This was known for two years. Markets are breeding grounds for zoonotic diseases. They often even jump from human to animal and back.
The real question is--how did the virus get to the live market?
The study accurately says, "While there is insufficient evidence to define upstream events, and exact circumstances remain obscure, our analyses indicate that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred via the live wildlife trade in China, and show that the Huanan market was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic."
"The sustained presence of a potential source of virus transmission into the human population in late 2019, plausibly from infected live mammals sold at the Huanan market, offers an explanation of our findings and the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The pattern of COVID-19 cases reported for the Huanan market, with the earliest cases in the same part of the market as the wildlife sales and evidence of at least two introductions (38), resembles the multiple cross-species transmissions of SARS-CoV-2 subsequently observed during the pandemic from animals to humans on mink farms (46), and from infected hamsters to humans in the pet trade (47). There was an extensive network of wildlife farms in western Hubei province, including hundreds of thousands of raccoon dogs on farms in Enshi prefecture, which supplied the Huanan market (48). This region of Hubei contains extensive cave complexes housing Rhinolophus bats, which carry SARSr-CoVs (49). SARS-CoV-1 was recovered from farmed masked palm civets from Hubei in 2003 and 2004 (20). The animals on these farms (nearly 1 million) were rapidly released, sold, or killed in early 2020 (48), apparently without testing for SARS-CoV-2 (7). Live animals sold at the market (Table 1) were apparently not sampled either. By contrast, during the SARS-CoV-1 outbreaks farms and markets remained open for over a year after the first human cases occurred, allowing sampling of viruses from infected animals (20).
The live animal trade and live animal markets are a common theme in virus spillover events (21–23, 50), with markets such as the Huanan market selling live mammals being in the highest risk category (51). The events leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic mirror the SARS-CoV-1 outbreaks from 2002-2004, which were traced to infected animals in Guangdong, Jiangxi, Henan, Hunan, and Hubei provinces in China (20). Maximum effort must now be applied to elucidate the upstream events that might have brought SARS-CoV-2 into the Huanan market, culminating in the COVID-19 pandemic. To reduce the risk of future pandemics we must understand, and then limit, the routes and opportunities for virus spillover."
> However, the observation that the preponderance of early cases were linked to the Huanan market does not establish that the pandemic originated there.
Sorry this is an unscientific conclusion. The lab leak is more plausible based on the animals required and known and proposed research at that facility. It's simply another polemic. Without information / data from the lab you cannot claim one is more probable.
Nope - HN is one of the worst 'smart' places on the internet for Covid discussion. Every single thread immediately devolves into completely ascientific conspiracy ranting.
This is also not limited to just COVID discussion either. Most things that aren't somehow related to day-to-day software development devolve into unsubstantiated, or ill-informed, "ranting."
Personally if I were constantly disappointed by a website I would take the extraordinary step of simply... not using that website anymore, rather than coming on that website and telling everybody how ill-informed they were. I always have been a bit odd though.
Labeling something as 'conspiracy ranting' is convenient low-brow tactic to dismiss a supported point of view without consideration. This is also a pattern on HN.
Ah yes, 'supported points of view' like half the comments in this thread talking about lab employees selling infected animals in the market? Or how we're "pretending" that Covid is a leading cause of death during a pandemic? Or how somehow Pfizer is implicated in the origin of Covid?
Another lazy rhetorical tactic, Association Fallacy. Not everyone is making all those claims, in fact I only made one: The lab leak is still a better explanation for the origin of COVID.
There’s a story on the front page currently about a lazy rhetorical tactic, wherein one calls out fallacies as if they were spells. You might find that interesting.
Nobody is "checking the details" in this thread - they're just wildly speculating based on their feelings and asserting that the absence of evidence about the virus originating at the WIV is very clearly suspicious...
Speaking generally, every single time a new study is discussed on HN, the first comment talks about how it doesn't do what it is supposed to. For e.g., a topic about "X cures cancer" has a comment that's at the very top that claims "No, X doesn't cure cancer, except in these narrow cases" and then sources the details in the paper.
That seems to me the right thing to do. HN does that very well.
If you read closer, you'll notice that it's not at all what is happening here. Maybe 1/10th of the comments are about the actual paper? Fewer? It's just mindless evidence-free conspiracy mongering including fun little subthreads about how you can't rule out that the US actually created the pandemic to punish China;
We are talking past each other. I’m speaking more generally since you’re talking about this entire community. But you have just this thread to point for an example.
IMHO, you can tell from the comments who actually read the linked paper, and who read only supposed debunkings of the paper on Substack/etc by Covid conspiracy theorists.
> The real question is--how did the virus get to the live market?
The chances are we'll never know, it may have spread through here (despite no real action to stop this form of trading from any of the wonderlfully eclectic groups still engaged in it).
> While there is insufficient evidence to define upstream events,
Also, we're not brave enough to say read the evidence it came from here. We're only brave enough to say it's the 'epicenter' of an early outbreak to keep from annoying those who don't co-operate anyway.
This lab was a joint venture of the French and Chinese. The French pulled out and sounded the alarm about how careless the Chinese were. So yeah it’s very plausible that such flagrant violations took place.
Yeah, they were meant to be largely banned since SARS1, the presence of raccoon dogs and foxes at the market in Wuhan is deeply problematic -- all of the people skeptical of China can still be skeptical!
They grow garlic with sewer water and the air is polluted because they're cranking out everything the world buys in suicide netted factories. China is a developing country, do you think government officials are going to go all around regulating wild life markets along with every other threat? They have the environmental and mental health concern of 1960's America.
1960s America led to 1970s America, which had a lot more concern for the environment. It's inevitable that as problems accumulate, people affected by them will want to do something about it.
1970's America wasn't anywhere near as poverty struck as China. It's really difficult to care about the world around you when you can't even take care at home.
In 1975 the US GDP was about $7500/yr per capita (in 2021 dollars). Today the Chinese GDP per capita is around $10k/yr (more like 19k accounting for purchasing power parity).
The 1975 US Household median income was ~$13,000 (approx $65,000-70,0000 in 2019 dollars) [0][1]
Chinese household median income is around $4,700-4,800 in 2021, with massive disparities between First world comparable regions such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin, and rust belt regions like Wuhan [2]. Even the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has noted that 600 million Chinese earn less that $140/month [3].
This of course leads to the larger discussion about GDP per capita being a weak metric to use when analyzing regional development, but in general China is by most standards still a developing middle income country with a (relatively) small and overperforming hinterland.
wildlife markets were an idea from Mao, because what else are you going to do when you have a population of hundreds of millions that are dying of starvation after colonial expansion and civil war?
But even if it had been intended as a stop gap, at this point its large industry. So if you wanted to "clean up" as in, "end" the wild meat market trade, you'd be ending a large, growing industry, that brings money and food to poor parts of the country that can't afford other foods. Additionally, you'd be crushing an industry that is actively bringing new foods to market that aren't available in other countries, but for which China may one day be the primary agricultural provider.
Not an easy ask for any country to do, let alone a developing one.
If you're asking for better regulation of these markets, then I am sure China will do so over time. But authoritarian countries will never be able to self regulate to the degree a rule-of-law country does. Authoritarianism breeds a "if you're not cheating, you're not trying" mentality that undermines regulatory attempts.
Live markets exist in China because there is low trust in the food supply. For many Chinese, they want to see the animal killed in front of them so they can make sure they're not getting ripped off.
Due to various policies, China is a relatively low-trust society. Of course, it's also low trust because ripping people off isn't necessarily seen as bad, it's seen as clever.
No, not even close to the same degree. If you told all your friends you sell ground beef at the farmers market but it was actually 50% beef 50% horse are they going to praise you for your cleverness or think you're an asshole?
That issue is why live markets exist cause no one there trusts the meat to be what what they say it is unless they can literally see it.
The labs janitor sold dead animals for a side hustle, cheaper then cremation and the lower caste is not properly educated about bacterias, viruses and bio hazards.
(Wild speculation - may contain novel truth contamination)
I don't believe this to be true. I consider the likelyhood that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the cause of this to be much higher than that the seafood market in wuhan was the cause and there's no reason to trust any media or NGO to be truthful in that regard.
The two are not mutually exclusive. For example, some "theories" say that a WIV employee took animals that had been used in experiments, and sold them at the market. I'm not suggesting this is actually what happened, just that there's plenty of room for involvement from both of these entities (or, perhaps, neither).
It's transparently obvious that the Market was first place where it began to spread in humans - so "neither" isn't an option. The Market was unequivocally involved.
The reason for the doubt is that it wasn't transparent nor obvious. The Chinese government retroactively censored the institute's publications, Fall 2019 job postings, staff listings, and internal discussion of new symptoms amongst certain researchers [1]. There is a possibility that there were a few earlier cases than the market ones which were covered up to conceal negligence at the institute.
It's just so silly -- we can do genomic analysis to figure out the lineage of every confirmed sample. "There's the possibility" is weasel wording that obscures the fact that there's literally no evidence for earlier cases.
I think a more likely lab leak via market theory is that an employee was exposed and then exposed others at the market. As I remember the market is between the lab and some public transit destinations. It would make sense to go through the market on the way home from work.
> As I remember the market is between the lab and some public transit destinations. It would make sense to go through the market on the way home from work.
You don't remember correctly. The WIV is ~15km from the market and there are multiple other markets nearer the WIV if employees were regularly 'shopping.
So when people were insisting the WIV was the source for all this time due to the type of work they were doing there, they really meant that the CCDC was the source even though the CCDC was doing entirely different (and lower level work)? You get why that's not very convincing and reeks of "god of the gaps" style arguments, right?
You find it more believable that it somehow made sense to sell animals infected with viruses for human consumption than someone made a mistake and got infected with a virus they were doing experiments on?
The Wuhan lab used to catch wild bats and take virus samples from them. It’s not too far fetched someone sold the same bats to the market or was infected and infected other people / living animals there.
There are more persons in a lab than only high qualified researchers. Cleaners for example. And one bat might not be much, but if your job is to dispose 20 or 50 of them and you can just go a few hundred meters and sell them to a vendor for a few bucks?
I don't say that is what actually happened there, I just think that this would be one possibility.
Actually yes. If someone is trading hundreds of live animals for meat on a weekly basis, and the animals aren't obviously seriously ill, why would you expect them to use any standard more rigorous than 'looks fine to me'?
Consider how things like hoof & mouth disease have ripped through agricultural herds in western countries, where there are much higher regulatory standards for food production. Diseases can spread fast before the symptoms become obvious.
I like how in their minds, changing the copy on a website is "changing the definition of a vaccine" and some deep dark conspiracy theory as if it's some binding legal framework and not a public comms platform.
Slightly off topic.
But what do you think of the "definition of recession"[1] debacle that is currently going on? Do you think this is similar to "changing the definition of a vaccine" that you mentioned?
I haven't followed it closely - but it does seem pretty similar. It's not like anything is 'triggered' when a recession is declared. And it's not like the economy is meaningfully better if you had quarterly growth of [-1%, -0.1%] vs. [-1.2%, 0.1%] -- even though by the two quarters rule, the first would be a recession and the second wouldn't.
It looks like NBER's definition of how they declare recessions has remained consistent, so I'd defer to them:
All of the companies that created the mRNA vaccines for COVID had already a few years of life, and those few years were all spent testing their vaccines.
It wasn't enough testing, and a large scale test wasn't economically viable. But they also weren't completely untested. (And guess what the world spent 6 months doing at some high death rate times? Yep, large scale testing them.)
Fair enough. Then let's go with: not properly tested and approved in alignment with tradition.
The rub for many was / is the quickness of the process in contrast with the cock-sureness of the narrative (i.e., don't worry about it...just trust us...). There was also the disconnect between "trust the science" vs limited data and the shutting down of any question. Real Science is fearless.
But the process was enough to bring sureness. You seem to have a problem with the process being non-traditional, but it was the obvious adaptation to get the same sureness on the shortest possible timeframe.
The data wasn't limited in any way.
It's funny, because I have the opposite criticism. We just let people die for 6 months because we refused to act on "we are sure it's safe, we are confident it will work" and waited to have complete certainty on both of those. If we just scaled the tests further and start paying the labs before we were completely sure the vaccines work (we just really, really expected them to). We could have tested them in less than a month, and vaccinated most of the more vulnerable people in less time than that.
But if we did that, we would be open to the possibility of one of the vaccines not working. We would need a lot of transparency to deal with that, and it looks like the population can't deal with quantified certainty in any way, just with the binary version of it.
> "You seem to have a problem with the process being non-traditional,"
Really? Because that's not what I said.
You can't change a process - especially not a medical one for 100s of millions of people - and then say "We're 100% certain of this. This is all new. There are no long term side effects. And if you think or say otherwise, we will cancel you."
Anyone who knows even a bit of history - medical or otherwise - and is comfortable with that is a either naive, or on the take.
To clarify, I don't have a problem with an non-traditional process. That being said, the way the process was "sold" set off my BS detector too many times. The two are disconnected to a fault.
Long to short, we've had "OMG the variants..." repeated over and over, how important the jab is to that, and then how in a worldwide pandemic the threat of variants can come from anywhere.
Yet, 2 docs in Brazil have to invent their own vax? And promise to give it away? While USA Big Pharma...does what??? counts their money? Because variants aren't a threat? See?
Again, complete disconnect. Disconnect that no one should be comfortable with.
> You can't change a process - especially not a medical one for 100s of millions of people - and then say "We're 100% certain of this. This is all new.
The testing process? Of course we can, statistics is quite an established and predictive science.
Again, looks like you have a problem with a non-traditional process. You also seem to have a falling for low-quality science journalism. Both are understandable, but your failure of understanding the vaccine policies around the pandemics were due to your partial understanding, and not fault of the policies.
