problem with it being a laboratory insertion was that although performing an insertion is relatively easy once you know what to insert, generally it’s beyond current science to independently create mutations for a specific purpose.
It’s a bit beyond me as a non-biologist but my feeling based on the literature was that the lab origin was unlikely. However it is pushed in certain circles partly for ideological reasons, based on evidence that is plausible at first glance but with a lot more digging not entirely convincing evidence.
However, there didn’t really seem to be much neutral expert analysis of the evidence.
From the OP, it appears that scientists knew exactly where to insert a furin cleavage site:
>“Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory,” writes Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2.
The problem is knowing how to put in the furin cleavage site, and generally if it's done in the lab it's done by copying a particular sequence from an existing virus as scientists can't predict how to do it themselves (without copying) with current state of knowledge.
That's such a mischaracterisation, I don't even know where to start. That Quay-guy obviously searched for "furin" on pubmed, found some papers (that don't even say that - and most definitely not for any coronaviruses) and thought it fit his thesis. If only viruses and infections were that simple!
> “At least 11 gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infective, are published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
From 2014, Host cell entry of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus after two-step, furin-mediated activation of the spike protein [1]:
> Such furin-mediated activation is unusual in that it occurs in part during virus entry. Our findings may explain the polytropic nature, pathogenicity, and life cycle of this zoonotic coronavirus.
MERS-CoV uses furin cleavage of S1/S2 but it does not bind to ACE2 like SARS-CoV-2.
The natural origin hypothesis is also pushed for ideological reasons - at this level of meta analysis we are at a stalemate. The article was good at revealing that there is not just ideology - but also material interests involved and that the two prestigious letters that were so categorical in dismissing the lab escape hypothesis were quite a bit tainted by conflicts of interests.
I believe the lab origin theory is flawed based on the scientific reasoning, not the meta analysis. I agree that the meta analysis is inconclusive as it is not emphasising the science enough. The feeling I get is China doesn't really want to talk about it because it encourages ideologically motivated people to attack China, and serious scientists are mostly not convinced that this is a lab escape and so don't feel the need to discuss it.
At the same time, China risks looking guilty because they are defensive and try to control the information. All this leaves this kind of article with a seemingly plausible scientific and ideological basis that is difficult for laymen and even scientific journalists to evaluate due to the complexity of the science involved, and not many scientists interested in spelling out why the reasoning might be flawed.
You also see in the quote from the article:
“Yes, but your wording makes this sound unlikely — viruses are specialists at unusual events,” is the riposte of David L. Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow who regards lab escape as a conspiracy theory.
The article is great at spelling a few things out, personally I feel enticed by it in some form. It is the job of other scientists to dispel any wrong or inaccurate information.
Usually the more interesting questions are of the kind of what -isn’t- being said, of what information isn’t being related or investigated.
I agree it's enticing. I tend to agree with the scientist quoted that it's a conspiracy theory, but if it is then it's a really good one, and this article is well written.
If I'm right the reason it's not being analysed or investigated is that from a scientific perspective it's just not an interesting question, rather than for a deeper ideological reason as suggested in this article.
I drew the conclusion that this furin cleavage site theory wasn't actually convincing after a few days of wading through scientific literature, but as a non-expert I was pretty disappointed that there wasn't more accessible analysis of well-written arguments as presented in the article that would put it into a more objective perspective. It would have been great if that scientist they quote would have provided a more detailed rebuttal.
The problem is it actually isn't the job of scientists to dispel wrong or inaccurate information for the most part. They do detailed esoteric studies and write them up for specialists. It's nobody's job to rebut bad arguments, and that's the problem.
Exactly, and concerning your last paragraph since nobody seems responsible (and who is able to write such a rebuttal) it isn’t done.
This is a problem because sometimes it can harm the information sphere around this, which is already loaded in camps and so on. Especially when it comes to China which has a questionable track record on sharing information which doesn’t paint them in a good light.
I find it hard to take seriously any “scientist” that dismisses an idea as a “conspiracy theory” (i.e. a concept developed by the CIA specifically to discredit political opponents) as opposed to using actual rational / scientific arguments.
At best, it demonstrates intellectual laziness, at worst a political / ideological conviction, neither of which is a hallmark of a good scientist.
To be clear, the scientist is not quoted as calling it a conspiracy theory, that is the wording of the author of the article.
The scientist provides a scientific explanation (“Recombination is naturally very, very frequent in these viruses, there are recombination breakpoints in the spike protein and these codons appear unusual exactly because we’ve not sampled enough.”).
First, "conspiracy theory" these days has a wider meaning, in that it can be used to refer to pretty much any claim that goes against conventional explanations. I'm not a fan of the wide use of this term but it is what it is and it's now basically a useless term in any discussion except for manipulation.
But let's flip this round as the author here is openly heavily weighing his dismissal of scientific support for natural origin by claiming that it is supported by ideological reasons. That's exactly the same as someone dismissing the lab claim for ideological/conspiracy reasons, just the other way round. Natural origin doesn't support the author's ideology, so he dismisses it and has a bias towards evidence for lab origin. The author has previous done this exact some thing with his previous writings, taking a fringe position and dismissing scientific objection that aligns with the scientific consensus as ideology. Basically, this is a subjective opinion piece, not objective analysis.
I agree with you conspiracy theory can mean pretty much anything for example during WW2 people couldn't grasp that Nazi regime had extermination camps until Allies entered East Europe and Germany and filmed the horrors of those camps. Some people could've called extermination camps conspiracy theory and regard it as propaganda against Hitler and Nazi Germany.
When entering the camps, they made sure to document well, because they knew no one could possibly believe the extent of the atrocities without seeing themselves.
Even the exact phrase "conspiracy theory" predates the CIA by at least 40 years. So it seems the poster's theory about the origin of the conspiracy theory is, reflectively, a conspiracy theory itself. Given that the CIA is so often the subject of such conspiracy theories, I suspect irony might have been employed.
Now I can't tell if the commenter legitimately thinks that no scientific mind would dismiss conspiracy theories or if they're making fun of people who want scientists to entertain conspiracy theories.
The problem with calling it a conspiracy theory does not hinge on whatever the CIA may or may not have used the expression for, but rather on the unassailable fact that there is no implied conspiracy in said theory. It's an accident theory, calling it a conspiracy theory is just as wrong as saying that James Dean died in a Porsche conspiracy.
But it needing a conspiracy to be kept quiet is one of the main arguments against thr lab theory.
How many people (lab technicians, doctors, 'police') would know it is from a lab and are hiding that information? If the answer is 'hundreds' then the chances of it being kept hidden are very low. That is what labeling it a conspiracy theory means.
You do realize the power of China's information control system and the level of national fervor their people have right? Any mention would be investigated, probably hidden and the person and their family disappeared.
Back in January, it wasn’t. Some Chinese friends of mine became very convinced it was a lab leak back in Jan 2020 based on rumors on WeChat. The censors cleaned that up, but I’m pretty confident that privately a lot of people in China believe the lab leak theory.
I lean towards the lab hypothesis due to China’s behavior early in the pandemic. I have a difficult time understanding why they would have been arresting doctors who were talking about the virus if it were natural.
The transition from arresting doctors to locking down cities doesn’t make much sense otherwise. You could argue they had motivation to arrest doctors talking about a natural infection if they thought they were spreading fear and disrupting lunar new year festivities, but going to locking down whole cities is about as fear inducing and disruptive as it gets. If that were the motivations for arrest, I’d expect more reluctant and less heavy handed mitigation efforts.
If this were a natural disease and the motivations were to control it as quickly as possible, I’d expect early doctors to be painted as national heroes/propagandized positively very early, similarly to the portrayal of the people that built extra hospital spaces early on.
It’s possible there were different officials involved that changed motivations halfway through, but the lab leak hypothesis offers a more consistent explanation. It makes sense that they would have tried to control the virus quietly if it were a lab leak/wanted to keep it secret, and that they would engage in drastic measures to control it when that didn’t work.
That's not enough to draw any conclusion - authoritarian governments led by a tiny few are the geopolitical equivalent of a schizophrenic. The smaller the group with absolute power, the more individual personalities, arbitrary interests, and even day-to-day mood dominate the decision making process. The more power is distributed beyond the group, the more policies return to the mean and the less it varies from day to day.
China has the added wrinkle that it's so large that national authorities policies' can vary wildly from local and regional responses for a long time while the bureaucrats play a game of telephone.
That’s a fair point. The response is not conclusive evidence.
I still think the response is more consistent with a lab leak, even when bureaucratic schizophrenia is accounted for, but that expected level of noise makes it impossible to conclude anything definitively.
> [...] China’s behavior early in the pandemic. I have a difficult time understanding why they would have been arresting doctors who were talking about the virus if it were natural.
I'm ambivalent about the two hypotheses, but China's early behaviour fits either, I think. I do think that the instinct of the regional bureaucracy is to control the flow of information, and punish those that proceed outside the party hierarchy (even if there was no foul play/bad conscience/anything to hide).
It’s plausible either way, and the behavior is by no means a smoking gun, but it seems slightly more consistent with a lab leak hypothesis. I’d expect a slightly different pattern of attempting to control information if there wasn’t any connection to the lab.
The disappearance of Huang Yan Ling is another bit of evidence that pushes me towards the lab leak.
If I were to assign a percentage to it, I’d say about 60% chance lab origin is true, 40% chance natural origin is true.
> it seems slightly more consistent with a lab leak hypothesis.
Do you actually have any evidence in which to compare and contrast how a government behaves when trying to cover up a manmade virus vs how a government behaves when trying to cover up a natural virus that has hopped species? Genuinely asking because we absolutely need to be pinning conclusions on evidence and not conjecture here.
My counterpoint is Ai Wei Wei was disappeared for barely anything at all, dude was producing art that people don’t like. And Jack Ma also disappeared for a period of time right? The Chinese government disappears people like I have coffee in the morning. I would need more evidence to presume this disappearance of a doctor is somehow more significant.
> Do you actually have any evidence in which to compare and contrast how a government behaves when trying to cover up a manmade virus vs how a government behaves when trying to cover up a natural virus that has hopped species?
I’m not GP, but GP used the term “lab escape”, not “man made”. Lab escape could just as easily apply to a naturally occurring disease that was being studied in the lab.
Yes. If you're talking about the bioweapon/artificial virus hypothesis, I am not suggesting that the virus was intentionally constructed. The lab was researching human transmissibility of bat coronaviruses and I believe there was likely some sort of accident.
The disappearance of Huang Yan Ling is significant because the Wuhan virology lab said she's fine and hasn't disappeared/is working elsewhere. Many suspected she was patient zero and died.
The CCP has a huge incentive to have her come forward and make some kind of a statement that she's fine and that the outbreak has nothing to do with the lab/those are all rumors, similar to what the lead researcher Shi Zhengli did. The expected behavior if she were the target of a rumor that she was patient zero would be to squash it immediately in the strongest way possible, whether or not it were true. Huang Yan Ling making a statement and talking about that silly rumor would be the strongest way to squash that rumor.
The fact that has not happened suggests she isn't able to because she is no longer alive.
As to more generic comparisons about behavior during a natural virus vs an accidentally released virus, I don't have anything stronger than conjecture, but think a comparison to SARS would shed some light. Again, it is my understanding that during that outbreak, in which a natural virus hopped species, there was heavy handed action and repression of information about how bad things were getting, but that was after things had gotten bad. I don't believe there were doctors that were being silenced before the outbreak got severe. If you want to prevent the severity of a natural outbreak you need and want doctors to be jumping on the issue early, and I would imagine you would want to exaggerate the effectiveness of their early intervention rather than silence doctors trying to mount an early intervention.
Arresting Drs talking about a possible repeat of SARS is something China clearly wouldn’t want out unless it absolutely had to. The effects on markets, general panic etc are not nothing issues.
Later discovering they really did have a problem and it was even worse than SARS going to a full lockdown at the main crossroads city right before Chinese New Year (the largest human migration event).
The motivation feels very normal/predicable for China. And also similar to their SARS response. So is SARS also an intentional self inflicted lab leak? And is MERS a secret belt and road initiative?
Seems weird there is a conspiracy about the third deadly coronavirus but not the first two... or the common cold for that matter? Where did that come from and was that a lab leak?
Whole thing smells of lazy arm chair enquiry with a touch of xenophobia
I don’t know why any mention of a lab escape automatically triggers people to start shouting “xenophobe”.
There’s nothing particularly new about lab escapes, they happen quite frequently. And given the presence of a bio-lab studying coronaviruses just a short distance from the site of the first reported cases, why would any rational person not consider that as a possibility?
I don’t think you even have to go down the “bio weapon” route here. It could be as simple as a worker infecting themselves with a natural sample unwittingly. Following your logic then, I think China would be incredibly unlikely to admit a lab escape of a natural sample now given the devastation it has caused. It’d be a huge loss of face and draw questions towards China’s competence.
In the context of the rest of my comment SARS, MERS... so we know that deadly variants of coronavirus break into the human population. But THIS one is the lab leak...
If this did come from a lab, it was an accident. I think it’s unreasonable to consider the spread in China intentional, as there’s no reasonable motivation to do so.
The main difference from SARS is we know there is a virology lab in Wuhan researching coronaviruses right across from the wet market considered the epicenter.
I don’t know enough about the reaction to SARS to know how similar it was, but my understanding was they were similarly draconian internally, and were trying to keep it relatively quiet, but I am not aware of any arrests of doctors early on in SARS outbreaks.
The plausibility of Covid escaping from a lab does not make all viruses plausibly escaped from labs. The reason it’s more plausible for covid are the initial reactions and the proximity of the epicenter to a virology lab studying covid.
I fail to see how it’s xenophobic to consider the lab leak plausible. If anything a natural spread relies on the assumption that the wet market was engaged in unhygienic practices and that someone foreign may have eaten an infected bat.
That’s a stronger claim than I was making; I don’t think it’s categorically unreasonable to assume there’s motivation to intentionally release a virus.
I think it’s unreasonable to think there was a motivation to intentionally release Covid.
I don’t think there’s reasonable motivation given when and where the outbreak started, how the virus works, China’s response, etc.
I think the particular scenarios you’re painting are also quite extreme/unlikely, so any claim that a virus was released intentionally would require extraordinary evidence in most cases/I’d rarely entertain that hypothesis. There are less drastic and risky ways with less blowback of dealing with all of those issues, even if you assume a very capable bad actor and ignore the normal and expected amount of incompetence and error.
> as there’s no reasonable motivation to do so.
China is the only major economy to have done well during the pandemic. Not saying that it was intentional but it seems somewhat naive to say there is no reasonable motivation to do so.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume they knew that would be the outcome, or that they would release it intentionally on their own population to affect the rest of the world.
