[But a leading scientist told Sir Jeremy that “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular”. Dr Collins, the former director of the US National Institutes of Health, warned it could damage “international harmony”.]
The entire foundation of science is based upon empirical observation and asking hypothetical questions. It is discouraging that scientists can make statements like this and get away with it.
Can you think of a scenario where science has ever benefited from censorship? Correct me if I am wrong, but respectfully that is the argument you are making, right?
Not that science benefits from censorship, but that game theory sometimes necessitates it.
Imagine a scientist with significant political cachet. This allows them to receive more funding, do more science. They cannot optimize their behavior only for truth-seeking, because that fails to maximize their political capital. If they optimize for the former, they will be replaced by someone who is better at the latter.
Any scientist that relies on external funding must balance science with politics to continue to do science, sometimes this involves censorship.
> Scientists should counter them with facts and honesty not censorship.
Scientists must be careful in how they communicate, and organizations like the CDC and FDA need to staff expert scientific communicators who can explain complicated things to lay people. Bill Nye types.
"Vaccines contain dihydrogen monoxide, a chemical that killed over 200,000 people within hours in 2004" is a scientifically factual statement, but not a well communicated one.
The reality is not so rosy. Many virologists know that if lab leak is true their careers will be over. So I am very skeptical of how much obfuscations and disinformation spread by virologists is for the good of humanity and how much of it is just to protect their self interest.
This is how science works in the post-WW2 era. Most prominent scientists (in any field) seldom do science when they attain their stature -- they manage people (students and postdocs), and many become politicians for their institution or lab to attain more funding.
By that point most of the low-hanging scientific "fruit" had already been picked. Due to increasing complexity and the high workload of running experiments, solo scientists could no longer make much progress. So they had to act as administrators and project managers, leading larger teams of assistants and graduate students.
Government funding of science and a proposal/grant system. Senior people spend a lot of time writing proposals, and need underlings to do the leg work. They also have to be politically savvy so their peers don't reject their proposals.
To expand on this, before World War II, there was far less federal funding for science, and I don't think university faculty had the need to bring in external funding that they do now. I don't know the history of requirements that faculty bring in funding, however.
I've never understood the argument that people would want to suppress the (accidental) lab-leak hypothesis out of a desire to protect the image of China. If the lab-leak hypothesis is incorrect, that doesn't change the fact that the virus originated in that country, it just means that the virus emerged from a wet market.
I'm not Chinese, but I'd imagine that a country's image is more harmed by accusations of having backwards cultural and food habits (and insufficient government regulation of dangerous markets) rather than potentially just one lone scientist making a mistake while working on advanced genetic research, which is a risk at any such lab in the world.
I agree. Should Galileo have suppressed his observations to protect the Catholic Church? If he had, would it have been in the name of science or something else?
>> I'm not Chinese, but I'd imagine that a country's image is more harmed by accusations of having backwards cultural and food habits
You forget the politics. CCP can never be wrong or do wrong. That would risk their rule. I'm pretty sure they would rather see the country burning than admitting guilt and incompetence. You can see that kind of selfish behaviour at most of the leaders(I would dare to say even in recent US history) but in an authoritan system this is made worse/more dramatic b/c there is no alternative(i.e opposition to replace leaders in a peaceful way)
> CCP can never be wrong or do wrong. That would risk their rule.
But by failing to regulate wet markets properly, aren't they equally at fault?
Perhaps the supposed logic is that a scientist at a lab doing this sort of research probably counts as a government employee, whereas someone storing animals unhygienically would more likely be self-employed, so that makes the government less directly responsible.
I'm not sure if that distinction really matters to people who want to blame China's government, though.
>> But by failing to regulate wet markets properly, aren't they equally at fault?
Not really. It's just "bad luck" and "nature's fault". I never heard anyone angry on the Chinese government for not adding more red tape /regulation to the wet market. If that would be the case we should have seen people protesting all over the world against public markets where sanitary conditions are not the primary concern of the merchants. I believe it'a well known that more viruses are expected to jump from animals to humans. It's just a matter of time/luck. Simply put, failing to regulate wet markets does not equal to developing and releasing a deadly virus.
You may not be able to replace the people at the top, but if a city in China is failing to to take active steps to contain an outbreak, you can bet that those local leaders will be replaced by the CCP.
Animal to human transmission is understandable though and forgivable as it happens all the time.
Human error would generate blame though and cost China tons of political capital with countries eager to calculate just how much damage this mistake cost them.
I would guess it benefits the US too since they had been providing business to the Wuhan lab and failed to vet them effectively. Here is a fun conspiracy theory: what if the US put high risk projects in China hoping that they could obfuscate blame from themselves in case it caused a public health crisis?
It's actually a serious path of investigation that took place last year. And documents actually show some US institution financing at least one lab in China. The motive wasn't to obfuscate blame but more likely to practice the research on a territory having less stringent regulation on this field.
That "ideology" originates in the US, namely in black communities that have been marginalised since slavery. No need for conspiracy theories about China somehow causing wokeness and antiracism.
It most certainly does not originate from the black community, but leftist liberal white academics. Blacks have certainly adopted the cause but they are not the ones stirring most of the ridiculousness we are seeing.
There are many more examples of black activists and scholars who have pioneered this way of seeing the world. Ascribing that work to white scholars denies the people actually doing the work agency, and to reiterate, is racist.
>I'm not Chinese, but I'd imagine that a country's image is more harmed by accusations of having backwards cultural and food habits (and insufficient government regulation of dangerous markets)
Yeah, there could never be a virus transmitted between Westerners and their food. Some kind of "swine flu" is a ridiculous notion.
In all likelihood, the local government conveniently blamed the wet market while the propaganda machine at the national level started blaming Americans visiting Wuhan for a military comp. I seriously doubt bats from faraway caves were being sold in a wet market in Wuhan. I personally haven't seen anything as disgusting as a bat being sold in a wet market, but I suppose the possibility is nonzero.
As I understand, bats are believed to be the reservoir for SARS-CoV, but the virus was spread to humans via an intermediate host. It would be the same with SARS-CoV-2, with an intermediate host acting as an amplifier.
In a democratic country the "ruling party" and "love towards their country" can be independent. But in an authoritarian country this feeling is supressed.
A charitable interpretation would read the statement as "further speculative debate". Indeed, several of the lab leak arguments mentioned in that very article were subsequently disproven months later, and their unqualified and categorical assertions were arguably no less unprofessional (indeed, perhaps more unprofessional) than other scientists simply exclaiming, "Ssshhhhhh".
We can't know the precise motivations behind those who suggested Sir Jermey pipe down, but indeed that's the problem with such speculative discourse. When speaking with a public voice--which can arguably include private communications to political leadership--there's nothing per se untoward, IMHO, with demanding that professionals speak carefully.
It's a fine line, but I don't see anything damning in these e-mail disclosures even though I'll readily admit that many people, including professionals (scientists, journalists, etc), prematurely dismissed the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak.
Collins hasn't done anything except management and policy for the last 30 years. The closest he's gotten to science is writing books I'd put in the autobiography or philosophy section and tag it "theistic evolution".
At least as of 2011: "Collins remains actively involved in research, studying the molecular genetics of diseases including cancer and adult-onset diabetes. His group also is developing animal models of genetic disorders to test potential therapeutic approaches." [0]
[0] Kresge N, Simoni RD, Hill RL. The Molecular Genetics of Cystic Fibrosis: The Work of Francis Collins. J Biol Chem. 2011 Aug 12;286(32):e8–9. doi: 10.1074/jbc.O111.000248. PMCID: PMC3151108
Yes, that is the management part of his job. He runs a research group and probably has to spend much of his time looking for funding for that group while lightly supervising the actual science it is doing.
"international harmony" is just a front for hiding self-interest. Many elites, including the said virologists and bureaucrats, have significant financial or other ties with China. That's why any discussion of China and pandemics is very quickly buried with bullying and force [1].
The CCP is already furthering oppression more than anyone else. They have absolutely decimated the indigenous way of Chinese life because they are anti culture and anti religion, except where it aligns with their party ideology. Harming their credibility actually helps the “actual” indigenous Chinese people and way of life.
Ever been to China? The country is ruled by Han supremacists and is openly racist to its own citizens who aren't Han. To defend the CCP using the argument of "Deep racism since the West existed" is just absurd party propaganda.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. It just leads to hell. Also really tedious and repetitive threads, and we want the opposite.
"Science" is a big-money industry with motivated sponsors, government influence, and strict gatekeeping.
When the quote says "further debate would do unnecessary harm to science," it's talking about this, the big S Science industry.
The scientific method is a way to verify truths by testing hypotheses. The Science industry will kick you out if you uncover inconvenient truths or even test the wrong hypotheses.
> The entire foundation of science is based upon empirical observation and asking hypothetical questions
True, but it’s possible to ask questions that sway public opinion. Look at all the “studies” tobacco companies paid for. Or the racist scientific theories that attempted to justify slavery.
If you’re asking questions about a lab leak out of genuine scientific interest, that’s perfectly legitimate.
But if you’re asking out of a desire to win political points, stir up tensions, etc., that’s destructive.
There are plenty of actors on both sides, using the same tool of scientific inquiry for good and for ill.
Your examples don't match the point you were making. The bent studies from tobacco companies were falsifying answers, not just asking questions, and the racist theories were operating on a hazy pseudoscientific level that can't even be called "falsification," but were also, by another means, giving false answers.
There may have been a time in history when asking questions alone has been used maliciously, but it's neither of those.
They’re the end result of asking biased questions then manipulating answers to fit those biased questions. My point is that if you ask biased questions it won’t be long until someone provides biased answers.
You need to ask unbiased questions to get unbiased answers.
You're simplifying too much. The tobacco company example illustrates very well how you can distract and lead astray by asking biased questions. Leading (smoking) statisticians like Fisher continued to point out there may be confounding causes. He did not falsify data. Even a spurious discussion about a "smoking gene" was created. Asking questions may seem innocent but it can be done strategically and can hinder drawing the right conclusions. Eventually the scientific method would correct those views, but it took more than 40 years even though the statistical data was available from the start.
Judea Pearl dedicates a whole chapter (Ch. 5) of his The Book of Why to this example.
If China screwed up and didn’t follow proper first world standards for their research and directly caused 2 years of hell for the rest of the world then they deserved everything that would have come their way. To hell with the future of science in China, some fuck ups are too big to sweep under the rug. Sometimes you need destructive anger. Sometimes you need raw political backlash.
It’s really bizarre to me that western scientists would feel more obligated to defend the future of scientific progress in a foreign communist country (especially one that’s currently engaging in an ethnic cleansing not seen since WWII) over their obligation to their own country and more importantly, than their obligation to the truth. These people have taken scientific and technological progress as their god and it’s impossible to understand their actions if you haven’t.
Motivation might go to bias. But, ultimately, if the science is good, the motivation should be irrelevant. Science and exploration, regardless of what motivates it has value.
> If you’re asking questions about a lab leak out of genuine scientific interest, that’s perfectly legitimate.
> But if you’re asking out of a desire to win political points, stir up tensions, etc., that’s destructive.
The trouble is that it's often both.
Suppose proof of a lab leak is bad for party A and good for party B. If no investigation takes place, people will assume it didn't happen. If we don't actually know the answer then party A is politically motivated to refuse to investigate and party B is politically motivated to demand an answer to the question better than "we don't know because we didn't look."
There may not be any party C who is completely disinterested and unbiased. You either investigate it or you don't. And either choice is politically charged.
But seriously. It is easy to be labelled "CCP-shill" or "useful idiot" if you question the lab leak theory.
And what is even crazier is that the lab leak-proponents are convinced that they are being censored. Even though they are completely dominating here (and elsewhere) in the hn comments, commenting on a pro-lab leak theory article from a major UK newspaper.
This isn't a US legal case; it's a scientific inquiry. Either lab leak or zoonosis is plausible, so you can't say one isn't the default until the other is proven. You don't flip a coin and say "heads until proven tails".
This seems like the misuse of impressive sounding words. The hypothesis has nothing to do with US law. It’s a question of whether there is sufficient empirical evidence in support of the prevailing hypothesis, that the virus originated from a market in Wuhan.
No, there isn't especially after 2 years. This does not however mean that in the absence of wet market evidence that the only possible answer is lab leak.
There are many animal hosts or reservoirs. The issue is that it's not obvious wether they got it from or gave it to humans. You really need the most direct ancestor virus.
We don't, and that's the issue, we can't know unless we find an ancestor virus. It's also very possible if could have wiped out the original virus in all original reservoirs. It's very difficult to do this now and for endemic viruses in general, and it took a very very long time to do for SARS where this wasn't a problem.
> “we really don’t know” how accurate the origin story is, she says: “There’s some sort of connection [to the Wuhan market] and there were people exposed to the market that were infected.”
> Baker says what is “very likely” is that the virus originated in a bat. “It’s a likely scenario but we will never know. The market was cleaned up quite quickly. We can only speculate.”
> “These wet markets have been identified as an issue because you do have species interacting,” she says. “It’s an opportunity to highlight the dangers of them and an opportunity to clamp down on them.”
> Turner adds: “We’ve found the ancestors of the virus, but having broader knowledge of the coronavirus in other species might give us a hint about the evolution of this thing and how it jumped.”
There has been other wet market origin stories as well, so I think absent other evidence it seemed like the Occam’s razor answer.
The immediate source - palm civets at a local market was found almost as soon as they looked, about four months after the outbreak. Tracing back where they got it from took longer.
After the discovery of WIV1 in bats it was found that it efficiently infected human airway epithelial cells, and since the palm civets were never linked to any outbreaks it is possible that the virus had directly hopped to humans from bats and that the palm civets were unnecessary as an intermediate species. It was also later found that it infects racoon dogs, ferret badgers and domestic cats. There was never any conclusive proof that raccoon dogs were responsible/required and that now looks unnecessary, which is a good example of how over a decade later what we think we know can change.
1. The closest known animal viruses to human SARS-1 were found in civet cats in 2003, within about a year of the first discovery of the virus in humans.
2. No animal viruses closer to SARS-1 have since been discovered. Dr. Shi discovered various viruses in bats that we believe are ancestral to SARS-1, including WIV-1 in 2013. This is significant because we believe SARS-1 evolved primarily in bats, but those viruses have lower genetic identity with SARS-1 than does the virus found in the civets.
If you disagree, please link a paper.
Based on the above, I don't understand why you'd think 2013 is the important date. Within about a year of the emergence of both of the previous two novel coronaviruses in humans (SARS-1 and MERS), a near-identical virus was discovered in animals (civets and camels). This is suggestive but not conclusive evidence that those animals first infected humans, and strong evidence that those viruses existed in nature--somewhere, even if not exclusively in those animals--before they emerged in humans.
For SARS-CoV-2, no such evidence has yet been found. This doesn't prove that SARS-CoV-2 is of unnatural origin, and I assume you'll mention the uncertainty in Ebola's zoonotic hosts shortly; but I don't see how anyone could treat that as irrelevant, except out of willful blindness.
I didn't mean to suggest that you were confusing anything with MERS. I just brought MERS up to show that not only had we found an animal infected with SARS-1 within about a year of its emergence in humans, but we'd also found such an animal for MERS, on a similar timescale. This means that SARS-CoV-2 is the 1/3 for which we haven't, not impossible just by chance but slightly more surprising than just 1/2.
And yeah, you'd mentioned WIV-1 above, and I'd assumed that's what you meant from the 2013 date. I noted this in point (2) of my grandparent comment. I just don't understand why you think that's more significant than finding the near-identical virus in civets. The SARS-1 civets might not have first transmitted SARS-1 to humans, but the WIV-1 bats definitely didn't--they're very different viruses, and while WIV-1 might indeed be able to infect humans it's definitely not what caused the actual outbreak. So why pick 2013 and not 2003?
We have no proof that civets gave us SARS-1 and not the other way around.
Since it was also found in raccoon dogs, ferret badgers and domestic cats which one of those was the actual intermediate animal? Civets were just the first identified. Either one of them gave it to us and we gave it to the other three, or possibly we got it from bats and gave it to all four. AFAIK there's no conclusive phylogenetic analysis establishing which species got it from whom.
I think you're strictly right there. If they'd obtained sequences then they could have built that tree; but as far as I know they didn't, perhaps because the cost of sequencing was higher back then. That's still more evidence than we have for SARS-CoV-2, though.
With SARS-1 we had the additional evidence that some wildlife traders had antibodies, presumably from mild infections by related viruses in the animals they handled. There's again no genomic evidence to exclude "reverse zoonosis" there, but the timing seems to make that pretty unlikely.
Yes, clear animal reservoirs, viral lineage, old samples from human or animal infections with precursor variants. No position on the question, just answering your question about proof.
That would only disprove the genetic manipulation part, but not necessarily lab leak. A WIV lab staff can easily contract virus from a bat inside the lab. This essentially what happened in Taiwan, where a lab staff got infected with COVID from a mouse [1]. To disprove lab leak you also have to show either 1. WIV or any other labs in Wuhan didn't have any virus samples that can be an ancestor of SARS-CoV2 2. we can establish a very clear and well understood route how the ancestor of SARS-CoV2 arrived at Wuhan from Yunan province, where the horseshoe bats live, including how it became so good at infecting humans in a very short period of time.
With SARS original they found the source as infected animals at a local food market. Something like that would pretty much disprove a lab leak as the source as it did that time.
If a virus essentially identical to the original wild type SARS-CoV-2 is found in a wild animal population that would be fairly strong evidence against the lab leak hypothesis, although not an absolute disproof. Researchers have looked and not found such, so it remains an open question.
So far the closest we've come is a bat virus in Laos but it has some significant genetic differences.
Also Ecohealth Alliance and WIV collected viruses in Laos. So in terms of natural origin vs. lab leak the viruses found in Laos don't increase probability on either side.
