The lab-leak hypothesis is meta-scientific. When it was first tossed around, the lab leak hypothesis generated two predictions:
1. We would find evidence that someone was doing experiments on furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses.
2. We would find that the furin cleavage site matched a known sequence.
We did not find 2, which should have been easy to find. Eventually, we found 1, since a rejected DARPA grant proposal affiliated with the lab in Wuhan emerged.
Then, we found 2!! with a plausible explanation of why no one had found it earlier -- you had to turn on "patented sequence search" on NCBI blast, which is turned off by default. An easy mistake to make. As a professional biochemist for a decade I had no idea that blast had a patent sequence search, much less that it was turned off by default (which, btw is a sensible setting).
The scientific method says given a model it should make independent predictions (ideally unlikely) which are later verified. The evidence for a lab leak should be considered relatively strong.
That would be, ironically, moderna. Will the patent court award them negative damages?
On a more serious note, to stave off conspiratorial thinking, it should be "not crazy" that a moderna furin sequence appear. If I told a biochemist to go and insert a furin cleavage site into a virus, that grad student would do an NCBI blast search and get a list of all sequences. Maybe they are more knowledgeable than me and did know that patent search was enabled (or maybe they were used to ripping off parents :| -- I'm anti-patent myself so this is not an indictment of the general process). Then that library of say a few hundred sequences is applied. Then the grad student, say, drops the 96-well plate with the virus samples, and gets infected -- It should not be surprising that the moderna sequence is the winner in the competition amongst the viruses in that grad students body because moderna has engineered that site to be a very effective site, and we know that having the furin cleavage site is correlated to virulence, so "natural selection" kicks in.
> On a more serious note, to stave off conspiratorial thinking, it should be "not crazy" that a moderna furin sequence appear. If I told a biochemist to go and insert a furin cleavage site into a virus, that grad student would do an NCBI blast search and get a list of all sequences.
The weird part is, prior to 2020, a BLAST search only results in Moderna patents. There wasn't anything there for them to copy from.
You are intellectually and scientifically dishonest by presenting the lab leak like this.
Take your own theory and argument for it. You could only stare at a honest list of for and against regarding the lab leak, and conclude that lab leak is meta-scientific.
When you call for evidence, remember the information blackouts and destruction of samples ordered by the Chinese. Chinese citizens and scientists were dissapeared for following the science and doing proper journalism. To conclude their legacy as meta-scientific is ugly. That is not my science, but maybe that is your job here...
Metascientific means a scientific investigation into the practice of science. There is no value judgement there, it's a description of how the investigation is being conducted.
Your comments have been breaking the site guidelines. We ban accounts that do that. Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? That means no name-calling, no personal attacks, and generally avoiding the flamewar style.
> Over two years after the coronavirus was first detected in China, and after at least 6.3 million deaths have been counted worldwide from the pandemic, the World Health Organization is recommending in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe is required into whether a lab accident may be to blame.
> That stance marks a sharp reversal of the U.N. health agency’s initial assessment of the pandemic’s origins, and comes after many critics accused WHO of being too quick to dismiss or underplay a lab-leak theory that put Chinese officials on the defensive.
"Using BLAST is easy". Yes, it's very easy to use BLAST to convince yourself of something that is not correct. It's a power tool being used by idiots most of the time, no wonder fingers get cut off.
Before implying it's not correct, do the math yourself. Calculate the relative drift among natural sequences and see if the moderna sequence is an outlier. How many single point mutations would it take to get from a known sequence to the moderna one.
Do what math now? I spent 10 years as an academic doing bioinformatics, with deep expertise in BLAST (I helped demonstrate that BLAST E-values accurately represent homology).
If you look, he shows some pages with resuults where the E-value is 282. Normally, an evalue should be 1e-2 or better (ideally 1e-6) before you start making ANY claims.
I've seen hundreds of examples where a person did the math, convinced everybody they were right, and either subtle errors or mistaken assumptions meant the work was useless. These days, if somebody starts with "Here, I'll show you how to use blast to demonstrate that the lab leak hypothesis is true", my priors say "most likely just garbage".
But this is not a homology exercise with natural selection. I can show you where I did a blast search, panned for "select amino acid substitutions of interest" and from the library out popped out a more efficient enzyme.
Yep! In my work we had a golden labelled set of known-homologous proteins, as well as sets of unknown-relationship and known-not-to-be-homologous (based on superfamily). We blasted all-vs-all and after dealing with a number of BLAST issues finally demonstrated that the searches produce false positives at the expected rates. I gained a lot of respect for the folks who implemented the statistical framework behind blast E-values.
I had another advisor who thought they were good at homology, so they'd take protein matches with an E-value of 10 (almost certainly random chance) and munge the data to make up a story. Most of my work was about using very stringent blast searches to make profiles, but all that work is superseded by HMMER now.
Can you link some sources here? Call me skeptical, but if the evidence is as convincing as you make it sound, then it implies a pretty widespread conspiracy among experts (of many countries and affiliations) who would understand the implications yet are deliberately mis-communicating via their podcasts, news appearances, papers in famous journals, etc. Are there any papers published on this or is it just in the book that the authors of this article are selling? I'm not sure if I'm confusing this author with a Matt Ridley who seems to be an eccentric but minor British noble who writes about fringe climate change ideas?
Edit: Ok I figured out the source of the claims, it's the Alina Chen (I didn't realize she was co author) stuff. And it is indeed the Viscount Matt Ridley himself!
You can find the primary source for the DARPA leak on hn; if you care to verify that the sequence comes from a patent yourself directly from primary sources, you can find instructions on how to do that on hn too. I've done the search myself, it's real.
I can't provide direct sources for the fact that these predictions preceded the discoveries, but I can tell you they ran through my head, and others I talked to, and the lack of a sequence match bothered me. If you want to get meta-meta-scientific I would not be surprised if there was at least a blog post by someone out there saying "if it was a lab leak, where's the sequence match?" Out there that preceded the sleuth who found it hidden in plain site (behind an NCBI search option)
Edit: I have not read the ridley/chen book, I know most of the stuff from when they were emergent reports by reading this site and applying my intuition as a former biochemist (and some of my actively working biochemist friends) ti judge relative merits of hypotheses.
The tl;dr is that there is a group called EcoHealth Alliance that was working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) making novel coronaviruses by modifying the furin cleavage site of coronaviruses taken from bats. The WIV (along with EcoHealth Alliance and also potentially the Chinese military) was also making chimeric viruses from the viruses responsible for SARS and MERS. They were then using these viruses to infect "humanized" mice (mice with human lung tissue). The head of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, was one of the first to denounce the possibility of a lab leak (without disclosing the work he was doing at WIV of course). Daszak was later kicked off the Lancet’s COVID-19 commission because he refused to share old progress reports on the work he was funding at WIV.
All of this evidence is circumstantial, but it's really a bit suspicious that this outbreak started just a few kilometers where this exact type of virus was being created.
Thank you for the write up. I’ll add a funny line from Jon Stewart: if an outbreak of chocolate goodness happens outside Hershey, Pennsylvania you don’t need to search for the bat that ate the cocoa bean. It’s the factory, stupid.
"We do know that the insertion of such FCS sequences into SARS-like viruses was a specific goal of work proposed by the EHA-WIV-UNC partnership within a 2018 grant proposal (“DEFUSE”) that was submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (25). The 2018 proposal to DARPA was not funded, but we do not know whether some of the proposed work was subsequently carried out in 2018 or 2019, perhaps using another source of funding.
"We also know that that this research team would be familiar with several previous experiments involving the successful insertion of an FCS sequence into SARS-CoV-1 (26) and other coronaviruses, and they had a lot of experience in construction of chimeric SARS-like viruses (27–29). In addition, the research team would also have some familiarity with the FCS sequence and the FCS-dependent activation mechanism of human ENaC α (19), which was extensively characterized at UNC (17, 18). For a research team assessing the pandemic potential of SARS-related coronaviruses, the FCS of human ENaC—an FCS known to be efficiently cleaved by host furin present in the target location (epithelial cells) of an important target organ (lung), of the target organism (human)—might be a rational, if not obvious, choice of FCS to introduce into a virus to alter its infectivity, in line with other work performed previously."
A loose conspiracy of a bunch of social media scientists/journalists? Wouldn't the overall size and diversity of the field mean that there would be at least a few dissenters presenting more factual alternatives?
You should just read the book. It's not very convincing. The most likely explanation for the lack of interest in identifying the origins is primarly a lack of data. Speculating about conspiracies does not help the discussion, either.
Meanwhile the natural sources hypothesis has made one prediction not found yet (animal zero) and the lab leak has made two. Unfortunately, judgements about this are made difficult because "relative believability" is inherently subjective, so we can endlessly argue about the relative merits of competing hypotheses it is while the biggest suspect is under suspicion of having destroyed key data -- because they did suppress information in the early stages (and are refusing credible audits now). Meanwhile, entropy is happening making further revelations from bioinformatics progressively unlikely. Shrug.
No conspiracy, most people will be easily pressured when their livelihoods/job/grant is on the line. Most countries politicians want to be favorable to China, the experts sadly just toe the line.
Few scientist are the learned aristocrats of before who did not depend on grant money to live comfortable lives.
I don't find any arguments around the furin cleavage site convincing. This kind of cleavage site is pretty small and the number of variations that have good efficiency is limited. The presence of a specific furin cleavage site is not clear evidence of genetic manipulation.
Evidence comes with context. We're asserting that something like this would be found. Then we found it! After not finding it initially, even. The inability to find it initially should tell you something about the general evolutionary drift around these sites to begin with.
I haven’t been fixated on this by any means but I remember reading an article months back that looked at the timeline and locations of the early cases and compared them against the locations of the market and the research facility. I came away thinking that the animal market hypothesis seemed much more likely than the lab leak.
Yep - there are a ton of such points of evidence. The strict "lab leak" proponents have essentially made an unfalsifiable hypothesis akin to the intelligent design people's "God of the Gaps" where each time there's new research that disproves a core assumption, that just means the conspiracy goes deeper.
I linked it above, but aside from the fact that every other pandemic we've seen came about the same way, there's a ton of specific evidence from this pandemic:
One thing the lab leak crew haven't been able to answer is how there could possibly be two different lineages at the market -- which you'd 100% expect from multiple spillover but is essentially impossible if your working theory is that an infected lab worker brought it to the market.
To be honest, I hadn't even encountered the idea that lab employees were what, selling infected animals at the market? Is this a real thing people are arguing? Who even comes up with this stuff.
That's been my pet hypothesis for a few years, but I wouldn't argue for it. I just base it on some of the disgusting, unethical things I saw while living in China.
Hmm, but have there been any other pandemics that started close to a lab researching the kind of pathogen involved in the pandemic? Funny you should ask. There was this one:
By “came about the same way”, I’m assuming you mean “by zoonotic transfer”. But the 1977 Russian flu pandemic is now widely believed to have been a lab leak, or a vaccine trial that went wrong.
There is also allegedly a Wuhan CDC facility meters away from the market where disposal of lab animals happened (I cannot confirm this myself), so if that's true, that's certainly another possibility.
Sorry but the post above is unscientific sophistry. Science is about weighing competing theories by examining the relative strength of evidence. The evidence is strongly in favor of zoonotic origin. What's posted here is an exercise in confirmation bias, not rigorous scientific thinking.
Not really. The poster is saying they used to believe X but was persuaded subsequently that ~X was more likely. This seems to indicate at least a recent pattern of avoiding confirmation bias.
You’d need to clarify what specifically is entailed by zoonotic origin (and what would count as not-zoonotic-origin) in order for your claim to be evaluated.
Rather than just saying "we found..." and expecting people to take it at that, provide sources. If I went and looked up everything anyone claimed, that's all I'd ever do.
You can BLAST that furin cleavage sequence and find matches in other non-patented sequences, though. Here’s one from 2011 (bases 286 to 304, reverse complement): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleotide/DN616748.1
We did not "find" 1 from any rejected DARPA grant proposal, that's nonsense and completely unsupported by the actual grant proposal. You cannot presume one leads to the other, that'd be like trying to cite a patent on a perpetual motion machine as conclusive proof perpetual motion machines exist.
I would argue that continuing to state what you have here qualifies as disinformation, and think HN should remove it immediately, lest HN become yet another breeding ground of this kind of anti-intellectual memetic drivel.
I dig it because it's like a summary of half of the Marvel movies, where the protagonists spend the entire adventure solving a problem they caused themselves.
Like, without the Thanos thingy, iron man is not a bloody hero, he is a villain. He is responsible for so much death and destruction it's not even funny. Black Mamba, killer. Black panther ? Maintains in place a political system that clearly allows any psychopath to access absolute power. Hulk, a time bomb. Thor ? He let his genocidal brother of the hook as soon as he is nice for 2 minutes. Spiderman ? Give an deadly bot swarm to the first father figure that smiles at him. Dr Strange ? Accept the request to GHB the planet and almost destroys it because a kid ask for it for 30 seconds.
It's a well known trope in sups stories, but for some reasons a lot of viewers really believes they are heroes. Even as a kid I though Batman was stupid for spending times fighting one criminal at a time with all his money.
Now, we are seeing a lot of this in today's IRL world.
Progress is saving you by giving you drugs for all the diseases it increases: diabetes, cancer, obesity, hormonal dysfunctions, etc. It's giving you a car so that you can you can go work in a remote place you would never have to work to without progress. It gives you software to organize your day to fit all the thing you would not have to do without progress.
Unlike a virus, you can't just grab a tornado and move it somewhere else to study it. If you want to study tornadoes, you have to be where tornadoes occur.
The WIV was not set up in Wuhan to study bat-borne coronaviruses in the surrounding area. This is a widespread myth, one popularized by Maggie Koerth on Twitter.
This turns the issue into a political one and ignores any other parties that might have been involved.
The only thing we should care to do at this point is learn as much as we can about where the virus originated. Everything else makes the task of finding the origin harder.
Weird non-sequitor. Chinese people don't obsess over and celebrate those sad days just like American people don't obsess over and celebrate the innumerable crises and human rights abuses of their own, say, the MOVE bombing. A little empathy goes a long way.
It has been proven true by anyone with common sense.
I've heard enough bullshit passed off as "it's just common sense" that anytime I hear someone use that as an argument, I take it to mean they don't have any argument other than the random thoughts rattling around in their head.
That's not to say I don't think the hypothesis didn't have some merit. But I could just as easily "it's just common sense" the other side of the argument, too.
The Bayes theorem suggests an overwhelming probability that the virus was leaked, just by it being located near such a big lab. Further evidence has actually bolstered the lab leak hypothesis. So it seems correct to say that it is common sense to believe in the hypothesis, unless you believe lab leaks are extremely rare.