If you are familiar with Wuhan, you’d know you are talking crap. The virology lab is on the East side of the river in the University sector of the city.
The market is on the west side of the river and is in the cbd sector of the city.
We are talking 10km distance apart, with a huge river between. And there are many other wet markets between that would more likely service the community closer to the lab.
That particular wet market takes a lot of shipments straight off boats and from outside the city.
But sure. If by “right across” you meant “on the other side of the CBD, across the largest river in China, and on the opposite side of the largest University campus in China” then I agree.
A virology lab studying the human transmissibility of bat corona viruses ~10km away from the purported epicenter of the outbreak of a bat related coronavirus is notable.
>I have a difficult time understanding why they would have been arresting doctors who were talking about the virus if it were natural.
No doctors were arrested early on. Few got cold tea lectures about spreading rumors that literal SARs returned not novel SARs like virus. Signed boilerplate paperwork and was released back to work. This is generic behavior for "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" tier infractions. Not particularly heavy handed at all as far as PRC behavior is concerned. Folks get talks with cyber security for far less. Arguably warranted, had covid not been once in generation virus, spreading panic based on rumors to some critical mass before CNY is pretty egregious. The fact these doctors got slap on risk treatment shows officials were essentially oblivious of severity of novel virus. If there was foreknowledge of a lab leak, these doctors would be under surveillance and stashed away in safe house away from family/friends/work for months/years like in other politically sensitive cases.
> On 3 January 2020, police from the Wuhan Public Security Bureau investigating the case interrogated Li, issued a formal written warning and censuring him for "publishing untrue statements about seven confirmed SARS cases at the Huanan Seafood Market." He was made to sign a letter of admonition promising not to do it again. The police warned him that any recalcitrant behavior would result in a prosecution.
Being detained and forced to sign a letter on threat of prosecution is the practical equivalent of being arrested.
> If there was foreknowledge of a lab leak, these doctors would be under surveillance and stashed away in safe house away from family/friends/work for months/years like in other politically sensitive cases.
There is no evidence that doctors like Doctor Li Wenliang had knowledge of the origin, and were targeted for reporting on the virus.
Huang Yan Ling was a researcher at the virology lab in Wuhan that has been missing since right before the outbreak.
Since when is being brought in for questioning equivalent to being arrested anywhere? Being arrested and prosecuted is being arrested. People deliberately conflate it build narrative of PRC hiding covid origins when its generic rumor quashing behavior by PSB. Point remains, non of the doctors alleged to be part of some massive cover up by conspiracy peddlers were subject to any of the treatment PRC actually reserves for coverups.
Huang Yan Ling stopped working at WIV in 2015. The only reason she's noteworthy is conspiracy theorist tried to link her as patient 0. People have some expectation that PRC should indulge in random conspiracy theory by parading her around. Like is US going open up fort Detrick for scrutiny? No because entertaining the whims of yahoos is ridiculous.
" I have a difficult time understanding why they would have been arresting doctors who were talking about the virus if it were natural."
Oh that's easy: an authoritarian state would be arresting irrespective of the origin. They want to control the message , no matter what. The truth is a distraction in that case.
Once things flip, and the public becomes aware, then they can re-write history and make them national hero's. Chinese citizens are apparently skeptical of their own government, and get pissed off a lot, I suggest the Doctor who made the discovery is a little bit of a populist hero already.
The CCP's actions demonstrate they are fully authoritarian, that's about it.
My colleague, an evolutionary biologist's comment on this: the virus is unlikely to prevail if manually tweaked since evolution does such an amazing job that it's very unlikely it alone could dominate and infect large populations.
I'm not an evolutionary biologist. I merely want to pass on his comment. He studied the viral genome segments inserted in human genome. I can pass that question to him if you want.
'Manually tweak' is a bad word invented by me. He didn't mean it was viral segment insertion either.
Regarding selection pressure people do that all the time, in fact it is far from easy to artificially apply environmental pressure and obtain highly functional new variants. In cancer research, xenograft are extremely tricky to do with immunodeficient animal models, let alone human tissue in the lab. Sure you can have some success but it's difficult enough to reproduce. His point is that even if an artificially selected highly viable variant was obtained, it is very unlikely it can prevail in real world nature selection (large scale too). I'm no expert but happy to read about any paper if it's not the case.
If we abstract away the specific actors/motivations, this reminds me a bit of the Oumuamua debate. "Man made" and "natural" are both very broad theories that admit many details and are thus hard to falsify. But I wonder to what degree we agree about:
(1) Which category (if either) has an advantage by Occam's razor?
(2) Which category (if either) is more easily falsifiable? (Meaning easier to determine improbable, since it is hard to falsify them entirely)
For me, I see neither having an advantage on (1), but on (2) there are a finite number of relevant, well-known lab techniques that could be investigated.
Yeah, my spouse just hit me with the same point. I think the ["natural" process but facilitated by lab escape] branch is probably the hardest to falsify, so it's a place peoples' prior weights on that scenario are going to end up really dominating discourse.
I think that branch is past what scientific dialog really covers, and it's probably the methods and standards of proof from legal exploration that might be the way to progress the discussion. Unfortunately, the world is missing a moderator that folks would broadly trust to facilitate that conversation.
> generally it’s beyond current science to independently create mutations for a specific purpose.
Labs are the places where people go to push the boundaries. If we go with lab-leak, it is extremely possible that they had figured something new out. They were doing something novel in there, because they were paid money to do novel things.
If we're going to play at paranoia and assume the virus was engineered, it doesn't necessarily follow that the release was an accidental leak.
It would be trivially easy for a hostile power to covertly release a pathogen in another country.
It would also be trivially easy to engineer simultaneous release in multiple locations.
It would be less easy but not impossible to take an existing pathogen during a pandemic, engineer a variant, and release it in another country.
There would always be ambiguity and uncertainty about the source, because there are no telltale markers that unambiguously define an origin, or even whether a pathogen is natural or man-made.
I am not suggesting any of this happened. But I am pointing out that biowarfare has some unexpected covert possibilities.
While Covid may or may not be an example - insufficient data - any defensive strategy should consider the possibility that some other pathogen might be seeded deliberately.
It's true that labs were pushing boundaries, the Wuhan lab as well. But every time they succeeded in doing something novel, they were celebrating it in the media.
If they really had been able to reach this major technological breakthrough, one would expect that they would have made this one public as well.
I would say that it's more likely that this was a natural mutation that got its chance to survive natural selection because of the lasting and intense contact with human researchers in the Wuhan lab.
There are some media sources that show that researches didn't take too many precautions with avoiding this contact. E.g. there are pictures of researchers without wearing gloves and one that's even showing bites from bats.
It depends how quickly the mistake was made. Totalitarian states are not famous for admitting mistakes, in fact they hide them with all their tools. So I don't think your media hype story is a good explanation.
Yes. Gain of function research involves putting evolutionary pressure on an organism to give it certain traits that can be found in the wild, but the resulting virus is anything but natural.
I think a lot of people dismiss the lab leak hypothesis based on the idea that a lab-created virus must have an engineered genome rather than an evolved one.
Introducing mutations with purpose is beyond us, but inserting a variety of mutations randomly in areas of the proteins known to be impactful in various processes, then observing the behavior of the mutants in vivo is not. We do high throughput mutant screening all the time.
Maybe this URL makes it seem more legit than it is, but the linked article below has a "2.5" version of events that proposed that samples taken from a group with who'd been infected by a coronavirus from bats may have been released accidentally. In other words that the lab was the point of release, but that they didn't construct or alter the virus as it already had adapted to humans in an earlier time.
I've done some separate reading that this is a legitimate way that viruses can adapt to a new species, but I don't have any background to evaluate the argument much beyond face value.
Some of the adjacent comments shed some doubt there as it sounds like bats aren't a plausible source because of the spike protein genetics.
The Wu and Zhao paper [0] you cited is based on this paper [1] by Zhou et al, whose conclusions were questioned by this preprint [2].
In fact, the paper [3] cited in the top comment has the following response to the Wu and Zhao paper you cited:
> The recent acquisition of the FCS by SARS-CoV-2 via a natural insert was proposed by Wu and Zhao (2021) on the basis of the existence of FCS in other, more distant Betacoronaviruses with different loop positions to SARS-CoV-2 and the existence of a partial natural insert in the same region in RmYN02 (Zhou et al. 2020a). The reliability of the conclusions of Zhou et al. (2020a) has been questioned by Deigin and Segreto (2020), who particularly challenge the claim that RmYN02 has an insertion around the site of the FCS insertion in SARS-CoV-2 and instead point to a two amino acid deletion in RmYN02 at that locus. Therefore, RmYN02 should not be used as evidence of the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2′s FCS until its claimed insertion is properly validated.
This is covered in detail in the article. To me the smoking gun in this article is the linked video of Daszak saying "we have now found... over 100 new SARS-related coronaviruses, very close to SARS...some of them get into human cells in the lab, some of them can cause SARS disease in humanized mice models...these are a clear and present danger". I've been aware of this for many months after reading this tweet [1] which says essentially the same thing.
Both RacCS203 (91.5% similar to SARS-CoV-2) and RmYN02 (93.3% similar to SARS-CoV-2) have furin cleavage sites. So we're up to 7-to-9 times now that evolution has evolved a furin cleavage site in betacoronaviruses, including 3 sarbecoviruses that may or may not be directly related.
The whole "furin cleavage site is an indication of human engineering" argument is just falsified at this point.
What's your estimate of the relative prevalence of an FCS among the likely space of lab-created SARS-like coronaviruses vs. among natural, SARS-like coronaviruses? My understanding is that adding an FCS is a very common method of lab gain of function, but rare among such viruses in nature.
I don't think the FCS is determinative, and I agree Wade's article overstates its significance. In a Bayesian analysis, it still seems to me like it points weakly (at least 3x prevalence?) towards lab origin, though.
Could you at least make a guess at the relative frequencies? My understanding was that hundreds of animal sarbecovirus strains are known, and of those only the two that you note above had an FCS (and not the rare CGG). On the other hand, I understand that adding an FCS is a common technique for lab gain of function, so that perhaps 5% of genetically-engineered SARS-like viruses would have one. That's how I got my ~3x.
It would be nice if each individual piece of evidence were all or nothing, either perfect evidence of lab origin in itself or perfectly irrelevant. I don't think real evidence usually comes that way, so it seems valuable to me to try to quantify even weak evidence.
And not that Nobel laureates don't have an unfortunate history of incorrect beliefs later in life: but I assume you're aware David Baltimore considers the FCS significant? He doesn't seem to have said anything else obviously crazy (unlike Mullis, Pauling, etc.), at least.
Nice layout of the dominating conspiracy theory that is constantly being repeated on various alt-right media.
Basically COVID-19 is the result of evil and illegal experiments setup by Anthony Fauci (US researcher and long time civil servant) at the Wuhan virology lab and covered up by WHO scientists.
And unlike the author here, this report is based upon interviews with employees at the lab and various form of documentation provided by the lab. Including health records of the employees.
And unlike the arrticle here, this report is based upon interviews with employees at the lab and various form of documentation provided by the lab. Including health records of the employees.
So I've been pretty skeptical of the lab theory to date, but:
> We visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is an impressive research facility, and looks to be run well, with due regard to staff health. We spoke to the scientists there. We heard that scientists’ blood samples, which are routinely taken and stored, were tested for signs they had been infected. No evidence of antibodies to the coronavirus was found. We looked at their biosecurity audits. No evidence.
So this is what they were told, but did they actually test the samples, and confirm that they belonged to the right people and originated from the given date? Apparently no.
> We looked at the closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 they were working on — the virus RaTG13 — which had been detected in caves in southern China where some miners had died seven years previously. But all the scientists had was a genetic sequence for this virus. They hadn’t managed to grow it in culture.
This is probably the most convincing argument: if they actually had worked on viruses similar enough to plausible be modified into SARS-CoV-2, this would have left evidence in scientific papers etc.
> While viruses certainly do escape from laboratories, this is rare. So, we concluded it was extremely unlikely this had happened in Wuhan.
This is incredibly weak: "lab escapes are rare, so it's extremely unlikely" is not much of an argument.
I'm reading it as shorthand for, "The prior probability of a lab escape is low, and we didn't see much evidence for it in this particular case, therefore we conclude that this instance being a lab escape is low", which is a fine argument.
It seems that proponents of the lab leak theory wants to turn the burden of proof upside down: I am claiming conspiracy starting with Anthony Fauci and ending up in a Chinese lab. It is up to you to provide hard evidence on why it is not so.
Sure you can do that as in freedom of thought and speech. But honestly; this is not really a constructive way to go about things.
Did you read the article. The investigative group is compromised. The doctors who were part of the group have strong connections and even experiments running in the same lab.
I agree that compromised isn't a smart word to use about this, but even if you think all these questions have been settled, I'm surprised you don't agree that it is bad optics to have the investigator to be the funder of the research being investigated, and even worse when he says things like: well, we asked them and they said no, so that's that. The conflict of interest couldn't be more obvious.
It's the media's job to investigate conflicts of interest, so the fact that they didn't looked into that, and that they took Daszak's original so-called debunking at face value, is bad optics on another level. It has left a credibility vacuum, so it's unsurprising that articles like the current one are coming in from the margins.
What is least likely? A group of scientists in a quasy communist country do a shit job of safety and end up endangering the worlds population or that a virus that coexists with Bats, somehow and for no (direct) evolutionary benefit, becomes able to infect humans?
It is, on the whole, but not immediately. It is kinda like the idea that while having eyes is a huge evolutionary benefit, having just part of the eye confers none. Or like guessing a password by random chance. If you get some immediate feedback by being partially right then it is pretty easy, but if you only know if the password is right or wrong, then the odds of guessing the password rounds to zero.
Based on what we know about the history and ecology of pathogens, the latter is far more likely. I say this as someone with training in the biological sciences.
but the prior probability of "a pandemic from natural causes envelops the world" is also low, say below 1% a year. But now, given that "a pandemic does envelop the world", the posterior probability of lab escape and natural cause of course rises dramatically... and then saying "we didn't see much evidence for it" on a superficial tour organised by those responsible for the lab does not strike me as a very powerful rebuttal.
It's akin to "the prior probability of labour camps is low", and "on our tour of North Korea (accompanied by several North Korean tour guides showing us just those places they wanted to show us when they wanted to show us) we didn't see any labour camps, therefore we conclude that the probability of labour camps in North Korea is low".
While we're invoking statistics: Take the null H_0 = "the virus emerged naturally in any large Chinese city with > 1m inhabitants". In 2017, there were 102 of those. Thus, the probability under H_0 that the virus emerged in the one city in China with a level 4 biolab has p < 0.01.
