>"Ben Embarek told the Danish reporters. In the end, Ben Embarek’s Chinese counterpart eventually agreed to discuss the lab-leak theory in the report “on the condition we didn’t recommend any specific studies to further that hypothesis.”
Things would have been so much better, if they had just come correct from the beginning.
But now we have all this politicking and censorship and accusations of racism, etc., etc. when discussing the possibility of it being a lab release.
Will Twitter and FB and the WHO issue a mea culpa? I don't expect so.
No, the WHO and many others insisted the most plausible scenario was it coming from the wet market which sold bats that were hunted about 1000 miles away.
That’s the theory they wanted people to consume.
[and apparently voters have short memories because they are disagreeing]
Even the most prominent proponent of the lab leak theory, Donald Trump, said several times early on that he wasn't sure if it was intentional or an accident. In fact, he was pretty clear he thought it was accidental, and only mentioned it being intentional as a possibility, but that was an afterthought.
Source, since everyone likes to put words in his mouth:
So who exactly said that it was engineered for certain?
EDIT: the downvotes indicate that the belief that some believe the virus to be engineered is dogmatic in nature, rather than based on facts. If this were such a common belief, surely someone can identify its main proponent.
I suspect you're being downvoted because of your insistence on Donald Trump being "pretty clear", among other things, when Donald Trump has a decades long history of being anything but "very clear"
While this is after when your comment refers to, here is an example.
> "And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?
"So it'd be interesting to check that."
Pointing to his head, Mr Trump went on: "I'm not a doctor. But I'm, like, a person that has a good you-know-what."
This was stated by a US President to the general public of his nation, and the world at large.
The next day, about this quote - he simpled stated that he was "being sarcastic"
If you have some notion on how this method of communication and reason equates with being "pretty clear", please do tell.
However, this reply of yours
>the downvotes indicate
Would seem to "indicate" that you're not exactly the most reasonable person to have any discussion in good faith to begin with.
No one is going to argue that Trump is a great orator or that he doesn't gaffe or that every single thing that comes out of his mouth ought to be taken at face value (Are you kidding me... do you believe this is true of any politician? Look at what happened with Cuomo after months of media adulation and an emmy....)
In the case of the lab leak theory, Trump was always extremely clear that he thought it a possibility and that he did not necessarily think it was a bioweapon. I can see that you are uninterested in engaging in good faith, because instead of keeping the debate to what it was about (the lab leak theory) you're changing the goalposts (demanding that everything he say be absolutely clear and never wrong or stupid, apparently in contrast to every other president before him [1]).
Lots of presidents speak poorly on certain issues, make stupid statements that they later have to cover up and retract, or cause confusion. That doesn't make them wrong on the issues they do speak clearly on.
> Would seem to "indicate" that you're not exactly the most reasonable person to have any discussion in good faith to begin with.
Oh please... downvoting someone who is giving you evidence of exactly what was said without a response indicates that those downvoting are only interested in ignoring reality.
[1] If I recall correctly, one of the most popular presidents of all time got up on stage and actually told the American public that accusations against him literally depend on 'what the meaning of the word is is'... come on, this is the most demanding and insane standard to expect of any American leader.
> I can see that you are uninterested in engaging in good faith, because instead of keeping the debate to what it was about (the lab leak theory) you're changing the goalposts (demanding that everything he say be absolutely clear and never wrong or stupid, apparently in contrast to every other president before him [1]).
No, a third grader can easily explain to you why when somebody has a long and detailed history of being completely and utterly full of shit, whatever they say going forward will barely be considered to be not full of shit, for whatever roundabout reasons and circumstances.
I have no interest in provoking a reaction from you (trolling), I'm just pointing out that all administrations say stupid things, and that's not a good reason to dismiss the correct things they say or to deny it without consideration. I honestly don't understand why this is controversial. Instead of an explanation as to why any administration's claims ought to be dismissed out of hand, I am being accused of breaking site rules.
It seems to me, that by downvoting and then accusing me of breaking site rules, you're trying to make me react. Isn't that also trolling? At no point did I ask for your comments or try to 'bait' you into making them. Have a great day!
>Launched in March 2019, Summit News is a far-right conspiracy website. Like most questionable sources this website does not have an about page nor disclosure of ownership. The primary writer appears to be Paul Joseph Watson, who is a former editor for the conspiracy website Infowars. Although not disclosed, Paul Joseph Watson appears to be the owner and editor of this website.
Sure, ad hominem attack.. but stereotypes exist for a reason. If a story is only in places like National Inquirer, or in this case, if the story is only on a place that is rated as a poor news site, then I'm not going to read it.
If it has merit, then it will be republished by more ( non-profit, and independent ) reliable news sources.
I think skepticism should vary, and we should be quicker to verify than dismiss. This post made a specific, verifiable claim; I find that most misleading articles are vague and impossible to verify, or omit any context.
I agree, but I think there's another aspect to this. The way many news sources with an agenda operate is by mixing news and opinion (vague, impossible to verify, sometimes omit context, but grounded in reality). Where it starts to cross the line into propaganda is when news is mixed with misleading falsehoods and an active attempt to manipulate context. An individual associated with InfoWars should be viewed with a large amount of skepticism.
Edit: link has changed to ap news (didn't know that was even a thing you could do after posting to HN?)
This story seems like more idle speculation with the backing of a semi-official source (but not in his official capacity).
Absolutely no new evidence is presented in the story, it's just one person's opinion. Also, this source is a right-wing media org, and in comments to the Washington Post later he walked the story back[1]:
> Asked for comment, Ben Embarek initially said the interview had been mistranslated in English-language media coverage. “It is a wrong translation from a Danish article,” he wrote, declining to comment further and referring The Washington Post to the WHO. He did not immediately respond to follow-up questions.
Moderators change URLs all the time on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Usually we explain why. Generally the goal is to have the best URL for supporting a substantive HN discussion. In this case the originally submitted URL was obviously not doing that.
Tangentially related: there are no antifa burnings or endless videos of cops acting badly either. It’s not as though criminals stopped being criminals and cops stopped policing…
It is important to consider the context within which these suggestions were initially put forth. We had a president that claimed to have Coronavirus under control, that it was no worse than the flu and who openly and frequently cast doubt upon the only expert in the room. Perhaps had his behavior been a bit more tempered, he would have been taken more seriously.
I posted an article on HN at the time from a Chinese-born Harvard Public Health PHd who was writing in winter of 2020 he thought it could have come from the lab.
It actually wasn't downvoted too much - plenty of people here found it plausible - but the amount of people saying I was stupid and gullible has really stuck with me.
I was told I had no idea how viruses work (this is true enough - I don't have a degree in biology) but still felt extremely gaslit.
I first heard about the lab leak theory late jan 2020, but I also was considered stupid and gullible too for believing it. Also mocked for wearing a mask from singapore to london in Feb 2020. :/
>I was told I had no idea how viruses work (this is true enough - I don't have a degree in biology) but still felt extremely gaslit.
Similarly, on New Year's Eve 2015 I saw mention of the Cologne mass attacks on women by refugees as they were occurring on, yes, 4chan/pol/, and checked /r/worldnews and /r/europe to find out more. I didn't see anything, and assumed that it was another /pol/ "it's happening" dank maymayism. I only later realized that German media and those subreddits' mods had all worked to suppress news of the attacks until they could no longer be ignored.
Was it confirmed these men were legitimate refugees?
> I only later realized that German media and those subreddits' mods had all worked to suppress news of the attacks until they could no longer be ignored.
I like this website. I feel like I learn a lot - mostly on discussions about fields I only have outside knowledge of.
Its not like I was personally offended but had the realization that it is possible for large groups of smart people to convince themselves of something even when it is not true (or at the very least, have no actual data to know if its true)
It doesn’t really matter who was president. The whole western world has handled Covid poorly. Including the current administration. The issue is no one has learned to not trust ccp. They lied about sars and tried to cover it up, and they lied about Covid from day 1 trying to cover it up.
That makes the media look worse, not better. Their true inclination is to think one thing but they self censored so they wouldn't be seen as agreeing with the bad orange man?
Perhaps. That does not change the fact that when you bloviate, demean and deflect, as did Trump, you will be disliked and distrusted. Reputation matters when making a claim that--in that moment--could not be supported with real evidence. Was it a plausible theory for the origin of the virus? Sure. But, when that message becomes entangled with a larger xenophobic rhetoric, then it just seems like, well, xenophobia. Again, the context matters.
> We had a president that claimed to have Coronavirus under control, that it was no worse than the flu
Could you remind us who was that person who went to SF’s Chinatown to hug random people and was urging others to “come and visit and enjoy Chinatown” during the first critical months of unknown risk?
I remember, and I am sure that many others do if they are honest with themselves. America needs to stand united. We have let politics drive a deep wedge between neighbors and families.
We live at the peak of the information age but our natures have not changed. Both left and right need to focus on being unified, not strong-arming the other side.
And people on "the left and right" need to remember that plenty of people don't believe in "sides" and just want to live their lives without being bullied around by whoever happens be in power or whatever ideas are popular at the moment.
I don't want unity. People obsessed with politics think they just need consensus to solve any problem, despite the atrocious track record of political solutions. Just leave the rest of us alone.
I remember when the previous President said he had evidence of a lab leak, but did not share it or have any corroboration from anyone else in the administration. It was obvious at the time that it was a political tool to drive a nationalist sentiment.
The issue is not that people wanted to investigate a lab leak, the issue was that people presented their lab leak theory as a fact. Believing in a theory without any evidence to support it falls pretty squarely in the conspiracy theory bucket.
Honestly, I haven't seen anything change in substance in the meantime. It still is a suspicious coincidence, but we don't have any clear indication of what actually happened. What has changed in the reporting is that people are expressing concerns about the lab (clearly theories, not fact), which is completely natural. We should investigate it so we can better prevent, detect, and respond to future outbreaks. But let's not make premature judgements from a coincidence.
We have hospitalization records of lab staff, which Trump kne about and was later declassified.
We have e-mail evidence of lab employees explicitly asking reporters not to report on the potential.
And we have a novel virus that appeared centered around a biomedical research lab doing gain of function research on closely related viruses.
Simply due to the level of accusation and its implications, the claim deserved investigation from day one not out of hand dismissal.
Imagine if someone is found with a gun right next to a shooting scene, and everyone around you insisted that he certainly could not be the one who did any wrong because... racism or something. And then later on, you find that that guys friends spoke privately with the police and asked them not to conduct an investigation. Shouldn't that arouse suspicion in normal people?
> Remember when the previous administration suggested looking into the Lab Leak theory and was laughed at?
The previous administration was completely nuts and would do and say all kinds of random things. The problems with communication and trust were too many to know where to start. Besides that, the context was totally different. A president trying to "wage a trade war" on China, stir up nationalist sentiment, distract from his responsibility to respond to the pandemic, constantly regurgitating conspiracy theories and other misinformation, constantly trying to distract from scandals, etc.
> Remember how you would get banned from Facebook for suggesting that the lab leak theory was a possibility?
The amount of misinformation about COVID was and is extreme. Yeah, they moderated their platform, which is under intense congressional scrutiny, in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic. Even so, I think you're conflating the bio-weapon theory with the lab-leak theory.
> Then major social networks and the medias reversed their positions. What changed in the meantime, other than the president?
Major social networks and medias didn't "reverse their positions"...we learned more, we're still learning more. What changed in the meantime is so, so many things lmao.
The previous administration was broadly right on many important topics regarding the pandemic, that the media was wrong on.
1. Vaccines would be available by the election (they were off by two days, likely because of optics of releasing a vaccine right before).
2. The lab leak theory being worthy of investigation
3. School lockdowns are damaging (now broad agreement)
4. New York did not need 40k ventilators and Andrew Cuomo covered up nursing home deaths (later an aide admitted to it)
5. Shutting down travel was wrong before it was right. If you recall, after trump's state of the union, in which he mentioned covid, Nancy Pelosi went into the streets of china town and insisted people ignore his fear mongering.
Shall I go on?
> A president trying to "wage a trade war" on China
A trade war which he campaigned on, was voted into office for, and for which he has the legal authority. You are complaining that trump doesn't agree with you, not that he did something legally wrong.
> we learned more, we're still learning more
Yes, they learned that they were wrong on many things and trump was right.