If I don’t see health authorities taking lab safety seriously by thoroughly and publicly investigating, why should I believe they take vaccine safety seriously? The framing damages credibility.
Why should you believe they take food safety seriously? Why should you believe they take water quality and treatment seriously? Or the authorities who oversee the safety of aerospace or airbags or what your bank is allowed to do with your savings? Vaccine safety is an awfully specific thing to double down on considering the overwhelmingly broad set of things that you rely on public servants for (specifically ones who regulate health), the very small number of times you need to get a vaccine in your life, and the sheer numbers and public nature of trials around vaccine testing.
If the lab leak hypothesis is proven beyond all doubt, then it embarrasses China.
Embarrassing one of the world's superpowers is broadly seen as an undesirable thing to do.
Ergo, scientists producing findings backing up the hypothesis will find plenty of opponents whose first and only job is to discredit them in any way possible, from denying their papers publication (looking at you, ResearchGate) to publicly attacking them on social media (Dr. Malone).
Lab leak theory is never going to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. For that to happen, Chinese government would need to cooperate. And it is almost an axiom that they won’t, if it has a slight chance of making them look bad.
I think understanding the origin is important, but I also understand why it wasn't a media fixation during the pandemic itself.
1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic
2) Unlike the nuclear analogy in the article, pandemic virus outbreaks happen naturally, and fairly frequently. Combined with the huge increase in global travel, when one does happen it can be around the world in every airport before anyone has even identified it.
So in the big picture this type of outbreak seems inevitable, not anomalous or inherently preventable.
Understanding the origin, either by cross-species origination or a laboratory containment breach, is indeed important and significant and should be pursued, but I also understand why the search for that answer isn't at the top of the 24-hour news cycle.
Concerning number 1) that is doesn’t change the Consequence I agree, but the response I thoroughly disagree unless you means strictly short term.
Came or not from a lab, SynBio and gain of functions experiments have the potential of re-doing this of way worse.
So basically the only truly important response that is not damage containment is to prevent this from happening (or happen again).
Honestly beside fringe groups I don’t see any initiatives happening, if it was up to me I’d kick gain of function experiments into the same realm as chemical weapons.
There are a variety of natural phenomena and human activities that are liable to create new dangerous viruses and/or bring humans into contact with them. Gain of function research presumably belongs in this category; so do certain food and livestock handling practices, development at the wildland-urban interface, climate change, and a host of other things.
The question is how much incremental risk do these activities expose us to, what is the cost/benefit of curtailing them, and what can we feasibly curtail. The risks are what they are, and while we might be misjudging them, knowing the origin of a single event is not especially helpful in recalibrating.
Nature breeds extremely serious viruses all by herself; a depressing possibility here is that humans just don't have that much influence over the risk of another pandemic no matter what we do.
> The question is how much incremental risk do these activities expose us to, what is the cost/benefit of curtailing them, and what can we feasibly curtail. The risks are what they are, and while we might be misjudging them, knowing the origin of a single event is not especially helpful in recalibrating.
I guess I'm more cynical, maybe even conspiratorial. My theory is that NIH was possibly, even if indirectly, contributing funding to the research that caused the outbreak, and that the major corporate media networks are there to shill for the establishment forces in the government and hushed this story as not to humiliate Fauci and the NIH.
I've seen Rand Paul credibly grilling Fauci on this issue a number of times and each time, the propaganda machine on reddit came out to damage control for Fauci.
The larger problem, beyond whether we funded this or not, whether or not it was a bat, is that the media and leaders in the government have repeatedly shown themselves to be completely undeserving of trust and so you're left guessing what the truth is with whatever limited information you have access to.
Rand Paul isn’t credible on nearly any topic, but especially not SARS-CoV-2. We are talking about a man who proposed banning masks on public transit, knew he had COVID but didn’t inform anyone but instead spread COVID amongst a bunch of elderly Senators, and spent time railing against vaccines for children.
The man is a non-practicing eye doctor who pretends to medical knowledge he doesn’t have.
When you're an MD for eyes or anything else, you can criticize his medical knowledge. Who cares if he specialized in eyes? He spent 2 decades as a surgeon. He obviously has more medical knowledge than most of Congress.
He's very credible on the discussions I referred to. Fauci basically sat there squirming and splitting hairs and playing semantic games to weasel his way out of admitting the NIH's involvement in the research going on at the Wuhan lab. My guess is you have some ideological axe to grind against Rand Paul or the right, that's just a guess, I could be wrong.
Yes, Rand Paul claims COVID came from China. But WHO-China investigation has found that COVID couldn't have come from China. Many scientists support Chinese scientists' fuindings [1].
> I also understand why it wasn't a media fixation during the pandemic itself.
You list some reasons, and I have in my mind a different reason.
There was a media blackout on the lab leak hypothesis because China put the kibosh on it, and since the US is dependent on Chinese exports for healthcare, PPE, defense and other critical supply lines, we did not want to piss them off.
Direction to the media for this blackout came from the US State Dept, and Mike Pompeo confirmed as much in semi-public comments that I will link if I ever find them again.
Wasn't SARS-1 stopped largely with contact tracing? You're saying that understanding the origin of the virus does not help the production of a vaccine in any way?
Big difference between the two: with SARS-1 you first got symptoms then become contagious, with COVID-19 it was the other way around. Obviously the second one is much harder to control, and if that had not been the case there is a fair chance that the pandemic would have been stopped in the initial phase.
Knowing where the virus is, how it spreads, and its genetic sequence are of course important. But I don't think CNN running segments about whether it came from a lab or a bat in 2020-2021 would have helped with any of those points.
> 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic
I have the opposite opinion.
If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread. That could have saved millions of lives.
We spent the first several months of the pandemic under the belief that it wasn't airborne. This ended up being false.
If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe and continuing without appropriate safeguards puts us at great risk.
Of course it does. It will impact other countries relationships with china. And it would impact the kind and level of scrutiny over this kind of research.
> It will impact other countries relationships with china. And it would impact the kind and level of scrutiny over this kind of research.
I think the point is that neither of those would have had an effect on the pandemic. By the time it was major news in the US, it was too late for any of that to matter in terms of what to do about this pandemic. Not the next one, or our future relations with China, but with this pandemic.
A) I guess I interpreted "consequences" more generally to also include the consequences beyond the disease itself.
B) I still believe that it would have been important. If it escaped from a lab, then those working in the lab could potentially have important information to share with the world about it. E.g. is it airborne, how much does it mutate, etc. They would have been studying it for a reason.
Based on what implicit assumption? That a government would allow that information to be published? Look at how cagey and not forthcoming the Chinese government was under the current conditions.
Try to extrapolate to what they would act like if it did leak from a lab.
Funny then how for the first few months of the pandemic the emphasis and public guidance was on desinfecting hands and surfaces and endless debates about how if masks actually help.
It wasn't disinformation. It was no secret that one of the reasons masks weren't recommended for general public use was that hospitals and clinics should be supplied as a priority.
If you got a different impression than this message, blame wherever you get your news from.
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
It's hard to get more direct than that. It wasn't just about preserving supply for healthcare workers, high-level government officials were explicitly stating that masks were not effective for the general public.
Fortunately we have archives of all this stuff, as many statements (like this one) were later deleted.
You will also note that in the early pandemic, it was completely unclear that non-N95 masks, such as surgical masks (let alone cotton masks) would have a positive benefit. That changed later on, of course.
That statement reflected the best information available at the time, but it was designed to be as simple and actionable as possible, not to communicate highly-technical nuance.
Seriously. I can find social media posts of friends in April of 2020 sewing cloth masks to donate to hospitals/medical clinics to help them backfill their mask shortages.
Yes, we used to think non-N95 masks (let alone cotton masks) wouldn't help, and then when we got more data to the contrary, we had to update this belief. That's unfortunate, but normal.
I'm not sure that is correct. In a subsequently FOIA'd email, Fauci told a colleague on February 5, 2020.
> Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.
That's a well known fact about how masks work in general, yes. They have a large effect on transmission from the wearer and a comparatively small effect in preventing transmission to the wearer.
However, when you have a limited supply of masks, it's impossible to give them out to every potentially-infected person, so saving them for high-risk people (like healthcare professionals, who also have the highest risk of becoming infected themselves) is still rational.
Only with droplet spread. Once we're in the realm of aerosol spread, as with SARS-CoV-2, you need N95 filters or better to stop them. The virus just goes around or through the cloth masks everyone was wearing.
I distinctly recall a virologist on public television early in the pandemic saying the hands and surface disinfection rituals were for psychology. He was not recommending masks either because there weren't enough to go around for everyone.
The debates about masks in the west, even after production ramped up, were a consequence of the initial confusing messages from officials. I've never seen it debated in Asia where they had masks available from the start.
As a resident of Asia I can tell you that people were wearing masks in late-January 2020, as soon as the outbreak was apparent in Wuhan.
This wasn't the first rodeo for SE Asia, scars of past pandemics has made the response here much more automatic, orderly and effective.
I think also supplies of masks etc were much more robust here because they were already worn in daily life due to pollution, normal sickness, etc and a massive medical tourism industry that was about to be shutdown and have their supplies made available.
The communication at the beginning was that it was only spread through respiratory droplets, so therefore the combination of social distancing and cloth/surgical masks would be sufficient.
Airborne/aerosol transmission was only acknowledged by the WHO and CDC in May of 2021, over a year after the pandemic was declared. And taking that long to acknowledge it makes me think it wasn't just a strategic lie to preserve the supply of respirators for medical staff.
That was debunked here on HN right from the start though. And this is hardly a specialist medical community. I think the parent is right in asserting that the medical community knew this all along. Probably they didn't know for absolute certain, but it was considered highly likely. And that then got spun into a confusing message by the media. The WHO and the CDC were useless, but plenty of medical bodies around the world did much better than them.
CDC updated its site in Oct 2020 to acknowledge airborne spread. There is still something of an argument in the scientific/medical community about what "airborne" means. A lot of folks lived through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Philadelphia_Legionnaires... which is scary because if there's just another infected person in the building, they can infect people far away!
and when the initial scientific articles about COVID air spreading (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article) came out, many policy makers were truly terrified of making announcements that would cause worldwide panic.
The new coronavirus is likely spreading through the air to some degree, the top U.S. infectious disease official said on Friday, one day after the World Health Organization urged further studies on the ways the virus is transmitted.
“Still some question about aerosol but likely some degree of aerosol,” Anthony Fauci, the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said by video during a panel session at a COVID-19 conference organized by the International AIDS Society.
Fauci on Thursday had said it was a “reasonable assumption” that airborne transmission was occurring even though there was not a lot of solid evidence behind it. The WHO urged more studies on the issue.
Airborne was always known; debate was droplet vs aerosol (particle size and thus dwell time/radius). Not really a binary distinction anyway; a matter of degree.
A fair large degree though. However, as I understand it, it wasn't a misconception unique this particular coronavirus. But that the entire medical field just had a longstanding, bad understanding of dynamics. So its not like the Wuhan lab was sitting on some crucial information, they almost certainly had the same misunderstanding.
I agree it's not binary -- and the SARS CoV2 debate, in particular, became a theater of the absurd -- but the categorical distinction is not entirely crazy: some viruses are much more sensitive to drying out or exposure to the environment and simply cannot transmit efficiently in tiny aerosols.
Tons of work has gone into weaponizing smallpox, for example. It's a non-trivial thing, even though smallpox is technically already a virus that transmits via aerosol. Many viruses will exist in saliva, and will happily transmit through direct contact, but won't transmit well via the air (mononucleosis comes to mind).
I think it’s a textbook example of poor science communication. The words of science do not mean to the public what they mean to scientists. Further, it’s safest to assume the worst in a situation like that. I think they should have erred on the side of “assume it’s airborne.”
Unfortunately, special interests (hospitals and other medical groups) had an incentive (security of their own access to masks) to mis-state the facts.
I really have to ask. Did we really not have any idea how corona viruses spread before? If so, what other virus families we are unaware now and why aren't we spending lot of money to prepare for all of them?
> If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe
Even if it wasn’t a lab leak, it could have been. So whether it was or was not should not change your opinion about the danger of this type of research.
This pandemic was raging inside China for months before it reached the US. What the Chinese government did by not allowing international observers and researchers and preventing the spread of information DID result in millions of lives lost. We could have had the vaccine available MONTHS in advance.
> If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread. That could have saved millions of lives.
The lesson here is not “we need to prove it was a lab leak,” the lesson is “we need better visibility inside China.” Which is also true for viruses that arise naturally inside China.
Do you think that if you could prove with total certainty that it was a lab leak in 2019, that would change China’s approach to secrecy in the future?
> If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe and continuing without appropriate safeguards puts us at great risk.
Do you think we can stop secret viral research in China if they want to do it?
One of my frustrations with the “lab leak theory” is that it seems to cause fuzzy thinking about future preparedness.
We can’t control other nations and we can’t stop natural viral evolution. Future preparedness is the same as past preparedness: detect and respond. We just did a bad job of it with COVID-19. The lesson is: do a better job.
> The lesson here is not “we need to prove it was a lab leak,” the lesson is “we need better visibility inside China.” Which is also true for viruses that arise naturally inside China.
The WIV was conducting research with US financial and technical support. The lab in question regarding a potential leak was funded in part to look for early signs of outbreaks.
If there was a lab leak and it was inadvertently caused by this lab, would you suggest that we continue to fund and provide support with no changes?
> One of my frustrations with the “lab leak theory” is that it seems to cause fuzzy thinking about future preparedness.
I can't speak to what you've seen elsewhere, but future preparedness should involve more transparency, safeguards that samples are being tested with the right safety levels and actual independent oversight.
It seems crazy to continue funding a bad faith actor without those conditions.
Really? Is diplomacy dead? I guess you can probably say "we can't absolutely control other nations" but nations don't even absolutely control themselves.
> Do you think we can stop secret viral research in China if they want to do it?
We could probably start by not funding exactly that, not sending our scientists there, not openly exchanging these processes and techniques with them… if they aren’t going to be reliable and upstanding stewards.
I meant the consequences and response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021.
Of course there are longer term and big-picture consequences if it was a lab leak. Which is why I said it was important to research and understand the origin. I just get why it wasn't top priority during the actual pandemic response.
Edit: And of course there are geopolitical implications. I think the same point applies, at the time the focus was on the response and avoiding inciting a political battle over something that wouldn't have a near-term benefit.
> If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread.
You're assuming that the lab "designed" it like a new vehicle engine complete with horsepower and torque specs.