Non-human animal-to-animal transmission has been observed, like on Danish mink farms. But you can sequence the virus from many human and non-human infections and build a phylogenetic tree from the sequences, knowing that each variant should have all the mutations of its ancestor plus maybe some new ones. In such a tree, the proximal zoonotic host should have infections with no human-infection ancestor. This was observed for the original SARS (palm civets) and MERS (camels), each within about a year. For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting.
No. The only way to disprove lab leak theory is for the CCP to disclose the WIV databases and records of what they were studying. Otherwise, just because it was found in some animal doesn’t quite disprove it. WIV was actively collecting virus samples from mammals for research funded by the US tax payer money through Eco Health Alliance.
If you are inclined to think the CCP knows / is covering up a lab leak; you are also inclined to think that they'd release fake disclosure data to cover it up.
Faking data is much harder: it’s easy to forget to remove something, change numbers so they don’t match other numbers, or make up numbers which have the statistical signal of manufactured data. Even being a great power does not prevent these kind of mistakes, because of the skill level censors would need in multiple scientific fields to make a good forgery. People get away with it in minor papers in the social sciences all the time, but with a million eyes on the data sets in this case, someone’s gonna see it.
They wouldn't have to actually fake scientific data - they'd just release everything else they were working on, omit the problematic files, and go "see? we showed you everything - there's nothing to see here!".
Time tables, budgets, staffing docs, those are readily forgeable. Any leftover discrepancies can be chocked up to clerical error. This is doubly so if the problematic research was classified or compartmentalized - files pertaining to those programs are often designed to be easily expunged.
Ultimately, China could release as many files as people ask, and never be able to settle the debate. You can't prove/disprove the existence of files they claim do not exist.
Our best bet would be whistleblowers - ideally multiple trusted and independent ones - who can testify to a hidden program. However, we can't use the lack of whistleblowers to prove the lack of a program, which is where we're stuck today.
Well, who says they haven't tried to do that. The 2013 Mojiang mining incident was claimed to be a fungal infection, while it was later proven it was a viral infection.
Let me respond to this question with another question. Can you disprove the existence of space aliens? No, you cannot, because they are statistically possible. Are they plausible? That isn't what is being asked here, the plausibility, just whether something is possible.
To whose satisfaction? Scientifically? It seems possible if the evidence still exists or could be found, based on a few of the other comments here. Politically? The faction that will never be satisfied, parted company with the scientific community, before the pandemic was even on the horizon.
As a scientist, I would have been OK with learning about the hypothesis from a credible source and letting it play out. I would have been OK with letting the public know about it. However, realistically, good faith investigation of the hypothesis would have been utterly drowned out by hysterically amplified versions of the same hypothesis that were already in circulation.
>"Professor Andrew Rambaut, from the University of Edinburgh, also said that furin cleavage site “strikes me as unusual”."
>"He added: “I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan.”"
This pair of quotes has a completely different meaning from the original quote it sliced up:
>"I am also agnostic on this – I do not have any experience of laboratory virology and don’t know what is likely or not in that context. From a (natural) evolutionary point of view the only thing here that strikes me as unusual is the furin cleavage site. It strongly suggests to me that we are missing something important in the origin of the virus. My inclination would be that it is a missing host species in which this feature arose because it was selected for in that host. We can see this insertion has resulted in an extremely fit virus in humans – we can also deduce that it is not optimal for transmission in bat species."
>"... [this ellipsis (...) is from the house.gov transcription] The biggest hinderance at the moment (for this and more generally) is the lack of data and information. There have been no genome sequences from Wuhan for cases more recent than the 6 beginning of January and reports, but no information, about virus from non-human animals in Wuhan. If the evolutionary origins of the epidemic were to be discussed, I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan."
To emphasize the very last part: Rambaut is talking about genome sequences from human patients in Wuhan -- not laboratory data from the suspect WIV. But the Telegraph quote implies the opposite.
(Also, obviously I'm not picking any "side" here: dishonesty in the Telegraph doesn't vindicate dishonesty in NIH leadership, and vice-versa).
The article shouldn’t have quote this person in the first place - there are plenty of serious investigations into the lab leak theory from reputable virologists. I recommend Alina Chan’s new book: Viral.
This clarification also masquerades as a clarification of something important. This person quoted by the tabloid is irrelevant here. In fact this article does more damage to the credibility of lab theory than otherwise and your clarification just shows.
Frustrating both the article and your clarification of basically a meaningless source.
There is a vast amount of information regarding lab leak theory and potential origin spanning back 20 years even though China has shut any investigation with gag orders and complete lack of transparency. Too much to unpack.
My concern is this: People will read your clarification of the quote as if it’s something important to clarify. Source itself is garbage.
IDK, seemed like it was pretty important to clarify that a quote was used very deceptively!
Seems important to point out that Chan's co-author is a climate-change sceptic that is a hereditary peer in the British House of Lords after chairing the bank Northern Rock - famous for failing spectacularly in 2007. Very credible!
I am saying that the source of a person who is not a virologist, has never worked in a lab environment and the general credibility of a tabloid (Telegraph.co.uk) does not give a good impression of the lab leak theory. I am trying to steering people away from the article.
And in so doing you advocate that people read a book written by a British Hereditary Lord climate change denier and a Molecular biologist? I don't think there is a misunderstanding.
Facts are facts. The fact is in 2019 there were 39,397 wet markets in China. How many virology labs were there in China handling Corona-viruses? TWO. One of which was TWO BLOCKS from where the wet market from where the original Covid-19 virus which started the pandemic has been traced to.
One might be forgiven for being curious as to the likelihood of the virus emerging from this particular wet market as opposed to all others.
That's not how probability works. You'd need to wait for thousands of years and several pandemics to know if they are more or less likely to emerge next to a virology lab. And then you'd need to control for the fact that virology labs are better at detecting dangerous viruses than average humans. Like how the first confirmed cases in the US were in Davis --- because there's a specialist unit at UC Davis that was already treating cruise ship patients.
That is actually how probability works when you are assessing the probability of uncertain propositions [1]. The prevalence of wet markets vs. virology labs should not be the only input but it is definitely relevant to our assessment of probabilities.
Fair to also entertain the possibility that they were tracking him because of his previous reporting on land reform in remote villages, when he travelled into remote areas again 4 years later. He had to sign a forced confession the first time and if they caught him interviewing disgruntled villagers again, I’m sure they were ready to ratchet up the punishment.
The 2021 Twitter story sounds very similar to the 2017 one: being followed and physically blocked by people.
> As they walked towards her house, a group of men blocked their way, pushed Sudworth and smashed and snatched the crew’s cameras.
> “As soon as we arrived in Yang Linghua’s village it was clear they were expecting us,” Sudworth wrote in his account, referring to the woman the BBC wanted to interview.
Could be the mines, or could be the Chinese government harassing a Western journalist they already had an issue with.
There’s plenty of valid scientific inquiry to be had regarding the theory once you get past the misinformation. But the political showmanship and the attraction of conspiracy theorists doesn’t help.
This is a common problem with conspiracies when they actually happened. You still get "conspiracy theorists" showing up with theories contrary to evidence or fabrications or misrememberings of details.
Which then discredits their own position -- even if the conspiracy actually happened -- because it didn't happen the way they claim it did.
There is a conspiracy theory that this method is used by conspirators to effect a coverup by discrediting skeptics of the official narrative.
Moon landing conspiracy theories are full of discredited nonsense. It is a conspiracy theory to claim that the source of the discredited nonsense is the people who faked the moon landing, because the moon landing wasn't faked so there were no such conspirators to do that.
Distinguishing this from the other thing is the issue. They do it because it works.
I thought you were talking about cases when “conspiracy theorists” are actually right, but their positions get poisoned by attributing some ridiculous stuff to them, and/or by artificial influx of similar “conspiracy theories” that are easy to disprove, so that the original theory is dismissed by association. For example, in Russia they love to flood the information space with bullshit theories a lot to “dilute” the truth and to disorient the public so that you can’t distinguish between truth and conspiracy theories anymore.
There are multiple labs in Wuhan. Wuhan institute of virology is the main on people like to talk about but there was indeed another lab a block or two away from the wet market. I don't know if both were doing virology experiments.
> “They also reported no storage nor laboratory activities on CoVs [coronaviruses] or other bat viruses preceding the outbreak.”
> The lab is classified BSL-2, a safety level at which air ventilation controls aren’t particularly strict, as they are in more secure labs. At that level, lab workers are usually dealing with pathogens that either cause mild disease in humans or which don’t typically spread through small particles that linger in the air. Researchers at that level don’t necessarily wear masks.
> The Wuhan CDC lab tested all of its staff for Covid-19 antibodies, it told the WHO in February. All staff tested negative, except one who tested positive, it said. That person was infected “due to family cluster transmission,” the WHO-led team’s report’s annex says.
> But Dr. Ben Embarek is the first to so explicitly question the team’s conclusion, published in a joint report with Chinese counterparts, that a lab accident was an “extremely unlikely” hypothesis.
> That wording was only reached after a 48 hour period of intense negotiations with Chinese counterparts said Dr. Ben Embarek, who said he would have preferred to designate an accident inside a lab as merely “unlikely.”
> The lab hadn’t published any work with bats since 2013, he said.
> “As far as we understand, they work mostly with parasites, not as much with viruses, so they have worked on parasites from bats.”
Yet, after fighting to label the lab leak theory “unlikely”, he throws a bone to the conspiracy theorists:
> “It’s also possible that someone is trying to hide something,” he added. “Who knows?”
In 2016, some of the scientists including Shi and the EcoHealth director, Peter Daszak, used the NIH funding to conduct experiments in Wuhan on live coronaviruses in a biosafety level 2 lab, according to published details of the work from [0]
They did do coronavirus experiments in level 2 facility.
> Since bat viruses like WIV1 haven’t been confirmed to cause disease in human beings, her biosafety committee recommended BSL-2 for engineering them and testing them and BSL-3 for any animal experiments.
> In response to questions about the decision to do the research in BSL-2 conditions, Peter Daszak forwarded a statement from EcoHealth Alliance stating that the organization “must follow the local laws of the countries in which we work” and that the NIH had determined the research was “not gain-of-function.”
> The genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 does not resemble that of any virus the WIV was known to be culturing in its lab, such as WIV1, and Baric says he still believes a natural spillover is the most likely cause.
This theory is more than a few steps away from being a smoking gun.
The point is, they did work with coronaviruses in level 2 lab, and similar works might or might not have concluded by end 2019. (If not by these particular researchers)
> It’s a Level 2 facility, not studying bats or coronavirus.
It is indeed a level 2 facility, and it was being used to perform the bat coronavirus research outsourced to the WIV [1]:
The NIH decided the risk was worth it. In a potentially fateful decision, it funded work similar to Baric’s at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which soon used its own reverse-genetics technology to make numerous coronavirus chimeras.
Unnoticed by most, however, was a key difference that significantly shifted the risk calculation. The Chinese work was carried out at biosafety level 2 (BSL-2), a much lower tier than Baric’s BSL-3+.
This article talks about WIV (est. 2018), which is across the city from the market, not 2 blocks away and about 2016 research that was also not located near the wet market in 2016. The Level 2 lab only moved near the wet market in 2019, at which point the Level 4 lab was the one conducting the research.
Also from the article:
> The genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 does not resemble that of any virus the WIV was known to be culturing in its lab, such as WIV1, and Baric says he still believes a natural spillover is the most likely cause.
The timelines and genetic profiles don’t match up for a level 2 lab leak 2 blocks from the wet market.
> This article talks about WIV (est. 2018), which is across the city from the market, not 2 blocks away
It moved just before the outbreak [1]:
The lab, where Chinese scientists research mild human diseases with bats, was moved near the seafood market where the first COVID-19 cases were found just days before the outbreak, WHO investigators said.
Classified with a “Biosafety Level of 2,” the lab also has ventilation controls that aren’t as strict as other more secure facilities, according to the report.
I find it surprising how little attention this tidbit got; a move of lab equipment and animals probably involved external personnel not used to bio-safety procedures. Perfect opportunity for a virus to escape.
> The genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 does not resemble that of any virus the WIV was known to be culturing in its lab
The key words here being "was known", since the WIV notoriously took its database offline and even requested the deletion of sequences stored on US servers [2][3].
This line of reasoning forget a very important information: research labs are not built at random. This lab studying coronavirusses was built there precisely because this is a place where new coronavirusses have appeared in the past.
Couldn't find the source I was looking for, which was I believe from a french scientist (likely from the French CIRI that co-founded the Wuhan lab studying coronavirusses). So I will have to softer my above assertion that the lab was build "precisely" in Wuhan because it was a place where coronavirusses have appeared in the past, into the less convincing: this lab was build in China because that's were coronavirusses responsible for SARS have come from.
Still not completely random. And yes labs and wild animal markets tend to met in high population density area, so that's another non-random factor I presume.
This coincidence is indeed troubling, but before jumping to conclusions it's good to remember why there is such consensus against lab leak theory, by (re)reading the original report on the origin of SARS-Cov2 (https://zenodo.org/record/5075888) and the short history of SARS past outbreaks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS#Outbreak_in_South_China - which interestingly lists several past lab leaks).
I don't find any of the competing theory very obvious to be honest.
What is very obvious though, and was made even more obvious to me when I was looking for that source, is the amount of political manipulation around this topic. The epidemic of manipulation of opinion is a greater concern that the epidemic of that virus if you ask me.
Can we refrain from posting articles about science from political newspapers, maybe?
Regarding Alian Chan, she and her co-author appeared on the Hidden Forces podcast a few months back and it's a pretty good listen to anyone unable to squeeze a book into their busy lives.
dishonesty in the Telegraph in this case might be caused by scientific illiteracy, that is to say they might honestly have thought that their selective quotations were a reflecting the message of the longer quote.
Or maybe I'm being too lenient in attributing to incompetence and not malice here.
The University of Edinburgh recently turned down an Freedom of Information request from The Telegraph asking to see Prof Rambaut’s replies, claiming “disclosure would be likely to endanger the physical or mental health and safety of individuals”.
James Comer, the Republican congressman who secured the unredacted emails, said it showed that experts like Dr Fauci had taken the Wuhan lab leak theory “much more seriously” than they had let on.
Sir Jeremy has been approached for comment but had not replied at the time of publication.
Basically journalists and politicians scour thousands of emails to find a selected quote that fit their sensationalist agenda, and then ask the persons involved for a comment. When they then explain how the quote is out of context, doesn't say what journalist thinks it says, or that new information is out. Then they get harrassed and bullied by a (mostly) online mob.
In other papers, perhaps, but the Telegraph famously hired (now PM) Boris Johnson who cut his teeth making up stories about the “evils” of the EU. I’m going to struggle to trust such an outlet.
Is there a way, outside full transparency from China in some "perestroika" type situation which seems highly unlikely, we will ever really know for sure?
It's also possible that the Chinese authorities themselves don't even know exactly what happened. Despite their authoritarian surveillance state they aren't omniscient.
Massive push for gag orders and having to sign in red ink over “severe punishment” for discussing anything related to COVID across the entire science community in China? Every virus related paper must be approved by CCP before publishing it or they’ll face severe consequences.
I have by default zero trust in CCP. So they would need to go out of their way to disprove it. Even then, I would question forgery and fake made up data to show to the world. Ethics goes out of the window when it’s party’s reputation.
As much as I hate it, plausible deniability is a common and effective Standard Operating Procedure for many organizations and governments.
"Two basic rules of government: Never look into anything you don't have to. And never set up an enquiry unless you know in advance what its findings will be."
- Sir Humphrey Appleby
At this point I'm not sure the CCP will fall anytime soon, they managed to implement capitalism even better than many Western European countries (they still lag the US in that respect, but catching fast). CCP will fall only if capitalism as we know it falls.
That article has a correction front and center. The mistake at the time was conflating lab leak theory with engineered weapon theory. Lab leak has never been disproven but the media rightly said it's unlikely despite lots of assertions to the contrary.
The lab leak theory was conflated with 'engineered in a lab' and everyone said no signs of gene editing.
A natural virus sample leaking from a center studying coronavirus was never really addressed. Nor was the concept of Gain of Function studies really addressed. Officially there were no GOF studies underway - but there had been requests for funding of GOF like studies - which were denied.
What concerns me is that researchers tend to piggyback data for new research proposals on existing grants. You all ready have the facilities, lab workers, cells lines, and reagents and other equipment - just run a few experiments to prove out the concept. What is the incremental cost to culture a few more plates of cells, run a few extra sequences?
The narrative that was debunked was the "engineered in a lab" variant. This is what was debunked because this is what was pushed by conspiracy theorists at that time.
This narrative had various claims: that Sars-cov2 contained bits of HIV (by crackpot nobelist Luc Montagnier), that it was released intentionally, that it was actually released several months earlier during the 2019 military games in order to facilitate spread and that it is a tool to cull the population of the globe.
This was debunked and is still debunked.
One problem with conspiracy theorists is that they have an extremely low accuracy requirement in order to consider themselves vindicated. Being on the mark right is unnecessary, even being in the ballpark right is unnecessary. For conspiracy theorists, being in the same galactic sector right is sufficient to consider it a win.
The theory that it is a lab leak, possibly but not necessarily involving gain of function research, and probably by accidentally hitching a ride on one of the researchers has appeared later. It has not been debunked, though it has not been prooven either. It is a plausible possibility.
It is not popular in pro-science circles, because should it be true, the popular reaction is that research should be baned because it is too dangerous which is a stupid stance equivalent to collectively burying your head in the sand.
Certainly could hurt. Saying anything related to China at that moment could sound like conspiracy theory, xenophobia or racism, certainly bringing in question the reputation and professionalism of these scientists.
Now... "Scientists believed..." Considering the realm of professional scientists, beliefs have no value and should be guarded unless sufficient evidence arises. They behaved well by not announcing it.