> 1. Vaccines would be available by the election (they were off by two days, likely because of optics of releasing a vaccine right before)
Fact check - the first COVID vaccine given in the US outside of a clinical trial was December 14, over a month after the election, not two days.
> If you recall, after trump's state of the union, in which he mentioned covid, Nancy Pelosi went into the streets of china town and insisted people ignore his fear mongering.
Are you aware that residents of Chinatowns are US citizens/residents, and not “travel”? I’d suggest you search news sources again and review Trump’s comments - he never warned Americans in the state of the union to stay away from downtown areas. He didn’t call for Americans to stay home and avoid coronavirus until March 2020. In February 2020 Trump’s message was that US residents had nothing to fear from the coronavirus, and that Democrats were trying to panic people - Pelosi et al were actually backing the administration line when they went to downtown areas and said people should continue their normal lives. Here’s one reminder article for you to review https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/485245-trump-hits-demo... ‘Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney earlier Friday claimed the press was seeking to use the virus to harm Trump, while Donald Trump Jr. claimed on Fox News that Democrats are hoping coronavirus "kills millions of people" so it ends the president's "streak of winning."’ This was 4 days after Pelosi visited Chinatown in SF.
> Remember when the previous administration suggested looking into the Lab Leak theory and was laughed at?
Remember when the head of the previous administration thought injecting disinfectants or UV light was a possible solution to Covid?
The problem with trust and credibility is that once it’s lost, it’s very hard to gain back. Even if the broken clock is right twice a day, it’s still broken.
There was public information about the UVA catheter at the time Trump made his comments.
>The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Advances in Therapy, were based on five days of 20-minute treatments with ultraviolet A (UVA) light using a catheter inserted into the patients' tracheas. Patients were followed for 30 days. The findings were based on four patients; the fifth patient had no detectable levels of SARS-CoV-2 at the study outset.
Did you post the wrong link? The doctors in that clip don't actually mention the UV light thing, although they are clear in their opposition to injecting disinfectant.
Aytu BioPharma is a small company bringing UV light into the body, and the early trials on COVID last year showed it worked. The same was true for Hydroxychloroquine too. You fell for propaganda.
Hydroxychloroquine has a mountain of side effects worse than COVID for most people, and very little (if any) positive effect.
Maybe UV could help in some way, but was this ever going to be a real solution? I highly doubt Aytu BioPharma was in a position to deliver anything meaningful at the volume and time-scale required.
Trump simply had no clue what a workable solution looked like. He broadcast to the world as the American President the ideas of the most recent crazy to have his ear (or one that he read on Twitter), and then got a bruised ego and doubled down when shown his ideas were worthless.
The side effects of HCQ were very overstated. The first study [1] that was pushed by the media to discredit Trump saying HCQ might be dangerous to the heart was later retracted [2] because the authors refused to share its data. The best metaanalysis today shows HCQ works to treat COVID if used early and is safe at the right doses [3].
He said they were going to look into it. He didn't break trust with your example because he didn't make a statement of fact that it was a cure. He said they'd look into it.
Now if all you do is read the title of articles or videos from left leaning news site, you may walk away with the belief that he's telling people to inject it. But he's not. He says they're going to look into it. Watch the video for yourself (and take note at the video title): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zicGxU5MfwE.
I want to add--I'm in no way indicating the right leaning news sites don't do the same. They've both screwed the country up by failing to report news without some bias slapped all over everything.
> The problem with trust and credibility is that once it’s lost, it’s very hard to gain back. Even if the broken clock is right twice a day, it’s still broken.
If that's the case, then the previous administration's opponents ought to look in the mirror, because they were the first anti-vaxxers, the first covid deniers (pelosi's statements that people should not be afraid of covid in late jan/early feb in chinatown, despite having access to the same intelligence as trump), and Dr Fauci lying to the US congress about gain of function research.
Honestly, given what's happened in the last two years on both sides, it should come as no surprise that no one trusts the federal government.
You can't blame corporate media and the scientific establishment, and big tech's active suppression of this topic on Trump. That's on them.
Do you think corporate media is giving the recent information the weight it deserves, given the fact that 4.3 million people died so far, and untold damage was done to the global economy and mental health?
Generally on HN we go by article quality rather than site quality (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) but in this case I think it is less distracting simply to change the URL. Actually the original domain is banned on HN, the same way most highly politicized sites are (regardless of which politics they practice) but users vouched for this submission, no doubt because they felt the story to be significant.
If anyone comes up with a better URL, we can change it again.
Edit: users in the thread have pointed out these other links (thanks!):
Every one of these articles is presenting a somewhat different story and I'm not sure what a good title would be. According to the WaPo and WSJ articles, Ben Embarek wasn't just a WHO official but the leader of the investigation ("Ben Embarek led a team of international scientists on a mission to China") - that seems particularly significant so I've added it to the title above. If anyone comes up with a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.
summit.news is a low quality source because it adds a cynical far right conspiracy spin to everything. Here, it immediately jumps back to gain of function research , while the primary source talks about something entirely different.
I'm not skilled enough in the biomedical background to evaluate the various genetics-based articles written for or against natural-origin and lab-origin hypotheses. As a layman, however, I find the degree to which the Chinese government has stomped all over foreign-led investigations into the origin of SARS-Cov-2 to be highly, highly suspicious.
I guess, but that imparts a level of uniform direction that isn't really known. It could very well be that the PRC government does not know themselves whether or not covid was a lab leak, because who the fuck knows what those beaker heads were doing. They just want to be sure that if it was a lab leak, that no one ever knows.
Basically: totalitarian governments suppress everything. It's what they do. It's not like the west had clear access inside facilities like WIV before the pandemic, so why do we expect different behavior now?
I remain really dubious, personally. Imagine it was a leak. Dozens or hundreds of people -- researchers with PhDs and international cred and travel ability -- would have had to be knowledgeable about the research and in on the coverup. Someone would have swung themselves an appointment at UCSF or Johns Hopkins or wherever in exchange for blabbing.
It's an attractive conspiracy, but really that's all there is. The existing circumstantial evidence is a big nothingburger (Chinese Institute of Virology studies known Chinese Viruses; News at 11!).
The ONLY significant evidence, itself still just a single source, is that the Journal reported that it was known to western intelligence agencies at the time that there was an outbreak of something flu-like among WIV employees in October 2020. That's I guess a little suspicious, but still unconfirmed and... really not enough to move the needle.
Add to that the fact that covid is a close cousin of already-known endemic viruses and that nothing about it looks engineered at all, and... this is still just a natural virus, sorry.
>Imagine it was a leak. Dozens or hundreds of people -- researchers with PhDs and international cred and travel ability -- would have had to be knowledgeable about the research and in on the coverup.
I don't see why this would be the case. It could be a lab leak with nobody at the being aware or having evidence. Why must people be in on a secret coverup?
Many activities that make evaluating the lab leak hypothesis difficult were done in the open: Destruction of early virus samples and deletion of Gene sequencing from public databases.
>Add to that the fact that covid is a close cousin of already-known endemic viruses and that nothing about it looks engineered at all, and... this is still just a natural virus, sorry.
The virus does not need to have been engineered to have leaked from a lab. Natural viruses can and do leak from labs as well.
You're doing the conspiracist thing where you respond to my examples of plausible explanations with more hypotheses that could alternately explain my guesses. But who cares? That's not how proof works.
This is just a gish gallop. I told you why I find existing evidence unconvincing. You need to convince me with evidence, not hypotheses.
I hadn't considered this before, but you're right that most of the people dismissing the 'lab leak' theory seem to believe that their intellectual opponents are proposing that a 'premeditated conspiracy' took place.
In any case, if I were a PRoC official, I would try to reduce the chance of any (direct or circumstantial) evidence of a lab leak came to light. That said, even suppression of circumstantial evidence is not necessarily evidence of either a lab leak or pre-meditated conspiracy.
To be fair, a lot of you nuts are absolutely alleging "premeditated conspiracy", or even loopier notions like bioweapon engineering. It's extremely hard to figure out who we're talking to.
If you want to argue for some weak form of the conspiracy, then maybe give it another name or something. But note that the weak form you seem to be thinking about (that it was benign research on natural viruses and just a routine mistake that caused the leak) seems to be even more susceptible to my suspicion. If you're a researcher who was doing this benign work, why keep silent? You could literally write a book fingering all your superiors as the villains and sell it for tens of millions of dollars and retire in Taipei or San Francisco.
>"To be fair, a lot of you nuts are absolutely alleging "premeditated conspiracy", or even loopier notions like bioweapon engineering. "
Why are you insulting me? I honestly don't know where this virus came from, and am more interested in what the polarized discourse says about our current state of affairs.
Please don't resort to personal insults on HN. It's a violation of the guidelines[1] and makes for poor and uninteresting discussion.
Instead...
> It's extremely hard to figure out who we're talking to.
...don't resort to personal attacks, and assess the argument that the individual is making, without setting up a straw-man argument. If you're unclear what their assumptions are, then ask.
>Imagine it was a leak. Dozens or hundreds of people -- researchers with PhDs and international cred and travel ability -- would have had to be knowledgeable about the research and in on the coverup
Maybe. And? Dozens or hundreds of internationally-relevant people would have been knowledgeable about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's specific involvement in 9/11, but that didn't stop it from being covered up for almost a decade.
The Saudi Government's involvement in 9/11 was public knowledge shortly after it happened. I read about it around 2002. It just didn't get media coverage.
Not really, the Chinese government knows the western powers want to use this to create an anti-China hysteria and so want to deny them the ability to do so. The NATO alliance is trying to create a confrontation over Taiwan and a lab leak hysteria is a great way to get the population onboard with a war.
The best writeup I've seen is actually this twitter thread from the WNYC science reporter, Nsikan Akpan (himself a phd in biology). The gist being that while lab leak is still possible, it's very unlikely and it's also likely we'll never find a smoking gun for any hypothesis.
Again, this writeup is more about the bioengineering hypothesis while embarak states another theory. in it‘s current state the term lab leak has almost become meaningless
I think equating the lab leak hypothesis with climate change denial also caused me to tune out. It's just not acting in good faith.
I also feel like if he's serious about it, he would produce something other than a tweet thread, at least a real blog post with links to papers he refers to. Otherwise it's hard for me to take them any more seriously than anyone else who handwaves about papers.
It would be nice to see something like that with good faith opportunities for people to respond and counterrespond but I'm skeptical about it happening.
There's also a sense that I have from reading stuff like that and others that we should treat the peer-reviewed academic paper trail as somehow the state of things, rather than looking at the evidence on its own terms. I don't mean anything conspiratorial about that, just that it's almost like they expect there to be some peer-reviewed paper out there from China that shows how they would have engineered it if they had, as if that's realistic at all.
That's not even getting into what you mention, which is the possibility nothing was engineered and there was a leak.
You're asking people to prove a negative and then you're upset when they can't?
It's impossible to disprove but both SARS and Bird Flu crossed over from animals in Southern China so there's no reason it must have come from the lab, either. Right now we have zero evidence either way, just people speculating mostly based on their pre-existing opinions of the Chinese state.
That's the problem with these conspiracy theories, though, right? They are unfalsifiable by design. A scientific hypothesis would be testable. For example, "Did the COVID-19 virus come from a lab?" would be falsifiable if the COVID-19 virus didn't share the base genetic sequence of typical viruses tested in a lab. Lo and behold, the COVID-19 virus doesn't have the genetic signature of viruses in labs. Therefore the conspiracy theory is more convoluted to include vastly more participants in a complex web of motives resulting in a theory that is less falsifiable and plays into every possible prejudice a laymen could have about geopolitics, money, race and national governments.
We've seen lab leaks and this is supposedly different because it's not disclosed and numerous other reasons making it hard to prove. We know about lab made viruses which this is supposedly different because it somehow looks like a virus of zoonotic origin. We've seen the Chinese government cover up embarrassing situations but this is different because there was heavy involvement from American researchers and American public educational institutions and they are in on the cover up too for some reason. We've seen the US government dislose previously classified information but this is different because all of the government officials who say they saw classified information about a lab leak (and were in a position to declassify said information) did not accompany their accusations with gathered intelligence. At some point we should recognize that these necessary mental gymnastics put the theory well into crank territory.
There is currently zero evidence to support a zoonotic origin.