Even given it was produced in a lab through chimeras and serial passage then they still wouldn't have known what they had. They wouldn't have known its characteristics in a human population. They wouldn't have known how long its incubation period was, or when peak symptoms and peak transmissibility happened, they wouldn't have known its virulence, or its R0 in a human population or pretty much anything. They'd might have receptor binding assays against the human ACE-2 receptor. That knowledge and $4.25 will buy you a latte, but it won't predict the trajectory of a pandemic.
And why aren't you annoyed at the coverup that China is doing of its zoonotic origins and that China isn't cleaning up all of the trafficking in live animals like palm civets and racoon dogs? We know SARS-CoV-1 happened, and there was no BSL4 lab to blame it on, so it was definitely zoonotic, yet still fairly unexplained, and nothing serious was done to prevent it from happening again. Now the US is blaming the WIV lab and China is feeding its domestic population propaganda about how the US did it, and still nothing is being done to address the mechanism that we know created SARS-CoV-1. There's still a known virological time bomb there that nobody is doing anything about.
And the reason why China wants to cover up the zoonotic origins and kick the can down the road is that it can use the lab leak theory to push the domestic propaganda that the US did, along with avoiding the political costs of clamping down on the animal trade. And there will be a political cost to doing that. Imagine if in 2009 that the H1N1 pandemic happened in a US pig farm and was 100 times worse, and then Obama tried to ban bacon to prevent a future pandemic.
Your "no priority" stance doesn't hold ground if the article is to be believed. The lab leak theory wasn't just low on the agenda, it was actively avoid altogether.
I don't even think it's that different from nuclear. The fact that Iraq had no WMDs (and I have doubts that anybody in the intelligence community really thought they did) got swept under the rug too, after a ton of civilian deaths there and military deaths on both sides. People just make stuff up and then it's too late.
We already had intense media speculation about the source of the virus at the start of the pandemic because _people wanted to know_. It would have been nice to have a proper investigation at the start of the pandemic as they may have caught evidence before it could have been destroyed.
This proper investigation would never have happened. China started a trade war with Australia for promoting an independent international investigation. I think the fact that China is willing to go to bat (pun intended) over this is a great argument for international sanctions no matter the origin, but I'm just a nobody on the internet.
> 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic
What??? I honestly expect more from HN readers than blatant china-apologists.
OF COURSE it changes the consequences! We tell China to hand over all research and distribute it to scientists around the world so that research doesn’t start from ground 0. If it could have accelerated understanding of the virus by several months, imagine how many lives could have been saved!
Instead China deleted all their files and kept quiet. They literally don’t care about millions of deaths.
My understanding is that we did not start from ground zero, already had a large scientific understanding of similar coronaviruses, had the virus sequenced very quickly, and then proceeded to get a vaccine tested and to market in a historic record-breaking amount of time.
Of course we should research the origin and, if a research lab was the source, take action to prevent it happening again. I'm not saying there should be no consequences, just countering the article which comes off as "why isn't this the number one priority??"
Thank you for posting this. We know that COVID couldn't have come from China. It came to China through frozen meat packages. WHO-China report already stated that fact. Dr. Fauci also believes that.
The only reason we can't find evidence because other countries wouldn't collaborate, for obvious reasons. Racists are trying to blame China because of lack of competence of their leaders.
I guess it is because the UK stopped doing as much testing. Presumably Google is reporting the number of positive tests (or something) and many people with covid don't bother getting tested any more.
The ONS is still doing random sampling and extrapolating to say how many people in the country are infected. "Around 1.7m people in the UK had coronavirus in the week ending 18 June" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51768274
You are misquoting, its estimated infections not cases. Not everyone who has an active infection gets a test and reports it, in fact its a small fraction.
The Proximal paper was used by Chinese disinformation bots to skelch any debate about a lab leak. I take that as a Streisand effect. Same when Fauci strongly and publically rebuked the Indian bioinformatics pre-print paper talking of the GP-120 HIV inserts. That is how I came to know about those inserts and their interesting history.
So strangely, the grossly unscientific propaganda effort that was the Proximal Origins paper may have had the reverse effects, at least, it had on me.
Anyone contributing to this virology conspiracy (why they were put in charge to lead the investigation and theory building, and not the way more qualified biosecurity experts?), including voluntarily, like Angie Rasmussen, has Chinese propaganda tainted blood on their hands.
I'm not sure where people developed this idea that coronaviruses don't exist near Wuhan. I've corrected it like a dozen times in this thread, but there are absolutely horseshoe bats in Hubei and there are absolutely coronaviruses in those bats -- including some close ancestors to SarsCov2.
Thanks for the correction. So some coronaviruses have been found in nature in Hubei, but surely in rural areas correct? Why would the center of a dense city like Wuhan be the epicenter for an outbreak (according to the official story a wet market that contained no bats walking distance from the Wuhan laboratory), and not an area where bats exist?
You were mistaken to say just "coronaviruses" instead of "the greatest diversity of sarbecoviruses", but your comment was otherwise in line with the pre-pandemic consensus--no one expected spillover in Wuhan. Dr. Zhengli Shi, whose research is at the heart of this controversy, wrote in an interview:
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
That said, it's no surprise that SARS-CoV-2 first emerged in a city, since it spreads most effectively in dense crowds. Even if spillover occurred in a small village, it's unlikely that enough people would die for anyone to notice until the virus reached a dense city--the virus's IFR isn't that high, and people die of other respiratory diseases every day. There's just no specific reason to expect that city would be Wuhan.
SARS-1 also emerged in a city far from the bat caves; but in that case, infected animals sold in markets there were identified, and the supply chain for those animals led back to likely bat spillover regions. For SARS-CoV-2, no such evidence has yet been found, despite much greater effort to search. That's not proof of unnatural origin, and there are other viruses for which the proximal host isn't known (e.g. Ebola); but that's different from both SARS-1 and MERS.
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
Doesn't that mean COVID19 occurring naturally in Hubei is highly unlikely ?
No one expected spillover of a SARS-like virus from bats anywhere in Hubei. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, since the scientific consensus is sometimes wrong; but no significant new evidence has yet emerged to make that more likely. The closest bat viruses in nature (BANAL-20) were discovered post-pandemic in Laos.
Most people who believe SARS-CoV-2 arose by natural zoonosis propose something similar to SARS-1's wildlife trafficking conduit. It's also possible that a human was infected elsewhere, and then traveled to Wuhan and seeded the pandemic--the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is highly stochastic until the case count gets big, so they wouldn't necessarily have seeded other clusters along the way. It's all pretty mysterious though, much more so than the emergence of the two previous coronavirus human pathogens (SARS-1 and MERS).
> Since the middle of last year, Li's postgraduate thesis has been circulated online as purported evidence that a coronavirus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 could have been infecting humans as early as 2012.
> Some also believe the paper provides circumstantial evidence for broader allegations that WIV had captured, studied and conducted "gain of function" experiments on viruses found in the mine, including RaTG13.
> First identified in 2016, RaTG13 shares 96.2% of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, according to a paper released by Shi and other researchers early in February 2020, just weeks after the first COVID-19 cases had been identified in Wuhan.
That's correct but out of date. RaTG13 used to be the closest known bat virus to SARS-CoV-2, but (a) it's far enough that there's no simple path to derive SARS-CoV-2 from it in the lab, and (b) it's not anymore, with the discovery of BANAL-20. The WIV was also sampling in Laos near where BANAL-20 were found, but hasn't published any closer genomes.
For the conspiracy-minded, I'd note that the WIV had published a subset of RaTG13's genome pre-pandemic, enough for others to identify the similarity. So they pretty much had to publish the rest of the genome post-pandemic, since it was obvious they had something interesting. The WIV used to have a public database of viral genomes, but it went offline around Sep 2019. They cite "hacking attempts" as the reason, but still haven't reinstated it in any form.
I'd personally guess that the Chinese government doesn't know whether SARS-CoV-2 arose naturally or unnaturally, and doesn't want to know--their preferred story (imported into China on frozen food) is near-certainly false, so no truth can benefit them. It's very hard to say though, all pretty mysterious. There are significant unexplored paths for investigation within reach of American subpoena though, e.g. in any cloud services used by the WIV for genomic data.
Ah, of course! I was thinking of this incident specifically, though it seems I remembered the details wrong; the miners who died seemingly did so before the WIV got involved:
> From 2012 to 2015, WIV researchers identified as many as 293 coronaviruses in and around the mine. (...) The institute in November 2020 disclosed the existence of eight other "SARS-type" coronavirus samples taken from the site.
> Since the middle of last year, Li's postgraduate thesis has been circulated online as purported evidence that a coronavirus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 could have been infecting humans as early as 2012.
> Some also believe the paper provides circumstantial evidence for broader allegations that WIV had captured, studied and conducted "gain of function" experiments on viruses found in the mine, including RaTG13.
Wow, thank you I haven't seen this before. If true, that's smoking gun stuff.
It’s an order of magnitude more information than you or the other commenter provided. Saying: “Wrong, I don’t like that.” is saying nothing at all. Be specific you fool.
If you know anything about how arguments work, and you actually read the parent to the comment you attack you would see that saying "that's not actually how you do it" is a perfectly fair response.
What EA_itsinthegame posted was a series of disconnected statements that only form a cohesive whole by virtue of the layout rules in a html rendering engine. It's certainly not anything approaching a criticism of the tweet thread as it never even manges to quote from it.
> According to the latest COVID Symptom Study app figures, there are currently 1,472 daily new cases of COVID in the UK on average over the two weeks up to 04 July 2020 (excluding care homes) [*]. The data suggests no decline from last week (1,445 cases). The latest figures were based on the data from almost 3 million users, 11,639 swab tests done between 21 June to 04 July (a full regional breakdown can be found here).
The 241K number is total gibberish. The 7-day average of new cases in the UK topped out at about 214K at the beginning of January, at the top of their Omicron wave, and has been nowhere near that since. It's around 13K right now.
I still don't get how that is related to the "The 241K number is total gibberish." statement that follows.
Is it because they should have removed the "More detail on the analysis" link to a no-longer-updated analysis and not removing the link invalidates the latest results somehow?
Or is there anything in that analysis of the results as of two years ago that discredits also everything that came later?
It's the source they're giving for the number, and there's nothing there that indicates it's valid. From every other source unrelated to that one, the UK's numbers have never been as high as they're claiming. Therefore, it's gibberish.
The "Official estimates of incidence of new PCR-positive cases" published by the Office for National Statistics in the latest release of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey [1] add up to 160k per day in the UK for the week from 28 May to 3 June.
The official estimate of people testing positive for COVID-19 has increased strongly since then - almost doubling from 900k for the week 27 May to 2 June to 1740k for the week 11 to 18 June.
A 50% increase in the number of daily new infections in three weeks doesn't seem so implausible and when the official estimate of daily new cases for this week gets published it may not be exactly 241k but it won't be much less. Definitely not an order of magnitude less!
TFA says “Covid cases are rising again. In the UK, they have broken through the 200,000 infections-a-day threshold for the first time since April.”
You can choose to talk about whatever you want but given the 200k figure and April reference it’s quite obvious that they are talking about the total number of infections in the UK - not just the laboratory-confirmed count.
> Reviews were mostly bad — in both senses of the word. That is to say, they were highly critical and inaccurate. In some cases, the authors said things that made clear they had not read the book but had made up their minds to dislike it. Not one but two virologists told us on Twitter that the book was full of lies — and that they had not read it. An odd thing for anybody to admit to, especially a scientist.
If you call yourself a "scientist" you have an ethical duty to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Perhaps not in the formal sense of a doctor's Hippocratic oath, but in the tradition of Galileo and Copernicus.
Interest in developing and deploying nuclear power dramatically declined after Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl incidents. This lead to an increased reliance on carbon-based energy sources like Coal and Natural Gas, likely killing hundreds of thousands over the years.
I think skittish virologists rightly concluded that a lab-leak mea culpa would have a similar effect on virology and perhaps broader medical research. The author disagrees, but history has shown us what happens.
If Three Mile Island and Chernobyl had been covered up and left to conspiracies the earth would be several degrees cooler right now.
Excuse me, but scientists are not public policy makers. Their job is to follow the evidence, not publish based on what they think will happen if they do.
If scientists do not publish their unbiased results and instead bend their results to fit personal or public expectation, their credentials should be revoked in the name of science itself. There is no greater crime against humanity that to conceal or compromise scientific truth.
Let us know when you have an "unambiguous truth detector" so we can start to revoke credentials. In the meantime, let's understand that scientists frequently allow their personal biases to leak into their papers.
I’m not talking about absolute truth. I am pointing my finger at those “scientists” that falsify or cherry-pick data sets, do not publish results that contradict their organization’s agenda, and similarly commit flagrant acts of dishonesty.
If they follow this particular line of evidence (which requires them excepting their own gross negligence) then not only would they be out of a job but may find themselves in jail.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Total nonsense. Chernobyl was covered up by the most brutal and inhumane regime ever. It's this exact cover up and lack of responsibility that disgusted a lot people and lead to the hatred and fear nuclear energy is drowning in.
There will always be cavemen that will fear what's beyond the cave exit, but they are powerless, albeit vocal, and are not responsible for the stagnation of nuclear research.
It's not that the origin story is not important, it's not that people don't care, it's that it is a distraction.
It doesn't help solve the crisis.
The article makes the comparison with a nuclear bomb. This is a bad comparison. If we were attacked by a sentient creature, we could reason with it and mitigate further damage or escalation.
In the case of a virus, it's good to know to prevent future pandemics maybe, and there is an academic interests, but it doesn't help with the current situation.
Finding the root cause of an unprecedented disaster might not reverse the history of that disaster, but it would help prevent future similar disasters. Now we are clearly aware of the costs. It isn't a distraction to look into the cause of a disaster as we are able as a society to work on many different problems at the same time.
It does help with our current situation of being very vulnerable to highly contagious respiratory diseases. COVID is probably never going away. To have another one join if this could have been prevented would be far worse for us.
The origin story is paramount to preventing future outbreaks and to the loss of, and disruption to, our way of life. The US took the same position on combating terrorism when it rooted out Al-Qaeda. To stop future loss of life, the root cause needs to be identified and dealt with. I vehemently disagree with the assessment that the origin is not instrumental to the defense of future outbreaks.
No it is not, because it is undisputed that viruses can evolve to infect humans.
If we had 100% solid proof SARS-COV-2 originated in a lab, it would not change our approach to detecting or mitigating future outbreaks. We always have to prepare for either.
It’s not like it never occurred to anyone before that dangerous infectious agents could escape a lab. It was a well-known possibility and was incorporated into U.S. federal pandemic preparedness planning since at least the George W Bush administration.
An accidental leak from a lab must still be detected, and once detected, public health measures initiated. The procedures are the same as for a natural origin.