Yeah man, back before covid scared the living shit out of people like you I'm sure there was 'sureness'. So much 'sureness' that major investors in Fidelity were cutting huge chunks of one of the only MRNA companies valuations:
That's a crazy inference. Nowhere did I imply completely above board. Doesn't rampantly falsify data, yes. Completely above board and trustworthy, no. There are vanishingly few organizations that are completely above board and trustworthy.
No. They were fined for doing things like recommending off-label use for their drugs, and they provided no data to support that off-label use. That isn't falsifying data, but that isn't acting trustworthy either.
You're the one who needlessly and wrongly conflated not falsifying data with being completely above board and trustworthy. I've been trying to get through to you this whole thread that the two are not equivalent.
Quote: "Today’s settlement follows a two-year investigation by the Oregon Department of Justice into evidence that suggested Pfizer was using unreliable and unsubstantiated claims to promote Zyvox®, a relatively new and expensive antibiotic used for treating certain types of pneumonia and bacterial skin infections. Despite lacking evidence required by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to make such claims, Pfizer allegedly relied upon flawed clinical studies to substantiate assertions that Zyvox® was a superior to vancomycin, a comparatively inexpensive generic drug that holds the largest market share and has been available for more than 40 years. Pfizer’s sales representatives detailed and distributed thousands of copies of these faulty studies throughout Oregon to promote the sale of Zyvox®."
Totaling almost 300 million in settlement payouts, they opted to do this AS A SETTLEMENT rather than let things drag out in court. Hmm... I wonder why. Couldn't be because they lied, hide, or downplayed information about Chantix's impact on people's mental health. This lands in their top 10 in terms of pay outs :)
While they haven't been fined for it yet (because their new contracts make it almost impossible :^) ), we have pretty substantial evidence Pfizer lied about a myriad of data points collected at at least one facility in regards to their covid19 injection trials.
But hey, at the end of the day I don't care what you believe beyond this post. You can defend the ultra corrupt big pharma company that bakes hundreds of millions in fines into its yearly operating budget.
> Couldn't be because they lied, hide, or downplayed information about Chantix's impact on people's mental health.
There are no allegations that they falsified data in this suit either.
That's three strikes — you're out! Would you like to step up to bat again to try to substantiate your claim that Pfizer has been fined for data falsification?
I would consider that a lab leak and to focus on the epicenter without looking at the obvious leak from the lab next door is just propaganda to make people not look to close. Because anyone that says "covid-19 originated from the wetmarket in wuhan" implies that it was not a lab leak.
Not sure why you're being downvoted for your opinion. I think it's quite clear all we have are theories at this point and if anyone knows, it would be the Chinese government.
Especially of importance is the market hypothesis was initially propelled by Peter Daszak with huge conflicts of interest as analyzed in excrutiating detail and sourced in Alina's Viral [2] book. I recommend this book, worth reading it as it strong arms every other hypothesis of COVID-19 origin and shows how unlikely it is.
Conspiracy theories aside, Worebey's Science paper is not unanimously well received by the scientific community, and the data analysis was shown to be partly flawed.
"Animals infected with SARS-CoV-2 have been documented around the world. Most of these animals became infected after contact with people with COVID-19, including owners, caretakers, or others who were in close contact. We don’t yet know all of the animals that can get infected. Animals reported infected worldwide include ..."
Plenty of animals have been found to positive for Covid - and the animal cages in the market had numerous environmental positive samples. I think you mean that no source animals have been found -- but if the timeline in this paper is right, the zoonotic jump happened in late November and they didn't shut down the market and start testing until almost a month later -- so a strong case of "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence"
Are you sure COVID has never been documented in animals? I seem to remember reading about cases where entire farm populations of minks were being killed. Perhaps you mean infection from an animal host to human?
Indeed. I think the grandparent commenter wanted to say "no animals infected with SARS-CoV-2 have yet been found, except those infected directly or indirectly by humans".
The only infected animals were bunched together in a single truck headed for a single market. That’s more plausible than an existing known virus derivative in a lab in the same city somehow allowing it to escape? Circumstantial activity like the denial and deletion of data surrounding the research at the lab is irrelevant too?
I don't know. I was addressing the question about the lack of infected source animals. I tried to make that clear by quoting the point that I was replying to.
> It also raises eyebrows the fact that no animal has ever been found to be positive for COVID, in contrast to all of the previous SARS pandemics.
This doesn't really mean very much.
It took something like 15 years to find the bat population likely to have been the source of SARS-CoV-1. It's not like we were able to say definitively how the spillover began; it's all probabilities.
We have found similar viruses to SARS-CoV-2 floating around in pangolins and bats.
> It took something like 15 years to find the bat population likely to have been the source of SARS-CoV-1.
This is true but misleading. It took a long time to find the reservoir host (i.e., the animal in which most of the virus evolved) for SARS-1, but the proximal host (i.e., the animal that actually infected the first humans) was found within about a year.
Based on the WIV's pre-pandemic research, we knew immediately that the reservoir host of SARS-CoV-2 is bats. We still haven't found the proximal host. It's almost certainly not pangolins, and Nature eventually published an extensive correction to their pangolin paper.
However, we do not have access to the precise latitude and longitude coordinates of all these cases. Should such data exist, they may be accompanied by additional metadata, some of which we have reconstructed, but some of which, including the date of onset of each case, would be valuable for ongoing studies. We also lack direct evidence of an intermediate animal infected with a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor virus either at the Huanan market or at a location connected to its supply chain, like a farm.
Don't worry adolph we still need to pretend that this is the leading cause of death in the world and that economic recession will not responsible for 10-100x this based on historical evidence.
Frankly turning this on it's head, Russia should be applauded for pushing so many people toward green, renewable and truely economically viable energy sources, I nominate putin for the nobel peace prize based on his efforts here.
> I nominate putin for the nobel peace prize based on his efforts here.
You're implying intent on his part. If any single person in the world would want renewables to never exist, it would be him. I also am aghast that you would feel this way about a man destroying hundreds of thousands of lives. The man is evil.
I wonder how many people who are seemingly willing to believe the self-serving CCP party-line on this, would be just as believing of the owners of a nuclear power plant in their town, once the drinking water became radioactive, claiming "it didn't come from the plant, someone else down the street must have done it" - that is just about as believable as this.
It’s painful in that scenario to give complete authority for resolving the nuclear safety issue to (1) the most likely cause of the issue, and (2) a low integrity party that has obscured their role in causation.
Maybe it was somebody in the flea market selling scrapped smoke detectors. Possible... but not my first guess. But it's worth keeping in mind that sometimes the most obvious answer is not the correct one.
In 1984: "During routine monitoring at a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant, a worker was found to be contaminated with radioactivity. A high concentration of radon in his home was subsequently identified as responsible."
For anyone who, like me, was curious about this, the worker's name was Stanley Watras. There's more on him on JSTOR if you want to read up: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44534629
I met a nurse that said one of her family members lived in a small housing development where almost everyone got terminal brain cancer. A certain company that you've heard of handled hazardous materials next door and offered to do the testing in the development. Surprise, no contamination found. And they made it clear that if you implicate them, you'll be contacted by their sizable legal department.
Everyone affected was either dead or bankrupt from paying their family's medical bills. No lawsuits against the company.
(This is is unrelated to your comment, just the username)
Trollish usernames aren't allowed on HN because they effectively troll every thread they post to.
We've learned that it's better to deal with this earlier than later, so I've banned the account. Happy to rename and unban it if you want to pick a more neutral username.
This is a borderline case—we don't want to be prudes—but I suspect most readers would rather not have "stinkass" in their face.
Hypothetically speaking, if it were a lab-leak and if it were a malicious lab tech or an that was mad at the world or compromised by a political actor, they could have dumped/micronize sprayed a vial [1] into the food market which would make the statement not entirely false. This is of course a lazy theory and would be nearly impossible to test out.
On that basis it could have also been attack to discredit China by CIA or like... Release pandemic from China then politically and economically attack them. Entirely something reasonable to consider considering history of USA...
Absolutely valid point. This theoretical scenario could be anyone that believes they stand to gain from this event. I updated my comment to reflect your point.
I have my own weak hypothesis regarding what you mention but I don't have anything really to back it up. Lineage A could have been the compromised tech and lineage B could have been an intentional engineered release that is more contagious but less lethal to improve morbidity from A and reduce or mitigate the fallout, not that anyone would ever admit doing this to the general public.
The CCP lies about everything from its GDP numbers to COVID infection rate and deaths. You simply cannot believe anything the Chinese government puts out.
What a weird statement to make. Sure, the coincidental nature draws extra suspicion, but new diseases appear naturally in the wild all the time. How often does drinking water in a city randomly turn radioactive from natural causes?
> I wonder how many people who are seemingly willing to believe the self-serving CCP party-line on this
Which of the paper's authors do you believe are beholden to the "self-serving CCP party-line"? Do you see flaws in the paper's analysis, or are you perhaps employing a thought-terminating cliche?
Your comment is orthogonal to the parent's comment and there's no reason to assign malice to the commenter.
It's quite plausible that the CCP is lying and the paper authors are honest about their findings. The problem is the analysis is only as good as the inputs. From the article:
> "Chinese government notified the World Health Organization (WHO) of an outbreak of severe pneumonia of unknown etiology in Wuhan...after careful examination of reported case histories..."
Note that:
1. The CCP claims the virus was unknown to them.
2. The CCP is in charge of what case histories are analyzed, and can carefully select those which point away from the lab leak.
I don't know to what degree there's truth in it, but Marion Koopmans has been in hot waters over her connections to the Chinese government. Last year, she has also publicly stated that the search started too late, and that they have negotiated about the outcome with the Chinese government (e.g., https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2021/03/30/een-goed-resultaat-a403..., paywalled).
Given that the existence of the lab is public knowledge, the paper could have at least acknowledged that the market was also a perfect site to distribute the virus intentionally.
This paper proves nothing beyond that there was a spatial relationship between the market and some of the initial cases. It wouldn’t have been hard for the CCP to discretely put some CV-19 distribution devices in the market, if the virus was released on purpose.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the pandemic started in Wuhan, but probably not in the way you're thinking: Wuhan is the largest railway hub in all of China [1]. And that's likely the reason why both the institute and the market were situated there in the first place.
A good point. Another factor reducing the "coincidence" of a (probable) bat-originated coronavirus pandemic starting in a city with a lab studying bat coronaviruses is that labs studying viruses of type X tend to be located in areas where viruses of type X are found.
To take ejb999's example of radioactive water being found near a nuclear power plant, is it more likely that the radioactive water was found because there is increased monitoring of radiation near nuclear power plants?
It is important not to make emotional leaps to conclusions. Apparent correlations deserve study, but they are not proofs.
You made no effort at all to criticize the methodology (which looks pretty standard to me, consistent with methods used to pinpoint the origin of other disease outbreaks besides COVID), or the raw data. Not one of the listed authors is Chinese, nor do any of them have any Chinese institutional affiliations.
What is your actual argument for why I should disregard this, beyond 'CCP bad'?
But the gp isn't making the argument that the data is suspect, and so carefully curated as to point to a misleading conclusion. Rather, it accuses the paper of reproducing a political party line.
If China is messing with the data, why do we even have data that shows the epicenter of infection moving southeast? Why not just hide or falsify it?
> Not one of the listed authors is Chinese, nor do any of them have any Chinese institutional affiliations.
Those are pretty naive criteria based on what we already know about the situation.
One of the biggest opponents of investigating the lab leak hypothesis was Peter Daszak, a British zoologist who is certainly not Chinese nor does his EcoHealth Alliance have any surface level ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. EcoHealth Alliance provided grants for the coronavirus research (and the activity that has been labeled by some as gain-of-research) and authored the misleading Lancet letter [0] that was used to ostracize anyone who publicly disagree with the animal-spillover hypothesis as well as enabled social media platforms and fact-checking sites to censor any content or discussion of the lab leak hypothesis.
TL;DR: people can have agendas that may not be obvious to you at first glance.
I wouldn't be complaining if the op had made an effort to establish such a linkage as you did for your example. Is it my job to validate an assertion which op didn't bother to support with an argument?
Of course not and op's reply was not, on its own, a very convincing rebuttal to the article. My only point is that the objectivity of the authors (really, any author on this subject at this point) should be assumed to be cloudy until proven otherwise. There's very few people on either side arguing in good faith about the source of COVID at this point.
My personal view is that it's impossible to know: the CCP has done everything possible to look guilty of hiding something, but unless there's some breakthrough where a source animal is found or someone in the CCP security apparatus makes a deathbed confession, I consider this an unresolvable discussion. That being said, I'm still 100% behind the shaming of people like Peter Daszak who have been shown to have acted in bad faith to cover their own asses.
Quick reminder that the researchers at the Wuhan lab are American. So, according to the conspiracy theory, there is some motivation for Americans to help China with a cover up.
No it doesn't lead to different conclusions. The lower right one is where the bat experiments were conducted rather than the one in the middle. That is far from the epicenter.
If people would actually read and digest the article before spewing out their own biases, then you would see that the article addressed this very contention.
The article pointed out several facts. One was that there were two strains already. Having that come from the virology institute doesn't make sense. It makes more sense if the virus was spreading and mutating amongst the animals in the market.
Second, is charting the concentration of early spread. Again, the market was the epicenter.
Third is looking more closely at that and seeing this same epicenter pattern in a specific part of the market. This again points to the market being the epicenter.
Fourth, there is no such pattern of infection around the virology institute that was conducting the bat virus research.