It took 9 months to find the source of MERS (camels). It took 14 months to find the origin of SARS1 (bats).
What evidence do you have that this was transmitted from an animal carrier? What mammal in China (it's not like there are that many mammal species living in the Wuhan metropolitan area) has been identified that easily catches COVID? The answer is zero.
The most likely explanation for this, which fits with all the other circumstantial data, is that the zoonotic origin was a genetically engineered mouse with human ACE2 receptors lining it's lungs. Note that I'm saying the mouse was genetically engineered, not the virus itself. The virus could easily evolve to infect humans by repeatedly exposing the humanized mice to the original, completely natural origin bat viruses.
Calling out "mental gymnastics" when you are acting as if it's a pure coincidence that a bat virus pandemic originated in a city containing the world's leading bat-borne virus research facility is the height of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. And before you say that the lab is in Wuhan because that's where the viruses are, no, it's not. The viruses historically have emerged in Yunnan province, in remote caves 1000 KM away from Wuhan.
OTOH, no one has found the zoonotic origin for ebola people looking for literally decades. That's also the case for a few other diseases as well. Just because the origin for MERS and SARS was found quickly, it doesn't follow that covid investigations will be as quick
Your "most likely" theory seems extremely fringe with absolutely zero evidence. I can see how it's possible but it seems vastly more complicated than just a lab leak.
Zero evidence? Might want to look at the details of the NIH grant funding the research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. You aren't very informed on the subject, which is why you dismiss it as fringe.
"3. Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice."
But sure, it's fringe and unlikely that the virus leaked out of a lab where it was specifically stated by the scientists applying for the grant that the funding would be used for testing interspecies transmission of bat coronaviruses with humanized mice. The lab doing this being in Wuhan, where the pandemic originated is also totally fringe and unlikely, is totally unrelated, right?
Gain of function proponents are ignoring research that indicates it's not possible to generate a virus dangerous to humans without leaving specific telltales. While this study isn't necessarily conclusive or a door slam in the face of lab leak, it's pretty huge data point that makes it far less likely.
This is a horrible Twitter thread. He leads off with an immediate ad hominem against Nicholas Wade, complete with an accusation of racism. He then states, falsely, that it isn't possible to engineer a virus without telltale markers, ignoring more modern techniques which don't leave telltales. He also conflates engineering a virus with the argument of it leaking.
The thread reeks of cognitive dissonance and cherry picked straw men, but the disgusting racism smear on Wade was just wrong. And I'm not even going to dig into the out of the gate comparison he used with climate deniers. Deeply insulting, and in bad faith.
I also forgot to mention that he deliberately ignored the humanized mice being the location of the serial passage work, and straw manned a "petri dish". Completely misrepresenting the fact that was most crucial.
In the future, using a Twitter account with locked comments is inadvisable. He blocked comments for a reason.
It's not an ad hominem, it's an attack on his credibility. He does not assert it's impossible to engineer a virus without markers he points to two reviewed studies saying known techniques will leave telltales. Like I said, it's evidence against lab leak but not conclusive.
His entire argument is very straightforward. Zoonotic origin is highly plausible, has caused previous SARS outbreaks, has no evidence against it. Lab leak is possible, though it has no precedent and there's evidence that makes it less likely. There's no conclusive evidence for either. The balance of evidence and history leans heavily to zoonotic. There is absolutely nothing anyone has said in this thread that he didn't directly address nor anything that weakens his argument. Anyone on the lab leak train right now is basing it purely on bias.
No it covers the entire spectrum of theories. You have to follow the thread it's like 50 tweets long. He talks about bioengineering, gain of function, serial passage and direct animal to lab to public.
Lab leak and lab engineered are not the same thing.
The SARS1 virus escaped from a lab many years after the original outbreak (via accidentally being put in a fridge reserved for inactive virus and being examined under electron microscope, infecting employee), and it wasn't engineered at all. It was 100% natural origin.
I have ZERO doubt in my mind that natural viruses have leaked from US labs in the past, and were covered up. Can't prove it of course. Superpowers don't admit to these kinds of things.
Belief that this wasn't leaked from a lab requires a dismissal of a huge chain of improbable coincidences, and it's much easier to believe when you are part of a community of scientists who will undoubtedly have funding up-ended when people figure out they were at fault. Not unlike what happened to the field of nuclear energy after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The international virology community knows this.
The New Yorker had an article in the discussion and interviewed two scientists, Stanford microbiologist David Relman and UNC virologist Ralph Baric, who signed the letter to WHO which was published in Science magazine.
Again, there is no identifiable difference between a virus harvested from guano in a cave that later leaks from a lab sample and the same virus if transmitted to a human.
Nobody is saying this virus was engineered in this thread.
It appears to me to be a deliberate psychological trick of lumping people who claim the virus leaked from a lab (by far the most probable cause) with people who say the virus was an engineered bioweapon (insane, nonsensical crazy talk). The entire virology community is dependent on government funding, and they have massive conflicts of interest. I work with academics all day every day, and far too many gradually turn into mealy-mouthed bureaucrats, doing and saying whatever it takes to chase their next juicy grant, abusing and exploiting graduate students all along the way.
There's the chance that it was a naturally occurring virus that wasd being stored in a lab (like RaTG13, it's closest known cousin). Then, there's the chance that it was manipulated in lab experiments by well-meaning scientists hoping to learn more about coronavirus transmission to humans (which I think is most likely, considering the behavior of the WIV, but far from certain). Finally, there's the chance that it was deliberately leaked as a bioweapon (doesn't make sense to me).
I totally agree that there are massive conflicts of interest, including the implication of being blacklisted from Chinese data sources for one's career and the chance that there simply won't be any funding in the future if the public believes that the research field itself is to blame.
I know it won't be a popular opinion here, but I am not sure I trust the judgment of scientists with conflicts of interest.
It would be human nature for those who were involved in lobbying for gain-of-function research to continue are now unwilling to entertain the idea that something as devastating as COVID was a result of such research. If that is true, it means that they were disasterously wrong in their earlier stance and it means that there will be no appetite to continue funding their field of expertise.
I'm tired of being told not to believe what's clearly in front of me -- a coordinated campaign in China to cover up any inquiry in to the origins of the virus accompanied by very suspicious behavior in China in the months before they were supposed to have been aware of the outbreak.
Whether COVID-19 itself is exactly a product of research at the WIV funded by EcoHealth Alliance and the NIAID, I don't know, but I can read those grant requests myself and see that they clearly refer to manipulating coronaviruses so that they better infect humanized mice cells. This is a study that Fauci insists is not gain of function research, but I'm unclear as to the distinction. I suspect that they played with language in these requests so as to be able to avoid triggering the legally-required review.
Fauci, and others, are potentially aware that the pandemic could have stemmed from research that they themselves fast-tracked around the legally mandated review process, making them partially culpable in millions of deaths worldwide -- it would be incredibly difficult in that situation to start looking critically at the possibility that it's true.
We should be very careful about trusting experts with a lot at stake in the answer to the question.
I know it won't be a popular opinion here, but I am not sure I trust the judgment of mathematicians with conflicts of interest.
It would be human nature for those who were involved in lobbying for 1+1=2 to continue are now unwilling to entertain the idea that something as devastating as 42 was a result of such a calculation.
The thread's entire premise is that lab leakers are only speculating while there is in fact direct evidence of natural origins.
What direct evidence of natural origins is he referring to? Kristian Andersen's argument in his oft-cited paper seems to be that the spike proteins are effective at infecting humans in a novel way, and that if he were engineering an infections coronavirus he would have designed it differently, therefore it's unlikely that it was bioengineered. Beyond that, they tend to point out that "there is no evidence" of a lab leak -- ignoring many pieces of evidence along the way, even if they are circumstantial, including the workers at the WIV contracting a dangerous disease w/ COVID-like symptoms in Fall 2019, the sudden disappearance of the WIV genome sequence database before the first publicly known cases, and the suspicious renaming of the RaTG13 virus sample (the closest known to COVID-19 genetically) in WIV literature. I feel perpetually gaslit but some of these scientists. The argument seems to go as follows: it is most reasonable to suspect a zoonotic transfer, even without direct evidence, because a community of scientists with clear conflicts of interest tell us so -- but we are supposed to dismiss the circumstantial evidence of a lab leak because the only satisfactory evidence would be if a smoking gun were found in the WIV records (and everyone knows that they won't be). The idea that it has natural origins stems from recent experience with SARS and MERS, but of course that doesn't mean much of anything at all -- those experience inform both theories. One should also consider the 1977 flu pandemic which was confirmed to have been related to a live vaccine trial done by the Chinese military -- information which was suppressed at the time by the WHO for fear of losing cooperation with China and Russia.
Origins aside, it is not disupted that the NIH through the NIAID and EcoHealth alliance were funding research into coronaviruses that was being done at the WIV, and that the data related to that research used to be readily available but now is suppressed by the Chinese government, exactly at the same time that we are experiencing a pandemic that the research was hoping to forestall. Isn't that alone troubling? Are the scientists in this community expressing any trouble with that fact, or are we meant to believe that we are conspiratorial nuts if we bring up China's behavior in any context?
> The thread's entire premise is that lab leakers are only speculating while there is in fact direct evidence of natural origins.
This is not either/or at all!
It can be both completely natural AND also have escaped from a lab. Pretending that lab == bio-engineered is a disingenuous distraction. For the given purpose of that lab them having a lot of naturally occurring viruses is to be expected, since that is the basis of what they are supposed to research.
A lot of people have pointed that out, why do you keep touting that distraction that paints anyone serious about the lab leak question as a conspiracy nut unwilling to look at the evidence? Natural origin is accepted and does not contradict the lab escape hypothesis at all.
To be honest the only way we will ever know is if the chinese would share the genomes of the viruses they stored in their lab, but who would trust them to do that? The express drive-by the WHO did in china served absolutely no purpose. I am ready to bet that all samples have been destroyed and the staff briefed (warned). I would even suspect the samples have not even been analysed by the Chinese themselves as it is better to not know than running the risk of some technician leaking such damaging information (and who would trust the Chinese authorities whatever they say anyway). So my money is on “we will never know”.
But like others, I have strong suspicions. It starts by an improbable coincidence (pandemic starting at the doorstep of a lab). The Chinese have acted guilty from the outset, by lying about the virus, arresting doctors, not allowing any investigation, and pushing crazy alternative theories.
To add to your point, it was a chain of improbable coincidences:
Pandemic starting at the doorstep of a lab (that is not located in remotely close proximity to the Yunnan caves where the previous SARS viruses were originating from)
Previous SARS virus outbreaks (SARS1 and MERS) had zoonotic reservoirs identified in months with dramatically fewer resources, but coincidentally, with vast resources and global efforts, no zoonotic reservoir identified for this virus.
Previous SARS virus outbreaks showed a gradual evolution of a virus to progressively becoming more infectious to humans, and equivalent genetic changes in the virus that can be traced. This one started out as highly infectious, and until several months in, mutations weren't very significant.
The Chinese Communist Party (not China, not the Chinese people, but the CCP) has expended far more energy suppressing research and scientific access than any form of investigation into the origins of the virus.
The CCP deliberately suppressed and arrested doctors publicly talking about the virus early on.
Edit:
Forgot to add that there is a direct paper trail (publicly available on data.gov) of grant documents which specify that the funding will be used in WIV for research of bat coronaviruses with (and I quote from the paper) "humanized mice". Humanized mice, in this context, are mice genetically engineered to have human ACE2 receptors lining their respiratory tissue. In what was the most infuriating moment of public testimony I have ever seen, Dr. Fauci argues that infecting humanized mice with animal viruses (resulting in animal viruses that can more easily infect humans) is NOT gain of function research. He was playing an obvious semantic game, where his definition of GOF is the far narrower concept of making an existing human infecting virus more infectious..... Seriously, I was a big fan of the guy until that single bit of testimony. Now i know he's a lying bureaucrat more than he is a scientist.
> Previous SARS virus outbreaks showed a gradual evolution of a virus to progressively becoming more infectious to humans, and equivalent genetic changes in the virus that can be traced. This one started out as highly infectious, and until several months in, mutations weren't very significant.
Both of these statements are so inaccurate. It took many years before scientists were certain what the reservoir was for SARS, and there were already different lineages of the virus at the Wuhan market!