Many low probability events happen every day, without contradicting the prior that they remain unlikely.
It is akin to saying "Pliny the Younger didn't die in Pompeii overtaken by a volcano because there is so many other cities he could have died in and other causes of death." Statistically, that would have been true, up until we learned that it happened. Then the low probability ceases to matter, since it becomes an observation.
Statistically, this is due to both priors rising, proportional to their original values, such that now the sum P(lab escape)+P(natural cause) == 1 and their average is a coin-toss (50-50). So without outside information, the prior statistical probability isn't low: it is exactly neutral between the options.
We've also seen viruses arise in small villages. This is even more unlikely to be predictable in advance which village with p << 0.0001.
> Statistically, this is due to both priors rising, proportional to their original values, such that now the sum P(lab escape)+P(natural cause) == 1
Exactly, that's what I was getting at - the prior for lab escape is low, but given that the pandemic happened, it the posterior for lab escape is 1 - posterior for natural.
And we had about as many examples for lab escapes as for natural epidemics in the last few decades, it seems to me.
It is incorrect to consider only one year. If the probability of an event is 1% each year, you expect the event to happen every 100 years or so. In fact with probability 1 it will happen at some point.
Lab escapes are not that rare, SARS-1 is known to have escaped 6 times. It also doesn't matter how safe and secure the WIV's BSL-4 lab is, since coronavirus research was done at BSL-2 and BSL-3.
> This is probably the most convincing argument: if they actually had worked on viruses similar enough to plausible be modified into SARS-CoV-2, this would have left evidence in scientific papers etc.
If I remember correctly, wasn't there no evidence in scientific papers etc that the virus RaTG13, which is the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2, actually existed until after the Covid pandemic started and they suddenly published information about it?
This isn't hard for to check. Yes, basically all research on RaTG13 did appear after the Covid pandemic, as you would naturally expect given that scientists were interested in it given the similarity. Nobody was interested in the RaTG13 previously.
However, the evidence is pretty clear that this was found and published earlier. It was originally described as "BtCoV/4991" and it was described and published as far as I can find as far back as 2016. (The name was changed to RaTG13 to describe that it was collected in 2013 in Tongguan).
> This is probably the most convincing argument: if they actually had worked on viruses similar enough to plausible be modified into SARS-CoV-2, this would have left evidence in scientific papers etc.
Possibly also worth to consider that there are very high incentives to publishing in China, as far as I understand authors can often get rewarded for publications
This is an entirely unsatisfactory investigation. Given the colossal incentive to absolve themselves of any responsibility, what possible value is there in asking the Chinese scientists questions and looking at what they give you? What would any rational entity do in this situation of causing a global pandemic?
Sorry but, interviewing staff at the lab to see if they are responsible? This is like putting a murderer who just pleaded not-guilty in the stand and asking them "did you do it?". What kind of answers were the WHO expecting to get?
the fact that this theory is still around after more than a year and not completely debunked is quite telling by itself. I thought this was a complete conspiracy theory last year, but the longer it sticks around the more likely it does become.
People still think the moon landings were fake 50 years later, and that Bush did 9/11 20 years later. I guess most conspiracy theories must be true if we go by "still around after a year" as our metric.
Bush's friends "did" 9/11, as in orchestrated it, suppressed investigations into it, and even directly funded it in the form of $130,000 USD transferred to two of the attackers days before the attacks. Didn't you know that?
Debunking a theory doesn't make it disappear. Sometime it can do the opposite and reinforce the theory.
In this case there is no smoking gun either way and a natural origin is much harder to trace than lab origin. That lack of absolute certainty, which science is often comfortable working with, leaves room for alternative theories to circulate and attach to those who like the sound of them for various reasons. It is a common human flaw that being aware that an event could hypothetically occur can be mistaken for proof that event actually occurred.
It can be rational to behave as if the event did occur if you don't know that it didn't.
Even if we're 50/50 on the source of the virus, maybe we should still ban or regulate GoF research, and consider banning or regulating some types of wet markets.
No, it's not rational as then you're relying on the other side to prove a negative, which is an unreasonable reversal of burden of proof (e.g. Russell's teapot).
As to 50/50 being reason to take large scale regulatory action, would you accept this level of proof to enact any law? That seems a low bar to me.
If it was 50% likely that people would break the speed limit when driving, should they be banned from driving?
It's easy to make false equivalences all day long but it is of no benefit to anybody.
If their breaking the speed limit would result in 3M human deaths plus the loss of 4% of the world's GDP with no offsetting benefit, then I think they probably should? So I agree that the equivalences aren't too helpful.
The point is that we should consider both the cost and the benefit of any regulation, in an expected value sense. Cars do kill people, but they also provide transportation that we've judged is worth that cost. But there's little indication that the WIV's (USA-funded!) risky research has delivered any significant benefit--the predicted coronavirus pandemic has indeed occurred, whatever the cause, and has anything from the WIV's work help us deal with that? On the other hand, even a small chance that their work caused this pandemic is a hugely negative expected value.
Long before the pandemic, there was obscure, academic debate over whether certain types of research with potential pandemic pathogens were worth the risk. Even with the evidence available at that time, I believe the 2014 ban was good, and its 2017 lifting was bad; but that debate now that takes on terrible new significance.
Someone else stated it well, but while neither equivalence is accurate, mine is a lot closer.
Speeding is common (difficult to prevent) and exhibits low downside risk. An intruder in the house is rare and carries an enormous downside risk. Which one is more analogous to the escape of a dangerous virus from a lab?
> natural origin is much harder to trace than lab origin
Why do you think that? Natural origin should leave closely-related viruses in nature, and animal sampling should find that. Such evidence was found for both the original SARS (palm civets) and MERS (camels) within about a year. For SARS-CoV-2, after about the same time and a much more intensive effort, we're still waiting.
Lab-accident origin is easy to trace only if the people working in the lab disclose everything they were working with. This requires both perfect honesty and perfect knowledge. The WIV did lots of work sampling viruses from nature, in remote bat caves that very few other humans would ever enter--around Yunnan to be clear, about 900 miles from Wuhan--and they could have leaked a novel virus before they even had a chance to sequence it. Of course that's still more likely to imply someone's lying, thus the accusations of "conspiracy theory"; but by that standard every human deception in history is conspiracy theory, including every intelligence operation, every Ponzi scheme, every cheating spouse, etc.
I'd put lab origin and natural origin around equal probability myself, and I'd consider anything between 10/90 and 90/10 reasonable. What would you estimate?
I don't really think it matters a whole lot whether it jumped species or was created in a lab. I think the issue is that there are nearly 8 billion people on the planet and that fact has somehow fundamentally changed how disease spreads and mutates.
We need to be figuring out how to deal with that. Wondering where it came from is mostly neither here nor there.
We aren't going to magically stop doing lab experiments if we can know for certain that it started in a lab. If we can determine for certain that this jumped species, welp, it isn't the first time and it won't be the last.
The issue with COVID is the precedent of attempts of trying to identify the origin of this new disease being sabotaged for seemingly political reasons (and with no obvious repercussions).
It seems intuitive that knowing the origin of the virus (sample escaping a lab or pure nature) could help prevent similar cases in the future or deal with them more efficiently. Is my intuition wrong here?
Even if it's a natural sample that escaped a lab, cleaning up the lab doesn't necessarily help anything because it's not the actual reservoir of the virus.
It would mean countries that have labs would either be forced to allow constant audits and reasonable regulations (such as don't have labs in cities) or face isolation.
It would also mean quite a heavy political response towards china if it indeed escaped a lab (which is why they're sabotaging everything even if it didn't...)
> It would also mean quite a heavy political response towards china if it indeed escaped a lab (which is why they're sabotaging everything even if it didn't...)
The threat of such a response to me is part of the problem. This incentivises an insecure player to act counter to the common goal by concealing the facts in order to avoid a scenario of being attacked by other players.
In the end we’re all human and mistakes happen. Regulations, audits, this can be implemented transparently for everyone; if that was the end of it and there was no perceived potential of repercussions, perhaps we wouldn’t have this problem.
(Not to say this somehow justifies the obstruction of the investigation, but IMO it’s something to keep in mind.)
Communist party rule will be in big danger if chinese people start blaming it for this clusterfuck.
Externally, its not controllable, US invaded 2 countries after 9/11, it would be easy to think that politicians will do something or someone more radical will get elected.
This sort of reasoning seems very ideologically and politically motivated. It's sad that we live in political climate where millions of people died and almost every single person's life in the planet has been affected and it's absolutely okay to make a statement that "no investigation is necessary".
Other than in your comment where it's apparently a fabricated quote, I don't see anyone saying that no investigation is necessary.
My assertion is that where it started is unlikely to yield real solutions because I don't think that's what caused it to turn into a giant and ongoing global crisis. I would like more focus on solutions and I don't think finding someone to pin the blame on is likely to move that needle at all.
My life experience suggests that finding a scapegoat tends to do the opposite: After someone's head is on a pike and calls for "justice" have been thereby nominally satisfied, the problem will rage on. Meanwhile, people may make less effort to solve it because they got some sense of satisfaction out of watching heads roll and justice get loudly declared.
Putting heads on a pike won't stop the spread of the virus. It's what many people want because millions have died.
It's not what I want and it has nothing to do with politics. I want people to live and be healthy and I simply don't think this is how that is most likely to be achieved.
When antibiotics were first discovered, the world spoke of "the end to disease." Now, we are actively breeding antibiotic resistant infections and having trouble coming with new treatment options for infections once thought to be easily treatable thanks to the miracles of modern medicine.
This strikes me as just the latest stage of that process (or the latest chapter in that story).
There's no novelty to or uncertainty about the risk of viruses entering the human population from nature. That's exactly as important to mitigate, whether or not it's what happened in this case.
If it turns out to have walked out of a lab, then perhaps it points to a need to harden containment. You can’t cancel virology, because we still need to deal with pathogens from nature.
It may be true, but isn't very surprising. It came when US-China tensions were already at peak and it was from onset was politicised as 'China virus', followed by political attacks by Trump and racial attacks against Chinese/Asians.
I can't read from your comment if you are talking about the PRC or the US political meddling. Given that both sides are as likely to do this for easy brownie points I don't think it matters as we will never have the correct answer: People in the US will at most be told one side while people in the PRC will be told the other. In the end it's just two sides throwing turds, like most politics.
The US gov obstructed WHO team doing research into the origins of COVID on Chinese soil? How?
There are no good and no bad guys, of course, but the topic is a very specific event and concrete facts, so shades and “what about X?” can go elsewhere as far as I’m concerned.
> We aren't going to magically stop doing lab experiments if we can know for certain that it started in a lab.
No magic required, we can just stop. Or better yet and more realistic, update and enforce regulations on this type of research.
Personally, I don't care whether it was a lab or not. The fact we haven't disproven it means it's not all that unlikely, and I think we should reform research practices now. We don't need to prove it did happen if we already know it could happen.
Can't help feeling sad, and bewildered in capacity of humans to cause damage at this level - the havoc this (human-made) virus is inflicting on people - close and faraway.
For me it felt allways a bit strange how fast china acted. The virus was very fresh, nothing was known, just a few cases and china totaly locked down millions if people. Two, three months later, when we already had high numbers if cases in the west, lockdowns started in the west also. But everybody said, "we know nothing about this new virus". For me it allways like, china knew much more about the virus early on.
This is easily explained by a combination of past experience (SARS), Chinese dictatorship (Western countries can’t realistically solder people into their homes), hubris (“our medical system is so good that we could easily handle a pandemic”), wokeism (locking borders is evil) and scientific failures in medicine (if it’s not proven by randomised controlled trials, it doesn’t exist). Add a bit of political infighting in the mix (which presumably doesn’t exist in China) and ...
Parent comment was highlighting that a healthy variety of plausible factors contributed to each respective country's outcome, and not all of them would have to be true to produce such an outcome
Not "easily" in the sense that it's easy to pinpoint the exact recipe, but "easily" in that the opposite outcomes would have been far more unlikely
Maybe I should have written “obviously” instead. Basically, no need to invent “non-obvious” factors like “China had prior knowledge of the virus”. It’s definitely possible, but you can explain China’s success vs Western failure without that “hidden” factor as well.
I'm not trying to quibble on the wording of your comment, but the thing is maybe you find it easy/obvious/whatever to combine those factors to explain this, but to me it's a fair bit of a jump.
Here's one way to look at it: if we had asked "how will China respond?" back in the beginning, how well would you have been able to predict their response if you had known the virus was of zoonotic origin? What if you had known the virus was of lab origin? I would think in the second case you'd have a lot more people betting that we'd get a swift (& deflective) response than in the former case, but it sounds like you disagree?
Swift response in China is easily predictable by their experience and dictatorship. Taiwan reacted similarly, taking the disease seriously, because of their prior experience with SARS.
The suppression of information and subsequent deflection, I find much more problematic. They can also be explained by China’s dictatorship and their aggressive PR management, but still... one of the easiest ways for China to dispel any “lab leak/release hypotheses” would be full transparency. So far they haven’t done that. But refusal to do so can again easily be explained by accidential lab leak / accident hypothesis, whereas the original parent was proposing that China had superior information in advance... again, possible, but not necessary to explain the current sequence of events.
The Threats, Hazards, Resilience and Contingency Committee (THRCC) was scrapped by Boris Johnson in July 2019, and had previously been "mothballed" by Theresa May to focus on Brexit efforts.
Whether the existence of a group of 15 MPs including such luminaries as Michael Gove, Matt Hancock and Gavin Williamson would have made a marked difference is not so obvious.
Existing plans were not scrapped and some believe using these plans actually was a big factor in the lacklustre initial response. The plans were too specific on what had come before (SARS most recently) and didn't allow accommodation of the differences of covid. It took a notable amount of time to change direction.
I'm sure there's plenty of blame to go around if one was inclined to do so, but I don't think disbanding one committee (despite its prescient name) was particularly notable.
OP made the argument China acted more competently than the west, and that this is suspicious and supports the lab leak hypothesis. Another explanation is that the west simply acted incompetently, while China acted "normally". Unfortunately it's not conceivable to many westerners that their governments are hilariously incompetent. Unfortunately, because it precludes improvement.
There are many stories were filtered out by Western media. Some not by media but could be filtered out by individuals selective ignoring.
For example: China built makeshift hospitals in very short period of time. This one is not filtered. Even Fauci suggested India should do that but in reality not many country can mobilize the resources. Another example is by strict locked down, Wuhan was sacrificed for the sake of all nation. Meanwhile the hospitals over the all country supplied volunteer medical personals and equipment pouring to Wuhan. There were too many registered volunteers even beyond the organizers requested. With enough resource concentrated in one place, covid was quickly under control.
