Part of me thinks that we should almost not waste the time to find out. Spend the effort on preparing for the next one, by improving air filtration etc.
Politics is too deeply entrenched, it will be an impossibility to uncover the truth.
Are you saying Trump was complicit in calling it the Chinese virus as part of their propaganda campaign? Sometimes things can just be explained by stupidity.
Was the idea that we should inquire about the virus’ origin dismissed as such, or just the idea that there is already strong evidence of any particular origin story?
Most of what I recalling at the time doesn't match that description. It was more disparaged as pointless speculation mostly being used to fuel political finger pointing when people had far more important things to figure out.
How do we know the next one will involve air filtration at all? Perhaps it will thrive on surfaces for long periods and will react negatively to air. How should we prepare for this or any other etiology that might be significantly different than this one? If we're constantly preparing for the last pandemic, and the next one is surprisingly different, wouldn't that be bad as well, as those resources could have been used better in the intervening time?
But, also, wouldn't it be better to determine the cause of this one so we know not to do whatever it was that caused this? For example, try to discourage exotic meats that might be host to the virus and/or eliminate or strictly control gain of function research, depending on the actual cause (or some other cause that isn't actually either of these)?
No this needs more investigation. Even if the Chinese side might be hard to crack, the American angle needs to be fully evaluated. Which American scientists were at least aware if not complicit (including Fauci) in this entire misguided attempt at proactively finding the next virus? Did they actively try to suppress their involvement once everything hit the fan?
The current plan is to 6x the funding for gain-of-function research, from $200 million to $1.2 billion, in the name of pandemic prevention. That's one serious reason for wanting to investigate whether gain-of-function research may have caused the current one.
The risks of such research have been in open debate for years, and the Obama administration even banned it for a while. It's not a far-fetched possibility, and it's a shame that the discussion about it became such a political casualty for the first year or so. The fact that heads are cooling a little now is clearly the precondition for scientists to be able to start writing letters like the OP.
> The current plan is to 6x the funding for gain-of-function research, from $200 million to $1.2 billion, in the name of pandemic prevention.
Do you have a source for this? Because if true this would be extremely frightening, even if Covid is natural the research is just too risky. GoF research should be banned, I mean it's entire justification for conducting this research in the first place is that it "helps predict new emergent diseases and develop vaccines" but it failed to predict this pandemic and did nothing towards vaccine development.
"Also, current plans are to expand worldwide collaboration on risky virus research sixfold, through the $1.2 billion Global Virome Project. Shouldn’t we figure out if this research sparked the pandemic before drastically expanding it?"
That's a pretty weak reference because it's part of an opinion piece with no references.
However there's an article in Nature which makes it clearer that the 1.2B figure is just an amount requested by those who suggested the project. A far cry from "current plans" to fund that amount.
> even if Covid is natural the research is just too risky. GoF research should be banned
This was actually the reason we stopped the research in the US in 2014: Risky with no clear benefit. It was restarted in 2017 after investigations and new guidelines for the research to hopefully improve safety measures.
I'm sympathetic to this view, but the flip side of it is we don't do much about currently identified pandemic vector risks such as swine CAFO operations; why would we expect new information (if any) affect our behavior any more than that?
If it's expensive to mitigate and hard to quantify, it's always going to be an uphill battle.
If a containment breach of a relatively harmless virus can lead to worldwide catastrophic consequences, you may want to know what procedures were breached and what institutional incentives are required to make sure the risks are constrained.
In software terms, if you have a bug that breaks the production and the response is messy and slow, you absolutely need to spend time and effort to change your response process. But you also need to know how this type of a bug became possible in the first place.
We need to make the penalty for this so insanely high that nobody, absolutely nobody ever even thinks of doing research that might lead to this ever again.
Yes. By that logic, why start punishing people for vehicular manslaughter? Just spend the effort on educating perpretrators so that they don't kill someone next time.
That viewpoint basically amounts to head in the sand. There is a plausible pathway to determine the origin. The lab could be openly investigated and the natural environment could be combed for an ancestor. If this was an unintentional release, it would vastly change the public perception and oversight protocols around pathogen research. Think what Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima did to nuclear energy.
If we don't get open cooperation from China, it's also extremely useful information and helps all other nations recalibrate their levels of trust and ties.
Because if a future lab release happens, it could be so, so much worse. If it seems impossible, disease was a contributing factor in 31 species' extinctions that we know of, and those diseases were of natural origin.[1] The Plague of Justinian, also of natural origin, is estimated to have killed up to half the world's population at the time. After the last year, can we really afford to take these risks lightly anymore?
That is an argument from ignorance logical fallacy. The inability to find something has no bearing on whether it exists or not and thus has no bearing on the probability of an inverted outcome.
Dark matter/energy also frequently fall into this sort of argument. There is no evidence that they do exist, which does not suggest the absence of their existence.
Not sure what your point is. The source for SARS and MERS were found within months. We're over a year into this with no clue. Based on the current circumstances' inconsistencies with historical circumstances, this appears to be something different.
His point still stands. Lack of evidence for one thing shouldn't be confused as evidence for something else. A man is home alone during a murder, and there is no evidence for this, did he commit the murder?
No, but when the second hypothesis is the one that CCP has banned any investigation and news of, is not cooperating on the investigation and when there had been claims about the WIV safety and the WIV has openly stated that they were researching bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses, then the lack of evidence for any other cause makes this one seem all the more likely. That's a lot of coincidences.
If CCP are covering it up, then of course there will be a lack of direct evidence. The above doesn't prove it conclusively, but it does make it rather suspicious. Why would CCP be hampering the investigations if they have nothing to hide? It was over a year before they let the WHO have a look. Plenty of time to get rid of any actual evidence.
Are you saying that the CCP did, in fact, let people talk about it? That they didn't cover it up for months before admitting that there was a pandemic, after it had already spread around the world? That they did, in fact, let the WHO investigate last year rather than a year later? That the WIV didn't research bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses?
There's also the reports about the leaked state department cables from 2018: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep... But I couldn't actually figure out where to find them, so you can discount that one as "not enough evidence to verify".
Those things aren't conspiracy theories. Yes, its not enough evidence to prove it either, but damn does it make them look shady.
No, I'm saying that CCP's behaviour is suspect and the fact that WIV did, in fact, openly research the exact type of virus that caused the outbreak and that the first reports were from Wuhan is a pretty crazy coincidence. Couple those two things together and occam's razor would suggest this needs more attention.
Suppose DNA was left at the scene and strong circumstantial evidence points to the man as the culprit, yet he refuses to let them compare his DNA to exonerate himself.
> 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.), even if the animals did not show clinical signs of the virus. The preliminary conclusion was the SARS virus crossed the xenographic barrier from Asian palm civets to humans, and more than 10,000 masked palm civets were killed in Guangdong Province. The virus was also later found in raccoon dogs (Nyctereuteus sp.), ferret badgers (Melogale spp.), and domestic cats. In 2005, two studies identified a number of SARS-like coronaviruses in Chinese bats.[60][61]
Infected animals were found in the market where the outbreak began 4 months after it started. We have nothing comparable a year and a half after COVID.
It stops being a fallacy and starts to become a valid consideration when the search for the thing not found has been thorough enough that it would have been very likely to be found if it had been there.
Suppose that I remember leaving $5000 in plain sight on a table. My initial priors are a 90% chance that it is there, a 9% chance that I put it somewhere else by accident, and a 1% that my friend Bob took it. I conduct a search that would have found it with 100% odds if it was on the table, 95% odds if I had put it somewhere else by accident, and a 0% chance if Bob took it. Add in the evidence of the search and all of a sudden the new odds are 0% chance that it is where I thought it was, about a 31% chance that I put it somewhere else, and a 69% chance that Bob took it.
This is the first major disease to jump to humans in the last 20 years that we haven't quickly tracked down the path to us. We're good at it. The fact that we didn't succeed this time when more effort was put into the search is something that should give us pause.
Many of the logical fallacies are logical fallacies from an Aristotelian perspective of statements that are either True or False, and nothing in between. "True" is a high bar.
Many of them dissolve when treated correctly with something like a Bayesian analysis. [1] This is one of them. Absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence of absence, contrary to the frequent assertions otherwise. It just isn't proof. The strength of the evidence is proportional to the amount of the possibility space searched and the quality of that search.
It is not fallacious to observe that our normally-successful efforts to find a natural cause failing raises the probabilities of the remaining explanations, and that of those possibilities, "lab origin" has a lot of the remaining probability. It doesn't mean that natural origin is disproved, nor did it mean any of the other possibilities are certain, but it is valid to adjust ones probability estimates.
(I've also learned from experience a lot of people will read this as being critical of the Aristotelian perspective or something. I am not. It is a valid logic. There are other valid logics. Many of them are more practically useful than rigid True and False, but Aristotelian logic, like Newtonian physics, is still a very important one to understand as it serves as an important limiting case for many other more complicated logics.)
[1]: This is not a position statement on Bayesian vs. frequentist.
The problem with your reasoning is that you are falsely equating absence of evidence into a qualifier for an opinion or conclusion, which it isn't. The absence of evidence only means that such evidence is missing and is in no way suggestive of anything else. All conclusions drawn from an absence of evidence are otherwise unqualified assumptions.
This was the exact reasoning people bet the farm on the housing market prior to late 2008. There was no evidence the housing market ever depreciated, so with that absence of evidence the housing market must therefore not ever depreciate. Contrary to that reasoning the housing market crashed and I got my house as a foreclosure at a heavily depreciated value.
> The inability to find something has no bearing on whether it exists or not
Bigfoot has entered the chat.
> Dark matter/energy...There is no evidence that they do exist,
Except there is plenty of evidence for dark matter. It's stuff that has observable mass and is found in countless galaxy rotation curve studies, gravitational lensing, etc.
Nature leaves a trail, so if you don’t find a trail then it becomes increasingly implausible that COVID resulted from a natural process. There are currently several intermediate steps that have not been uncovered anywhere, and which would have to have happened in order for this to be a natural process.
This just sounds like the “lack of evidence is evidence of a conspiracy” epistemology so often resorted to by conspiracy theorists. The problem with the epistemology is that it applies equally well to all conceivable conspiracies.
This may be true in general, but in this case we're trying to figure out if something is man-made or occurred naturally. No one is saying it couldn't have happened naturally, but natural evolution happens differently (and more slowly and messily) than human creation. In prior cases (SARS and MERS), plenty of evidence of natural evolution was found very quickly. Here it has been conspicuously absent. What conclusion would you draw from that?
I'm not sure I follow the logic. If China is so good at keeping people quiet, how do you know? Sounds to me that for us to know they have to be less than good at it?
I'm sorry but I really cannot see how everyone knowing (since we on HN knows it must be widespread) is China being good at keeping people quiet. Instead of downvoting how about explaining the logic?
Wrong. A likely Sars1 origin was found within months. For Sars2 Chinese researches sampled 40000 animals (according to WHO report) and found nothing.
Sars1: Prof. Zheng-Li Shi from Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Prof. Shu-Yi Zhang from the Institute of Zoology, and some researchers from Australia also tracked the source of SARS virus to bats, and their findings were published in Science in September 2005
Finding a virus in an animal isn't that same as finding the source. A source has not been found. Only later and intermediate hosts (as in 2005):
>"As no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching and as RNA recombination is frequent within coronaviruses, it is highly likely that SARS-CoV newly emerged through recombination of bat SARSr-CoVs in this or other yet-to-be-identified bat caves"
>"No direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations, but WIV16 was found in a cave in Yunnan province, China between 2013 and 2016, and has a 96% genetically similar virus strain."
How is this even going to work? PRC will never allow access to the actual data if it was a lab escape/origin. The sort of propoganda happening on Twitter shows that even discussion is going to be difficult.
If experts can make a decent argument that the lab escape is the most likely scenario, then the PRC can choose to let us have access to the data, or look 100% guilty and be treated accordingly.
You don't believe data can be manufactured/erased to tell a story if someone is willing to? There is enough time as well to generate a new trail of breadcrumbs.
I don't think we will get the true answer or an answer that is going to satisfy everyone, just a lot of geopolitical posturing.
The data have already been destroyed. The Wuhan lab where this research was taking place also had a leadership change, and is now run by someone in the military. That happened in March or April of 2020, IIRC.
Chinese researchers and journalists disappeared in that time frame (their work was deleted from online archives, their names removed from public employment listings... etc.).
I have family in China, and we watched all this happen. These are the things that happened in public. The Western press was too busy with "oh my gosh, we should probably stop flights now" to take serious notice. Then the whole thing became politicized (in the U.S., at least) and if you made statements like "this started in Wuhan, in the lab there, not in the animal market next to it," you were called racist, even though race had nothing to do with it.
We can ask until the cows come hom. The evidence is gone, disposed of by a series of decisions made more than a year ago.
> if you made statements like "this started in Wuhan, in the lab there, not in the animal market next to it," you were called racist, even though race had nothing to do with it.
Honestly I always felt like "a scientist working with dangerous pathogens had an accident" is way less racist than "someone ate a weird animal from a wet market"... And yet the backlash was stronger for the lab leak scenario, almost as if the opinions were influenced by someone.
To be fair the lab escape scenario looks a lot like a conspiracy theory. One should remember that around that time the "flat earth" theory was still going on (IIRC), and there are similar lab escape theories about AIDS.
It doesn't at all look "like a conspiracy theory". Many past lab leaks have been documented (edit: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1394327678136852488), there had been widespread debate among virologists for years about whether the risk of a lab leak was too high to fund such research, the Obama administration banned it for a while for that reason, the State Department had expressed concerns about lax safety at the Wuhan lab, and so on. It's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. If anything "looks like a conspiracy theory" it's the way that the topic was so harshly suppressed for the last year. I don't think that was a conspiracy either, though, I think it was just political polarization. Hopefully the winds are shifting now to reduce that, on this particular issue.
> It doesn't at all look "like a conspiracy theory"
Maybe for someone well informed like you. But I assure you it does look like a conspiracy theory for "the mere mortal". This is precisely what I was trying to explain. Please don't shoot the messenger.
The "conspiracy" part of the theory isn't the leak itself but that hundreds or thousands of people are involved in covering it up and the effort is being lead by an über-competent cabal of unnamed government officials. That is what makes this theory different from historical lab accidents and makes it seem pretty crackpot.
That's a strawman, though. Pretty similar to when someone is talking about government overreach with regards to restrictions or the effectiveness/negative effects of lockdowns or PCR tests as ways to deal with a pandemic and people call them "covid deniers" as if they were denying the existence of the virus.
There have always been conspiracy theories but I think it's more relevant to note how quickly this theory was co-opted by anti-asian racism and converted into a version where that lab escape was interpreted to be an intention action to cause a world wide pandemic.
I really sympathize with both sides here - I think it's quite possible a lab accident was involved with the virus escaping into the world... but the benefit we'd get from knowing that would mostly involve labs being a lot more careful with PPE and I think we've seen PPE usage tick way up and the dangerous involved with disease handling get a lot larger of a spotlight. And, I also think that beating up or harassing Asian-Americans is wrong and if we need to tell a big societal level lie to people to get them to stop then I'm okay with that.
Seriously? We should lie and deceive on a global scale in order to prevent a tiny number of people from being assholes when you know very well that they’re just going to find another reason to be hateful. Lying to everyone isn’t going to prevent hate, I really don’t understand this reasoning. Any time I’ve come across people who express hateful opinions about other groups of people it’s always due to the fact that a) they don’t have any close interactions with people of that group and b) their own social group is similarly isolated and ignorant. Lying to people in situations like that will never change their opinions, the only thing that will is direct face to face communication where trust can be built with them and their peers.
No, a lab escape scenario is an accident theory. The Chinese military sending infectious people to our country on purpose sounds like a conspiracy theory.
We went pretty quickly from "it started somewhere in China" to beating elderly asian people to death in the streets. I think the backlash was more against the justifications people use to be awful.
Didn't it only start happening, like, a year after people daring to wrongthink (that the virus wasn't of entirely natural origin) were persistently being called Trump-supporting Nazi conspiracy theorists?