You are mad at the CCP for putting out misleading information. You are guilty of the same thing!
Imagine trying to say that a statement you disagree with is equivalent to large scale attempts to prevent the discovery of the origin of a disease, causing more death
The Chinese didn't do anything that we wouldn't have done. In fact, they took better steps than we did, as far as the pandemic is concerned.
Of course the dude had concerns, anyone with half a brain would explore all of the possible origins and theories. But the lab leak theory is just that - one theory that could explain the situation at hand.
The problem is that too many people have put far too much stock in the lab leak theory to the point that it's being treated as the most likely source of origin, but that's just not what the evidence says.
US did this many times. The investigations ended up like they usually do in US, starting from My Lai - in the best case they’ll find a single scapegoat and that’s it.
You mean Li Wenliang, the doctor who was eventually decorated - by Chinese government - for speaking up? He was never put to jail. That’s another case of anti-Chinese propaganda for you.
Born
12 October 1985
Beizhen, Jinzhou, Liaoning, China
Died
7 February 2020 (aged 34)
Wuhan, Hubei, China
Cause of death
COVID-19
Yes, all of that suspicious propaganda about the Chinese government's treatment of dissidents. The decoration came after his death at 34 years old.
> He died from the disease on 7 February 2020, at age 34.[8][9] A subsequent Chinese official inquiry exonerated him, and the Communist Party of China formally offered a "solemn apology" to his family and revoked the admonishment of him.
What are you talking about (serious)? Dissent is legal and will not result in imprisonment in the US.
I don't even subscribe to Facebook or Twitter by choice. I definitely wouldn't subscribe to imprisonment by choice, haha. If you're concerned about these platforms controlling their content privately, don't use them.
Well, the US seems hellbent on shipping one journalist who broke no law in US to their torture chambers. Until that's sorted out you just can't claim moral superiority.
I don’t think Americans understand the government having that type of involvement tbh. It’s just so foreign a concept to us as a whole. It’s kind of arrogant tbh.
Do we really have to reduce it to such a simplistic scale as "government good" vs "government bad"? It's like trying to discuss obesity in terms of whether food is good or bad.
What actually happened is not what the media reported? The china in the media is not real. Its a fabrication,synthesized by the CCP who is in control of all chinese news sources.
On the ground, the news of the virus was first supressed by local officials, allowing lots of people to attempt a "escape" from wuhan, when they got informed by relatives that something was up.
When the pot boiled over, the bejing government stepped in and "walled" in wuhan. But they told that first and acted later, allowing thousands to "escape" ( they boasted about this on social media, thats how we know) and they escaped into lots of other countries - because while national flights were cancelled, international flights were still allowed.
This thing has been a lecture in disastrous disaster management - nothing more, nothing less. Its proof that totalitarian states even suck at the one thing they claim to be good at- being totalitarian.
We dont need to compare anything. We already know. Even the Biden administration who kisses China's ass agrees. Its well known and all the virus experts that aren't brainwashed leftists agree. Many of them did from day 1. They had other leaks and there are news articles about it with the original SARS.
Stop trying to play pretend and believe the truth.
My heuristic is, whenever I encounter these labels, it's the moment I stop reading. They signal the end of productive conversation, anything surrounding them can be ignored.
There's been plenty, there's been exactly zero evidence though that it was from bats and wet markets. And if it were from bats or other animals, why did fouchi want to collect even more animals that are already being experimented on an increase the rate of already dangerous research?
There's no evidence for the counter argument either, but to believe that we have to accept the big coincidence that it happened to start in the one city where they were studying that exact virus.
I'm not saying that this means it was definitely a lab leak. It absolutely doesn't, without further evidence, but discounting it completely, especially given how suspicious the CCP acted around it (why wait an entire year before letting the WHO investigate and then only for a few hours? why silence scientists and doctors?), is equally silly.
There's no evidence it was a lab leak, there's no evidence that it wasn't either. There's some circumstantial data to suggest that the CCP isn't a trustworthy source. That's all we know.
Yes its silly to assume that it was a lab leak. But its also silly to assume that it wasn't. We don't know what it was.
> I find the degree to which the Chinese government has stomped all over foreign-led investigations into the origin of SARS-Cov-2 to be highly, highly suspicious.
I don't find it suspicious at all, precisely because I don't trust the Chinese government. In my estimation of the CPC, the following probabilities are all roughly equal (and close to 1):
* P(suppress investigation | natural origin)
* P(suppress investigation | lab leak of benign research)
* P(suppress investigation | lab leak of gain of function)
From a Bayesian point of view, then, P(lab leak | suppress investigation) is going to be almost equal to P(lab leak).
This is exactly what's so frustrating about the media treating the gain-of-function research they were doing as the "smoking gun" is so disingenuous. We were doing all of the same types of research, even cooperating with their government on some of it in our own labs IN CHINA, and then all of a sudden we turn around and blame them? Come on, people, you're playing right into what the propaganda says happened. They're not doing anything the U.S. government wouldn't do if the likely point of origin had been somewhere in Atlanta.
Right, but the purpose of the narrative is not to compare whether we are doing the same thing. It is to blame China for the pandemic. TBH, if we did the same thing, I expect the rest of the world would blame us.
That said, it seems pretty unproductive at this point to blame anyone, but it does seem productive to avoid it happening again.
Not sure that makes sense given your presumed knowledge of the Chinese government's reaction to SARS?
Or are you in bad faith giving dubious priors?
"This lack of openness caused delays in efforts to control the epidemic, resulting in criticism of the People's Republic of China from the international community. China officially apologized for early slowness in dealing with the SARS epidemic."
I think we agree? The Chinese government wasn't open about SARS, and despite their apology in 2003 (by which point SARS was on the path to containment), I don't have reason to believe they've become more open about such things in the last couple decades. I am by no means a China expert, so you may disagree with my priors about their behavior.
My experience in biology labs (though not virology labs) suggests that a leak of benign research is plausible, and that if it did happen odds are good that there wouldn't be a ton of documentation to suppress. Mistakes happen all the time, and if researchers filled out a report every time a tube was dropped or some PPE was ignored in a "pretty safe" scenario, there'd be almost no time for research.
I still think the total number of human-animal contacts outside the lab are at least an order of magnitude greater than inside of it, so I would rank the probabilities as (natural > benign research leak >> gain of function leak).
My problem with the non-lab-leak story is that CCP went to great lengths to cover up and downplay the virus in the early months, largely contributing to its global spread and a bunch of coincidences would have had to line up just right for the wet market hypothesis to be true (just happened to be in the same city as the lab where they just happened to be studying the exact same thing, where the CCP just happened to threaten and arrest any doctors or scientists talking about it?). CCP has also in recent months tried to shift the blame to other countries and they wouldn't let the WHO investigate for over a year, plenty of time to dispose of any evidence if it was a lab leak.
While non of that proves anything, it certainly makes CCP look incredibly suspicious. Of course, if it was a lab leak, its pretty unlikely we will ever know. All I know is that the CCP acted extremely shady and that alone makes me doubt their official story. Again, this doesn't mean it wasn't the wet market hypothesis, but its clear that the CCP's word cannot be trusted.
We also know that viruses have leaked form high security labs in the past (including smallpox!) so its not exactly unheard of.
Some footnotes: Its important to separate China/Chinese people from the CCP. Its also important to separate "bioengineered" from "lab accident", I think the former is extremely unlikely and the latter is very possible.
My problem with the non-lab-leak story is that USA went to great lengths to cover up and downplay the virus in the early months, largely contributing to its global spread
Is that meant to be a counterargument? (just because the USA downplayed it doesn't make CCP's doing so better, especially since they had advance knowledge and could have potentially completely prevented the global pandemic, while when it was in the USA, it was already global, even if lesser) Are you agreeing with me but adding that the USA isn't faultless? (Its true, but I don't know how its relevant to what I said) I really have no idea what you're trying to say.
Not parent, but considering the USA covered up and denied the virus spread for several months, the argument could be that China/CCP doing the same doesn’t indicate the virus was engineered by China.
After all, there is no indication the virus was engineered by the US government, yet the danger was repeatedly lied about by the highest levels of government in January and February 2020, e.g. “when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away” (Feb 10), “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero” (Feb 26) ”It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear” (Feb 27), etc.
It’s claimed the local CCP apparatus lying and covering up the virus in December 2019 was for similar political reasons - there was an important event coming up in the city and they didn’t want it to be canceled.
The claim isn't that it was engineered, just that it escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Besides, reports from China predated any from the USA, so for it to even be in the USA, CCP needed to have failed in containing it.
I'm not denying that the USA's covering it up made it worse, it absolutely did. The US government aren't innocent in the global spread of the virus. But this entire discussion was about whether it originated from a lab break or natural spread through the wet market, so in that context, it doesn't really seem relevant, while CCP's behaviour is relevant in the sense that it paints a picture of them being untrustworthy and having acted shady when their culpability was questioned, so their denials of the WIV break, as well as their other actions (especially denying the WHO the ability to investigate for OVER A YEAR) puts doubt on their story.
Doubt, though, isn't definitive proof. I never said that I think it was definitely a lab break, just that I think the chances are higher than many people like to admit and that the CCP have not proven trustworthy. We will probably never know for sure, either way.
Agreed, it seems to me like we’ll never know for sure. Some aspects of china’s behavior are suspicious, and the lab leak theory is a plausible hypothetical, but I doubt we’ll ever see the evidence to know either way.
We should definitely be reconsidering our own funding and oversight of any research that is similar to “gain of function”.
If the smoking gun in the case is 'they must be guilty because they behaved like X' then we test this hypothesis by replacing 'CCP' with 'USA' (or the more apt swap would be 'RNC') and see how it look.
It turns out that when you do this simple find and replace, we get equally as factual statements. So does this imply that it leaked from a US operated facility? Or is this an indication of the type of work the US was funding at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and conducting more generally? Or most likely, is this an irrelevant piece of 'evidence' of wrong doing on the part of any person or nation by assuming guilt based on their claim of innocence?
An innocent person will say they were innocent just as often as a guilty person who is trying to hide their guilt.
> It turns out that when you do this simple find and replace, we get equally as factual statements.
Only if you ignore the known facts. We know that covid-19 originated from wuhan, we know that the wuhan institute of virology was studying that exact virus. We know that the CCP did not allow the WHO to investigate the WIV hypotheses until over a year later.
Yes the USA acted shady, but the USA doesn’t have these addictions factual contributing elements. These factors don’t prove anything, of course, I never said that they do, but they certainly paint a picture that shows that the lab leak hypothesis is at least viable and the alternatives require some coincidences to be true. Again not proof, but certainly evidence that shouldn’t be ignored.
The USA analogy is ignoring all of the other factual information we have and is focusing purely on “well China isn’t the only country acting shady”, which I don’t think is relevant or useful. CCP aren’t the only ones responsible for where we are today, but they were a rather key part of it, regardless whether covid-19 was a lab leak or not.
> by assuming guilt based on their claim of innocence?
It’s not their claim of innocence that is suspicious, it’s their actively suppressing information that is: they didn’t allow the WHO to investigate until over a year later and they didn’t allow scientists and doctors to acknowledge there was a virus. More recently they even tried to say the virus originated in countries other than China. That’s rather more than a claim of innocence.
Probably very similarly. If the EU Commission tried to lead an investigation of some major disaster potentially originating in the US, cooperative is not the word I'd use to describe how it would go. Sadly.
Some more background on this. First, an interview in Science from a few months back[1]. I very much trust the reporting in that interview (Kai Kakape is an award-winning science journalist), but it also has the air of words being chosen very carefully.
Second, this thread[2] is very interesting. The Chinese government is freaking out pretty hard against the idea of doing more of a real investigation. I'm not sure how all the pieces fit together, but I find it curious for sure.
Yes, the jumping of viruses from animals to humans due to keeping them in close proximity is so unlikely that it's happened hundreds of times before (e.g. SARS, MERS, Spanish flu, bubonic plague).
The bat lady herself says that these type of bats are not in or near Wuhan:
“I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”
The bat viruses most closely related to SARS-CoV-1 were found 700+ miles away from Guangdong where the first SARS-CoV-1 outbreak was. There's never been any explanation of how that happened, but there's no distraction of a BSL4 lab in Guangdong so there's no lab leak theory.