Just to add to this, in the linked paper by Worobey et. al., Fig 2(B) shows something they label as "Centroid of Blue Cases". That centroid appears to be almost squarely on the location of the Wuhan Institute of Infectious Diseases.
For some reason, neither the locations of the Wuhan Institute of Infectious Diseases or the Wuhan Institute of Virology are mentioned in the linked paper.
This is correct, but the paper does observe that these second-stage cases (mostly reported around January and February) occur in an area of high density housing with a preponderance of elderly people.
Are you referring to the linked paper or something else?
As far as I can tell (the writing style is not very clear IMHO), the Fig 2(B) blue cases are not second-stage cases, but rather a plot of "cases with no known link to the market".
As for your second point, I don't see any discussion in the paper that this cluster "occur[s] in an area of high density housing with a preponderance of elderly people". Where are you seeing this?
If you are not seeing such discussion perhaps you should read it more slowly. It's early in the Results section.
The clustering of COVID-19 cases in December around the Huanan market (Fig. 1, B and C, insets) contrasts with the pattern of widely dispersed cases across Wuhan by early January through mid-February 2020 (Fig. 1, D and E), which we mapped using location data from individuals using a COVID-19 assistance app on Sina Weibo (26). Weibo-based data analyses show that, unlike early COVID-19 cases, by January and February many of the sick who sought help resided in highly populated areas of the city, and particularly in areas with a high density of older people (Fig. 1E and figs. S9 and S10).
Sorry, I'm not understanding how what you're quoting there relates to Fig. 2(B). That's a reference to a separate Weibo-based data analysis that has no link at all to Fig. 2(B).
I'm trying to be civil, but you keep making statements about the paper that are objectively not correct. Fig. 2(B) does not show "second stage cases (mostly reported around January and February)" as you posted earlier. The map from the Weibo analysis is not shown in the paper, so one can't "put[] the maps side by side". Moreover, it's irrelevant to claim that a Weibo analysis of second stage cases not shown in the paper is relevant to the interpretation of figures in the paper that are not limited to second stage cases.
Perhaps you should get someone else to explain it to you. You are complaining that the map from the Weibo analysis is not shown in the paper, but it is, in figures 1D & 1E. Either you have poor reading comprehension or you are just trying to confuse people.
That author is probably a crank, but the particular image he's critiquing is Fig. 1(a) of the linked paper (reproduced by the BBC), and the locations of both Wuhan institutes are not wrong.
All conclusions are weak because all theories are at least possible and there is no conclusive evidence. Instead of accepting we will never know, people will now tell you with 1000% (1e4) certainty that it was definitely X. They will queue to die on whatever hill their brains have randomly selected. It's like lemmings only they don't actually do that.
>I wonder how many people who are seemingly willing to believe the self-serving CCP party-line on this, would be just as believing of the owners of a nuclear power plant in their town, once the drinking water became radioactive, claiming "it didn't come from the plant, someone else down the street must have done it" - that is just about as believable as this.
Absolutely sure the CCP are lying (I don't trust them either but that's not proof they're lying is it?)
Another comment here:
>I don't believe this to be true. I consider the likelyhood that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the cause of this to be much higher than that the seafood market in wuhan was the cause and there's no reason to trust any media or NGO to be truthful in that regard.
Literally "I don't believe the facts".
That's just this thread, on HN.
It's really concerning, or it was when I thought people could be self governing. /EdgyBS
To be fair, if 100 years ago some scientist wrote a paper about how being a certain race made you more prone to violence or how lobotomies are safe and effective.. there would be people saying you don't believe the facts of you don't agree. So, before you judge people maybe reflect on history a little and see that people have reasons to distrust government. A single paper doesn't prove anything. It must be reproducible throughout the scientific community.
That's the weird thing. 100 years ago I'd have doubted that. Some people would have been sure it was 100% accurate and others that all medicine was just nonsense.
And we're in the same place now.
Because people 100% believe things based on zero evidence.
>there is no reason to trust any media or NGO to be truthful in that regard.
So if there are facts, you cannot believe them and OP doesn't.
And Second:
For arguments stake, let's assume that is correct and there are zero facts. So what can you conclude?
Nothing! It's possible there was a lab leak, it's possible there wasn't, we just do not know. That would be a fine conclusion.
So why has Op decided one possible conclusions is "much higher (probability) than" the others?
We don't know if there is a god or not. So concluding one particular religion is correct is dumb. The same applies to people claiming one theory or another is right re Covid Origins.
That is where the disregard for (lack of) facts comes in. If you don't know, you don't know; you don't get to decide with certainty what reality is because looking is too hard.
There's fleetingly little evidence of anything aside from a natural origin. This could be consistent with a natural virus collected at the WIV which subsequently escaped, but the multiple lineages at the market makes this extremely unlikely as well.
I'll never believe that this wasn't leaked from the Wuhan virology lab. There was way too much done to suppress any coverage and the people involved in the investigation had conflicts of interest since they were the ones who funded the lab. All the behavior from China was extremely guilty. It seems naive to believe that this came from a seafood market.
It's been fascinating and terrifying watching people (in general and on here) jump to answers that are nice but wrong (China did it on purpose, You can cure it with X, it's just the flu, etc) over the last few years. We will never know for certain what happened.
It's honestly killed me support for democracy. 95% of people seem to be incapable of thinking about uncertainty and living with not knowing. They just jump headlong into whatever looks good. Facts and reason are just justifications for things their prejudices already decided.
There's a difference between being informed and feeling informed. The Western civilization have increasing distanced itself from the former because its "offensive and hurts others feelings" in favor of the latter.
When emotion triumphs logic and reasoning, that society is nearing end of times. Such was the case for Roman empire, increasingly people's mentality started to shift away from reality and into idealized and complex web of absurdities leading up to its down fall, much of which were spouted by its upper echelon awash with luxury and comforts unaffordable by its masses
We see such absurdities being pushed in schools (ex. Math is racist) and in society in general which then antagonizes and gaslights, attacks opposing nuanced views that throws its own narratives into question.
While doing business with authoritarian states, we've ended up resembling in some form. It's a damn shame, once again reminded that open societies remain open only as long as its participants believe it to be so. If we close ourselves to one view then we are doomed to repeat the same attrocities that closed socities commit against individuals groups.
I generally find that, while there are a worrying amount of people with insane takes on things, often reaching 30% in various polls when something becomes "political", that the majority generally gets it right. If only there was a bit more democracy, a lot of bad things could be avoided.
Having said that, I looked up the polling on lab leaks and American democracy loses on this one:
Read up on selectorate theory for a good argument as to why majorities often don't matter. It's a well developed elaboration of the truism that politicians prefer to pick their voters, and it is absolutely employed strategically.
The one thing that makes me think the Lab Leak theory is true is that the Chinese government very very strongly denies the story and does anything it can to deflect or redirect the discussion to some other theory.
For anyone reading these kinds of stories and reports but is not a regular China follower, there is one thing you really should know. Anytime the Chinese government reacts very negatively to a story (Denial, attacking, undermining, deflecting), it usually means the story is true. The Chinese government is really terrible at information management and addressing anything that might make them look bad or lose face.
Just admitting a Chinese lab collected, studied and by accident a lab worker got infected with COVID is just something China can not admit. It is perfectly reasonable that some lab somewhere would collect and study the COVID virus. What is unreasonable is that the lab or a lab worker just got sloppy and accidently released that virus out to the world.
Any "scientific evidence" that can be touched by the Chinese government will be corrupted. Any influence they have over "scientific evidence" is not scientific evidence.
Yeah, really disappointed in this thread’s comments about Chinese scientists and the country as a whole. This type of comment is all too common on here.
He specifically mentioned the Chinese government; therefore, his comment was specifically not racist. The Chinese government is not a race. It's just a bad government. All races have them at times.
Criticizing a government is not criticizing a race.
You criticizing a government because of its policies, oppressiveness, and so on. None of that has anything to do with race. The Chinese have every ability to have a good government as any other race, because race has nothing to do with it.
They just happen to have a bad government, compared to a number of other better governments (of all races). Heck, look at Taiwan. Chinese people, much better government.
It's not criticizing a government to say "Chinese scientists". Also, much of the research in the Wuhan lab was being conducted by American scientists of Chinese descent for American academic institutions--no relation to the Chinese government. The entire conspiracy theory is held together by racism.
* First, I am fully supporting constructive criticism.
* A word "bad" is not constructive criticism, because it's not backed by facts.
* You misunderstood my comment. As I was asking the facts to support Chinese government to be bad, and the comparison to other nations with similar sizes. Of course you cannot compare Chinese government vs. Singapore government, and claim Chinese government is bad.
> ...well, yes, of course they do. But they would also strongly deny the story if they thought it was untrue.
Then why would block any investigation from outside the Chinese government? If anything, if the Lab Leak theory is provable false, they should be inviting outsiders to investigate and waste their political capital/time/energy. If your advisories want to spin their wheels on something that is not true, then let them.
> So if they don't react negatively and deny something, then the story is... false? That doesn't make any sense.
When it comes to the Chinese government and information, surprisingly as it sounds, yes. If the Lab Leak story was not true, the Chinese government would not even react to it. They might even entertain it as part of their information ops strategy since the Lab Leak theory is a plausible theory.
If you think about it, how does the Wet Market theory make China look better than the Lab Leak theory? It really doesn't. If serious pandemics are coming out of Wet Markets, then why does China still allow Wet Markets to exist? At least with lab safety, labs can be improved and managed better while Wet Markets are just ticking pandemic timebombs.
> Then why would block any investigation from outside the Chinese government?
I can easily believe that the Chinese government, not exactly known for its openness, would be keen to block investigations into their bio research labs, regardless of what happened in Wuhan.
The potential upsides are few - would any doubters be silenced if the investigation found nothing?
I can also believe that even if they have no reason to believe that the lab leak theory is true and their internal investigations have turned up nothing, that they're not entirely convinced there is zero chance there wasn't a lab leak.
Even if they think there's only a 1% chance there was a lab leak, then the idea of an outside investigation is clearly dangerous to them. Blocking an investigation is safer.
Let's assume the US is the epicenter of a global pandemic that killed 6 million people and $12 trillion in economic damage (and counting). And the US is refusing to cooperate with an investigation into its origins.
What is an appropriate response from China, Russia, and the international community?
Assume the US's military isn't the most powerful and technologically advanced in the world. Instead China's is the most powerful and advanced.
The question is what would China do if it had America's dominant position and there was and a global pandemic killing 6 million and causing 12 trillion in damage originated blocks away from an American virus lab and animal market.
Nothing, given that it's way less aggressive than US, and I believe for a deep cultural reasons. Which is also what have been done literally every single time it happened before, I believe? The whole idea of punishing a country for a pandemic sounds deranged even for a right wing propaganda.
Ensuring the cause of the pandemic is understood and steps have been taken to greatly reduce the likely hood of it happening again is the opposite of deranged. Failing to do so is in fact deranged.
I'm not sure I agree with this. Do other world powers allow their rivals to investigate their bio research facilities? I don't think I've ever heard of the US inviting other world powers to examine anything sensitive like a bio research facility
> It is perfectly reasonable that some lab somewhere would collect and study the COVID virus. What is unreasonable is that the lab or a lab worker just got sloppy and accidently released that virus out to the world.
Is this still true? It is unfortunate that it took an event like this to prove what we already knew: lab workers, who are of course fallible humans, will make mistakes.
Given that Covid was released upon the world likely due to a lab accident and all of the damage it did over a span of years, it would seem reasonable to rethink whether unlimited experimentation and especially enhancement with viruses should be allowed. This in itself has proven to be a source of denial by the very virus experts (like Fauci) that do not want their area of science to be restricted.
> Given that Covid was released upon the world likely due to a lab accident
This is entirely without evidence.
> This in itself has proven to be a source of denial by the very virus experts (like Fauci) that do not want their area of science to be restricted.
Even if you ignore Covid19 -- epidemiologists and virologists have been screaming for years that pandemics are hugely problematic and will become increasingly likely as we densify and further intrude into the urban-wilderness interface. We got extremely lucky that SARS1 wasn't as lethal or infectious as Covid-19. If the work virologists do (even the 'riskiest' work) could lead to new universal coronavirus vaccines or better treatments, it's a much more complicated question on whether to continue the work than ignorant opinions insist.
They obviously don't have control over the authors of the paper for thread you're commenting on, and for the umpteenth time, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Confidently asserting that since we don't have evidence of a lab leak, it's somehow more likely is just dumb.
Virologists have pored over the genome and are highly confident it's a virus of natural origin -- that already greatly limits the role a lab could have played and doesn't require any input or approval from the Chinese government.
> umpteenth time, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence
Repeating nonsensical statements does not make the statement clearer. Paying attention to what you want to pay attention to is fine, but it is not a robust way to process unreliable data.
And what evidence may you have that it did not come from a lab?
Ignoring the incredible risks of playing with and even creating deadly pathogens and the high likelihood of it being released into the world serves what purpose other than to protect a small group of scientists that want to create Frankenstein pathogens for experimental purposes that are likely to be either weaponized or accidentally released? Even if there are some beneficial results from such research it is likely countered by the huge risks to mankind.
You do see the imbalance between the two statements right?
"This virus came from a lab - so we should ban lab research"
and
"You can't prove the virus didn't come from a lab - so we should ban lab research"
Nature is doing far more Gain of Function research than humans are capable of - as evidenced by literally every pandemic in history. I've generally found the people who are the most vocal about banning GoF have literally no idea what it entails and why the way pedestrians talk about is so cringeworthy.
We don't have testable theories here, we have Mad Libs.
A virus of (human)/(animal) origin was (un)intentionally (released)/(spread)/(detected) in Wuhan, starting at a (lab)/(market).