Who is “we”? The line of thinking that starts with COVID19 and ends with violence against grandmothers seems so preposterous that it should be tested objectively to see if it exists. There are reports of huge increases in hate crimes during a year full of brazen violence and media-fueled racial tensions. This is most easily explained by a trend in classification rather than victimization. That is, law enforcement is now documenting something that has been going on for a long time. This is certainly true of the national crime victimization survey, which listed Asians for the first time in the 2018 report, released at the end of 2019. I do expect to see increases in Asian victimization in the 2020 report, but the motivations are most likely under the banner of social justice. Nobody was looting and burning down cities in protest of the coronavirus.
>The line of thinking that starts with COVID19 and ends with violence against grandmothers seems so preposterous that it should be tested objectively to see if it exists.
Okay
>There are reports of huge increases in hate crimes during a year full of brazen violence and media-fueled racial tensions.
You don't think #ChineseVirus had anything to do with those racial tensions?
>This is most easily explained by a trend in classification rather than victimization. That is, law enforcement is now documenting something that has been going on for a long time. This is certainly true of the national crime victimization survey, which listed Asians for the first time in the 2018 report, released at the end of 2019.
I don't think a lot of people dismissed the "lab theory" per se. The people who were coopting the theory were also the folks who called in intentional/by design. We had evidence for neither and yet suddenly it had become an excuse to yell epithets at random people on the street.
No. The response was overwhelmingly political and censorious and it has everything to do with the extremist culture around politics where if Trump said "A" it must be "not A" and viceversa.
You're justifying that censorship saying that the "wrongthink people" were close to this so that's why it was mostly shunned.
It's disingenuous. This whole year and counting (specially in places with slow vaccine rollouts) has been full of instances where certain challenges to the official local government doctrine where combated heavily with not much argument other than personal attacks and requests for faith in the "one true narrative".
> No, all the choices have already been made. The data have already been destroyed
You don't know that. You'd need an investigation to conclude that. Using it as an excuse not to investigate seems like assuming the conclusion.
Even if some data have been destroyed, it doesn't follow that every last piece of data everywhere has. Who knows what might turn out to be significant? There may well be relevant data in many countries, too, since the research was international.
That's a great page.
I'm always looking for fact based news (they say evidence based). Having it as a git repository that people can clone and push to is a great way of doing it.
Thanks.
As we learned in the last election cycle, the Truth is a matter of populism.
If Wuhan lab leak were 'truth' - without hard evidence and a bold international campaign to forcefully make people aware ... then China would be able to hide behind a cloud of whataboutery and changing the subject.
Unless there is some kind of genetic linkage etc..
I also feel that some US authorities wouldn't want the truth to be fully known lest there be unpredictable repercussions and 'worries about Anti Asian Hate Crime' and those kinds of things, preferring to handle it 'behind closed doors'.
It would be great if we could arrive at some kind of objective truth, not holding my breath.
> We should start looking at Anthony Fauci himself, who most likely pushed for this type of research via his influence at the NIAID/NIH [0].
This seems like a reach. There's a big difference in liability between "mismanaged deadly pathogens, caused a pandemic" and "said that someone should study deadly pathogens".
> and "said that someone should study deadly pathogens".
In 2014 when the US stopped gain-of-function research for being too risky, Fauci started funding it in Wuhan through EcoHealth. That's a lot more than just "said someone should study deadly pathogens".
Even if it was a lab release, it's still a natural virus and could have happened without the lab release. Without previous studies of related viruses, it would have taken multiple years to produce a vaccine.
>Even if it was a lab release, it's still a natural virus and could have happened without the lab release.
That is not the assertion being made by the scientists pushing for the investigation. The assertion is that this is a chimeric virus that very much does NOT show up in nature and its lab-made qualities are precisely why it became a global pandemic.
Or would you take it as pure coincidence that the first truly global pandemic in however many decades you'd like just happened to be lab made?
It still doesn't change anything, this type of research is getting too easy/too cheap to say that policy can save us from it. Somewhere someone will be doing it knowing the goal is to invoke genocide like final solution.
OP: "This virus was natural therefore any investigations into its artificiality are moot."
Me: "This virus has unique qualities that made it especially contagious, so its artificiality is not moot."
You: "Other viruses in the past were also bad."
Me, now: Yes, other viruses in the past were also bad. If you meant that to relate to the previous comments I think you left out the important bits.
It's like if we were discussing whether we should investigate if someone caused a deadly landslide. Why would you argue that we shouldn't look into it simply because landslides also happen naturally? If there are empty crates of TNT on the top of the hill, shouldn't we look into it?
I wasn't arguing not to investigate. I don't think there's a good reason to say with certainty that it shouldn't be looked into.
What happened is that (I think) I misinterpreted this statement:
> Or would you take it as pure coincidence that the first truly global pandemic in however many decades you'd like just happened to be lab made?
Upon re-reading, it seems you're saying that if this virus turned out to be lab-made, this fact might have something to do with it becoming a global pandemic (through an increased probability of spreading worldwide).
Whereas you're not saying that the fact that this became a global pandemic indicates that it is lab-made, which is how I misinterpreted it initially.
Not exactly. "gain of function" [0] research, if I understand correctly, tries to understand how to make a virus more virulent. Or make it affect hosts it wouldn't normally affect.
By that logic there shouldn't be any murder trials. Eventually everyone will die.
It is sickening that millions of people died, more will die, hundreds of millions of people have been pushed below poverty line, almost every single person's life on the planet is affected in some way and some people think it's unnecessary to investigate.
Adorable and naive, it's becoming too easy to do it, regardless of policies there will be somebody somewhere working on it as a weapon. [0] gives a good perspective.
b.) The people responsible hid crucial information which could have helped contain the spread in the early days and find treatments,
c.) The people assuring us that lab creation was an impossible "conspiracy theory" at the very least have egg on their face, and at worst have no credibility or were engaged in a campaign of mis/disinformation.
And that's without getting into questions of whether the "leak" story is being used to cover for "intentional release."
> The people responsible hid crucial information which could have helped contain the spread in the early days and find treatments
You imply in punishing those people? In the case it was a leak, the people interested in punishing them don't have that power, the people with that power were the same suppressing the information, so no, that won't happen.
> The people assuring us that lab creation was an impossible "conspiracy theory" at the very least have egg on their face, and at worst have no credibility or were engaged in a campaign of mis/disinformation
You should already remove any credibility from anybody claiming it was impossible, as well as from anybody claiming any other kind of certainty. What actually happened won't change that.
What we should do is take a good new look at the containment procedures of those labs, reevaluate them, verify if they are followed and fix what is not. We should also press uncooperative countries, like China, to open those up for inspection. Again, whether this one virus came from a lab leak or not is not relevant, we know that best practices are still leaky, and we have seen how problematic a leak would be.
All this politics game of "did | did not" is very counterproductive.
> What we should do is take a good new look at the containment procedures of those labs, reevaluate them, verify if they are followed and fix what is not.
Who should do that, exactly? The same people you seem to think we should not to attempt to investigate or hold accountable in any way?
> We should also press uncooperative countries, like China, to open those up for inspection.
If China was demanding to have a bunch of their inspectors let into Fort Detrick to poke around, we wouldn't be any more welcoming than they have been. It's silly to allow imperial powers to engage in bioweapons research and then expect them to show each other all their cards.
Why are you assuming this is bioweapons research? There is more to virus research than bioweapons.
It is much easier to get China to complain with "we developed those standards for virus research, and would like you to comply too, like any other serious country" than "we believe you made an incredibly large fuck-up and want your help to prove it".
If it leaked from a lap we need to hold China responsible and ensure that no scientists ever do similar research, under pain of life in any country on earth.
Whomever leaked this murdered over 1/2 the holocaust, and the total death count is only going to keep going up. The leak is a crime against humanity and should be prosecuted as one.
It is certain that some series of events led to the pandemic.
There exists a class of people who, without necessarily being driven by other motivations, generally try to find out what is really going on. We call such people scientists.
No need to focus on motivation. Curiosity should be enough.
I see this argument pop up quite frequently on HN with good amount of upvotes. I am guessing this type of arguments are motivated by and upvoted because of poltical and ideological ulterior motives.
I think there's also something more insidious at play. In western countries lot of people have become rich by exporting manufacturing to China. If somehow it is found that COVID was a lab-leak, there'd be a huge amount of backlash against China. It will harm the business, who are doing their manufacturing in China. There's a lot of money involved if lab-leak hypothesis turned out true.
I tend to sympathize with this attitude, and while it is absolutely true that the world needs to be better prepared for pandemics regardless of origin, I don't think it's correct that the origin of the disease doesn't matter.
Just from a scientific perspective, we should know where covid-19 came from. If it hopped from bats to people in a wet market, that tells us something about the likelihood of this type of virus spreading from contact with wild animals. If it was accidentally released from a lab, that tells us something different.
In a healthy geopolitical environment, an impartial investigative team that's able to pinpoint the source of the original transmission could make this information public so that everyone can learn how to avoid this happening again. If the pandemic happened because policy enforcement at the virus lab in Wuhan was weak, this is worth knowing. Not to to lay blame and point fingers, but to help labs worldwide identify potential weak points in their own procedures.
The danger is that if evidence points to an accidental lab release, some Western politicians will seize on the opportunity to shame China just for the sake of national chauvinism. This will accomplish nothing positive. The Chinese Communist Party is very thin skinned and essentially amoral so they'll have no compunctions about covering up any evidence of a lab leak in order to save face. All of this political stuff risks getting in the way of helping the scientific community understand where covid-19 came from so we'll have a better understanding of how to reduce the chances of this happening again.
Thin skinned or not if it was a lab leak they’re liable for millions of deaths and trillions in economic devastation world wide. I would say that reason enough to get to the bottom of the origin question.
I see a lot of these appeals for ignorance in these conversations. There's so many obvious reasons why we'd want to learn to truth, such as learning how to prevent it from happening again and to determine if gain of function research is too risky.
The only reason I see why we should want to remain ignorant is it will possibly embarrass China.
If the lab leak is real, then we should absolutely use this as a reason to stop Gain of Function research or at least establish institutions that ensure the safety of such research, preferably across international borders. The point being that you want to avoid something like this ever happening again.
Shekhar Gupta (One of India's foremost journalists and media people) did a great 30 minute analysis of this article covering who the cast members are and how this ties back into various stories from the last year.
So far, the lab origin story sounds the most plausible and has the least holes in it. Now innocent until proven guilty is a thing, but is not like the PRC would ever agree to a fair trial.
Since there isn’t any evidence for either scenario I don’t think it’s at all accurate to say one possible origin is “the most plausible”. A lack of evidence for one does not give credence to the other and vice versa.
By observation of the night sky would you believe Copernicus or Ptolemy? Would you need to have evidence of the solar system's origins or is the decreased computation required for Copernicus enough to indicate it to be a superior explanation?
If I can't find my phone and I either left it somewhere in the house or on the Uber I took home last night, the longer I search my house and don't find it, the more likely it is that I left it on the Uber.
You think they wouldn't clean house if the virus had naturally hopped to humans but the WIV was still being publicly blamed? I think they responded to the accusation, not to the reality on the ground.
That's not to say that I think it didn't come from the WIV, just that they'd act the same way regardless of where the first transmission occurred.
> the lab origin story sounds the most plausible and has the least holes in it
You seem to ignore the fact that there's exactly zero evidence either pro or contra. The fame of the "media person" is the kind of argument you typically see invoked in Facebook and Youtube comments.
How is this the lab origin story more plausible than the original hypothesis that sars-cov2 originated from the wet-markets? Both are places where human and exotic animals closely interact, where sars-cov2 could have jumped. Why do you think the odds of the virus jumping are higher in one place than another?
I’m not in a position to say one way or the other, but the articles detail a number of suggestive evidence that in my mind makes the wild animal spread less likely. But as has been pointed out, it is NOT definitive one way or the other.
Please stop posting flamewar comments. You've done it more than once in this thread already. That's basically vandalism, if not arson, when the topic is this inflammatory. No more of this please.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I don't know anything about virology, but I do know about wet markets. Every working class neighborhood in every city in China has at least one wet market. I would guess that hundreds of millions of people in China shop at wet markets every day. Even if you filter out all the wet markets that do not sell exotic animals like bats and pangolins, it still seems suspicious that this outbreak appears to have been centered around one of the few wet markets in China that happens to be situated in the vicinity of a major virus lab.
Not to mention the dozens of expert virologists that agree the virus characteristics do not seem to be natural.
I have to wonder though if the wet market was a CCP smoke screen... why wasn’t it further from their lab doing exactly this type of viral work? IDK, maybe that was the point to cause suspicion? I’m not crafty enough to know my ability to write world deceiving half-truths.
1. We have strong suspicion that the virus was going around in early December, away from the Wuhan wet market.
2. If the source was natural and zootonic, we would have expected to find the intermediate animal by now. For Sars1 and Mers, we found that animal within 4 months and 9 months respectively. It's been 18 months since Covid19, and we have no clue what that animal despite better science and astronomically more investment.
> if the source was natural and zootonic, we would have expected to find the intermediate animal by now.
Only if you assume it's both widespread and endemic in the intermediate animal population.
If it's spreading at low levels through that population for some reason (like being a less social animal) then it's trying to find a needle in a haystack, and that's on top of the needle/haystack of identifying the correct animal and population.
If it's not endemic we may never find it, perhaps the intermediate population were well on their way to herd immunity before the virus jumped to humans leaving little to no trace.
There are some other possibilities too, like it could have been transmitting undetected among relatively isolated humans (like small farming villages) for some time before an infected farmer visited a market. This would significantly broaden the scope of when and where the infected animal population was.
That we haven't found the source yet is incredibly weak evidence.
There was an article posted recently on HN with no discussion that outlined the evidence for the various theories, and had pretty solid evidence for the leak theory (assuming they didn't omit evidence for the other theories):
The origin of COVID-19 is going to be one of the biggest news stories in 2021-22 IMO. China's global reputation is going to take a hit. I don't think they did this intentionally. I think everyone had the best of intentions and either they found something deep in a bat cave or there was a lab mishap. I've gone down the rabbit hole on this issue. Here are some interesting links https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=R01AI110964&hl=en&as_sd... is the papers done by a NIH grant to Eco Health Alliance. This shows they were looking for new variants of Coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7089274/pdf/114... This shows they were artificially synthesizing Coronaviruses and incubating them in monkey cells. Dr. Peter Daszak seems to be in the center of a lot of this and IMO had a conflict of interest being on the WHO COVID-19 origins report.
Please don't copy-paste comments. It strictly lowers the signal/noise ratio, and it contradicts the principle that HN threads are supposed to be conversations. People don't repeat long pre-written statements in conversation.
If you want to refer to something you said in a previous context, that's fine and is what links are for.
> China's global reputation is going to take a hit.
If having openly racist culture and running concentration camps has done nothing to their reputation, I don't think anything will.
> I don't think they did this intentionally.
Regardless if this was intentional or not, they should take responsibility. Imagine if Russia dropped a nuclear bomb on Europe by mistake. This is the same calibre of "oops my bad.".
It's not a secret that these viruses were researched as a potential bio-weapon. In that sense whether it was intentional or not, it has done immense damage to worldwide economy, which is exactly the goal of such bio-weapon.
Claiming that COVID came from a lab is pretty close to non-falsifiable, i.e. impossible to prove. I assume that if it was an accidental or intentional release of a bioweapon, all evidence would have long since been wiped clean. Making the claim that the CCP secretly created COVID is backed by zero evidence, and assuming they're even vaguely competent, all evidence to prove it would have been long since destroyed. This is a very unproductive path of inquiry,
There was an article posted to HN recently that went into detail on the evidence contained within the virus itself, that it has features not consistent with natural processes. However, it wasn't secretly created, it was created (in part) with grants from the US, which are public.
> Claiming that COVID came from a lab is pretty close to non-falsifiable, i.e. impossible to prove.
I don't think this is true. A hypothesis can be unfalsifiable without being unprovable. (Think of a "needle in a haystack" existence hypothesis: it's unfalsifiable, at least practically speaking, but it can be proven simply by finding the needle.)