But that is proof that a virus in bats can jump to humans 700+ miles away.
I'm not excluding the lab hypothesis, I'm just pointing our that the natural hypothesis is also valid. Honestly, I don't think we're ever gonna figure out definitively which one it was (I don't think there's a 3rd competing theory). Even if it was a lab leak, I suspect that the evidence for that is gone.
“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”
there is no local bat population near Wuhan, China -- nor is Wuhan known to be some sort of wet market epicenter. It has wet markets like any Chinese city would.
The reason the wet market theory came to prominence was because commerce seemed like a reasonable explanation for how a novel coronavirus showed up so far away from its known animal reservoir (bats).
The reason the WIV is in Wuhan is the same as the reason why the CDC is in Atlanta or whatever -- Wuhan is a major city and it has things in it.
Understood, I should have been more clear that it is the largest urban center close to a large and interesting bat population i.e. hundreds of miles away. Certainly that's not the only wet market, and I just discovered a paper claiming that there were no bats actually being sold at that particular market:
Coincidentally, my sister lived in Wuhan for 3 years. Prior to 2020, I had to explain its location to people here in the US, but that is no longer the case!
That is really far off from the reality of determining viral origins.
Both SARS and MERS were recent coronavirus outbreaks that have had their origins rigorously pinpointed. Did this happen because governments cooperated and journalists provided important information? Not even close. Governments interfered with research into SARS and MERS origins for political reasons and journalists never really contributed anything of significance. The hard work was done by scientists doing sampling and sequencing of viruses and their results are extremely robust.
The next most recent pandemic is HIV/AIDS. When AIDS first hit everyone absolutely knew for certain that it was caused and spread by rampant gay sex in coastal cities. Then when research pointed to the Caribbean everyone knew that decadent travelers were to blame. It was only after a great deal of scientific work, again focused on sampling and sequencing, that we came to know HIV came from interactions with wild animals in Africa and didn't explode until much, much later. The one thing that can be said for certain about all of the early popular hypotheses is that they were all both completely wrong and thoroughly unhelpful.
The biggest problem with the lab leak theory is that it ignores all of the important information we have learned from past outbreaks and origins investigations and instead asserts that things are different this time and everything is about making narratives that have a coherent feel like a novel or dramatic film. An alternative conclusion that is far more simple is that finding the origins of SARS-CoV2 is going to be similar to the experiences we had with HIV and SARS and MERS. The rest is politics and click bait journalism.
MERS was rigorously pinpointed because camels were filthy with it, it was a slam dunk.
SARS-CoV-1 has never been rigorously pinpointed. Civets clearly got infected with it, but its not clear if they were infected by bats first or were infected by humans (similarly to minks and SARS-CoV-2). It wasn't until 2013 when WIV1 was isolated and is the most likely related virus in bats in Yunnan. WIV1 may be able to infect humans directly, but it is only 95% homologous with SARS-CoV-1.
The WIV1 sample was also found in bats in the same province as the RaTG13 virus which is closest overall so far to SARS-CoV-2, but the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak happened about 700+ miles away in Guangdong. It still isn't clear how that happened, just a lot of handwaving about the movement of animals like civets around China.
We should do a little experiment, since HN is so good at gathering and keeping data on us.
Gather the last year's worth of commentary around this subject and get all the people who kneejerked "lab hypothesis is a conspiratorial/xenophobic/racist theory," and ask them what do they think about the situation now and what has changed in their minds.
>Dr Peter Embarek, the epidemiologist who led the WHO’s four-week fact-finding mission in China earlier this year, said it was "one of the likely hypotheses” that the first person to be infected with coronavirus was a lab employee.
China forbade publishing the virus's genome. It was published by a Chinese scientist contrary to the rules and his lab was shutdown the next day for 'rectification'.
So the best guess is that it came from wild bats, and there was a lab right next to the initial outbreak site that was studying wild bats. That could just be a coincidence, but it's a pretty remarkable coincidence and at the very least deserves further investigation.
It could have been just an innocent mistake. A researcher got the disease while collecting bats out in the wild, but the lab never got a sample of the disease. The researcher was asymptomatic and unknowingly spread it to another person while stopping by the local market on their way home. So as far as anybody can tell, it came from the marketplace.
I don't know what really happened, but I think I'm being more reasonable that most people about this. There's three other major lines of thinking, all politically motivated and all wrong in my opinion.
#1: Many of the Western "liberals", especially the media, dismissed any kind of "lab-leak theory" as right wing conspiracies for most of 2020. I honestly think just because Trump and the right were promoting it, the "liberals" were against it.
#2: The Western conservatives and Trump filled in all the blanks in the "lab-leak theories" with their own personal agendas. This turned sane and objective lab-leak theories into conspiracy theories. What the other lab in Wuhan was doing is interesting, but not necessarily connected.
#3: The Chinese government considers any lab-leak theories as anti-Chinese propaganda, and aggressively launches it's own counter-propaganda. In my opinion, the Chinese government doesn't want to know the truth, and the biggest and most racist anti-Chinese organization of them all is the Chinese government itself, based upon what's currently happening in HK and to the Uighurs, among other human rights issues.
I'm by no means against China, their government is just as hypocritical as the US, and both get in the way of any kind of truly objective and scientific approach to these issues. Seems like there's so much "noise", so much cognitive dissonance and emotional charge, that we're incapable of discussing these things sanely.
I think the fact that there are only two labs in China that study Coronaviruses...and the outbreak location is a few hundred yards from where one of the labs is...is enough of a coincidence that it should be THE theory that it somehow (leak of some sort) until proven otherwise.
If this really did jump from bats, they should be able to find this IN bats.
Instead we can't seem to find that side of things. Instead the virus seems better fit to the mouse / ACE2 receptor stuff going on in the lab (with a big jump in infection rate) vs a gradual build from something evolving to work in humans.
> That could just be a coincidence, but it's a pretty remarkable coincidence
Not really.
It was always likely to be found in a major population center where people cluster tightly, where the r0 would be higher, where superspreading events would hit more people, and where there would be more educated hospital staff that would notice something going on.
Wuhan is the largest city in central China. It is also about as close to Yunnan where the bats are, as Guangdong is (where the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak happened).
If we understood what kind of intermediate animals might be involved in the zoonotic transfer and what their movement was around China, I strongly suspect that the chances that it was observed in Wuhan are something closer to 1-in-12 than 1-in-1000. And this is the second round, the first roll of the dice we had was with SARS-CoV-1 where we rolled a different number and it hit Guangdong.
Wuhan is 3,200 square miles, and it didn't just happen anywhere in Wuhan. The initial outbreak site was within walking distance of a laboratory that was studying that specific type of virus.
Of all the different heavily-populated places the disease could have started, it happened right next to a lab studying coronaviruses. That's no "1-in-12" chance and even "1-in-1000" seems kinda low.
The "lab-leak theory" is just as reasonable as the "we don't know where it came from but it wasn't the nearby lab theory".
In local news, officials announced that the accidental nuclear detonation a few blocks from the Acme Nuclear Weapons Depot was in fact the fault of a nearby farmers market. Back to you Jim for the college sports update.
One gets the sense that the ... intense ... interest in the origin of this virus, and whether it has any association this lab is not really driven by overwhelming scientific curiosity.
Is it worth knowing? Sure. Would a convincing answer to the question at any point between March 2020 and now changed the course of the pandemic in any way? No.
Fun thought experiment: If we could assume with absolute certainty that we would find out the inception of COVID-19 by Jan1 2023, and Vegas was allowing people to wager money on “somehow came from a lab in Wuhan”, I wonder what the odds would be compared to “came from a wet market”, or other competing theories. Money has a funny way of making people weigh and consider the outcome of an event.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadEdit: when this comment was written, the thread was pointing at summit.news, not AP.
Things would have been so much better, if they had just come correct from the beginning.
But now we have all this politicking and censorship and accusations of racism, etc., etc. when discussing the possibility of it being a lab release.
Will Twitter and FB and the WHO issue a mea culpa? I don't expect so.
As a starter, we need a deep and careful investigation to make sure this doesn't happen ever again either in China or elsewhere.
That’s the theory they wanted people to consume.
[and apparently voters have short memories because they are disagreeing]
This is indeed interesting to see.
Even the most prominent proponent of the lab leak theory, Donald Trump, said several times early on that he wasn't sure if it was intentional or an accident. In fact, he was pretty clear he thought it was accidental, and only mentioned it being intentional as a possibility, but that was an afterthought.
Source, since everyone likes to put words in his mouth:
https://apnews.com/article/understanding-the-outbreak-intell... (dated April 30, 2020).
So who exactly said that it was engineered for certain?
EDIT: the downvotes indicate that the belief that some believe the virus to be engineered is dogmatic in nature, rather than based on facts. If this were such a common belief, surely someone can identify its main proponent.
I suspect you're being downvoted because of your insistence on Donald Trump being "pretty clear", among other things, when Donald Trump has a decades long history of being anything but "very clear"
While this is after when your comment refers to, here is an example.
> "And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?
"So it'd be interesting to check that."
Pointing to his head, Mr Trump went on: "I'm not a doctor. But I'm, like, a person that has a good you-know-what."
This was stated by a US President to the general public of his nation, and the world at large.
The next day, about this quote - he simpled stated that he was "being sarcastic"
If you have some notion on how this method of communication and reason equates with being "pretty clear", please do tell.
However, this reply of yours
>the downvotes indicate
Would seem to "indicate" that you're not exactly the most reasonable person to have any discussion in good faith to begin with.
In the case of the lab leak theory, Trump was always extremely clear that he thought it a possibility and that he did not necessarily think it was a bioweapon. I can see that you are uninterested in engaging in good faith, because instead of keeping the debate to what it was about (the lab leak theory) you're changing the goalposts (demanding that everything he say be absolutely clear and never wrong or stupid, apparently in contrast to every other president before him [1]).
Lots of presidents speak poorly on certain issues, make stupid statements that they later have to cover up and retract, or cause confusion. That doesn't make them wrong on the issues they do speak clearly on.
> Would seem to "indicate" that you're not exactly the most reasonable person to have any discussion in good faith to begin with.
Oh please... downvoting someone who is giving you evidence of exactly what was said without a response indicates that those downvoting are only interested in ignoring reality.
[1] If I recall correctly, one of the most popular presidents of all time got up on stage and actually told the American public that accusations against him literally depend on 'what the meaning of the word is is'... come on, this is the most demanding and insane standard to expect of any American leader.
No, a third grader can easily explain to you why when somebody has a long and detailed history of being completely and utterly full of shit, whatever they say going forward will barely be considered to be not full of shit, for whatever roundabout reasons and circumstances.
>are only interested in ignoring reality.
You're trolling on HN. Stop trolling on HN.
It seems to me, that by downvoting and then accusing me of breaking site rules, you're trying to make me react. Isn't that also trolling? At no point did I ask for your comments or try to 'bait' you into making them. Have a great day!
>Launched in March 2019, Summit News is a far-right conspiracy website. Like most questionable sources this website does not have an about page nor disclosure of ownership. The primary writer appears to be Paul Joseph Watson, who is a former editor for the conspiracy website Infowars. Although not disclosed, Paul Joseph Watson appears to be the owner and editor of this website.
BuzzFeed was once declared not a reliable news source.
If it has merit, then it will be republished by more ( non-profit, and independent ) reliable news sources.
https://nyheder.tv2.dk/udland/2021-08-12-ansat-paa-laborator...
This story seems like more idle speculation with the backing of a semi-official source (but not in his official capacity).
Absolutely no new evidence is presented in the story, it's just one person's opinion. Also, this source is a right-wing media org, and in comments to the Washington Post later he walked the story back[1]:
> Asked for comment, Ben Embarek initially said the interview had been mistranslated in English-language media coverage. “It is a wrong translation from a Danish article,” he wrote, declining to comment further and referring The Washington Post to the WHO. He did not immediately respond to follow-up questions.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/12/who-origins-...
More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28172310
Remember how you would get banned from Facebook for suggesting that the lab leak theory was a possibility?
Then major social networks and the medias reversed their positions. What changed in the meantime, other than the president?
It actually wasn't downvoted too much - plenty of people here found it plausible - but the amount of people saying I was stupid and gullible has really stuck with me.
I was told I had no idea how viruses work (this is true enough - I don't have a degree in biology) but still felt extremely gaslit.