Their behavior maybe questionable if it has had any negative impact on the awareness of the problem. But that is another matter and not something one should omit if the problem, initially, turned out the be clearly serious. AFAIK, that was not the case.
It’s anti-scientific to not consider a leak from the lab studying coronavirus in a city where a novel one appears.
Where do you think hypothesis come from? Ingenuity based on educated beliefs is a the very core of science. The above stance sounds a lot like the cult of science which has become so pervasive.
They did not behave well. Many scientists put forward the seafood market and then animal vector believes which have equal or less evidence.
If a feature would make the virus very unsuccessful in bats, then how did it propagate? There had to be another cross-over species or something but no one has any data to suggest what that is. China has apparently made it impossible to do the work of piecing that together, so the lab leak hypothesis may never be put to bed. Maybe the party leadership believes a lab leak is likely even if they have no specific knowledge of it.
To add to my original question, is the furin cleavage site further adapted in the Omicron variant, explaining its increased infectiousness? If so, what is the difference between that and the Delta variant?
The Omicron variant is actual prior to Delta variant and prior to all other variants even so named Alpha variant. This article indicates why Omicron could be yet another lab leak.
https://bprice.substack.com/p/lab-leak-20
EcoHealth Alliance, the main US funders of the Wuhan lab have been awfully shy about letting anyone see their data. There's a good chance proof is there and the data can legally forced out of them.
Hmm, that's a nifty site, reminiscent in some ways of Metaculus but with an actual methodology behind it rather than just prediction aggregation. Very nice UI/UX as well. I'm surprised I've never heard of it.
Currently, it seems most helpful in aggregating some of the arguments folks put forth in examining claims, including describing the basic issues and linking some references. Plus it seems to offer some insight into what folks are thinking.
Then from an academic perspective, I really like the sort of approach that they're trying to use. A well-developed implementation of that general approach would seem like it could be awesome.
That said, dunno if I find their current methodology or numbers too convincing, as far as actual conclusions go.
it kind of doesn't matter why it is, it just is (the why might also be unknowable, or too facilely reducible to just-so stories). And it's actually not TOTALLY unusual in coronaviruses, it's unusual in the coronavirus subfamily that COVID-19 comes from.
There is this very hilarious paper where they talk about this, but also rejigger the phylogenetic trees without describing how they pick what to put in and hide from the trees, e.g. they overload "trivially similar" sequences that happen to have furin cleavage sites, and then there are diagrams where they omit entire huge families of coronaviruses that don't contain the furin cleavage site to "lie to you with pictures" that the furin cleavage site is more common than it actually is.
Many coronaviruses including MERS have a furin cleavage site and they're common and likely evolved independently multiple times, showing that this acquisition of an FCS is common:
The FCS in SARS-CoV-2 is NSPRRAR, we now know of sarbecoviruses like like the BANAL viruses in Laos which have NSPAAR, some other viruses like RmYN02 have NSPAAR or NSPVAR. If you insert an R into the BANAL spike protein you get the SARS-CoV-2 FCS.
Finding bat sarbecoviruses which are one insertion away from having the original FCS really blows a gaping hole in this whole idea that the FCS is some kind of smoking gun.
Delta has P681R and Omicron has P681H mutations in the FCS region which may be behind why they're more infectious/transmissible. So the FCS is also still evolving and adapting to humans.
You're answering why furin cleavage sites in general are not unusual. Not why this particular furin cleavage site is unusual from a natural evolutionary view.
It's if you line up the related bat coronaviruses sequences they are all much the same in that region apart from Sars-Cov-2 which seems to have a clean insert of a PRRA sequence.
Hence the "bothered by the furin site and has a hard time (to) explain that as an event outside the lab, though there are possible ways in nature but highly unlikely." in the article. If it had got there through evolution you'd expect the adjacent sequences to vary more.
If RmYN02 picks up the QTQT sequence from recombination with other bat coronaviruses (or RmYN02 is a deletion away from a common progenitor we haven't found yet -- and the QTQT deletion is seen in SARS-CoV-2 variants in humans) then it is one insertion away from PRAAR which would be an active FCS, which is then one substitution away from the PRRAR SARS-CoV-2.
> Given that furin cleavage signals are present in other coronaviruses at exactly that point in the S1/S2 boundary region, it only LOOKS unusual, especially against the backdrop of SARS. The preponderance of evidence, coupled with Ockham’s razor (that the simplest explanation is preferred) dictates that the PRRA sequence has been conserved in nCoV2019 from a long ago ancestor virus. It is not of suspicious origin. The closest bat virus sequence is really not close at all.
Snopes and the science page on reddit are not confidence-inspiring sources, to be honest. We need an authoritative investigation (led by WHO/CDC) into the origins of the virus to be able to make knowledgable statements. Until that happens, there is only hearsay and speculation.
Sad truth is that CDC/WHO are one of the most competent authorities on the matter, and they have experienced experts in the relevant fields. Only when politics comes into play, that the organisations' actions and intentions are called into question. The ideal thing would be to somehow remove international political considerations from the equation and then ask WHO to conduct an investigation.
Of course, the chances of that happening are probably lower than an actually lethal virus leaking from a lab.
It's not a science page on Reddit, the source is a published virologist who himself cites dozens and dozens of sources.
I find it odd that people are commenting about how this doesn't inspire confidence, but "rootclaim" as well as an editorialised headline from the telegraph is.
I am very confident that SARS-CoV-2 has no connection to the Wuhan Institute of Virology or any other laboratory. Not genetic engineering, not intentional evolution, not an accidental release. The most plausible scenario, by a landslide, is that SARS-CoV-2 jumped from a bat (or other species) into a human, in the wild.
A year later and we are yet to see a zoonotic link, but of course it’s the “most plausible scenario”.
The reality is that we will likely never know because it’s not in chinas best interest to allow any real investigation into this.
SARS's zoonotic link was only established in 2017. You can't expect it to be find. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And it's going to be harder for this virus than SARS.
Right now, over a year later, reality is conforming exactly to what you would expect to happen starting from that hypothesis a year ago. So I don't even understand why you're mentioning it, it's not a logical argument.
> Sep 9, 2003 (CIDRAP News) – Chinese scientists found that animals sold at street markets in Guangdong, China, carried a coronavirus nearly identical to the SARS coronavirus, according to a report published recently in Science.
> The animal viruses were found in Himalayan palm civets and raccoon dogs, which were sold for food in the markets, according to the report. The findings indicate a route of transmission between species but do not reveal whether these animals are the virus's natural reservoir or contracted it from another source, according to the report.
Source [1].
The same thing didn't happen for SARS-CoV2. I believe none of the animals in the wet market has been tested positive for SARS-CoV2 or SARS-CoV2-like viruses [2].
Wait what? So we agree that they didn't find the oroginal reservoir, just a similar virus, right? Meaning, that it's not a zootoc link, as you previously asked for. You understand that it isn't possible anymore, because the current SARS-CoV-2 would almost certainly displace them now that it's endemic, correct?
So why do you expect the same thing to happen now that it's very unlikely, knowing that there is no way to know that these viruses actually are the ancestors and may very well have been cousins of SARS, that would have disappeared if SARS was more contagious.
To find an actual virus that is actually an ancestor of SARS, we had to wait until 2017. What you cited wouldn't meet the criteria you yourself set forth, and for this virus it would be impossible to find on the same timeframe. So I really don't get neither how this validates your point that we would expect to find the zoonitc link in a year, nor even how it would fit into an argument that it's unexpected we didn't find this.
I think you've misunderstood the difference between the proximal and reservoir hosts, because your comment is almost entirely wrong. As noted in the article linked above, scientists researching the original SARS found the exact (within the few mutations expected on any short transmission chain) virus that infected humans in palm civets and raccoon dogs, within about a year. These are the proximal hosts, i.e. the hosts believed to have infected humans. Once a proximal non-human animal host is found, we can be very confident that the virus is zoonotic.
Much later, Dr. Shi discovered that the greatest diversity of similar viruses was in bats. The bat viruses are less closely related to human SARS than the palm civet or raccoon dog viruses; but there's a lot of them, and they look ancestral. We therefore believe that the virus mostly evolved in bats, then was transmitted to the palm civets and raccoon dogs, evolved a little bit more there, and finally was transmitted to humans. This was very important in understand the evolutionary history of the virus, but provided no new information on how humans were first infected.
Knowing one of the classes of host doesn't imply knowing the other:
1. For the original SARS, we found the proximal host within about a year. Much later, Dr. Shi found the reservoir host.
2. For SARS-CoV-2, we knew the reservoir host immediately, because it's closely related to the original SARS. After two years of searching, we still haven't found the proximal host.
If one exists, the proximal animal host of SARS-CoV-2 is probably in China. Since China has seen low human spread (probably more than their official statistics, but clearly far less than the rest of the world), I don't see why you'd expect a human variant to displace the original zoonotic variant. There's also no particular evolutionary pressure for that--a variant evolved in humans might happen to be more transmissible in the proximal host animal, but that's not what's getting selected for when the virus is transmitted between humans.
That a person cited sources should not be seen as a sign of the quality of the work. Nor should be the amount of citations the person makes. In some cases the lack of citations can be used to suggest a piece of writing should not be taken seriously. But never the other way around.
It's extremely common for people to reach a conclusion, and only then to go looking for research. And, then, to be looking only for research which backs up their claims. Since there is often extensive research backing up both sides of issues, and also because these people rarely actually examine closely the articles they are citing (upon inspection the articles are often speaking about something different, saying the exact opposite thing, etc.), the citations have nearly zero positive value.
That doesn't change that I was correcting an incorrect statement. Someone said the source was Reddit, it isn't, it has multiple sources, none of which are Reddit.
As far as I'm concerned this is a complete non-sequitur.
The source is undeniably Reddit, in a sense (in the sense that it is opposed to a peer-reviewed journal).
Regardless, I directly addressed a portion of your comment. I believe the portion was meant to borrow some of the creditability of serious journals and give it to Reddit - which is, perhaps, a bad idea, for the reasons I laid out. To label my comment a non-sequitur is ridiculous.
In no sense is the source Reddit, anymore than the source of a New York Times article is paper, or the source of my word is your screen.
Citing sources is meant to borrow the credibility of the source for elements of your argument. Not to attribute that credibility to the sheet of paper your pen is inking.
I suspect you've locked onto the specific denotation of "source" as being an individual article. That is not the only denotation of the word. It can also refer to, as examples, persons or journals.
I absolutely haven't. A source can be an article itself (as in the content), or it can be an organisation (a joirnal, a newspaper), or it can be a person. I'm saying that the source isn't the medium over which the content itself is delivered. So for example, the New York Time is a source, so is any given article and it's associated author. However, the blank paper on which it was printed isn't a source, neither is the ink it was printed on, and correspondingly a website which merely relays words is not a source, but a medium.
Several top virologists have publicly tarred lab leak as racist conspiracy theory, while privately discussed that not only it is a possibility, some of them believed it's highly probable. Here's a very recent email that has been released yesterday [1]. So forgive me for not taking another virologist's take on why lab leak is improbable on redit seriously.
So now a single passage out of context that accounts for 4 out of 1000 differing nucleotides is proof positive that the author's mind was absolutely settled that it was a lab leak? Give me a break.
There is actually only one of these people that pronounced themselves about the implausibility of it being a lab leak. The only email attributed to him don't say that he thinks it was "highly probable", just that he didn't find at the time an explanation for those 14 nucleotides.
Do you have something about Mike Farzan saying, in public, that it was very unlikely that the lab leak theory was true? Or is it then incorrect to say that individual virologists were saying privately one thing and publicly another?
That PhD virologist comes off as not credible at all, as part of their response is to deny the entire possibility of lab leaks in general. Their argument is that industrial accidents are simply caused by incompetence or lack of funding, and WIV is well-funded and run by competent people: therefore, bad things simply cannot happen. Their attitude is fundamentally unserious.
>"I say this as someone who has been to these conferences, who knows many scientists who work on dangerous viruses, and work in facilities like the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We virologists know this group, we know about the WIV, and the WIV facilities do not frighten us. We do not view WIV as “unsound” or “risky” or “dangerous” or “incompetent” (76)."
>"We’re not worried about BSL4 labs that are well-equipped, well-funded, etc. (like the WIV is)."
>[...] "We biosecurity people are also very concerned about new BSL4 labs being built in developing countries in South America and Africa (99). But, you know what’s interesting? The WIV and its researchers are part of these committees that get together and discuss what to do about these challenges. They are part of the people who are helping to decide what is “safe enough” for a BSL4 lab! We here in the US agree with the WIV about what “safe” means (76). And the biggest reason for that is that we here in the United States helped train WIV researchers. We are the ones who taught them how to work with these dangerous viruses (76,100,101)."
(There are no buffer overflows in this C code: I'm very competent and experienced and how dare you).
It doesn't seem at all line they're claiming that lab escapes never happen. Just that this particular lab is known for being extremely safe, and that it's therefore unlikely it would have had a leak.
For a leak of such a virus to happen from a BSL4 facility that routinely handles much more contagious viruses, you would need incompetence or funding issues, yes.
> Just that this particular lab is known for being extremely safe, and that it's therefore unlikely it would have had a leak.
This is nothing but disinformation.
> Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats.
> Instead, there is Chinese evidence that the lab had safety problems. VOA has located state media reports showing that there were security incidents flagged by national inspections as well as reported accidents that occurred when workers were trying to catch bats for study.
That's interesting, because when you ignore the spin on both texts, you find out there is no contradictory information at all. Yet you could that it's nothing but disinformation. You should also note that the article is in the Opinion section, and doesn't actually publish the cables.
The cables the is factually claiming is that US officials learnt that the research going on at the lab indicated that there is a high risk of a coronavirus causing a pandemic, that there is a risk of zoonosis, and that there are risks associated with this research. There are no specific claims of bad practices or mismanagement, and it is entirely likely that the author is using those words to refer to the decision to do this kind of research as well as GoF research when he talks about unsafe practices and mismanagement, as they are the only material issues with safety and management he mentioned.
Beyond that, I don't see any evidence the lab was operating unsafely. If the virus really was in those populations, you'd need two unlikely things to happen, since we all agree the virus wasn't engineered.
First, the Chinese government needs to have made the conscious decision not to release proof that the virus was natural. Indeed, if it was being studied alive, the WIV would absolutely have identified it and a precursor. They could have offered one or both of these, or returned to where they found it, and pinpoint an origin, absolving themselves of all these arguments.
Then, the virus, which would belogically present in bat populations in those populated areas, would have had to escape a BSL4 lab, but not have escaped into society beforethen? What's the likelihood that it could have, while weakly infectious and poorly adapted to humans, managed to go through the protections of a BSL4 lab, but not managed to make it out of those animals?
I don't have the time to go through lawyer-speak arguments. The cables from officials regarding WIV safety have been verified. Just because it's on the opinion page doesn't mean it's false. It has way more credibility than some random virologist's claim about WIV safety on Reddit. Period.
Just few points:
* There's no agreement that this virus hasn't been engineered. Ralph Baric has said that just looking at the DNA it's not possible to distinguish whether a virus has been engineered or not. Alina Chan had raised this point and Vox has even made a correction on their article [1]:
> A previous version of this story stated that SARS-CoV-2 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies … assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty. (h/t to Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for her critique and input)
Please don't spread misinformation.
* A bio safety expert has weighed in and also expressed his concern about possible lab leak of SARS-CoV-2 [2].
* Viruses escape labs on regular basis [3]. Someone else on this thread also posted a link of a recent virus escape from a Taiwan lab.
* This is not the first time a lab leak happened and virologists tried to cover up. It happened during Soviet era in the 70s [4]. The truth came out after the fall of Soviet Union.
> The cables from officials regarding WIV safety have been verified. Just because it's on the opinion page doesn't mean it's false. It has way more credibility than some random virologist's claim about WIV safety on Reddit. Period.
The cables were written by an entrepreneur and a manager, and the opinion section isn't willing to publish them. That's not lawyer speak, that's the lengths you have to go to in order to interpret a shady opinion piece that goes to lengths not to provide the actually interesting information.
> There's no agreement that this virus hasn't been engineered. Ralph Baric has said that just looking at the DNA it's not possible to distinguish whether a virus has been engineered or not. Alina Chan had raised this point and Vox has even made a correction on their article [1]:
> A previous version of this story stated that SARS-CoV-2 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies … assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty. (h/t to Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for her critique and input)
You can't prove a negative. That's all the substance in what I've quoted.
> Please don't spread misinformation.
Where have a I tried to prove a negative?
> Viruses escape labs on regular basis [3]. Someone else on this thread also posted a link of a recent virus escape from a Taiwan lab.
You should read my reply - from that article, the infected scientist was at the time not wearing his PPE. The infection was due to his incompetence, and wouldn't have happened if he was actually following BSL4 regulations. It seems his colleagues saw this and thought it was fine.
> This is not the first time a lab leak happened and virologists tried to cover up. It happened during Soviet era in the 70s [4]. The truth came out after the fall of Soviet Union.
Don't try to beg the question, please.
> A bio safety expert has weighed in and also expressed his concern about possible lab leak of SARS-CoV-2 [2].
Now we're finally getting somewhere. I assume who you're referring to as a biosafety expert is James W. LeDuc. All he's saying is that it's a possibility and that it needs to be investigated - so I don't see the disagreement. This was in April 2020, before a lot of the evidence we are relying on came out. Beyond this, his interlocutors points seem not be factually accurate, or at leasy hasty conclusions that later did didn't bear out.
> You should read my reply - from that article, the infected scientist was at the time not wearing his PPE. The infection was due to his incompetence, and wouldn't have happened if he was actually following BSL4 regulations. It seems his colleagues saw this and thought it was fine.
that's.. worse though, right? that's an incident in a BSL-4 where an incautious scientist disregarded regulations, without his colleagues calling him on it, and leading to the release of SARS. that's the reality - regulations are always broken, colleagues are always complacent. why would WIV or any other BSL-4 be any better?