The fundamental lesson from COVID-19 is that we cannot let our guard down. The Trump administration did in many ways, and so were not able to detect or respond fast enough.
So what you’re saying is we should be more concerned with defense and accept that viruses will be engineered. I don’t disagree with this line of thinking but I also believe we must be on the offensive too. We can’t just accept that labs will build viruses.
Rubbish. The response would not be to increase surveillance near labs. It would be to float a moratorium on GoF research and to increase biosafety at labs. Much of the work being done at the WIV was carried out at BSL-2, which is absolutely shocking.
It seems like you are using the US War on Terror as a good example? It didn’t stop the loss of life, it just changed the arena. Orders of magnitudes more people died as a result of that than from the attack that spawned it.
I think this is correct. I also think the point being made is that we SHOULD spend more time learning lessons and applying them to try and prevent some of the future pandemics. Imagine if we can prevent just one out of the next 10 pandemics through investment here. That would be millions of lives saved!
Part of the problem with the covid pandemic is how much we let our guard down. For example, the Global Health Security and Biodefense unit — responsible for pandemic preparedness — was established in 2015 by Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice [0].
This was then disbanded under Trump and its head Timothy Ziemer, top White House official in the NSC for leading U.S. response against a pandemic, left the administration [1].
Jon Oliver has a good segment on why we need to focus on preventing future pandemics [2].
If this is true, it seems like science trying to have it both ways.
Usually, there's desire for media to share scientific evidence in ways that are engaging to the public to recognize our best scientific conclusions.
What I'm taking from your portrayal is scientists know best what ~"helps the current situation."
Despite the origin being important, and that the public wants to know about it science doesn't want evidence on this matter and doesn't want it covered by the media or for it to influence the thinking of the public.
These seem like political behaviors, not scientific ones.
It doesn't help solve the crisis and it doesn't change attitudes toward gain-of-function research. The pandemic itself, regardless of origin, highlighted the possible consequences. Even without a connection to research - and even more so with the mere possibility - it heightened concern about lab safety, and made the risk/reward calculations around GoF research even less favorable than they already had been. The community of people capable of performing or funding such research was already on top of it - again, regardless of origin. Public finger-pointing is only likely to rile up nationalist sentiments which would interfere with establishing better procedures and protocols governing virological research.
The lawyers and diplomats have some work to do, but (especially in light of today's news) I suggest that the rest of us including the media have some higher priorities for how to spend our time/energy.
> As you may have guessed from our strange spelling, UnHerd aims to do two things: to push back against the herd mentality with new and bold thinking, and to provide a platform for otherwise unheard ideas, people and places.
Ahh yes, definitely the mission statement of a reputable source.
UnHerd has a following among conspiracy theorists, but its journalism is pretty good! E.g. here's an interview with Sajid Javid (UK minister for health) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7yZZKlg-m8
What happened is that they are clearly lying to us, and they hold all the evidence. What do you want us to do?
Either they're lying to cover up a lab leak, or they're lying up to but not including about lab leak.
Multiple near-nuclear events happened during the cold war, averted several times only by a single Soviet soldier using his common sense. We didn't find out about that until much much later.
Give it a few decades, and we can hope to find out.
Gulf on Tonkin, anyone?
It's not that I don't care, it's that it's not a fight I believe can be won this decade.
When Australia proposed an international investigation into the origins, in direct response, China started cyber attacks, resentencing Australian prisoners to death, and used economic warfare.
This seems like a conversation we can not have, if China has any say in it. And for a natural origin spillover event, it sure wants to have its say...
If your claims are true, then the fact that I (and others) didn't know this is seriously disturbing. I think a lot of people would have doubled down and pushed for alot more pressure and investigation into all of China's dealings across the board, if they had known.
At the very least it's an indictment on our media which should be pointing out these curious coincidences. Instead I think they have other motives.
I don't know about the other two but Australian coal was put under sanction by china in the wake of their call for an investigation. This, ironically, was quite bad for china since it indirectly led to power cuts in some provinces because they couldn't use the lower grade of coal otherwise available.
Most people are referring to PRC (AKA mainland China, nominally communist) not ROC (AKA Taiwan, a republic) when they say China (at least in the west), so your statement is true but not particularly helpful in this context.
From the Wikipedia link: "A lab worker was bitten and infected by a mouse infected with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant at a high-biosecurity facility in Taipei [Taiwan in December of 2021]".
From there, news articles speculate that "this will add credibility to the lab leak theory [if confirmed]" and this "gives legs to Wuhan lab leak theory," which is hardly conclusive.
I don't see how this incident would indicate that SARS-CoV-2 initially came out of a lab. It demonstrates a possible vector out of a lab, but I'm guessing that's already a well-known vector when dealing with lab animals, and it doesn't provide any evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was actually developed in a lab or initially spread from one.
Whatever toy gain of function research someone is doing in a lab vastly pales in comparison to the enormous gain of function 'experiment' we are right now performing worldwide with the continued high transmission rate of COVID-19.
Look at what variants like Omicron BA.5 and BA.4 have evolved into, they are quite possibly the most infectious and dangerous air spread pathogens known to man. These didn't come from a lab, we cooked them up by dropping all mitigations and pretending the pandemic was over instead of quashing this virus for good.
The only alternative to this experiment is China's currently policy. There isn't much of a middle ground because anything short of aggressive testing, lockdowns, and quarantine won't be enough to stop the spread.
No, we literally just need to mandate N95 masks in public settings and get the effective R value down near 1 again. Contact tracing and government support for paid sick leave, etc. would control it even further. At no point do harsh lockdowns have to happen.
> No, we literally just need to mandate N95 masks in public settings and get the effective R value down near 1 again.
But as soon as people take off masks, it starts spreading again. It's also getting less politically viable when ~70% of Americans have had covid (the CDC estimated 60% in late April).
> It's also getting less politically viable when ~70% of Americans have had covid (the CDC estimated 60% in late April)
This means nothing. The virus reinfects people with existing immunity. For example Senator Wicker from MS is on his _third_ infection: https://www.magnoliastatelive.com/2022/06/13/senator-roger-w... Two of those infections have been in the last four months alone!
We have to use NPIs like masking to stop the virus from spreading in order to stop new variants from evolving. There is no herd immunity. There is no natural immunity.
> Vaccines against the coronavirus may impair the body’s ability to produce a key type of antibody, thus potentially limiting the immune system’s defenses against mutated strains of the virus, a new study suggests.
> The study draws upon data collected during Moderna’s randomized control trial for its mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, from July 2020 through March 2021.
> When you say “we”, who do you mean exactly? How did they cook them?
The entire population of the western world. Every time COVID-19 infects a person and replicates it has the chance to mutate or introduce errors. If those errors in replication increase the fitness of the virus it will evolve to become a more powerful variant (i.e. gain of function). By continuing to allow hundreds of thousands of new cases and infections to occur daily we are increasing the chance of variants evolving. The _only_ way to stop variants is to stop transmission, period.
> Can you explain why you believe the pandemic is not over?
We are still averaging over 100k new cases a day in the US. And that's with almost all of the population using rapid tests that aren't counted in that measurement.
Source please? Everything I've read about latest Omicrons suggests that they are more transmissible, more likely to evade immunity, and substantially _less_ severe in terms of hospitalization and deaths. By and large, this is what you'd expect to happen at the end of a pandemic, regardless of our response.
"they are more transmissible, more likely to evade immunity"
Intrinsic severity of the virus doesn't change the fact it is the most transmissible virus we have ever seen in the world.
Even if it is intrinsically less severe than previous variants, because we are allowing it to spread to EVERYONE in the world we are seeing a much worse impact. Did you miss that in the US alone we've had over 160k deaths from COVID-19 just in the last 6 months of this year? No other virus has had this level of death in the same timeframe.
China has eradicated omicron. Shanghai had _zero_ cases of omicron reported on June 24th. A couple months ago they were seeing 25k+ cases a day. This is a city of 25 million people, the third largest and most dense city in the world. And yet somehow with a collective attitude and government support they beat back the virus and have fully reopened and returned to normal.
Contrast this with the United States where we have so far had over _one million deaths_ from COVID-19. In the same timespan China has seen just a few thousand deaths.
As someone in tech, what bothers me is all the attention AI gets for possible ethical problems, while biologists are doing some pretty scary experiments with potentially large-scale negative consequences, and they've gotten relatively little attention.
It's also very weird that the same type of people who normally talk about corporations/governments covering up pollutants do not talk about how many people could die from a potential lab leak.
Every single pandemic before SC2 was of natural origin. You have to make a much more persuasive case than "people could die from a lab leak" to ban research that could plausibly reduce the death toll from the next pandemic.
Are you not familiar with the 1977 flu pandemic? About 700k people died. You can argue about whether that was a "lab leak" or (as Gronvall prefers) a mere "vaccine accident", but either is unnatural.
Even in the 'steelman' case of a lab leak in the '77 H1N1 - it was a natural virus that later escaped and caused the pandemic. Even if it was some accident involving the 1950's H1N1, that means the natural 1950s H1N1 was capable of causing a pandemic...
We really need to come to terms with the fact that whether we research them or not, there are going to be increasing numbers of pandemic-capable viruses spreading in human populations.
If I tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 and then visited a nursing home without a mask, exhaling the natural virus all over the home's vulnerable residents, then I'm pretty sure you'd say I'd done something terrible. I think you'd be right. It's obvious to most people in most circumstances that even if a pathogen exists in nature and naturally causes some degree of death and sickness, a human who enables that pathogen to cause a greater degree of death and sickness is doing something bad. This is especially true if they're doing so maliciously (e.g., in biological warfare), but still true even if they're merely reckless (e.g. my nursing home visitor, or that flu shot nurse who reused the syringes).
So why does this intuition fail when the virus passes through a lab? The 1946-1957 flu virus was indeed natural, but the 1977 pandemic of that same virus was near-certainly not--without the activities of the scientists involved, the virus would probably have stayed safely in the freezer forever. The scientists also had the option not to put it in the freezer in the first place, in which case it would have probably just gone extinct. That scientific activity almost certainly caused those deaths.
Maybe it's just that one death is a tragedy, and 700k deaths are a statistic? When the last smallpox death (so far, at least) occurred following a lab accident in the UK, the director of the lab in question killed himself out of guilt, even though that lab was basically in compliance with the standards of the time. Perhaps he just had an unusually sensitive conscience; but I wonder if the scale of death in the 1977 flu pandemic (or this pandemic now, if it turns out to be unnatural) is simply so great that people can't engage with it, and their usual moral mechanisms just shut down.
In engineering school, we're taught from the first week that our work has the potential to kill people, and that it's our fault if it does. If a structural engineer responded to a building collapse simply by explaining that buildings are very important for society and that many people would die of exposure without them, then his colleagues would be mystified, and perhaps concerned for his mental health. We're expected to study and learn from our failures, in order not to repeat them. The argument that "X has benefits, therefore we can ignore its costs completely" is so ridiculous that I've never heard it spoken.
Yet a vocal subset of virologists are somehow able to make just that argument for their discipline, shrugging off the deaths they cause as a "natural" cost of doing business, unworthy of study or thought--and a significant fraction of the public accepts it! I find this strange, and terrifying. Don't you?
Not chinese biologists . Or Mexican biologists for all that matters (I'm from Mexico). I mean, there's a lot of countries capable of playing with viruses which dont have real practical controls.
You might argue that these achieve little in practice, and due to corruption amount to nothing more than fig leafs. But that doesn't invalidate the argument because AI researchers don't even wear that much!
There's no proof of "gain of function" experiments at all or specifically linked to Sars-Cov-2. It is heavily unlikely that such an experiment would switch a virus from un-pandemic-able to pandemic-able. The mechanisms to do that are entirely theoretical.
So it's not clear at all that gain of function would have been able to create a Virus like Sars-Cov-2 out of a hypothetical bat virus. And there is no evidence any such research has been going on. Nor is there any evidence the virus has passed through the Wuhan lab in question at all.
The lab leak hypothesis was also pretty tightly coupled with the bioweapon/intentional release theory which is part of why it received so much push back.
Also I don't recall the specific fact check messages but if they were in line with "there's no hard evidence of a lab leak" I'd say that's still pretty accurate.
A lot of what I saw were channels pushing both at the same time. An accidental leak of an attempted bioweapon or something like that was pretty popular in some circles.
The owner of a service has no requirement or duty to carry anyone's speech. A person's freedom of speech doesn't override anyone else's freedom of association. So a private company can censor or reject any speech using their service unless otherwise mandated by law (common carrier etc).
It's inflammatory, outright disinformation, outright misinformation, or just something the service owner doesn't want to carry. Discussion a lab leak hypothesis is not the same as claiming COVID leaked from a bioweapon laboratory or was intentionally leaked for <reasons>.
That being said, social media sites flagging posts is very different from outright censorship. It's not uncommon for someone to actually get censored/removed from a site claiming its censorship over discussing some topic when really it was a history of dipshit behavior and flagrant TOS violations.
so, the vast majority of social media then? what makes this issue so special? why did all of the major social media networks censor/"flag" anyone publicly speculating only certain speculations about this issue?
Large platforms (twitter, YouTube, etc) banning views that they don’t agree with gives them power to truly shape society by controlling acceptable discourse.
What they deem outright information may in fact be true. And even allowing clear misinformation (1+1=3) is important. We need people to learn to process information not protect them from it. Using 1+1=3 analogy, wouldn’t you want people to rally around tooling people to learn math?
> The lab leak hypothesis was also pretty tightly coupled with the bioweapon/intentional release theory which is part of why it received so much push back.
No it wasn't. The media often takes the most extreme case in order to denigrate the whole side that they don't like.
Let's not forget that the lab leak hypothesis was championed by political figures who were embarrassed that they were woefully clueless about how to implement pandemic response plans, even though their agencies already had those plans in place for years, and that their aligned media pushed these conspiracies without evidence.
First, reporters are incapable of discovering this information on their own. They just don't have the tools. Investigatory bodies do, and reporters would have to wait.
Secondly, there were multiple plausible ideas about what could have happened. The drum was beaten on only one of them. Trump got caught with his pants down because as with everything else he's ever been a part of, he was woefully unprepared and out of his depth.
Third, and tying in with the first point, the more important story to virtually everyone was not how the first people were infected, but what the response and fallout of the infections were.
So again, you had a bunch of clueless, embarrassed political partisans who got caught with their pants down, and their base ate up the blame-shifting because of their xenophobic tendencies.
That isn't justification for the censorship. Reporters do report on things they don't understand all the time. The point was to make it possible for qualified people to investigate, but that wasn't politically popular at the time.
Should the scientific community rally to the opposition of the current unpopular president? That doesn't seem like a good idea.