Not surprising at all considering Wuhan Lab scientists admitted on video they were bitten by bats and they had lax to no safety standards. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4102619
> A video released two years before the start of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic shows Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) scientists being cavalier toward protective equipment and being bitten by bats that carry deadly viruses such as SARS, demonstrating a lax safety culture in the lab.
> On Dec. 29, 2017, Chinese state-run TV released a video designed to showcase Shi Zhengli, (石正麗), also known as "Bat Woman," and her team of scientists at the WIV in their quest to find the origin of SARS. Despite the fact that the scientists work in a biosafety level 4 lab, they show a shocking disregard for safety when handling potentially infectious bats both in the wild and in the lab.
> From 4:45 to 4:56, a scientist can be seen holding a bat with his bare hands. Team members from 7:44 to 7:50 can be seen collecting potentially highly infectious bat feces while wearing short sleeves and shorts and with no noticeable personal protective equipment (PPE) other than gloves.
> Virus researcher Cui Jie (崔杰) relates his experiences of being bitten from 8:47 to 8:50. He said that the bat's fangs went right through his glove, which was likely nitrile. He described the feeling as "like being jabbed with a needle." The video then cuts to a person's limb showing swelling after a bat bite.
That provides a plausible origin scenario of the pandemic: In October 2019, a researcher at the Wuhan Lab was bitten by a bat, got infected (asymptomatically), went home and unknowingly infected other people in the community, and the virus spread from there.
Sadly, I don't think we'll ever know what happened. Those who were directly involved with the early stage of the outbreak will never speak up, because Beijing issued a complete gag order on what happened. Anyone that speaks about the early stages of the pandemic be charged with espionage, and if found guilty, they can receive the death penalty. https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/11/9833532bb925-chin...
Indeed, this type of carelessness adds to the inherent danger of researching highly infectious diseases. Labs leak all the time, for example the original SARS escaped from labs at least three times [1]:
> The recent announcement of nine cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome linked to China's National Institute of Virology brings to three the number of lab outbreaks of the disease in the past eight months.
It's also happened dozens of times in the US, UK, and former Soviet Union. Tuberculosis, Smallpox, various flu viruses have all escaped from "secure" labs. [2] [3]
Maybe studying viruses isn't as safe as we thought.
>That provides a plausible origin scenario of the pandemic
Plausible but it gets us no closer to the truth unfortunately. There are many plausible origins, but it is important we do not mistake plausible for the most likely.
I agree though, the CCP has massively hindered this search for truth and will likely continue to do so, all to save face.
You'd need to find that bat that you imagine bit someone in October 2019, swab its nose or anus and sequence for SARS-CoV-2, because the closest known bat virus relative to SARS-CoV-2 has a decades-long evolutionary gap to it.
Oh, also viruses don't get virulent in the new host the moment the zoonotic transfer occurs. It takes a bit of time to evolve and adapt.
Unfortunately, there is a big gap between the viruses found in nature, and SARS-Cov-2 that bit humanity on the ass. We have not found an "evolutionary trail", so to speak between the two. You would think that if something evolves from A to B, that you'd find variants interpolating the two stages. In natural evolution, that's always the case. But in the case of SARS-Cov-2, this new virus magically appears in Wuhan.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaTG13#Phylogenetic we're not hopelessly lost though? It seems like no matter what the "origin" is, just chasing around Hubei sequencing animal droppings is going to allow us to refine the above nicely.
What's the point? After reading all the evidence, people such as myself firmly believe that it came from the Wuhan lab. Nothing the inquiry will come up with convince me otherwise. It's pretty obvious once you read all of the unbiased articles that show that months earlier, the same research facilities and scientists were touting their research in gain-of-function in bat coronaviruses. I mean come on!
Bureacracies like WHO will NEVER EVER say that it came from a Chinese lab. The "inquiry" will say that it's unlikely and try to bury the issue, and then it will just keep popping its head out in news articles that get ultimately ignored.
You haven't read enough evidence to know the cause no matter how much you follow the case as we have hardly started collecting evidence. It's still in early preliminary stages.
To find a source we need a host. We haven't even found a host from SARS yet even though that happened back in 2002. All we have is a very closely related one (96% match?) and that was found in 2020. It takes a lot of work by scientists living among wild animals for years in often very remote locations. Stating it was from a lab after so little time has past and so little work has been done is at a minimum jumping to conclusions.
It's not going to be possible to prove lab origin w/o Chinese cooperation.
However, lab origin should not be totally dismissed, so we can have a discussion about safety of gain-of-function research now, rather than waiting for some verifiable event to happen in the future.
I don't know who is acting like that, but that's the kind of thing that becomes very interesting if you believe COVID leaked from a lab and not appeared suddenly at a wet market.
The discussion around this issue is always implicitly framed as though "Covid came from a lab" implies "created by CCP researchers." The GoF ties to US institutions including the Pentagon are always assiduously avoided (the NY Mag article being one notable exception: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...)
Very interesting to see this idea bubbling to the surface at the same time that Bill Gates's Epstein ties are being re-broadcast, the CDC is rapidly reversing guidance and relaxing protocols, the WEF cancelling its summer meeting, Elon Musk suddenly sticking the knife in crypto's back ....
Any actual scientist (and not an "expert") know how long these things take. It took from 2002 to 2020 (edit: or was it 2018? I can't remember) to find a closely related SARS host (as in "not a match but close enough to point to a likely cause"). I find it very telling that we get lots of articles stating lots of stuff but not really any real scientific research papers on the source. I'm also not seeing any of these scientists volunteer to live for years in remote locations taking anal swaps of animals to actually find the cause. I believe what we are seeing are the science equivalent to armchair generals.
What do you make of the claim in this article [1], which says that intermediate host species were found within 4 months of SARS1 outbreak, and within 9 months of MERS outbreak? Admittedly I can't find the underlying source for his claims.
I haven't read it but an intermediate host is a link between humans and the original host. The intermediate host was quickly found. I linked this elsewhere in the thread:
>"As no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching and as RNA recombination is frequent within coronaviruses, it is highly likely that SARS-CoV newly emerged through recombination of bat SARSr-CoVs in this or other yet-to-be-identified bat caves."
They also write...
>"After the causative agent of SARS was identified, SARS-CoV and/or anti-SARS-CoV antibodies were found in masked palm civets (Paguma larvata) and animal handlers in a market place. However, later, wide-reaching investigations of farmed and wild-caught civets revealed that the SARS-CoV strains found in market civets were transmitted to them by other animals."
Sorry if I made a mess of this as I'm on my phone and commented on more than on post too quickly really..
Edit: Woops, forgot the source. I knew it would be a mess..
Then you have other academics in the comments saying nothing is certain yet, and other prominents labs like Gupta Labs at Cambridge and Bloom Lab from Seattle saying there could be multiple explanations.
I know the issue is politicised and that's wrong as Ecohealth alliance from the US sponsored this research so there is no "single country at fault" - no need to avoid topics.
It's not "chinas fault" it's more like, what on earth was the US based Ecohealth alliance doing with this research, why so many previous lab leaks with little attention, what is the history if the Wuhan lab, whats the actual facts about Gain of Function research etc. All topics that the press is not looking into for some reason.
On Ecohealth alliance:
“ It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.””
I'm no virologist but of all the places on earth we are supposed to believe that, by cheer coincidence, the outbreak happened in that one city that happens to do research and have patents on lab-modified bat viruses and that it doesn't have anything to do with that lab.
That fact alone is what makes this even more absurd to me. I know about probability math, - the fact the these virologists seemingly just discard that factor is twilight-zone territory to me.
What does the phrase "I know about probability math" mean in this context? It sounds like you're implying that you have a probablistic model for this scenario, if so I would be very interested to see it.
To be fair, the reason the lab is in that place is precisely because it's close to a place where zoonoses has occurred multiple times. Kind of like how we don't blame lighthouses for shipwrecks.
That being said, from what I've read it appears that a lab escape is a very real possibility. Though I doubt that we'll ever find out
I've heard this a number of times now, but is it actually true?
I find that argument hard to corroborate and there are other parsimonious explanations, like WIV was located in Wuhan because Wuhan is a major world city with high quality institutions of higher education.
Of course certain virologists would be eager to dismiss lab leak hypothesis. Just think about the implication of this hypothesis turns out to be true. Virologists have very strong conflict of interests. If these people have any integrity they'd refrain from commenting.
What's particularly significant and hasn't much been commented on yet is that Ralph Baric, the leading American collaborator of the bat coronavirus research at Wuhan, has signed the letter. He also (according to the OP) declined to comment further. That seems more like integrity.
Lab leak does not necessarily imply the virus was engineered. Indeed there is reasonable evidence for the former and little, but not none, for the later.
I can only find sources saying that the Furin cleavage site doesn’t rule out engineering, or sources saying the Furin cleave site could be naturally occurring. Sounds like we don’t know yet.
All these lines of evidence and reasoning show that the acquisition of the polybasic furin cleavage site by SARS-CoV-2 is a “missing link” in our understanding of its evolutionary history, that can only be addressed through the discovery of new viruses.”
As addition of a Furin cleavage site is an old hat acknowledged technique for increasing human infectivity of a virus. The issue with a zoonotic origin though, is that the odds of a mutation is incredibly small, and a recombination at that site would require the sequence to exist in another coronavirus, which has not
been discovered to date.
It is also known WIV researchers had recieved instruction from another virologist on "no-see-um" editing techniques that would not leave traces of the mechanism used to splice in an edit.
So not proof, but the network of coincidence is as hard to ignore as a spinal tap amp duct taped to your head, cranked to 11, playing the 1812 Overture.
This is becoming more and more common, Pure Science is almost never practiced anymore. The Hard sciences like Immunology, virology, general medicine used to be some what insulated from politics however in the last few years all sciences are no longer data driven.
You form a conclusion then find the facts that fit your narrative, and if your narrative is not the "correct" one you better not release your facts...
Is it? Since the beginning the science has been in conflict with politics (or the Church, or the Kings/Emperors before democracy). Notable political/social opposition to the sciences are well documented. Couple of examples: doctors washing their hands was a controversial issue [2] and how being able to eat "higher-class" food killed thousands of Japanese, who rejected eating other food even when it was known it was killing them [3].
I think neither is exactly true. Like any endeavour that requires patronage, scientists have to sing for their supper. The combinations of scientists and patrons vary across time and space with some being more amenable to pure science and others breeding corruption. Like everything it is much more complex upon closer inspection.
The cases I've shared were not about patronage (maybe Galileo, unsure), but about third parties categorically denying the science it based on their social/political thinking.
Here is a well written article about the topic, which outlines some details that I am currently investigating for confirmation, and helps make Galileo's story a little more nuanced than the elementary school version: https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2020/09/18/what...
Being in Japan, 3 was fascinating. I feel like Japans strong cultural belief in their own superiority and love of hierarchy make it especially susceptible to these type of issues.
I also happen to live in Japan, that's prob why I knew this example well and I'm well aware/critic of the covid situation and the Olympics being pushed forward.
Abe resignation seems to be based on being sick though, there was some, well extreme people measuring how long it took him to walk a fixed distance over time and when he started to slow down significatively, they predicted he was sick. He resigned few days later, officially because of an illness:
I highly doubt that AtlasObscura article, it sounds like a classical urban myth. In East Asia there are tens if not hundreds of millions of people who've eaten nothing but white rice as the staple in their diet their whole life, and it's not caused any issues as far as I'm aware. Of course if you eat just rice and nothing else, that might be unhealthy. But that's not an issue with white rice.
If you want to see this in full force, go try to find out from medical organizations whether there are irreversible health effects for gender transition therapies in adolescents.
APA (and WHO, and...) will say no. But you'll see curious notes about recommendations to monitor bone density, and curious usages of auxiliary drugs whose purpose is to combat osteoporosis. Turns out, the therapies are well known to permanently and negatively affect bone density and long term effects-- while assumed to include osteoporosis and more frequent fractures-- are simply unknown.
But the science and statistics cannot be allowed to trump the politics, so you will see no mention of this in complete contravention of traditional Hippocratic responsibilities and medical ethics.
That sounds like the worst of the Internet in action. You disagree with someone's off-handed remark on social media, so you want to remove their funding source?
I guess that's pretty popular, but I have to say I don't care for it.
Many people are still in the bargaining stage of COVID response -- if we find that some person made this virus and released it into the wild, we just send them to prison and the problem goes away. That's a very human reaction to the problem, but unfortunately it doesn't actually work. We have to clean up this colossal mess regardless of whether it was man-made or not, and we have to reckon with the millions that died and will never come back.
Finding someone to blame is just a distraction, and I imagine that many people want to move past that distraction and eradicate the disease. The learning can come later when we're collectively more calm.
I doubt that anyone was funded to create SARS-CoV-2 and then try to suppress discussion about it on Twitter. I think the "unfollow me if you think it's man-made" is just a short-circuit to avoid flamewars and distraction. It probably isn't a belief against doing a blameless postmortem so that we can handle things like this better in the future.
> You disagree with someone's off-handed remark on social media, so you want to remove their funding source?
No, what I was getting at is that they might have a financial incentive to discredit the lab escape theory. For instance, some of this researcher's funding or his institution's funding might be from CCP-backed entities.
> We have to clean up this colossal mess regardless of whether it was man-made or not, and we have to reckon with the millions that died and will never come back. Finding someone to blame is just a distraction, and I imagine that many people want to move past that distraction and eradicate the disease. The learning can come later when we're collectively more calm.
This, trying to push the idea that fighting the virus or investigating the outbreak theory are mutually exclusive, is also a rhetoric I would expect to be pushed from the party responsible for the outbreak.
Truth is, why obstruct investigation efforts and try to hide the facts if the origin of the virus is natural?
> That sounds like the worst of the Internet in action. You disagree with someone's off-handed remark on social media, so you want to remove their funding source?
It's not about removing, it's about finding who they are speaking out for.
But you all are so quick to assume that people have a financial agenda rather than their own thoughts. Like maybe people just think things and say them, and it's not all some propaganda campaign.
Career scientists not motivated by money assumes there is something that would dissuade them from not being so. Is there anything that motivates a scientist to avoid tailoring a response beyond personal moral codes? We do have a replication crisis mind you https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Overall
Discrediting your opposites is primarily a feature of rhetoric, not discourse.
If your goal is to have an earnest discussion, to go over the various sorts of evidence and the varied hypotheses, you need to address those first.
Some American scientists have claimed the virus does not look engineered. Why? What is their evidence for the claim? If you are asserting the virus is or at least could be engineered, can you account for the evidence supporting their assertion? Can you point to evidence that supports your hypothesis and not theirs? How do they respond to this evidence?
It may be -- in an earnest discussion -- that one side is not engaging, for one reason or another. Maybe they don't want to admit they are wrong, maybe they are getting paid not to. At that point, after you have yourself examined their claims, after you have examined whether you are just being stubborn yourself, it is quite reasonable to disregard them, maybe even in the future.
Bringing it in too early, before engaging with their claims, trying to find reasons not to examine their evidence, makes it seem like you are just interested in winning the rhetorical argument.
Most scientific research is not self funded. Why assume outside sponsoring has no influence. You dont see TV news bad mouthing pharma companies as TV channels rely on pharma ads...
You completely misinterpreted the statement. It was rather obvious to me that the person you were replying to was curious if there was any conflicts of interest that would cause someone to ignore a conclusion.
Finding someone to blame as you say is not really the key issue. If you want to prevent this from happening again you might just possibly want to know where this virus came from.
4 months after SARS 1 we knew the intermediate host was a civet. 9 months after MERS, we knew the intermediate host was a camel. As of now not a single intermediate zoonotic host has been identified.
At this point the probability threshold has shifted towards a lab leak. We can acknowledge this fact or we can collectively acknowledge that maybe just maybe a research center with a quarter of a billion dollars in funding from the United States government for evolving Corona viruses from bats to infect humanized mice might have had something to do with the virus that broke out in the exact same city.