> In this study, an international survey based on volunteering was conducted in biosafety level 3 and 4 laboratories to determine the number of laboratory-acquired infections and the possible underlying causes of these contaminations.
> The analysis of the survey reveals that laboratory-acquired infections have been infrequent and even rare in recent years, and human errors represent a very high percentage of the cases.
> Today, most risks from biological hazards can be reduced through the use of appropriate procedures and techniques, containment devices and facilities, and the training of personnel.
> Just because it's on the opinion page doesn't mean it's false.
No, but if it’s a red flag that the author has an agenda, or wants to jump to a conclusion without gathering enough evidence required for the news section.
> It has way more credibility than some random virologist's claim about WIV safety on Reddit. Period.
Reddit is the medium of distribution, as it was intended as kind of a springboard to an AMA. Could have been posted on Medium, Substack, etc. For what it’s worth, he is a published virologist: https://scholar.google.com.co/citations?user=8wCwbNUAAAAJ&hl...
I’m not saying he has the right take (I don’t know enough about virology to evaluate his content), just that it was a widely circulated, comprehensive and researched piece of content about the lab leak theory, as were the other two articles.
In a sea of half-thought out opinions and conspiracy theories these 3 articles actually spent incredible amounts of time and published evidence (on both sides of the theory) that can be analyzed and debated in depth.
Beyond that, the original SARS escaped at least once from a BSL-4 lab in Taiwan:
> The scientist had been working on a SARS study in Taiwan's only biosafety level 4 lab since June, the Taiwan statement said. [...] A chest x-ray showed pneumonia in his right lung, and polymerase chain reaction tests of throat and blood samples were positive for the SARS virus.
The idea that "BSL-4" implies "negligible risk of accident" seems to be empirically false. In any case, the WIV was creating chimeras of novel coronaviruses with much looser precautions, at BSL-2:
> The Chinese work was carried out at biosafety level 2 (BSL-2), a much lower tier than Baric’s BSL-3+.
>
tripletao 2 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | on: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, b...
Beyond that, the original SARS escaped at least once from a BSL-4 lab in Taiwan:
> The scientist had been working on a SARS study in Taiwan's only biosafety level 4 lab since June, the Taiwan statement said. [...] A chest x-ray showed pneumonia in his right lung, and polymerase chain reaction tests of throat and blood samples were positive for the SARS virus.
Many viruses have come to infect people in BSL4 labs, when they happen to be run incompetently.
From the exact same article you cite :
> The AP report quoted Dr. Shigeru Omi, the WHO's Western Pacific regional director, as saying the patient most likely was infected by some spilled liquid he saw on the surface of a test tube. Omi said the man was working without protective gear, such as a gown and gloves, at the time, according to the report.
Which, again, does nothing to oppose the thesis in the original post, which is that these viruses won't escape a BSL4 lab that's actually operating competently at the BSL4 level.
> The idea that "BSL-4" implies "negligible risk of accident" seems to be empirically false. In any case, the WIV was creating chimeras of novel coronaviruses with much looser precautions, at BSL-2:
That was also explicitely addressed. In 2013, the WIV was not a BSL4 lab.
A BSL-4 lab operated by researchers who never made mistakes would probably be quite safe. Unfortunately, they're instead operated by flawed humans. If you look at the safety culture of nuclear engineering, aviation, or other fundamentally dangerous activities that we nonetheless manage to practice safely, then you'll see practitioners who recognize that. They don't dismiss accidents or near-accidents as human error, even if a human failed to follow a procedure, and instead look for better ways to build systems tolerant of the human errors that inevitably occur. The attitude I've seen from many virologists--or at least, from the virologists with the perhaps-questionable judgment required to become the public face of these arguments--is disturbingly different.
And yeah, the WIV was working with novel bat-origin coronaviruses at BSL-2, not 4. That makes the risk of an accident yet higher, which makes our reddit virologist's argument that "BSL-4 labs like the WIV are really safe" not just bad but also dishonest. So I'm not sure what you think is addressed?
ETA: And I see that the reddit post talks about the WIV doing work at BSL-3 before they opened their BSL-4 lab. This claim is unreferenced, and as far as I can tell it's false; Dr. Shi confirms that they were working at BSL-2:
> In an email, Zhengli Shi said she followed Chinese rules that are similar to those in the US. Safety requirements are based on what virus you are studying. Since bat viruses like WIV1 haven’t been confirmed to cause disease in human beings, her biosafety committee recommended BSL-2 for engineering them and testing them and BSL-3 for any animal experiments.
The reddit post could easily be read to imply that after the BSL-4 lab opened, all work moved to the higher BSL; but it never actually says that, and I'm not aware of any evidence (or even any claim from the WIV) that it did. There's a strong incentive to work at lower BSL even when a higher-level facility is available, since the extra precautions significantly slow work. I therefore believe it's likely that work was continuing at BSL-2 in 2019.
First of all, if a transmission can happen at a wet market, it can also happen inside a lab. One doesn't need a virology degree to understand something this simple. As a matter of fact that's exactly what happened in a Taiwan lab [1].
> “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular”.
You know what else causes unnecessary harm to science, public trust and health policy? Repeated and condescending lies and gas-lighting from those in charge.
so also does the firehose of conspiracy theory's, misinformation and lunatic fringe that appears to be the overtly noisy minority on all forms of media these days.
Deliberate misinformation directly from your government meant to control the reaction of the masses is orders of magnitude more dangerous than your right-wing uncle meme-ing on Facebook.
Its harder for Gov to keep a secret than it is for a facebook group to maintain a lie.
much much harder.
And there are various degrees of accountability to every level of a Gov. Not as much as I'd like and not as reliable as i'd like it to be, but its there.
there is zero, zilch, no accountability for facebook liars.
I'm going to jump in here, because I wanted to make a point about conspiracy theorists, too.
What pisses me off most about this is that now it's so much easier for a conspiracy theorist to believe in government cover-ups of big, important things. One of my family members is way into all this stuff, and next time I tell him cancer isn't cured because how would all the experts across the globe all simultaneously keep that a secret--he's gonna point at this.
People can be stupid and believe really crazy ideas, but let's not have governments and experts lying to the people they represent.
The problem is that the lab leak was dismissed as a conspiracy theory as are many of the things that have now come to pass, e.g.: ineffective vaccines, side effects.
Pair that with the disinformation coming from once trusted institutions, e.g.: 5 vs 10 day quarantine, sending health care workers to work while still positive.
It's no wonder people are giving more credence to these fringe groups. The government has nobody to blame but itself for such poor messaging.
But don't you see the conflicting positions here...
on one hand The Gov and bureaucracies in general have ham-fisted the response. This surprises no one really. we all know that Governments can be awful at these sorts of things.
yet somehow they have masterminded the development and release of a contagious bio weapon and done it in damn near perfected secrecy?
How can someone hold both those statements with equal weight in their minds at the same time.
The "Government" is not one monolithic being. They are composed of various people/orgs with varying capabilities. Some are incompetent and some are competent at the work they do.
thats exactly why its so ridiculously hard to keep a secret. its made up of thousands of people, all with their own personalities, objectives, desires, beliefs and competencies.
Ok, but can you please not post unsubstantive comments or flamebait to HN? Your comment here is low-information/high-indignation. We're looking for the other way around.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
A genocidal totalitarian regime that harvests organs from non-violent political prisoners may be responsible for the worst accident in human history and the people we count on for the unbiased truth are covering it up.
I wonder what they'd do for more funding.
Being called anti-science is starting to look like a compliment.
And their's more:
>Chan said there had been trepidation among some scientists about publicly discussing the lab leak hypothesis for fear that their words could be misconstrued or used to support racist rhetoric about how the coronavirus emerged.
Ironic because Chan has been a media crusade about it. Every news org seems willing to give her air time even though she's turned up zilch. Now chiming that the media is suppressing is the cry of someone who has staked their career on an argument they can't win it's merits. If she (or anyone) had some viable proof then it would be guaranteed to be splashed on every front page.
So much data drops and narrative shifts taking place re:covid data. Allegedly those [1] project defuse documents submitted to darpa we're legit. How they gonna wiggle out of that if so? Brace for house of cards collapse.
I looked up Major Murphy using Marine Online's Locator: he shows up, with his place of work as the Office of Naval Research. My initial skim of the docs didn't raise any immediate red flags to me (things like poor adherence to Naval Correspondence standards for documents). Seems legit. Just my $0.02...
>>>Have you read the actual documents? Most of it is Murphy’s unsubstantiated opinion.
His letter to the Inspector General lists reference documents. Even a cursory search via DDG yields some of them, which were covered on HN when they were released back in September ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28965770 ).
"The team discusses risk mitigation strategies to address potential risks of the research to public health and animal safety but does not mention or assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research and DURC. Given the team's approach does potentially involve GoF/DURC research (they aim to synthesize spike glycoproteins that may bind to human cell receptors and insert them into SARSsr-CoV backbones to assess capacity to cause SARS-like disease), if selected for funding an appropriate DURC risk mitigation plan should be incorporated into contracting language that includes a responsible communications plan."
Major Murphy's letter also states: "When synthesized with the EcoHealth Alliance proposal, US collections confirm EcoHealth Alliance was performing the work proposed. The analysts produce their reports in a vacuum, absent the context the proposal provides. As a fellow at DARPA, I could see both, and can do the synthesis."
Do you have access to the intelligence agency collections plans, and/or their analyst outputs? What information do you have that contradicts his statement that his conclusions are corroborated by Top Secret intel analysis?
And we have research now that hypothesizes that Omicron incubated in mice and then jumped back to humans.
If that hypothesis is true, then we have a fine example of something running in the background in a reservoir and then Hey, Presto! suddenly appearing to be mutated specifically for humans.
If that's true, then all manner of "weird" things suddenly become both plausible and probable without any human intervention at all.
As for "lab leak"--at this point all we can do is shrug. China will NEVER allow that to be investigated if there is even the slightest possibility of being true. Period. Full stop.
Barring a whistleblower with hard evidence, we'll never know.
"If you find that [a government] has lost, destroyed, or failed to preserve any evidence whose contents or quality are material to the issues in this case, then you may draw an inference unfavorable to the [government]." West Virg. Jury Inst. 5.03
Okay. China created it. Now what? I have yet to see anyone explain what they would do with the result that is somehow beneficial.
Does knowing this help fight it? Does it help stop it? Does it help treat it? Does it help stop the spread?
Let's say China even INTENTIONALLY did it. Then what? You gonna invade China? Exactly how are you gonna make someone like Apple pull out of China when they should already be doing that NOW for other reasons?
I regard the "lab leak hypothesis" like I regard news about celebrities--worthless and unactionable.
It's simply a "boogeyman" to focus hate to create the "in group" and the "out group" for propaganda purposes.
Assuming the best, the parent asked a bunch of questions (in an admittedly dismissive and argumentative way) to try and invite some kind of response that explains what China gets out of it, and what the world does next if we could somehow prove China created the original virus.
So … let’s assume China created it. Now what?
What’s the next step and response if it was an accident?
What’s the next step and response if it was intentional?
Edit: I’m asking because I’m genuinely curious about what the next step would be. I mean, it’d satisfy my curiosity and interest in knowing the cause and origin. But then I want to figure out what the world response should be.
If you honestly dispute that there are options in foreign affairs between "do absolutely nothing" and "full scale military invasion," then our worldviews are so far apart that I don't think fighting about it on the Internet will be a good use of time for either of us.
You seem to be grossly misinterpreting my comment. I’ve said nothing at all to suggest there are no options in foreign affairs between "do absolutely nothing" and "full scale military invasion”. Where are you even getting that message?
I asked what you thought those options are since you seem to have some opinions. Or at least a few of them. Specifically.
I don’t see how I said anything that indicates I’m trying to fight on the internet about our worldviews.
There are all kinds of forms of cooperation between countries: economic, political, financial, scientific, legal, regulatory, transportation, trade, military, etc.
One option instead of full scale invasion is to cut back or attach strings to some of those forms of cooperation.
This happens all the time.
In this specific scenario, it might look like: Spend $100M upgrading Wuhan lab security and we won’t indefinitely ban travel from Wuhan Province to the US.
Or, more aggressively: Shut down the Wuhan lab or we will release tons of hacked data about corruption in the government.
Not saying that these are smart options, but you get the idea of the spectrum of options between total absolution and total aggression.
> There are all kinds of forms of cooperation between countries: economic, political, financial, scientific, legal, regulatory, transportation, trade, military, etc.
Oh, for sure. Those are certainly the broad categories of foreign policy and cooperative (and coercive) action.
I appreciate the specific ideas. I really am just curious what others’ ideas are on specific actions that could be taken if there was suddenly definitive proof tomorrow of origins.
The world is so incredible dependent on China for just about everything from the simplest tools to cars, computers and medical equipment. My guess is that it would change nothing, we would still be letting them produce everything for us because it is so much cheaper, and keep letting them grow their economy at record speeds.
Back in the day, that inconvenient time we used to refer to as “history”, there were people called “robber barons”, massive child labor, unsafe working environments &etc.
If (the collective) we just shrugged it off because we didn’t want to offend anyone do you think things would be any different today?
Few people are really answering the question, and I can only assume because everyone knows that the answer is "nothing". Western thought doesn't really work well when it's dealing with a non-Western entity that can defend itself. So while people are up in arms about the lab-leak hypothesis, they can't think past just being upset at China. We can't press China militarily without the Western way of life being threatened, we can't threaten them economically without the Western way of life being threatened and we can't blackmail them because the first two methods are nonstarters.
Stop trusting sources or information coming out of china, if western sources contradict it. Thats the next step. Update your informational priors, to disregard them. And then also convince other people to disregard them, and make fun of people you know, who uses those sources, if there are contradictory western sources.
Except that it’s not inactionable. If it happened once (accidentally, I’m presuming), it can happen again. It’s not like the Wuhan lab is the only source of such research. So it’s entirely legitimate to question the value of such research, especially if a leak could result in a global pandemic.
Well, politically speaking, sanctions would certainly be possible - if not for the virus they (hypothetically) created, then for what would in retrospect look like (in this hypothetical) a clear attempt at a cover-up.
That said: it doesn’t even need to go that far - whether the response should be punitive, it doesn’t need to be. The scientific communities in China and the west are collaborative and could negotiate agreements not to do GoF research. US groups were funneling money into China to do GoF research on coronaviruses, which could be stopped.
> what the West is supposed to do to China should the lab-leak hypothesis be true.
The west, or society, should use this as evidence of basically not trusting information from the government of china, if it is contradicted by more neutral or western sources, in the future.
So, for example, if someone is talking to you personally, and they try to use evidence from that government, and you have other evidence from western sources that contradicts it, you should just laugh in their face. Call them a mean name and ridicule them.
What do you mean it is non-actionable? If it was a lab leak we can determine what conditions lead to the leak and adopt better safety measures.
The lab leak was most likely a protocol error and without a collective awareness of the cause, the population cannot push our elected leaders to demand better safety protocols.
Who is "we"? And if it's a weapons lab, what makes you think China is going to allow geopolitical adversaries to poke around to make a more secure and safer environment? This idea works with countries that can't defend themselves against the West such as Iraq, but it's always backed by an invasion. No such option exists in the case of China, so their sovereignty will remain unsullied.
The people of the USA. Apparently, the lab in Wuhan was performing gain of function research with funding from NIH. Now what is up for debate is if that specific research was what led to Covid-19.
It's actually even worse. It's like, "we don't care how the oil spill started, or even if there are oil spills, or even if 'oil' and 'spill' actually have any business being used together, because what use could pointing a finger have?"
> Ban gain of function research because it killed 20 million people?
And how do you plan on enforcing this on China? Or on Russia?
I'm still waiting for all the armchair geniuses to explain this one to me.
You can be ready for when some idiot does this research or not. Those are your options unless you've got some magic way to go to war with nuclear powers that I am unaware of.
All banning gain of function research does is leave you unprepared when it happens.
Unless you've got a way to enforce this on China, this is unactionable. It's simply propaganda to rile people up.
1) If it was an accident, what are you going to do? If there is anyone sane in the leadership of the lab with knowledge of how this occurred, procedures have already changed. What more do you want them to do? You're NOT going to get a gain-of-function ban without some form of strong coercion. What will it be?
2) If it was intentional (and I see no gain for China if it were), what do you plan to do? You will have to somehow do something to cause actual harm to Chinese leadership. What? China is already guilty of genocide, and all the West does is shrug.
Hell, it would almost be better if this were an intentional release if not for all the dead. The emergence of Omicron would demonstrate to the idiots worldwide who thought they could control a virus that the idea is laughable and that the virus will quickly evade whatever you think are your protection measures.
And all this ASSUMES that it actually was a lab leak, which the current hypothesis about jumping from mice back to humans decreases the Bayesian prior on dramatically. If Covid can jump that quickly from humans to mice and back, gain of function is suddenly frighteningly common. And the research into gain of function, rather than being banned, needs to be ramped up hard.
What a sadly modern philosophy... Sure, why should we learn anything from the past? Let's just adjust the past to be whatever's most convenient for today. If it's not convenient at this immediate moment right now, let's just ignore it ever happened. Those millions of people who died unnecessarily? "Boogeyman" "propaganda" for the "out group"?
I do think it would be actionable as sibling comments point out, but I would find this knowledge interesting by itself (intellectual curiosity, I think we are at the right place for this).
> focus hate
That wouldn't be me.
I would feel bad for the people who caused the leak (edit to be clear: if this is what happened, not assuming anything here). To be at the origin of such a pandemic spanning multiple years with all the repercussions must be uncomfortable.
I think you're likely to be underestimating how psychopathic / purely driven by their research to the exclusion of all other factors these people are likely to be. You're probably assuming they have a normal / social / reasonable level of empathy, which is an assumption you're extending them, not necessarily one they deserve.