Narrative 1: Animal origin with extensive spread in a food market
Narrative 2: Animal origin with accidental release from lab study
Narrative 3: Intentional creation/modification of a virus for purposes of scientific study and subsequent (un)intentional release
Narrative 4: Intentional creation/modification of a virus for nefarious purposes with (un)intentional release
Narrative 5: Animal origin with slow undetected community spread somewhere and possibly random mutation that lead to more viral fitness in Wuhan.
---
What would actually change if you had certainty around one of these theories? Are you certain that there will not be a zoonotic viral pandemic in the future? If you aren't certain that there will never be a zoonotic pandemic again, then we should ramp up vector and disease surveillance.
Also, China has had no problem disciplining people that cause trouble and embarrassment. If they thought someone caused this, that person is fucking gone.
I guess I didn't say all of it - yes, if it is a possibility, we should take it seriously. I think they are all possible, we should take them all seriously.
I don't think there is any way to get to a scientific certainty either positively or negatively about any of the origin theories; thus we should take precautions about all of them.
I think there is certainly a discussion to be had around gain-of-function. I think that discussion should include how gain-of-function is actually used in research laboratories, and what mitigations are already in place.
I'm not a fan of lab leak, but I don't really care.
What get's me is I'd support serious action against china because if its a lab leak they need to own that, and if it's from shitty food supply chain they need to own that too.
Also they're a shitty dictatorship, they're aggressive, they're genocidal etc.
People seem very enthusiastic to blame china for a lab leak, but have no enthusiasm to blame them for other mechanisms or to convert that blame into supporting action. It's a weird thing for my brain and I share this more as sharing my confusion to see if anyone else feels the same way.
I think you did a very nice job breaking down the many many uncertainties here btw.
That is exactly how this conspiracy theory is being employed. China is being punished because of a made-up story that is politically advantageous to spread. This is similar to Russia saying that Ukraine is infested with Nazis.
One problem in these kinds of investigations is that nobody involved really wants the truth to be known. The lab isn't going to let anyone poke around and see what it was doing until the CPP falls. And even then records have probably been wiped already.
The problem is that there really isn't any evidence. SARS-COV-2 has never been detected in any Chinese land animals associated with the market. We know that birds can transmit it, but it needs to come from somewhere. There's no reservoir of the stuff found in the wild...unlike viruses like Ebola, Marburg, MERS, etc.
There were two variants in the market...but given the speed at which SARS-COV-2 variants have mutated in humans, well, how likely is it that the market was the source? SARS-COV-2 went through millions of humans before the first variant popped out. Is it reasonable to assume that some progenitor virus went though millions of iterations to become SARS-COV-2 in the market, then did it again and again?
But however unlikely, this is where we are today. Was it just bad luck that some virus entered an immuno-compromised animal at the market and mutated...twice?
No, there were two distinct lineages in the market. That's different than variants.
The lineages are important because although the differences between the sequences are small, they are distinct, and there are no known transitional haplotypes.
> given the speed at which SARS-COV-2 variants have mutated in humans, well, how likely is it that the market was the source?
In Dr. Birx's recently released book she claims to have known it came from a lab origin from the start, based on evolutionary reasoning. As she describes: A virus takes years to learn/evolve the ability to infect humans, and does so poorly at the start. But covid was extremely effective at infecting humans "right out of the box." In a lab environment the virus is repeatedly exposed to human cells and gets better at infecting human cells with each iteration.
Evolutionary biologist Heather Heying similarly reasoned the origin of the virus through an understanding of evolution. Covid doesn't appear to transmit outside. If covid evolved naturally, it would be capable of spreading outside, where animals live. Instead, it appeared to evolve to spread in lab-like air conditioned conditions only.
> In a lab environment the virus is repeatedly exposed to human cells and gets better at infecting human cells with each iteration.
That is just replicating what nature does when it hops from individual to individual. Nature has billions of animals to do serial passage through.
And we still don't know that the species jump happened in the market, and I'm somewhat skeptical of the claims of this author. I tend to think it was circulating in rural Hubei, probably coinfecting domestic animals and people, getting better and better at infecting people until the market event happened which was where it found a densely packed human population where it spread with R0 significantly greater than 1 and took off. There's no evidence of that though because when the grandparents of farmers in rural villages die of pneumonia nobody bothers collecting samples because that's normal.
And we only noticed it when it started to efficiently infect human beings because that is when the pandemic started. The initial poor cryptic spread between humans and animals before that wouldn't have been detected because poor spreading couldn't cause the pandemic to start.
And we know that its possible for the virus to jump backwards and forwards between humans and minks, so the idea that an intermediate animal reservoir would have been infected with this virus and would have repeatedly attempted to jump to farm workers until it finally got good at spreading in humans is not that far fetched at all. Then the intermediate animal host becomes a massive bioreactor in close contact with humans, giving it many opportunities to roll the dice until it finds a combination that unlocks its pandemic potential, and then the first time it was transported into a dense human population it takes off.
There could be a hundred other viruses in animals in China all knocking on the door, occasionally infecting humans and not being good at it all right now, happening every day in China. This one was very good at infecting humans, along with being very good at infecting all kinds of other animals (mink, deer, dogs, cats, etc) because in order to cause a pandemic it had to be good at that, if it was bad at that it wouldn't have happened. It is like the anthropic principle--the virus seems incredibly lucky, because it had to be.
It would actually be extremely unlikely for a virus that is "medium good at spreading to humans" to stay in an isolated location, especially one that spreads asymptomatically.
If it spreads asymptomatically though isn't that "good" at spreading rather than "medium"?
SARS-1 disn't have a presymptomatic infectious phase and the peak of symptoms was roughly the peak of infectiousness, and it was mostly severely virulent, and it didn't produce a global pandemic and was controllable.
To have an uncontrollable pandemic you really need that silent spreading, so the pandemic virus that emerges necessarily has that property from the "start".
How does a virus that's pretty good at spreading through humans but not yet amazing at spreading through humans stay in an isolated region for months or even years?
>I tend to think it was circulating in rural Hubei, probably coinfecting domestic animals and people, getting better and better at infecting people until the market event happened which was where it found a densely packed human population where it spread with R0 significantly greater than 1 and took off.
How would a virus that's medium good at infecting humans, but not yet amazing at infecting humans, stay in rural Hubei for years without escaping?
> A virus takes years to learn/evolve the ability to infect humans, and does so poorly at the start.
This sounds like pure speculation. How much actual data do we have on viruses that just made the jump from animals to humans? Probably nowhere near the amount needed to confidently say that the original Wuhan strain was somehow too infectious to realistically be of natural origin.
As for getting better at infecting humans over time, covid _has_ done that. Whatever omicron subvariant we're on could run circles around the original strain without breaking a sweat.
> If covid evolved naturally, it would be capable of spreading outside, where animals live. Instead, it appeared to evolve to spread in lab-like air conditioned conditions only.
Did she make an actual quantitative comparison between the infectiousness of covid and other respiratory viruses, inside versus outside?
Before her book was released, when Dr. Birx was going along with the natural origin story that was being pushed by the government, did you go around calling that "pure speculation?"
Dr. Fauci has recently been saying in interviews that the only masks that work are N95/KN95. When he was pushing cloth masks, did you go around calling that "pure speculation?"
Dr. Fauci has said, under oath, that when he was saying the vaccines would stop the spread he was just expressing a hope that would be the case. Dr. Birx says in her book she knew it would not stop the spread. When they were saying it would stop the spread, did you go around calling that "pure speculation?"
Why are replies like this so frustratingly common when I engage with the "covid conspiracy theorist" crowd? I asked for empirical evidence and you responded with a massive self-righteous rant calling me a hypocrite because you _think_ I hold certain views. So what if I'm a hyprocrite, does that mean they're right? No, it doesn't, so your comment is nothing more than a drawn-out ad hominem attack.
Dr. Birx describing the evolution of viruses and how Covid does not fit that mold is not "pure speculation." I cited her book, and as she's a world class expert in this field I don't know what more beyond that you would expect? Unless you are expecting the CCP to open their books, which is laughable.
Note that the zoonotic path of Ebola into humans isn't well-understood. There was pretty good evidence of the path for SARS-1 though, and very good evidence for MERS. For SARS-CoV-2, there's still nothing, despite the recent emergence and considerably greater effort searching.
The "two lineages" argument has been grossly distorted by Worobey and the media. They're just two single-nucleotide polymorphisms apart, so they could easily have arisen in a single human-to-human transmission. SARS-CoV-2 averages something around a third of an SNP per human-to-human transmission, so ~10% of such transmissions differ by two SNPs.
If a missing link does exist, then it's just a single mutation away from either strain. So there's no reason to consider the "two lineages" too significant in any direction, unless you believe sampling in humans has been perfectly good. That belief seems unreasonable to me, especially since belief in a natural zoonotic origin requires us to believe sampling in animals has been perfectly bad.
> They're just two single-nucleotide polymorphisms apart
The problem with that argument, is that it doesn't explain the polytomies and is misleading, as you accuse Worobey of being.
"Just a few SNPs" is disingenuous and glosses over the usefulness of this evidence that almost everyone agrees on - eg, that it's highly unlikely that lineage B evolved from lineage A. (Even Jesse Bloom agrees on this.)
It may take a bit to find consensus on the dual-zoonosis theory and related phylogenetics, but the eagerness with which people dismiss this issue drives me nuts.
You're correct that it's highly unlikely that B evolved from A, but why do you think that's significant? We know the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is highly stochastic, with most lineages dying out and a few exploding, and we know the IFR in humans is small enough that considerable cryptic spread is possible before enough people die to raise the alarm.
So why do you take the two lineages as conclusive evidence of two zoonotic events (as Worobey has repeatedly claimed in the media, even though his papers are more cautious)? Given the above, I don't see how we can exclude that the two lineages evolved in early human cryptic spread, before we started sampling enough to draw a perfect phylogenetic tree.
I don't take two lineages to be conclusive evidence of multiple zoonotic events. However, the multiple polytomies for each are not easy to explain away.
Have you read Pekar's most recent paper in Science? I raise this in earnest, I'm reading it now. A lot of it follows the preprint, but the update more directly addresses many of the points we're discussing.
I led with "just two mutations" because as far as I can tell, all of Worobey's or Pekar's reasoning starts from the assumption that there was no significant cryptic (unsampled) human spread. If the two lineages were tens of SNPs apart, then I believe that would be a reasonable assumption--it would be hard to explain how the virus could spread in humans long enough to accumulate that many mutations without causing enough sickness and mortality for someone to notice.
But with just two SNPs, I believe that assumption is invalid. So while I believe those authors have correctly observed that we're missing part of the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2, I don't see how they decided whether that's unsampled spread in animals vs. unsampled spread in humans, except under that incorrect assumption.
I hadn't read the final paper, but I'm looking at it now. I don't see any new points that don't depend on that assumption yet, though. Do you?
> all of Worobey's or Pekar's reasoning starts from the assumption that there was no significant cryptic (unsampled) human spread.
They don't assume that. See the discussion in Pekar. ("The high extinction rate [...] Failed introductions of intermediate haplotypes are also possible.") The whole point of their epidemiological modeling is to disentangle the likelihood of this happening. (See: "Separate introductions of lineages A and B")
The tMRCA doesn't allow enough time for any deep cryptic spread. The authors show this. It's not assumed.
> We show that it is highly unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 circulated widely in humans earlier than November 2019 and that there was limited cryptic spread, with, at most, dozens of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the weeks leading up to the inferred tMRCA, but likely far fewer.
I haven't fully studied all the layers yet, but as far as I can tell it's numerical sludge, in the same general direction as econometrics, with so many free parameters or arbitrary choices in the model that you could plausibly get almost any result you wanted. Similar models got their chance to make falsifiable predictions of the case count in the actual pandemic, and they failed repeatedly, often by huge margins, in both directions.
For a specific criticism, the authors report that they're robust against variation in doubling time, but nothing about robustness to the extent of the overdispersion of SARS-CoV-2's spread (i.e., the superspreader characteristic, where most patients infect very few people but a minority infect a lot). They appear to model that only through the connectivity of the infection network, which appears to be fixed. All other things being equal, more stochastic early spread will make it harder to confidently reach any conclusion.
I'm not saying this work isn't interesting at all, or that I could do better; but it's many layers of stacked uncertainty. I believe the confidence that the authors express in this paper is already excessive, and Worobey's statements to the media go considerably beyond that.
Sorry if that phrasing was too mean; I've described many models that I judged to be uselessly complex as "numerical sludge" in the past, including my own less successful efforts. Do you at least understand my specific objection above? You're almost certainly a better biologist than me, but differential equation models get a lot closer to my real expertise.
The output of their model is the structure of the resulting phylogenetic tree. I believe the primary determinant of that will be the extent of overdispersion of transmission, i.e. the shape of the pdf of how many people you expect each patient to infect. For example, let's say R0 = 2 and each patient always infects exactly two others. Then all lineages will survive (at least initially, until a significant fraction of the population is recovered and immune). The phylogenetic tree will be as perfect a binary tree as the mutation rate and our sampling permit. If we cut off the beginning, then we'll see many descendant lineages.
Instead, let's say the spread is absurdly overdetermined, so that each patient infects either zero others (with p = 0.99) or 200 (with p = 0.01). Then (after trying the simulation enough times for the pandemic to finally get started) our tree will just be a succession of super-spreading events, with far fewer lineages.
I believe that by manipulating that pdf, we can reshape that phylogenetic tree to almost anything we want. I see no description from the authors of why they believe the pdf resulting from their choice of a contact network is the right one, nor any study of robustness to changes in the shape of that pdf. Am I missing something?