Similarly, on New Year's Eve 2015 I saw mention of the Cologne mass attacks on women by refugees as they were occurring on, yes, 4chan/pol/, and checked /r/worldnews and /r/europe to find out more. I didn't see anything, and assumed that it was another /pol/ "it's happening" dank maymayism. I only later realized that German media and those subreddits' mods had all worked to suppress news of the attacks until they could no longer be ignored.
(Cue "/pol/ was right" couplet)
Was it confirmed these men were legitimate refugees?
> I only later realized that German media and those subreddits' mods had all worked to suppress news of the attacks until they could no longer be ignored.
Why would they do that?
Just like every time there is a religious terror knife attack they claim it’s someone with mental problems.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/09/africa/fake-refugees-kenya-in...
https://abcnews.go.com/International/fake-syrian-passports-w...
https://news.yahoo.com/migrants-using-fake-syrian-passports-...
You don't need a degree to understand how a virus works.
The amount of people saying something about you on a mostly anonymous internet message board has really stuck with you?
This is, probably for your own good, a decent indicator that you should stop visiting said website.
I like this website. I feel like I learn a lot - mostly on discussions about fields I only have outside knowledge of.
Its not like I was personally offended but had the realization that it is possible for large groups of smart people to convince themselves of something even when it is not true (or at the very least, have no actual data to know if its true)
Could you remind us who was that person who went to SF’s Chinatown to hug random people and was urging others to “come and visit and enjoy Chinatown” during the first critical months of unknown risk?
We live at the peak of the information age but our natures have not changed. Both left and right need to focus on being unified, not strong-arming the other side.
I don't want unity. People obsessed with politics think they just need consensus to solve any problem, despite the atrocious track record of political solutions. Just leave the rest of us alone.
And this sentiment is problematic, because other countries have unity and are not afraid to use it.
Further, the above (reasonably) implies that, had the president not changed, the reversing of positions would not have occurred.
The issue is not that people wanted to investigate a lab leak, the issue was that people presented their lab leak theory as a fact. Believing in a theory without any evidence to support it falls pretty squarely in the conspiracy theory bucket.
Honestly, I haven't seen anything change in substance in the meantime. It still is a suspicious coincidence, but we don't have any clear indication of what actually happened. What has changed in the reporting is that people are expressing concerns about the lab (clearly theories, not fact), which is completely natural. We should investigate it so we can better prevent, detect, and respond to future outbreaks. But let's not make premature judgements from a coincidence.
We have e-mail evidence of lab employees explicitly asking reporters not to report on the potential.
And we have a novel virus that appeared centered around a biomedical research lab doing gain of function research on closely related viruses.
Simply due to the level of accusation and its implications, the claim deserved investigation from day one not out of hand dismissal.
Imagine if someone is found with a gun right next to a shooting scene, and everyone around you insisted that he certainly could not be the one who did any wrong because... racism or something. And then later on, you find that that guys friends spoke privately with the police and asked them not to conduct an investigation. Shouldn't that arouse suspicion in normal people?
The previous administration was completely nuts and would do and say all kinds of random things. The problems with communication and trust were too many to know where to start. Besides that, the context was totally different. A president trying to "wage a trade war" on China, stir up nationalist sentiment, distract from his responsibility to respond to the pandemic, constantly regurgitating conspiracy theories and other misinformation, constantly trying to distract from scandals, etc.
> Remember how you would get banned from Facebook for suggesting that the lab leak theory was a possibility?
The amount of misinformation about COVID was and is extreme. Yeah, they moderated their platform, which is under intense congressional scrutiny, in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic. Even so, I think you're conflating the bio-weapon theory with the lab-leak theory.
> Then major social networks and the medias reversed their positions. What changed in the meantime, other than the president?
Major social networks and medias didn't "reverse their positions"...we learned more, we're still learning more. What changed in the meantime is so, so many things lmao.
1. Vaccines would be available by the election (they were off by two days, likely because of optics of releasing a vaccine right before). 2. The lab leak theory being worthy of investigation 3. School lockdowns are damaging (now broad agreement) 4. New York did not need 40k ventilators and Andrew Cuomo covered up nursing home deaths (later an aide admitted to it) 5. Shutting down travel was wrong before it was right. If you recall, after trump's state of the union, in which he mentioned covid, Nancy Pelosi went into the streets of china town and insisted people ignore his fear mongering.
Shall I go on?
> A president trying to "wage a trade war" on China
A trade war which he campaigned on, was voted into office for, and for which he has the legal authority. You are complaining that trump doesn't agree with you, not that he did something legally wrong.
> we learned more, we're still learning more
Yes, they learned that they were wrong on many things and trump was right.
Fact check - the first COVID vaccine given in the US outside of a clinical trial was December 14, over a month after the election, not two days.
> If you recall, after trump's state of the union, in which he mentioned covid, Nancy Pelosi went into the streets of china town and insisted people ignore his fear mongering.
Are you aware that residents of Chinatowns are US citizens/residents, and not “travel”? I’d suggest you search news sources again and review Trump’s comments - he never warned Americans in the state of the union to stay away from downtown areas. He didn’t call for Americans to stay home and avoid coronavirus until March 2020. In February 2020 Trump’s message was that US residents had nothing to fear from the coronavirus, and that Democrats were trying to panic people - Pelosi et al were actually backing the administration line when they went to downtown areas and said people should continue their normal lives. Here’s one reminder article for you to review https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/485245-trump-hits-demo... ‘Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney earlier Friday claimed the press was seeking to use the virus to harm Trump, while Donald Trump Jr. claimed on Fox News that Democrats are hoping coronavirus "kills millions of people" so it ends the president's "streak of winning."’ This was 4 days after Pelosi visited Chinatown in SF.
Remember when the head of the previous administration thought injecting disinfectants or UV light was a possible solution to Covid?
The problem with trust and credibility is that once it’s lost, it’s very hard to gain back. Even if the broken clock is right twice a day, it’s still broken.
>The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Advances in Therapy, were based on five days of 20-minute treatments with ultraviolet A (UVA) light using a catheter inserted into the patients' tracheas. Patients were followed for 30 days. The findings were based on four patients; the fifth patient had no detectable levels of SARS-CoV-2 at the study outset.
https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/reduced-viral-loads-se...
>The problem with trust and credibility is that once it’s lost, it’s very hard to gain back.
Are you talking about corporate media? They seem to break trust constantly, and a large % of the population continues to trust them.
So far I've seen no retractions.
https://aytubio.com/pipeline/healight-technology-platform/
Maybe UV could help in some way, but was this ever going to be a real solution? I highly doubt Aytu BioPharma was in a position to deliver anything meaningful at the volume and time-scale required.
Trump simply had no clue what a workable solution looked like. He broadcast to the world as the American President the ideas of the most recent crazy to have his ear (or one that he read on Twitter), and then got a bruised ego and doubled down when shown his ideas were worthless.
No propaganda there.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/health/malaria-drug-trump...
[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[3] https://hcqmeta.com/
Now if all you do is read the title of articles or videos from left leaning news site, you may walk away with the belief that he's telling people to inject it. But he's not. He says they're going to look into it. Watch the video for yourself (and take note at the video title): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zicGxU5MfwE.
I want to add--I'm in no way indicating the right leaning news sites don't do the same. They've both screwed the country up by failing to report news without some bias slapped all over everything.
If that's the case, then the previous administration's opponents ought to look in the mirror, because they were the first anti-vaxxers, the first covid deniers (pelosi's statements that people should not be afraid of covid in late jan/early feb in chinatown, despite having access to the same intelligence as trump), and Dr Fauci lying to the US congress about gain of function research.
Honestly, given what's happened in the last two years on both sides, it should come as no surprise that no one trusts the federal government.
Do you think corporate media is giving the recent information the weight it deserves, given the fact that 4.3 million people died so far, and untold damage was done to the global economy and mental health?
The story itself is arguably significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), so I've turned off the flags after changing the URL.
Generally on HN we go by article quality rather than site quality (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) but in this case I think it is less distracting simply to change the URL. Actually the original domain is banned on HN, the same way most highly politicized sites are (regardless of which politics they practice) but users vouched for this submission, no doubt because they felt the story to be significant.
If anyone comes up with a better URL, we can change it again.
Edit: users in the thread have pointed out these other links (thanks!):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/12/who-origins-...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/head-of-who-team-investigating-...
Every one of these articles is presenting a somewhat different story and I'm not sure what a good title would be. According to the WaPo and WSJ articles, Ben Embarek wasn't just a WHO official but the leader of the investigation ("Ben Embarek led a team of international scientists on a mission to China") - that seems particularly significant so I've added it to the title above. If anyone comes up with a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/head-of-who-team-investigating-...
Basically: totalitarian governments suppress everything. It's what they do. It's not like the west had clear access inside facilities like WIV before the pandemic, so why do we expect different behavior now?
I remain really dubious, personally. Imagine it was a leak. Dozens or hundreds of people -- researchers with PhDs and international cred and travel ability -- would have had to be knowledgeable about the research and in on the coverup. Someone would have swung themselves an appointment at UCSF or Johns Hopkins or wherever in exchange for blabbing.
It's an attractive conspiracy, but really that's all there is. The existing circumstantial evidence is a big nothingburger (Chinese Institute of Virology studies known Chinese Viruses; News at 11!).
The ONLY significant evidence, itself still just a single source, is that the Journal reported that it was known to western intelligence agencies at the time that there was an outbreak of something flu-like among WIV employees in October 2020. That's I guess a little suspicious, but still unconfirmed and... really not enough to move the needle.
Add to that the fact that covid is a close cousin of already-known endemic viruses and that nothing about it looks engineered at all, and... this is still just a natural virus, sorry.
I don't see why this would be the case. It could be a lab leak with nobody at the being aware or having evidence. Why must people be in on a secret coverup?
Many activities that make evaluating the lab leak hypothesis difficult were done in the open: Destruction of early virus samples and deletion of Gene sequencing from public databases.
>Add to that the fact that covid is a close cousin of already-known endemic viruses and that nothing about it looks engineered at all, and... this is still just a natural virus, sorry.
The virus does not need to have been engineered to have leaked from a lab. Natural viruses can and do leak from labs as well.
This is just a gish gallop. I told you why I find existing evidence unconvincing. You need to convince me with evidence, not hypotheses.
I hadn't considered this before, but you're right that most of the people dismissing the 'lab leak' theory seem to believe that their intellectual opponents are proposing that a 'premeditated conspiracy' took place.
In any case, if I were a PRoC official, I would try to reduce the chance of any (direct or circumstantial) evidence of a lab leak came to light. That said, even suppression of circumstantial evidence is not necessarily evidence of either a lab leak or pre-meditated conspiracy.
If you want to argue for some weak form of the conspiracy, then maybe give it another name or something. But note that the weak form you seem to be thinking about (that it was benign research on natural viruses and just a routine mistake that caused the leak) seems to be even more susceptible to my suspicion. If you're a researcher who was doing this benign work, why keep silent? You could literally write a book fingering all your superiors as the villains and sell it for tens of millions of dollars and retire in Taipei or San Francisco.
Why are you insulting me? I honestly don't know where this virus came from, and am more interested in what the polarized discourse says about our current state of affairs.
Please don't resort to personal insults on HN. It's a violation of the guidelines[1] and makes for poor and uninteresting discussion.
Instead...
> It's extremely hard to figure out who we're talking to.
...don't resort to personal attacks, and assess the argument that the individual is making, without setting up a straw-man argument. If you're unclear what their assumptions are, then ask.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Maybe. And? Dozens or hundreds of internationally-relevant people would have been knowledgeable about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's specific involvement in 9/11, but that didn't stop it from being covered up for almost a decade.
https://twitter.com/MoNscience/status/1396240581651742724
I also feel like if he's serious about it, he would produce something other than a tweet thread, at least a real blog post with links to papers he refers to. Otherwise it's hard for me to take them any more seriously than anyone else who handwaves about papers.
It would be nice to see something like that with good faith opportunities for people to respond and counterrespond but I'm skeptical about it happening.
There's also a sense that I have from reading stuff like that and others that we should treat the peer-reviewed academic paper trail as somehow the state of things, rather than looking at the evidence on its own terms. I don't mean anything conspiratorial about that, just that it's almost like they expect there to be some peer-reviewed paper out there from China that shows how they would have engineered it if they had, as if that's realistic at all.