I don't know and I don't assume anything. I was only talking about my own curiosity on the origins of the covid. Though I haven't seriously looked into any particular thing about this recently, including today.
That may work for domestic public opinion, but getting any international sanctions to stick on China would require a lot more than circumstantial "they won't let us investigate" evidence. International "law" (if such a thing truly exists in practice) is wonky, and rarely based on nuanced views or established facts.
Even domestically, that above quote only applies in specific cases - civil cases, or criminal cases where it can be proven evidence was actually destroyed. I'm not personally aware of clear evidence of bad-faith destruction of evidence right now on China's part. China's refusal to allow a third-party investigation would then be more similar to pleading the 5th, something even US courts are prevented from punishing.
There is another hypothesis that an immunocompromised patient who took some type of drug that induces DNA mutations in the coronavirus, similar to what Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics offers. If COVID-19 stayed in the patient's body for a long time, it would have time to cause many mutations before transmission.
Here's an excellent video covering the data on the mice/omicron hypothesis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH1u1GIPU2A It's by Dr. John Campbell who I just discovered and his coverage of the pandemic is by far the most informative and evidence-based that I've found so far.
> If that hypothesis is true, then we have a fine example of something running in the background in a reservoir and then Hey, Presto! suddenly appearing to be mutated specifically for humans.
Isn't this the case with all zoonotic viruses? The reservoir is all the other species? HIV was also found in monkeys. We are all affected by the reservoir because we are also part of the reservoir.
Whistleblower exist. The question is which country got the balls to prosecute. USA Biden? France Macron? Justice can only be served or enforced if there is a court operates it. When the most powerful nation own chief justices cowered to Antifa and BLM back then to even take on the fraud cases, anyone dare to take down dragon of the east. How many leaders scared of critisizing Kim or the Talebans? It is not whether China allow investigate it is no one brave enough to do a Covid Nuremberg...not even US military.
The connectedness of the earth's inhabitants including microscopic beings is in full effect and spotlighted by Covid. Regardless of where the Covid strain originated, we can't deny how closely linked every being on earth is. I ruminate on this known and cliche fact, but I struggle to pin point why. I know we are all connected and its obvious we share one planet. I know we all share distant relatives and descended from simpler earth-life eons ago. But living through the connectedness of Covid is both frightening and enlightening.
What really raises the most suspicion of the lab leak theory in my mind was how the Chinese government acted towards the rest of the scientific community...well before it was a theory at all. Not allowing foreign scientists in, destroying evidence, arresting journalists, etc. That just screams cover-up, even if there was none (in terms of a lab leak.)
Then Western scientists that rely on grants with Chinese ties, etc trying to cover the asses publicly, while privately saying it's possible...really doesn't inspire a lot of public confidence imo. There is a pretty big monetary incentive from the very people that we'd want to figure this out to say it didn't happen, even if it did.
It does feel like there hasn't been a proper airing of exactly what gain of function research has been going on (whether or not it led to this particular virus) and how governments have supported it. I suspect it's because, despite being a "hindsight is 2020" moment, a lot of people would be angry, and at a lot of public policy scientists involved in the response.
Plenty of people had the hindsight in 2020 that the lab leak theory was not only plausible but likely; it’s disingenuous to call this “hindsight is 20/20”.
I meant that gain for function research looks like a really bad idea right now, even if that wasn't the origin of covid, and some of the public policy experts making recommendations right now were people who had no problems with game of function research 3 years ago.
I don't expect it to be suspicious or odd _in China_. What I am saying is that internationally we should not just shrug it off as "aww, it just China, they're always so sneaky and secretive even when it's nothing!" We should treat the situation as if they are indeed hiding something important every time, because otherwise, constantly acting suspiciously about everything is an effective strategy for them conceal anything important.
Barring foreign scientists, arresting journalists, and destroying evidence is always suspicious, even if they always do it, and it should always make people from open and free societies curious of why they are doing it, not shrug it off because it's the norm.
It is being used as proof that they leaked it from a lab, when it is just how societies built like China behave. You can't infer anything from normal behavior.
It is similar to the way that Hussein's actions in blocking access to presidential palaces was considered to be highly suspicious and therefore proof that he was hiding his weapons program. Turns out he was just trying to save face domestically by standing up against the weapons inspectors over something that he considered symbolic and immaterial in order to not look like a total pushover (a desperate need of dictators). It had nothing to do with weapons programs at all.
Yeah, holding strong to the logic that's like a mom concluding of her kindergartner "You're being evasive, this means definitely that you're hiding something" is ridiculous.
If the outbreak started in Colorado, and Russia wanted access to the CDC lab there, Americans (officials and public) would also be crying and screaming...
Said hypothetical should include the disease originating around the lab, numerous conspicuous coverups and missing people, and a lack of transparent investigation. Should such a scenario happen, I think your argument becomes a bit of a strawman (i.e. that a segment of every nation's population would always cry foul in said scenario). I would expect more than just Russia would want access, and likewise that plenty of US citizens would protest as well.
Why is it a strawman? If malfeasance is occurring, they will not want Russia looking at their lab, if malfeasance is not occurring, they still do not want Russia looking at their lab. I'm just pointing out the obvious, ((!A -> B) and (A -> B)) -> B.
It’s also worth noting that you’re talking about the US allowing the country with whom they have the most adversarial relationship investigate their labs. In reality, we’re taking about international bodies doing the investigation. The fact that China has isolated themselves so badly that the best analogy for “anyone investigates China” is “Russia investigates the US” says plenty.
Firstly, we’re not talking about America right now. Even so, the US has its faults, but is vastly more transparent than the CCP. I would be shocked if the US arrested scientists and journalists to conceal the origins of a viral outbreak.
God damn debating with you people is useless sometimes.
My second paragraph is meant to show a possible other explanation why the Chinese didn't want foreigners snooping around their bio labs: in my belief the same evasiveness the Chinese has/had would apply to the USA if China wanted to visit and have unlimited access (for a thorough investigation) of American bio labs.
And I'm not talking about whether American journalists would be arrested. I'm just talking about the evasiveness about the labs.
> I would be shocked if the US arrested scientists and journalists to conceal the origins of a viral outbreak.
The US are actively prosecuting a journalist on phony charges because he helped expose their war crimes, among other things. The UK is of course actively complicit, which contributed in making his life a living hell.
Given that precedent, I wouldn't be shocked at all.
And you'll read an endless trove of comments posted on this site, including from myself, in support of Assange and his work, and condemnation of what the US is doing to him.
We shouldn't even be on this tangent, because the parent comment was nothing but "what about America!" and now we're veering into even more tangential territory with "well what about America with regards to some other topic!?" This isn't a Chuck Norris movie with a good guy and a bad guy.
My point was, I didn't see much difference to what the US has done to Wikileaks, and the hypothetical arrest by the US of journalists & scientists over leaking the top secret origins of an outbreak.
Now that I think of it I was likely incorrect. There's one big difference: I expect the US would first make sure they wouldn't look too bad doing it. That's almost certainly why some Swedish prosecutor happened to blow Assange's sexual affairs utterly out of proportion: kill the name before the guy.
So should we just pretend to think that it's suspicious even though it doesn't seem suspicious, or do we really need to soak our minds in the void until we actually believe that it is? How many IQ points do I need to lose before I am no longer normalizing totalitarianism?
Some of the details are unusual though especially the Wuhan Institute of Virology taking down it's previously public pathogen sequence database before the thing kicked off.
They took it down in mid September of 2019, a previously public database. They still refuse to share the data with anyone, which is weird since the database was public to begin with.
It is really weird how HN talks about this in comparison to similar topics. For example, this is the exact same logic that leads people to believe that encrypting data or using Tor is evidence of someone trying to hide criminal behavior. Almost everyone here would object to that type of thinking, but when it comes to China it suddenly becomes "Why would they object to transparency unless they had something to hide?".
Yes. Countries and people are two different thing and the expected and acceptable behaviours are different too.
If you write an officially sounding letter to your neighbour demanding to know how they come to choose the paint to repaint their bikeshed you are a weirdo and they are in their right to ignore you.
If you write the same letter to a city official about a public bikeshed you are sending a freedom of information request and they are expected to respond promptly and accurately.
You missed GP's point, which apparently was equating personal privacy with China's national security. I didn't think twice about China's lack of transparency. It's normal and expected behavior from China, so I would never suspect it to mean they were hiding something that was actually salient to the global pandemic... they're just hiding everything, but all it amounts to is hiding whatever corruption comes with government. IOW what they're usually hiding is often well known and is nothing interesting. Suspicion of things being hidden, wild speculation on it and tenuously attaching it somehow to common strife seems to be a conservative theme.
What always interests me is:
1) How many pandemics have there been?
2) How many lab leaks have there been?
3) How many lab leaks have caused outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics?
4) What is the cause of every other pandemic?
The answers lead me to believe a lab leak of virulent COVID, if it occurred, and let's assume it did, is only a coincidence, and the hidden cause of this pandemic is, while somehow the most unsuspected in light of the assumed lab leak, was the same cause as every other pandemic, ever.
I think the article just shows that experts are human and subject to human bias, and as such, like everyone else that similarly succumbed to bias, foolish for considering or believing in something with literally millions, tens of millions, or hundreds of millions to one odds against (lab leaks happen occasionally, there have probably been hundreds to thousands of lab leaks in 100 years, but over eons there have been millions of pandemics, and in recorded history, there have been enough of them to see a clear pattern: viruses jump species, people living and working in close proximity to animals are infected, the infection spreads).
Wildfires occur naturally in a similar fashion. We still try to diagnose their causes and use that information to punish arson or otherwise come up with better strategies to prevent them.
I'm not sure what you're referring to, re: ignore, but I don't think your analogy is remotely apt. I think you're saying a little fire is like a little virus, and a big fire like a pandemic. But anyone can light a fire, even animals cause wildfires, and thanks to lightning and fuel, fire doesn't need anyone to cause it. No one, I think, can "light" a little virus that could then spread like wildfire across the globe. Maybe a state actor, but not some individual and not accidentally. But this is mixing the two conspiracies, ordinary lab leak vs. engineered virus intentionally released. I just don't think China is up to it. I still return to the fact that lots of nasty things have escaped labs and the worst result was a very minor outbreak. Though genetics and microbiology has made incredible advances, it is all, all of it, on Nature's back. I think in a contest between Nature and any group of the smartest most knowledgable scientists with global resources to create the deadliest virus imaginable, Nature wins every single time, forever. And if COVID-19 was engineered for this, it sucks, it's an absurd and annoying failure. I think the reason why the source for COVID-19 can not be found is that it was fully consumed by one or more of the first 50 infected Wuhan residents that purchased it at the wet market and fully digested it before anyone had a hint of symptoms.
The similarities vastly outweigh the differences. The biggest difference between SARS-CoV and COVID-19 is that the latter takes a bit longer before you get ill but you are already contagious. Other than that it's mostly the same old story. Note that if not for SARS-CoV this would have been a lot more serious because that served as a dress rehearsal and put a lot of mechanisms in place as well as suggested screening for Coronaviruses in cases like these.
Another major difference between SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 is that SARS-CoV-1 took time to gain new adaptions to effectively spread between humans. These mutations that SARS-CoV-1 went through allowed researchers to find the intermediate animal host within months.
With SARS-CoV-2 there was no known mutation phase where the virus rapidly gained mutations to more efficiently transmit between humans. SARS-COV2 came out the gate perfectly adapted and did not start mutating extensively until many months after it spread globally. These lack of adaptations are also the reason why it's so hard to trace back to the original intermediate host species.
We actually do not know this for sure. There is a chance that the reservoir is one step removed and that another host in between amplified the virus to the point where it could make the jump.
Ebola also has this property, but it is just a bit too lethal to spread far (fortunately). An Ebola with a slightly longer asymptomatic incubation time (while already shedding) would be far worse then the current versions.
With Ebola each and every outbreak starts with an interspecies jump, usually bushmeat. The idea that these jumps are extremely rare is in principle incorrect, but it looks like that because pandemics are rare. But those are just the runaway successes (from the viral point of view).
The comment was about the way the Chinese government (mis)handled the information sharing, etc., and hence about the possibility of a lab leak, not about the actual disease, which (IMO) is even different, as covid-19 is much, much more contagious. And if the lab leak hypothesis is true, then the first outbreak didn't serve "as a dress rehearsal", but rather as the inspiration for the current one.
> Not allowing foreign scientists in, destroying evidence, arresting journalists, etc.
The Chinese government does all these things because it is routinely covering up illegal behavior. The fact that they followed standard operating procedure means they were probably simply continuing with the standard operating procedure of tacitly allowing illegal behavior. Illegal behavior in the context of a lab enhancing viruses is likely to result in a lab leak of a very dangerous virus.
Thing is, that's what authoritarian organizations seem to do reflexively, whether it's smart or not. Maybe because they have trouble getting reliable information themselves - is a coverup needed, or does it look like no coverup is needed because your subordinates have already covered up to cover their own behinds?
> What really raises the most suspicion of the lab leak theory in my mind was how the Chinese government acted towards the rest of the scientific community.
That is nothing special for the Chinese government, they would have acted that way regardless. They are extremely adept at creating Streisand effects.
I think the Chinese government would have reacted like this even if it didn't know what they were dealing with, which still is the most likely explanation.
I think the general information control we saw around Covid far more concerning.
China arrests and disappears people for making minor off handed comments about the CCP, the way they handled it really doesn't prove anything other than they were attempting to silence -everyone- involved so they had complete control of how information flows, just like they do on every other issue that has international attention.
This article is kind of self defeating - based on the article the scientists expressed uncertainty over the origins of covid, but the title is "Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab" which seems to prove their point exactly?
I don't know if this is common knowledge but there's an equal and opposite theory in China that covid came from the us. I just did a search for "covid us" on Baidu and this is the third result https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/114737709
along with suggested search queries "Is the new crown virus caused by the United States?" "Is the new crown pneumonia a virus released by the United States?"
(crown = omicron, I'm pretty sure)
I think there is a real possibility that covid is a lab leak, but it's impossible to find the truth when everyone is eager to point the finger at (other ethnic group)
The story is more about how this was covered up which destroys any faith you had in our scientific leaders who are clearly making decisions base on their political goals, and not on the truth. It is the same way Dr. Fauci admitted to lying to the public about masks not working so that he could achieve his goal of having masks being saved for healthcare professionals. When your leaders are known to be lying to you, especially on something much bigger than even 9/11 or pearl harbor, this sparks the kind of outrage that should get those in charge fired. They by their own e-mails and admissions are lying about the science of the biggest event in our lifetime in order to achieve completely separate goals from science. Even if their goals are the most noble in their own eyes to serve as preventing international issues, it is still a disservice to every single scientist that is practicing with the goal of finding the truth. They are trying to act like the parents and that everyone else is the child. It's like those movies when they hide things from the public so as 'not to cause a panic,' but even worse as their hiding of the truth has resulted in censorship of actual science being researched, not to mention censorship on social media platforms.
I'd agree if there's actual science being suppressed, but it seems to me there is none, just a lot of speculation and finger pointing without evidence on all sides.
Despite the lack of solid evidence more than a quarter of Americans already believe in the lab leak theory. In this very article any private expression of uncertainty has been twisted to serve a political agenda. I would say that these scientists' concerns are well founded.
The science is suppressed because people are and have been fearful to even research and make a claim contrary to the socially allowed claim. There is actually lack of solid evidence of natural evolution of the virus as well and they have yet to find any connection to any animal with the virus, not to mention the viruses spike protein would make it not infectious in bats where the origin was hypothesized. Yet, speaking about natural growth has not resulted in censures or labeling of researchers ass fringe. The issue is not that there isn't solid evidence of a lab leak, it's that there isn't solid evidence that it wasn't a lab leak either. This article goes into detail on why lab leak is still a leading theory: https://bprice.substack.com/p/yes-we-need-to-keep-talking-ab...
Dear HNers, please consult the post history of OPs account. It is a newish account which has been used daily to post controversial ideological and political flame baits, mostly related to COVID conspiracies, pandemic denialism and low-key misinformation.
welcome to the bottom of the page! You're in good company though, we have tea and snacks.
Unfortunately HN users are not somehow special and immune to flame bait. This type of content would dominate the front page if it weren't manually down-weighed.
Meanwhile, truly technically interesting projects like clip guided diffusion and GLIDE have zero coverage or discussion here. It's a shame but the larger the community
the more topics tend toward the mean.
832 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 456 ms ] threadThe entire foundation of science is based upon empirical observation and asking hypothetical questions. It is discouraging that scientists can make statements like this and get away with it.
Imagine a scientist with significant political cachet. This allows them to receive more funding, do more science. They cannot optimize their behavior only for truth-seeking, because that fails to maximize their political capital. If they optimize for the former, they will be replaced by someone who is better at the latter.
Any scientist that relies on external funding must balance science with politics to continue to do science, sometimes this involves censorship.
Scientists must be careful in how they communicate, and organizations like the CDC and FDA need to staff expert scientific communicators who can explain complicated things to lay people. Bill Nye types.
"Vaccines contain dihydrogen monoxide, a chemical that killed over 200,000 people within hours in 2004" is a scientifically factual statement, but not a well communicated one.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK45556/
I've never understood the argument that people would want to suppress the (accidental) lab-leak hypothesis out of a desire to protect the image of China. If the lab-leak hypothesis is incorrect, that doesn't change the fact that the virus originated in that country, it just means that the virus emerged from a wet market.
I'm not Chinese, but I'd imagine that a country's image is more harmed by accusations of having backwards cultural and food habits (and insufficient government regulation of dangerous markets) rather than potentially just one lone scientist making a mistake while working on advanced genetic research, which is a risk at any such lab in the world.