> SARS-COV-2 has never been detected in any Chinese land animals associated with the market.
They acted very quickly to sterilize the market which eliminated the evidence.
In SARS-1 the market associated with that was allowed to operate until investigators were able to take samples from the animals there and find the related virus.
As a containment measure this was probably the right reflex to have, as an investigative measure this was highly counterproductive. If, however, you are one of the people who blame China for not acting fast enough to contain the spread then you can't criticize them for this.
> There's no reservoir of the stuff found in the wild...unlike viruses like Ebola, Marburg, MERS, etc.
MERS just happened to be very easy since we sampled the camels and they were positive and sitting right there with lots of human contact. In the case of SARS-1 the actual progenitor virus was only found 10 years later in bats in Yunnan. With Ebola the species that harbors the virus has actually yet to be determined, decades later. Marburg was first discovered in 1967 and was only isolated from Egyptian fruit bats in 2009, 42 years later.
I think you're vastly underestimating how hard it is to track down animal reservoirs, and with the reservoir of Ebola still being unknown 46 years after it was discovered kind of undermines your entire point.
We also now have the BANAL viruses found in bats in Laos which are getting closer and closer to a match to SARS-CoV-2, which is actually good progress after only 2-3 years (it would actually be highly suspicious if someone found the 99% homologous bat progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 after only a few years of looking, that would suggest that China knew where it was all along -- actual science that isn't on the TV or movies is quite difficult and usually a lengthy needle-in-a-haystack process as all of these examples show).
> In the case of SARS-1 the actual progenitor virus was only found 10 years later in bats in Yunnan.
Why do you keep saying this? As you know, the closest animal viruses to SARS-1 were found in civet cats and raccoon dogs, within about a year of its emergence in humans.
The bat viruses that Dr. Shi later discovered are scientifically important, because most of SARS-1's genome probably evolved in bats. They provide no new insight as to how the virus came to infect humans, though.
WIV-1 can directly infect humans. So did civit cats and racoon dogs give us SARS-1 or did we infect them (or backwards and forwards as in the case of SARS-CoV-2 and mink)?
If you go back a few months before the pandemic outbreak in humans and there's a zoonotic jump to civit cat and raccoon dogs then I don't think you can usefully call that the reservoir species. It existed and evolved for decades in bats, which I'd call the reservoir. The jump to the intermediate animal I'd consider to be part of the pandemic mechanism (unless you can find SARS-1 in samples from a decade previously in those animals).
[ And another way to say this is why do we bother calling out an "intermediate species" when discussing pandemics? ]
WIV-1 can infect human cells in vitro. No complete human infected with WIV-1 has ever been identified, living or dead. When SARS-1 emerged in humans, cases were concentrated among traders handling civet cats, as were positive antibody tests. That seems to me like a pretty strong case for forward zoonosis, maybe not perfect but certainly stronger than any evidence we have for SARS-CoV-2.
I agree there's no evidence for any animal except bats as the reservoir for SARS-1 (or SARS-CoV-2). The intermediate host seems like the important link to show natural origin, though. Genetic engineers can't invent new viruses de novo, only modify existing ones, so a reservoir host must always exist; the question is just how it got from that reservoir to a human pandemic.
If SARS-1 was more infectious and less virulent you wouldn't see cases concentrated amongst traders, would you? If anything, since many of them already have some kind of immunity from previous infection, you would not expect them to even notice being sick before the virus already infected thousands.
I agree that finding the origin of a virus that's less deadly and faster-spreading (like SARS-CoV-2) is a harder problem. Nevertheless:
1. We quickly found pretty good evidence (infected civet cats and raccoon dogs, and infected human traders of those animals) that SARS-1 arose from natural zoonosis, within about a year of its emergence in humans. The later discovery of WIV-1 didn't add to this evidence.
2. We've found no such evidence for SARS-CoV-2.
That doesn't mean SARS-CoV-2 definitely arose unnaturally--we've expended a lot more effort looking, but it really is a harder problem. It just means we don't know, and we need to keep looking. Do you disagree?
They sterilized the market as a containment protocol for SARS-CoV-2, which eliminated the evidence.
With SARS-1 the market was still fully operating when they went looking for the origins.
Once the human pandemic kicks off and you find some civets or whatever with the virus, then how do you prove they had it before the humans unless you have lucky lab samples drawn from civets who were infected prior to Dec 2019? You'd need to do something like find civit-adapted SARS-CoV-2 which could be genetically dated to prior to Dec 2019 because there were simply too many mutations to have been backspill from the human pandemic. If the spread in civets started very shortly before the spread in humans then that would likely not be possible at this point. If you could find a virus in civets that was 5 years of genetic drift away from SARS-CoV-2 that would probably work, but that may never have existed. What remains is finding the persistent bat reservoir.
A civet (assuming hypothetically that's the intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2) infected before Dec 2019 would provide strong genomic evidence of forward zoonosis. A civet infected afterward could still provide that evidence though, if it's by a zoonotic lineage distinguishable from the one that spilled over into humans (if such a lineage exists; you're of course correct it's not guaranteed to).
For now that's all academic though, since we've found zero animals infected by any lineage of SARS-CoV-2, excluding animals that we're quite confident were infected directly or indirectly by humans, from the timing, circumstances, and genomic evidence. I don't think your scenario is impossible, and the traders themselves also had good incentive to hide or dispose of suspect animals before anyone could swab them. There's inherently no direct evidence for it, though.
It seems like most arguments over the origin of SARS-CoV-2 eventually reduce to arguments over what the Chinese government has concealed, whether deliberately or accidentally as part of their containment protocol. That makes the argument hard to resolve, though there's still considerable unexplored evidence within reach of American or European subpoena, like a search through all available raw sequencer reads between September and December 2019 for contamination from SARS-CoV-2 or related viruses.
I'm not really disagreeing, but isn't comparing Ebola and Marburg to SARSes a bit apples-to-bananas?
Ebola and Marburg for decades were quite rare. Incredibly deadly, but an outbreak would affect a few tens of people, and invariably in remote locations. By the time the epidemiologists arrived, the outbreak was waning.
Clearly the Ebola outbreak in 2010s was much bigger, but that was the first such large outbreak.
Also, with outbreaks in the rainforest, and perhaps with poor sanitation, there are thousands of possible animal hosts, whereas hyper-urbanised China hives far less opportunity for wildlife contact.
China is not "hyper-urbanised". There is still a good 30% rural population a lot of which live close to very dense forests with questionable sanitation.
I don't understand how those viruses being rare in humans and outbreaks fading is actually making it harder to find them. If anything it is easier because then they don't have to figure out if humans gave it to them or they gave it to humans.
Wuhan itself is 12 million people, 1,500 km^2 according to Wikipedia. I don't know but I'm guessing there is far less opportunities for coming up close with all sorts of wildlife.
Id also guess the manpower that went into searching for the SARS2 predecessor far exceeds the efforts that went into sampling animals in African rainforest.
The zoonotic theory is that the infected animals came from exactly the places where there is a lot of wildlife and were shipped to Wuhan (which is basically the point of wet markets).
There might have been more manpower looking for the SARS-2 predecessor but, unlike with Ebola, there isn't any guarantee it still exists in a recognizable form, and in intermediate hosts you have the issue of human-animal transmission.
Yeah, at this point it is impossible to determine any intermediate host unless you have lucky backdated samples in a freezer someplace.
And I'm still skeptical that bats gave it directly to intermediate animals who gave it to people in a nice linear fashion. Humans going into mines (like the Mojiang miners) or bat guano farming could have become infected and given it to farmed animals that they were around first, and the pandemic could be the result of spillback once the virus got good at infecting humans (not needing to be particularly good at infecting the farmed animals because of massively crowded conditions).
If, unlike most of the other top commenters I see, you read the paper and its sibling[0], which isn't very long or difficult to understand, you'll find an interesting and thoughtful analysis. They talk a lot about ascertainment (sampling) bias. They find the data points to the market even after they threw out the 1/3+ of the people who lived closest to it. And the cases not linked to the market lived closer to it than the cases that were:
> One of the key findings of our study is that ‘unlinked’ early COVID-19 patients, those who neither worked at the market or knew someone who did, nor had recently visited the market, resided significantly closer to the market than patients with a direct link to the market. The observation that a substantial proportion of early cases had no known epidemiological link had previously been used as an argument against a Huanan market epicenter of the pandemic. However, this group of cases resided significantly closer to the market than those who worked there, indicating that they had been exposed to the virus at, or near, the Huanan market. For market workers, the exposure risk was their place of work not their residential locations, which were significantly further afield than those cases not formally linked to the market.
This makes sense, but it's probably not something I'd have thought of myself.
I also find figure 4[1] fascinating. Evidence points not just to the market, but to just a handful of stalls within it.
The sibling study tracks two lineages in the early spread, both clustered around the market. The first study, citing this sibling, says:
> This, along with the lineage A cases we report in close geographical proximity to the market in December, challenges the suggestion that the market was simply a superspreading event, which would be lineage-specific. Rather, it adds to the evidence presented here that lineage A, like lineage B, may have originated at the Huanan market then spread from this epicenter into the neighborhoods surrounding the market and then beyond.
They conclude that they are likely the result of separate animal-to-human transmissions and that there were probably more jumps that quickly died off. This suggests that the virus was well-suited to infect humans before it jumped:
> Successful transmission of both lineage A and B viruses after independent zoonotic events indicates that evolutionary adaptation within humans was not needed for SARS-CoV-2 to spread (49). We now know that SARS-CoV-2 can readily spread after reverse-zoonosis to Syrian hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus), American mink (Neovison vison), and white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), indicating its host generalist capacity (50–55).
"I remind us all that an “outbreak at the Wet market” “natural origin” “not designed” “not a bioweapon” and “nothing to do with a virology lab” are all VERY different things that keep, oddly, getting conflated."
~ Eric Weinstein
This study seems to potentially shine some light on only the first item in that list, an outbreak at/near the wet market.
This is just a study of the distribution of early cases which was centered around the market. But the WIV is in the same area so I don’t see what this proves. Still doesn’t isolate an animal or explain how they had a bat virus that 95% matched sars cov 2 genome back in 2013 in WIV.
Wuhan Biosafety Lab is only 8 miles away from this seafood market. That lab is the only lab on earth to deal with SARS related study. The link is quite obvious to me which is why China tried to interfere with the investigation so hard.
The practice of plotting case maps like this started during the 1854 cholera epidemic. The cholera case map helped discredit the theory that cholera was transmitted by miasma, and supported the theory of fecal-oral transmission. Just some related history that you might find interesting.
280 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadThe real question is--how did the virus get to the live market?
The study accurately says, "While there is insufficient evidence to define upstream events, and exact circumstances remain obscure, our analyses indicate that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred via the live wildlife trade in China, and show that the Huanan market was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic."
"The sustained presence of a potential source of virus transmission into the human population in late 2019, plausibly from infected live mammals sold at the Huanan market, offers an explanation of our findings and the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The pattern of COVID-19 cases reported for the Huanan market, with the earliest cases in the same part of the market as the wildlife sales and evidence of at least two introductions (38), resembles the multiple cross-species transmissions of SARS-CoV-2 subsequently observed during the pandemic from animals to humans on mink farms (46), and from infected hamsters to humans in the pet trade (47). There was an extensive network of wildlife farms in western Hubei province, including hundreds of thousands of raccoon dogs on farms in Enshi prefecture, which supplied the Huanan market (48). This region of Hubei contains extensive cave complexes housing Rhinolophus bats, which carry SARSr-CoVs (49). SARS-CoV-1 was recovered from farmed masked palm civets from Hubei in 2003 and 2004 (20). The animals on these farms (nearly 1 million) were rapidly released, sold, or killed in early 2020 (48), apparently without testing for SARS-CoV-2 (7). Live animals sold at the market (Table 1) were apparently not sampled either. By contrast, during the SARS-CoV-1 outbreaks farms and markets remained open for over a year after the first human cases occurred, allowing sampling of viruses from infected animals (20).
The live animal trade and live animal markets are a common theme in virus spillover events (21–23, 50), with markets such as the Huanan market selling live mammals being in the highest risk category (51). The events leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic mirror the SARS-CoV-1 outbreaks from 2002-2004, which were traced to infected animals in Guangdong, Jiangxi, Henan, Hunan, and Hubei provinces in China (20). Maximum effort must now be applied to elucidate the upstream events that might have brought SARS-CoV-2 into the Huanan market, culminating in the COVID-19 pandemic. To reduce the risk of future pandemics we must understand, and then limit, the routes and opportunities for virus spillover."
> you cannot claim one is more probable
Am I missing something here?
It's a source of constant disappointment.
And especially the things that are. That's what makes HN special.
I also frequently choose not to engage with ill-informed comment threads; I'm regretting my lapse in judgement today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
HN is probably overly scientific in this sense.
That seems to me the right thing to do. HN does that very well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252553
The chances are we'll never know, it may have spread through here (despite no real action to stop this form of trading from any of the wonderlfully eclectic groups still engaged in it).
> While there is insufficient evidence to define upstream events,
Also, we're not brave enough to say read the evidence it came from here. We're only brave enough to say it's the 'epicenter' of an early outbreak to keep from annoying those who don't co-operate anyway.
My guess is that someone was selling animals from the lab that were supposed to be destroyed.
AFAIK those markets are out-right banned already.
In 1975 the US GDP was about $7500/yr per capita (in 2021 dollars). Today the Chinese GDP per capita is around $10k/yr (more like 19k accounting for purchasing power parity).
You can pull all the numbers you want, but you can't steer from the fact that it's an impoverished shithole.