It's mainly due to dictatorship system that other countries can not easily duplicate. This can explain most countries are "incompetent".
They did have the experience with SARS1. And if you look at other countries that had experience with SARS1 they also acted very swiftly and did fairly well - Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam.
What I found absolutely baffling is that we in west saw what China was doing and haven't got our shit together until months later (with exceptions). Instead the discourse was about how much the Chinese eat unsavory things and how much pollution is there so it wouldn't be the same if it got here at all.
But none of those countries went to the extent the China did, and also taking into account that the Chinese did not have anybody to base their response on, whereas everybody else did. It is a extremely peculiar first response.
Chinese citizens were visibly angry with what happened in Wuhan, because they saw it as a failure of the govt especially after the same mistake and steps happened with SARS. Their handling, and all of Asia’s handling was deeply informed by their experiences with SARS.
China didn't act fast, they buried their head in the sand and denied it existed until the point where it was undeniable. China didn't start lockdowns until it was clear that their hospitals were going to be completely overwhelmed and that it was spreading fast. If they knew about SARS-CoV-2 they would have done that to begin with instead of jailing doctors for causing alarm.
China built a new giant hospital after all the hospitals on the city were overcrowded and people were dying on their entrance, and instituted a lockdown after the new hospital became crowded.
All of their speed was on the time between the decision and implementation, they din't display any prescience.
There has been an extensive analysis by a virologist on Reddit[¹], who claimed that, very simply, SARS-COV2 is a so-called "mosaic" virus, while man-made viruses are inevitably "chimera" ones. The article does not seem to make this distinction.
The virologist also chimed on HN (besides, calling BS on people who were, out of ignorance, spreading false beliefs), but it seems he's not participating to this post.
It'd be best to have the opinion of a specialized scientist, in order to to have scientific clarity before starting the political arguments.
I think you should be wary of your semantics, there is seemingly a consensus that the virus is not man-made - the question is if the virus "escaped" from a laboratory in Wuhan (originating from nature, however studied in a controlled environment).
The link you provided does discuss the probability of the virus accidentally leaking from a laboratory, however the reasons provided does not really provide much facts, seemingly more speculation (except for facts regarding who we think is patient zero):
"The WIV, and Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi’s lab group, are extremely well-respected in the virology community.
As well respected as many US scientists.
● All the WIV’s sampling of bats and the genomes that they find in bats are publicly available information.
Why isn’t SARS-CoV-2 on any of those lists? We would know.
● This doesn’t look anything like any laboratory accident that we’ve seen before.
It's a false dichotomy between natural and manmade. What about a virus that naturally occurred in a bat cave, was studied in a lab, and escaped from the lab later? What if that virus mutated unintentionally while in the lab? And what if its mutation was encouraged by researchers in the lab?
Occam's Razor, to me, suggests that it's more likely the virus came from the nearby infectious disease lab than from the wet market that operated probably for centuries.
Why couldn't it have been transported into the city on trucks and vehicles coming from sampling sites? Or hitchhiked in bat guano on a worker's boot who visited the wet market?
You've generated 2 possible outcomes and gone "yes these are the only possibilities". But why? There was a whole train of transportation bringing things into the city for the lab.
Of course, if it was from that timeline, then the whole "lab escape" thing becomes a bit problematic doesn't it? Because, why would it need to be by activities of the lab specifically? It wouldn't - coz it could really just have rode in on anything. Which would of course mean that actually, it's probably way more likely that a virus which can infect humans, starting out in the wild, and being sample by a lab, probably infected a bunch of humans anyway because it didn't stop being in the wild when it was collected by researchers...
It could have. There's irony in the tone of your response to a post that started with calling out a false dichotomy. There are many more possibilities and that was my point.
On your latter point, I'll just say that the virus likely needed some time to mutate into a human infectious form, and most of what we're talking about is, where and how did that happen?
And yet the only possibilities you managed to generate were variants of "but it definitely somehow escaped from a lab".
You're not taking a logical position, you're starting from one conclusion "it was a Chinese lab!" and iterating around that, for the sole reason that the only reason the lab is being considered was the usual suspects of conspiracy theory began pushing "Chinese bioweapon" from the outset (and we all know bioweapons require labs, so one had to be found).
Forgive my preference not to generate verbal diarrhea into the page for your reading pleasure. It should be simple to extrapolate many more possibilities from what I stated if someone were willing to put an ounce of thought into it. Which you already did.
Anyway, I presume you are reacting to my summation of comparing the wet market vs lab theories and stating that one, when expanded to include several closely related possibilities, seemed far more likely to me. I stand by my framing, which doesn't preclude that there is another third possible factor, or many more.
I'm not starting from any conclusion like that, and in fact, my whole post was saying that it was likely NOT a bioweapon even if there was a lab escape. Please stop imputing talking points you have heard elsewhere to my argument. It's actually quite rude.
>Why couldn't it have been transported into the city on trucks and vehicles coming from sampling sites? Or hitchhiked in bat guano on a worker's boot who visited the wet market?
So in answer to occams razor you construct convoluted transmission scenarios?
Re: the chimera vs mosaic, that's not particularly true.
If I take a known virus and make a single mutation (insertion of a furin site in this case), then I wind up with the same virus, + a furin. If I take that mutated virus, and then passage it through multiple generations in lab grown hosts, it will mutate at random throughout the genome.
The exact rate and the time it would take is heavily debated, but one important note is that viruses with an RNA-dependant RNA polymerase are, as an evolutionary strategy, quite poor at preserving their own genetic information. They have the highest error rate of replication of any known organism. Which means, after some discrete amount of generations, you could wind up with some sort of "mosaic" + "chimeric" virus. Again though, how many generations is under hot dispute. And how long that would take in nature vs in a laboratory is also under hot dispute.
100% of the evidence for lab leak is circumstantial. But we know two things:
1) If I set out to design a SARS-CoV 2, it's technically feasible. And there's reason to be interested in this type of research. And lab accidents involving pathogens can and do happen.
2) There's no single piece of evidence concretely and completely ruling it out. Which is unfortunate.
I'm a structural biologist, I primarily study viruses, I also engaged heavily in that topic you mentioned (against my better judgement). At the moment, I have a mental probability (which is probably incorrect) of wild virus 90% chance, lab leak 10% chance. I'd be extremely surprised if it was a lab leak, but I also can't sufficiently falsify that hypothesis to complete write it off.
Primarily Occam's razor. The total area available to coronaviruses in the wild to replicate and mutate in is orders of magnitude greater than the area available in a laboratory.
It tilts the needle, yes, but there are numerous other pieces of evidence that tilt it in the other direction. Hence the 90%/10% split in my mind. But I won't fault anyone else for having a different split. I think that's reasonable.
I am not an expert in the field, but I don’t find this math convincing - I arrive at the opposite conclusion. This was not a random lab and the outbreak didn’t just start anywhere.
This is already answered in GP comment: a career in biology would suffer if biological research were to become more suspect to the general population, with a corresponding loss of prestige.
Do you know if the early (March 2020) phylogenetic work[1] that showed that the most ancestral genomes extracted from early human samples weren't from Wuhan has stood up to scrutiny?
I just have a hard time understanding why so clear evidence of the epidemic starting outside Wuhan is missing from the debate, so I'd appreciate if you could comment on it.
In my opinion this is the single strongest piece of evidence against the lab-leak hypothesis (and it also refutes the whole "furin-site uses non-canonical amino acids which shows evidence of human involvement" hypothesis as well). I haven't found anything disproving it, and I have looked a fair bit. However, epidemiology is not anything I know about, so I'm about on the same level as anyone else there.
When this came up on HN before, it looked like the argument was premised on the divergence between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 -- it's not reasonable to think some lab started from RaTG13 and ended up with SARS-CoV-2. It's a very long reddit thread and I'm not a biologist, so it's hard to be sure. But on that understanding, my objection is "WIV had many unpublished coronavirus samples, and took their database offline in fall 2019. RaTG13 is just the least distant relative to SARS-CoV-2 that they did publish." as I said last time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26756618
Minor detail, but the title of that reddit post instantly turned me off. It's indicates the author is clearly willing to state opinions as fact, and even though they walk it back in their TL;DR, it reeks of the same type of manipulation that conspiracists thrive on.
There’s is a French book just released about this : « Sars-CoV-2, aux origines du mal » by Brice Perrier and an interview also in French https://youtu.be/1wul4z8pmzU
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 344 ms ] thread[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27056327
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062021
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2834627
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/on-the-...
but hey. at least you are virtue signaling
Then you should read what scientists write, not science journalists. If you can't actually understand the science, which is perfectly reasonable given that most of us are laymen, you can read scientific journalists, but then you need to acknowledge that you operate on trust, which would mean you need to take the authors biases into account, and don't pretend you 'only care about the science'.
Wade has been widely criticized on mistakes in scientific accuracy have been pointed out concerning his last books on genetics and race, and he appeared to have some sort of ideological axe to grind. The same may very well be the case here.
It's trivial to misrepresent science in subtle ways to tilt a discussion one way or the other on controversial issues such as this, so author credibility matters.
It is disingenuous to claim to care about Science while willfully ignoring the biases inherent in the narrative of presentation.
I don't. The question was did the virus come out as the result of that research or not. The answer is simple yes or no. No need to dance around.
All the arguments I see so far are of "but, but he cheats on his wife" quality.
I understand. This is their choice. We do not have to agree.
Personally I think lab origin is unlikely as whilst it's possible to describe how it could happen, that's not proof it did actually happen. Too often people mistake theoretical actions for proof of action. The probability of natural origin still ranks higher for me but I wouldn't bet my house on it.
There is. We just do not know it. But somebody does.
You can read both. In this case science journalists are both explaining the science (quite well, in this case) and also alledging bad behaviour by scientists, and if he's right (which again, seems to be the case given the evidence presented) then only reading what those very same scientists have written would leave you less well informed.
William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor. See section “Views on Race and Eugenics”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley
My problem with this isn’t that a racist position exists. It’s that racism thrives and grows when you don’t point it out in a manner which leaves a stain on the racist. Those who are secretly racist will be emboldened by a publicly accept racist and it will give them some path to expressing or acting on their racist views which they have otherwise suppressed.
So should we read the article? Maybe. But should we share it while saying “hey look what this known racist is saying”? I don’t think so.
And at any rate, the attempted smearing of anyone who points to problems in establishment thinking as a racist is trivial, completely expected of a certain segment of society and of no importance relative to the topic at hand. Wade's article not only builds an extremely strong case for the "engineered in a lab" theory, but just as importantly, shows that virology as field needs to be shut down. Virologists have been caught engaging in two conspiracies around this topic now - the conspiracy of silence by Chinese state and researchers, and the second was the deception around the letters claiming a lab leak was an absurd conspiracy theory and which boldly claimed there were no conflicts of interest even though they had the biggest conflicts imaginable. That's before we even get to the stupidity of GOF research.
It's a small field with a bad culture, and as the article points out, has in the end contributed nothing to actually fighting COVID. The case for defunding it looks strong and the case for continuing it looks weak.
Those things are all far more important than your allergic reaction to a man who worked for decades at the NYT of all places
I'm not sure you read past the first sentence of that article, since the second sentence makes it clear that Nicholas Wade is the one making the claim he's not racist. "It's not prejudice; it's science." It's pretty clear the reviewer -- in Scientific American, which I believe does have some bona fides -- is laying out the case that, in fact, it's prejudice, not science, and lays it out in a pretty convincing manner. The book being reviewed, as I understand it, has been pretty widely criticized not only by reviewers, but by scientists arguing that Wade misrepresented their research.
Does that have any bearing on Wade's case for SARS-CoV-2 being a lab-created virus? Certainly not directly; maybe not at all. I read the whole article, and it certainly makes a plausible and compelling case! But like it or not, a lot of the conversation around "the lab creation theory" for SARS-CoV-2 has had a decidedly racial tinge. Having it turn out that this plausible and compelling case has been made by a science writer who had a recent, major work widely criticized for, ah, a decidedly racial tinge is, well... let's say "interesting."
As a final note, gain-of-function research certainly sounds fraught with peril even under the best of circumstances, and these do not sound like they were the best of circumstances. I question whether that means "virology as a field needs to be shut down."
The explicit statement that Nicholas Wade is not a racist appears both as the first sentence - unquoted i.e. this is not reported speech but a statement by the article author - and in the abstract at the top, also not in quotes. But then it starts by mis-representing his argument by saying he "explains why white people are better because of their genes" and in the very next sentence admits that "to be fair" that's not actually what he said at all.
We are left deliberately confused about both what the author of the article and the author of the book actually think. For example you wrote:
Nicholas Wade is the one making the claim he's not racist. "It's not prejudice; it's science."
and you put that statement in quotes to imply that Wade is the one who said it, but in fact, it's the article author who wrote that statement, not Wade!
I don't fully understand where you see a racial tinge in the lab creation theory. The lab is in China but beyond that it has nothing to do with being Chinese. And as Wade and others document, the money came from US research agencies and GOF research is done in multiple countries, so again, I don't see any racial connection. If Wade was actually a racist I guess he'd not miss this golden opportunity to blame the apparently lax Chinese lab practices on their DNA, but he makes no such argument anywhere, not even about culture.
No, I put it in quotes to indicate that it was a quote. And yes, allturtles is correct that the author was engaging in a rhetorical device here, and is clearly (at least, it's clear to me) asserting that, yes, Wade's thesis was essentially racist. I don't think we're going to get anywhere continuing this, though, so let's just agree to disagree.
And let's not even begin to think what will happen if there were to be evidence that this was an intentional release.
But don't you think it's important to know this?
The most scary path would be intentional. I can't think of any other aftermath except for WWIII.
Yeah sure. We've just lost 3 million lives, let's kill the rest of the planet as consolation. As fucked up as our politicians are I hope they are not ready to die.
More likely result is that most of the world would stop trading with them. Nobody would want to see a Made in China tag on anything. Which would in turn be very bad for the economy in China and lead to unrest.
So the more likely outcome would be civil war in China.
One of the things Wade demonstrates is that China was most likely doing research on CoV viruses in ordinary labs with nothing more than gloves and a white lab coat. The standard photo of Dr Shi is of her in a pressurised bubble suit but that's bsl4 and virologists don't like working in those conditions because it slows them down. So the research grants say the work will be done at much lower safety levels.
I guess at some point you enter a gray area where gross negligence and intentionality blur together. But the bioweapon idea shouldn't take hold because it's obviously wrong on its face: the virus has no characteristics that would make for a good weapon of any kind. For it to be intentional would require some kind of theory involving vaccinations but Europe's irrational shutdowns of their own vaccine programmes throws a wrench in the typical vaccine related conspiracy theories.