And this last point is a fascinating common non sequitor. That's not even what happened; we had the media clamoring that it came from that market and any talk of the lab is racist and/or xenophobic. Do you think any investigation of the lab would have jeopardized the public? Worse than the visceral eating bats (i.e. selling bats for consumption)?
Reporters aren't going to report on what ifs for years. That's what talking heads do. How often are they reporting on the wet market hypothesis again? Oh right, they aren't. They got the information that they could find, reported on it, and there's nothing else to report. That isn't censorship, that's due diligence. Maybe you could learn the difference.
Ever considered the possibility of discussion being stifled due to intentional "false flagged" information. We don't want an idea being talked about. Let's just create a socially unacceptable similar conspiracy theory, then censor everything related.
Think Alex Jones talking about nanobots in the vaccines, well now you can't be taken seriously with any vaccine related discourse or you get lumped in with the nanobots, 5g crowd.
...Except, Alex Jones is pretty much the opposite of a false flag - if anything, he's one of the duly appointed flag-bearers of that political slant. If you're bringing him up in a discussion about "false flags", it goes to show just how little relation the term has with reality.
I've followed quite a lot of the lab leak discussion and I wouldn't say that's true. If anything the most popular people to point fingers at are Daszak and his associates who are mostly pretty white.
I initially dismissed the lab leak hypothesis because surely nobody would be stupid enough to make new SARS virus strains on purpose. They’re worthless as biological weapons, and the risks are insane.
Then it turns out that that is precisely the type of research the Wuhan lab does regularly.
And then when our prime minister merely suggested an investigation, China put punitive tariffs on billions of dollars of our exports to them.
Because clearly, that’s how innocent governments with nothing to hide act.
Immediate, massive retaliation for merely suggesting that someone should look into things.
But everybody should believe the Chinese government! They told you: it came from a pangolin in the market. Why would they lie?
They lied about the reason for the punitive tariffs, sure, making up some insane story about centrally orchestrated “dumping”.
Okay, so they lied. But not about Wuhan! That would be unethical…
I think the more likely case is Hanlon’s Razor — Chinese government officials figure it could have leaked due to their lax safety standards, and just don’t want to look into it for fear of someone conclusively proving this.
This seems probable to me as well: they don’t know that a lab leak occurred, but believe it’s a plausible explanation, and one whose investigation needs to be suppressed because of the potential for embarrassment and retaliation. They might even have sought to destroy as much evidence as possible rather than trying to uncover the truth internally: if nobody knows the truth, the truth can never leak out.
> ...because surely nobody would be stupid enough to make new SARS virus strains on purpose. They’re worthless as biological weapons, and the risks are insane.
If we wait until the next pandemic hits, we will be months or years behind the curve, trying to understand it and develop treatments. Millions more people will die because we'll have been caught on our back foot.
Lucky for the human race, viruses are statistically more likely to mutate, over time, in particular ways. So it's possible to make pretty good guesses about where future would mutations might occur. So if we deliberately create those mutants in a laboratory, we can study which strains look particularly virulent and/or dangerous.
Yes, there ARE risks to this strategy, in terms of lab leaks. But the vast majority of virologists and epidemiologists have known for decades that deadly worldwide pandemics of novel Coronaviruses are an inevitably in the 21st century... It's just a matter of time. We will definitely see several more pandemics, at least as damaging as COVID-19, befor the century is out.
So even without a lab leak, we would only save ourselves a couple more years before nature did the job, itself... And it will keep happening, over and over with new Coronaviruses, for the foreseeable future. The human race can do very little to slow it, let alone stop it.
This kind of logic seems sane until you stop and think about it for a while.
First off -- and this should be enough by itself -- the research the Wuhan lab did hasn't appeared to have helped in a material way to fight the COVID pandemic. So they gambled, lost, and there is nothing to show for it.
But that's not the insane bit. The truly insane bit is that over 20 million people died for this little "experiment" of theirs.
I'll try to come up with an analogy of how truly bonkers this is:
Imagine one day, a nuke unexpectedly blows up New York, and millions upon millions of people die. It's an ICBM of some sort, but not launched from an expected enemy launch site. Everyone assumes it must be a terrorist attack, which is then "confirmed" when rocket booster fragments are found near the launch site -- in the United States -- discovered to be two different models of rockets jury-rigged together. Clearly terrorists got their hand on a bomb and did whatever they could do to launch it! Problem solved.
... and then it turns out that the DHS has a program where they would build random combinations of boosters and upper stages together with mis-matched warheads, and launch them for "testing" to so that they could "learn what terrorists might do".
Clearly it wasn't terrorists, one of the DHS experiments went horribly wrong.
... and then instead of being horrified, people would justify this by saying: "If the DHS hadn't done these kinds of experiments, then we wouldn't be prepared for when terrorists launched a makeshift rocket! How would we know how to shoot one down? We need to learn these things before we are attacked!"
Meanwhile, millions are dead from the experiment -- not the terrorists. The DHS experiments of course did not lead to better missile defence. The rocket wasn't shot down. Not to mention that that's not what terrorists generally do. Or they may not even be able to do this kind of thing anyway.
But this is precisely the type of thing Wuhan was doing. They were playing with the biological equivalent of global nuclear armageddon, and they weren't even doing it in a BSL 4 lab! It's the equivalent of the DHS rocket experiments building nuclear-tipped rockets out in the open with random local contractors in the same way SpaceX is building their star ship. They were doing experiments to combine SARS and flu-like viruses in ways that might never happen in the wild. They weren't just accelerating natural processes to find out what might happen, they were doing entirely novel things that's only possible in a lab.
> First off -- and this should be enough by itself -- the research the Wuhan lab did hasn't appeared to have helped in a material way to fight the COVID pandemic. So they gambled, lost, and there is nothing to show for it.
You can't possibly claim that without being a qualified expert in the field. I'm not, but I have asked friends who are--and they're quite firm that this type of experimental research (1) did help speed up our COVID-19 response, and save lives, and (2) is critical to prevent future outbreaks from becoming much, much worse.
I'm not asking for journal cites or anything, but I am curious: What's the source of your conclusion that gain-of-function research didn't help prevent the COVID-19 pandemic from becoming even worse?
But if you look at the actual examples they provide, they're incredibly weak. Remdesivir wasn't discovered due to GoF research, and wasn't tested in humans solely due to any result from GoF research; but GoF research did provide some of the early evidence that prompted the first human trials. Unfortunately remdesivir also shows little evidence of efficacy in humans:
They also cite minor contributions to some novel vaccine candidates that as far as I can tell haven't progressed to humans. And these examples are from Ralph Baric's lab; while he may have been reckless, his research was less controversial than the WIV's, working at higher BSL and with fewer novel pathogens. The WIV took significantly greater risks, and so far has literally zero practical benefit to show for it.
Virology in aggregate has clearly provided a benefit to humanity, in this pandemic and elsewhere. That's not the question, though. The deliberate search for enhanced potential human pandemic pathogens--including both laboratory gain-of-function on such pathogens, and sampling missions to remote sites to find new natural pathogens in areas that no other humans routinely visited, and thus that presented no obvious risk of natural spillover--is a tiny subset of virology.
We could ban that tiny subset, and we'd still have all our same vaccines, same anti-viral drugs, same tests, etc. If anyone tells you otherwise, then ask them for the evidence.
They lied, and it's been documented - but that cuts both ways. They also lied about wild animals being sold at their market.
From Bloomberg:
When an international group of experts organized by the World Health Organization traveled to Wuhan, China, earlier this year to research the origins of the coronavirus that sparked the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, they visited the Baishazhou market, which is larger, but perhaps less well-known (internationally, at least) than the Huanan market, where many people initially believed the virus first jumped from wild animals to humans.
The research team was told only frozen foods, ingredients, and kitchenware were sold there. But a recently released study that had previously languished in publishing limbo showed, thanks to data meticulously collected over 30 months, that at least two vendors there regularly sold live wild animals, Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg also notes that one of the earliest recorded COVID-19 clusters in Wuhan [December 19th] involved a Huanan stall employee who traded goods back and forth between the two markets."
It seems likely to Goldstein that some authorities didn't want the presence of a thriving wildlife trade to become public knowledge. "It seems to me, at a minimum, that local or regional authorities kept that information quiet deliberately. It's incredible to me that people theorize about one type of cover-up," he said, likely referring to the hypothesis that the virus actually leaked from a nearby government-run lab, "but an obvious cover-up is staring them right in the face."
Two years and I have yet to read an explanation of what this hypothesis is. Were they careless with a natural virus? Did they modify viruses? Did they release a nature virus on purpose? Did they accidentally release a modified virus? What's modified even mean here, studying random mutation? Engineering things?
It's Schrodinger's Argument. It's all of them and none of them and it always shifts depending on who you're talking to. So I've concluded it's the largest, dumbest motte-and-bailey argument there is.
But at least we can all agree, whatever it is, there's no practical lessons to be taken from it.
> an accident in a laboratory or during a research field trip
Which, yes, is incredibly vague. I give them credit for at least ruling out the "Evil Chinese Scientists intentionally create and release deadly virus!" bullsh*t.
One plausible "lab" scenario: A baggage-hauling laborer caught the proto-COVID-19 virus in a bat-filled cave during a routine "collect samples of germs from bats" expedition, then unknowingly spread it back in Wuhan.
My opinion: For useful-fact-oriented folks, the Lab Hypothesis is mostly a tedious waste of time. For those motivated by hot-button emotions, attention-seeking, etc., the most lurid and cartoonish versions of the Lab Hypothesis are by far the best. If they can conjure such images in the minds of their audience - withOUT having to spell them out, for reality-checkers to attack - then all the better. Hence the remarkable scarcity of Lab Hypothesis explanations.
Thing is, isn't "during a field trip" actually the zoonotic theory? Ie, if there's a super contagious virus circulating around in bats, and a researcher was in a cave, then went to the market... that's the same as a tourist visiting a cave (as I have done) or a worker harvesting Bird's Next from cave, then selling at the market.
Objectively? Yes. But the moment you involve the lab - even if the only "lab involvement" was some grunt laborer, who harvests guano for fertilizer from the exact same cave on the other 29 days of the month, to feed his family - a whole lot of people's emotions and imaginations go "BOOM!".
The WIV sent workers into remote caves that no other humans routinely entered; you can find many pictures and videos from their expeditions on the Internet. I think their baggage-hauling laborers were mostly grad students, but I agree that an infection of such a laborer is a quite plausible origin for this pandemic--a visit to a remote cave specifically chosen for its diversity of novel viruses is obviously a much higher risk than a cave chosen at random, though it's hard to quantify by how much.
In this scenario, if the WIV's worker had never entered the cave, then the virus would quite possibly never have left the cave. Even if it would have been released later by an infected non-scientist, I'd always rather die later than sooner. (I've seen people arguing sooner is better, because it encourages pandemic preparedness; I guess that's true, in the same sense that reckless drivers encouraged development of automotive airbags. I've never seen a driver make that argument to the judge, though.)
So given the above, do you still think the WIV should have sent the worker into the cave? We're not talking about the whole of virology here, just a tiny subset of high-risk research that so far has provided no significant public benefit.
There is an episode of Lex Fridman's Podcast with Jamie Metzl on the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K78jqx9fx2I
Metzl is highly confident of a lab-leak. However, lab-leak doesn't require that the virus has been tampered with and I somewhat agree that is important to know if the virus escaped due to inadequate lab safety.
Exactly. People yelling "censorship" forget that the lab leak theory was mostly about how COVID was engineered as a bioweapon, which still remains a conspiracy.
On the other hand, existence of this conspiracy has been used to shut down perfectly reasonable discussion around a less outlandish lab leak for months.
Even in this post opponents of the lab leak theory are still bringing up this bioweapons conspiracy - but I can't see a single lab leak proponent suggesting it's an engineered bioweapon.
The issue is the existence of this outlandish fringe theory was used to censor all reasonable discussion on the lab leak.
Thank you, apparently raising this simple distinction is enough to get downvoted out of circulation. The problem wasn't that people questioned the status quo, it's that people went too far in ascribing cartoonish-like evil to actors that simply were trying to cover up something embarrassing.
> but I can't see a single lab leak proponent suggesting it's an engineered bioweapon.
Interesting perspective. On the other hand, just like the comment below, I never saw a single person raise the lab leak theory as an alternative explanation to a naturally occurring disaster. It was always in the context of "COVID is a weapon to control and kill us".
791 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 526 ms ] thread1. We would find evidence that someone was doing experiments on furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses.
2. We would find that the furin cleavage site matched a known sequence.
We did not find 2, which should have been easy to find. Eventually, we found 1, since a rejected DARPA grant proposal affiliated with the lab in Wuhan emerged.
Then, we found 2!! with a plausible explanation of why no one had found it earlier -- you had to turn on "patented sequence search" on NCBI blast, which is turned off by default. An easy mistake to make. As a professional biochemist for a decade I had no idea that blast had a patent sequence search, much less that it was turned off by default (which, btw is a sensible setting).
The scientific method says given a model it should make independent predictions (ideally unlikely) which are later verified. The evidence for a lab leak should be considered relatively strong.
On a more serious note, to stave off conspiratorial thinking, it should be "not crazy" that a moderna furin sequence appear. If I told a biochemist to go and insert a furin cleavage site into a virus, that grad student would do an NCBI blast search and get a list of all sequences. Maybe they are more knowledgeable than me and did know that patent search was enabled (or maybe they were used to ripping off parents :| -- I'm anti-patent myself so this is not an indictment of the general process). Then that library of say a few hundred sequences is applied. Then the grad student, say, drops the 96-well plate with the virus samples, and gets infected -- It should not be surprising that the moderna sequence is the winner in the competition amongst the viruses in that grad students body because moderna has engineered that site to be a very effective site, and we know that having the furin cleavage site is correlated to virulence, so "natural selection" kicks in.
The weird part is, prior to 2020, a BLAST search only results in Moderna patents. There wasn't anything there for them to copy from.
https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/how-to-blast-your-way-to-the...
Take your own theory and argument for it. You could only stare at a honest list of for and against regarding the lab leak, and conclude that lab leak is meta-scientific.
When you call for evidence, remember the information blackouts and destruction of samples ordered by the Chinese. Chinese citizens and scientists were dissapeared for following the science and doing proper journalism. To conclude their legacy as meta-scientific is ugly. That is not my science, but maybe that is your job here...
Metascientific means a scientific investigation into the practice of science. There is no value judgement there, it's a description of how the investigation is being conducted.
> Over two years after the coronavirus was first detected in China, and after at least 6.3 million deaths have been counted worldwide from the pandemic, the World Health Organization is recommending in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe is required into whether a lab accident may be to blame.