I mean it really is absurd how quickly people dismiss this rather obvious fact.
Figuring out where this virus came from is extremely relevant considering that the gain of function research that in all likelihood created it is going to be increased in funding as a result of the pandemic. If the public knew that the virus was almost certainly not a naturally transmitted one from a wild animal host, they probably wouldn't be on board with funding more of the research that created it.
> What i find weird is the extreme and very unscientific agression among certain virologist: "If you think SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab, please unfollow me. "
Take a similar situation, imagine you were a structural engineer a decade ago and you tweeted "If you think 9/11 was an inside job because jet fuel can't melt steel beams, please unfollow me" or an astronaut tweeting "if you think we didn't land on the moon, please unfollow me" - whether the particular issue they've mentioned is true or false doesn't actually matter. They're trying to avoid the confrontationalists/conspiracy theorists following them/replying to their tweets. They're pretty much tweeting "don't @ me"
The analogy isn't really working, but the core is valid nonetheless: when an idea has few valid examiners and thousands of nutjob followers and they all want to talk to you, perhaps the latter even more than the former, then you'll eventually accept the risk of perhaps missing out on one of the few gems rather than suffering through the endless repetitions of all the others.
> It's not like a lab leak is an extremely unlikely possibility at all.
The tweet was talking about the virus being engineered in a lab, not the possibility it escaped from a lab. Their opinion on the possibility of lab leak seems [1] quite reasonable to me - they believe it's possible but unlikely, and link to more info.
> You should rather check who is funding the people who are making certain statements like that.
Sure - do you have more info on his sources of grants etc?
What’s the difference between gain of function research and engineering? My understanding is that gain of function research accelerates the natural selection process to intentionally produce i.e. engineer desired mutations, like the capability of infecting human cells. Seems like a distinction without a difference.
Recently there was an article about software engineering where the (apparently non-technical) author defined colloquial phrases such as "to engineer an outcome" as to jerry-rig and generally do the opposite of any scientifically-principled process. I think the onus should be on the researchers to use clearer technical jargon or else it creates this kind of false dichotomy where a very narrow claim is used to imply much more. Frankly I think exploiting vagueness of words like that is sometimes intended, especially in titles/headlines. The careful technical interpretation is for CYA, while the broad colloquial interpretation is for social/political points and agendas.
There are 2 concrete distinct ideas, but many are conflating both of the ideas. It results in it being very hard to have a conversation because it's unclear which idea people are talking about.
Idea 1: SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab
Idea 2: SARS-CoV-2 was in/around/related to WIV and escaped
Idea 1 was widely debunked by American scientists.
Idea 2 is an idea that there is a considerable body of circumstantial evidence supporting and is certainly the most likely origin in my estimation.
> why these weird rumors about Gain of Function research that no one seemingly looks into etc.
we investigated the receptor usage of the SL-CoV S by
combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus
system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules
of human, civet, or horseshoe bat.
Later down on the paper it describes the process by which they did the combination.
Our own American scientists said this process would likely result in biomarkers that were not found in the circulating virus (my layman, not expert, understanding).
What do you mean by "engineered in a lab?" No one believes that anyone just typed a sequence into their computer and created it from whole cloth.
On the other hand, the WIV has recently published papers about creating new coronaviruses by combining a gene from one virus with the rest of another virus, as well as other types of modifications to existing coronaviruses. They have active grants to continue with this type of research. They also have acknowledged performing this work in BSL-2 labs, which would not be secure enough to contain SARS-CoV-2 if it were to have been the result of one of these experiments.
WIV contains a BSL-4 lab, which is fairly new. WIV itself has been around for 65 years. It contains many labs, at various levels of security. It's a huge hassle to conduct work in the BSL-4, and researchers generally would only work in the BSL-4 if they were working with pathogens that required it.
WIV has acknowledged that at least some of their bat coronavirus research was conducted in their BSL-2 labs which have a far, far lower level of security.
WIV has a BSL-4 lab, but not all the work there was done in it.
> Before 2020, the rules followed by virologists in China and elsewhere required that experiments with the SARS1 and MERS viruses be conducted in BSL3 conditions. But all other bat coronaviruses could be studied in BSL2, the next level down. BSL2 requires taking fairly minimal safety precautions, such as wearing lab coats and gloves, not sucking up liquids in a pipette, and putting up biohazard warning signs. Yet a gain-of-function experiment conducted in BSL2 might produce an agent more infectious than either SARS1 or MERS. And if it did, then lab workers would stand a high chance of infection, especially if unvaccinated. Much of Shi [Zheng-li, head researcher at WIV]’s work on gain-of-function in coronaviruses was performed at the BSL2 safety level, as is stated in her publications and other documents. She has said in an interview with Science magazine that “[t]he coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories.”
I don't personally doubt it's a conspiracy theory but would you clarify exactly where "American scientists" debunked this - is it in the link you provided, it's not clear, it appears to only deal with claim 2?
In this discussion and the older threads he links in there, Bedford basically rules out an 'engineered' virus, does not rule out a lab leak, but leans towards zoonosis (pathogen jumping from animal to human).
-
Here are Thread reader links for the older threads he references:
Trevor Bedford is one scientist at the Hutch. He is certainly qualified to have an opinion, but his opinion is not the conclusive determination on the matter. Other scientists whom I respect have different opinions:
The other links you provide are rebuttals of particular arguments, but in no way settle the entire question. Knowing that bits of HIV weren't inserted into SARS-CoV2, for example, tells you nothing about whether this virus may have emerged from natural selection experiments in the lab. There are good arguments on both sides, but Twitter, in particular, seems stuck on the pronouncements of early 2020, when nobody knew much of anything about the virus and a certain prominent politician was speculating wildly, thus setting up a left/right polarization over what should be a factual debate.
We need to stop this hostile form of "scientific debate" where one person's opinion is held up as "the science", while all other voices are dismissed as fringe.
Also, Dr. Shi was trained by Ralph S. Baric of the University of North Carolina in building “chimera” viruses — taking, for example, the spike protein from a new virus and splicing it to the backbone of a known one like SARS. He invented “no-see-um” techniques that left no trace of the splice.
I find the word "debunk" has been frequently used by one political side to label any idea they disagree with.
This is a very strange word. When I read history of science books, this word was almost never used. Change of scientific consensus is not uncommon in the history of science. Scientists disagree with each other, debate with each other, but they don't claim they debunk each other.
I don't believe people use this word in good faith. It seems to be politically loaded power grab.
Misinformation is another word that has become extremely popular in the last year or two.
I don't think very many people think very deeply about the meaning of words, and how subtle changes in the ones that are chosen can influence the collective consciousness. A lot of people even seem to strongly dislike the topic being mentioned.
I think that practitioners of Postmodernism have spent a lot of time thinking about the meanings of words that they can cause people to perceive, and that they have had a very successful track record of using this to shift cultural parameters and achieve their political objectives.
They'd probably prefer that you didn't notice they were doing this.
There is a 3rd option. I'm going to repost a comment I made a few days ago regarding the labs in Wuhan:
The "Wuhan Institute of Virology" is named in a couple of news articles and scientific publications. However what is rarely discussed is that the Wuhan CDC (武汉市疾病预防控制中心), which also has a virus lab and was also researching coronaviruses is in walking distance from that wet market! I took a screenshot of it, in the top right is the Huanan Seafood Market, in the bottom the CDC, which includes a virus lab: https://i.imgur.com/smODVQe.png
Unfortunately you won't find it on Google Maps but anyone who is able to read Chinese can check this themselves. All the early cases were centered around this area, including the hospital that treated the first cases. It's absurd that this is almost never talked about anywhere. On the CDC website they had an open position looking for a researcher to study, among others, exactly the kind of bat CoV that's been identified as most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. This has since been deleted but it could still be accessed during the early days of the outbreak.
> It's absurd that this is almost never talked about anywhere
FYI, this really doesn't match my experience. I got curious and Googled about the lab's location myself about a year ago, not long after the outbreak, and found the hypothesis tantalizing, even in the absence of hard evidence.
I've seen ongoing discussion about this since then on various blogs and on Twitter.
As a more meta-comment, we're all in tiny, personalized information silos nowadays based on the sites and communities we frequent. Even a pseudo-public forum like Twitter is not really public - you only see the slice that you follow.
IMO 'nobody is talking about it' is more about how you've curated your own info-stream, rather than about the world at large.
To add one more data point, for the past year I’ve been following this story passively — reading articles I’ve come across but never searching actively — and this is the first I’ve heard of the coincident location of the Wuhan CDC.
Replying to you and @smallnamespace, not only are we in extremely small silos, you can realize how small the silo is by
1) taking sporadic notes, but not full urls
2) attempting to follow your same trail again
I often find I can't even, with knowledge of what I read/saw find the same sources again, using the same tools and sites without basically taking detailed notes. The idea that information is public and can be connected in the same way is preposterous, but only via experience.
If you have an insight, or a linkage between facts and events, please document it in a way that is shareable and findable. I too saw the ad for the virologist post-doc position in the Wuhan lab. I think lab escape of either a wild virus or a slightly modified one is likely. It doesn't mean that it is nefarious.
I think a full text and graphical log of the research process would be highly productive.
That's important advice. The thought of documenting anything didn't even cross my mind in the early days of the pandemic. It was all so blatantly suspicious that I had no doubt large news outlets would report on it any day, and then there would be international pressure for a proper investigation. But that day never came. Instead they started spreading the bat-eating story after Chinese state media claimed the virus originated in the market, without evidence. People don't even eat bat in Wuhan. And when that got questioned they switched to pangolins. To this day no such link was found. And the Wuhan CDC lab was never investigated.
There's so much distraction, hysteria and extremely questionable science reporting. Without having in depth knowledge about Mainland China, I'm not sure if I'd not fallen for some of the misinformation as well. So yes, it's extremely important people document what they see and understand, and share it with other in a way that makes it easily accessible. When many journalists do a bad job at fact checking and questioning their sources, we have to be better than that, else we just contribute to the noise.
> However what is rarely discussed [...] It's absurd that this is almost never talked about anywhere.
Not all that rarely IME, and certainly not "almost never". It's popped up every now and then for over a year now; here on HN among other places. (OTOH, maybe that was you I saw. :-)
(It also suggests that one of the loudest early detractors of the "escaped from lab" theory, the main author of the Feb 19, 2020 Lancet letter, had an undeclared conflict of interest because he is president of an organisation which funded Coronavirus research at WIV)
> What i find weird is the extreme and very unscientific agression among certain virologist: "If you think SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab, please unfollow me. "
There were a lot of them on twitter, and frankly, they disqualified themselves from the adult table. They've chosen politics over science.
Social media is designed around social proof and validation. Plenty of otherwise rational people crave the support and affirmation of endorsing “correct” thinking while also attacking the “incorrect” thinking.
I always wondered why people used the phrase "dunk on" when referring to Twitter. Then I witnessed the purely and obviously performative nature of the bulk of these kinds of user's statements.
Even ones who claim to be activists will ignore any good faith questions, because every second they spend engaging in meaningful dialogue doesn't allow them to sit there and attack others for points from their followers.
Isn’t that tweet pretty clearly aimed at people who were already concluding that it was engineered in a lab? That’s a lot different than saying we should investigate the origins of the virus.
If a scientist is telling people to unfollow them because those people believe it's a possibility that they don't want ruled out without evidence; that is the very definition of being a child. In fact, maybe they shouldn't have credentials at that point.
If someone is telling people who already only believe that conclusion then that makes sense.
It's important to ask people that do this stuff to be very specific about their motivations in the moment, document them, and hold them accountable at a later date when the dust settles.
The statement is very explicitly not aimed at people who believe it’s a possibility.
The childishness of telling people to unfollow you on Twitter is undeniable, but isn’t really related, and is just what you get when you’re reading Twitter.
I am always surprised how the virologist community have sacrificed their integrity.
From the article titled "Scientists: 'Exactly zero' evidence COVID-19 came from a lab"[1]:
> But that was before he learned more about COVID-19 and related coronaviruses, which have features already seen in nature. "There are lots of data and lots of evidence, as well as previous examples of this coming from nature," he said. "We have exactly zero evidence or data of this having any connection to a lab."
I don't think that people are doubting the virologists' epistemic ability; it's the fact that their reasoning seems to be motivated by a desire to deflect blame away from the NIAID/CCP/virology field which is the problem.
Is that (motivated reasoning) not a textbook failure of epistemic ability though?
I mean, I suppose from a pragmatic standpoint (the world as it is) it's starting to get into the realm of enlightenment, but if friggin' scientists can't think clearly, then perhaps their new found "five star", god-tier status in society should be knocked down to four or four and a half stars.
I was being way too generous; wilful blindness would be closer, and it's combination of people
- making a conscious decision not to think the unthinkable ("work in my scientific sub-discipline has caused a disaster")
- attempting to avoid particular repercussions for their field, such as a world-wide ban on gain-of-function research (plenty of scientists would want to avoid what they might see as a disproportionate knee-jerk reaction from lay members of the general public which hindered work in a field that they believed to have great promise for the future, and they might believe that this decision should be in the hands of experts).
- trying to prevent the loss of sources of funding for virological research and the resulting impact on their career
and finally, and most importantly
- being moved by a misplaced sense of humanitarian responsibility to try to prevent the escalation of geopolitical tensions between superpowers ("virologists the world over have a vital role to play at this present moment in standing shoulder to shoulder in heading off the looming threat of war").
If I were cynical, I'd think that recent changes to reporting on the subject were as much a result of changes to the occupancy of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as they were to evidence that has come to light over the last few months.
To me, much of this is a subset of causes of epistemic failures (plus dishonesty, selfishness) - I have witnessed first hand many people who consider themselves to be better at thinking because they are a scientist, or are scientific thinkers, or believe in The Science. To me, this is like a form of intellectual cancer in our society.
> being moved by a misplaced sense of humanitarian responsibility to try to prevent the escalation of geopolitical tensions between superpowers ("virologists the world over have a vital role to play at this present moment in standing shoulder to shoulder in heading off the looming threat of war").
> If I were cynical, I'd think that recent changes to reporting on the subject were as much a result of changes to the occupancy of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as they were to evidence that has come to light over the last few months.
I actually consider these to be fairly valid motivations. True, it violates strict epistemology, but if it is done with full knowledge at least it is understandable. However, I haven't encountered many examples of people who acknowledge that they are lying for the greater good - rather, it seems much more common that people are lying to themselves and others, motivated by a fear of Trump (or whatever the boogeyman du jour is). If lying is done with awareness, I seem to consider it less dangerous (which is perhaps a dumb way to think...."it depends" I imagine).
> It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York
The controversy around Peter Daszak goes deeper. First off, he was the only American on the WHO team that visited Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) earlier this year. Per the WSJ (https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-china-hunt-covid-origins-11...) the WHO rejected three different nominees from the Trump administration and instead chose Daszak. That seems suspicious to me, because Daszak's prior work with WIV means there is a clear conflict of interest, and it puts the WHO's judgment into doubt since it would seem like a convenient pick for the CCP, given how tightly they managed the WHO's visit and subsequent report.
Furthermore, Daszak's name appears as an author on a WIV paper that concerns coronavirus research (https://jvi.asm.org/content/jvi/90/6/3253.full.pdf), and the text within suggests WIV was actively performing gain of function research with SARS-like (SL) viruses:
> "We recently isolated a bat SL-CoV strain (WIV1) and constructed an infectious clone of another strain (SHC014); significantly, these strains are closely related to SARS-CoV and capable of using the same cellular receptor (angiotensin-convert-ing enzyme 2 [ACE2]) as SARS-CoV"
Note that EcoHealth's grant was omitted from the oversight process concerning research involving dangerous pathogens (https://news.yahoo.com/hhs-board-never-approved-wuhan-155055...). Per this article, Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard H. Ebright said that NIH and NIAID "systematically thwarted — indeed systematically nullified — the HHS P3CO Framework by declining to flag and forward proposals for review."