You forget the politics. CCP can never be wrong or do wrong. That would risk their rule. I'm pretty sure they would rather see the country burning than admitting guilt and incompetence. You can see that kind of selfish behaviour at most of the leaders(I would dare to say even in recent US history) but in an authoritan system this is made worse/more dramatic b/c there is no alternative(i.e opposition to replace leaders in a peaceful way)
But by failing to regulate wet markets properly, aren't they equally at fault?
Perhaps the supposed logic is that a scientist at a lab doing this sort of research probably counts as a government employee, whereas someone storing animals unhygienically would more likely be self-employed, so that makes the government less directly responsible.
I'm not sure if that distinction really matters to people who want to blame China's government, though.
Not really. It's just "bad luck" and "nature's fault". I never heard anyone angry on the Chinese government for not adding more red tape /regulation to the wet market. If that would be the case we should have seen people protesting all over the world against public markets where sanitary conditions are not the primary concern of the merchants. I believe it'a well known that more viruses are expected to jump from animals to humans. It's just a matter of time/luck. Simply put, failing to regulate wet markets does not equal to developing and releasing a deadly virus.
Human error would generate blame though and cost China tons of political capital with countries eager to calculate just how much damage this mistake cost them.
For example, "intersectionality" was coined by this black academic:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberl%C3%A9_Williams_Crens...
There are many more examples of black activists and scholars who have pioneered this way of seeing the world. Ascribing that work to white scholars denies the people actually doing the work agency, and to reiterate, is racist.
Yeah, there could never be a virus transmitted between Westerners and their food. Some kind of "swine flu" is a ridiculous notion.
We can't know the precise motivations behind those who suggested Sir Jermey pipe down, but indeed that's the problem with such speculative discourse. When speaking with a public voice--which can arguably include private communications to political leadership--there's nothing per se untoward, IMHO, with demanding that professionals speak carefully.
It's a fine line, but I don't see anything damning in these e-mail disclosures even though I'll readily admit that many people, including professionals (scientists, journalists, etc), prematurely dismissed the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak.
[0] Kresge N, Simoni RD, Hill RL. The Molecular Genetics of Cystic Fibrosis: The Work of Francis Collins. J Biol Chem. 2011 Aug 12;286(32):e8–9. doi: 10.1074/jbc.O111.000248. PMCID: PMC3151108
"international harmony" is just a front for hiding self-interest. Many elites, including the said virologists and bureaucrats, have significant financial or other ties with China. That's why any discussion of China and pandemics is very quickly buried with bullying and force [1].
[1]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FI3V-gdWQAkWyJS?format=jpg&name=...
Ever been to China? The country is ruled by Han supremacists and is openly racist to its own citizens who aren't Han. To defend the CCP using the argument of "Deep racism since the West existed" is just absurd party propaganda.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When the quote says "further debate would do unnecessary harm to science," it's talking about this, the big S Science industry.
The scientific method is a way to verify truths by testing hypotheses. The Science industry will kick you out if you uncover inconvenient truths or even test the wrong hypotheses.
True, but it’s possible to ask questions that sway public opinion. Look at all the “studies” tobacco companies paid for. Or the racist scientific theories that attempted to justify slavery.
If you’re asking questions about a lab leak out of genuine scientific interest, that’s perfectly legitimate.
But if you’re asking out of a desire to win political points, stir up tensions, etc., that’s destructive.
There are plenty of actors on both sides, using the same tool of scientific inquiry for good and for ill.
There may have been a time in history when asking questions alone has been used maliciously, but it's neither of those.
You need to ask unbiased questions to get unbiased answers.
Judea Pearl dedicates a whole chapter (Ch. 5) of his The Book of Why to this example.
It’s really bizarre to me that western scientists would feel more obligated to defend the future of scientific progress in a foreign communist country (especially one that’s currently engaging in an ethnic cleansing not seen since WWII) over their obligation to their own country and more importantly, than their obligation to the truth. These people have taken scientific and technological progress as their god and it’s impossible to understand their actions if you haven’t.
> But if you’re asking out of a desire to win political points, stir up tensions, etc., that’s destructive.
The trouble is that it's often both.
Suppose proof of a lab leak is bad for party A and good for party B. If no investigation takes place, people will assume it didn't happen. If we don't actually know the answer then party A is politically motivated to refuse to investigate and party B is politically motivated to demand an answer to the question better than "we don't know because we didn't look."
There may not be any party C who is completely disinterested and unbiased. You either investigate it or you don't. And either choice is politically charged.
https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak
Quite understandable if you would not want to participate in that.
And what is even crazier is that the lab leak-proponents are convinced that they are being censored. Even though they are completely dominating here (and elsewhere) in the hn comments, commenting on a pro-lab leak theory article from a major UK newspaper.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-...
That's not conspiracy, that's fact; and it's weird no one called you out on it.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/28/how-did-the-co...
> “we really don’t know” how accurate the origin story is, she says: “There’s some sort of connection [to the Wuhan market] and there were people exposed to the market that were infected.”
> Baker says what is “very likely” is that the virus originated in a bat. “It’s a likely scenario but we will never know. The market was cleaned up quite quickly. We can only speculate.”
> “These wet markets have been identified as an issue because you do have species interacting,” she says. “It’s an opportunity to highlight the dangers of them and an opportunity to clamp down on them.”
> Turner adds: “We’ve found the ancestors of the virus, but having broader knowledge of the coronavirus in other species might give us a hint about the evolution of this thing and how it jumped.”
There has been other wet market origin stories as well, so I think absent other evidence it seemed like the Occam’s razor answer.
No one is out there testing a billion bats (or many more billions of mice and what not). Animal patient 0 is probably dead already anyway?
Good luck with that search.
There's a lot of research which is getting closer:
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-871965/v1
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21240-1
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.5847...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.428212v1
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-885194/v1
https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2021/10/11/in-search-for-co...
1. The closest known animal viruses to human SARS-1 were found in civet cats in 2003, within about a year of the first discovery of the virus in humans.
2. No animal viruses closer to SARS-1 have since been discovered. Dr. Shi discovered various viruses in bats that we believe are ancestral to SARS-1, including WIV-1 in 2013. This is significant because we believe SARS-1 evolved primarily in bats, but those viruses have lower genetic identity with SARS-1 than does the virus found in the civets.
If you disagree, please link a paper.
Based on the above, I don't understand why you'd think 2013 is the important date. Within about a year of the emergence of both of the previous two novel coronaviruses in humans (SARS-1 and MERS), a near-identical virus was discovered in animals (civets and camels). This is suggestive but not conclusive evidence that those animals first infected humans, and strong evidence that those viruses existed in nature--somewhere, even if not exclusively in those animals--before they emerged in humans.
For SARS-CoV-2, no such evidence has yet been found. This doesn't prove that SARS-CoV-2 is of unnatural origin, and I assume you'll mention the uncertainty in Ebola's zoonotic hosts shortly; but I don't see how anyone could treat that as irrelevant, except out of willful blindness.
[Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389864/)
WIV1 grows in primary human airway epithelial cell cultures:
[SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence](https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048)
> Together, the data demonstrate that the WIV1-CoV spike can mediate infection of human airway cultures with no significant adaptation required.
And thanks for putting words in my mouth but no, I'm not confusing those with MERS.
And yeah, you'd mentioned WIV-1 above, and I'd assumed that's what you meant from the 2013 date. I noted this in point (2) of my grandparent comment. I just don't understand why you think that's more significant than finding the near-identical virus in civets. The SARS-1 civets might not have first transmitted SARS-1 to humans, but the WIV-1 bats definitely didn't--they're very different viruses, and while WIV-1 might indeed be able to infect humans it's definitely not what caused the actual outbreak. So why pick 2013 and not 2003?
Since it was also found in raccoon dogs, ferret badgers and domestic cats which one of those was the actual intermediate animal? Civets were just the first identified. Either one of them gave it to us and we gave it to the other three, or possibly we got it from bats and gave it to all four. AFAIK there's no conclusive phylogenetic analysis establishing which species got it from whom.
MERS is much more obvious what happened.
With SARS-1 we had the additional evidence that some wildlife traders had antibodies, presumably from mild infections by related viruses in the animals they handled. There's again no genomic evidence to exclude "reverse zoonosis" there, but the timing seems to make that pretty unlikely.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1140695/
[1] https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/taiwan-investigates-covid-lab...
So far the closest we've come is a bat virus in Laos but it has some significant genetic differences.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2
Time tables, budgets, staffing docs, those are readily forgeable. Any leftover discrepancies can be chocked up to clerical error. This is doubly so if the problematic research was classified or compartmentalized - files pertaining to those programs are often designed to be easily expunged.
Ultimately, China could release as many files as people ask, and never be able to settle the debate. You can't prove/disprove the existence of files they claim do not exist.
Our best bet would be whistleblowers - ideally multiple trusted and independent ones - who can testify to a hidden program. However, we can't use the lack of whistleblowers to prove the lack of a program, which is where we're stuck today.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
If they were all destroyed, then go get a sample from their natural reservoir (wherever those animals came from)
As a scientist, I would have been OK with learning about the hypothesis from a credible source and letting it play out. I would have been OK with letting the public know about it. However, realistically, good faith investigation of the hypothesis would have been utterly drowned out by hysterically amplified versions of the same hypothesis that were already in circulation.
>"He added: “I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan.”"
This pair of quotes has a completely different meaning from the original quote it sliced up:
>"I am also agnostic on this – I do not have any experience of laboratory virology and don’t know what is likely or not in that context. From a (natural) evolutionary point of view the only thing here that strikes me as unusual is the furin cleavage site. It strongly suggests to me that we are missing something important in the origin of the virus. My inclination would be that it is a missing host species in which this feature arose because it was selected for in that host. We can see this insertion has resulted in an extremely fit virus in humans – we can also deduce that it is not optimal for transmission in bat species."
>"... [this ellipsis (...) is from the house.gov transcription] The biggest hinderance at the moment (for this and more generally) is the lack of data and information. There have been no genome sequences from Wuhan for cases more recent than the 6 beginning of January and reports, but no information, about virus from non-human animals in Wuhan. If the evolutionary origins of the epidemic were to be discussed, I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan."
https://republicans-oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2... (pp. 8-9)
To emphasize the very last part: Rambaut is talking about genome sequences from human patients in Wuhan -- not laboratory data from the suspect WIV. But the Telegraph quote implies the opposite.
(Also, obviously I'm not picking any "side" here: dishonesty in the Telegraph doesn't vindicate dishonesty in NIH leadership, and vice-versa).
This clarification also masquerades as a clarification of something important. This person quoted by the tabloid is irrelevant here. In fact this article does more damage to the credibility of lab theory than otherwise and your clarification just shows.
Frustrating both the article and your clarification of basically a meaningless source.
There is a vast amount of information regarding lab leak theory and potential origin spanning back 20 years even though China has shut any investigation with gag orders and complete lack of transparency. Too much to unpack.
My concern is this: People will read your clarification of the quote as if it’s something important to clarify. Source itself is garbage.
Seems important to point out that Chan's co-author is a climate-change sceptic that is a hereditary peer in the British House of Lords after chairing the bank Northern Rock - famous for failing spectacularly in 2007. Very credible!
I am saying that the source of a person who is not a virologist, has never worked in a lab environment and the general credibility of a tabloid (Telegraph.co.uk) does not give a good impression of the lab leak theory. I am trying to steering people away from the article.
One might be forgiven for being curious as to the likelihood of the virus emerging from this particular wet market as opposed to all others.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference
Someone really really didn't want anyone near those mines.
Fair to also entertain the possibility that they were tracking him because of his previous reporting on land reform in remote villages, when he travelled into remote areas again 4 years later. He had to sign a forced confession the first time and if they caught him interviewing disgruntled villagers again, I’m sure they were ready to ratchet up the punishment.
The 2021 Twitter story sounds very similar to the 2017 one: being followed and physically blocked by people.
> As they walked towards her house, a group of men blocked their way, pushed Sudworth and smashed and snatched the crew’s cameras.
> “As soon as we arrived in Yang Linghua’s village it was clear they were expecting us,” Sudworth wrote in his account, referring to the woman the BBC wanted to interview.
Could be the mines, or could be the Chinese government harassing a Western journalist they already had an issue with.
TWO BLOCKS? Or a 40min drive? This is why the lab leak theory feels conspiracy-adjacent. Too much exaggeration.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/640/cpsprodpb/D961/production/...
> The institute is a 40-minute drive from the Huanan wet market where the first cluster of infections emerged in Wuhan.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57268111.amp
There’s plenty of valid scientific inquiry to be had regarding the theory once you get past the misinformation. But the political showmanship and the attraction of conspiracy theorists doesn’t help.
Which then discredits their own position -- even if the conspiracy actually happened -- because it didn't happen the way they claim it did.
There is a conspiracy theory that this method is used by conspirators to effect a coverup by discrediting skeptics of the official narrative.
This is actual public disinformation practice, not a "conspiracy theory".
Distinguishing this from the other thing is the issue. They do it because it works.
I thought you were talking about cases when “conspiracy theorists” are actually right, but their positions get poisoned by attributing some ridiculous stuff to them, and/or by artificial influx of similar “conspiracy theories” that are easy to disprove, so that the original theory is dismissed by association. For example, in Russia they love to flood the information space with bullshit theories a lot to “dilute” the truth and to disorient the public so that you can’t distinguish between truth and conspiracy theories anymore.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Center_For_Disease_Con...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/head-of-who-team-investigating-...
> “They also reported no storage nor laboratory activities on CoVs [coronaviruses] or other bat viruses preceding the outbreak.”
> The lab is classified BSL-2, a safety level at which air ventilation controls aren’t particularly strict, as they are in more secure labs. At that level, lab workers are usually dealing with pathogens that either cause mild disease in humans or which don’t typically spread through small particles that linger in the air. Researchers at that level don’t necessarily wear masks.
> The Wuhan CDC lab tested all of its staff for Covid-19 antibodies, it told the WHO in February. All staff tested negative, except one who tested positive, it said. That person was infected “due to family cluster transmission,” the WHO-led team’s report’s annex says.
> But Dr. Ben Embarek is the first to so explicitly question the team’s conclusion, published in a joint report with Chinese counterparts, that a lab accident was an “extremely unlikely” hypothesis.
> That wording was only reached after a 48 hour period of intense negotiations with Chinese counterparts said Dr. Ben Embarek, who said he would have preferred to designate an accident inside a lab as merely “unlikely.”
> The lab hadn’t published any work with bats since 2013, he said.
> “As far as we understand, they work mostly with parasites, not as much with viruses, so they have worked on parasites from bats.”
Yet, after fighting to label the lab leak theory “unlikely”, he throws a bone to the conspiracy theorists:
> “It’s also possible that someone is trying to hide something,” he added. “Who knows?”
They did do coronavirus experiments in level 2 facility.
[0] https://archive.is/KwZKn?
[edit] replaced link as FT makes it difficult to refer to them.
Regarding the 2016 work:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
> Since bat viruses like WIV1 haven’t been confirmed to cause disease in human beings, her biosafety committee recommended BSL-2 for engineering them and testing them and BSL-3 for any animal experiments.
> In response to questions about the decision to do the research in BSL-2 conditions, Peter Daszak forwarded a statement from EcoHealth Alliance stating that the organization “must follow the local laws of the countries in which we work” and that the NIH had determined the research was “not gain-of-function.”
> The genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 does not resemble that of any virus the WIV was known to be culturing in its lab, such as WIV1, and Baric says he still believes a natural spillover is the most likely cause.
This theory is more than a few steps away from being a smoking gun.
The idea of COVID leaking from a Level 2 lab 2 blocks from the Wuhan wet market is solely circumstantial.
It is indeed a level 2 facility, and it was being used to perform the bat coronavirus research outsourced to the WIV [1]:
The NIH decided the risk was worth it. In a potentially fateful decision, it funded work similar to Baric’s at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which soon used its own reverse-genetics technology to make numerous coronavirus chimeras.
Unnoticed by most, however, was a key difference that significantly shifted the risk calculation. The Chinese work was carried out at biosafety level 2 (BSL-2), a much lower tier than Baric’s BSL-3+.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
Also from the article:
> The genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 does not resemble that of any virus the WIV was known to be culturing in its lab, such as WIV1, and Baric says he still believes a natural spillover is the most likely cause.
The timelines and genetic profiles don’t match up for a level 2 lab leak 2 blocks from the wet market.
It moved just before the outbreak [1]:
The lab, where Chinese scientists research mild human diseases with bats, was moved near the seafood market where the first COVID-19 cases were found just days before the outbreak, WHO investigators said.
Classified with a “Biosafety Level of 2,” the lab also has ventilation controls that aren’t as strict as other more secure facilities, according to the report.
I find it surprising how little attention this tidbit got; a move of lab equipment and animals probably involved external personnel not used to bio-safety procedures. Perfect opportunity for a virus to escape.
> The genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 does not resemble that of any virus the WIV was known to be culturing in its lab
The key words here being "was known", since the WIV notoriously took its database offline and even requested the deletion of sequences stored on US servers [2][3].
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/08/13/who-scientist-eyes-on-wuhan-la...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-24/u-s-confi...
[3] https://www.science.org/content/article/claim-chinese-team-h...
Will add a source later when not on mobile.
Still not completely random. And yes labs and wild animal markets tend to met in high population density area, so that's another non-random factor I presume.
This coincidence is indeed troubling, but before jumping to conclusions it's good to remember why there is such consensus against lab leak theory, by (re)reading the original report on the origin of SARS-Cov2 (https://zenodo.org/record/5075888) and the short history of SARS past outbreaks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS#Outbreak_in_South_China - which interestingly lists several past lab leaks).
I don't find any of the competing theory very obvious to be honest. What is very obvious though, and was made even more obvious to me when I was looking for that source, is the amount of political manipulation around this topic. The epidemic of manipulation of opinion is a greater concern that the epidemic of that virus if you ask me.