> the virus has no characteristics that would make for a good weapon of any kind.
Quite the contrary. The virus clearly favors authoritarian societies whose citizens will let their government weld them into their apartments. Just look at the death rate in China compared to the US and Europe. The only free societies that have come out unscathed are isolated islands (NZ, Taiwan).
That said, there is zero chance that the CPC had foreknowledge of this. They got very, very lucky.
Eastern European countries are topping the death-per-capita charts (and the ones that don't are still topping excess-death charts).
African countries are doing "okay" because their ratio of people above age 65 is 2-3% rather than the 20% in Europe, and case numbers are low because they don't have the money to mass test.
Over time, I have seen these numbers level out. Of course, there's still some disparities in how countries manage the epidemic, but it seems more a case of when a country will be hit, not if. The countries that managed their first wave well (Poland, Czechia, Ukraine, Turkey) have been hit harder in the second wave than other countries.
It seems that Covid spread and fatality nicely correlates with how integrated and mobile a country's society is. Which shouldn't be that surprising, I guess. The only countries bucking this trend are in East-Asia (not just South Korea, but Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, etc), probably due to their experiences with earlier outbreaks.
This happens to be a virus which focuses most of its harm on elderly people who can be triaged out of care where resources are stretched in conflict situations, causes relatively few issues for combatants and spreads in an unpredictable manner well beyond the target population. Its clearly insufficient to undermine the actual fighting fitness of the societies which make no effort to stop its spread, but at the same time it goes round the world killing random noncombatants and likely gets back to your own population via neutral countries. Clearly far worse as a bioweapon than many naturally occurring viruses, especially when you apparently don't have an antidote and your potential adversaries can develop one faster
Mind you, I'm becoming increasingly convinced it was an accidental lab leak due to negligence, so this isn't my attempt at defending China in any way.
Global power shifts to their favor by slowing down democratic economies, sacrificing parts of their own population and economy in the short term. As a collectivist dictatorship tracking every move of its population a pandemic is easier to handle.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Both sources are capable of being the origin, we should work on reducing the chance that either cause a similar pandemic.
It's obviously very risky to do, but we should focus on adopting and enforcing better security practices to minimize the risks, not ban GoF altogether.
I see somewhat of a parallel with security research for computers -- you can try to ban it, and it will probably reduce the total research volume, but it will also decrease the level of openness and harm mitigation of the research that does remain.
If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if), the nation or lab it happened in is just the proximate cause. Deeper responsibility would lie with the institutions and individuals that pushed it despite the risks. No one knows the answer to this (edit: I mean to whether covid escaped from a lab), but it's an open question that deserves credible investigation. Having the investigator be one of the principal funders of the research being investigated is such...bad optics, to put it nicely, that one wonders how anyone thought that would be ok.
[1] https://mbio.asm.org/content/3/5/e00360-12
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/an-enginee...
However i would not let China off the hook until we have figured out exactly what happened. If nobody is held "accountable" (for a certain definition of this word) it is bound to happen again and the next time it most certainly will be "biological warfare".
This needs to be treated as seriously and as comprehensively the way we treat Nuclear Weapons.
In the beginning of January 2020, president Trump was already informed by an advisor who had close contacts in Wuhan that the outbreak was much more severe than China made it look like. But he chose not to act on that, because the USA were in the middle of closing a trade deal with China. However later that month he changed his mind when the first infections in the USA happened, and later even more when a Chinese official came out with a theory that it might actually have been an USA sports team that visited Wuhan in late 2019 that was the source of the Corona outbreak (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-ch...)
So this is not about 'people making this about China', it has been China from the start trying to cover this up and trying to make it about other countries. A more transparent Chinese policy would have given other countries the chance to react early and save thousands of lives.
Military games / Fort Detrick vaping disease troll was in response to Tom Cotton and co. formally spewing lab leak theory. Note earlier date in Feb.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...
US politicized first, when soft measures failed a month after warning Wuhan lockdown. There was ample warning, enough that many of PRC neighbors with high traffic contained well with at least some effort in coordination. PRC position up until then was let science figure it out, Wuhan was very covid19 was first discovered but doesn't mean originated there. The brief domestic deflection in early Feb was possible import from ASEAN. Even early PRC "dis"info campaigns emphasized harsh lockdown not lockdown skepticism. Countries that didn't take Wuhan lockdown seriously got burned. Queue west being prominent source of exporting covid world wide by taking lax measures. This is seen in import statistic of every country that rigorously tracked imported covid cases - PRC exported very little cases, and essentially none few weeks after lockdown. North America / Europe, magnitudes more.
This isn't a China thing. It's a human thing. No one wants to be known as the person who destroyed the world like this.
There are many videos and articles on this site about how SARS-2-CoV was not zoonotic. I don't necessarily blame China, but the funders of the research.
https://www.peakprosperity.com/more-evidence-covid-19-may-no...
I'm not sure you can get more credible or independent than his work.
That's the rational response. The fact that it can be played for political gain means it will be played for political gain, regardless of how rational it is.
Look at the whole mask debacle of the last year. If we assume people can and do act rationally, then both sides wouldn't have played it up as much and made it a defining issue or lied about portions of it, but instead we had both people and organizations/parties using it to rally their base (on both sides) and an authority that decided to use half-truths to trick people into doing what they thought they should do given the resources available at the time (to put it kindly).
That's the reality of the world we lived in for the last 12 months, and I see no reason to assume it's all of a sudden different. I'm not sure that means we shouldn't know, but let's be real clear on what the the likely outcome is if it's found to have escaped from some lab in China, regardless of who funded what or who was working on it, and that's that it would be a complete and utter shit show for the West and China, and possibly the entire world.
It seems like we don't have evidence, but the natural evolutionary experiment that's occurred provides a staggering amount. We can see from the virus phylogeny that:
1. The virus entered the human population in October 2019. All known SARS2 sequences are related in a single clade that, under very soft assumptions about mutation rate, would coalesce in late fall 2019. The first sequences we got, in early 2020, had only a handful of mutations between them. Nothing has ever arisen outside of this clade.
2. The virus entered humans with it's spike protein already fully adapted to the human ACE receptor protein. We can see this because there was not an accelerated evolution in this protein. We did not see changes in the viral genome resulting in a significant phenotypic change until the b.1.1.7 and other "third wave" variants arose. This stands in intense contrast to every other zoonotic transfer we know of. Adaptation always occurs because biology is different enough that different viral configurations provide immediate gain, and through continuous mutation the virus is exploring a huge space of these all the time. The fact that it doesn't mutate rapidly indicates it is near a strong local optimum.
One way of understanding the significance of this is by thinking of the virus as a learned model which is learning a solution to the problem of its own survival. What this evidence shows is that is appeared already optimized. We see this because over an incredible number of update steps (many quadrillions perhaps, with each human infection being like a minibatch, and each viral replication like a step) there was no significant reduction in test loss (viral survival). We randomly picked a perfect initial model. Either that first virus was lucky in a way that is similar to guessing a perfect solution, which has a probability so low as to be fanciful, or it had already in incorporated all the readily-usa le information about the human ACE receptor.
Do we have evidence? What is the probability of this pattern occuring in the case of a natural spillover? It's 1:atoms-in-the universe level. Finding a virus already so optimized to humans by randomly sampling from existing ones is like the kind of collision probability level that we comfortably use to build cryptocurrency castles that assume key non-collision. In the case of a virus optimized by serial passage in the lab? Frankly it's indistinguishable from that.
In this case, as the article mentions, there was a conflict of interest as well that might well have motivated some leading scientists in the field to campaign against the theory that the Wuhan lab was the source of the outbreak.
This is untrue. I'd point to this quote:
“It’s pretty apparent that there’s this evolutionary arms race between the receptor binding domain and ACE2 that’s happening within the bats themselves,” says Tyler Starr, a postdoc in the lab of genome scientist Jesse Bloom at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “Whatever it’s doing is ratcheting up this evolution and sometimes spitting out things that can bind potentially to many different ACE2s, including ours.”[1]
The unique thing about COVID is the transmission and the long incubation time.
There are plenty of naturally occurring mutations that have occurred that are more contagious than COVID (AIDS R0=~4.5, Ebola=~2.5 are two major ones that spring to mind). And SARS1 had a very similar binding behaviour, and the jumping behavior via civets is very similar to COVID.
[1] https://cen.acs.org/biological-chemistry/infectious-disease/...
This is a good summary of the current consensus:
It is clear from our analysis that viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been circulating in horseshoe bats for many decades. The unsampled diversity descended from the SARS-CoV-2/RaTG13 common ancestor forms a clade of bat sarbecoviruses with generalist properties—with respect to their ability to infect a range of mammalian cells—that facilitated its jump to humans and may do so again. Although the human ACE2-compatible RBD was very likely to have been present in a bat sarbecovirus lineage that ultimately led to SARS-CoV-2, this RBD sequence has hitherto been found in only a few pangolin viruses. Furthermore, the other key feature thought to be instrumental in the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to infect humans—a polybasic cleavage site insertion in the S protein—has not yet been seen in another close bat relative of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4
b) Genetic analysis indicates that it most likely came from bats directly to humans, but picked up the ACE2 receptors from a Pangolin virus that was passed back to bats, evolved there and then infected humans. To quote the same nature article I lined above:
However, on closer inspection, the relative divergences in the phylogenetic tree (Fig. 2, bottom) show that SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely to have acquired the variable loop from an ancestor of Pangolin-2019 because these two sequences are approximately 10–15% divergent throughout the entire S protein (excluding the N-terminal domain). It is RaTG13 that is more divergent in the variable-loop region (Extended Data Fig. 1) and thus likely to be the product of recombination, acquiring a divergent variable loop from a hitherto unsampled bat sarbecovirus28. This is notable because the variable-loop region contains the six key contact residues in the RBD that give SARS-CoV-2 its ACE2-binding specificity27,37. These residues are also in the Pangolin Guangdong 2019 sequence. The most parsimonious explanation for these shared ACE2-specific residues is that they were present in the common ancestors of SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13 and Pangolin Guangdong 2019, and were lost through recombination in the lineage leading to RaTG13. This provides compelling support for the SARS-CoV-2 lineage being the consequence of a direct or nearly-direct zoonotic jump from bats, because the key ACE2-binding residues were present in viruses circulating in bats.
and:
Although the human ACE2-compatible RBD was very likely to have been present in a bat sarbecovirus lineage that ultimately led to SARS-CoV-2, this RBD sequence has hitherto been found in only a few pangolin viruses.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4
There are plenty of viruses from animals known to infect humans, viruses that have never been in humans and are not evolved to infect them, this happens alarmingly regularly. Here's a couple you've probably never heard of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_bat_lyssavirus , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendra_virus
There is absolutely nothing amazing about covid being able to infect humans, it's exceptional because it can pass from human to human and because it's airborne(ish).
Yes, absolutely. AFAIK that's where almost all viruses that infect humans come from.
> it's exceptional because it can pass from human to human
With extremely high efficiency, from the first appearance of the virus! If it were not already optimal, then the initial transmission rate would have been lower, and the genome would have had to rapidly change in the process of surviving. This was seen with SARS1. It's seen with other epidemics. The fact that it isn't seen here is very, very weird. Why did SARS2 not have to adapt to its new host?
> The virus entered humans with it's spike protein already fully adapted to the human ACE receptor protein.
1. Is a partially functional (still infectious) spike receptor protein possible? (you don't know, and present no evidence in this rant)
2. How do you know the virus shows "no accelerated evolution"...partially effective viruses would have a lower replication factor, and not become global pandemic, and would not spread far enough to preserved within the human population as anything of interest.
3. How do you know that a natural virus which was only partially effective at replication didn't in fact encounter favorable conditions when it encountered humans, having accidentally been better adapted for them?
> The fact that it doesn't mutate rapidly indicates it is near a strong local optimum.
4. How do you know that the spike protein - which is highly conserved amongst coronaviruses - can even have a range of mutations and still retain function (allowing viral entry to the cell for infectious purposes)? (you don't, research finds that the spike protein has suboptimal binding to ACE receptors - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7239051/)
> This stands in intense contrast to every other zoonotic transfer we know of.
5. Does it? Because no research is proposing this. Research in fact finds that analysis of similar coronaviruses shows that the spike protein is likely the result of multiple recombinations between a few species (https://academic.oup.com/emph/article/2020/1/290/5956769).
> Do we have evidence? What is the probability of this pattern occuring in the case of a natural spillover?
6. Do you? Apparently not because there's not a single shred of peer reviewed research you care to link to support your position here, and you've done none of the legwork to support the logic part of your conclusions.
That's not really true. It was adapted to ACE but not perfectly. As the B117 shows it could do better. Coronaviruses mutate slowly and random mutation in the spike protein is a lot more likely to make non-functional than to improve it. It's good enough, not perfect. Evolution likes good enough.
EDIT: but you do raise a good point with how much better than the known coronaviruses' spikes it is. Perhaps there is another intermediate host with ACE2 closer to humans? Sars-Cov-2 infects pretty well lots of animals - almost all the cats, minks, ...
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/36/22311
Evolution doesn't require anything beyond "good enough", but it's surprising for a virus to be better-adapted to humans than to its animal hosts at the moment of its zoonotic jump--before the jump, where could that pressure come from? I don't think this is determinative, but it points weakly in favor of lab origin (e.g., from culture in human cells or in mice genetically engineered to express human ACE2).
Also: major changes in he spike protein could impact the ability of the virus to infect humans, so -- there is that.
[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2104974
This article suggests that lvl2 protocols were indeed used for lvl4 biohazards.
The US is a major global center of trade and travel, and in the end, much of the spread around the world is because there was basically no attempt to stop it from spreading through there.
All roads lead to Rome.
A similar, though obviously still very different, example that came to my mind is Chernobyl. The incident made bad reactor designs and their consequences visible to all, and in the long run, it improved nuclear reactors' safety. How would you feel that after Chernobyl, there was no research on why it happened, and people would have said "well, what's happened happened, there is no way to change that, so why investigate"?
If we never figure out (and we don't even attempt) how the virus came to be (wet market, lab accident, intentional release, eating raw exotic animal, or just a normal mutation, I don't know, I'm not an expert, but saying the options I heard so far), the same circumstances will be continue to be available, and sooner or later, another (potentially worse) pandemic will hit us.
However, as you mentioned, there are negative effects of knowing things, so I wish whenever we do find out what and how happened, nations could do a "blameless post-mortem" (in case it was unintentional).
This is legitimate reason to have a good investigation and find out the real cause of the virus. From pure technical point of view it is absolutely right.
However because of the cognitional defects of our cave man brain due to the quick social and technology progress outpaced the nature evolution process, the OP's strategy shows wisdom. Let me explain:
There are 3 cases that can present the same reason:
1.Your case which I think it's sincere request for improvement of the procedure to avoid future disaster.