That's not even getting into what you mention, which is the possibility nothing was engineered and there was a leak.
It's impossible to disprove but both SARS and Bird Flu crossed over from animals in Southern China so there's no reason it must have come from the lab, either. Right now we have zero evidence either way, just people speculating mostly based on their pre-existing opinions of the Chinese state.
We've seen lab leaks and this is supposedly different because it's not disclosed and numerous other reasons making it hard to prove. We know about lab made viruses which this is supposedly different because it somehow looks like a virus of zoonotic origin. We've seen the Chinese government cover up embarrassing situations but this is different because there was heavy involvement from American researchers and American public educational institutions and they are in on the cover up too for some reason. We've seen the US government dislose previously classified information but this is different because all of the government officials who say they saw classified information about a lab leak (and were in a position to declassify said information) did not accompany their accusations with gathered intelligence. At some point we should recognize that these necessary mental gymnastics put the theory well into crank territory.
It took 9 months to find the source of MERS (camels). It took 14 months to find the origin of SARS1 (bats).
What evidence do you have that this was transmitted from an animal carrier? What mammal in China (it's not like there are that many mammal species living in the Wuhan metropolitan area) has been identified that easily catches COVID? The answer is zero.
The most likely explanation for this, which fits with all the other circumstantial data, is that the zoonotic origin was a genetically engineered mouse with human ACE2 receptors lining it's lungs. Note that I'm saying the mouse was genetically engineered, not the virus itself. The virus could easily evolve to infect humans by repeatedly exposing the humanized mice to the original, completely natural origin bat viruses.
Calling out "mental gymnastics" when you are acting as if it's a pure coincidence that a bat virus pandemic originated in a city containing the world's leading bat-borne virus research facility is the height of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. And before you say that the lab is in Wuhan because that's where the viruses are, no, it's not. The viruses historically have emerged in Yunnan province, in remote caves 1000 KM away from Wuhan.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2
https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
It's right at the bottom of the summary.
"3. Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice."
But sure, it's fringe and unlikely that the virus leaked out of a lab where it was specifically stated by the scientists applying for the grant that the funding would be used for testing interspecies transmission of bat coronaviruses with humanized mice. The lab doing this being in Wuhan, where the pandemic originated is also totally fringe and unlikely, is totally unrelated, right?
Gain of function proponents are ignoring research that indicates it's not possible to generate a virus dangerous to humans without leaving specific telltales. While this study isn't necessarily conclusive or a door slam in the face of lab leak, it's pretty huge data point that makes it far less likely.
I also forgot to mention that he deliberately ignored the humanized mice being the location of the serial passage work, and straw manned a "petri dish". Completely misrepresenting the fact that was most crucial.
In the future, using a Twitter account with locked comments is inadvisable. He blocked comments for a reason.
His entire argument is very straightforward. Zoonotic origin is highly plausible, has caused previous SARS outbreaks, has no evidence against it. Lab leak is possible, though it has no precedent and there's evidence that makes it less likely. There's no conclusive evidence for either. The balance of evidence and history leans heavily to zoonotic. There is absolutely nothing anyone has said in this thread that he didn't directly address nor anything that weakens his argument. Anyone on the lab leak train right now is basing it purely on bias.
There was a lab leak of SARS1 in 2004 which infected a lab worker and the people he came in contact with. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.the-scientist.com/news-anal...
The SARS1 virus escaped from a lab many years after the original outbreak (via accidentally being put in a fridge reserved for inactive virus and being examined under electron microscope, infecting employee), and it wasn't engineered at all. It was 100% natural origin.
I have ZERO doubt in my mind that natural viruses have leaked from US labs in the past, and were covered up. Can't prove it of course. Superpowers don't admit to these kinds of things.
Belief that this wasn't leaked from a lab requires a dismissal of a huge chain of improbable coincidences, and it's much easier to believe when you are part of a community of scientists who will undoubtedly have funding up-ended when people figure out they were at fault. Not unlike what happened to the field of nuclear energy after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The international virology community knows this.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/the-sudden-...
The two scientists seemed to think that although a lab leak origin is possible the natural origin story is more likely.
Nobody is saying this virus was engineered in this thread.
It appears to me to be a deliberate psychological trick of lumping people who claim the virus leaked from a lab (by far the most probable cause) with people who say the virus was an engineered bioweapon (insane, nonsensical crazy talk). The entire virology community is dependent on government funding, and they have massive conflicts of interest. I work with academics all day every day, and far too many gradually turn into mealy-mouthed bureaucrats, doing and saying whatever it takes to chase their next juicy grant, abusing and exploiting graduate students all along the way.
There's the chance that it was a naturally occurring virus that wasd being stored in a lab (like RaTG13, it's closest known cousin). Then, there's the chance that it was manipulated in lab experiments by well-meaning scientists hoping to learn more about coronavirus transmission to humans (which I think is most likely, considering the behavior of the WIV, but far from certain). Finally, there's the chance that it was deliberately leaked as a bioweapon (doesn't make sense to me).
I totally agree that there are massive conflicts of interest, including the implication of being blacklisted from Chinese data sources for one's career and the chance that there simply won't be any funding in the future if the public believes that the research field itself is to blame.
It would be human nature for those who were involved in lobbying for gain-of-function research to continue are now unwilling to entertain the idea that something as devastating as COVID was a result of such research. If that is true, it means that they were disasterously wrong in their earlier stance and it means that there will be no appetite to continue funding their field of expertise.
I'm tired of being told not to believe what's clearly in front of me -- a coordinated campaign in China to cover up any inquiry in to the origins of the virus accompanied by very suspicious behavior in China in the months before they were supposed to have been aware of the outbreak.
Whether COVID-19 itself is exactly a product of research at the WIV funded by EcoHealth Alliance and the NIAID, I don't know, but I can read those grant requests myself and see that they clearly refer to manipulating coronaviruses so that they better infect humanized mice cells. This is a study that Fauci insists is not gain of function research, but I'm unclear as to the distinction. I suspect that they played with language in these requests so as to be able to avoid triggering the legally-required review.
Fauci, and others, are potentially aware that the pandemic could have stemmed from research that they themselves fast-tracked around the legally mandated review process, making them partially culpable in millions of deaths worldwide -- it would be incredibly difficult in that situation to start looking critically at the possibility that it's true.
We should be very careful about trusting experts with a lot at stake in the answer to the question.
It would be human nature for those who were involved in lobbying for 1+1=2 to continue are now unwilling to entertain the idea that something as devastating as 42 was a result of such a calculation.
What direct evidence of natural origins is he referring to? Kristian Andersen's argument in his oft-cited paper seems to be that the spike proteins are effective at infecting humans in a novel way, and that if he were engineering an infections coronavirus he would have designed it differently, therefore it's unlikely that it was bioengineered. Beyond that, they tend to point out that "there is no evidence" of a lab leak -- ignoring many pieces of evidence along the way, even if they are circumstantial, including the workers at the WIV contracting a dangerous disease w/ COVID-like symptoms in Fall 2019, the sudden disappearance of the WIV genome sequence database before the first publicly known cases, and the suspicious renaming of the RaTG13 virus sample (the closest known to COVID-19 genetically) in WIV literature. I feel perpetually gaslit but some of these scientists. The argument seems to go as follows: it is most reasonable to suspect a zoonotic transfer, even without direct evidence, because a community of scientists with clear conflicts of interest tell us so -- but we are supposed to dismiss the circumstantial evidence of a lab leak because the only satisfactory evidence would be if a smoking gun were found in the WIV records (and everyone knows that they won't be). The idea that it has natural origins stems from recent experience with SARS and MERS, but of course that doesn't mean much of anything at all -- those experience inform both theories. One should also consider the 1977 flu pandemic which was confirmed to have been related to a live vaccine trial done by the Chinese military -- information which was suppressed at the time by the WHO for fear of losing cooperation with China and Russia.
Origins aside, it is not disupted that the NIH through the NIAID and EcoHealth alliance were funding research into coronaviruses that was being done at the WIV, and that the data related to that research used to be readily available but now is suppressed by the Chinese government, exactly at the same time that we are experiencing a pandemic that the research was hoping to forestall. Isn't that alone troubling? Are the scientists in this community expressing any trouble with that fact, or are we meant to believe that we are conspiratorial nuts if we bring up China's behavior in any context?
This is not either/or at all!
It can be both completely natural AND also have escaped from a lab. Pretending that lab == bio-engineered is a disingenuous distraction. For the given purpose of that lab them having a lot of naturally occurring viruses is to be expected, since that is the basis of what they are supposed to research.
A lot of people have pointed that out, why do you keep touting that distraction that paints anyone serious about the lab leak question as a conspiracy nut unwilling to look at the evidence? Natural origin is accepted and does not contradict the lab escape hypothesis at all.
But like others, I have strong suspicions. It starts by an improbable coincidence (pandemic starting at the doorstep of a lab). The Chinese have acted guilty from the outset, by lying about the virus, arresting doctors, not allowing any investigation, and pushing crazy alternative theories.
I served it's purpose perfectly! It allowed China to pretend that an investigation was done.
Pandemic starting at the doorstep of a lab (that is not located in remotely close proximity to the Yunnan caves where the previous SARS viruses were originating from)
Previous SARS virus outbreaks (SARS1 and MERS) had zoonotic reservoirs identified in months with dramatically fewer resources, but coincidentally, with vast resources and global efforts, no zoonotic reservoir identified for this virus.
Previous SARS virus outbreaks showed a gradual evolution of a virus to progressively becoming more infectious to humans, and equivalent genetic changes in the virus that can be traced. This one started out as highly infectious, and until several months in, mutations weren't very significant.
The Chinese Communist Party (not China, not the Chinese people, but the CCP) has expended far more energy suppressing research and scientific access than any form of investigation into the origins of the virus.
The CCP deliberately suppressed and arrested doctors publicly talking about the virus early on.
Edit:
Forgot to add that there is a direct paper trail (publicly available on data.gov) of grant documents which specify that the funding will be used in WIV for research of bat coronaviruses with (and I quote from the paper) "humanized mice". Humanized mice, in this context, are mice genetically engineered to have human ACE2 receptors lining their respiratory tissue. In what was the most infuriating moment of public testimony I have ever seen, Dr. Fauci argues that infecting humanized mice with animal viruses (resulting in animal viruses that can more easily infect humans) is NOT gain of function research. He was playing an obvious semantic game, where his definition of GOF is the far narrower concept of making an existing human infecting virus more infectious..... Seriously, I was a big fan of the guy until that single bit of testimony. Now i know he's a lying bureaucrat more than he is a scientist.
https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
Both of these statements are so inaccurate. It took many years before scientists were certain what the reservoir was for SARS, and there were already different lineages of the virus at the Wuhan market!
You are mad at the CCP for putting out misleading information. You are guilty of the same thing!
Of course the dude had concerns, anyone with half a brain would explore all of the possible origins and theories. But the lab leak theory is just that - one theory that could explain the situation at hand.
The problem is that too many people have put far too much stock in the lab leak theory to the point that it's being treated as the most likely source of origin, but that's just not what the evidence says.
If you think the U.S. is above unlawfully detaining a doctor, then I've got sad news for you.
The us does do this and has large and growing domestic opposition movements.
Born 12 October 1985 Beizhen, Jinzhou, Liaoning, China
Died 7 February 2020 (aged 34) Wuhan, Hubei, China
Cause of death COVID-19
Yes, all of that suspicious propaganda about the Chinese government's treatment of dissidents. The decoration came after his death at 34 years old.
> He died from the disease on 7 February 2020, at age 34.[8][9] A subsequent Chinese official inquiry exonerated him, and the Communist Party of China formally offered a "solemn apology" to his family and revoked the admonishment of him.
I don't even subscribe to Facebook or Twitter by choice. I definitely wouldn't subscribe to imprisonment by choice, haha. If you're concerned about these platforms controlling their content privately, don't use them.
Depending on what you think about the virtues of government, that's something between a pretty good thing or the worst horror you can imagine.
On the ground, the news of the virus was first supressed by local officials, allowing lots of people to attempt a "escape" from wuhan, when they got informed by relatives that something was up. When the pot boiled over, the bejing government stepped in and "walled" in wuhan. But they told that first and acted later, allowing thousands to "escape" ( they boasted about this on social media, thats how we know) and they escaped into lots of other countries - because while national flights were cancelled, international flights were still allowed.