Can we refrain from posting articles about science from political newspapers, maybe?
https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/lab-leak-hypothesis-alina-c...
Or maybe I'm being too lenient in attributing to incompetence and not malice here.
The University of Edinburgh recently turned down an Freedom of Information request from The Telegraph asking to see Prof Rambaut’s replies, claiming “disclosure would be likely to endanger the physical or mental health and safety of individuals”.
James Comer, the Republican congressman who secured the unredacted emails, said it showed that experts like Dr Fauci had taken the Wuhan lab leak theory “much more seriously” than they had let on.
Sir Jeremy has been approached for comment but had not replied at the time of publication.
Basically journalists and politicians scour thousands of emails to find a selected quote that fit their sensationalist agenda, and then ask the persons involved for a comment. When they then explain how the quote is out of context, doesn't say what journalist thinks it says, or that new information is out. Then they get harrassed and bullied by a (mostly) online mob.
I have by default zero trust in CCP. So they would need to go out of their way to disprove it. Even then, I would question forgery and fake made up data to show to the world. Ethics goes out of the window when it’s party’s reputation.
"An Intelligence Report Will Say UK Spy Agencies Found No Evidence Of Russian State Interference In The Outcome Of The Brexit Referendum"[0]
"Boris Johnson refuses Russia report's demand to probe 'meddling' in Brexit vote"[1]
[0] https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertonardelli/intelligence-report...
[1] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/breaking-boris-johnso...
"Two basic rules of government: Never look into anything you don't have to. And never set up an enquiry unless you know in advance what its findings will be." - Sir Humphrey Appleby
Here's a post from Jun 2020 where people are arguing both sides:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23660413
I'm pretty sure this is the debate I remembered, since I have 2 comments in that thread.
A natural virus sample leaking from a center studying coronavirus was never really addressed. Nor was the concept of Gain of Function studies really addressed. Officially there were no GOF studies underway - but there had been requests for funding of GOF like studies - which were denied.
What concerns me is that researchers tend to piggyback data for new research proposals on existing grants. You all ready have the facilities, lab workers, cells lines, and reagents and other equipment - just run a few experiments to prove out the concept. What is the incremental cost to culture a few more plates of cells, run a few extra sequences?
This narrative had various claims: that Sars-cov2 contained bits of HIV (by crackpot nobelist Luc Montagnier), that it was released intentionally, that it was actually released several months earlier during the 2019 military games in order to facilitate spread and that it is a tool to cull the population of the globe.
This was debunked and is still debunked.
One problem with conspiracy theorists is that they have an extremely low accuracy requirement in order to consider themselves vindicated. Being on the mark right is unnecessary, even being in the ballpark right is unnecessary. For conspiracy theorists, being in the same galactic sector right is sufficient to consider it a win.
The theory that it is a lab leak, possibly but not necessarily involving gain of function research, and probably by accidentally hitching a ride on one of the researchers has appeared later. It has not been debunked, though it has not been prooven either. It is a plausible possibility.
It is not popular in pro-science circles, because should it be true, the popular reaction is that research should be baned because it is too dangerous which is a stupid stance equivalent to collectively burying your head in the sand.
It is important to distinguish the two though.
https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/lab-leak-hypothesis-alina-c...
Now... "Scientists believed..." Considering the realm of professional scientists, beliefs have no value and should be guarded unless sufficient evidence arises. They behaved well by not announcing it.
Their behavior maybe questionable if it has had any negative impact on the awareness of the problem. But that is another matter and not something one should omit if the problem, initially, turned out the be clearly serious. AFAIK, that was not the case.
Where do you think hypothesis come from? Ingenuity based on educated beliefs is a the very core of science. The above stance sounds a lot like the cult of science which has become so pervasive.
They did not behave well. Many scientists put forward the seafood market and then animal vector believes which have equal or less evidence.
Currently, it seems most helpful in aggregating some of the arguments folks put forth in examining claims, including describing the basic issues and linking some references. Plus it seems to offer some insight into what folks are thinking.
Then from an academic perspective, I really like the sort of approach that they're trying to use. A well-developed implementation of that general approach would seem like it could be awesome.
That said, dunno if I find their current methodology or numbers too convincing, as far as actual conclusions go.
There is this very hilarious paper where they talk about this, but also rejigger the phylogenetic trees without describing how they pick what to put in and hide from the trees, e.g. they overload "trivially similar" sequences that happen to have furin cleavage sites, and then there are diagrams where they omit entire huge families of coronaviruses that don't contain the furin cleavage site to "lie to you with pictures" that the furin cleavage site is more common than it actually is.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/
Many coronaviruses including MERS have a furin cleavage site and they're common and likely evolved independently multiple times, showing that this acquisition of an FCS is common:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
The FCS in SARS-CoV-2 is NSPRRAR, we now know of sarbecoviruses like like the BANAL viruses in Laos which have NSPAAR, some other viruses like RmYN02 have NSPAAR or NSPVAR. If you insert an R into the BANAL spike protein you get the SARS-CoV-2 FCS.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.428212v1
Finding bat sarbecoviruses which are one insertion away from having the original FCS really blows a gaping hole in this whole idea that the FCS is some kind of smoking gun.
Delta has P681R and Omicron has P681H mutations in the FCS region which may be behind why they're more infectious/transmissible. So the FCS is also still evolving and adapting to humans.
It's if you line up the related bat coronaviruses sequences they are all much the same in that region apart from Sars-Cov-2 which seems to have a clean insert of a PRRA sequence.
Hence the "bothered by the furin site and has a hard time (to) explain that as an event outside the lab, though there are possible ways in nature but highly unlikely." in the article. If it had got there through evolution you'd expect the adjacent sequences to vary more.
This kind of thing https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image...
That is from:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7211627/#mmc1
Specifically the lower bit of figure 2:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7211627/figure/...
If RmYN02 picks up the QTQT sequence from recombination with other bat coronaviruses (or RmYN02 is a deletion away from a common progenitor we haven't found yet -- and the QTQT deletion is seen in SARS-CoV-2 variants in humans) then it is one insertion away from PRAAR which would be an active FCS, which is then one substitution away from the PRRAR SARS-CoV-2.
https://virological.org/t/tackling-rumors-of-a-suspicious-or...
Snopes is highly skeptical: https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/16/lab-leak-evidence/
An r/science essay from a PhD in virology is highly skeptical: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
While Root Claim estimates an 83% chance of a lab leak: https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV...
CDC can’t be trusted to even make a simple covid test and they don’t want to admit scientific research killed 20 million people.
Of course, the chances of that happening are probably lower than an actually lethal virus leaking from a lab.
I find it odd that people are commenting about how this doesn't inspire confidence, but "rootclaim" as well as an editorialised headline from the telegraph is.
A year later and we are yet to see a zoonotic link, but of course it’s the “most plausible scenario”.
The reality is that we will likely never know because it’s not in chinas best interest to allow any real investigation into this.
Right now, over a year later, reality is conforming exactly to what you would expect to happen starting from that hypothesis a year ago. So I don't even understand why you're mentioning it, it's not a logical argument.
> Sep 9, 2003 (CIDRAP News) – Chinese scientists found that animals sold at street markets in Guangdong, China, carried a coronavirus nearly identical to the SARS coronavirus, according to a report published recently in Science.
> The animal viruses were found in Himalayan palm civets and raccoon dogs, which were sold for food in the markets, according to the report. The findings indicate a route of transmission between species but do not reveal whether these animals are the virus's natural reservoir or contracted it from another source, according to the report.
Source [1].
The same thing didn't happen for SARS-CoV2. I believe none of the animals in the wet market has been tested positive for SARS-CoV2 or SARS-CoV2-like viruses [2].
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2003/09/animals-...
[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/26/1021263/bat-covi...
So why do you expect the same thing to happen now that it's very unlikely, knowing that there is no way to know that these viruses actually are the ancestors and may very well have been cousins of SARS, that would have disappeared if SARS was more contagious.
To find an actual virus that is actually an ancestor of SARS, we had to wait until 2017. What you cited wouldn't meet the criteria you yourself set forth, and for this virus it would be impossible to find on the same timeframe. So I really don't get neither how this validates your point that we would expect to find the zoonitc link in a year, nor even how it would fit into an argument that it's unexpected we didn't find this.
Much later, Dr. Shi discovered that the greatest diversity of similar viruses was in bats. The bat viruses are less closely related to human SARS than the palm civet or raccoon dog viruses; but there's a lot of them, and they look ancestral. We therefore believe that the virus mostly evolved in bats, then was transmitted to the palm civets and raccoon dogs, evolved a little bit more there, and finally was transmitted to humans. This was very important in understand the evolutionary history of the virus, but provided no new information on how humans were first infected.
Knowing one of the classes of host doesn't imply knowing the other:
1. For the original SARS, we found the proximal host within about a year. Much later, Dr. Shi found the reservoir host.
2. For SARS-CoV-2, we knew the reservoir host immediately, because it's closely related to the original SARS. After two years of searching, we still haven't found the proximal host.
If one exists, the proximal animal host of SARS-CoV-2 is probably in China. Since China has seen low human spread (probably more than their official statistics, but clearly far less than the rest of the world), I don't see why you'd expect a human variant to displace the original zoonotic variant. There's also no particular evolutionary pressure for that--a variant evolved in humans might happen to be more transmissible in the proximal host animal, but that's not what's getting selected for when the virus is transmitted between humans.
It's extremely common for people to reach a conclusion, and only then to go looking for research. And, then, to be looking only for research which backs up their claims. Since there is often extensive research backing up both sides of issues, and also because these people rarely actually examine closely the articles they are citing (upon inspection the articles are often speaking about something different, saying the exact opposite thing, etc.), the citations have nearly zero positive value.
As far as I'm concerned this is a complete non-sequitur.
Regardless, I directly addressed a portion of your comment. I believe the portion was meant to borrow some of the creditability of serious journals and give it to Reddit - which is, perhaps, a bad idea, for the reasons I laid out. To label my comment a non-sequitur is ridiculous.
Citing sources is meant to borrow the credibility of the source for elements of your argument. Not to attribute that credibility to the sheet of paper your pen is inking.
[1] https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1480930691919618051
> while privately discussed that not only it is a possibility, some of them believed it's *highly probable*.
This is what you have written:
> proof positive that the author's mind was *absolutely settled* that it was a lab leak
Judge for yourself. I am not going to respond to any of your comment on this thread. Peace.
Do you have something about Mike Farzan saying, in public, that it was very unlikely that the lab leak theory was true? Or is it then incorrect to say that individual virologists were saying privately one thing and publicly another?
https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did... (4.1)
>"I say this as someone who has been to these conferences, who knows many scientists who work on dangerous viruses, and work in facilities like the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We virologists know this group, we know about the WIV, and the WIV facilities do not frighten us. We do not view WIV as “unsound” or “risky” or “dangerous” or “incompetent” (76)."
>"We’re not worried about BSL4 labs that are well-equipped, well-funded, etc. (like the WIV is)."
>[...] "We biosecurity people are also very concerned about new BSL4 labs being built in developing countries in South America and Africa (99). But, you know what’s interesting? The WIV and its researchers are part of these committees that get together and discuss what to do about these challenges. They are part of the people who are helping to decide what is “safe enough” for a BSL4 lab! We here in the US agree with the WIV about what “safe” means (76). And the biggest reason for that is that we here in the United States helped train WIV researchers. We are the ones who taught them how to work with these dangerous viruses (76,100,101)."
(There are no buffer overflows in this C code: I'm very competent and experienced and how dare you).
For a leak of such a virus to happen from a BSL4 facility that routinely handles much more contagious viruses, you would need incompetence or funding issues, yes.
Just because they are “leaders in the field of safety” doesn’t mean that a lab leak is impossible, just unlikely.
The argument isn't an argument from authority either, it's just that they are well known for using very safe procedures.
This is nothing but disinformation.
> Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
> Instead, there is Chinese evidence that the lab had safety problems. VOA has located state media reports showing that there were security incidents flagged by national inspections as well as reported accidents that occurred when workers were trying to catch bats for study.
[2] https://www.voanews.com/a/covid-19-pandemic_chinese-lab-chec...
The cables the is factually claiming is that US officials learnt that the research going on at the lab indicated that there is a high risk of a coronavirus causing a pandemic, that there is a risk of zoonosis, and that there are risks associated with this research. There are no specific claims of bad practices or mismanagement, and it is entirely likely that the author is using those words to refer to the decision to do this kind of research as well as GoF research when he talks about unsafe practices and mismanagement, as they are the only material issues with safety and management he mentioned.
Beyond that, I don't see any evidence the lab was operating unsafely. If the virus really was in those populations, you'd need two unlikely things to happen, since we all agree the virus wasn't engineered.
First, the Chinese government needs to have made the conscious decision not to release proof that the virus was natural. Indeed, if it was being studied alive, the WIV would absolutely have identified it and a precursor. They could have offered one or both of these, or returned to where they found it, and pinpoint an origin, absolving themselves of all these arguments.
Then, the virus, which would belogically present in bat populations in those populated areas, would have had to escape a BSL4 lab, but not have escaped into society beforethen? What's the likelihood that it could have, while weakly infectious and poorly adapted to humans, managed to go through the protections of a BSL4 lab, but not managed to make it out of those animals?
Just few points:
* There's no agreement that this virus hasn't been engineered. Ralph Baric has said that just looking at the DNA it's not possible to distinguish whether a virus has been engineered or not. Alina Chan had raised this point and Vox has even made a correction on their article [1]:
> A previous version of this story stated that SARS-CoV-2 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies … assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty. (h/t to Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for her critique and input)
Please don't spread misinformation.
* A bio safety expert has weighed in and also expressed his concern about possible lab leak of SARS-CoV-2 [2].
* Viruses escape labs on regular basis [3]. Someone else on this thread also posted a link of a recent virus escape from a Taiwan lab.
* This is not the first time a lab leak happened and virologists tried to cover up. It happened during Soviet era in the 70s [4]. The truth came out after the fall of Soviet Union.
[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22734496/genetic-engineer...
[2] https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1479170984343064579
[3] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/20/18260669/deadly...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/20/world/europe/coronavirus-...
The cables were written by an entrepreneur and a manager, and the opinion section isn't willing to publish them. That's not lawyer speak, that's the lengths you have to go to in order to interpret a shady opinion piece that goes to lengths not to provide the actually interesting information.
> There's no agreement that this virus hasn't been engineered. Ralph Baric has said that just looking at the DNA it's not possible to distinguish whether a virus has been engineered or not. Alina Chan had raised this point and Vox has even made a correction on their article [1]:
> A previous version of this story stated that SARS-CoV-2 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies … assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty. (h/t to Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for her critique and input)
You can't prove a negative. That's all the substance in what I've quoted.
> Please don't spread misinformation.
Where have a I tried to prove a negative?
> Viruses escape labs on regular basis [3]. Someone else on this thread also posted a link of a recent virus escape from a Taiwan lab.
You should read my reply - from that article, the infected scientist was at the time not wearing his PPE. The infection was due to his incompetence, and wouldn't have happened if he was actually following BSL4 regulations. It seems his colleagues saw this and thought it was fine.
> This is not the first time a lab leak happened and virologists tried to cover up. It happened during Soviet era in the 70s [4]. The truth came out after the fall of Soviet Union.
Don't try to beg the question, please.
> A bio safety expert has weighed in and also expressed his concern about possible lab leak of SARS-CoV-2 [2].
Now we're finally getting somewhere. I assume who you're referring to as a biosafety expert is James W. LeDuc. All he's saying is that it's a possibility and that it needs to be investigated - so I don't see the disagreement. This was in April 2020, before a lot of the evidence we are relying on came out. Beyond this, his interlocutors points seem not be factually accurate, or at leasy hasty conclusions that later did didn't bear out.
that's.. worse though, right? that's an incident in a BSL-4 where an incautious scientist disregarded regulations, without his colleagues calling him on it, and leading to the release of SARS. that's the reality - regulations are always broken, colleagues are always complacent. why would WIV or any other BSL-4 be any better?
Why would they be just as bad?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7088173/
> In this study, an international survey based on volunteering was conducted in biosafety level 3 and 4 laboratories to determine the number of laboratory-acquired infections and the possible underlying causes of these contaminations.
> The analysis of the survey reveals that laboratory-acquired infections have been infrequent and even rare in recent years, and human errors represent a very high percentage of the cases.
> Today, most risks from biological hazards can be reduced through the use of appropriate procedures and techniques, containment devices and facilities, and the training of personnel.
No, but if it’s a red flag that the author has an agenda, or wants to jump to a conclusion without gathering enough evidence required for the news section.
> It has way more credibility than some random virologist's claim about WIV safety on Reddit. Period.
Reddit is the medium of distribution, as it was intended as kind of a springboard to an AMA. Could have been posted on Medium, Substack, etc. For what it’s worth, he is a published virologist: https://scholar.google.com.co/citations?user=8wCwbNUAAAAJ&hl...
I’m not saying he has the right take (I don’t know enough about virology to evaluate his content), just that it was a widely circulated, comprehensive and researched piece of content about the lab leak theory, as were the other two articles.
In a sea of half-thought out opinions and conspiracy theories these 3 articles actually spent incredible amounts of time and published evidence (on both sides of the theory) that can be analyzed and debated in depth.
> The scientist had been working on a SARS study in Taiwan's only biosafety level 4 lab since June, the Taiwan statement said. [...] A chest x-ray showed pneumonia in his right lung, and polymerase chain reaction tests of throat and blood samples were positive for the SARS virus.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2003/12/taiwanes...