> That stance marks a sharp reversal of the U.N. health agency’s initial assessment of the pandemic’s origins, and comes after many critics accused WHO of being too quick to dismiss or underplay a lab-leak theory that put Chinese officials on the defensive.
[0]: https://www.wivb.com/news/world/who-covid-origins-unclear-bu...
Search for "moderna" then scroll up a bit.
If you look, he shows some pages with resuults where the E-value is 282. Normally, an evalue should be 1e-2 or better (ideally 1e-6) before you start making ANY claims.
I've seen hundreds of examples where a person did the math, convinced everybody they were right, and either subtle errors or mistaken assumptions meant the work was useless. These days, if somebody starts with "Here, I'll show you how to use blast to demonstrate that the lab leak hypothesis is true", my priors say "most likely just garbage".
[1]: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Web&PAGE_TYPE=B...
I had another advisor who thought they were good at homology, so they'd take protein matches with an E-value of 10 (almost certainly random chance) and munge the data to make up a story. Most of my work was about using very stringent blast searches to make profiles, but all that work is superseded by HMMER now.
The HIV paper has been withdrawn and was total bunk.
See comments on the paper:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1?...
Edit: Ok I figured out the source of the claims, it's the Alina Chen (I didn't realize she was co author) stuff. And it is indeed the Viscount Matt Ridley himself!
I can't provide direct sources for the fact that these predictions preceded the discoveries, but I can tell you they ran through my head, and others I talked to, and the lack of a sequence match bothered me. If you want to get meta-meta-scientific I would not be surprised if there was at least a blog post by someone out there saying "if it was a lab leak, where's the sequence match?" Out there that preceded the sleuth who found it hidden in plain site (behind an NCBI search option)
Edit: I have not read the ridley/chen book, I know most of the stuff from when they were emergent reports by reading this site and applying my intuition as a former biochemist (and some of my actively working biochemist friends) ti judge relative merits of hypotheses.
https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/how-to-blast-your-way-to-the...
~700pts, ~450 comments, with the source published 23. September 2021.
The tl;dr is that there is a group called EcoHealth Alliance that was working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) making novel coronaviruses by modifying the furin cleavage site of coronaviruses taken from bats. The WIV (along with EcoHealth Alliance and also potentially the Chinese military) was also making chimeric viruses from the viruses responsible for SARS and MERS. They were then using these viruses to infect "humanized" mice (mice with human lung tissue). The head of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, was one of the first to denounce the possibility of a lab leak (without disclosing the work he was doing at WIV of course). Daszak was later kicked off the Lancet’s COVID-19 commission because he refused to share old progress reports on the work he was funding at WIV.
All of this evidence is circumstantial, but it's really a bit suspicious that this outbreak started just a few kilometers where this exact type of virus was being created.
"We also know that that this research team would be familiar with several previous experiments involving the successful insertion of an FCS sequence into SARS-CoV-1 (26) and other coronaviruses, and they had a lot of experience in construction of chimeric SARS-like viruses (27–29). In addition, the research team would also have some familiarity with the FCS sequence and the FCS-dependent activation mechanism of human ENaC α (19), which was extensively characterized at UNC (17, 18). For a research team assessing the pandemic potential of SARS-related coronaviruses, the FCS of human ENaC—an FCS known to be efficiently cleaved by host furin present in the target location (epithelial cells) of an important target organ (lung), of the target organism (human)—might be a rational, if not obvious, choice of FCS to introduce into a virus to alter its infectivity, in line with other work performed previously."
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2202769119
You should just read the book. It's not very convincing. The most likely explanation for the lack of interest in identifying the origins is primarly a lack of data. Speculating about conspiracies does not help the discussion, either.
Meanwhile the natural sources hypothesis has made one prediction not found yet (animal zero) and the lab leak has made two. Unfortunately, judgements about this are made difficult because "relative believability" is inherently subjective, so we can endlessly argue about the relative merits of competing hypotheses it is while the biggest suspect is under suspicion of having destroyed key data -- because they did suppress information in the early stages (and are refusing credible audits now). Meanwhile, entropy is happening making further revelations from bioinformatics progressively unlikely. Shrug.
Are there not?
My point is that it's really impossible to run a loosely organized large-scale conspiracy. There are too many ways for the conspiracy to fall apart.
Few scientist are the learned aristocrats of before who did not depend on grant money to live comfortable lives.
I linked it above, but aside from the fact that every other pandemic we've seen came about the same way, there's a ton of specific evidence from this pandemic:
https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g...
Including the timeline/locations of the earliest cases:
https://zenodo.org/record/6299600#.YjSWqDUxmUk
One thing the lab leak crew haven't been able to answer is how there could possibly be two different lineages at the market -- which you'd 100% expect from multiple spillover but is essentially impossible if your working theory is that an infected lab worker brought it to the market.
To be honest, I hadn't even encountered the idea that lab employees were what, selling infected animals at the market? Is this a real thing people are arguing? Who even comes up with this stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu
By “came about the same way”, I’m assuming you mean “by zoonotic transfer”. But the 1977 Russian flu pandemic is now widely believed to have been a lab leak, or a vaccine trial that went wrong.
So your claim is false.
The comment is offering "testimony of conversion" which is not scientific.
I would argue that continuing to state what you have here qualifies as disinformation, and think HN should remove it immediately, lest HN become yet another breeding ground of this kind of anti-intellectual memetic drivel.
When and where were those two predictions published? Can you give a link?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8&t=178s
Like, without the Thanos thingy, iron man is not a bloody hero, he is a villain. He is responsible for so much death and destruction it's not even funny. Black Mamba, killer. Black panther ? Maintains in place a political system that clearly allows any psychopath to access absolute power. Hulk, a time bomb. Thor ? He let his genocidal brother of the hook as soon as he is nice for 2 minutes. Spiderman ? Give an deadly bot swarm to the first father figure that smiles at him. Dr Strange ? Accept the request to GHB the planet and almost destroys it because a kid ask for it for 30 seconds.
It's a well known trope in sups stories, but for some reasons a lot of viewers really believes they are heroes. Even as a kid I though Batman was stupid for spending times fighting one criminal at a time with all his money.
Now, we are seeing a lot of this in today's IRL world.
Progress is saving you by giving you drugs for all the diseases it increases: diabetes, cancer, obesity, hormonal dysfunctions, etc. It's giving you a car so that you can you can go work in a remote place you would never have to work to without progress. It gives you software to organize your day to fit all the thing you would not have to do without progress.
Ok, it's tongue in cheek. I love progress.
But still.
The only thing we should care to do at this point is learn as much as we can about where the virus originated. Everything else makes the task of finding the origin harder.
I've heard enough bullshit passed off as "it's just common sense" that anytime I hear someone use that as an argument, I take it to mean they don't have any argument other than the random thoughts rattling around in their head.
That's not to say I don't think the hypothesis didn't have some merit. But I could just as easily "it's just common sense" the other side of the argument, too.
Embarrassing one of the world's superpowers is broadly seen as an undesirable thing to do.
Ergo, scientists producing findings backing up the hypothesis will find plenty of opponents whose first and only job is to discredit them in any way possible, from denying their papers publication (looking at you, ResearchGate) to publicly attacking them on social media (Dr. Malone).
1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic
2) Unlike the nuclear analogy in the article, pandemic virus outbreaks happen naturally, and fairly frequently. Combined with the huge increase in global travel, when one does happen it can be around the world in every airport before anyone has even identified it.
So in the big picture this type of outbreak seems inevitable, not anomalous or inherently preventable.
Understanding the origin, either by cross-species origination or a laboratory containment breach, is indeed important and significant and should be pursued, but I also understand why the search for that answer isn't at the top of the 24-hour news cycle.
Came or not from a lab, SynBio and gain of functions experiments have the potential of re-doing this of way worse.
So basically the only truly important response that is not damage containment is to prevent this from happening (or happen again).
Honestly beside fringe groups I don’t see any initiatives happening, if it was up to me I’d kick gain of function experiments into the same realm as chemical weapons.
The question is how much incremental risk do these activities expose us to, what is the cost/benefit of curtailing them, and what can we feasibly curtail. The risks are what they are, and while we might be misjudging them, knowing the origin of a single event is not especially helpful in recalibrating.
Nature breeds extremely serious viruses all by herself; a depressing possibility here is that humans just don't have that much influence over the risk of another pandemic no matter what we do.
If only we had responded this way to the virus.
Once we identified and sequenced the virus, knowing the origin wasn't going to change how many people were on ventilators in hospitals.
I've seen Rand Paul credibly grilling Fauci on this issue a number of times and each time, the propaganda machine on reddit came out to damage control for Fauci.
The larger problem, beyond whether we funded this or not, whether or not it was a bat, is that the media and leaders in the government have repeatedly shown themselves to be completely undeserving of trust and so you're left guessing what the truth is with whatever limited information you have access to.
The man is a non-practicing eye doctor who pretends to medical knowledge he doesn’t have.
He's very credible on the discussions I referred to. Fauci basically sat there squirming and splitting hairs and playing semantic games to weasel his way out of admitting the NIH's involvement in the research going on at the Wuhan lab. My guess is you have some ideological axe to grind against Rand Paul or the right, that's just a guess, I could be wrong.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
You list some reasons, and I have in my mind a different reason.
There was a media blackout on the lab leak hypothesis because China put the kibosh on it, and since the US is dependent on Chinese exports for healthcare, PPE, defense and other critical supply lines, we did not want to piss them off.
Direction to the media for this blackout came from the US State Dept, and Mike Pompeo confirmed as much in semi-public comments that I will link if I ever find them again.
edit: this isn't the source I was thinking of, and it fingers the IC not State. I will keep looking https://www.newsweek.com/mike-pompeo-intel-officials-wuhan-l...
I have the opposite opinion.
If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread. That could have saved millions of lives.
We spent the first several months of the pandemic under the belief that it wasn't airborne. This ended up being false.
If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe and continuing without appropriate safeguards puts us at great risk.
But that still doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic. That's coulda-woulda-shoulda reasoning.
I think the point is that neither of those would have had an effect on the pandemic. By the time it was major news in the US, it was too late for any of that to matter in terms of what to do about this pandemic. Not the next one, or our future relations with China, but with this pandemic.
B) I still believe that it would have been important. If it escaped from a lab, then those working in the lab could potentially have important information to share with the world about it. E.g. is it airborne, how much does it mutate, etc. They would have been studying it for a reason.
Try to extrapolate to what they would act like if it did leak from a lab.
If you got a different impression than this message, blame wherever you get your news from.
> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
It's hard to get more direct than that. It wasn't just about preserving supply for healthcare workers, high-level government officials were explicitly stating that masks were not effective for the general public.
Fortunately we have archives of all this stuff, as many statements (like this one) were later deleted.
You will also note that in the early pandemic, it was completely unclear that non-N95 masks, such as surgical masks (let alone cotton masks) would have a positive benefit. That changed later on, of course.
That statement reflected the best information available at the time, but it was designed to be as simple and actionable as possible, not to communicate highly-technical nuance.
I of course knew that was BS from the get-go. But nonetheless they did say it.
https://time.com/5794729/coronavirus-face-masks/
> Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.
However, when you have a limited supply of masks, it's impossible to give them out to every potentially-infected person, so saving them for high-risk people (like healthcare professionals, who also have the highest risk of becoming infected themselves) is still rational.
The debates about masks in the west, even after production ramped up, were a consequence of the initial confusing messages from officials. I've never seen it debated in Asia where they had masks available from the start.
This wasn't the first rodeo for SE Asia, scars of past pandemics has made the response here much more automatic, orderly and effective.
I think also supplies of masks etc were much more robust here because they were already worn in daily life due to pollution, normal sickness, etc and a massive medical tourism industry that was about to be shutdown and have their supplies made available.
- Jerome Adams, former US Surgeon General, M.D.
Airborne/aerosol transmission was only acknowledged by the WHO and CDC in May of 2021, over a year after the pandemic was declared. And taking that long to acknowledge it makes me think it wasn't just a strategic lie to preserve the supply of respirators for medical staff.
and when the initial scientific articles about COVID air spreading (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article) came out, many policy makers were truly terrified of making announcements that would cause worldwide panic.
The new coronavirus is likely spreading through the air to some degree, the top U.S. infectious disease official said on Friday, one day after the World Health Organization urged further studies on the ways the virus is transmitted.
“Still some question about aerosol but likely some degree of aerosol,” Anthony Fauci, the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said by video during a panel session at a COVID-19 conference organized by the International AIDS Society.
Fauci on Thursday had said it was a “reasonable assumption” that airborne transmission was occurring even though there was not a lot of solid evidence behind it. The WHO urged more studies on the issue.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-meetin...
Tons of work has gone into weaponizing smallpox, for example. It's a non-trivial thing, even though smallpox is technically already a virus that transmits via aerosol. Many viruses will exist in saliva, and will happily transmit through direct contact, but won't transmit well via the air (mononucleosis comes to mind).
In the early days China even claimed even that this thing is NOT contagious - and yet they already started isolating patients at this time.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00974-w
It seemed pretty obvious it was aerosol but not proven early on/suppressed for reasons.
Unfortunately, special interests (hospitals and other medical groups) had an incentive (security of their own access to masks) to mis-state the facts.
Even if it wasn’t a lab leak, it could have been. So whether it was or was not should not change your opinion about the danger of this type of research.
The lesson here is not “we need to prove it was a lab leak,” the lesson is “we need better visibility inside China.” Which is also true for viruses that arise naturally inside China.
Do you think that if you could prove with total certainty that it was a lab leak in 2019, that would change China’s approach to secrecy in the future?
> If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe and continuing without appropriate safeguards puts us at great risk.
Do you think we can stop secret viral research in China if they want to do it?
One of my frustrations with the “lab leak theory” is that it seems to cause fuzzy thinking about future preparedness.
We can’t control other nations and we can’t stop natural viral evolution. Future preparedness is the same as past preparedness: detect and respond. We just did a bad job of it with COVID-19. The lesson is: do a better job.
The WIV was conducting research with US financial and technical support. The lab in question regarding a potential leak was funded in part to look for early signs of outbreaks.
If there was a lab leak and it was inadvertently caused by this lab, would you suggest that we continue to fund and provide support with no changes?
> One of my frustrations with the “lab leak theory” is that it seems to cause fuzzy thinking about future preparedness.
I can't speak to what you've seen elsewhere, but future preparedness should involve more transparency, safeguards that samples are being tested with the right safety levels and actual independent oversight.
It seems crazy to continue funding a bad faith actor without those conditions.
Really? Is diplomacy dead? I guess you can probably say "we can't absolutely control other nations" but nations don't even absolutely control themselves.