Chinese household median income is around $4,700-4,800 in 2021, with massive disparities between First world comparable regions such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin, and rust belt regions like Wuhan [2]. Even the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has noted that 600 million Chinese earn less that $140/month [3].
This of course leads to the larger discussion about GDP per capita being a weak metric to use when analyzing regional development, but in general China is by most standards still a developing middle income country with a (relatively) small and overperforming hinterland.
[0] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1977/demo/p60-10...
[1] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1975?amount=1
[2] http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202201/t2022011...
[3] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1189968.shtml
But even if it had been intended as a stop gap, at this point its large industry. So if you wanted to "clean up" as in, "end" the wild meat market trade, you'd be ending a large, growing industry, that brings money and food to poor parts of the country that can't afford other foods. Additionally, you'd be crushing an industry that is actively bringing new foods to market that aren't available in other countries, but for which China may one day be the primary agricultural provider.
Not an easy ask for any country to do, let alone a developing one.
If you're asking for better regulation of these markets, then I am sure China will do so over time. But authoritarian countries will never be able to self regulate to the degree a rule-of-law country does. Authoritarianism breeds a "if you're not cheating, you're not trying" mentality that undermines regulatory attempts.
Due to various policies, China is a relatively low-trust society. Of course, it's also low trust because ripping people off isn't necessarily seen as bad, it's seen as clever.
That issue is why live markets exist cause no one there trusts the meat to be what what they say it is unless they can literally see it.
(Wild speculation - may contain novel truth contamination)
Having said that, a case could be made that this (lab leak via market) is a distinction without a difference.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU
You don't remember correctly. The WIV is ~15km from the market and there are multiple other markets nearer the WIV if employees were regularly 'shopping.
They'd be fired for sure if caught.
They also would make almost no extra money... The going rate for bats isn't much...
I don't say that is what actually happened there, I just think that this would be one possibility.
Consider how things like hoof & mouth disease have ripped through agricultural herds in western countries, where there are much higher regulatory standards for food production. Diseases can spread fast before the symptoms become obvious.
If you're referring to the CDC changing its layperson definition on https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/imz-basics.htm, its old definition was wrong and didn't include flu vaccines, among many others.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=definition+of+recession&sour...
It looks like NBER's definition of how they declare recessions has remained consistent, so I'd defer to them:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210103093754/https://www.nber....
Not really drugs per se, but at 50k feet yes that's true (but no entirely accurate).
However, the mRNA technology is new, different from traditional vaccines, and effectively untested. Untested until Covid.
This isn't a judgement or a knock. Just a fact.
It wasn't enough testing, and a large scale test wasn't economically viable. But they also weren't completely untested. (And guess what the world spent 6 months doing at some high death rate times? Yep, large scale testing them.)
The rub for many was / is the quickness of the process in contrast with the cock-sureness of the narrative (i.e., don't worry about it...just trust us...). There was also the disconnect between "trust the science" vs limited data and the shutting down of any question. Real Science is fearless.
The data wasn't limited in any way.
It's funny, because I have the opposite criticism. We just let people die for 6 months because we refused to act on "we are sure it's safe, we are confident it will work" and waited to have complete certainty on both of those. If we just scaled the tests further and start paying the labs before we were completely sure the vaccines work (we just really, really expected them to). We could have tested them in less than a month, and vaccinated most of the more vulnerable people in less time than that.
But if we did that, we would be open to the possibility of one of the vaccines not working. We would need a lot of transparency to deal with that, and it looks like the population can't deal with quantified certainty in any way, just with the binary version of it.
Really? Because that's not what I said.
You can't change a process - especially not a medical one for 100s of millions of people - and then say "We're 100% certain of this. This is all new. There are no long term side effects. And if you think or say otherwise, we will cancel you."
Anyone who knows even a bit of history - medical or otherwise - and is comfortable with that is a either naive, or on the take.
To clarify, I don't have a problem with an non-traditional process. That being said, the way the process was "sold" set off my BS detector too many times. The two are disconnected to a fault.
For example, there's this:
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/07/13/1111137...
Long to short, we've had "OMG the variants..." repeated over and over, how important the jab is to that, and then how in a worldwide pandemic the threat of variants can come from anywhere.
Yet, 2 docs in Brazil have to invent their own vax? And promise to give it away? While USA Big Pharma...does what??? counts their money? Because variants aren't a threat? See?
Again, complete disconnect. Disconnect that no one should be comfortable with.
The testing process? Of course we can, statistics is quite an established and predictive science.
Again, looks like you have a problem with a non-traditional process. You also seem to have a falling for low-quality science journalism. Both are understandable, but your failure of understanding the vaccine policies around the pandemics were due to your partial understanding, and not fault of the policies.
https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/ https://www.statnews.com/2017/06/28/moderna-writedown/
The only thing you were sure of is that you were terrified, and wanted anything and anyone to save you.
But hey I'm sure all those auto-immune diseases cropping up from the vaccines fall into the category of "sureness" :D
the 2 are equivalent given context, no?
> he thinks these whistleblowers and the BMJ are liars https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635
Now we know not to trust lern_too_spel :)
follow up source: https://www.doj.state.or.us/media-home/news-media-releases/o...
Quote: "Today’s settlement follows a two-year investigation by the Oregon Department of Justice into evidence that suggested Pfizer was using unreliable and unsubstantiated claims to promote Zyvox®, a relatively new and expensive antibiotic used for treating certain types of pneumonia and bacterial skin infections. Despite lacking evidence required by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to make such claims, Pfizer allegedly relied upon flawed clinical studies to substantiate assertions that Zyvox® was a superior to vancomycin, a comparatively inexpensive generic drug that holds the largest market share and has been available for more than 40 years. Pfizer’s sales representatives detailed and distributed thousands of copies of these faulty studies throughout Oregon to promote the sale of Zyvox®."
Very long and pleasant way of saying "they lied".
Not enough?
How about Chantix: 1. https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news... 2. https://www.youhavealawyer.com/chantix/
Totaling almost 300 million in settlement payouts, they opted to do this AS A SETTLEMENT rather than let things drag out in court. Hmm... I wonder why. Couldn't be because they lied, hide, or downplayed information about Chantix's impact on people's mental health. This lands in their top 10 in terms of pay outs :)
And again, I will direct you to: https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635
While they haven't been fined for it yet (because their new contracts make it almost impossible :^) ), we have pretty substantial evidence Pfizer lied about a myriad of data points collected at at least one facility in regards to their covid19 injection trials.
But hey, at the end of the day I don't care what you believe beyond this post. You can defend the ultra corrupt big pharma company that bakes hundreds of millions in fines into its yearly operating budget.
Makes no difference to me, I'm healthy :)
No, that's a very long way of saying that they haven't received FDA approval to make that claim. Nothing in there substantiates your claim that Pfizer falsified data in https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta....
> Couldn't be because they lied, hide, or downplayed information about Chantix's impact on people's mental health.
There are no allegations that they falsified data in this suit either.
That's three strikes — you're out! Would you like to step up to bat again to try to substantiate your claim that Pfizer has been fined for data falsification?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Daszak
[2] https://www.harpercollins.com/products/viral-matt-ridleyalin...
Here's a discussion on inference pointing to references and sources that argue against the results of the paper: https://inference-review.com/article/thunder-out-of-china
It also raises eyebrows the fact that no animal has ever been found to be positive for COVID, in contrast to all of the previous SARS pandemics.
EDIT: thanks everyone for correcting my assertion. No source animal was found.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/...
EDIT:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_that_can_get_S... - long list of refs
Since this was a food market, it's possible and likely that all the source animals were eaten by the time the study was being done.
This doesn't really mean very much.
It took something like 15 years to find the bat population likely to have been the source of SARS-CoV-1. It's not like we were able to say definitively how the spillover began; it's all probabilities.
We have found similar viruses to SARS-CoV-2 floating around in pangolins and bats.
This is true but misleading. It took a long time to find the reservoir host (i.e., the animal in which most of the virus evolved) for SARS-1, but the proximal host (i.e., the animal that actually infected the first humans) was found within about a year.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2004/01/who-sees...
Based on the WIV's pre-pandemic research, we knew immediately that the reservoir host of SARS-CoV-2 is bats. We still haven't found the proximal host. It's almost certainly not pangolins, and Nature eventually published an extensive correction to their pangolin paper.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x#change-his...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
However, we do not have access to the precise latitude and longitude coordinates of all these cases. Should such data exist, they may be accompanied by additional metadata, some of which we have reconstructed, but some of which, including the date of onset of each case, would be valuable for ongoing studies. We also lack direct evidence of an intermediate animal infected with a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor virus either at the Huanan market or at a location connected to its supply chain, like a farm.
Previously:
What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31866601
[flagged] More evidence that Covid-19 started in a market, not a laboratory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30566956
Book Review: “Viral” by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29764537
US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125145
Frankly turning this on it's head, Russia should be applauded for pushing so many people toward green, renewable and truely economically viable energy sources, I nominate putin for the nobel peace prize based on his efforts here.
You're implying intent on his part. If any single person in the world would want renewables to never exist, it would be him. I also am aghast that you would feel this way about a man destroying hundreds of thousands of lives. The man is evil.
If this was required for most discoveries we'd have to recall a serious number of nobels...
Also if he's shutting down hundreds of throusands of biological co2 and methane factories isn't that further supporting the case?
In 1984: "During routine monitoring at a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant, a worker was found to be contaminated with radioactivity. A high concentration of radon in his home was subsequently identified as responsible."
Everyone affected was either dead or bankrupt from paying their family's medical bills. No lawsuits against the company.
Trollish usernames aren't allowed on HN because they effectively troll every thread they post to.
We've learned that it's better to deal with this earlier than later, so I've banned the account. Happy to rename and unban it if you want to pick a more neutral username.
This is a borderline case—we don't want to be prudes—but I suspect most readers would rather not have "stinkass" in their face.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksrWmPMZGiY [video, gets NSFW around 2:30]
Even this hypothetical theory doesn't explain the early lineage A / lineage B split and is not supported by existing data.
Which of the paper's authors do you believe are beholden to the "self-serving CCP party-line"? Do you see flaws in the paper's analysis, or are you perhaps employing a thought-terminating cliche?
It's quite plausible that the CCP is lying and the paper authors are honest about their findings. The problem is the analysis is only as good as the inputs. From the article:
> "Chinese government notified the World Health Organization (WHO) of an outbreak of severe pneumonia of unknown etiology in Wuhan...after careful examination of reported case histories..."
Note that:
1. The CCP claims the virus was unknown to them.
2. The CCP is in charge of what case histories are analyzed, and can carefully select those which point away from the lab leak.
This paper proves nothing beyond that there was a spatial relationship between the market and some of the initial cases. It wouldn’t have been hard for the CCP to discretely put some CV-19 distribution devices in the market, if the virus was released on purpose.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Railway_Hub
To take ejb999's example of radioactive water being found near a nuclear power plant, is it more likely that the radioactive water was found because there is increased monitoring of radiation near nuclear power plants?
It is important not to make emotional leaps to conclusions. Apparent correlations deserve study, but they are not proofs.
You made no effort at all to criticize the methodology (which looks pretty standard to me, consistent with methods used to pinpoint the origin of other disease outbreaks besides COVID), or the raw data. Not one of the listed authors is Chinese, nor do any of them have any Chinese institutional affiliations.
What is your actual argument for why I should disregard this, beyond 'CCP bad'?
If China is messing with the data, why do we even have data that shows the epicenter of infection moving southeast? Why not just hide or falsify it?
Those are pretty naive criteria based on what we already know about the situation. One of the biggest opponents of investigating the lab leak hypothesis was Peter Daszak, a British zoologist who is certainly not Chinese nor does his EcoHealth Alliance have any surface level ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. EcoHealth Alliance provided grants for the coronavirus research (and the activity that has been labeled by some as gain-of-research) and authored the misleading Lancet letter [0] that was used to ostracize anyone who publicly disagree with the animal-spillover hypothesis as well as enabled social media platforms and fact-checking sites to censor any content or discussion of the lab leak hypothesis.
TL;DR: people can have agendas that may not be obvious to you at first glance.
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
My personal view is that it's impossible to know: the CCP has done everything possible to look guilty of hiding something, but unless there's some breakthrough where a source animal is found or someone in the CCP security apparatus makes a deathbed confession, I consider this an unresolvable discussion. That being said, I'm still 100% behind the shaming of people like Peter Daszak who have been shown to have acted in bad faith to cover their own asses.
Here’s a link to that, if we’re open to differing perspectives.
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/lie-exposed-bbc-says-covid...
If people would actually read and digest the article before spewing out their own biases, then you would see that the article addressed this very contention.
The article pointed out several facts. One was that there were two strains already. Having that come from the virology institute doesn't make sense. It makes more sense if the virus was spreading and mutating amongst the animals in the market.
Second, is charting the concentration of early spread. Again, the market was the epicenter.
Third is looking more closely at that and seeing this same epicenter pattern in a specific part of the market. This again points to the market being the epicenter.
Fourth, there is no such pattern of infection around the virology institute that was conducting the bat virus research.
For some reason, neither the locations of the Wuhan Institute of Infectious Diseases or the Wuhan Institute of Virology are mentioned in the linked paper.
As far as I can tell (the writing style is not very clear IMHO), the Fig 2(B) blue cases are not second-stage cases, but rather a plot of "cases with no known link to the market".
As for your second point, I don't see any discussion in the paper that this cluster "occur[s] in an area of high density housing with a preponderance of elderly people". Where are you seeing this?
If you are not seeing such discussion perhaps you should read it more slowly. It's early in the Results section.