This thing has been a lecture in disastrous disaster management - nothing more, nothing less. Its proof that totalitarian states even suck at the one thing they claim to be good at- being totalitarian.
Stop trying to play pretend and believe the truth.
>Stop trying to play pretend and believe the truth.
Just like Bush and his Dubya Em Deez, right? The other side is always brainwashed, and your side always "knows the truth"
Why don't you go use that power of yours to go do something helpful?
My heuristic is, whenever I encounter these labels, it's the moment I stop reading. They signal the end of productive conversation, anything surrounding them can be ignored.
I'm not saying that this means it was definitely a lab leak. It absolutely doesn't, without further evidence, but discounting it completely, especially given how suspicious the CCP acted around it (why wait an entire year before letting the WHO investigate and then only for a few hours? why silence scientists and doctors?), is equally silly.
There's no evidence it was a lab leak, there's no evidence that it wasn't either. There's some circumstantial data to suggest that the CCP isn't a trustworthy source. That's all we know.
Yes its silly to assume that it was a lab leak. But its also silly to assume that it wasn't. We don't know what it was.
I don't find it suspicious at all, precisely because I don't trust the Chinese government. In my estimation of the CPC, the following probabilities are all roughly equal (and close to 1):
* P(suppress investigation | natural origin)
* P(suppress investigation | lab leak of benign research)
* P(suppress investigation | lab leak of gain of function)
From a Bayesian point of view, then, P(lab leak | suppress investigation) is going to be almost equal to P(lab leak).
That said, it seems pretty unproductive at this point to blame anyone, but it does seem productive to avoid it happening again.
Years of propaganda has worked its magic in far more sinister ways than any of us want to admit, especially to ourselves.
* P(agressivley blame china | american lab leak of gain of function)
Not a 0 on that one.
Or are you in bad faith giving dubious priors?
"This lack of openness caused delays in efforts to control the epidemic, resulting in criticism of the People's Republic of China from the international community. China officially apologized for early slowness in dealing with the SARS epidemic."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
My experience in biology labs (though not virology labs) suggests that a leak of benign research is plausible, and that if it did happen odds are good that there wouldn't be a ton of documentation to suppress. Mistakes happen all the time, and if researchers filled out a report every time a tube was dropped or some PPE was ignored in a "pretty safe" scenario, there'd be almost no time for research.
I still think the total number of human-animal contacts outside the lab are at least an order of magnitude greater than inside of it, so I would rank the probabilities as (natural > benign research leak >> gain of function leak).
While non of that proves anything, it certainly makes CCP look incredibly suspicious. Of course, if it was a lab leak, its pretty unlikely we will ever know. All I know is that the CCP acted extremely shady and that alone makes me doubt their official story. Again, this doesn't mean it wasn't the wet market hypothesis, but its clear that the CCP's word cannot be trusted.
We also know that viruses have leaked form high security labs in the past (including smallpox!) so its not exactly unheard of.
Some footnotes: Its important to separate China/Chinese people from the CCP. Its also important to separate "bioengineered" from "lab accident", I think the former is extremely unlikely and the latter is very possible.
Is that meant to be a counterargument? (just because the USA downplayed it doesn't make CCP's doing so better, especially since they had advance knowledge and could have potentially completely prevented the global pandemic, while when it was in the USA, it was already global, even if lesser) Are you agreeing with me but adding that the USA isn't faultless? (Its true, but I don't know how its relevant to what I said) I really have no idea what you're trying to say.
After all, there is no indication the virus was engineered by the US government, yet the danger was repeatedly lied about by the highest levels of government in January and February 2020, e.g. “when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away” (Feb 10), “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero” (Feb 26) ”It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear” (Feb 27), etc.
It’s claimed the local CCP apparatus lying and covering up the virus in December 2019 was for similar political reasons - there was an important event coming up in the city and they didn’t want it to be canceled.
Besides, reports from China predated any from the USA, so for it to even be in the USA, CCP needed to have failed in containing it.
I'm not denying that the USA's covering it up made it worse, it absolutely did. The US government aren't innocent in the global spread of the virus. But this entire discussion was about whether it originated from a lab break or natural spread through the wet market, so in that context, it doesn't really seem relevant, while CCP's behaviour is relevant in the sense that it paints a picture of them being untrustworthy and having acted shady when their culpability was questioned, so their denials of the WIV break, as well as their other actions (especially denying the WHO the ability to investigate for OVER A YEAR) puts doubt on their story.
Doubt, though, isn't definitive proof. I never said that I think it was definitely a lab break, just that I think the chances are higher than many people like to admit and that the CCP have not proven trustworthy. We will probably never know for sure, either way.
We should definitely be reconsidering our own funding and oversight of any research that is similar to “gain of function”.
It turns out that when you do this simple find and replace, we get equally as factual statements. So does this imply that it leaked from a US operated facility? Or is this an indication of the type of work the US was funding at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and conducting more generally? Or most likely, is this an irrelevant piece of 'evidence' of wrong doing on the part of any person or nation by assuming guilt based on their claim of innocence?
An innocent person will say they were innocent just as often as a guilty person who is trying to hide their guilt.
Only if you ignore the known facts. We know that covid-19 originated from wuhan, we know that the wuhan institute of virology was studying that exact virus. We know that the CCP did not allow the WHO to investigate the WIV hypotheses until over a year later.
Yes the USA acted shady, but the USA doesn’t have these addictions factual contributing elements. These factors don’t prove anything, of course, I never said that they do, but they certainly paint a picture that shows that the lab leak hypothesis is at least viable and the alternatives require some coincidences to be true. Again not proof, but certainly evidence that shouldn’t be ignored.
The USA analogy is ignoring all of the other factual information we have and is focusing purely on “well China isn’t the only country acting shady”, which I don’t think is relevant or useful. CCP aren’t the only ones responsible for where we are today, but they were a rather key part of it, regardless whether covid-19 was a lab leak or not.
> by assuming guilt based on their claim of innocence?
It’s not their claim of innocence that is suspicious, it’s their actively suppressing information that is: they didn’t allow the WHO to investigate until over a year later and they didn’t allow scientists and doctors to acknowledge there was a virus. More recently they even tried to say the virus originated in countries other than China. That’s rather more than a claim of innocence.
Second, this thread[2] is very interesting. The Chinese government is freaking out pretty hard against the idea of doing more of a real investigation. I'm not sure how all the pieces fit together, but I find it curious for sure.
[1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/politics-was-always-...
[2]: https://twitter.com/natashaloder/status/1425915665752461316
It's really that simple...
“I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...
But that is proof that a virus in bats can jump to humans 700+ miles away.
https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...
- Shi Zhengli
The reason the wet market theory came to prominence was because commerce seemed like a reasonable explanation for how a novel coronavirus showed up so far away from its known animal reservoir (bats).
The reason the WIV is in Wuhan is the same as the reason why the CDC is in Atlanta or whatever -- Wuhan is a major city and it has things in it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2
Coincidentally, my sister lived in Wuhan for 3 years. Prior to 2020, I had to explain its location to people here in the US, but that is no longer the case!
Both SARS and MERS were recent coronavirus outbreaks that have had their origins rigorously pinpointed. Did this happen because governments cooperated and journalists provided important information? Not even close. Governments interfered with research into SARS and MERS origins for political reasons and journalists never really contributed anything of significance. The hard work was done by scientists doing sampling and sequencing of viruses and their results are extremely robust.
The next most recent pandemic is HIV/AIDS. When AIDS first hit everyone absolutely knew for certain that it was caused and spread by rampant gay sex in coastal cities. Then when research pointed to the Caribbean everyone knew that decadent travelers were to blame. It was only after a great deal of scientific work, again focused on sampling and sequencing, that we came to know HIV came from interactions with wild animals in Africa and didn't explode until much, much later. The one thing that can be said for certain about all of the early popular hypotheses is that they were all both completely wrong and thoroughly unhelpful.
The biggest problem with the lab leak theory is that it ignores all of the important information we have learned from past outbreaks and origins investigations and instead asserts that things are different this time and everything is about making narratives that have a coherent feel like a novel or dramatic film. An alternative conclusion that is far more simple is that finding the origins of SARS-CoV2 is going to be similar to the experiences we had with HIV and SARS and MERS. The rest is politics and click bait journalism.
SARS-CoV-1 has never been rigorously pinpointed. Civets clearly got infected with it, but its not clear if they were infected by bats first or were infected by humans (similarly to minks and SARS-CoV-2). It wasn't until 2013 when WIV1 was isolated and is the most likely related virus in bats in Yunnan. WIV1 may be able to infect humans directly, but it is only 95% homologous with SARS-CoV-1.
The WIV1 sample was also found in bats in the same province as the RaTG13 virus which is closest overall so far to SARS-CoV-2, but the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak happened about 700+ miles away in Guangdong. It still isn't clear how that happened, just a lot of handwaving about the movement of animals like civets around China.
Gather the last year's worth of commentary around this subject and get all the people who kneejerked "lab hypothesis is a conspiratorial/xenophobic/racist theory," and ask them what do they think about the situation now and what has changed in their minds.
I'd love to know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYDL_RK--w
https://news.yahoo.com/who-wuhan-lab-worker-covid-patient-ze...
China forbade publishing the virus's genome. It was published by a Chinese scientist contrary to the rules and his lab was shutdown the next day for 'rectification'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Yongzhen
[0]https://i.pinimg.com/736x/6c/1d/61/6c1d61b11496488750658428d...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FwvZql6RToE&feature=share&fbcl...
It could have been just an innocent mistake. A researcher got the disease while collecting bats out in the wild, but the lab never got a sample of the disease. The researcher was asymptomatic and unknowingly spread it to another person while stopping by the local market on their way home. So as far as anybody can tell, it came from the marketplace.
I don't know what really happened, but I think I'm being more reasonable that most people about this. There's three other major lines of thinking, all politically motivated and all wrong in my opinion.
#1: Many of the Western "liberals", especially the media, dismissed any kind of "lab-leak theory" as right wing conspiracies for most of 2020. I honestly think just because Trump and the right were promoting it, the "liberals" were against it.
#2: The Western conservatives and Trump filled in all the blanks in the "lab-leak theories" with their own personal agendas. This turned sane and objective lab-leak theories into conspiracy theories. What the other lab in Wuhan was doing is interesting, but not necessarily connected.
#3: The Chinese government considers any lab-leak theories as anti-Chinese propaganda, and aggressively launches it's own counter-propaganda. In my opinion, the Chinese government doesn't want to know the truth, and the biggest and most racist anti-Chinese organization of them all is the Chinese government itself, based upon what's currently happening in HK and to the Uighurs, among other human rights issues.
I'm by no means against China, their government is just as hypocritical as the US, and both get in the way of any kind of truly objective and scientific approach to these issues. Seems like there's so much "noise", so much cognitive dissonance and emotional charge, that we're incapable of discussing these things sanely.
Instead we can't seem to find that side of things. Instead the virus seems better fit to the mouse / ACE2 receptor stuff going on in the lab (with a big jump in infection rate) vs a gradual build from something evolving to work in humans.
Not really.
It was always likely to be found in a major population center where people cluster tightly, where the r0 would be higher, where superspreading events would hit more people, and where there would be more educated hospital staff that would notice something going on.
Wuhan is the largest city in central China. It is also about as close to Yunnan where the bats are, as Guangdong is (where the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak happened).
If we understood what kind of intermediate animals might be involved in the zoonotic transfer and what their movement was around China, I strongly suspect that the chances that it was observed in Wuhan are something closer to 1-in-12 than 1-in-1000. And this is the second round, the first roll of the dice we had was with SARS-CoV-1 where we rolled a different number and it hit Guangdong.
Of all the different heavily-populated places the disease could have started, it happened right next to a lab studying coronaviruses. That's no "1-in-12" chance and even "1-in-1000" seems kinda low.
The "lab-leak theory" is just as reasonable as the "we don't know where it came from but it wasn't the nearby lab theory".
Re: USS Iowa Turret Explosion
Is it worth knowing? Sure. Would a convincing answer to the question at any point between March 2020 and now changed the course of the pandemic in any way? No.