The idea that "BSL-4" implies "negligible risk of accident" seems to be empirically false. In any case, the WIV was creating chimeras of novel coronaviruses with much looser precautions, at BSL-2:
> The Chinese work was carried out at biosafety level 2 (BSL-2), a much lower tier than Baric’s BSL-3+.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
Beyond that, the original SARS escaped at least once from a BSL-4 lab in Taiwan:
> The scientist had been working on a SARS study in Taiwan's only biosafety level 4 lab since June, the Taiwan statement said. [...] A chest x-ray showed pneumonia in his right lung, and polymerase chain reaction tests of throat and blood samples were positive for the SARS virus.
Many viruses have come to infect people in BSL4 labs, when they happen to be run incompetently.
From the exact same article you cite :
> The AP report quoted Dr. Shigeru Omi, the WHO's Western Pacific regional director, as saying the patient most likely was infected by some spilled liquid he saw on the surface of a test tube. Omi said the man was working without protective gear, such as a gown and gloves, at the time, according to the report.
Which, again, does nothing to oppose the thesis in the original post, which is that these viruses won't escape a BSL4 lab that's actually operating competently at the BSL4 level.
> The idea that "BSL-4" implies "negligible risk of accident" seems to be empirically false. In any case, the WIV was creating chimeras of novel coronaviruses with much looser precautions, at BSL-2:
That was also explicitely addressed. In 2013, the WIV was not a BSL4 lab.
And yeah, the WIV was working with novel bat-origin coronaviruses at BSL-2, not 4. That makes the risk of an accident yet higher, which makes our reddit virologist's argument that "BSL-4 labs like the WIV are really safe" not just bad but also dishonest. So I'm not sure what you think is addressed?
ETA: And I see that the reddit post talks about the WIV doing work at BSL-3 before they opened their BSL-4 lab. This claim is unreferenced, and as far as I can tell it's false; Dr. Shi confirms that they were working at BSL-2:
> In an email, Zhengli Shi said she followed Chinese rules that are similar to those in the US. Safety requirements are based on what virus you are studying. Since bat viruses like WIV1 haven’t been confirmed to cause disease in human beings, her biosafety committee recommended BSL-2 for engineering them and testing them and BSL-3 for any animal experiments.
The reddit post could easily be read to imply that after the BSL-4 lab opened, all work moved to the higher BSL; but it never actually says that, and I'm not aware of any evidence (or even any claim from the WIV) that it did. There's a strong incentive to work at lower BSL even when a higher-level facility is available, since the extra precautions significantly slow work. I therefore believe it's likely that work was continuing at BSL-2 in 2019.
[1]: https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/taiwan-investigates-covid-lab...
You know what else causes unnecessary harm to science, public trust and health policy? Repeated and condescending lies and gas-lighting from those in charge.
Not even close.
Its harder for Gov to keep a secret than it is for a facebook group to maintain a lie.
much much harder.
And there are various degrees of accountability to every level of a Gov. Not as much as I'd like and not as reliable as i'd like it to be, but its there.
there is zero, zilch, no accountability for facebook liars.
What pisses me off most about this is that now it's so much easier for a conspiracy theorist to believe in government cover-ups of big, important things. One of my family members is way into all this stuff, and next time I tell him cancer isn't cured because how would all the experts across the globe all simultaneously keep that a secret--he's gonna point at this.
People can be stupid and believe really crazy ideas, but let's not have governments and experts lying to the people they represent.
Pair that with the disinformation coming from once trusted institutions, e.g.: 5 vs 10 day quarantine, sending health care workers to work while still positive.
It's no wonder people are giving more credence to these fringe groups. The government has nobody to blame but itself for such poor messaging.
on one hand The Gov and bureaucracies in general have ham-fisted the response. This surprises no one really. we all know that Governments can be awful at these sorts of things.
yet somehow they have masterminded the development and release of a contagious bio weapon and done it in damn near perfected secrecy?
How can someone hold both those statements with equal weight in their minds at the same time.
does. not. compute.
It's doable, and has been done.
And is being done.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A genocidal totalitarian regime that harvests organs from non-violent political prisoners may be responsible for the worst accident in human history and the people we count on for the unbiased truth are covering it up.
I wonder what they'd do for more funding.
Being called anti-science is starting to look like a compliment.
And their's more:
>Chan said there had been trepidation among some scientists about publicly discussing the lab leak hypothesis for fear that their words could be misconstrued or used to support racist rhetoric about how the coronavirus emerged.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory...
[1] https://www.projectveritas.com/news/military-documents-about...
Most of it is Murphy’s unsubstantiated opinion.
All the quotes in the video are from Murphy’s opinion and not from the leaked funding request documents.
Nowhere in the documents is any proof that DARPA rejected the research due to gain of function concerns.
All we know from the documents is that HealthAlliance requested funding to research and vaccinated bats.
That’s it.
Everything else is fan fiction by a soldier.
His letter to the Inspector General lists reference documents. Even a cursory search via DDG yields some of them, which were covered on HN when they were released back in September ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28965770 ).
https://newsrescue.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/defuse-pro...
https://drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/defuse-p...
https://drasticresearch.org/2021/09/21/the-defuse-project-do...
>>>Nowhere in the documents is any proof that DARPA rejected the research due to gain of function concerns.
Here's the rejection: https://drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/hr00118s...
"The team discusses risk mitigation strategies to address potential risks of the research to public health and animal safety but does not mention or assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research and DURC. Given the team's approach does potentially involve GoF/DURC research (they aim to synthesize spike glycoproteins that may bind to human cell receptors and insert them into SARSsr-CoV backbones to assess capacity to cause SARS-like disease), if selected for funding an appropriate DURC risk mitigation plan should be incorporated into contracting language that includes a responsible communications plan."
Major Murphy's letter also states: "When synthesized with the EcoHealth Alliance proposal, US collections confirm EcoHealth Alliance was performing the work proposed. The analysts produce their reports in a vacuum, absent the context the proposal provides. As a fellow at DARPA, I could see both, and can do the synthesis."
Do you have access to the intelligence agency collections plans, and/or their analyst outputs? What information do you have that contradicts his statement that his conclusions are corroborated by Top Secret intel analysis?
>>>Everything else is fan fiction by a soldier.
Are you ready to retract that accusation?
If that hypothesis is true, then we have a fine example of something running in the background in a reservoir and then Hey, Presto! suddenly appearing to be mutated specifically for humans.
If that's true, then all manner of "weird" things suddenly become both plausible and probable without any human intervention at all.
As for "lab leak"--at this point all we can do is shrug. China will NEVER allow that to be investigated if there is even the slightest possibility of being true. Period. Full stop.
Barring a whistleblower with hard evidence, we'll never know.
Does knowing this help fight it? Does it help stop it? Does it help treat it? Does it help stop the spread?
Let's say China even INTENTIONALLY did it. Then what? You gonna invade China? Exactly how are you gonna make someone like Apple pull out of China when they should already be doing that NOW for other reasons?
I regard the "lab leak hypothesis" like I regard news about celebrities--worthless and unactionable.
It's simply a "boogeyman" to focus hate to create the "in group" and the "out group" for propaganda purposes.
Assuming the best, the parent asked a bunch of questions (in an admittedly dismissive and argumentative way) to try and invite some kind of response that explains what China gets out of it, and what the world does next if we could somehow prove China created the original virus.
So … let’s assume China created it. Now what?
What’s the next step and response if it was an accident?
What’s the next step and response if it was intentional?
Edit: I’m asking because I’m genuinely curious about what the next step would be. I mean, it’d satisfy my curiosity and interest in knowing the cause and origin. But then I want to figure out what the world response should be.
I asked what you thought those options are since you seem to have some opinions. Or at least a few of them. Specifically.
I don’t see how I said anything that indicates I’m trying to fight on the internet about our worldviews.
Great. So you agree that there are other options in between do nothing, and an invasion.
Both you, and everyone else, agrees on that idea. So that means that you personally can think of some in between those two extremes.
One option instead of full scale invasion is to cut back or attach strings to some of those forms of cooperation.
This happens all the time.
In this specific scenario, it might look like: Spend $100M upgrading Wuhan lab security and we won’t indefinitely ban travel from Wuhan Province to the US.
Or, more aggressively: Shut down the Wuhan lab or we will release tons of hacked data about corruption in the government.
Not saying that these are smart options, but you get the idea of the spectrum of options between total absolution and total aggression.
Oh, for sure. Those are certainly the broad categories of foreign policy and cooperative (and coercive) action.
I appreciate the specific ideas. I really am just curious what others’ ideas are on specific actions that could be taken if there was suddenly definitive proof tomorrow of origins.
If (the collective) we just shrugged it off because we didn’t want to offend anyone do you think things would be any different today?
> What’s the next step
Stop trusting sources or information coming out of china, if western sources contradict it. Thats the next step. Update your informational priors, to disregard them. And then also convince other people to disregard them, and make fun of people you know, who uses those sources, if there are contradictory western sources.
Assuming that is true.
Are you asking what China would have done with the result of researching COVID?
Same thing anyone does with research?
Or are you asking what we do with the information as to why something bad happened?
Same things / reasons we want to know why something bad happened?
Another action the world can take is to hold them responsible for actions. This may be in various ways like non co-operation, economic sanctions etc
Q: What would happen if we deliberately did everything possible to artificially create the circumstances leading to a pandemic?
A: A pandemic
Any value of such research SHOULD be questioned.
That said: it doesn’t even need to go that far - whether the response should be punitive, it doesn’t need to be. The scientific communities in China and the west are collaborative and could negotiate agreements not to do GoF research. US groups were funneling money into China to do GoF research on coronaviruses, which could be stopped.
The west, or society, should use this as evidence of basically not trusting information from the government of china, if it is contradicted by more neutral or western sources, in the future.
So, for example, if someone is talking to you personally, and they try to use evidence from that government, and you have other evidence from western sources that contradicts it, you should just laugh in their face. Call them a mean name and ridicule them.
The lab leak was most likely a protocol error and without a collective awareness of the cause, the population cannot push our elected leaders to demand better safety protocols.
If there was an international agreement to stop gain of function research, then that motivation would be gone.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-r...
Your logic is like BP saying “hey it doesn’t matter how the oil spill started . . .”
And how do you plan on enforcing this on China? Or on Russia?
I'm still waiting for all the armchair geniuses to explain this one to me.
You can be ready for when some idiot does this research or not. Those are your options unless you've got some magic way to go to war with nuclear powers that I am unaware of.
All banning gain of function research does is leave you unprepared when it happens.
Unless you've got a way to enforce this on China, this is unactionable. It's simply propaganda to rile people up.
1) If it was an accident, what are you going to do? If there is anyone sane in the leadership of the lab with knowledge of how this occurred, procedures have already changed. What more do you want them to do? You're NOT going to get a gain-of-function ban without some form of strong coercion. What will it be?
2) If it was intentional (and I see no gain for China if it were), what do you plan to do? You will have to somehow do something to cause actual harm to Chinese leadership. What? China is already guilty of genocide, and all the West does is shrug.
Hell, it would almost be better if this were an intentional release if not for all the dead. The emergence of Omicron would demonstrate to the idiots worldwide who thought they could control a virus that the idea is laughable and that the virus will quickly evade whatever you think are your protection measures.
And all this ASSUMES that it actually was a lab leak, which the current hypothesis about jumping from mice back to humans decreases the Bayesian prior on dramatically. If Covid can jump that quickly from humans to mice and back, gain of function is suddenly frighteningly common. And the research into gain of function, rather than being banned, needs to be ramped up hard.
> focus hate
That wouldn't be me.
I would feel bad for the people who caused the leak (edit to be clear: if this is what happened, not assuming anything here). To be at the origin of such a pandemic spanning multiple years with all the repercussions must be uncomfortable.
Even domestically, that above quote only applies in specific cases - civil cases, or criminal cases where it can be proven evidence was actually destroyed. I'm not personally aware of clear evidence of bad-faith destruction of evidence right now on China's part. China's refusal to allow a third-party investigation would then be more similar to pleading the 5th, something even US courts are prevented from punishing.
Related article (https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/recent-ebola-outbrea...): “Recent Ebola outbreak emerged from someone infected 5 years earlier”
In that case the lack of mutations is how they estimated the lengthy dormant period.
Isn't this the case with all zoonotic viruses? The reservoir is all the other species? HIV was also found in monkeys. We are all affected by the reservoir because we are also part of the reservoir.
Then Western scientists that rely on grants with Chinese ties, etc trying to cover the asses publicly, while privately saying it's possible...really doesn't inspire a lot of public confidence imo. There is a pretty big monetary incentive from the very people that we'd want to figure this out to say it didn't happen, even if it did.
1. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
That is par for the course. The Chinese government would have acted this way regardless of if it was a lab leak, natural event, or space aliens.
This is not suspicious behavior in China, as the GP said - it is standard operating procedure.
Barring foreign scientists, arresting journalists, and destroying evidence is always suspicious, even if they always do it, and it should always make people from open and free societies curious of why they are doing it, not shrug it off because it's the norm.
It is similar to the way that Hussein's actions in blocking access to presidential palaces was considered to be highly suspicious and therefore proof that he was hiding his weapons program. Turns out he was just trying to save face domestically by standing up against the weapons inspectors over something that he considered symbolic and immaterial in order to not look like a total pushover (a desperate need of dictators). It had nothing to do with weapons programs at all.
If the outbreak started in Colorado, and Russia wanted access to the CDC lab there, Americans (officials and public) would also be crying and screaming...
My second paragraph is meant to show a possible other explanation why the Chinese didn't want foreigners snooping around their bio labs: in my belief the same evasiveness the Chinese has/had would apply to the USA if China wanted to visit and have unlimited access (for a thorough investigation) of American bio labs.
And I'm not talking about whether American journalists would be arrested. I'm just talking about the evasiveness about the labs.
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29916895 for more.
The US are actively prosecuting a journalist on phony charges because he helped expose their war crimes, among other things. The UK is of course actively complicit, which contributed in making his life a living hell.
Given that precedent, I wouldn't be shocked at all.
We shouldn't even be on this tangent, because the parent comment was nothing but "what about America!" and now we're veering into even more tangential territory with "well what about America with regards to some other topic!?" This isn't a Chuck Norris movie with a good guy and a bad guy.
Now that I think of it I was likely incorrect. There's one big difference: I expect the US would first make sure they wouldn't look too bad doing it. That's almost certainly why some Swedish prosecutor happened to blow Assange's sexual affairs utterly out of proportion: kill the name before the guy.
If you write an officially sounding letter to your neighbour demanding to know how they come to choose the paint to repaint their bikeshed you are a weirdo and they are in their right to ignore you.
If you write the same letter to a city official about a public bikeshed you are sending a freedom of information request and they are expected to respond promptly and accurately.
countries and people are different things; countries are generally much more secretive than people.
What always interests me is:
1) How many pandemics have there been? 2) How many lab leaks have there been? 3) How many lab leaks have caused outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics? 4) What is the cause of every other pandemic?
The answers lead me to believe a lab leak of virulent COVID, if it occurred, and let's assume it did, is only a coincidence, and the hidden cause of this pandemic is, while somehow the most unsuspected in light of the assumed lab leak, was the same cause as every other pandemic, ever.
I think the article just shows that experts are human and subject to human bias, and as such, like everyone else that similarly succumbed to bias, foolish for considering or believing in something with literally millions, tens of millions, or hundreds of millions to one odds against (lab leaks happen occasionally, there have probably been hundreds to thousands of lab leaks in 100 years, but over eons there have been millions of pandemics, and in recorded history, there have been enough of them to see a clear pattern: viruses jump species, people living and working in close proximity to animals are infected, the infection spreads).
Wildfires occur naturally in a similar fashion. We still try to diagnose their causes and use that information to punish arson or otherwise come up with better strategies to prevent them.
If you prefer to close your eyes and keep blaming a bat in the nearby Wuhan fish market, you're free to do so.
With SARS-CoV-2 there was no known mutation phase where the virus rapidly gained mutations to more efficiently transmit between humans. SARS-COV2 came out the gate perfectly adapted and did not start mutating extensively until many months after it spread globally. These lack of adaptations are also the reason why it's so hard to trace back to the original intermediate host species.
We actually do not know this for sure. There is a chance that the reservoir is one step removed and that another host in between amplified the virus to the point where it could make the jump.
Ebola also has this property, but it is just a bit too lethal to spread far (fortunately). An Ebola with a slightly longer asymptomatic incubation time (while already shedding) would be far worse then the current versions.
With Ebola each and every outbreak starts with an interspecies jump, usually bushmeat. The idea that these jumps are extremely rare is in principle incorrect, but it looks like that because pandemics are rare. But those are just the runaway successes (from the viral point of view).
The Chinese government does all these things because it is routinely covering up illegal behavior. The fact that they followed standard operating procedure means they were probably simply continuing with the standard operating procedure of tacitly allowing illegal behavior. Illegal behavior in the context of a lab enhancing viruses is likely to result in a lab leak of a very dangerous virus.
That is nothing special for the Chinese government, they would have acted that way regardless. They are extremely adept at creating Streisand effects.
I think the general information control we saw around Covid far more concerning.
I don't know if this is common knowledge but there's an equal and opposite theory in China that covid came from the us. I just did a search for "covid us" on Baidu and this is the third result https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/114737709
along with suggested search queries "Is the new crown virus caused by the United States?" "Is the new crown pneumonia a virus released by the United States?"
(crown = omicron, I'm pretty sure)
I think there is a real possibility that covid is a lab leak, but it's impossible to find the truth when everyone is eager to point the finger at (other ethnic group)
Despite the lack of solid evidence more than a quarter of Americans already believe in the lab leak theory. In this very article any private expression of uncertainty has been twisted to serve a political agenda. I would say that these scientists' concerns are well founded.
Unfortunately HN users are not somehow special and immune to flame bait. This type of content would dominate the front page if it weren't manually down-weighed.
Meanwhile, truly technically interesting projects like clip guided diffusion and GLIDE have zero coverage or discussion here. It's a shame but the larger the community the more topics tend toward the mean.
have they issued any statements?