2.There's a known hidden agenda based on some ideology but asking for investigation. A good example is what Dick Cheney and a group of his associates did. They had no interests to understand truth. A reason for investigation is a excuse for fool people
3.(This one is difficult to understand) There's an unintentional hidden agenda mixed with the legitimate reason that the guy who ask for truth might not be aware of hidden agenda. There are a lot of example in another community not available to English reader. The closest example is Australia Prime minister Morrison. It's very controversial and speculative. Most HNers' won't have the necessary insight to understand this example but I believe presenting a weak example is better than nothing.
With case 2 and especially 3, OP's strategy is better than yours. That's why I said OP's shows wisdom: Avoid conflicts and more loss as a whole.
Sometime a correct conclusion in the scope of leaf could be a wrong conclusion in the scope of tree. But maybe correct again in the scope of Forest. I'm not claiming my conclusion is better than yours. I might be in the "tree" level. I'm saying you are looking at a pure technical point of view. OP's thinking is bigger.
(edit) reformat and word correction
And before anyone accuses me of racism: I am speaking about the Chinese government, not Chinese people, who are the first victims of the government.
The Truth and Reconciliation tribunals the UN puts on (e.g. South African apartheid) are a good example. Just achieving a common understanding of what happened has value all by itself.
If we are playing the blame game we should be playing it right.
China may not be able to fully compensate the world financially, but if you win a billion dollar lawsuit against me, you won't get your money, but you will still get my car and anything else I own.
Not to get all political but this totally reminds me of Mitt Romney on Jan 6th evening when he said something to the tune of: “an (election) audit won’t satisfy, them only telling them the truth will”… how he or anyone at a news studio knew the truth when nobody else did was baffling to me
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Where are all the bats infected with this virus? It it came from a bat, it would have had to be circulating in the bat population a LOT to mutate enough to jump to humans, right?
So...why not go find a bad, identify the parent virus, and close this whole thing out?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
Guess who found the bat host? Shi Zhengli of the very WIV in question.
"In late 2006, scientists from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention of Hong Kong University and the Guangzhou Centre for Disease Control and Prevention established a genetic link between the SARS coronavirus appearing in civets and humans, bearing out claims that the disease had jumped across species.[62]"
It goes on to state that the bat link was confirmed in 2017.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB107456233748805972
> In late May 2003, studies were conducted using samples of wild animals sold as food in the local market in Guangdong, China. The results found that the SARS coronavirus could be isolated from masked palm civets (Paguma sp.)
and
> The SARS epidemic began in the Guangdong province of China in November 2002 ... Chinese government officials did not inform the World Health Organization of the outbreak until February 2003.
That's six months from the start of the outbreak, and less than four months from WHO being informed, not three years.
Where did you get your "three years" figure from?
I did plenty of these gain-of-function experiments in my postgrad studies. Mice tumours cells given genes to super-express certain cell adhesion molecules. Without this kind of approach, it is difficult to impossible to study these reactions. You just gotta be careful.
So a very likely explanation is some low level employees grabbed some bats, got their suits and vehicles contaminated didn't clean things properly, drove down to the Wuhan laboratory, and rested in town spreading virus contaminated dust or if they were already sick, their virus filled respiration about.
No lab leak needed, just the regular practices when "Wuhan Institute of Virology in China sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across the country", and those doing so were being sloppy, as they have been known to be repeatably.
[0] Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus — and suggests new outbreak could occur - December 2017 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9
Also, my understanding (quite possibly wrong) is that while humans can get sick from bats, as cave workers did in Southern China, those viruses aren't contagious in the sense that the sick humans go on to infect others. "Since no case of an epidemic caused by direct bat-to-human transmission has yet been demonstrated, it is thought that the transfer to humans more probably took place via an intermediate host species in which the virus could evolve and move towards forms likely to infect human cells." [1] If that's right then your explanation of spilled bat samples is incomplete: it doesn't explain what caused the bat samples to adapt into a form that could spread among humans. That sort of puts us back at square 1. Another way of saying this is that if your explanation is likely, then we'd have expected the pandemic to have started where the bats are - through sick cave workers or something similar. But in fact it started far away.
[1] https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-is-be...
The leader of the Wuhan team went there with a team to collect samples and animals. In the early days of Covid, those samples were re-examined and it turned out that the genome of the Covid strain was very similar to the Covid 19 virus. So the conclusion was taken that those bats must have been the origin where Corona somehow started. Somehow nobody at that time thought much about the fact that those samples were kept in Wuhan, exactly where the outbreak started.
Bats have a very unusual immune system in that they can harbor viruses without the virus killing the bat or the bat killing the virus.
It's one of the things that makes them ferociously good incubators for a cross-species mammalian plague. The other things are that they fly (so can cover larger distances than most mammals) and have communal living (so can transmit to each other very readily).
Hence I didn't say we evolved from chimpanzees, even though it'd've suited the snow clone better
But wet markets and virus laboratories are still on...
But then, we should probably also apply Hanlon's razor [2] "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Rhetorically speaking, Hanlon's razor doesn't quite have the same weight as Occam's, if only because people tend to view behavior they don't understand as stupid. But I'll add another "razor": don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to self-interested.
My point was more that the dichotomy stupidity vs. malice seems to imply that e.g. playing music, or having dinner is either stupid or bad. Many things get done out of self-interest without being malicious, or without malicious intent.
The remakes are always worse.
So we'd a priori expect coronavirus to originate in the area with coronavirus hosts, whether it was through the lab or the market...
Also while there are other species of bats near Wuhan, they are in hibernation in winter.
Every neighbourhood in every city in Asia has a wet market. Well other than Japan and Singapore, I guess. I live in Asia and there are two wet markets within walking distance of my house.
Wet markets are as omnipresent as convenience stores in America.
Since its rather trivial to compare viruses and I haven't seen mention about it being a different variant, I assume its still the same virus as original Wuhan ones.
Even to my rather ignorant eyes this makes Wuhan just a place it got spread to wider public, and not much more. Definitely not some patient-0 situation and most probably not even ground-0 one. Now I don't claim to understand why it didn't explode in those early days like it did afterwards, but this fact can't be ignored when evaluating this topic. I wonder why there isn't a single mention of this in article.
The other big inconsistency is that the epidemic did not become nonticeable in Italy until late February 2020. If COVID was already present in September 2019, why didn't it spread rapidly like it did anywhere else?
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03008916209877...
Heh, what is the Razor or other applicable language construct when someone gives two options and then suggests there's one they think is obviously correct, without saying which one or why - leaving it completely opaque or confusing to the casual reader?
I legit do not know which of the two cases here you think Occam's Razor applies straightforwardly. I can make easy cases for both sides being the simplest explanation.
e.g., "it seems simplest that the leading world centre would have excellent safety protocols and thus the chaotic wet market in a region known for those viruses is more likely the source", vs "it seems simplest that human error in a research environment studying these viruses compared to a wet market where, if that was a likely vector, we'd surely be seeing these things way more often", kind of thing.
There’s an unnecessarily large assumption being made here. We can look at the Wuhan institute’s past and the history of comparable labs to get an estimation of lab leak frequency.
Similarly, there’s a whole bunch of context around things like: what kind of samples did the lab have in its freezers when covid was discovered? In the wetmarket case, what’s the transmission chain from a reservoir through to the market have to look like?
Once you compile all this context, then Occam’s Razor becomes a good tool. But before that it’s just a shot in the dark (kinda like you hint at). I’m not sure any single HN comment is really capable of giving sufficient context for this particular case.
https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan...
Escape from an incompetently-secured and reckless lab definitely falls under "stupidity". There is nothing malicious about it.
The conclusion that "the coronavirus originated in Wuhan therefore the Wuhan Institute caused the virus" could be backwards even if the correlation is real. It could be the virology institute is in Wuhan because there are bat coronaviruses near there.
And still without any speculation, one of those hypothesis could potentially be confirmed if only the main suspect did let us look at the crime scene. In any criminal trial, said suspect would get a guilty verdict from the jury in minutes.
No, since in a criminal trial the standard is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That hasn't been met here.
This article certainly makes a prima facie case which would be enough to trigger discovery in a civil case. A reasonable person could also think that it has provided proof on the balance of probabilities, which would be enough for civil but not criminal liability.
More than a year after the initial documented cases in Wuhan, the source of SARS-CoV-2 has yet to be identified, and the search for a direct or intermediate host in nature has been so far unsuccessful.
The low binding affinity of SARS-CoV-2 to bat ACE2 studied to date does not support Chiroptera as a direct zoonotic agent. Furthermore, the reliance on pangolin coronavirus receptor binding domain (RBD) similarity to SARS-CoV-2 as evidence for natural zoonotic spillover is flawed, as pangolins are unlikely to play a role in SARS-CoV-2′s origin and recombination is not supported by recent analysis.
At the same time, genomic analyses pointed out that SARS-CoV-2 exhibits multiple peculiar characteristics not found in other Sarbecoviruses.
A novel multibasic furin cleavage site (FCS) confers numerous pathogenetically advantageous capabilities, the existence of which is difficult to explain though natural evolution...
source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0
I looked into these lab origin theories for the furin cleavage site last year. The problem with it being a laboratory insertion was that although performing an insertion is relatively easy once you know what to insert, generally it’s beyond current science to independently create mutations for a specific purpose.
It’s a bit beyond me as a non-biologist but my feeling based on the literature was that the lab origin was unlikely. However it is pushed in certain circles partly for ideological reasons, based on evidence that is plausible at first glance but with a lot more digging not entirely convincing evidence.
However, there didn’t really seem to be much neutral expert analysis of the evidence.
>“Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory,” writes Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2.
> “At least 11 gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infective, are published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
> Such furin-mediated activation is unusual in that it occurs in part during virus entry. Our findings may explain the polytropic nature, pathogenicity, and life cycle of this zoonotic coronavirus.
MERS-CoV uses furin cleavage of S1/S2 but it does not bind to ACE2 like SARS-CoV-2.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15214
At the same time, China risks looking guilty because they are defensive and try to control the information. All this leaves this kind of article with a seemingly plausible scientific and ideological basis that is difficult for laymen and even scientific journalists to evaluate due to the complexity of the science involved, and not many scientists interested in spelling out why the reasoning might be flawed.
You also see in the quote from the article:
“Yes, but your wording makes this sound unlikely — viruses are specialists at unusual events,” is the riposte of David L. Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow who regards lab escape as a conspiracy theory.
Usually the more interesting questions are of the kind of what -isn’t- being said, of what information isn’t being related or investigated.
If I'm right the reason it's not being analysed or investigated is that from a scientific perspective it's just not an interesting question, rather than for a deeper ideological reason as suggested in this article.
I drew the conclusion that this furin cleavage site theory wasn't actually convincing after a few days of wading through scientific literature, but as a non-expert I was pretty disappointed that there wasn't more accessible analysis of well-written arguments as presented in the article that would put it into a more objective perspective. It would have been great if that scientist they quote would have provided a more detailed rebuttal.
The problem is it actually isn't the job of scientists to dispel wrong or inaccurate information for the most part. They do detailed esoteric studies and write them up for specialists. It's nobody's job to rebut bad arguments, and that's the problem.
At best, it demonstrates intellectual laziness, at worst a political / ideological conviction, neither of which is a hallmark of a good scientist.
The scientist provides a scientific explanation (“Recombination is naturally very, very frequent in these viruses, there are recombination breakpoints in the spike protein and these codons appear unusual exactly because we’ve not sampled enough.”).
But let's flip this round as the author here is openly heavily weighing his dismissal of scientific support for natural origin by claiming that it is supported by ideological reasons. That's exactly the same as someone dismissing the lab claim for ideological/conspiracy reasons, just the other way round. Natural origin doesn't support the author's ideology, so he dismisses it and has a bias towards evidence for lab origin. The author has previous done this exact some thing with his previous writings, taking a fringe position and dismissing scientific objection that aligns with the scientific consensus as ideology. Basically, this is a subjective opinion piece, not objective analysis.
What makes you think that they are a concept developed by the CIA?
How many people (lab technicians, doctors, 'police') would know it is from a lab and are hiding that information? If the answer is 'hundreds' then the chances of it being kept hidden are very low. That is what labeling it a conspiracy theory means.
The transition from arresting doctors to locking down cities doesn’t make much sense otherwise. You could argue they had motivation to arrest doctors talking about a natural infection if they thought they were spreading fear and disrupting lunar new year festivities, but going to locking down whole cities is about as fear inducing and disruptive as it gets. If that were the motivations for arrest, I’d expect more reluctant and less heavy handed mitigation efforts.
If this were a natural disease and the motivations were to control it as quickly as possible, I’d expect early doctors to be painted as national heroes/propagandized positively very early, similarly to the portrayal of the people that built extra hospital spaces early on.
It’s possible there were different officials involved that changed motivations halfway through, but the lab leak hypothesis offers a more consistent explanation. It makes sense that they would have tried to control the virus quietly if it were a lab leak/wanted to keep it secret, and that they would engage in drastic measures to control it when that didn’t work.
China has the added wrinkle that it's so large that national authorities policies' can vary wildly from local and regional responses for a long time while the bureaucrats play a game of telephone.
I still think the response is more consistent with a lab leak, even when bureaucratic schizophrenia is accounted for, but that expected level of noise makes it impossible to conclude anything definitively.
I'm ambivalent about the two hypotheses, but China's early behaviour fits either, I think. I do think that the instinct of the regional bureaucracy is to control the flow of information, and punish those that proceed outside the party hierarchy (even if there was no foul play/bad conscience/anything to hide).
The disappearance of Huang Yan Ling is another bit of evidence that pushes me towards the lab leak.
If I were to assign a percentage to it, I’d say about 60% chance lab origin is true, 40% chance natural origin is true.
Do you actually have any evidence in which to compare and contrast how a government behaves when trying to cover up a manmade virus vs how a government behaves when trying to cover up a natural virus that has hopped species? Genuinely asking because we absolutely need to be pinning conclusions on evidence and not conjecture here.
My counterpoint is Ai Wei Wei was disappeared for barely anything at all, dude was producing art that people don’t like. And Jack Ma also disappeared for a period of time right? The Chinese government disappears people like I have coffee in the morning. I would need more evidence to presume this disappearance of a doctor is somehow more significant.
I’m not GP, but GP used the term “lab escape”, not “man made”. Lab escape could just as easily apply to a naturally occurring disease that was being studied in the lab.