The clustering of COVID-19 cases in December around the Huanan market (Fig. 1, B and C, insets) contrasts with the pattern of widely dispersed cases across Wuhan by early January through mid-February 2020 (Fig. 1, D and E), which we mapped using location data from individuals using a COVID-19 assistance app on Sina Weibo (26). Weibo-based data analyses show that, unlike early COVID-19 cases, by January and February many of the sick who sought help resided in highly populated areas of the city, and particularly in areas with a high density of older people (Fig. 1E and figs. S9 and S10).
Fig 2B is an exemplar, as is clear from the description: 'Schematic showing how cases can be near to, but not centered on, a specific location.'
* "Sars-Cov-2 was Lab Made Under Project DEFUSE"
* "Was Sars-Cov-2 DESIGNED to Spawn so Many Variants?"
* "Vaccine Shedding Finally Proven!"
* ""COVID Vaccine Technology" will Make Varroa Mites Infertile"
* "Boosters Now PROMOTE Covid Deaths in Europe"
* "Developmental Disorders in Babies born to Vaccinated Mothers?"
>I wonder how many people who are seemingly willing to believe the self-serving CCP party-line on this, would be just as believing of the owners of a nuclear power plant in their town, once the drinking water became radioactive, claiming "it didn't come from the plant, someone else down the street must have done it" - that is just about as believable as this.
Absolutely sure the CCP are lying (I don't trust them either but that's not proof they're lying is it?)
Another comment here:
>I don't believe this to be true. I consider the likelyhood that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the cause of this to be much higher than that the seafood market in wuhan was the cause and there's no reason to trust any media or NGO to be truthful in that regard.
Literally "I don't believe the facts".
That's just this thread, on HN.
It's really concerning, or it was when I thought people could be self governing. /EdgyBS
And we're in the same place now.
Because people 100% believe things based on zero evidence.
Where is the fact in there? "China investigated itself and found themselves not guilty" does not make a "fact".
>there is no reason to trust any media or NGO to be truthful in that regard.
So if there are facts, you cannot believe them and OP doesn't.
And Second:
For arguments stake, let's assume that is correct and there are zero facts. So what can you conclude?
Nothing! It's possible there was a lab leak, it's possible there wasn't, we just do not know. That would be a fine conclusion.
So why has Op decided one possible conclusions is "much higher (probability) than" the others?
We don't know if there is a god or not. So concluding one particular religion is correct is dumb. The same applies to people claiming one theory or another is right re Covid Origins.
That is where the disregard for (lack of) facts comes in. If you don't know, you don't know; you don't get to decide with certainty what reality is because looking is too hard.
https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g...
There's fleetingly little evidence of anything aside from a natural origin. This could be consistent with a natural virus collected at the WIV which subsequently escaped, but the multiple lineages at the market makes this extremely unlikely as well.
It's honestly killed me support for democracy. 95% of people seem to be incapable of thinking about uncertainty and living with not knowing. They just jump headlong into whatever looks good. Facts and reason are just justifications for things their prejudices already decided.
When emotion triumphs logic and reasoning, that society is nearing end of times. Such was the case for Roman empire, increasingly people's mentality started to shift away from reality and into idealized and complex web of absurdities leading up to its down fall, much of which were spouted by its upper echelon awash with luxury and comforts unaffordable by its masses
We see such absurdities being pushed in schools (ex. Math is racist) and in society in general which then antagonizes and gaslights, attacks opposing nuanced views that throws its own narratives into question.
While doing business with authoritarian states, we've ended up resembling in some form. It's a damn shame, once again reminded that open societies remain open only as long as its participants believe it to be so. If we close ourselves to one view then we are doomed to repeat the same attrocities that closed socities commit against individuals groups.
Having said that, I looked up the polling on lab leaks and American democracy loses on this one:
https://morningconsult.com/2021/06/09/coronavirus-lab-leak-w...
48% "The Coronavirus spilled from a Virology lab in China"
28% Don't Know / No Opinion
26% "The Coronavirus moved naturally from animals to humans"
For anyone reading these kinds of stories and reports but is not a regular China follower, there is one thing you really should know. Anytime the Chinese government reacts very negatively to a story (Denial, attacking, undermining, deflecting), it usually means the story is true. The Chinese government is really terrible at information management and addressing anything that might make them look bad or lose face.
Just admitting a Chinese lab collected, studied and by accident a lab worker got infected with COVID is just something China can not admit. It is perfectly reasonable that some lab somewhere would collect and study the COVID virus. What is unreasonable is that the lab or a lab worker just got sloppy and accidently released that virus out to the world.
Any "scientific evidence" that can be touched by the Chinese government will be corrupted. Any influence they have over "scientific evidence" is not scientific evidence.
Or just because it's Chinese? Now back to square one?
Criticizing a government is not criticizing a race.
You criticizing a government because of its policies, oppressiveness, and so on. None of that has anything to do with race. The Chinese have every ability to have a good government as any other race, because race has nothing to do with it.
They just happen to have a bad government, compared to a number of other better governments (of all races). Heck, look at Taiwan. Chinese people, much better government.
* A word "bad" is not constructive criticism, because it's not backed by facts.
* You misunderstood my comment. As I was asking the facts to support Chinese government to be bad, and the comparison to other nations with similar sizes. Of course you cannot compare Chinese government vs. Singapore government, and claim Chinese government is bad.
...well, yes, of course they do. But they would also strongly deny the story if they thought it was untrue.
> Anytime the Chinese government reacts very negatively to a story (Denial, attacking, undermining, deflecting), it usually means the story is true.
So if they don't react negatively and deny something, then the story is... false? That doesn't make any sense.
Then why would block any investigation from outside the Chinese government? If anything, if the Lab Leak theory is provable false, they should be inviting outsiders to investigate and waste their political capital/time/energy. If your advisories want to spin their wheels on something that is not true, then let them.
> So if they don't react negatively and deny something, then the story is... false? That doesn't make any sense.
When it comes to the Chinese government and information, surprisingly as it sounds, yes. If the Lab Leak story was not true, the Chinese government would not even react to it. They might even entertain it as part of their information ops strategy since the Lab Leak theory is a plausible theory.
If you think about it, how does the Wet Market theory make China look better than the Lab Leak theory? It really doesn't. If serious pandemics are coming out of Wet Markets, then why does China still allow Wet Markets to exist? At least with lab safety, labs can be improved and managed better while Wet Markets are just ticking pandemic timebombs.
I can easily believe that the Chinese government, not exactly known for its openness, would be keen to block investigations into their bio research labs, regardless of what happened in Wuhan.
The potential upsides are few - would any doubters be silenced if the investigation found nothing?
I can also believe that even if they have no reason to believe that the lab leak theory is true and their internal investigations have turned up nothing, that they're not entirely convinced there is zero chance there wasn't a lab leak.
Even if they think there's only a 1% chance there was a lab leak, then the idea of an outside investigation is clearly dangerous to them. Blocking an investigation is safer.
Now imagine it's US, not China. Would US let anyone from outside to investigate its labs?
Let's assume the US is the epicenter of a global pandemic that killed 6 million people and $12 trillion in economic damage (and counting). And the US is refusing to cooperate with an investigation into its origins.
What is an appropriate response from China, Russia, and the international community?
Assume the US's military isn't the most powerful and technologically advanced in the world. Instead China's is the most powerful and advanced.
Ensuring the cause of the pandemic is understood and steps have been taken to greatly reduce the likely hood of it happening again is the opposite of deranged. Failing to do so is in fact deranged.
Is this still true? It is unfortunate that it took an event like this to prove what we already knew: lab workers, who are of course fallible humans, will make mistakes.
Given that Covid was released upon the world likely due to a lab accident and all of the damage it did over a span of years, it would seem reasonable to rethink whether unlimited experimentation and especially enhancement with viruses should be allowed. This in itself has proven to be a source of denial by the very virus experts (like Fauci) that do not want their area of science to be restricted.
This is entirely without evidence.
> This in itself has proven to be a source of denial by the very virus experts (like Fauci) that do not want their area of science to be restricted.
Even if you ignore Covid19 -- epidemiologists and virologists have been screaming for years that pandemics are hugely problematic and will become increasingly likely as we densify and further intrude into the urban-wilderness interface. We got extremely lucky that SARS1 wasn't as lethal or infectious as Covid-19. If the work virologists do (even the 'riskiest' work) could lead to new universal coronavirus vaccines or better treatments, it's a much more complicated question on whether to continue the work than ignorant opinions insist.
To make it clear, the Chinese government blocks any investigation by outside parties that they don't control or have influence over.
Virologists have pored over the genome and are highly confident it's a virus of natural origin -- that already greatly limits the role a lab could have played and doesn't require any input or approval from the Chinese government.
Repeating nonsensical statements does not make the statement clearer. Paying attention to what you want to pay attention to is fine, but it is not a robust way to process unreliable data.
Ignoring the incredible risks of playing with and even creating deadly pathogens and the high likelihood of it being released into the world serves what purpose other than to protect a small group of scientists that want to create Frankenstein pathogens for experimental purposes that are likely to be either weaponized or accidentally released? Even if there are some beneficial results from such research it is likely countered by the huge risks to mankind.
"This virus came from a lab - so we should ban lab research"
and
"You can't prove the virus didn't come from a lab - so we should ban lab research"
Nature is doing far more Gain of Function research than humans are capable of - as evidenced by literally every pandemic in history. I've generally found the people who are the most vocal about banning GoF have literally no idea what it entails and why the way pedestrians talk about is so cringeworthy.
How do you believe the CCP's reaction would be different from what we saw them actually do?
A virus of (human)/(animal) origin was (un)intentionally (released)/(spread)/(detected) in Wuhan, starting at a (lab)/(market).
Narrative 1: Animal origin with extensive spread in a food market
Narrative 2: Animal origin with accidental release from lab study
Narrative 3: Intentional creation/modification of a virus for purposes of scientific study and subsequent (un)intentional release
Narrative 4: Intentional creation/modification of a virus for nefarious purposes with (un)intentional release
Narrative 5: Animal origin with slow undetected community spread somewhere and possibly random mutation that lead to more viral fitness in Wuhan.
---
What would actually change if you had certainty around one of these theories? Are you certain that there will not be a zoonotic viral pandemic in the future? If you aren't certain that there will never be a zoonotic pandemic again, then we should ramp up vector and disease surveillance.
Also, China has had no problem disciplining people that cause trouble and embarrassment. If they thought someone caused this, that person is fucking gone.
I don't think there is any way to get to a scientific certainty either positively or negatively about any of the origin theories; thus we should take precautions about all of them.
Widespread political support for ending all public funding of gain-of-function research or outright banning it.
What get's me is I'd support serious action against china because if its a lab leak they need to own that, and if it's from shitty food supply chain they need to own that too.
Also they're a shitty dictatorship, they're aggressive, they're genocidal etc.
People seem very enthusiastic to blame china for a lab leak, but have no enthusiasm to blame them for other mechanisms or to convert that blame into supporting action. It's a weird thing for my brain and I share this more as sharing my confusion to see if anyone else feels the same way.
I think you did a very nice job breaking down the many many uncertainties here btw.
The problem is that there really isn't any evidence. SARS-COV-2 has never been detected in any Chinese land animals associated with the market. We know that birds can transmit it, but it needs to come from somewhere. There's no reservoir of the stuff found in the wild...unlike viruses like Ebola, Marburg, MERS, etc.
There were two variants in the market...but given the speed at which SARS-COV-2 variants have mutated in humans, well, how likely is it that the market was the source? SARS-COV-2 went through millions of humans before the first variant popped out. Is it reasonable to assume that some progenitor virus went though millions of iterations to become SARS-COV-2 in the market, then did it again and again?
But however unlikely, this is where we are today. Was it just bad luck that some virus entered an immuno-compromised animal at the market and mutated...twice?
No, there were two distinct lineages in the market. That's different than variants.
The lineages are important because although the differences between the sequences are small, they are distinct, and there are no known transitional haplotypes.
> given the speed at which SARS-COV-2 variants have mutated in humans, well, how likely is it that the market was the source?
See Pekar et al: https://zenodo.org/record/6342616
They deal with this question directly.
Evolutionary biologist Heather Heying similarly reasoned the origin of the virus through an understanding of evolution. Covid doesn't appear to transmit outside. If covid evolved naturally, it would be capable of spreading outside, where animals live. Instead, it appeared to evolve to spread in lab-like air conditioned conditions only.
That is just replicating what nature does when it hops from individual to individual. Nature has billions of animals to do serial passage through.
And we still don't know that the species jump happened in the market, and I'm somewhat skeptical of the claims of this author. I tend to think it was circulating in rural Hubei, probably coinfecting domestic animals and people, getting better and better at infecting people until the market event happened which was where it found a densely packed human population where it spread with R0 significantly greater than 1 and took off. There's no evidence of that though because when the grandparents of farmers in rural villages die of pneumonia nobody bothers collecting samples because that's normal.
And we only noticed it when it started to efficiently infect human beings because that is when the pandemic started. The initial poor cryptic spread between humans and animals before that wouldn't have been detected because poor spreading couldn't cause the pandemic to start.
And we know that its possible for the virus to jump backwards and forwards between humans and minks, so the idea that an intermediate animal reservoir would have been infected with this virus and would have repeatedly attempted to jump to farm workers until it finally got good at spreading in humans is not that far fetched at all. Then the intermediate animal host becomes a massive bioreactor in close contact with humans, giving it many opportunities to roll the dice until it finds a combination that unlocks its pandemic potential, and then the first time it was transported into a dense human population it takes off.
There could be a hundred other viruses in animals in China all knocking on the door, occasionally infecting humans and not being good at it all right now, happening every day in China. This one was very good at infecting humans, along with being very good at infecting all kinds of other animals (mink, deer, dogs, cats, etc) because in order to cause a pandemic it had to be good at that, if it was bad at that it wouldn't have happened. It is like the anthropic principle--the virus seems incredibly lucky, because it had to be.
SARS-1 disn't have a presymptomatic infectious phase and the peak of symptoms was roughly the peak of infectiousness, and it was mostly severely virulent, and it didn't produce a global pandemic and was controllable.
To have an uncontrollable pandemic you really need that silent spreading, so the pandemic virus that emerges necessarily has that property from the "start".
How would a virus that's medium good at infecting humans, but not yet amazing at infecting humans, stay in rural Hubei for years without escaping?
This sounds like pure speculation. How much actual data do we have on viruses that just made the jump from animals to humans? Probably nowhere near the amount needed to confidently say that the original Wuhan strain was somehow too infectious to realistically be of natural origin.
As for getting better at infecting humans over time, covid _has_ done that. Whatever omicron subvariant we're on could run circles around the original strain without breaking a sweat.
> If covid evolved naturally, it would be capable of spreading outside, where animals live. Instead, it appeared to evolve to spread in lab-like air conditioned conditions only.
Did she make an actual quantitative comparison between the infectiousness of covid and other respiratory viruses, inside versus outside?
Dr. Fauci has recently been saying in interviews that the only masks that work are N95/KN95. When he was pushing cloth masks, did you go around calling that "pure speculation?"
Dr. Fauci has said, under oath, that when he was saying the vaccines would stop the spread he was just expressing a hope that would be the case. Dr. Birx says in her book she knew it would not stop the spread. When they were saying it would stop the spread, did you go around calling that "pure speculation?"
The "two lineages" argument has been grossly distorted by Worobey and the media. They're just two single-nucleotide polymorphisms apart, so they could easily have arisen in a single human-to-human transmission. SARS-CoV-2 averages something around a third of an SNP per human-to-human transmission, so ~10% of such transmissions differ by two SNPs.
If a missing link does exist, then it's just a single mutation away from either strain. So there's no reason to consider the "two lineages" too significant in any direction, unless you believe sampling in humans has been perfectly good. That belief seems unreasonable to me, especially since belief in a natural zoonotic origin requires us to believe sampling in animals has been perfectly bad.
https://mobile.twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/153463060722071...
The problem with that argument, is that it doesn't explain the polytomies and is misleading, as you accuse Worobey of being.
"Just a few SNPs" is disingenuous and glosses over the usefulness of this evidence that almost everyone agrees on - eg, that it's highly unlikely that lineage B evolved from lineage A. (Even Jesse Bloom agrees on this.)
It may take a bit to find consensus on the dual-zoonosis theory and related phylogenetics, but the eagerness with which people dismiss this issue drives me nuts.
https://twitter.com/jepekar/status/1499840349807656960
So why do you take the two lineages as conclusive evidence of two zoonotic events (as Worobey has repeatedly claimed in the media, even though his papers are more cautious)? Given the above, I don't see how we can exclude that the two lineages evolved in early human cryptic spread, before we started sampling enough to draw a perfect phylogenetic tree.
Have you read Pekar's most recent paper in Science? I raise this in earnest, I'm reading it now. A lot of it follows the preprint, but the update more directly addresses many of the points we're discussing.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337
My problem with the "just a couple mutations" deniers is that that viewpoint doesn't speak to any of the real phylogenic questions here.
But with just two SNPs, I believe that assumption is invalid. So while I believe those authors have correctly observed that we're missing part of the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2, I don't see how they decided whether that's unsampled spread in animals vs. unsampled spread in humans, except under that incorrect assumption.
I hadn't read the final paper, but I'm looking at it now. I don't see any new points that don't depend on that assumption yet, though. Do you?
They don't assume that. See the discussion in Pekar. ("The high extinction rate [...] Failed introductions of intermediate haplotypes are also possible.") The whole point of their epidemiological modeling is to disentangle the likelihood of this happening. (See: "Separate introductions of lineages A and B")
The tMRCA doesn't allow enough time for any deep cryptic spread. The authors show this. It's not assumed.
> We show that it is highly unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 circulated widely in humans earlier than November 2019 and that there was limited cryptic spread, with, at most, dozens of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the weeks leading up to the inferred tMRCA, but likely far fewer.
https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.abp8337/su...
I haven't fully studied all the layers yet, but as far as I can tell it's numerical sludge, in the same general direction as econometrics, with so many free parameters or arbitrary choices in the model that you could plausibly get almost any result you wanted. Similar models got their chance to make falsifiable predictions of the case count in the actual pandemic, and they failed repeatedly, often by huge margins, in both directions.
For a specific criticism, the authors report that they're robust against variation in doubling time, but nothing about robustness to the extent of the overdispersion of SARS-CoV-2's spread (i.e., the superspreader characteristic, where most patients infect very few people but a minority infect a lot). They appear to model that only through the connectivity of the infection network, which appears to be fixed. All other things being equal, more stochastic early spread will make it harder to confidently reach any conclusion.
I'm not saying this work isn't interesting at all, or that I could do better; but it's many layers of stacked uncertainty. I believe the confidence that the authors express in this paper is already excessive, and Worobey's statements to the media go considerably beyond that.
Enjoy your criticism.
The output of their model is the structure of the resulting phylogenetic tree. I believe the primary determinant of that will be the extent of overdispersion of transmission, i.e. the shape of the pdf of how many people you expect each patient to infect. For example, let's say R0 = 2 and each patient always infects exactly two others. Then all lineages will survive (at least initially, until a significant fraction of the population is recovered and immune). The phylogenetic tree will be as perfect a binary tree as the mutation rate and our sampling permit. If we cut off the beginning, then we'll see many descendant lineages.
Instead, let's say the spread is absurdly overdetermined, so that each patient infects either zero others (with p = 0.99) or 200 (with p = 0.01). Then (after trying the simulation enough times for the pandemic to finally get started) our tree will just be a succession of super-spreading events, with far fewer lineages.
I believe that by manipulating that pdf, we can reshape that phylogenetic tree to almost anything we want. I see no description from the authors of why they believe the pdf resulting from their choice of a contact network is the right one, nor any study of robustness to changes in the shape of that pdf. Am I missing something?
They acted very quickly to sterilize the market which eliminated the evidence.
In SARS-1 the market associated with that was allowed to operate until investigators were able to take samples from the animals there and find the related virus.
As a containment measure this was probably the right reflex to have, as an investigative measure this was highly counterproductive. If, however, you are one of the people who blame China for not acting fast enough to contain the spread then you can't criticize them for this.
> There's no reservoir of the stuff found in the wild...unlike viruses like Ebola, Marburg, MERS, etc.
MERS just happened to be very easy since we sampled the camels and they were positive and sitting right there with lots of human contact. In the case of SARS-1 the actual progenitor virus was only found 10 years later in bats in Yunnan. With Ebola the species that harbors the virus has actually yet to be determined, decades later. Marburg was first discovered in 1967 and was only isolated from Egyptian fruit bats in 2009, 42 years later.
I think you're vastly underestimating how hard it is to track down animal reservoirs, and with the reservoir of Ebola still being unknown 46 years after it was discovered kind of undermines your entire point.
We also now have the BANAL viruses found in bats in Laos which are getting closer and closer to a match to SARS-CoV-2, which is actually good progress after only 2-3 years (it would actually be highly suspicious if someone found the 99% homologous bat progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 after only a few years of looking, that would suggest that China knew where it was all along -- actual science that isn't on the TV or movies is quite difficult and usually a lengthy needle-in-a-haystack process as all of these examples show).
Why do you keep saying this? As you know, the closest animal viruses to SARS-1 were found in civet cats and raccoon dogs, within about a year of its emergence in humans.
The bat viruses that Dr. Shi later discovered are scientifically important, because most of SARS-1's genome probably evolved in bats. They provide no new insight as to how the virus came to infect humans, though.
If you go back a few months before the pandemic outbreak in humans and there's a zoonotic jump to civit cat and raccoon dogs then I don't think you can usefully call that the reservoir species. It existed and evolved for decades in bats, which I'd call the reservoir. The jump to the intermediate animal I'd consider to be part of the pandemic mechanism (unless you can find SARS-1 in samples from a decade previously in those animals).
[ And another way to say this is why do we bother calling out an "intermediate species" when discussing pandemics? ]
I agree there's no evidence for any animal except bats as the reservoir for SARS-1 (or SARS-CoV-2). The intermediate host seems like the important link to show natural origin, though. Genetic engineers can't invent new viruses de novo, only modify existing ones, so a reservoir host must always exist; the question is just how it got from that reservoir to a human pandemic.
1. We quickly found pretty good evidence (infected civet cats and raccoon dogs, and infected human traders of those animals) that SARS-1 arose from natural zoonosis, within about a year of its emergence in humans. The later discovery of WIV-1 didn't add to this evidence.
2. We've found no such evidence for SARS-CoV-2.
That doesn't mean SARS-CoV-2 definitely arose unnaturally--we've expended a lot more effort looking, but it really is a harder problem. It just means we don't know, and we need to keep looking. Do you disagree?
With SARS-1 the market was still fully operating when they went looking for the origins.
Once the human pandemic kicks off and you find some civets or whatever with the virus, then how do you prove they had it before the humans unless you have lucky lab samples drawn from civets who were infected prior to Dec 2019? You'd need to do something like find civit-adapted SARS-CoV-2 which could be genetically dated to prior to Dec 2019 because there were simply too many mutations to have been backspill from the human pandemic. If the spread in civets started very shortly before the spread in humans then that would likely not be possible at this point. If you could find a virus in civets that was 5 years of genetic drift away from SARS-CoV-2 that would probably work, but that may never have existed. What remains is finding the persistent bat reservoir.
For now that's all academic though, since we've found zero animals infected by any lineage of SARS-CoV-2, excluding animals that we're quite confident were infected directly or indirectly by humans, from the timing, circumstances, and genomic evidence. I don't think your scenario is impossible, and the traders themselves also had good incentive to hide or dispose of suspect animals before anyone could swab them. There's inherently no direct evidence for it, though.
It seems like most arguments over the origin of SARS-CoV-2 eventually reduce to arguments over what the Chinese government has concealed, whether deliberately or accidentally as part of their containment protocol. That makes the argument hard to resolve, though there's still considerable unexplored evidence within reach of American or European subpoena, like a search through all available raw sequencer reads between September and December 2019 for contamination from SARS-CoV-2 or related viruses.
Ebola and Marburg for decades were quite rare. Incredibly deadly, but an outbreak would affect a few tens of people, and invariably in remote locations. By the time the epidemiologists arrived, the outbreak was waning.
Clearly the Ebola outbreak in 2010s was much bigger, but that was the first such large outbreak.
Also, with outbreaks in the rainforest, and perhaps with poor sanitation, there are thousands of possible animal hosts, whereas hyper-urbanised China hives far less opportunity for wildlife contact.
I don't understand how those viruses being rare in humans and outbreaks fading is actually making it harder to find them. If anything it is easier because then they don't have to figure out if humans gave it to them or they gave it to humans.
Id also guess the manpower that went into searching for the SARS2 predecessor far exceeds the efforts that went into sampling animals in African rainforest.
There might have been more manpower looking for the SARS-2 predecessor but, unlike with Ebola, there isn't any guarantee it still exists in a recognizable form, and in intermediate hosts you have the issue of human-animal transmission.
And I'm still skeptical that bats gave it directly to intermediate animals who gave it to people in a nice linear fashion. Humans going into mines (like the Mojiang miners) or bat guano farming could have become infected and given it to farmed animals that they were around first, and the pandemic could be the result of spillback once the virus got good at infecting humans (not needing to be particularly good at infecting the farmed animals because of massively crowded conditions).
> One of the key findings of our study is that ‘unlinked’ early COVID-19 patients, those who neither worked at the market or knew someone who did, nor had recently visited the market, resided significantly closer to the market than patients with a direct link to the market. The observation that a substantial proportion of early cases had no known epidemiological link had previously been used as an argument against a Huanan market epicenter of the pandemic. However, this group of cases resided significantly closer to the market than those who worked there, indicating that they had been exposed to the virus at, or near, the Huanan market. For market workers, the exposure risk was their place of work not their residential locations, which were significantly further afield than those cases not formally linked to the market.
This makes sense, but it's probably not something I'd have thought of myself.
I also find figure 4[1] fascinating. Evidence points not just to the market, but to just a handful of stalls within it.
The sibling study tracks two lineages in the early spread, both clustered around the market. The first study, citing this sibling, says:
> This, along with the lineage A cases we report in close geographical proximity to the market in December, challenges the suggestion that the market was simply a superspreading event, which would be lineage-specific. Rather, it adds to the evidence presented here that lineage A, like lineage B, may have originated at the Huanan market then spread from this epicenter into the neighborhoods surrounding the market and then beyond.
They conclude that they are likely the result of separate animal-to-human transmissions and that there were probably more jumps that quickly died off. This suggests that the virus was well-suited to infect humans before it jumped:
> Successful transmission of both lineage A and B viruses after independent zoonotic events indicates that evolutionary adaptation within humans was not needed for SARS-CoV-2 to spread (49). We now know that SARS-CoV-2 can readily spread after reverse-zoonosis to Syrian hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus), American mink (Neovison vison), and white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), indicating its host generalist capacity (50–55).
[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337 [1] https://www.science.org/cms/10.1126/science.abp8715/asset/86...
~ Eric Weinstein
This study seems to potentially shine some light on only the first item in that list, an outbreak at/near the wet market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...