-
While all of this could just be strange coincidence, incorrect speculation, or reasonably explained with more information, it has all the markers of something that deserves scrutiny and transparency. I feel like everyone who was and still is quick to shut down the lab leak possibility is acting against the spirit of open inquiry and thwarting the best understanding that we could have from this entire saga.
The author of that article makes some claims that you should give some critical thought to:
Some are pretty obviously wrong:
- they say the virus hasn't mutated to become more suitable or transmissible in humans
- they imply the first cases of COVID-19 were hospitalizations and imply that asymptomatic spread of the disease is not possible
Then also the article claims that science hasn't tracked gene mutations of the virus that took place in bats. I think that has indeed happened.
The logic of the people they blame us contradictory too. They say the base DNA could have been concealed by making a novel base but then they say by that this was a researcher doing public, documented research, which suggests they would indeed use standard practices and the signatures would be there.
Could you be more specific perhaps? Maybe you could take the time and explain to me the motives of using a novel base to hide the weapons research while also publishing said research because it's public and funded by grant money. Something about universities hiring evil secret agents doesn't seem plausible to me.
If you want people to take seriesly the idea of COVID-19 coming from a lab then be scientific about it and offer up some ways to make it falsifiable. Otherwise it's simply not scientific, and almost everyone here pushing that theory is ignoring the evidence against it or modifying the conspiracy to fit the facts that contradict it. It's not constructive right now.
The hypothesis that COVID-19 came from an animal, namely a bat, in Wuhan China is independently suggested by multiple areas of science (genetics and epidemiology). It's also in line with similar outbreaks that happened in the past. The science of this is about as "unsettled" as the the theory of evolution vs creationism.
I politely recommend you do more research into the subject. It won't change your conclusions, but the state of affairs is very much not settled.
Also, here's your falsifiability: when it can be shown that the virus is zoonotic in origin, the other theories of its origin are falsified.
I do not believe that the virus was engineered in a lab at this point, but turning this into tribe warfare will not help anything. Saying that the opinion you disagree with is unscientific and comparing it to creationism just shows you aren't looking to have an actual conversation.
Falsifiability would be something like: we know what the genetics of lab-made viruses look like; they have certain base pair signatures; therefore if this virus were made in a lab it would have those signatures.
A real scientist with close knowledge of the virus and the lab offered this.
Every time another "expert" or an academic says that it's not worth investigating, because it is too political, I treat it as a litmus test if the person is full of shit and should not be allowed near public policy decision. Even if they are an expert in the field, does not mean they are "street smart".
Everything can be and is politicized. Even local news about a petty theft or changes to a small park ends up being very political in the media or some local discussion board (looking at Nextdoor). If it crosses the border, it becomes international politics.
There are existing cases when coronaviruses leaked from the labs before and it is a known concern: [1], [2]
The debate on the risking of such research has been going on for years [3] and in 2014 the US even paused funding selected gain-of-function research [4]. It happened before more than once, denying that it could have happened again in 2019, because there are no evidence, is simply lazy. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Why it matters? Because only in 2016 China adopted national guidelines for treatment of lab animals [5].
Knowing what happens critically important to make sure it does not happen again. Any system, that wants to adapt needs to analyze and find root cause of the mistake. Take rules and regulations in Aviation, all decisions about safety are driven by experience and past mistakes. If something is a pilot's mistake, then either there is a safeguard added, protocol or training altered, or everything above; but it's not customary to downplay or avoid highlighting human error. It is a common-sense approach used in any area, from aviation to military to sea navigation, etc. Either actors learn or the system learns by eliminating actors. Only in case of virus research, humanity is an actor that either needs to learn or ...
And I don't understand, why it is so important not o blame Chinese government?
Do we not want to blame the Soviet government for the handling and the fallout of Chernobyl? Or those, who made risky decisions while operation the plant?
If it is leaked from the lab, amend must be made to the facility, protocols, guidelines. Nevertheless, if it turns out that it is someone's gross negligence, the person or group of people should be reprimanded.
The US industrial farming can be a culprit of another "pig" or "chicken" flu or something more deadly. I would not be surprised, if some industrial farm with a string of sanitary and animal rights violations breeds a new virus. In this case, I want them to be reprimanded; if a state has loose regulations to prevent it, I want that state to be reprimanded by the federal government. And I would expect the US to take financial loss and pressure from the international community as an incentive to learn from mistake.
> "If you think SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab, please unfollow me. "
You'd believe scientists should know better that it's not about "China is guilty, they should pay for their crime" at all but "Let' us understand the origins so that we might prepare and protect ourselves better for another pandemic outbreak."
A lot of people here claiming there is no evidence. Whether they think there was none because they didn't bother to look, they think the evidence is poor, or they can't imagine any authoritative evidence without the help of China it's just not true.
People imagine Chinese social media as something that is completely locked down when in reality it was abuzz with information when a new mysterious disease was appearing in Wuhan. Countries like Taiwan were suspicious and taking action as early as December.
Here is a set of evidence I have a hard time poking holes in:
There are some pieces of evidence that are compelling alone:
- beyond a reasonable doubt, coronavirus research was done at WIV.
- beyond a reasonable doubt, collection of coronavirus from bats was done for the lab.
- beyond a reasonable doubt, there have been instances of poor PPE/safety measures.
> Whether they think there was none because they didn't bother to look
The origin was politicized in the US and taboo to even question it, so few did. It was labeled a crazy conspiracy theory by the media and that shut the door on open inquiry until recently.
This is why there is a big difference between skepticism and conspiracy. A skeptic digs deeper to gather more data and facts, a conspiracy loosely joins a few data points and makes a poor conjecture.
Conspiracy is political ammunition, skepticism is healthy debate and gladly welcomes more data.
"Skepticsm" is when over educated pseudo-intellectuals want THEIR theories to have the ring of "science," while dismissing others as conspiracy theorists.
All of science is driven by hypothesis, but those hypotheses don't just appear out of nowhere. Suspicion, bias, and bad data can all drive focus on a particular field. In that way, such conjecture is a powerful scientific tool that in my opinion is too often dismissed.
It is a miraculous coincidence that a novel virus would spontaneously emerge at the exact location of a virology lab studying that virus.
The counterpoint to this is that this lab was setup in this location for the exact reason that a novel coronavirus would potentially emerge from bats in the region. This would require both miraculous forethought on the potential for bats in the region to produce novel coronaviruses, and a strange desire to place the virology lab near the location.
Most high level virology labs are centered based on considerations such as ability to hire talent and security/land concerns. It's relatively straightforward to organize expeditions to any region of the world at this point to collect samples.
Which means that for the standard explanation to hold true.
- A virology lab was created to study potentially dangerous versions of coronavirus (WIV founded 1956)
- The virology lab must have been placed near the location where animals were producing interesting virus strains. (WIV studying coronaviruses from all over China since 2005 including Horshoe bats from Yunnan province carrying progenitor strains of the SARS virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology)
- A novel coronavirus emerged near the WIV lab in Q4 2019 due to unrelated sales of locally hunted bats.
Strange things occur, but this would be strange enough as to require plausible studies identifying animal sources of Covid-19 to take at face value.
I'm sorry, but this feels like conspiracy-theory peddling and FUD.
What the linked site calls "evidence", is are at best "hints" or "possible signs". No evidence anywhere. Instead, you have wildly weird texts like section 8.3 ("A Note on Biowarfare") that literally just reads "This document does not make any attempt to link the work done at these laboratories as part of a 'bioweapon' or "bio-warfare" program.". It's completely and utterly disconnected from the rest of the text. Why even bring it up? Just so you can throw the word "bioweapon" out there?
Plus, the site always seems to see "causation" whenever there is correlation, and never even stops to admit that there's the possibility they got the chain of causation backwards: if there was a lot of coronavirus-carrying bats in the region wouldn't it make sense to build a research institute there? And publish on all the findings? The site goes on to cite papers and job postings that are exactly the kinds of research (and job postings) you'd expect from a site that focuses on coronavirus related research. Yet the linked site makes it sound ominous, when it is utterly mundane.
So one has to ask who actually produced this site to begin with? To quote the page:
> "We are an anonymous group of researchers"
Very convenient. In other words, no-one with a serious research background could be convinced to put their name on this nonsense.
There doesn't appear to be any regional association with the WIV's research on Bats. WIV studied bats fro all over China and notably isolated the likely center of the 2003 SARS outbreak to a set of bats in Yunnan. The institute was founded in 1956, long before Coronavirus research started in earnest.
Considering that the Horshoe Bat range encompasses a band between Portugal and Japan that would make the mongol empire jealous, I fail to see how this changes the point. The probability of Coronavirus emerging within the Horshoe Bat range in the same city as a virology lab is vanishingly small without a further confounding variable.
You say the article feels like a conspiracy theory, yet it points to negligence as the likely culprit, which is pretty much the opposite of a conspiracy. You call it FUD (fear uncertainty doubt), but I'm totally uncertain how it would qualify as FUD.
There is one obvious conspiracy by the Chinese government to prevent all understanding of the virus. That does fit the definition of what a conspiracy is.
> "This document does not make any attempt to link the work done at these laboratories as part of a 'bioweapon' or "bio-warfare" program."
This makes perfect sense if you are an American, because in the anti-intellectual Trump era, there was a well circulated rumor that COVID was a Chinese bio-weapon that the CPC figured it could deal with better than Americans because China can weld people's door's shut, and you can't do that in America. This is on par with the widely circulated Chinese rumor that the American military brought it to Wuhan. Obviously both of those are extremely unlikely and very much conspiracy theories. Certainly on the American side our scientists said it's extremely unlikely that COVID was engineered and has none of the markers of bio-engineering very early into covid.
This is the article stating that it is not addressing that conspiracy theory, which was very much part of the conversation when it was written over a year ago.
> Just so you can throw the word "bioweapon" out there?
Out of your own ignorance of the context you are assuming malice.
>and never even stops to admit that there's the possibility that the causal reasoning is backwards
This is literally the second paragraph in the article, and it was bolded for emphasis:
This document does not attempt to provide a concrete conclusion
on whether either claim is factually true. Rather, it examines
the probability that each claim is true to allow the reader to
make his or her own conclusions. While either claim cannot be
irrevocably proven true, an attempt has been made to ensure the
evidence used to support these claims is as factual as possible.
Furthermore, you completely ignored the meat of the article focusing on a couple of weaker and overall not super central points.
> Very convenient. In other words, no-one with a serious research background could be convinced to put their name on this nonsense.
It's almost like there is an extremely draconian authoritarian ruling government with very deep reach that has a long history of disappearing people it doesn't like or punishing them via connections with people who have power over them that people might be afraid of.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. The parent took a step in that direction, which is bad, but you've responded by escalating noticeably, which is worse. (It's also not in your interests because it discredits the view you're arguing for, in the eyes of neutral readers.)
Please review the site guidelines and stick to the rules. They include:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
This is not evidence of anything in particular, without some Bayesian calibration:
- What other kinds of virus research besides coronavirus was done at the WIV?
- What proportion of coronaviruses are anyway derived from bats?
- What were the outcomes of the instances of poor PPE/safety measures with regard to containment?
Without this calibration, all you've written is innuendo.
Isn't "beyond a reasonable doubt" a legal construct, rather than a scientific one? Science looks at probabilities and measurable numbers not one person or another's "reasonable doubt".
Taiwan responded when their (assistant) minister of health came across posts on online forums claiming that there was a SARS-like disease being covered up in Wuhan. On Dec 31 they were screening passengers and on Jan 2nd they started asking all patients about travel histories.
It also helped them that mainland China was limiting travel at the time for political reasons.
They’ve been repeatedly conflated, either purposefully or carelessly. Almost no one was actually pursuing the engineered bioweapon angle but anyone who even suggested that it may have leaked from a lab that studies bat coronaviruses was treated like a tinfoil hat conspiracy nut. It’s pretty dismal that no one is going to be accountable for their behaviour through this whole mess, nothing will be learned and we’ll probably be worse off the next time something like this happens.
The behaviorist interpretation of belief is that beliefs expressed will be based on whatever is the most socially acceptable, and that that internal beliefs are formed to be consistent with outward expression of belief.
Nobody will be able to look at this rationally until nobody cares either way. That’s what makes history interesting. It always changes.
I think prohibition is a good illustration of why that interpretation is inaccurate. When one group’s beliefs become dominant in society it doesn’t result in everyone’s opinions changing. People will pay lip service to the commonly held belief but will act otherwise behind closed doors. The people that carry the internalized belief are often entirely oblivious to how much of a lie it actually is since they never get invited to the speak easy.
I know this sounds odd, but at this point I don't think it matters, as far as what we need to do next, and more pressure on this point may just make that harder.
1) Regardless of whether or not this virus came from a lab, could such a thing plausibly happen in the future? Unquestionably yes.
2) Do we have international bodies to do inspection of the safety standards of any lab doing this kind of work? Ones that have the authority to require changes, or even shut down a lab, if those safety standards are not met? Unquestionably no, we have no such international body.
3) Could we make one? Yes, if China and Russia and the USA all agree to make one, it could be made binding on the rest of the world.
So, let's get on with that. I fear that the discussion of the origin of covid-19, while it has certainly been useful in showing what the potential future problems are, may get in the way of setting up something to prevent it happening (again?) in the future.
>I know this sounds odd, but at this point I don't think it matters
I know the quote "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" and all, but if we deem it important to get to the bottom of individual deaths, accidental or not, than it is important to get to the bottom of millions of deaths.
The sheer amount of the word "seems" and "plausible" here ought to tell you what is being discussed: what's being discussed is not primary evidence, it's interpretation of the meaning and impact, in the mind of the discussing parties
If you want to go all "judicial" on this, "on the balance of probabilities" in the context of an ongoing political and trade dispute between the parties, feels to me like an attempt to appeal to pseudo rational claims, more than an actual, dispassionate declaration of likelihood.
The article says "keep an open mind" which strongly suggests the "evidence" is equivocal. If you're not a virologist or scientist who works in the primary field, and I am not one either, you're at BEST attempting to interpret science at second or third hand. Science often uses words differently to colloquial speech. The word "must" for instance, has no normative force always. This "must" be because blah blah blah is not saying "causative" unless it actually says so. If it doesn't say WHY it MUST mean something, it's opinion. If it says MUST because of the balance of probabilities it's actually MAY in any case.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadPolitics is too deeply entrenched, it will be an impossibility to uncover the truth.
Also, what do you mean by "improving air filtration"?
Sampling bias acknowledged.
I think many academics and scientists are so emotionally invested in the side they took they will defend it no matter of the evidence.
But, also, wouldn't it be better to determine the cause of this one so we know not to do whatever it was that caused this? For example, try to discourage exotic meats that might be host to the virus and/or eliminate or strictly control gain of function research, depending on the actual cause (or some other cause that isn't actually either of these)?
The risks of such research have been in open debate for years, and the Obama administration even banned it for a while. It's not a far-fetched possibility, and it's a shame that the discussion about it became such a political casualty for the first year or so. The fact that heads are cooling a little now is clearly the precondition for scientists to be able to start writing letters like the OP.
Do you have a source for this? Because if true this would be extremely frightening, even if Covid is natural the research is just too risky. GoF research should be banned, I mean it's entire justification for conducting this research in the first place is that it "helps predict new emergent diseases and develop vaccines" but it failed to predict this pandemic and did nothing towards vaccine development.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/cong...
However there's an article in Nature which makes it clearer that the 1.2B figure is just an amount requested by those who suggested the project. A far cry from "current plans" to fund that amount.
This was actually the reason we stopped the research in the US in 2014: Risky with no clear benefit. It was restarted in 2017 after investigations and new guidelines for the research to hopefully improve safety measures.
I think it's very wrong to shy away from inquiry of the truth out of fear of politics.
If it's expensive to mitigate and hard to quantify, it's always going to be an uphill battle.
In software terms, if you have a bug that breaks the production and the response is messy and slow, you absolutely need to spend time and effort to change your response process. But you also need to know how this type of a bug became possible in the first place.
If we don't get open cooperation from China, it's also extremely useful information and helps all other nations recalibrate their levels of trust and ties.