The CCP has a huge incentive to have her come forward and make some kind of a statement that she's fine and that the outbreak has nothing to do with the lab/those are all rumors, similar to what the lead researcher Shi Zhengli did. The expected behavior if she were the target of a rumor that she was patient zero would be to squash it immediately in the strongest way possible, whether or not it were true. Huang Yan Ling making a statement and talking about that silly rumor would be the strongest way to squash that rumor.
The fact that has not happened suggests she isn't able to because she is no longer alive.
As to more generic comparisons about behavior during a natural virus vs an accidentally released virus, I don't have anything stronger than conjecture, but think a comparison to SARS would shed some light. Again, it is my understanding that during that outbreak, in which a natural virus hopped species, there was heavy handed action and repression of information about how bad things were getting, but that was after things had gotten bad. I don't believe there were doctors that were being silenced before the outbreak got severe. If you want to prevent the severity of a natural outbreak you need and want doctors to be jumping on the issue early, and I would imagine you would want to exaggerate the effectiveness of their early intervention rather than silence doctors trying to mount an early intervention.
Later discovering they really did have a problem and it was even worse than SARS going to a full lockdown at the main crossroads city right before Chinese New Year (the largest human migration event).
The motivation feels very normal/predicable for China. And also similar to their SARS response. So is SARS also an intentional self inflicted lab leak? And is MERS a secret belt and road initiative?
Seems weird there is a conspiracy about the third deadly coronavirus but not the first two... or the common cold for that matter? Where did that come from and was that a lab leak?
Whole thing smells of lazy arm chair enquiry with a touch of xenophobia
There’s nothing particularly new about lab escapes, they happen quite frequently. And given the presence of a bio-lab studying coronaviruses just a short distance from the site of the first reported cases, why would any rational person not consider that as a possibility?
I don’t think you even have to go down the “bio weapon” route here. It could be as simple as a worker infecting themselves with a natural sample unwittingly. Following your logic then, I think China would be incredibly unlikely to admit a lab escape of a natural sample now given the devastation it has caused. It’d be a huge loss of face and draw questions towards China’s competence.
The main difference from SARS is we know there is a virology lab in Wuhan researching coronaviruses right across from the wet market considered the epicenter.
I don’t know enough about the reaction to SARS to know how similar it was, but my understanding was they were similarly draconian internally, and were trying to keep it relatively quiet, but I am not aware of any arrests of doctors early on in SARS outbreaks.
The plausibility of Covid escaping from a lab does not make all viruses plausibly escaped from labs. The reason it’s more plausible for covid are the initial reactions and the proximity of the epicenter to a virology lab studying covid.
I fail to see how it’s xenophobic to consider the lab leak plausible. If anything a natural spread relies on the assumption that the wet market was engaged in unhygienic practices and that someone foreign may have eaten an infected bat.
It is not true that there are never going to be reasonable motivations to deploy a virus:-
It could be viewed as a tool to alter population demographics in an ageing society.
It might be deployed against an adversary.
It might be used to reduce the human population to avoid a predicted ecological disaster.
There are probably dozens of very reasonable motivations.
I think it’s unreasonable to think there was a motivation to intentionally release Covid.
I don’t think there’s reasonable motivation given when and where the outbreak started, how the virus works, China’s response, etc.
I think the particular scenarios you’re painting are also quite extreme/unlikely, so any claim that a virus was released intentionally would require extraordinary evidence in most cases/I’d rarely entertain that hypothesis. There are less drastic and risky ways with less blowback of dealing with all of those issues, even if you assume a very capable bad actor and ignore the normal and expected amount of incompetence and error.
If you are familiar with Wuhan, you’d know you are talking crap. The virology lab is on the East side of the river in the University sector of the city.
The market is on the west side of the river and is in the cbd sector of the city.
We are talking 10km distance apart, with a huge river between. And there are many other wet markets between that would more likely service the community closer to the lab.
That particular wet market takes a lot of shipments straight off boats and from outside the city.
But sure. If by “right across” you meant “on the other side of the CBD, across the largest river in China, and on the opposite side of the largest University campus in China” then I agree.
https://www.breakingasia.com/wp-content/uploads/Wuhan-Virolo...
A virology lab studying the human transmissibility of bat corona viruses ~10km away from the purported epicenter of the outbreak of a bat related coronavirus is notable.
How come no one at the lab? Or the University got it? How come initially it was Hankou (west side) that was locked down and not Wuchang (east side)?
Surely the folks leaking (given the equivalent of the cdc is in the same location) it would have thought of that and locked it down first?
Sorry that facts keep spoiling the juicy narrative.
No doctors were arrested early on. Few got cold tea lectures about spreading rumors that literal SARs returned not novel SARs like virus. Signed boilerplate paperwork and was released back to work. This is generic behavior for "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" tier infractions. Not particularly heavy handed at all as far as PRC behavior is concerned. Folks get talks with cyber security for far less. Arguably warranted, had covid not been once in generation virus, spreading panic based on rumors to some critical mass before CNY is pretty egregious. The fact these doctors got slap on risk treatment shows officials were essentially oblivious of severity of novel virus. If there was foreknowledge of a lab leak, these doctors would be under surveillance and stashed away in safe house away from family/friends/work for months/years like in other politically sensitive cases.
The following happened to Doctor Li Wenliang:
> On 3 January 2020, police from the Wuhan Public Security Bureau investigating the case interrogated Li, issued a formal written warning and censuring him for "publishing untrue statements about seven confirmed SARS cases at the Huanan Seafood Market." He was made to sign a letter of admonition promising not to do it again. The police warned him that any recalcitrant behavior would result in a prosecution.
Being detained and forced to sign a letter on threat of prosecution is the practical equivalent of being arrested.
> If there was foreknowledge of a lab leak, these doctors would be under surveillance and stashed away in safe house away from family/friends/work for months/years like in other politically sensitive cases.
There is no evidence that doctors like Doctor Li Wenliang had knowledge of the origin, and were targeted for reporting on the virus.
Huang Yan Ling was a researcher at the virology lab in Wuhan that has been missing since right before the outbreak.
Huang Yan Ling stopped working at WIV in 2015. The only reason she's noteworthy is conspiracy theorist tried to link her as patient 0. People have some expectation that PRC should indulge in random conspiracy theory by parading her around. Like is US going open up fort Detrick for scrutiny? No because entertaining the whims of yahoos is ridiculous.
That's a lie.
Oh that's easy: an authoritarian state would be arresting irrespective of the origin. They want to control the message , no matter what. The truth is a distraction in that case.
Once things flip, and the public becomes aware, then they can re-write history and make them national hero's. Chinese citizens are apparently skeptical of their own government, and get pissed off a lot, I suggest the Doctor who made the discovery is a little bit of a populist hero already.
The CCP's actions demonstrate they are fully authoritarian, that's about it.
It was more likely putting evolutionary pressure on Coronaviruses in order to change it's properties and behaviour.
Regarding selection pressure people do that all the time, in fact it is far from easy to artificially apply environmental pressure and obtain highly functional new variants. In cancer research, xenograft are extremely tricky to do with immunodeficient animal models, let alone human tissue in the lab. Sure you can have some success but it's difficult enough to reproduce. His point is that even if an artificially selected highly viable variant was obtained, it is very unlikely it can prevail in real world nature selection (large scale too). I'm no expert but happy to read about any paper if it's not the case.
(1) Which category (if either) has an advantage by Occam's razor? (2) Which category (if either) is more easily falsifiable? (Meaning easier to determine improbable, since it is hard to falsify them entirely)
For me, I see neither having an advantage on (1), but on (2) there are a finite number of relevant, well-known lab techniques that could be investigated.
I think that branch is past what scientific dialog really covers, and it's probably the methods and standards of proof from legal exploration that might be the way to progress the discussion. Unfortunately, the world is missing a moderator that folks would broadly trust to facilitate that conversation.
Labs are the places where people go to push the boundaries. If we go with lab-leak, it is extremely possible that they had figured something new out. They were doing something novel in there, because they were paid money to do novel things.
It would be trivially easy for a hostile power to covertly release a pathogen in another country.
It would also be trivially easy to engineer simultaneous release in multiple locations.
It would be less easy but not impossible to take an existing pathogen during a pandemic, engineer a variant, and release it in another country.
There would always be ambiguity and uncertainty about the source, because there are no telltale markers that unambiguously define an origin, or even whether a pathogen is natural or man-made.
I am not suggesting any of this happened. But I am pointing out that biowarfare has some unexpected covert possibilities.
While Covid may or may not be an example - insufficient data - any defensive strategy should consider the possibility that some other pathogen might be seeded deliberately.
I would say that it's more likely that this was a natural mutation that got its chance to survive natural selection because of the lasting and intense contact with human researchers in the Wuhan lab. There are some media sources that show that researches didn't take too many precautions with avoiding this contact. E.g. there are pictures of researchers without wearing gloves and one that's even showing bites from bats.
No it isn't.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4810786/
I think a lot of people dismiss the lab leak hypothesis based on the idea that a lab-created virus must have an engineered genome rather than an evolved one.
I've done some separate reading that this is a legitimate way that viruses can adapt to a new species, but I don't have any background to evaluate the argument much beyond face value.
Some of the adjacent comments shed some doubt there as it sounds like bats aren't a plausible source because of the spike protein genetics.
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/a-propos...
In fact, the paper [3] cited in the top comment has the following response to the Wu and Zhao paper you cited:
> The recent acquisition of the FCS by SARS-CoV-2 via a natural insert was proposed by Wu and Zhao (2021) on the basis of the existence of FCS in other, more distant Betacoronaviruses with different loop positions to SARS-CoV-2 and the existence of a partial natural insert in the same region in RmYN02 (Zhou et al. 2020a). The reliability of the conclusions of Zhou et al. (2020a) has been questioned by Deigin and Segreto (2020), who particularly challenge the claim that RmYN02 has an insertion around the site of the FCS insertion in SARS-CoV-2 and instead point to a two amino acid deletion in RmYN02 at that locus. Therefore, RmYN02 should not be used as evidence of the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2′s FCS until its claimed insertion is properly validated.
Disclaimer: I’m no biologist/virologist.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.05.023
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.00627
[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0
[1] https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1197631383470034951?s...
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
They exist in the human HCoV-HKU1, HCoV-OC43, MERS-CoV and appear to have evolved independently at least 6 times in betacoronaviruses.
Furthermore while this article claims that the furin cleavage site has not found in any sarbecoviruses, that is now outdated information:
> "Evidence for SARS-CoV-2 related coronaviruses circulating in bats and pangolins in Southeast Asia"
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7873279/
Both RacCS203 (91.5% similar to SARS-CoV-2) and RmYN02 (93.3% similar to SARS-CoV-2) have furin cleavage sites. So we're up to 7-to-9 times now that evolution has evolved a furin cleavage site in betacoronaviruses, including 3 sarbecoviruses that may or may not be directly related.
The whole "furin cleavage site is an indication of human engineering" argument is just falsified at this point.
I don't think the FCS is determinative, and I agree Wade's article overstates its significance. In a Bayesian analysis, it still seems to me like it points weakly (at least 3x prevalence?) towards lab origin, though.
The significance is zero. Nature itself knows how to figure it out.
> but rare among such viruses in nature.
This assertion is false. It is common among betacoronaviruses in nature, not rare. That was the point of those two articles.
We have even found two sarbecoviruses now (directly related to SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2) in bats in Thailand which have an FCS.
It points literally 0% towards lab origin.
It would be nice if each individual piece of evidence were all or nothing, either perfect evidence of lab origin in itself or perfectly irrelevant. I don't think real evidence usually comes that way, so it seems valuable to me to try to quantify even weak evidence.
And not that Nobel laureates don't have an unfortunate history of incorrect beliefs later in life: but I assume you're aware David Baltimore considers the FCS significant? He doesn't seem to have said anything else obviously crazy (unlike Mullis, Pauling, etc.), at least.
Even given the CGG codon? Sorry, not buying it. You can argue that its evidentiary value is weaker than the article suggests, but it's not 0%.
https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-is-be...
Basically COVID-19 is the result of evil and illegal experiments setup by Anthony Fauci (US researcher and long time civil servant) at the Wuhan virology lab and covered up by WHO scientists.
It is as idiotic as it sounds.
https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the...
Origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus
And unlike the author here, this report is based upon interviews with employees at the lab and various form of documentation provided by the lab. Including health records of the employees.
For more from one of the WHO people:
https://theconversation.com/i-was-the-australian-doctor-on-t...
I was the Australian doctor on the WHO’s COVID-19 mission to China. Here’s what we found about the origins of the coronavirus
https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the...
Origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus
And unlike the arrticle here, this report is based upon interviews with employees at the lab and various form of documentation provided by the lab. Including health records of the employees.
For more from one of the WHO people:
https://theconversation.com/i-was-the-australian-doctor-on-t...
I was the Australian doctor on the WHO’s COVID-19 mission to China. Here’s what we found about the origins of the coronavirus
> We visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is an impressive research facility, and looks to be run well, with due regard to staff health. We spoke to the scientists there. We heard that scientists’ blood samples, which are routinely taken and stored, were tested for signs they had been infected. No evidence of antibodies to the coronavirus was found. We looked at their biosecurity audits. No evidence.
So this is what they were told, but did they actually test the samples, and confirm that they belonged to the right people and originated from the given date? Apparently no.
> We looked at the closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 they were working on — the virus RaTG13 — which had been detected in caves in southern China where some miners had died seven years previously. But all the scientists had was a genetic sequence for this virus. They hadn’t managed to grow it in culture.
This is probably the most convincing argument: if they actually had worked on viruses similar enough to plausible be modified into SARS-CoV-2, this would have left evidence in scientific papers etc.
> While viruses certainly do escape from laboratories, this is rare. So, we concluded it was extremely unlikely this had happened in Wuhan.
This is incredibly weak: "lab escapes are rare, so it's extremely unlikely" is not much of an argument.
It seems that proponents of the lab leak theory wants to turn the burden of proof upside down: I am claiming conspiracy starting with Anthony Fauci and ending up in a Chinese lab. It is up to you to provide hard evidence on why it is not so.
Sure you can do that as in freedom of thought and speech. But honestly; this is not really a constructive way to go about things.
There is an investegative group from the WHO interviewing the Wuhan lab people and looking at various form of documentation.
The lab leak proponents claim that they are all lying and all the documents are fraudulent.
The lab leak proponents have the burden of proof and IMHO kinda should shut up until they can carry that burden.
Insanity!
It's the media's job to investigate conflicts of interest, so the fact that they didn't looked into that, and that they took Daszak's original so-called debunking at face value, is bad optics on another level. It has left a credibility vacuum, so it's unsurprising that articles like the current one are coming in from the margins.
Saying there is no benefit is like saying there is no benefit for people people who switch jobs just so they get paid more.