We could probably start by not funding exactly that, not sending our scientists there, not openly exchanging these processes and techniques with them… if they aren’t going to be reliable and upstanding stewards.
Of course there are longer term and big-picture consequences if it was a lab leak. Which is why I said it was important to research and understand the origin. I just get why it wasn't top priority during the actual pandemic response.
Edit: And of course there are geopolitical implications. I think the same point applies, at the time the focus was on the response and avoiding inciting a political battle over something that wouldn't have a near-term benefit.
You're assuming that the lab "designed" it like a new vehicle engine complete with horsepower and torque specs.
Even given it was produced in a lab through chimeras and serial passage then they still wouldn't have known what they had. They wouldn't have known its characteristics in a human population. They wouldn't have known how long its incubation period was, or when peak symptoms and peak transmissibility happened, they wouldn't have known its virulence, or its R0 in a human population or pretty much anything. They'd might have receptor binding assays against the human ACE-2 receptor. That knowledge and $4.25 will buy you a latte, but it won't predict the trajectory of a pandemic.
And why aren't you annoyed at the coverup that China is doing of its zoonotic origins and that China isn't cleaning up all of the trafficking in live animals like palm civets and racoon dogs? We know SARS-CoV-1 happened, and there was no BSL4 lab to blame it on, so it was definitely zoonotic, yet still fairly unexplained, and nothing serious was done to prevent it from happening again. Now the US is blaming the WIV lab and China is feeding its domestic population propaganda about how the US did it, and still nothing is being done to address the mechanism that we know created SARS-CoV-1. There's still a known virological time bomb there that nobody is doing anything about.
And the reason why China wants to cover up the zoonotic origins and kick the can down the road is that it can use the lab leak theory to push the domestic propaganda that the US did, along with avoiding the political costs of clamping down on the animal trade. And there will be a political cost to doing that. Imagine if in 2009 that the H1N1 pandemic happened in a US pig farm and was 100 times worse, and then Obama tried to ban bacon to prevent a future pandemic.
What??? I honestly expect more from HN readers than blatant china-apologists.
OF COURSE it changes the consequences! We tell China to hand over all research and distribute it to scientists around the world so that research doesn’t start from ground 0. If it could have accelerated understanding of the virus by several months, imagine how many lives could have been saved!
Instead China deleted all their files and kept quiet. They literally don’t care about millions of deaths.
Of course we should research the origin and, if a research lab was the source, take action to prevent it happening again. I'm not saying there should be no consequences, just countering the article which comes off as "why isn't this the number one priority??"
The only reason we can't find evidence because other countries wouldn't collaborate, for obvious reasons. Racists are trying to blame China because of lack of competence of their leaders.
There's the exact reason "why it wasn't a media fixation": people calling anyone a racist for thinking bad of China.
"China said so, so it must be true."
[1]https://i.imgur.com/u6KABa5.png
The ONS is still doing random sampling and extrapolating to say how many people in the country are infected. "Around 1.7m people in the UK had coronavirus in the week ending 18 June" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51768274
So strangely, the grossly unscientific propaganda effort that was the Proximal Origins paper may have had the reverse effects, at least, it had on me.
Anyone contributing to this virology conspiracy (why they were put in charge to lead the investigation and theory building, and not the way more qualified biosecurity experts?), including voluntarily, like Angie Rasmussen, has Chinese propaganda tainted blood on their hands.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711/figures/1
See the RF1 and RM1 in the bottom chart? Sars-like bat coronaviruses from Hubei Province!
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201206204844/https://www.scien...
That said, it's no surprise that SARS-CoV-2 first emerged in a city, since it spreads most effectively in dense crowds. Even if spillover occurred in a small village, it's unlikely that enough people would die for anyone to notice until the virus reached a dense city--the virus's IFR isn't that high, and people die of other respiratory diseases every day. There's just no specific reason to expect that city would be Wuhan.
SARS-1 also emerged in a city far from the bat caves; but in that case, infected animals sold in markets there were identified, and the supply chain for those animals led back to likely bat spillover regions. For SARS-CoV-2, no such evidence has yet been found, despite much greater effort to search. That's not proof of unnatural origin, and there are other viruses for which the proximal host isn't known (e.g. Ebola); but that's different from both SARS-1 and MERS.
Doesn't that mean COVID19 occurring naturally in Hubei is highly unlikely ?
Most people who believe SARS-CoV-2 arose by natural zoonosis propose something similar to SARS-1's wildlife trafficking conduit. It's also possible that a human was infected elsewhere, and then traveled to Wuhan and seeded the pandemic--the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is highly stochastic until the case count gets big, so they wouldn't necessarily have seeded other clusters along the way. It's all pretty mysterious though, much more so than the emergence of the two previous coronavirus human pathogens (SARS-1 and MERS).
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
> Since the middle of last year, Li's postgraduate thesis has been circulated online as purported evidence that a coronavirus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 could have been infecting humans as early as 2012.
> Some also believe the paper provides circumstantial evidence for broader allegations that WIV had captured, studied and conducted "gain of function" experiments on viruses found in the mine, including RaTG13.
> First identified in 2016, RaTG13 shares 96.2% of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, according to a paper released by Shi and other researchers early in February 2020, just weeks after the first COVID-19 cases had been identified in Wuhan.
For the conspiracy-minded, I'd note that the WIV had published a subset of RaTG13's genome pre-pandemic, enough for others to identify the similarity. So they pretty much had to publish the rest of the genome post-pandemic, since it was obvious they had something interesting. The WIV used to have a public database of viral genomes, but it went offline around Sep 2019. They cite "hacking attempts" as the reason, but still haven't reinstated it in any form.
I'd personally guess that the Chinese government doesn't know whether SARS-CoV-2 arose naturally or unnaturally, and doesn't want to know--their preferred story (imported into China on frozen food) is near-certainly false, so no truth can benefit them. It's very hard to say though, all pretty mysterious. There are significant unexplored paths for investigation within reach of American subpoena though, e.g. in any cloud services used by the WIV for genomic data.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
> From 2012 to 2015, WIV researchers identified as many as 293 coronaviruses in and around the mine. (...) The institute in November 2020 disclosed the existence of eight other "SARS-type" coronavirus samples taken from the site.
> Some also believe the paper provides circumstantial evidence for broader allegations that WIV had captured, studied and conducted "gain of function" experiments on viruses found in the mine, including RaTG13.
Wow, thank you I haven't seen this before. If true, that's smoking gun stuff.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/
What EA_itsinthegame posted was a series of disconnected statements that only form a cohesive whole by virtue of the layout rules in a html rendering engine. It's certainly not anything approaching a criticism of the tweet thread as it never even manges to quote from it.
That got me laughing out loud in the elevator hahahaha, love it.
Which says:
> According to the latest COVID Symptom Study app figures, there are currently 1,472 daily new cases of COVID in the UK on average over the two weeks up to 04 July 2020 (excluding care homes) [*]. The data suggests no decline from last week (1,445 cases). The latest figures were based on the data from almost 3 million users, 11,639 swab tests done between 21 June to 04 July (a full regional breakdown can be found here).
The 241K number is total gibberish. The 7-day average of new cases in the UK topped out at about 214K at the beginning of January, at the top of their Omicron wave, and has been nowhere near that since. It's around 13K right now.
How are your link and quote related to the « 200k+ cases per day in June 2022 » claim?
If you don’t know yourself, asking GP won’t help.
Is it because they should have removed the "More detail on the analysis" link to a no-longer-updated analysis and not removing the link invalidates the latest results somehow?
Or is there anything in that analysis of the results as of two years ago that discredits also everything that came later?
The "Official estimates of incidence of new PCR-positive cases" published by the Office for National Statistics in the latest release of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey [1] add up to 160k per day in the UK for the week from 28 May to 3 June.
The official estimate of people testing positive for COVID-19 has increased strongly since then - almost doubling from 900k for the week 27 May to 2 June to 1740k for the week 11 to 18 June.
A 50% increase in the number of daily new infections in three weeks doesn't seem so implausible and when the official estimate of daily new cases for this week gets published it may not be exactly 241k but it won't be much less. Definitely not an order of magnitude less!
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
Edit: by the way, the official estimate of incidence (daily new cases) from the ONS was over 650k for the week 13 to 19 March.
You can choose to talk about whatever you want but given the 200k figure and April reference it’s quite obvious that they are talking about the total number of infections in the UK - not just the laboratory-confirmed count.
I assume it's based on the official surveys:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
"Overall, it is estimated 1.7 million people in private households across the UK had the virus last week – the highest figure since the end of April."
With less than 20k cases per day you would need to accumulate them for 3 months to get 1.7 million cases.
If you call yourself a "scientist" you have an ethical duty to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Perhaps not in the formal sense of a doctor's Hippocratic oath, but in the tradition of Galileo and Copernicus.
Interest in developing and deploying nuclear power dramatically declined after Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl incidents. This lead to an increased reliance on carbon-based energy sources like Coal and Natural Gas, likely killing hundreds of thousands over the years.
I think skittish virologists rightly concluded that a lab-leak mea culpa would have a similar effect on virology and perhaps broader medical research. The author disagrees, but history has shown us what happens.
If Three Mile Island and Chernobyl had been covered up and left to conspiracies the earth would be several degrees cooler right now.
Other people, including the voting public, have the job of determining policy based on what they find.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
There will always be cavemen that will fear what's beyond the cave exit, but they are powerless, albeit vocal, and are not responsible for the stagnation of nuclear research.
It doesn't help solve the crisis.
The article makes the comparison with a nuclear bomb. This is a bad comparison. If we were attacked by a sentient creature, we could reason with it and mitigate further damage or escalation.
In the case of a virus, it's good to know to prevent future pandemics maybe, and there is an academic interests, but it doesn't help with the current situation.
It does help with our current situation of being very vulnerable to highly contagious respiratory diseases. COVID is probably never going away. To have another one join if this could have been prevented would be far worse for us.
If we had 100% solid proof SARS-COV-2 originated in a lab, it would not change our approach to detecting or mitigating future outbreaks. We always have to prepare for either.
It’s not like it never occurred to anyone before that dangerous infectious agents could escape a lab. It was a well-known possibility and was incorporated into U.S. federal pandemic preparedness planning since at least the George W Bush administration.
An accidental leak from a lab must still be detected, and once detected, public health measures initiated. The procedures are the same as for a natural origin.
The fundamental lesson from COVID-19 is that we cannot let our guard down. The Trump administration did in many ways, and so were not able to detect or respond fast enough.
It was Trump’s fault!! /s
So what you’re saying is we should be more concerned with defense and accept that viruses will be engineered. I don’t disagree with this line of thinking but I also believe we must be on the offensive too. We can’t just accept that labs will build viruses.
Part of the problem with the covid pandemic is how much we let our guard down. For example, the Global Health Security and Biodefense unit — responsible for pandemic preparedness — was established in 2015 by Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice [0].
This was then disbanded under Trump and its head Timothy Ziemer, top White House official in the NSC for leading U.S. response against a pandemic, left the administration [1].
Jon Oliver has a good segment on why we need to focus on preventing future pandemics [2].
[0]: https://time.com/5806558/administration-officials-fight-crit...
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v-U3K1sw9U
Usually, there's desire for media to share scientific evidence in ways that are engaging to the public to recognize our best scientific conclusions.
What I'm taking from your portrayal is scientists know best what ~"helps the current situation."
Despite the origin being important, and that the public wants to know about it science doesn't want evidence on this matter and doesn't want it covered by the media or for it to influence the thinking of the public.
These seem like political behaviors, not scientific ones.
This is extremely naive. Do you really believe it won’t happen all over again?
The real crisis is not Covid. It’s how easy something even worse than Covid could be started today.
It doesn't help solve the crisis and it doesn't change attitudes toward gain-of-function research. The pandemic itself, regardless of origin, highlighted the possible consequences. Even without a connection to research - and even more so with the mere possibility - it heightened concern about lab safety, and made the risk/reward calculations around GoF research even less favorable than they already had been. The community of people capable of performing or funding such research was already on top of it - again, regardless of origin. Public finger-pointing is only likely to rile up nationalist sentiments which would interfere with establishing better procedures and protocols governing virological research.
The lawyers and diplomats have some work to do, but (especially in light of today's news) I suggest that the rest of us including the media have some higher priorities for how to spend our time/energy.
Ahh yes, definitely the mission statement of a reputable source.
Either they're lying to cover up a lab leak, or they're lying up to but not including about lab leak.
Multiple near-nuclear events happened during the cold war, averted several times only by a single Soviet soldier using his common sense. We didn't find out about that until much much later.
Give it a few decades, and we can hope to find out.
Gulf on Tonkin, anyone?
It's not that I don't care, it's that it's not a fight I believe can be won this decade.
Even if this one wasn’t a lab leak, the next one very well could be. The risk/reward profile of that sort of research is insanely unfavorable.
This seems like a conversation we can not have, if China has any say in it. And for a natural origin spillover event, it sure wants to have its say...
At the very least it's an indictment on our media which should be pointing out these curious coincidences. Instead I think they have other motives.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/03/australia-finds-new-markets-...
Power cuts later that fall: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58733193
>A lab worker was bitten and infected by a mouse infected with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant at a high-biosecurity facility in Taipei.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
> Republic of China
Most Taiwanese would love to change that name, but China is threating war if they do.
From there, news articles speculate that "this will add credibility to the lab leak theory [if confirmed]" and this "gives legs to Wuhan lab leak theory," which is hardly conclusive.
I don't see how this incident would indicate that SARS-CoV-2 initially came out of a lab. It demonstrates a possible vector out of a lab, but I'm guessing that's already a well-known vector when dealing with lab animals, and it doesn't provide any evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was actually developed in a lab or initially spread from one.
Look at what variants like Omicron BA.5 and BA.4 have evolved into, they are quite possibly the most infectious and dangerous air spread pathogens known to man. These didn't come from a lab, we cooked them up by dropping all mitigations and pretending the pandemic was over instead of quashing this virus for good.
But as soon as people take off masks, it starts spreading again. It's also getting less politically viable when ~70% of Americans have had covid (the CDC estimated 60% in late April).
This means nothing. The virus reinfects people with existing immunity. For example Senator Wicker from MS is on his _third_ infection: https://www.magnoliastatelive.com/2022/06/13/senator-roger-w... Two of those infections have been in the last four months alone!
We have to use NPIs like masking to stop the virus from spreading in order to stop new variants from evolving. There is no herd immunity. There is no natural immunity.
It's looking more and more likely that this is why most people are getting reinfected. Last month OAS made the news, just not by name: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/328102
> Vaccines against the coronavirus may impair the body’s ability to produce a key type of antibody, thus potentially limiting the immune system’s defenses against mutated strains of the virus, a new study suggests.
> The study draws upon data collected during Moderna’s randomized control trial for its mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, from July 2020 through March 2021.
When you say “we”, who do you mean exactly? How did they cook them?
Can you explain why you believe the pandemic is not over?
The entire population of the western world. Every time COVID-19 infects a person and replicates it has the chance to mutate or introduce errors. If those errors in replication increase the fitness of the virus it will evolve to become a more powerful variant (i.e. gain of function). By continuing to allow hundreds of thousands of new cases and infections to occur daily we are increasing the chance of variants evolving. The _only_ way to stop variants is to stop transmission, period.
> Can you explain why you believe the pandemic is not over?
We are still averaging over 100k new cases a day in the US. And that's with almost all of the population using rapid tests that aren't counted in that measurement.
"they are more transmissible, more likely to evade immunity"
Intrinsic severity of the virus doesn't change the fact it is the most transmissible virus we have ever seen in the world.
Even if it is intrinsically less severe than previous variants, because we are allowing it to spread to EVERYONE in the world we are seeing a much worse impact. Did you miss that in the US alone we've had over 160k deaths from COVID-19 just in the last 6 months of this year? No other virus has had this level of death in the same timeframe.
It's not. Measles, for example, is more transmissible.
> No other virus has had this level of death in the same timeframe.
Not true. Spanish Flu, for example, killed more both in raw numbers and proportionally in a similar time frame.
Here's a helpful infographic: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-of-pandemics-deadli...
This is impossible. You'd kill the host together with the virus.
Contrast this with the United States where we have so far had over _one million deaths_ from COVID-19. In the same timespan China has seen just a few thousand deaths.
If China can do it, why can't the US?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu
We really need to come to terms with the fact that whether we research them or not, there are going to be increasing numbers of pandemic-capable viruses spreading in human populations.
So why does this intuition fail when the virus passes through a lab? The 1946-1957 flu virus was indeed natural, but the 1977 pandemic of that same virus was near-certainly not--without the activities of the scientists involved, the virus would probably have stayed safely in the freezer forever. The scientists also had the option not to put it in the freezer in the first place, in which case it would have probably just gone extinct. That scientific activity almost certainly caused those deaths.
Maybe it's just that one death is a tragedy, and 700k deaths are a statistic? When the last smallpox death (so far, at least) occurred following a lab accident in the UK, the director of the lab in question killed himself out of guilt, even though that lab was basically in compliance with the standards of the time. Perhaps he just had an unusually sensitive conscience; but I wonder if the scale of death in the 1977 flu pandemic (or this pandemic now, if it turns out to be unnatural) is simply so great that people can't engage with it, and their usual moral mechanisms just shut down.
In engineering school, we're taught from the first week that our work has the potential to kill people, and that it's our fault if it does. If a structural engineer responded to a building collapse simply by explaining that buildings are very important for society and that many people would die of exposure without them, then his colleagues would be mystified, and perhaps concerned for his mental health. We're expected to study and learn from our failures, in order not to repeat them. The argument that "X has benefits, therefore we can ignore its costs completely" is so ridiculous that I've never heard it spoken.
Yet a vocal subset of virologists are somehow able to make just that argument for their discipline, shrugging off the deaths they cause as a "natural" cost of doing business, unworthy of study or thought--and a significant fraction of the public accepts it! I find this strange, and terrifying. Don't you?
AI is at the "hire and fire until they get a sycophant" stage in the development of proper ethical review methods.
Here's neurobiology at UNAM: http://www.inb.unam.mx/index.php/comite-de-etica-en-la-inves... and here's a bioethics committee in the university of Guadalajara: http://www.cusur.udg.mx/es/investigacion/comite-de-etica-en-... and here's a Ethics committee for the Shanghai Clinical Research Center: http://www.scrcnet.org/iec_en.asp
You might argue that these achieve little in practice, and due to corruption amount to nothing more than fig leafs. But that doesn't invalidate the argument because AI researchers don't even wear that much!
So it's not clear at all that gain of function would have been able to create a Virus like Sars-Cov-2 out of a hypothetical bat virus. And there is no evidence any such research has been going on. Nor is there any evidence the virus has passed through the Wuhan lab in question at all.
This is why free speech is important, it is impossible to rely on “fact checkers”.
Also I don't recall the specific fact check messages but if they were in line with "there's no hard evidence of a lab leak" I'd say that's still pretty accurate.
No speech should be censored.
That being said, social media sites flagging posts is very different from outright censorship. It's not uncommon for someone to actually get censored/removed from a site claiming its censorship over discussing some topic when really it was a history of dipshit behavior and flagrant TOS violations.
so, the vast majority of social media then? what makes this issue so special? why did all of the major social media networks censor/"flag" anyone publicly speculating only certain speculations about this issue?
Censorship is bad even when legally permissible. And we should still fight corporations acting unethically even when the law is on their side.
What they deem outright information may in fact be true. And even allowing clear misinformation (1+1=3) is important. We need people to learn to process information not protect them from it. Using 1+1=3 analogy, wouldn’t you want people to rally around tooling people to learn math?
Flagging misinformation is attempting to educate people.
No it wasn't. The media often takes the most extreme case in order to denigrate the whole side that they don't like.
First, reporters are incapable of discovering this information on their own. They just don't have the tools. Investigatory bodies do, and reporters would have to wait.
Secondly, there were multiple plausible ideas about what could have happened. The drum was beaten on only one of them. Trump got caught with his pants down because as with everything else he's ever been a part of, he was woefully unprepared and out of his depth.
Third, and tying in with the first point, the more important story to virtually everyone was not how the first people were infected, but what the response and fallout of the infections were.
So again, you had a bunch of clueless, embarrassed political partisans who got caught with their pants down, and their base ate up the blame-shifting because of their xenophobic tendencies.
Should the scientific community rally to the opposition of the current unpopular president? That doesn't seem like a good idea.
And this last point is a fascinating common non sequitor. That's not even what happened; we had the media clamoring that it came from that market and any talk of the lab is racist and/or xenophobic. Do you think any investigation of the lab would have jeopardized the public? Worse than the visceral eating bats (i.e. selling bats for consumption)?
Think Alex Jones talking about nanobots in the vaccines, well now you can't be taken seriously with any vaccine related discourse or you get lumped in with the nanobots, 5g crowd.
Then it turns out that that is precisely the type of research the Wuhan lab does regularly.
And then when our prime minister merely suggested an investigation, China put punitive tariffs on billions of dollars of our exports to them.
Because clearly, that’s how innocent governments with nothing to hide act.
Immediate, massive retaliation for merely suggesting that someone should look into things.
But everybody should believe the Chinese government! They told you: it came from a pangolin in the market. Why would they lie?
They lied about the reason for the punitive tariffs, sure, making up some insane story about centrally orchestrated “dumping”.
Okay, so they lied. But not about Wuhan! That would be unethical…
If we wait until the next pandemic hits, we will be months or years behind the curve, trying to understand it and develop treatments. Millions more people will die because we'll have been caught on our back foot.
Lucky for the human race, viruses are statistically more likely to mutate, over time, in particular ways. So it's possible to make pretty good guesses about where future would mutations might occur. So if we deliberately create those mutants in a laboratory, we can study which strains look particularly virulent and/or dangerous.
Yes, there ARE risks to this strategy, in terms of lab leaks. But the vast majority of virologists and epidemiologists have known for decades that deadly worldwide pandemics of novel Coronaviruses are an inevitably in the 21st century... It's just a matter of time. We will definitely see several more pandemics, at least as damaging as COVID-19, befor the century is out.
So even without a lab leak, we would only save ourselves a couple more years before nature did the job, itself... And it will keep happening, over and over with new Coronaviruses, for the foreseeable future. The human race can do very little to slow it, let alone stop it.
First off -- and this should be enough by itself -- the research the Wuhan lab did hasn't appeared to have helped in a material way to fight the COVID pandemic. So they gambled, lost, and there is nothing to show for it.
But that's not the insane bit. The truly insane bit is that over 20 million people died for this little "experiment" of theirs.
I'll try to come up with an analogy of how truly bonkers this is:
Imagine one day, a nuke unexpectedly blows up New York, and millions upon millions of people die. It's an ICBM of some sort, but not launched from an expected enemy launch site. Everyone assumes it must be a terrorist attack, which is then "confirmed" when rocket booster fragments are found near the launch site -- in the United States -- discovered to be two different models of rockets jury-rigged together. Clearly terrorists got their hand on a bomb and did whatever they could do to launch it! Problem solved.
... and then it turns out that the DHS has a program where they would build random combinations of boosters and upper stages together with mis-matched warheads, and launch them for "testing" to so that they could "learn what terrorists might do".
Clearly it wasn't terrorists, one of the DHS experiments went horribly wrong.
... and then instead of being horrified, people would justify this by saying: "If the DHS hadn't done these kinds of experiments, then we wouldn't be prepared for when terrorists launched a makeshift rocket! How would we know how to shoot one down? We need to learn these things before we are attacked!"
Meanwhile, millions are dead from the experiment -- not the terrorists. The DHS experiments of course did not lead to better missile defence. The rocket wasn't shot down. Not to mention that that's not what terrorists generally do. Or they may not even be able to do this kind of thing anyway.
But this is precisely the type of thing Wuhan was doing. They were playing with the biological equivalent of global nuclear armageddon, and they weren't even doing it in a BSL 4 lab! It's the equivalent of the DHS rocket experiments building nuclear-tipped rockets out in the open with random local contractors in the same way SpaceX is building their star ship. They were doing experiments to combine SARS and flu-like viruses in ways that might never happen in the wild. They weren't just accelerating natural processes to find out what might happen, they were doing entirely novel things that's only possible in a lab.
You can't possibly claim that without being a qualified expert in the field. I'm not, but I have asked friends who are--and they're quite firm that this type of experimental research (1) did help speed up our COVID-19 response, and save lives, and (2) is critical to prevent future outbreaks from becoming much, much worse.
I'm not asking for journal cites or anything, but I am curious: What's the source of your conclusion that gain-of-function research didn't help prevent the COVID-19 pandemic from becoming even worse?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02903-x
But if you look at the actual examples they provide, they're incredibly weak. Remdesivir wasn't discovered due to GoF research, and wasn't tested in humans solely due to any result from GoF research; but GoF research did provide some of the early evidence that prompted the first human trials. Unfortunately remdesivir also shows little evidence of efficacy in humans:
https://www.science.org/content/article/very-very-bad-look-r...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-recommends-against-use-of-g...
They also cite minor contributions to some novel vaccine candidates that as far as I can tell haven't progressed to humans. And these examples are from Ralph Baric's lab; while he may have been reckless, his research was less controversial than the WIV's, working at higher BSL and with fewer novel pathogens. The WIV took significantly greater risks, and so far has literally zero practical benefit to show for it.
Virology in aggregate has clearly provided a benefit to humanity, in this pandemic and elsewhere. That's not the question, though. The deliberate search for enhanced potential human pandemic pathogens--including both laboratory gain-of-function on such pathogens, and sampling missions to remote sites to find new natural pathogens in areas that no other humans routinely visited, and thus that presented no obvious risk of natural spillover--is a tiny subset of virology.
We could ban that tiny subset, and we'd still have all our same vaccines, same anti-viral drugs, same tests, etc. If anyone tells you otherwise, then ask them for the evidence.
From Bloomberg:
When an international group of experts organized by the World Health Organization traveled to Wuhan, China, earlier this year to research the origins of the coronavirus that sparked the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, they visited the Baishazhou market, which is larger, but perhaps less well-known (internationally, at least) than the Huanan market, where many people initially believed the virus first jumped from wild animals to humans.
The research team was told only frozen foods, ingredients, and kitchenware were sold there. But a recently released study that had previously languished in publishing limbo showed, thanks to data meticulously collected over 30 months, that at least two vendors there regularly sold live wild animals, Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg also notes that one of the earliest recorded COVID-19 clusters in Wuhan [December 19th] involved a Huanan stall employee who traded goods back and forth between the two markets."
It seems likely to Goldstein that some authorities didn't want the presence of a thriving wildlife trade to become public knowledge. "It seems to me, at a minimum, that local or regional authorities kept that information quiet deliberately. It's incredible to me that people theorize about one type of cover-up," he said, likely referring to the hypothesis that the virus actually leaked from a nearby government-run lab, "but an obvious cover-up is staring them right in the face."
https://news.yahoo.com/virologist-suggests-coronavirus-origi...
It's Schrodinger's Argument. It's all of them and none of them and it always shifts depending on who you're talking to. So I've concluded it's the largest, dumbest motte-and-bailey argument there is.
But at least we can all agree, whatever it is, there's no practical lessons to be taken from it.
No, we can't all agree. On anything.
Given that the Chinese have shut down investigation, how would you expect anyone to tell you exactly how it happened?
> an accident in a laboratory or during a research field trip
Which, yes, is incredibly vague. I give them credit for at least ruling out the "Evil Chinese Scientists intentionally create and release deadly virus!" bullsh*t.
One plausible "lab" scenario: A baggage-hauling laborer caught the proto-COVID-19 virus in a bat-filled cave during a routine "collect samples of germs from bats" expedition, then unknowingly spread it back in Wuhan.
My opinion: For useful-fact-oriented folks, the Lab Hypothesis is mostly a tedious waste of time. For those motivated by hot-button emotions, attention-seeking, etc., the most lurid and cartoonish versions of the Lab Hypothesis are by far the best. If they can conjure such images in the minds of their audience - withOUT having to spell them out, for reality-checkers to attack - then all the better. Hence the remarkable scarcity of Lab Hypothesis explanations.
In this scenario, if the WIV's worker had never entered the cave, then the virus would quite possibly never have left the cave. Even if it would have been released later by an infected non-scientist, I'd always rather die later than sooner. (I've seen people arguing sooner is better, because it encourages pandemic preparedness; I guess that's true, in the same sense that reckless drivers encouraged development of automotive airbags. I've never seen a driver make that argument to the judge, though.)
So given the above, do you still think the WIV should have sent the worker into the cave? We're not talking about the whole of virology here, just a tiny subset of high-risk research that so far has provided no significant public benefit.
Even in this post opponents of the lab leak theory are still bringing up this bioweapons conspiracy - but I can't see a single lab leak proponent suggesting it's an engineered bioweapon.
The issue is the existence of this outlandish fringe theory was used to censor all reasonable discussion on the lab leak.
Source: my extended family
Interesting perspective. On the other hand, just like the comment below, I never saw a single person raise the lab leak theory as an alternative explanation to a naturally occurring disaster. It was always in the context of "COVID is a weapon to control and kill us".