Because if a future lab release happens, it could be so, so much worse. If it seems impossible, disease was a contributing factor in 31 species' extinctions that we know of, and those diseases were of natural origin.[1] The Plague of Justinian, also of natural origin, is estimated to have killed up to half the world's population at the time. After the last year, can we really afford to take these risks lightly anymore?
[1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
Thanks for the thoughtful post
Dark matter/energy also frequently fall into this sort of argument. There is no evidence that they do exist, which does not suggest the absence of their existence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
If CCP are covering it up, then of course there will be a lack of direct evidence. The above doesn't prove it conclusively, but it does make it rather suspicious. Why would CCP be hampering the investigations if they have nothing to hide? It was over a year before they let the WHO have a look. Plenty of time to get rid of any actual evidence.
There's also the reports about the leaked state department cables from 2018: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep... But I couldn't actually figure out where to find them, so you can discount that one as "not enough evidence to verify".
Those things aren't conspiracy theories. Yes, its not enough evidence to prove it either, but damn does it make them look shady.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory
This is contrary but I'm open to debate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747529/
> 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.), even if the animals did not show clinical signs of the virus. The preliminary conclusion was the SARS virus crossed the xenographic barrier from Asian palm civets to humans, and more than 10,000 masked palm civets were killed in Guangdong Province. The virus was also later found in raccoon dogs (Nyctereuteus sp.), ferret badgers (Melogale spp.), and domestic cats. In 2005, two studies identified a number of SARS-like coronaviruses in Chinese bats.[60][61]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
Suppose that I remember leaving $5000 in plain sight on a table. My initial priors are a 90% chance that it is there, a 9% chance that I put it somewhere else by accident, and a 1% that my friend Bob took it. I conduct a search that would have found it with 100% odds if it was on the table, 95% odds if I had put it somewhere else by accident, and a 0% chance if Bob took it. Add in the evidence of the search and all of a sudden the new odds are 0% chance that it is where I thought it was, about a 31% chance that I put it somewhere else, and a 69% chance that Bob took it.
This is the first major disease to jump to humans in the last 20 years that we haven't quickly tracked down the path to us. We're good at it. The fact that we didn't succeed this time when more effort was put into the search is something that should give us pause.
Many of them dissolve when treated correctly with something like a Bayesian analysis. [1] This is one of them. Absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence of absence, contrary to the frequent assertions otherwise. It just isn't proof. The strength of the evidence is proportional to the amount of the possibility space searched and the quality of that search.
It is not fallacious to observe that our normally-successful efforts to find a natural cause failing raises the probabilities of the remaining explanations, and that of those possibilities, "lab origin" has a lot of the remaining probability. It doesn't mean that natural origin is disproved, nor did it mean any of the other possibilities are certain, but it is valid to adjust ones probability estimates.
(I've also learned from experience a lot of people will read this as being critical of the Aristotelian perspective or something. I am not. It is a valid logic. There are other valid logics. Many of them are more practically useful than rigid True and False, but Aristotelian logic, like Newtonian physics, is still a very important one to understand as it serves as an important limiting case for many other more complicated logics.)
[1]: This is not a position statement on Bayesian vs. frequentist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_assumption
This was the exact reasoning people bet the farm on the housing market prior to late 2008. There was no evidence the housing market ever depreciated, so with that absence of evidence the housing market must therefore not ever depreciate. Contrary to that reasoning the housing market crashed and I got my house as a foreclosure at a heavily depreciated value.
Bigfoot has entered the chat.
> Dark matter/energy...There is no evidence that they do exist,
Except there is plenty of evidence for dark matter. It's stuff that has observable mass and is found in countless galaxy rotation curve studies, gravitational lensing, etc.
False dichotomy. The main lab-leak theory is that a natural virus being studied escaped from a lab, not a man-made one.
>"... no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching..."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11...
Edit: Added source.
Sars1: Prof. Zheng-Li Shi from Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Prof. Shu-Yi Zhang from the Institute of Zoology, and some researchers from Australia also tracked the source of SARS virus to bats, and their findings were published in Science in September 2005
>"As no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching and as RNA recombination is frequent within coronaviruses, it is highly likely that SARS-CoV newly emerged through recombination of bat SARSr-CoVs in this or other yet-to-be-identified bat caves"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11...
>"No direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations, but WIV16 was found in a cave in Yunnan province, China between 2013 and 2016, and has a 96% genetically similar virus strain."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
Politics will be inexorably intertwined in such an investigation.
For ordinary citizens, of course not.
I don't think we will get the true answer or an answer that is going to satisfy everyone, just a lot of geopolitical posturing.
The data have already been destroyed. The Wuhan lab where this research was taking place also had a leadership change, and is now run by someone in the military. That happened in March or April of 2020, IIRC.
Chinese researchers and journalists disappeared in that time frame (their work was deleted from online archives, their names removed from public employment listings... etc.).
I have family in China, and we watched all this happen. These are the things that happened in public. The Western press was too busy with "oh my gosh, we should probably stop flights now" to take serious notice. Then the whole thing became politicized (in the U.S., at least) and if you made statements like "this started in Wuhan, in the lab there, not in the animal market next to it," you were called racist, even though race had nothing to do with it.
We can ask until the cows come hom. The evidence is gone, disposed of by a series of decisions made more than a year ago.
Honestly I always felt like "a scientist working with dangerous pathogens had an accident" is way less racist than "someone ate a weird animal from a wet market"... And yet the backlash was stronger for the lab leak scenario, almost as if the opinions were influenced by someone.
Maybe for someone well informed like you. But I assure you it does look like a conspiracy theory for "the mere mortal". This is precisely what I was trying to explain. Please don't shoot the messenger.
I really sympathize with both sides here - I think it's quite possible a lab accident was involved with the virus escaping into the world... but the benefit we'd get from knowing that would mostly involve labs being a lot more careful with PPE and I think we've seen PPE usage tick way up and the dangerous involved with disease handling get a lot larger of a spotlight. And, I also think that beating up or harassing Asian-Americans is wrong and if we need to tell a big societal level lie to people to get them to stop then I'm okay with that.
Okay
>There are reports of huge increases in hate crimes during a year full of brazen violence and media-fueled racial tensions.
You don't think #ChineseVirus had anything to do with those racial tensions?
>This is most easily explained by a trend in classification rather than victimization. That is, law enforcement is now documenting something that has been going on for a long time. This is certainly true of the national crime victimization survey, which listed Asians for the first time in the 2018 report, released at the end of 2019.
Here's the report from 2010: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/cv10.txt
It lists Asians.
>I do expect to see increases in Asian victimization in the 2020 report, but the motivations are most likely under the banner of social justice.
What?
Specifically, what the fuck?
>Nobody was looting and burning down cities in protest of the coronavirus.
No, but they're torching Chinese restaurants because they are Chinese. Here's one example among many:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/officials-look-into-chi...
You're justifying that censorship saying that the "wrongthink people" were close to this so that's why it was mostly shunned.
It's disingenuous. This whole year and counting (specially in places with slow vaccine rollouts) has been full of instances where certain challenges to the official local government doctrine where combated heavily with not much argument other than personal attacks and requests for faith in the "one true narrative".
You don't know that. You'd need an investigation to conclude that. Using it as an excuse not to investigate seems like assuming the conclusion.
Even if some data have been destroyed, it doesn't follow that every last piece of data everywhere has. Who knows what might turn out to be significant? There may well be relevant data in many countries, too, since the research was international.
https://project-evidence.github.io/
If Wuhan lab leak were 'truth' - without hard evidence and a bold international campaign to forcefully make people aware ... then China would be able to hide behind a cloud of whataboutery and changing the subject.
Unless there is some kind of genetic linkage etc..
I also feel that some US authorities wouldn't want the truth to be fully known lest there be unpredictable repercussions and 'worries about Anti Asian Hate Crime' and those kinds of things, preferring to handle it 'behind closed doors'.
It would be great if we could arrive at some kind of objective truth, not holding my breath.
If COVID-19 was, in fact, a lab release then that's a strong argument for shutting the research down.
Liable in the trillions? Too big to speak about.
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
This seems like a reach. There's a big difference in liability between "mismanaged deadly pathogens, caused a pandemic" and "said that someone should study deadly pathogens".
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_R01AI110964_7529
In 2014 when the US stopped gain-of-function research for being too risky, Fauci started funding it in Wuhan through EcoHealth. That's a lot more than just "said someone should study deadly pathogens".
This is disputed.
That is not the assertion being made by the scientists pushing for the investigation. The assertion is that this is a chimeric virus that very much does NOT show up in nature and its lab-made qualities are precisely why it became a global pandemic.
Or would you take it as pure coincidence that the first truly global pandemic in however many decades you'd like just happened to be lab made?
Me: "This virus has unique qualities that made it especially contagious, so its artificiality is not moot."
You: "Other viruses in the past were also bad."
Me, now: Yes, other viruses in the past were also bad. If you meant that to relate to the previous comments I think you left out the important bits.
It's like if we were discussing whether we should investigate if someone caused a deadly landslide. Why would you argue that we shouldn't look into it simply because landslides also happen naturally? If there are empty crates of TNT on the top of the hill, shouldn't we look into it?
What happened is that (I think) I misinterpreted this statement:
> Or would you take it as pure coincidence that the first truly global pandemic in however many decades you'd like just happened to be lab made?
Upon re-reading, it seems you're saying that if this virus turned out to be lab-made, this fact might have something to do with it becoming a global pandemic (through an increased probability of spreading worldwide).
Whereas you're not saying that the fact that this became a global pandemic indicates that it is lab-made, which is how I misinterpreted it initially.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gain_of_function_research
https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-experiments...
It is sickening that millions of people died, more will die, hundreds of millions of people have been pushed below poverty line, almost every single person's life on the planet is affected in some way and some people think it's unnecessary to investigate.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
a.) It was covered up,
b.) The people responsible hid crucial information which could have helped contain the spread in the early days and find treatments,
c.) The people assuring us that lab creation was an impossible "conspiracy theory" at the very least have egg on their face, and at worst have no credibility or were engaged in a campaign of mis/disinformation.
And that's without getting into questions of whether the "leak" story is being used to cover for "intentional release."
> It was covered up
This is not actionable.
> The people responsible hid crucial information which could have helped contain the spread in the early days and find treatments
You imply in punishing those people? In the case it was a leak, the people interested in punishing them don't have that power, the people with that power were the same suppressing the information, so no, that won't happen.
> The people assuring us that lab creation was an impossible "conspiracy theory" at the very least have egg on their face, and at worst have no credibility or were engaged in a campaign of mis/disinformation
You should already remove any credibility from anybody claiming it was impossible, as well as from anybody claiming any other kind of certainty. What actually happened won't change that.
What we should do is take a good new look at the containment procedures of those labs, reevaluate them, verify if they are followed and fix what is not. We should also press uncooperative countries, like China, to open those up for inspection. Again, whether this one virus came from a lab leak or not is not relevant, we know that best practices are still leaky, and we have seen how problematic a leak would be.
All this politics game of "did | did not" is very counterproductive.
Who should do that, exactly? The same people you seem to think we should not to attempt to investigate or hold accountable in any way?
> We should also press uncooperative countries, like China, to open those up for inspection.
If China was demanding to have a bunch of their inspectors let into Fort Detrick to poke around, we wouldn't be any more welcoming than they have been. It's silly to allow imperial powers to engage in bioweapons research and then expect them to show each other all their cards.
It is much easier to get China to complain with "we developed those standards for virus research, and would like you to comply too, like any other serious country" than "we believe you made an incredibly large fuck-up and want your help to prove it".
Whomever leaked this murdered over 1/2 the holocaust, and the total death count is only going to keep going up. The leak is a crime against humanity and should be prosecuted as one.
If you're posting inflamed, denunciatory rhetoric about a divisive topic, you're not using HN as intended.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(1) people like dramatic scandalous stories, in general. (2) knowing such might drive some prevention of whatever mistake lead to such from recurring.
There exists a class of people who, without necessarily being driven by other motivations, generally try to find out what is really going on. We call such people scientists.
No need to focus on motivation. Curiosity should be enough.
I think there's also something more insidious at play. In western countries lot of people have become rich by exporting manufacturing to China. If somehow it is found that COVID was a lab-leak, there'd be a huge amount of backlash against China. It will harm the business, who are doing their manufacturing in China. There's a lot of money involved if lab-leak hypothesis turned out true.
Just from a scientific perspective, we should know where covid-19 came from. If it hopped from bats to people in a wet market, that tells us something about the likelihood of this type of virus spreading from contact with wild animals. If it was accidentally released from a lab, that tells us something different.
In a healthy geopolitical environment, an impartial investigative team that's able to pinpoint the source of the original transmission could make this information public so that everyone can learn how to avoid this happening again. If the pandemic happened because policy enforcement at the virus lab in Wuhan was weak, this is worth knowing. Not to to lay blame and point fingers, but to help labs worldwide identify potential weak points in their own procedures.
The danger is that if evidence points to an accidental lab release, some Western politicians will seize on the opportunity to shame China just for the sake of national chauvinism. This will accomplish nothing positive. The Chinese Communist Party is very thin skinned and essentially amoral so they'll have no compunctions about covering up any evidence of a lab leak in order to save face. All of this political stuff risks getting in the way of helping the scientific community understand where covid-19 came from so we'll have a better understanding of how to reduce the chances of this happening again.
The only reason I see why we should want to remain ignorant is it will possibly embarrass China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlO8sKRynBY
So far, the lab origin story sounds the most plausible and has the least holes in it. Now innocent until proven guilty is a thing, but is not like the PRC would ever agree to a fair trial.
https://farside.ph.utexas.edu/books/Syntaxis/Almagest/node4....
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's not to say that I think it didn't come from the WIV, just that they'd act the same way regardless of where the first transmission occurred.
You seem to ignore the fact that there's exactly zero evidence either pro or contra. The fame of the "media person" is the kind of argument you typically see invoked in Facebook and Youtube comments.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I have to wonder though if the wet market was a CCP smoke screen... why wasn’t it further from their lab doing exactly this type of viral work? IDK, maybe that was the point to cause suspicion? I’m not crafty enough to know my ability to write world deceiving half-truths.
1. We have strong suspicion that the virus was going around in early December, away from the Wuhan wet market.
2. If the source was natural and zootonic, we would have expected to find the intermediate animal by now. For Sars1 and Mers, we found that animal within 4 months and 9 months respectively. It's been 18 months since Covid19, and we have no clue what that animal despite better science and astronomically more investment.
Only if you assume it's both widespread and endemic in the intermediate animal population.
If it's spreading at low levels through that population for some reason (like being a less social animal) then it's trying to find a needle in a haystack, and that's on top of the needle/haystack of identifying the correct animal and population.
If it's not endemic we may never find it, perhaps the intermediate population were well on their way to herd immunity before the virus jumped to humans leaving little to no trace.
There are some other possibilities too, like it could have been transmitting undetected among relatively isolated humans (like small farming villages) for some time before an infected farmer visited a market. This would significantly broaden the scope of when and where the infected animal population was.
That we haven't found the source yet is incredibly weak evidence.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 - May 2021 (536 comments)
If you want to refer to something you said in a previous context, that's fine and is what links are for.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If having openly racist culture and running concentration camps has done nothing to their reputation, I don't think anything will.
> I don't think they did this intentionally.
Regardless if this was intentional or not, they should take responsibility. Imagine if Russia dropped a nuclear bomb on Europe by mistake. This is the same calibre of "oops my bad.". It's not a secret that these viruses were researched as a potential bio-weapon. In that sense whether it was intentional or not, it has done immense damage to worldwide economy, which is exactly the goal of such bio-weapon.
I think most people just don't know about the Uyghur camps.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
I don't think this is true. A hypothesis can be unfalsifiable without being unprovable. (Think of a "needle in a haystack" existence hypothesis: it's unfalsifiable, at least practically speaking, but it can be proven simply by finding the needle.)
> A video released two years before the start of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic shows Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) scientists being cavalier toward protective equipment and being bitten by bats that carry deadly viruses such as SARS, demonstrating a lax safety culture in the lab.
> On Dec. 29, 2017, Chinese state-run TV released a video designed to showcase Shi Zhengli, (石正麗), also known as "Bat Woman," and her team of scientists at the WIV in their quest to find the origin of SARS. Despite the fact that the scientists work in a biosafety level 4 lab, they show a shocking disregard for safety when handling potentially infectious bats both in the wild and in the lab.
> From 4:45 to 4:56, a scientist can be seen holding a bat with his bare hands. Team members from 7:44 to 7:50 can be seen collecting potentially highly infectious bat feces while wearing short sleeves and shorts and with no noticeable personal protective equipment (PPE) other than gloves.
> Virus researcher Cui Jie (崔杰) relates his experiences of being bitten from 8:47 to 8:50. He said that the bat's fangs went right through his glove, which was likely nitrile. He described the feeling as "like being jabbed with a needle." The video then cuts to a person's limb showing swelling after a bat bite.
That provides a plausible origin scenario of the pandemic: In October 2019, a researcher at the Wuhan Lab was bitten by a bat, got infected (asymptomatically), went home and unknowingly infected other people in the community, and the virus spread from there.
Sadly, I don't think we'll ever know what happened. Those who were directly involved with the early stage of the outbreak will never speak up, because Beijing issued a complete gag order on what happened. Anyone that speaks about the early stages of the pandemic be charged with espionage, and if found guilty, they can receive the death penalty. https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/11/9833532bb925-chin...
> The recent announcement of nine cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome linked to China's National Institute of Virology brings to three the number of lab outbreaks of the disease in the past eight months.
It's also happened dozens of times in the US, UK, and former Soviet Union. Tuberculosis, Smallpox, various flu viruses have all escaped from "secure" labs. [2] [3]
Maybe studying viruses isn't as safe as we thought.
---
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/05/29/s...
[2] https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-virology-research-center-hit...
[3] https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/29/1978-accidenta...
Given that the amount of evidence is exactly zero, anyone can spin their favorite "unsurprising" theories all day long.
Plausible but it gets us no closer to the truth unfortunately. There are many plausible origins, but it is important we do not mistake plausible for the most likely.
I agree though, the CCP has massively hindered this search for truth and will likely continue to do so, all to save face.
Oh, also viruses don't get virulent in the new host the moment the zoonotic transfer occurs. It takes a bit of time to evolve and adapt.
Bureacracies like WHO will NEVER EVER say that it came from a Chinese lab. The "inquiry" will say that it's unlikely and try to bury the issue, and then it will just keep popping its head out in news articles that get ultimately ignored.
Why do you care if you will NEVER EVER believe it didn't?
To find a source we need a host. We haven't even found a host from SARS yet even though that happened back in 2002. All we have is a very closely related one (96% match?) and that was found in 2020. It takes a lot of work by scientists living among wild animals for years in often very remote locations. Stating it was from a lab after so little time has past and so little work has been done is at a minimum jumping to conclusions.
However, lab origin should not be totally dismissed, so we can have a discussion about safety of gain-of-function research now, rather than waiting for some verifiable event to happen in the future.
The Wuhan Lab was funded through the american Ecohealth alliance, and a dozen american scientists probably know just as much as the Chinese do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432
Very interesting to see this idea bubbling to the surface at the same time that Bill Gates's Epstein ties are being re-broadcast, the CDC is rapidly reversing guidance and relaxing protocols, the WEF cancelling its summer meeting, Elon Musk suddenly sticking the knife in crypto's back ....
[1] https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
>"As no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching and as RNA recombination is frequent within coronaviruses, it is highly likely that SARS-CoV newly emerged through recombination of bat SARSr-CoVs in this or other yet-to-be-identified bat caves."
They also write...
>"After the causative agent of SARS was identified, SARS-CoV and/or anti-SARS-CoV antibodies were found in masked palm civets (Paguma larvata) and animal handlers in a market place. However, later, wide-reaching investigations of farmed and wild-caught civets revealed that the SARS-CoV strains found in market civets were transmitted to them by other animals."
Sorry if I made a mess of this as I'm on my phone and commented on more than on post too quickly really..
Edit: Woops, forgot the source. I knew it would be a mess..
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11...
Then you have other academics in the comments saying nothing is certain yet, and other prominents labs like Gupta Labs at Cambridge and Bloom Lab from Seattle saying there could be multiple explanations.
I know the issue is politicised and that's wrong as Ecohealth alliance from the US sponsored this research so there is no "single country at fault" - no need to avoid topics.
It's not "chinas fault" it's more like, what on earth was the US based Ecohealth alliance doing with this research, why so many previous lab leaks with little attention, what is the history if the Wuhan lab, whats the actual facts about Gain of Function research etc. All topics that the press is not looking into for some reason.
On Ecohealth alliance:
“ It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.””
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432
I mean: you seriously cannot make that up.
That being said, from what I've read it appears that a lab escape is a very real possibility. Though I doubt that we'll ever find out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology
But i too think it all too likely that we won't be any wiser about the origins.
Though it would be great if a timeline could be established, i don't remember seeing a good explanation on Covid in Italy being discovered in 2019.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
Via @Ayjchan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1394327680456220672?s=20
I find that argument hard to corroborate and there are other parsimonious explanations, like WIV was located in Wuhan because Wuhan is a major world city with high quality institutions of higher education.
I can only find sources saying that the Furin cleavage site doesn’t rule out engineering, or sources saying the Furin cleave site could be naturally occurring. Sounds like we don’t know yet.
https://twitter.com/wanderer_jasnah/status/13942477140246609...
Some more reading: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210217/The-origin-of-SAR...
All these lines of evidence and reasoning show that the acquisition of the polybasic furin cleavage site by SARS-CoV-2 is a “missing link” in our understanding of its evolutionary history, that can only be addressed through the discovery of new viruses.”
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
As addition of a Furin cleavage site is an old hat acknowledged technique for increasing human infectivity of a virus. The issue with a zoonotic origin though, is that the odds of a mutation is incredibly small, and a recombination at that site would require the sequence to exist in another coronavirus, which has not been discovered to date.
It is also known WIV researchers had recieved instruction from another virologist on "no-see-um" editing techniques that would not leave traces of the mechanism used to splice in an edit.
So not proof, but the network of coincidence is as hard to ignore as a spinal tap amp duct taped to your head, cranked to 11, playing the 1812 Overture.
https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1391507230848032772
https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1391507230848032772
This is becoming more and more common, Pure Science is almost never practiced anymore. The Hard sciences like Immunology, virology, general medicine used to be some what insulated from politics however in the last few years all sciences are no longer data driven.
You form a conclusion then find the facts that fit your narrative, and if your narrative is not the "correct" one you better not release your facts...
[1] https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2020/09/18/what...
[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/handwashi...
[3] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e...
If you’re interested, here is a more recent example of “politics vs science” and politics losing badly: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Abe-declares-e...
Here’s a fun quote from the article:
"We have managed to bring the outbreak under control within just one and a half months. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the Japan model,"
Meanwhile at the time of writing Japan is experiencing a surge in coronavirus cases and Abe has resigned.
Abe resignation seems to be based on being sick though, there was some, well extreme people measuring how long it took him to walk a fixed distance over time and when he started to slow down significatively, they predicted he was sick. He resigned few days later, officially because of an illness:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/japans-abe-goes-to-hospital-for...
The sorts of science that the public finds most interesting are those with a human backstory and politics is the best kind of story.
APA (and WHO, and...) will say no. But you'll see curious notes about recommendations to monitor bone density, and curious usages of auxiliary drugs whose purpose is to combat osteoporosis. Turns out, the therapies are well known to permanently and negatively affect bone density and long term effects-- while assumed to include osteoporosis and more frequent fractures-- are simply unknown.
But the science and statistics cannot be allowed to trump the politics, so you will see no mention of this in complete contravention of traditional Hippocratic responsibilities and medical ethics.
Would be interesting to dig further into who is funding their research.
I guess that's pretty popular, but I have to say I don't care for it.
Many people are still in the bargaining stage of COVID response -- if we find that some person made this virus and released it into the wild, we just send them to prison and the problem goes away. That's a very human reaction to the problem, but unfortunately it doesn't actually work. We have to clean up this colossal mess regardless of whether it was man-made or not, and we have to reckon with the millions that died and will never come back.
Finding someone to blame is just a distraction, and I imagine that many people want to move past that distraction and eradicate the disease. The learning can come later when we're collectively more calm.
I doubt that anyone was funded to create SARS-CoV-2 and then try to suppress discussion about it on Twitter. I think the "unfollow me if you think it's man-made" is just a short-circuit to avoid flamewars and distraction. It probably isn't a belief against doing a blameless postmortem so that we can handle things like this better in the future.
No, what I was getting at is that they might have a financial incentive to discredit the lab escape theory. For instance, some of this researcher's funding or his institution's funding might be from CCP-backed entities.
> We have to clean up this colossal mess regardless of whether it was man-made or not, and we have to reckon with the millions that died and will never come back. Finding someone to blame is just a distraction, and I imagine that many people want to move past that distraction and eradicate the disease. The learning can come later when we're collectively more calm.
This, trying to push the idea that fighting the virus or investigating the outbreak theory are mutually exclusive, is also a rhetoric I would expect to be pushed from the party responsible for the outbreak.
Truth is, why obstruct investigation efforts and try to hide the facts if the origin of the virus is natural?
It's not about removing, it's about finding who they are speaking out for.
Discrediting your opposites is primarily a feature of rhetoric, not discourse.
If your goal is to have an earnest discussion, to go over the various sorts of evidence and the varied hypotheses, you need to address those first.
Some American scientists have claimed the virus does not look engineered. Why? What is their evidence for the claim? If you are asserting the virus is or at least could be engineered, can you account for the evidence supporting their assertion? Can you point to evidence that supports your hypothesis and not theirs? How do they respond to this evidence?
It may be -- in an earnest discussion -- that one side is not engaging, for one reason or another. Maybe they don't want to admit they are wrong, maybe they are getting paid not to. At that point, after you have yourself examined their claims, after you have examined whether you are just being stubborn yourself, it is quite reasonable to disregard them, maybe even in the future.
Bringing it in too early, before engaging with their claims, trying to find reasons not to examine their evidence, makes it seem like you are just interested in winning the rhetorical argument.
Finding someone to blame as you say is not really the key issue. If you want to prevent this from happening again you might just possibly want to know where this virus came from.
4 months after SARS 1 we knew the intermediate host was a civet. 9 months after MERS, we knew the intermediate host was a camel. As of now not a single intermediate zoonotic host has been identified.
At this point the probability threshold has shifted towards a lab leak. We can acknowledge this fact or we can collectively acknowledge that maybe just maybe a research center with a quarter of a billion dollars in funding from the United States government for evolving Corona viruses from bats to infect humanized mice might have had something to do with the virus that broke out in the exact same city.
I mean it really is absurd how quickly people dismiss this rather obvious fact.
Figuring out where this virus came from is extremely relevant considering that the gain of function research that in all likelihood created it is going to be increased in funding as a result of the pandemic. If the public knew that the virus was almost certainly not a naturally transmitted one from a wild animal host, they probably wouldn't be on board with funding more of the research that created it.
Take a similar situation, imagine you were a structural engineer a decade ago and you tweeted "If you think 9/11 was an inside job because jet fuel can't melt steel beams, please unfollow me" or an astronaut tweeting "if you think we didn't land on the moon, please unfollow me" - whether the particular issue they've mentioned is true or false doesn't actually matter. They're trying to avoid the confrontationalists/conspiracy theorists following them/replying to their tweets. They're pretty much tweeting "don't @ me"
That's a pretty bad analogy. It's not like a lab leak is an extremely unlikely possibility at all.
You should rather check who is funding the people who are making certain statements like that. Follow the money trail.
The tweet was talking about the virus being engineered in a lab, not the possibility it escaped from a lab. Their opinion on the possibility of lab leak seems [1] quite reasonable to me - they believe it's possible but unlikely, and link to more info.
> You should rather check who is funding the people who are making certain statements like that.
Sure - do you have more info on his sources of grants etc?
[1] https://twitter.com/macroliter/status/1391777097434152963
Idea 1: SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab
Idea 2: SARS-CoV-2 was in/around/related to WIV and escaped
Idea 1 was widely debunked by American scientists.
Idea 2 is an idea that there is a considerable body of circumstantial evidence supporting and is certainly the most likely origin in my estimation.
> why these weird rumors about Gain of Function research that no one seemingly looks into etc.
You can read one such yourself: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/
Later down on the paper it describes the process by which they did the combination.Our own American scientists said this process would likely result in biomarkers that were not found in the circulating virus (my layman, not expert, understanding).
On the other hand, the WIV has recently published papers about creating new coronaviruses by combining a gene from one virus with the rest of another virus, as well as other types of modifications to existing coronaviruses. They have active grants to continue with this type of research. They also have acknowledged performing this work in BSL-2 labs, which would not be secure enough to contain SARS-CoV-2 if it were to have been the result of one of these experiments.
WIV has acknowledged that at least some of their bat coronavirus research was conducted in their BSL-2 labs which have a far, far lower level of security.
> Before 2020, the rules followed by virologists in China and elsewhere required that experiments with the SARS1 and MERS viruses be conducted in BSL3 conditions. But all other bat coronaviruses could be studied in BSL2, the next level down. BSL2 requires taking fairly minimal safety precautions, such as wearing lab coats and gloves, not sucking up liquids in a pipette, and putting up biohazard warning signs. Yet a gain-of-function experiment conducted in BSL2 might produce an agent more infectious than either SARS1 or MERS. And if it did, then lab workers would stand a high chance of infection, especially if unvaccinated. Much of Shi [Zheng-li, head researcher at WIV]’s work on gain-of-function in coronaviruses was performed at the BSL2 safety level, as is stated in her publications and other documents. She has said in an interview with Science magazine that “[t]he coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories.”
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
I don't personally doubt it's a conspiracy theory but would you clarify exactly where "American scientists" debunked this - is it in the link you provided, it's not clear, it appears to only deal with claim 2?
In this discussion and the older threads he links in there, Bedford basically rules out an 'engineered' virus, does not rule out a lab leak, but leans towards zoonosis (pathogen jumping from animal to human).
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Here are Thread reader links for the older threads he references:
Were parts of HIV inserted into SARS-CoV-2? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1223666856923291648.html
What do the number of amino acid and nucleotide changes tell us? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1224207086013149184.html
Which data point are consistent with zoonosis or lab escape? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1230634136102064128.html
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
The other links you provide are rebuttals of particular arguments, but in no way settle the entire question. Knowing that bits of HIV weren't inserted into SARS-CoV2, for example, tells you nothing about whether this virus may have emerged from natural selection experiments in the lab. There are good arguments on both sides, but Twitter, in particular, seems stuck on the pronouncements of early 2020, when nobody knew much of anything about the virus and a certain prominent politician was speculating wildly, thus setting up a left/right polarization over what should be a factual debate.
We need to stop this hostile form of "scientific debate" where one person's opinion is held up as "the science", while all other voices are dismissed as fringe.
If it was bred in a lab via humanized mice engineered with human ACE 2 receptors, would you consider that? What about forms of "no seeum" splicing?
From
https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-to-stop...
Where are all these animals in the wild (since the lab theory has been "debunked") with SARS-CoV-2?
I'd imagine we'd have found tons of them by now, right?
This is a very strange word. When I read history of science books, this word was almost never used. Change of scientific consensus is not uncommon in the history of science. Scientists disagree with each other, debate with each other, but they don't claim they debunk each other.
I don't believe people use this word in good faith. It seems to be politically loaded power grab.
I don't think very many people think very deeply about the meaning of words, and how subtle changes in the ones that are chosen can influence the collective consciousness. A lot of people even seem to strongly dislike the topic being mentioned.
They'd probably prefer that you didn't notice they were doing this.
The "Wuhan Institute of Virology" is named in a couple of news articles and scientific publications. However what is rarely discussed is that the Wuhan CDC (武汉市疾病预防控制中心), which also has a virus lab and was also researching coronaviruses is in walking distance from that wet market! I took a screenshot of it, in the top right is the Huanan Seafood Market, in the bottom the CDC, which includes a virus lab: https://i.imgur.com/smODVQe.png
Unfortunately you won't find it on Google Maps but anyone who is able to read Chinese can check this themselves. All the early cases were centered around this area, including the hospital that treated the first cases. It's absurd that this is almost never talked about anywhere. On the CDC website they had an open position looking for a researcher to study, among others, exactly the kind of bat CoV that's been identified as most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. This has since been deleted but it could still be accessed during the early days of the outbreak.
FYI, this really doesn't match my experience. I got curious and Googled about the lab's location myself about a year ago, not long after the outbreak, and found the hypothesis tantalizing, even in the absence of hard evidence.
I've seen ongoing discussion about this since then on various blogs and on Twitter.
As a more meta-comment, we're all in tiny, personalized information silos nowadays based on the sites and communities we frequent. Even a pseudo-public forum like Twitter is not really public - you only see the slice that you follow.
IMO 'nobody is talking about it' is more about how you've curated your own info-stream, rather than about the world at large.
1) taking sporadic notes, but not full urls
2) attempting to follow your same trail again
I often find I can't even, with knowledge of what I read/saw find the same sources again, using the same tools and sites without basically taking detailed notes. The idea that information is public and can be connected in the same way is preposterous, but only via experience.
If you have an insight, or a linkage between facts and events, please document it in a way that is shareable and findable. I too saw the ad for the virologist post-doc position in the Wuhan lab. I think lab escape of either a wild virus or a slightly modified one is likely. It doesn't mean that it is nefarious.
I think a full text and graphical log of the research process would be highly productive.
There's so much distraction, hysteria and extremely questionable science reporting. Without having in depth knowledge about Mainland China, I'm not sure if I'd not fallen for some of the misinformation as well. So yes, it's extremely important people document what they see and understand, and share it with other in a way that makes it easily accessible. When many journalists do a bad job at fact checking and questioning their sources, we have to be better than that, else we just contribute to the noise.
Check out Hunchly - https://www.hunch.ly/
"Hunchly automatically collects, documents, and annotates every web page you visit."
Webarchive links are in the comments.
Not all that rarely IME, and certainly not "almost never". It's popped up every now and then for over a year now; here on HN among other places. (OTOH, maybe that was you I saw. :-)
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
It's a long read but a worthy one. Exploring all the options better than the NYT article.
The lack of biomarkers is not proof either way.
There is debate about that. Interesting article here:
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
(It also suggests that one of the loudest early detractors of the "escaped from lab" theory, the main author of the Feb 19, 2020 Lancet letter, had an undeclared conflict of interest because he is president of an organisation which funded Coronavirus research at WIV)
There were a lot of them on twitter, and frankly, they disqualified themselves from the adult table. They've chosen politics over science.
Even ones who claim to be activists will ignore any good faith questions, because every second they spend engaging in meaningful dialogue doesn't allow them to sit there and attack others for points from their followers.
If someone is telling people who already only believe that conclusion then that makes sense.
It's important to ask people that do this stuff to be very specific about their motivations in the moment, document them, and hold them accountable at a later date when the dust settles.
The childishness of telling people to unfollow you on Twitter is undeniable, but isn’t really related, and is just what you get when you’re reading Twitter.
From the article titled "Scientists: 'Exactly zero' evidence COVID-19 came from a lab"[1]:
> But that was before he learned more about COVID-19 and related coronaviruses, which have features already seen in nature. "There are lots of data and lots of evidence, as well as previous examples of this coming from nature," he said. "We have exactly zero evidence or data of this having any connection to a lab."
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/05/scientis...
I mean, I suppose from a pragmatic standpoint (the world as it is) it's starting to get into the realm of enlightenment, but if friggin' scientists can't think clearly, then perhaps their new found "five star", god-tier status in society should be knocked down to four or four and a half stars.
- making a conscious decision not to think the unthinkable ("work in my scientific sub-discipline has caused a disaster")
- attempting to avoid particular repercussions for their field, such as a world-wide ban on gain-of-function research (plenty of scientists would want to avoid what they might see as a disproportionate knee-jerk reaction from lay members of the general public which hindered work in a field that they believed to have great promise for the future, and they might believe that this decision should be in the hands of experts).
- trying to prevent the loss of sources of funding for virological research and the resulting impact on their career
and finally, and most importantly
- being moved by a misplaced sense of humanitarian responsibility to try to prevent the escalation of geopolitical tensions between superpowers ("virologists the world over have a vital role to play at this present moment in standing shoulder to shoulder in heading off the looming threat of war").
If I were cynical, I'd think that recent changes to reporting on the subject were as much a result of changes to the occupancy of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as they were to evidence that has come to light over the last few months.
> being moved by a misplaced sense of humanitarian responsibility to try to prevent the escalation of geopolitical tensions between superpowers ("virologists the world over have a vital role to play at this present moment in standing shoulder to shoulder in heading off the looming threat of war").
> If I were cynical, I'd think that recent changes to reporting on the subject were as much a result of changes to the occupancy of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as they were to evidence that has come to light over the last few months.
I actually consider these to be fairly valid motivations. True, it violates strict epistemology, but if it is done with full knowledge at least it is understandable. However, I haven't encountered many examples of people who acknowledge that they are lying for the greater good - rather, it seems much more common that people are lying to themselves and others, motivated by a fear of Trump (or whatever the boogeyman du jour is). If lying is done with awareness, I seem to consider it less dangerous (which is perhaps a dumb way to think...."it depends" I imagine).
The controversy around Peter Daszak goes deeper. First off, he was the only American on the WHO team that visited Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) earlier this year. Per the WSJ (https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-china-hunt-covid-origins-11...) the WHO rejected three different nominees from the Trump administration and instead chose Daszak. That seems suspicious to me, because Daszak's prior work with WIV means there is a clear conflict of interest, and it puts the WHO's judgment into doubt since it would seem like a convenient pick for the CCP, given how tightly they managed the WHO's visit and subsequent report.
Furthermore, Daszak's name appears as an author on a WIV paper that concerns coronavirus research (https://jvi.asm.org/content/jvi/90/6/3253.full.pdf), and the text within suggests WIV was actively performing gain of function research with SARS-like (SL) viruses:
> "We recently isolated a bat SL-CoV strain (WIV1) and constructed an infectious clone of another strain (SHC014); significantly, these strains are closely related to SARS-CoV and capable of using the same cellular receptor (angiotensin-convert-ing enzyme 2 [ACE2]) as SARS-CoV"
Note that EcoHealth's grant was omitted from the oversight process concerning research involving dangerous pathogens (https://news.yahoo.com/hhs-board-never-approved-wuhan-155055...). Per this article, Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard H. Ebright said that NIH and NIAID "systematically thwarted — indeed systematically nullified — the HHS P3CO Framework by declining to flag and forward proposals for review."
-
While all of this could just be strange coincidence, incorrect speculation, or reasonably explained with more information, it has all the markers of something that deserves scrutiny and transparency. I feel like everyone who was and still is quick to shut down the lab leak possibility is acting against the spirit of open inquiry and thwarting the best understanding that we could have from this entire saga.
Some are pretty obviously wrong:
- they say the virus hasn't mutated to become more suitable or transmissible in humans
- they imply the first cases of COVID-19 were hospitalizations and imply that asymptomatic spread of the disease is not possible
Then also the article claims that science hasn't tracked gene mutations of the virus that took place in bats. I think that has indeed happened.
The logic of the people they blame us contradictory too. They say the base DNA could have been concealed by making a novel base but then they say by that this was a researcher doing public, documented research, which suggests they would indeed use standard practices and the signatures would be there.
The hypothesis that COVID-19 came from an animal, namely a bat, in Wuhan China is independently suggested by multiple areas of science (genetics and epidemiology). It's also in line with similar outbreaks that happened in the past. The science of this is about as "unsettled" as the the theory of evolution vs creationism.
Also, here's your falsifiability: when it can be shown that the virus is zoonotic in origin, the other theories of its origin are falsified.
I do not believe that the virus was engineered in a lab at this point, but turning this into tribe warfare will not help anything. Saying that the opinion you disagree with is unscientific and comparing it to creationism just shows you aren't looking to have an actual conversation.
A real scientist with close knowledge of the virus and the lab offered this.
Everything can be and is politicized. Even local news about a petty theft or changes to a small park ends up being very political in the media or some local discussion board (looking at Nextdoor). If it crosses the border, it becomes international politics.
There are existing cases when coronaviruses leaked from the labs before and it is a known concern: [1], [2] The debate on the risking of such research has been going on for years [3] and in 2014 the US even paused funding selected gain-of-function research [4]. It happened before more than once, denying that it could have happened again in 2019, because there are no evidence, is simply lazy. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Why it matters? Because only in 2016 China adopted national guidelines for treatment of lab animals [5].
Knowing what happens critically important to make sure it does not happen again. Any system, that wants to adapt needs to analyze and find root cause of the mistake. Take rules and regulations in Aviation, all decisions about safety are driven by experience and past mistakes. If something is a pilot's mistake, then either there is a safeguard added, protocol or training altered, or everything above; but it's not customary to downplay or avoid highlighting human error. It is a common-sense approach used in any area, from aviation to military to sea navigation, etc. Either actors learn or the system learns by eliminating actors. Only in case of virus research, humanity is an actor that either needs to learn or ...
And I don't understand, why it is so important not o blame Chinese government? Do we not want to blame the Soviet government for the handling and the fallout of Chernobyl? Or those, who made risky decisions while operation the plant? If it is leaked from the lab, amend must be made to the facility, protocols, guidelines. Nevertheless, if it turns out that it is someone's gross negligence, the person or group of people should be reprimanded.
The US industrial farming can be a culprit of another "pig" or "chicken" flu or something more deadly. I would not be surprised, if some industrial farm with a string of sanitary and animal rights violations breeds a new virus. In this case, I want them to be reprimanded; if a state has loose regulations to prevent it, I want that state to be reprimanded by the federal government. And I would expect the US to take financial loss and pressure from the international community as an incentive to learn from mistake.
[1] SARS escaped Beijing lab twice (2004) https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...
[2] https://www.who.int/csr/don/2003_09_24/en/
[3] Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research (2015) https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...
[4] http://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Documents/gain-of-function.pdf
[5] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/china-finally-settin...
You'd believe scientists should know better that it's not about "China is guilty, they should pay for their crime" at all but "Let' us understand the origins so that we might prepare and protect ourselves better for another pandemic outbreak."
People imagine Chinese social media as something that is completely locked down when in reality it was abuzz with information when a new mysterious disease was appearing in Wuhan. Countries like Taiwan were suspicious and taking action as early as December.
Here is a set of evidence I have a hard time poking holes in:
https://project-evidence.github.io/
There are some pieces of evidence that are compelling alone:
The origin was politicized in the US and taboo to even question it, so few did. It was labeled a crazy conspiracy theory by the media and that shut the door on open inquiry until recently.
Conspiracy is political ammunition, skepticism is healthy debate and gladly welcomes more data.
The counterpoint to this is that this lab was setup in this location for the exact reason that a novel coronavirus would potentially emerge from bats in the region. This would require both miraculous forethought on the potential for bats in the region to produce novel coronaviruses, and a strange desire to place the virology lab near the location.
Most high level virology labs are centered based on considerations such as ability to hire talent and security/land concerns. It's relatively straightforward to organize expeditions to any region of the world at this point to collect samples.
Which means that for the standard explanation to hold true.
- A virology lab was created to study potentially dangerous versions of coronavirus (WIV founded 1956)
- The virology lab must have been placed near the location where animals were producing interesting virus strains. (WIV studying coronaviruses from all over China since 2005 including Horshoe bats from Yunnan province carrying progenitor strains of the SARS virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology)
- A novel coronavirus emerged near the WIV lab in Q4 2019 due to unrelated sales of locally hunted bats.
Strange things occur, but this would be strange enough as to require plausible studies identifying animal sources of Covid-19 to take at face value.
Plus, the site always seems to see "causation" whenever there is correlation, and never even stops to admit that there's the possibility they got the chain of causation backwards: if there was a lot of coronavirus-carrying bats in the region wouldn't it make sense to build a research institute there? And publish on all the findings? The site goes on to cite papers and job postings that are exactly the kinds of research (and job postings) you'd expect from a site that focuses on coronavirus related research. Yet the linked site makes it sound ominous, when it is utterly mundane.
So one has to ask who actually produced this site to begin with? To quote the page:
> "We are an anonymous group of researchers"
Very convenient. In other words, no-one with a serious research background could be convinced to put their name on this nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#SA...
Appeals to authority are one of the failings of modern science, The data and facts should stand up to independent review no need for "credentials"
There is one obvious conspiracy by the Chinese government to prevent all understanding of the virus. That does fit the definition of what a conspiracy is.
> "This document does not make any attempt to link the work done at these laboratories as part of a 'bioweapon' or "bio-warfare" program."
This makes perfect sense if you are an American, because in the anti-intellectual Trump era, there was a well circulated rumor that COVID was a Chinese bio-weapon that the CPC figured it could deal with better than Americans because China can weld people's door's shut, and you can't do that in America. This is on par with the widely circulated Chinese rumor that the American military brought it to Wuhan. Obviously both of those are extremely unlikely and very much conspiracy theories. Certainly on the American side our scientists said it's extremely unlikely that COVID was engineered and has none of the markers of bio-engineering very early into covid.
This is the article stating that it is not addressing that conspiracy theory, which was very much part of the conversation when it was written over a year ago.
> Just so you can throw the word "bioweapon" out there?
Out of your own ignorance of the context you are assuming malice.
>and never even stops to admit that there's the possibility that the causal reasoning is backwards
This is literally the second paragraph in the article, and it was bolded for emphasis:
Furthermore, you completely ignored the meat of the article focusing on a couple of weaker and overall not super central points.> Very convenient. In other words, no-one with a serious research background could be convinced to put their name on this nonsense.
It's almost like there is an extremely draconian authoritarian ruling government with very deep reach that has a long history of disappearing people it doesn't like or punishing them via connections with people who have power over them that people might be afraid of.
Please review the site guidelines and stick to the rules. They include:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- What other kinds of virus research besides coronavirus was done at the WIV? - What proportion of coronaviruses are anyway derived from bats? - What were the outcomes of the instances of poor PPE/safety measures with regard to containment?
Without this calibration, all you've written is innuendo.
It also helped them that mainland China was limiting travel at the time for political reasons.
Nobody will be able to look at this rationally until nobody cares either way. That’s what makes history interesting. It always changes.
Perhaps the most interesting point is the discussion of the furin cleavage site.
1) Regardless of whether or not this virus came from a lab, could such a thing plausibly happen in the future? Unquestionably yes.
2) Do we have international bodies to do inspection of the safety standards of any lab doing this kind of work? Ones that have the authority to require changes, or even shut down a lab, if those safety standards are not met? Unquestionably no, we have no such international body.
3) Could we make one? Yes, if China and Russia and the USA all agree to make one, it could be made binding on the rest of the world.
So, let's get on with that. I fear that the discussion of the origin of covid-19, while it has certainly been useful in showing what the potential future problems are, may get in the way of setting up something to prevent it happening (again?) in the future.
I know the quote "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" and all, but if we deem it important to get to the bottom of individual deaths, accidental or not, than it is important to get to the bottom of millions of deaths.
If you want to go all "judicial" on this, "on the balance of probabilities" in the context of an ongoing political and trade dispute between the parties, feels to me like an attempt to appeal to pseudo rational claims, more than an actual, dispassionate declaration of likelihood.
The article says "keep an open mind" which strongly suggests the "evidence" is equivocal. If you're not a virologist or scientist who works in the primary field, and I am not one either, you're at BEST attempting to interpret science at second or third hand. Science often uses words differently to colloquial speech. The word "must" for instance, has no normative force always. This "must" be because blah blah blah is not saying "causative" unless it actually says so. If it doesn't say WHY it MUST mean something, it's opinion. If it says MUST because of the balance of probabilities it's actually MAY in any case.