> The prior probability of a lab escape is low
but the prior probability of "a pandemic from natural causes envelops the world" is also low, say below 1% a year. But now, given that "a pandemic does envelop the world", the posterior probability of lab escape and natural cause of course rises dramatically... and then saying "we didn't see much evidence for it" on a superficial tour organised by those responsible for the lab does not strike me as a very powerful rebuttal.
It's akin to "the prior probability of labour camps is low", and "on our tour of North Korea (accompanied by several North Korean tour guides showing us just those places they wanted to show us when they wanted to show us) we didn't see any labour camps, therefore we conclude that the probability of labour camps in North Korea is low".
While we're invoking statistics: Take the null H_0 = "the virus emerged naturally in any large Chinese city with > 1m inhabitants". In 2017, there were 102 of those. Thus, the probability under H_0 that the virus emerged in the one city in China with a level 4 biolab has p < 0.01.
It is akin to saying "Pliny the Younger didn't die in Pompeii overtaken by a volcano because there is so many other cities he could have died in and other causes of death." Statistically, that would have been true, up until we learned that it happened. Then the low probability ceases to matter, since it becomes an observation.
Statistically, this is due to both priors rising, proportional to their original values, such that now the sum P(lab escape)+P(natural cause) == 1 and their average is a coin-toss (50-50). So without outside information, the prior statistical probability isn't low: it is exactly neutral between the options.
We've also seen viruses arise in small villages. This is even more unlikely to be predictable in advance which village with p << 0.0001.
Exactly, that's what I was getting at - the prior for lab escape is low, but given that the pandemic happened, it the posterior for lab escape is 1 - posterior for natural.
And we had about as many examples for lab escapes as for natural epidemics in the last few decades, it seems to me.
If I remember correctly, wasn't there no evidence in scientific papers etc that the virus RaTG13, which is the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2, actually existed until after the Covid pandemic started and they suddenly published information about it?
However, the evidence is pretty clear that this was found and published earlier. It was originally described as "BtCoV/4991" and it was described and published as far as I can find as far back as 2016. (The name was changed to RaTG13 to describe that it was collected in 2013 in Tongguan).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/983856042 <-- partial RaTG13 sequence in 2016
Possibly also worth to consider that there are very high incentives to publishing in China, as far as I understand authors can often get rewarded for publications
In this case there is no smoking gun either way and a natural origin is much harder to trace than lab origin. That lack of absolute certainty, which science is often comfortable working with, leaves room for alternative theories to circulate and attach to those who like the sound of them for various reasons. It is a common human flaw that being aware that an event could hypothetically occur can be mistaken for proof that event actually occurred.
Even if we're 50/50 on the source of the virus, maybe we should still ban or regulate GoF research, and consider banning or regulating some types of wet markets.
As to 50/50 being reason to take large scale regulatory action, would you accept this level of proof to enact any law? That seems a low bar to me.
The point is that we should consider both the cost and the benefit of any regulation, in an expected value sense. Cars do kill people, but they also provide transportation that we've judged is worth that cost. But there's little indication that the WIV's (USA-funded!) risky research has delivered any significant benefit--the predicted coronavirus pandemic has indeed occurred, whatever the cause, and has anything from the WIV's work help us deal with that? On the other hand, even a small chance that their work caused this pandemic is a hugely negative expected value.
Long before the pandemic, there was obscure, academic debate over whether certain types of research with potential pandemic pathogens were worth the risk. Even with the evidence available at that time, I believe the 2014 ban was good, and its 2017 lifting was bad; but that debate now that takes on terrible new significance.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097416/
Speeding is common (difficult to prevent) and exhibits low downside risk. An intruder in the house is rare and carries an enormous downside risk. Which one is more analogous to the escape of a dangerous virus from a lab?
Why do you think that? Natural origin should leave closely-related viruses in nature, and animal sampling should find that. Such evidence was found for both the original SARS (palm civets) and MERS (camels) within about a year. For SARS-CoV-2, after about the same time and a much more intensive effort, we're still waiting.
Lab-accident origin is easy to trace only if the people working in the lab disclose everything they were working with. This requires both perfect honesty and perfect knowledge. The WIV did lots of work sampling viruses from nature, in remote bat caves that very few other humans would ever enter--around Yunnan to be clear, about 900 miles from Wuhan--and they could have leaked a novel virus before they even had a chance to sequence it. Of course that's still more likely to imply someone's lying, thus the accusations of "conspiracy theory"; but by that standard every human deception in history is conspiracy theory, including every intelligence operation, every Ponzi scheme, every cheating spouse, etc.
I'd put lab origin and natural origin around equal probability myself, and I'd consider anything between 10/90 and 90/10 reasonable. What would you estimate?
It would only be a conspiracy theory if there was intent - plenty of room for accident without making it a conspiracy.
We need to be figuring out how to deal with that. Wondering where it came from is mostly neither here nor there.
We aren't going to magically stop doing lab experiments if we can know for certain that it started in a lab. If we can determine for certain that this jumped species, welp, it isn't the first time and it won't be the last.
It seems intuitive that knowing the origin of the virus (sample escaping a lab or pure nature) could help prevent similar cases in the future or deal with them more efficiently. Is my intuition wrong here?
It would mean countries that have labs would either be forced to allow constant audits and reasonable regulations (such as don't have labs in cities) or face isolation.
It would also mean quite a heavy political response towards china if it indeed escaped a lab (which is why they're sabotaging everything even if it didn't...)
The threat of such a response to me is part of the problem. This incentivises an insecure player to act counter to the common goal by concealing the facts in order to avoid a scenario of being attacked by other players.
In the end we’re all human and mistakes happen. Regulations, audits, this can be implemented transparently for everyone; if that was the end of it and there was no perceived potential of repercussions, perhaps we wouldn’t have this problem.
(Not to say this somehow justifies the obstruction of the investigation, but IMO it’s something to keep in mind.)
Communist party rule will be in big danger if chinese people start blaming it for this clusterfuck.
Externally, its not controllable, US invaded 2 countries after 9/11, it would be easy to think that politicians will do something or someone more radical will get elected.
My assertion is that where it started is unlikely to yield real solutions because I don't think that's what caused it to turn into a giant and ongoing global crisis. I would like more focus on solutions and I don't think finding someone to pin the blame on is likely to move that needle at all.
My life experience suggests that finding a scapegoat tends to do the opposite: After someone's head is on a pike and calls for "justice" have been thereby nominally satisfied, the problem will rage on. Meanwhile, people may make less effort to solve it because they got some sense of satisfaction out of watching heads roll and justice get loudly declared.
Putting heads on a pike won't stop the spread of the virus. It's what many people want because millions have died.
It's not what I want and it has nothing to do with politics. I want people to live and be healthy and I simply don't think this is how that is most likely to be achieved.
This strikes me as just the latest stage of that process (or the latest chapter in that story).
If it turns out to have walked out of a lab, then perhaps it points to a need to harden containment. You can’t cancel virology, because we still need to deal with pathogens from nature.
There are no good and no bad guys, of course, but the topic is a very specific event and concrete facts, so shades and “what about X?” can go elsewhere as far as I’m concerned.
No magic required, we can just stop. Or better yet and more realistic, update and enforce regulations on this type of research.
Personally, I don't care whether it was a lab or not. The fact we haven't disproven it means it's not all that unlikely, and I think we should reform research practices now. We don't need to prove it did happen if we already know it could happen.
Can't help feeling sad, and bewildered in capacity of humans to cause damage at this level - the havoc this (human-made) virus is inflicting on people - close and faraway.
Some questions for people that know more about this.
How many Institutes of Virology exist around the world?
Is there a way to know how and by who are they funded?
Is there a way to know which ones were/had been working with coronavirus/sars?
https://www.cartalk.com/radio/letter/andy-letter
Original section of the episode: https://www.cartalk.com/sites/default/files/bestmoments/2019...
Not "easily" in the sense that it's easy to pinpoint the exact recipe, but "easily" in that the opposite outcomes would have been far more unlikely
Here's one way to look at it: if we had asked "how will China respond?" back in the beginning, how well would you have been able to predict their response if you had known the virus was of zoonotic origin? What if you had known the virus was of lab origin? I would think in the second case you'd have a lot more people betting that we'd get a swift (& deflective) response than in the former case, but it sounds like you disagree?
The suppression of information and subsequent deflection, I find much more problematic. They can also be explained by China’s dictatorship and their aggressive PR management, but still... one of the easiest ways for China to dispel any “lab leak/release hypotheses” would be full transparency. So far they haven’t done that. But refusal to do so can again easily be explained by accidential lab leak / accident hypothesis, whereas the original parent was proposing that China had superior information in advance... again, possible, but not necessary to explain the current sequence of events.
They probably were aware the risks of a highly infectious disease and possibly had contingencies drawn up for this very thing.
The UK had planned for what would happen during a global outbreak and the Conservative government scrapped them and 140,000 people died.
Whether the existence of a group of 15 MPs including such luminaries as Michael Gove, Matt Hancock and Gavin Williamson would have made a marked difference is not so obvious.
Existing plans were not scrapped and some believe using these plans actually was a big factor in the lacklustre initial response. The plans were too specific on what had come before (SARS most recently) and didn't allow accommodation of the differences of covid. It took a notable amount of time to change direction.
I'm sure there's plenty of blame to go around if one was inclined to do so, but I don't think disbanding one committee (despite its prescient name) was particularly notable.
For example: China built makeshift hospitals in very short period of time. This one is not filtered. Even Fauci suggested India should do that but in reality not many country can mobilize the resources. Another example is by strict locked down, Wuhan was sacrificed for the sake of all nation. Meanwhile the hospitals over the all country supplied volunteer medical personals and equipment pouring to Wuhan. There were too many registered volunteers even beyond the organizers requested. With enough resource concentrated in one place, covid was quickly under control.
It's mainly due to dictatorship system that other countries can not easily duplicate. This can explain most countries are "incompetent".
What I found absolutely baffling is that we in west saw what China was doing and haven't got our shit together until months later (with exceptions). Instead the discourse was about how much the Chinese eat unsavory things and how much pollution is there so it wouldn't be the same if it got here at all.
The expectation should be that officials would act once they determined it was fast spreading, not once thousands of people are sick.
Of course this mistake was repeated in many countries.
All of their speed was on the time between the decision and implementation, they din't display any prescience.
There has been an extensive analysis by a virologist on Reddit[¹], who claimed that, very simply, SARS-COV2 is a so-called "mosaic" virus, while man-made viruses are inevitably "chimera" ones. The article does not seem to make this distinction.
The virologist also chimed on HN (besides, calling BS on people who were, out of ignorance, spreading false beliefs), but it seems he's not participating to this post.
It'd be best to have the opinion of a specialized scientist, in order to to have scientific clarity before starting the political arguments.
[¹]=https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
The link you provided does discuss the probability of the virus accidentally leaking from a laboratory, however the reasons provided does not really provide much facts, seemingly more speculation (except for facts regarding who we think is patient zero):
"The WIV, and Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi’s lab group, are extremely well-respected in the virology community. As well respected as many US scientists.
● All the WIV’s sampling of bats and the genomes that they find in bats are publicly available information. Why isn’t SARS-CoV-2 on any of those lists? We would know.
● This doesn’t look anything like any laboratory accident that we’ve seen before.
● The evidence we have points to Patient Zero being nowhere near the City of Wuhan." (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kAHSEx9-eIyVIahczH8itHaUm9j...)
Occam's Razor, to me, suggests that it's more likely the virus came from the nearby infectious disease lab than from the wet market that operated probably for centuries.
You've generated 2 possible outcomes and gone "yes these are the only possibilities". But why? There was a whole train of transportation bringing things into the city for the lab.
Of course, if it was from that timeline, then the whole "lab escape" thing becomes a bit problematic doesn't it? Because, why would it need to be by activities of the lab specifically? It wouldn't - coz it could really just have rode in on anything. Which would of course mean that actually, it's probably way more likely that a virus which can infect humans, starting out in the wild, and being sample by a lab, probably infected a bunch of humans anyway because it didn't stop being in the wild when it was collected by researchers...
On your latter point, I'll just say that the virus likely needed some time to mutate into a human infectious form, and most of what we're talking about is, where and how did that happen?
You're not taking a logical position, you're starting from one conclusion "it was a Chinese lab!" and iterating around that, for the sole reason that the only reason the lab is being considered was the usual suspects of conspiracy theory began pushing "Chinese bioweapon" from the outset (and we all know bioweapons require labs, so one had to be found).
Forgive my preference not to generate verbal diarrhea into the page for your reading pleasure. It should be simple to extrapolate many more possibilities from what I stated if someone were willing to put an ounce of thought into it. Which you already did.
Anyway, I presume you are reacting to my summation of comparing the wet market vs lab theories and stating that one, when expanded to include several closely related possibilities, seemed far more likely to me. I stand by my framing, which doesn't preclude that there is another third possible factor, or many more.
I'm not starting from any conclusion like that, and in fact, my whole post was saying that it was likely NOT a bioweapon even if there was a lab escape. Please stop imputing talking points you have heard elsewhere to my argument. It's actually quite rude.
So in answer to occams razor you construct convoluted transmission scenarios?
If I take a known virus and make a single mutation (insertion of a furin site in this case), then I wind up with the same virus, + a furin. If I take that mutated virus, and then passage it through multiple generations in lab grown hosts, it will mutate at random throughout the genome.
The exact rate and the time it would take is heavily debated, but one important note is that viruses with an RNA-dependant RNA polymerase are, as an evolutionary strategy, quite poor at preserving their own genetic information. They have the highest error rate of replication of any known organism. Which means, after some discrete amount of generations, you could wind up with some sort of "mosaic" + "chimeric" virus. Again though, how many generations is under hot dispute. And how long that would take in nature vs in a laboratory is also under hot dispute.
100% of the evidence for lab leak is circumstantial. But we know two things:
1) If I set out to design a SARS-CoV 2, it's technically feasible. And there's reason to be interested in this type of research. And lab accidents involving pathogens can and do happen.
2) There's no single piece of evidence concretely and completely ruling it out. Which is unfortunate.
I'm a structural biologist, I primarily study viruses, I also engaged heavily in that topic you mentioned (against my better judgement). At the moment, I have a mental probability (which is probably incorrect) of wild virus 90% chance, lab leak 10% chance. I'd be extremely surprised if it was a lab leak, but I also can't sufficiently falsify that hypothesis to complete write it off.
Wouldn't the fact that it started in Wuhan point the razor in the direction of lab-escape theory?
I just have a hard time understanding why so clear evidence of the epidemic starting outside Wuhan is missing from the debate, so I'd appreciate if you could comment on it.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9241
He does come off as very arrogant, a lot of his replies were like "yeah but we'd know".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris