I strongly suspect that the three-letter agencies have good intel to conclusively show that this is the case, but they have decided to hold back on it for the sake of US-China relations.
I'm not sure what world you're living in but we've been shooting missiles at Chinese military objects and restricting their access to semiconductors. I have little doubt that if the CIA or FBI had information it was actually a Chinese plot they would have released it by now.
Naw. Nobody wins from increased instability. Seems to me the playbook is obvious. You see in politics all the time. Everyone knows the truth but pretends otherwise until the proper time when things have settled down and the truth can be allowed to be free.
We are coming to the time when people are forgetting what lockdown were like and just want to move on with live. The near future is when the lab leak hypothesis can become the de facto default of scientists and intel agencies.
Same applies for the vaccines. 4 months of study for top level review of vaccines as a metastudy. 6 months of journal review for meta analysis of existing papers. 6 months of journal review, 4 months to parse the data.
Already, before the narrative can change, 20 months need to pass since the end of the dataset. If you want relevent data on covid and vaccine outcomes, then it's Jan 2021-Dec 2022.
First two years of preliminary data won't be finalized and combined and analyzed to a sufficient degree to potentially flip the narrative until about September 2024.
Want real data on covid and the vaccine? 5 years worth? You can have it in September 2027.
Why bother having the CIA release shit when you can just have the scientists do your dirty for you and time slide relevent information into 2024+?
How would that improve anything for the US, though? Shooting down balloons helps us because it gets rid of spy equipment in our skies (and lets us get our hands on it). Restricting access to semiconductors keeps us on better technological footing than China.
If they release evidence of a lab leak, China will deny it and relations will deteriorate. How do either of those things help the US? It's not going to make China a pariah in the world (and even if it did, that may or may not be a good thing) - the world is already very clear on their profound human rights abuses of Uyghurs, but nothing happens because they're too economically important.
We'd maybe gain some theoretical moral high ground, but that doesn't make the world safer or better.
> I'm not sure what world you're living in but we've been shooting missiles at Chinese military objects
Only after several days of failing to resolve the balloon matter diplomatically. Shooting it down was not their first resort, and that's probably because diplomatic considerations with China were being weighed against the domestic political situation. When the diplomatic situation can be kept relatively smooth and normal by keeping the public in the dark, that's the 'rational' choice.
One of those agencies - the FBI - has long held that Covid-19 is the result of a lab leak: “The FBI previously came to the conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with “moderate confi-dence” and still holds to this view.” (from the WSJ article)
That may be a neat concept for a science fiction novel, but it seems more likely that someone at the Wuhan BSL4 was working with coronaviruses (as they do) and somehow contracted the virus themselves. They may have been working with lab animals, such as bats. The virus didn’t have to come with a sinister intention.
Looking at this another way, until today, the most common hypothesis was that the virus crossed into humans because of contact with wild animals. A lab leak probably also involved contact with wild animals. It’s just now the Energy Dept. has gotten their hands on intelligence supporting this notion in particular.
It’s not such a crazy idea because it had a large unexplained evolutionary gab in generic sequences from other variants that I believe is still pretty unexplained. The “conventional” theory is an immune suppressed HIV patient, but I’ve read that idea has a lot of holes in it.
Nothing seems certain at this point, but, let’s say the pandemic was actually caused by a lab leak. That’ll mean the world was brought to an economic standstill and millions of people died because of the errors and carelessness of some people…will there be consequences? What will be the assurance that such deadly mistake won’t occur again?
If it was actually a lab leak, then it’ll definitely rank as the most costly and fatal mistake in the 21st Century. I can hardly wrap my head around it; human error causing damage on a mythical scale. Scary stuff.
Let me play the game. If covid was caused by a lab leak, I think the right question to ask is: who benefits (did benefit) by the leak? And remember that number of dead people is something that governments don’t care about (i.e., governments easily go into war every now and then: it’s clear they couldn’t care less about civilians).
The worlds billionaires, combined, made more money in 2020-2022 than the previous 20 years combined. When there’s that much money involved, one must be a little suspicious.
I dunno actually, who has actually been arguing that it couldn’t be a lab leak? I’ve generally seen people arguing the position: there’s no evidence for it having been a leak. This second hand story about a low-confidence classified report doesn’t push me much in either direction. It is possible, though.
What do we do if it leaked? Dangerous thing are handled in labs. We should double check the handling protocols based on the unknown possibility that it was a leak, just to be safe. I bet there are more dangerous things than COVID in all sorts of labs.
Even if we accepted the idea that "governments don't care", it's still made up of people that act out of self interest. How would they protect themselves and their loved ones from the same fate that they so callously cast upon the rest of us? I think Hanlon's Razor applies:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect"
> How would they protect themselves and their loved ones from the same fate that they so callously cast upon the rest of us?
A good question, but worth noting that they do seem to have in fact done so. I struggle to think of a single-higher up of any significance who was felled by SARS-CoV-2, despite the fact so many of them are octogenarians. Colin Powell maybe, but his blood cancer was clearly the more proximate cause of his death. A few in Iran, but, well.
The only reason to not say it was a lab leak is to avoid embarrassing those responsible, China first and America second.
But little by little people will start accepting that.
What should the consequences be? At the very least a tightening of the controls around labs doing bio research. Of course, this amounts to nothing if someone is allowed to outsource research to labs in countries that don't follow the stringent procedures. So, anybody who does such outsourcing shares the full responsibility if things go wrong.
What about Covid itself? China and America need to provide reparations. How much? Clearly in the trillions, maybe double digit trillions.
How about those who obstructed the investigations? I think they should face justice, and it's not unreasonable to expect that some would go to prison for their obstructions.
Both in China and America? For sure in America, where the arm of justice has a long reach. In China, if Xi wants a well functioning Party, yes, he should sent those who obstructed to jail, for if he tolerates that, his Party will go in decay.
We need treaties tightly regulating all biolabs around the world. Any countries not agreeing with the treaties should be blacklisted from entering entering or exiting countries that are part of the treaty, perhaps even restricting trade as well.
The decontamination protocols and entry / exit procedures for every biolab should be unified, worldwide, with strict and regular third-party circular auditing around the world. This allows labs to maintain their secrets; only the perimeter / filter are subject to this.
That would be the sensible course of action as a matter of Earth defense.
The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years. Allow the development of vaccines for extant viruses, but completely ban all Dr Frankenstein activities with viruses. No more "invent a virus in a lab to beat nature to the punch" horse shit, with is flagrant weapons development under the cover of civilian research. As soon as the virus started circulating through the population, did these researchers share their knowledge and help develop a vaccine? No, they buried their involvement and covered up everything they knew. They were no help at all, and never intended to be. Burn their books which describe how it is done, and silence the people who already understand it with the threat of criminal imprisonment for sharing their knowledge. Encourage major religions to amend their rules with strong taboos against this research, and institute harsh economic sanctions against any nation that doesn't participate in this ban.
Does this seem extreme? It shouldn't. This field of research has the power to kill billions and no demonstrable upside. It is even more dangerous than nuclear weapons; because at least a technician at a nuclear weapon production facility would be hard pressed to release his work on the global public of his own initiative. Smuggling a virus out of any lab is trivial, all it takes is a single madman's willingness to sacrifice himself as patient zero.
We're the villagers in an "evil wizard" scenario. The wizards have been meddling in dangerous forces beyond the understanding of common people, and it's getting people killed. The solution is to storm the wizard's tower and throw the wizards off the top of it.
> The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years.
This kind of sloppy hyperbole is tremendously damaging, feeding the false narrative that we must choose between the benefits of modern virology--smallpox wasn't eradicated until 1977!--and the catastrophic risks of experiments on novel potential pandemic pathogens.
Almost all modern virological research involves either existing pathogens already present in humans, or novel pathogens in systems incapable of replicating in humans. The WIV's research was a narrow exception, and one that was controversial long before this pandemic. For example, here's David Relman asking Ralph Baric a question about those risks, back in 2014:
That narrow area carries almost all the risk of a catastrophic research accident, and has yet to deliver any significant benefit. It could be banned with minimal impact on almost all modern virological research. That narrow regulation is what we need, and there are people (like the new NGO Protect Our Future) working to draft and enact it. Your conflation between modern virology in aggregate and that narrow area doesn't help them, and I hope you will stop.
Hackernews now advocating for burning books, wow. This is the end result in allowing political ragebait threads instead of focusing on tech and startups.
That's as dense as claiming we should punish the Cambridge Analytica incident by reverting the entire humanity's computing technology by a century. There are numerous perspectives in which you and I are the evil wizards simply because we're in this move-fast-and-break-things industry. Don't burn the field just to punish a few.
America founded research at the Wuhan lab [1], and more precisely exactly the research that lead to the virus outbreak.
EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak have been working with Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology], for more than 15 years. Since 2014, an NIH grant has funded EcoHealth’s research in China, which involves collecting faeces and other samples from bats, and blood samples from people at risk of infection from bat-origin viruses. Scientific studies suggest that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus most likely originated in bats, and research on the topic could be crucial to identifying other viruses that might cause future pandemics. The WIV is a subrecipient on the grant.
It would be very fortunate if American scientists and people in power are involved. At least then there is some hope of actually finding out what happened and seeking justice.
No one is going to pay any significant reparations for a couple.
1. Too many first world countries do not want to open up that can of worms because it might come back to bite them in the ass over the various things they have inflicted environmentally on the rest of the world.
The US and Europe for example are responsible for the overwhelming majority of greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere--yes some other countries are now emitting comparable amounts to current US/EU emissions, but because CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years the US/EU emissions from the past 200 years still massively dominate and will for a long time.
2. Calculating the reparations amount due to a given country would require an analysis of how much of their losses were due to their poor handling of COVID. There's too much risk that such analysis could conclude for many countries that their net losses were way higher than they would have been had the country handled it better.
If you suffer $X loss but then only get say 1/10 $X in reparations because that analysis concluded that 90% of your loss could have been avoided if you'd handled it better, your citizens aren't going to be happy their government got the 1/10 $X in reparations. No, your citizens are going to be annoyed their government botched things making COVID 10 times worse than it had to be.
> That’ll mean the world was brought to an economic standstill and millions of people died because of the errors and carelessness of some people…will there be consequences? What will be the assurance that such deadly mistake won’t occur again?
If history is any indicator, no, and there isn't any.
But if you're interested in establishing precedent for reckless behaviour damaging the world economy, and the health of millions of people, I understand that would open the developed world to a mountain of liability in the arena of climate change.
Based on what exactly? According to Wikipedia, the Iraq War produced a total death count of 25,071 and a total wounded count of 117,961. Also according to Wikipedia COVID-19 has produced a death count of 6,868,964 and an infection count of 674,809,997.
I'm all for complaining about US tactics, but it's 100% incorrect to try and claim that the Iraq War was "worse" than COVID-19.
Iraq only produced a death count of 25k? Do Iraqis not count?
Also almost all of the violence post war should be somewhat attributable to the invasion; we broke the basket to secure oil rights (and some argue to also keep the petrodollar as the world reserve currency)
The cost was way more than the cherry-picked stats you present
You seem to assume no Iraqis were killed, which is pretty odd.
In "costly and fatal", I also include that the Iraq War arguably marks the end of the US as the world's only superpower. Both in terms of cost and moral status, it was a huge abdication of status.
There's a reasonably high chance that SARS-2 covid virus leads to a minor or moderate decrease in average lifespan (due to the effects on the vascular system and wreacking havoc on all sorts of organs) and that it will continue to circulate in humanity forever.
If that's the case it'll just slowly outscale any singular event like the Iraq War over multiple human generations of deaths and damage.
> What will be the assurance that such deadly mistake won’t occur again?
Whatever assurances you want will be a fantasy.
There has never been accountability among the elite class and there won't be, because whatever mistakes they make only affect everybody else.
It's like a video game - imagine the game characters you 'mistreat' asking what consequences you will be facing. You'd cackle at game designers having thought of such an amusing feature and proceed to go right back to doing as you please.
What’s even more difficult to wrap your head around should be the poor response to the pandemic; the lack of regard for the vulnerable (citizens) and the poor (nations).
>millions of people died because of the errors and carelessness of some people…
Which people? Should a lab tech in China receive consequences because religious people in America believed in the promises of their pastor and went to church and were sickened?
Huh? The previous President of the US frequently called it the "China Virus".
> GOP conspiracy to bring down Biden
Biden wasn't President for the first year of the pandemic, not sure how that works out.
> Are American progressives so fragile in their identity that they avoid agreeing with conservatives for fear of guilt by association?
I personally don't care whether the virus was man-made or natural. It bares next to zero importance on my life. At the end of the day what are we really arguing about? Lab practices in China? The Chinese should be better about lab safety and wet markets. But there was a pandemic which has killed millions of people. It seems like the people most invested in this question are also the ones most invested in downplaying the pandemic, which is just evil.
>I personally don't care whether the virus was man-made or natural
That's really surprising to me, because in my opinion the answer truly does matter, and sticking my head in the sand feels defeatist. I suppose that's a difference of opinions, though.
How does it really matter though? What are in the Western world going to do in retaliation? Are we going to start a war with China over their bio-lab programs?
To be fair in this instance, this is a wild story that does have all the hallmarks of a wacky conspiracy theory straight out of a Bond film. Some secret Chinese laboratory is doing some secret stuff with some super spreading disease and then whoops it gets leaked and shuts the entire world down.
Also keep in mind where the info was coming from in the US: it was being introduced by Trump. This is someone who regularly spouses countless baseless conspiracies whenever he needs some sort of ammunition to blame a group he doesn't like. There is plenty of fair reasons to not have believed this story.
It's not some secret Chinese laboratory. It's a well known institute, a pretty famouse one in fact. It's the place that identified the source of the 2003 sars pandemic.
The scientists said it wasn't a lab leak. The science, from the very start, could have been interpreted either way.
In fact the only real evidence, and all of it tenuous and circumstantial, is in support of a lab leak. There is actually not a single piece of direct evidence AFAIK for zoonotic origin, except that that route is possible (ie no mutations that would be impossible naturally, etc) and the overwhelmingly usual route for novel pathogens.
The source of the problem is all the terrible leaders, whether they be the media, politicians, etc. You've focused solely on the "media", but a large part of the anti-science tribalism flowed from the infantile president trying to point the finger at anyone else, rather than accepting the existence of and dealing with the problem. When that much nonsense is being pumped into the zeitgeist, priors get massively screwed up - anything resembling the nonsense is dubious, so anything opposing the nonsense is duvious, and so on.
Also it's not particularly appropriate to use the label "conservative" for those trying to buck societal institutions. The actually conservative position was to follow public health advice.
As an American progressive, here's how I feel about it. I have no doubt that others will have a different take.
I don't think it was tribalized by American media; I think covid hit when much of the world, not least the US, was embroiled in tribalism. I wanted to know whether it had come from a lab leak, but at the time a lot of the lab-leak rhetoric was packaged along with racist and nationalist vitriol, to the point where people who appeared to be of Asian descent were being attacked in the street.
So sensible people who suggested the virus may have come from a lab were out-shouted by people saying things like The election was stolen, Jews will not replace us, China virus, execute Fauci, being asked to wear a mask in Starbucks is like the Holocaust. I can forgive people for not wanting to try to pick out valid points from that particular torrent of bullshit. I think the resistance to the lab leak theory was less that people were dismissing science and more that the zone had been flooded and they were up to their neck in it.
The This Week In Virology podcast has been talking about the lab leak concept since the early days of the pandemic, with various experts opining on the likelihood. In [1], the expert discusses how the virus itself does not seem engineered; it’s most likely a naturally created virus.
However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan, quite legitimately - and they produce good science from this work. But because this is China, if a lab accident happened, it won’t be getting reported in the media. It’s a state secret.
The Energy Department gave a low probability to their assessment, but this is still a bombshell. Imagine the legal liability for China in international courts if the evidence is solid enough for litigation.
The Wuhan institute was celebrated as an improvement over the facilities at which dangerous viruses had previously been studied in China. The 2004 SARS outbreak originated in a lab: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/
That WaPo article isn't about the quality of research at the WIV, it's an attempted (failed) debunking of the "fringe theory" that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab. It has nothing to say on what good science they produced, perhaps because there wasn't any. Virology appears to spend its time fiddling with viruses based on the claim that doing so will help create vaccines, except, their work doesn't seem to have contributed to any vaccine development.
This is news to me. The article you referenced opens by saying [0]:
> The World Health Organization has confirmed that breaches of safety procedures on at least two occasions at one of Beijing's top virology laboratories were the probable cause of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) there last month, which infected nine people, one of whom died.
This seems to be saying they traced the illness in nine people there at the lab back to two leaks at the lab, not that the entire disease outbreak originated in a lab.
There a lot of other studies, referenced in this wikipedia article [1], which explain that the first SARS virus originated in bats:
> Phylogenetic analysis of these viruses indicated a high probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and spread to humans either directly or through animals held in Chinese markets.
> In 2004, scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention of the University of Hong Kong and the Guangzhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention established a genetic link between the SARS coronavirus appearing in civets and humans, confirming claims that the virus might have transmitted from the animal species to humans.
In the last 15 years people have fallen ill of the plague, cowpox, meningococcus, h5n1, anthrax, and zika due to lab leaks in the Unites States [2]. These are just the leaks where people got sick and/or died, all lab workers I believe. There were others affecting animals, and others where nobody got sick. None of that means these labs originated these diseases. The origin of a disease is separate from a localized outbreak.
> However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan
No it isn't. The were studying SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1.
They sequenced RaTG13 but that is too far away from SARS-CoV-2 with a thousand random mutations across its genome. And there's no evidence that they ever recovered culturable virus from RaTG13 or were able to culture it--there's a vast gap between sequencing a virus and culturing it.
We also know about their SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1 work because they published it. Before the pandemic they had no reason to keep work on RaTG13 secret.
This is a case of Schrodinger's BSL4 lab. We know they built chimeras of other viruses because they told the world about that, we know they sequenced RaTG13 because they published that sequence, but there's a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor backbone that they found, which for some reason they picked to be the backbone in a new set of experiments, which they had perfect secrecy over and nobody has ever found any evidence of it.
The obvious solution for this conundrum is that they did study it, but didn't publish it because the screw-up happened and all evidence was promptly destroyed. In a totalitarian state, the secrecy is the default mode. You can get exceptions and publish stuff, sure, but only once you asked and received permission. If you didn't - or in the period between you asking and permission being issued something happened - no evidence will be seen by anybody.
Unfortunately, unless whoever destroyed evidence screwed up (happens all the time, security services have enough idiots and slackers), or somebody kept some evidence and then will defect, yes, it is likely we'll never have the proof. That's why they do it.
Not sure how you made this conclusion... But of course we need to look if there's new evidence - that's what I just said, that there could be new evidence, but if there won't be then we couldn't know for sure.
Because we can now say that there was any evidence we want but the totalitarian state destroyed it. We can now make any argument where the state destroying evidence fills in the gap of the theory.
Maybe we should stop supporting the study of dangerous viruses in facilities that don't maintain adequate levels of transparency.
Regardless of what actually happened in this case (FWIW I still believe a natural origin was most likely), the Chinese authorities covered up everything to do with the lab and destroyed potential evidence before a proper investigation could take place. In court cases we have a norm that evidence you destroy is treated as evidence against you, for good reason.
I'm not making an argument regarding this instance, but to have a theory that you can't disprove really makes it not a theory and impossible to engage with.
> In court cases we have a norm that evidence you destroy is treated as evidence against you, for good reason.
Destruction of evidence is considered only evidence of consciousness of guilt and cannot be used to prove guilt alone. The court also has to consider that an innocent person may commit destruction of evidence to avoid wrongful prosecution from situations that look damning.
Another point is that in the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2002-2004 the Chinese government acted similarly:
> Early in the epidemic, the Chinese government discouraged its press from reporting on SARS, delayed reporting to WHO, and initially did not provide information to Chinese outside Guangdong province, where the disease is believed to have originated.[19] Also, a WHO team that travelled to Beijing was not allowed to visit Guangdong province for several weeks.[20] This resulted in international criticism, which seems to have led to a change in government policy in early April.
There was no BSL4 lab in Guangzhou and they didn't sterilize the market there right away, so in that case they were able to eventually track the virus to its origins--yet the reaction of the Chinese government was basically the same.
Americans have a fairly severe problem with assuming that other nations and people's will react with transparency to the US if they have nothing to hide. This is the same problem we saw with Hussein and the way that he tried to block the weapons inspectors and it turned out by his own admission that it was due to him not wanting to appear weak in the view of Iran and Hussein was preoccupied with Iran: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/02/saddam-hussein...
The circumstances that make the theory unfalsifiable (lack of transparency/controls in Chinese biological research) are the issue here. Due to the lack of transparency we will likely never have definitive proof for the origin one way or the other.
At a minimum the US government should not be funding any biological research in places without adequate transparency/controls.
It's not, because all it would take to falsify it would be to do an exhaustive search of the lab's documentation and a comprehensive interview of lab employees.
We can't do it because of the CCP, not because of epistemological reasons.
The effort required to culture virus like this is fairly large, and it requires them to keep it secret in 2019 before there was any need to keep it secret. Nobody talked about it to collaborators, no sequences were leaked out, etc.
They somehow had tighter controls than Apple developing a new iPhone, before they had any reason to.
Again, you think keeping something secret needs a reason. That's not how totalitarian state works. In such state, not keeping something secret needs a reason. Everything else is secret by default. And the standard mode of action on any disaster is to deny it, lie and hide the evidence. It's not special for pandemic, it happens every time.
Yes they absolutely have tighter controls than Apple, and the reason is they live in a totalitarian state and Apple doesn't.
How long had they been working on either of those before publishing? You're giving the end points of the research, the person you're replying to is saying the end point wasn't reached, hence it was still secret.
See if you can determine that for yourself by e.g. reading the second paper as far as the first sentence of the second paragraph and then looking at the publication date.
I'm not interested in reading those papers, especially as what's relevant are the dates, which means the burden is on the person presenting them to get the dates right, no one else. More importantly, they were missing the point, which was my point.
Your point? I'm not sure if you had one. Next time, just post the date up instead of some snarky RTFM that doesn't even fit the thread.
It's not like the 2016 article was some kind of a spy leak. They were allowed to cooperate on things that lead to this publication - because in 2016, there was a reason to allow it - NIH grants alone would probably be a good reason. As soon as they learned about the screwup (that likely happened somewhere in 2019) all evidence of the works related to the leak that hasn't been published has been hidden or destroyed. Thus, we can't expect any publications about that work, at least not from 2019 onwards. You're fishing for some contradiction, but there's none - publications do not suggest absence of censorship, publications only suggest the censors had no problems with it being published. And indeed, they couldn't know in 2016 that their research in 2019 would lead to a massive screwup with a global consequences. If they were an open society, there would be a constant trail of evidence leading to the moment of the screwup - communications, orders, articles, chats, etc. In a totalitarian society, all these were under tight control by default - and as soon as it turned out they are dangerous - which became clear sometime in 2019, when the Chinese government learned about the possible leak - all this information, already tightly controlled by default anyway, was disappeared or at least made inaccessible to outsiders. It is possible it still exists somewhere in the dungeons of the Great Firewall - who knows. The point is this is why information control exists - to make such things possible. In an open society, this would be completely infeasible - tracking back everything connected to a certain research program and making it as if it didn't exist. In a closed, tightly controlled society - yes, plausible.
What about the request to use gain of function research to add furin sites to coronaviruses? That seems to me the smoking gun, since this lab asked for funding to do exactly that.
It’s a bit like Jaime Meitzl (sp?) said - for the first time in history you find a unicorn (furin binding site in a coronavirus) next to a lab that asked for funding to make regular horses into unicorns. But the lab says it’s “natural origin”.
The PRRAR FCS not a known FCS prior to the pandemic so it is unlikely the lab would have genetically engineered it and they would have used something like RRXRR instead.
Other coronaviruses have an FCS and they have evolved multiple different times, independently:
The fact that we knew that adding an FCS to a virus would likely enhance its ability to produce a pandemic really isn't a smoking gun that we actually did it, because we're just studying and copying what nature is already doing (who is actually a much better geneticist than we are, with vastly greater tools).
And since you want to talk about suspicious "unicorns" how about the idea that a lab worker was infected in the lab, and then the only thing that they did was visit the wet market. They didn't infect anyone they lived with, or go to any restaurants, or go visit grandma and this Typhoid Mary/Mike has no existence outside of working in the lab and visiting the wet market. And this idea gets worse if you include more workers in WIV having supposedly been exposed.
What fits with the facts better is that they genetically engineered the virus in perfect secrecy and deliberately let it loose in the wet market, which is just insanity--nobody gains anything from doing that, but it is also impossible to argue against.
Why would it have happened only in the market? Seems to me that it’s plausible they just managed to cover up other points of origin for the pandemic in Wuhan and that the market was the first super spreading event.
If your only defense is that this is not the most commonly used way to add a FCS to coronaviruses, that seems pretty thin.
HKU4 contamination in agricultural samples in the Country that HKU4 was discovered in does not pose a particularly controversial question as to how it got there.
While it is in the same group of beta coronaviruses that MERS is in, the HKU4 virus was first found in Kowloon and the "HK" stands for "Hong Kong" (although it would be a mistake to assume that says much more than where it was found and not what its range is throughout China)
And coronaviruses undergo recombination (XBB.1.5 is a recombinant which is all over the news) and that produces "Chimeric" viruses in nature. Finding evidence of "gene splicing" in samples and determining it must be humans ignores the fact that nature does it better than we do, and really points at how politically biased that article is.
They want you to believe that WIV imported MERS-like viruses from Saudi Arabia and were fucking around with them in the lab, and not that those viruses are found all over China naturally and nature fucks around them constantly in much higher volume than we can.
Did you notice the bit where it's a cDNA clone of an RNA virus and do you understand the implications of that?
This is an engineering product.
As for politics, sure there is a lot of that going around but you can verify this finding yourself with freely available software using the published sequences.
I don't think much of the "takedown" so far. Interested to discuss specifics if I'm not getting something.
Cadhla (who works for EcoHealth alliance BTW) points out that it was Wuhan University who registered the rice sequence bioproject PRJNA601977 - which is not hugely relevant since the source of the contamination could be from anywhere (that happened to have a HKU4 reverse genetics system...).
Andreas points to incomplete sequence coverage (not unusual in a contamination scenario) and claims it might be "not dangerous work" because the sequence gap leaves open the possibility that the missing bit was non-functional. True but weak. It's 33 NTs of highly conserved sequence, what does he really think was in that gap? I know what Fat Tony would say.
Her claim that a reverse genetics systems for HKU4-like COVs was previously disclosed seems weird since AFAIK it was this team that had previously disclosed it. It's possible I am not understanding what she is saying as it makes no sense to me.
Earlier in the pandemic I read a report talking about the possibility of the virus being something they sampled, and that it leaked when they accessed the sample presumably to start sequencing/analyzing it.
The theory was that it was a virus they'd have sampled from immunocompromised miners working in the same caves that the bats with the most closely related viruses inhabit. They had some references to a report with something like that happening some time prior.
It's so far the only theory I've read that seems to match the evidence.
The evidence doesn't seem to indicate that it was engineered, or that it was a product of gain of function research on animals. I think there would have been more solid evidence pointing in that direction by now, if that was the case. They would have published something related to it, or non-Chinese researchers connected to the lab would have known something.
Yet there's no evidence of any related animal resorvoir, and the virus was very well adapted to humans from the very start. And everything points to the virus passing through the lab somehow. Those things put together seems to point at them having sampled a virus that already made the jump to humans, and that somehow during the sampling, or retrieving the sample from storage, the virus escaped.
There's many thousands more contact between bats and humans involved in mining (literally how RaTG13 and the Mojiang mine, bat guano collection for farming and just tourism:
There's a lot of economic activity in China that is close to bat habitats and there's evidence that cross reactivity to sarbecoviruses exists in a significant amount in rural china.
The researchers collecting samples were a very tiny slice of the human-to-bat-virus exposure that is going on in China all the time.
And we know that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't last very long on surfaces, it isn't transmitted by fomites. It needs to be aerosolized and breathed in. It isn't likely that the researchers were collecting live viable virus in the samples that they brought back to the lab. What they were sequencing was overwhelmingly going to be "dead" mRNA.
The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened. They didn't start spreading it around their apartment building, they didn't infect people in restaurants, didn't infect elderly relatives who wound up in the hospital, etc.
It makes "more" sense that they deliberately genetically engineered the virus and released it in the wet market entirely on purpose.
> The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened.
Except that SARS-CoV-2's epidemiological dynamics are well-known to be overdispersed? Almost all lineages die out, and a few explode due to repeated super-spreader events. It's therefore unlikely that the first cluster will be discovered at the site of introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 was presumably first introduced to other continents at airports and seaports; but that's not where the first clusters were found.
Explain the coincidence of why it happened to be in a wet market and not a restaurant or other gathering where people congregate. Just happened to be the one place to make it look exactly like zoonosis and extraordinarily similar to SARS-1.
If you think SARS-CoV-2 arose naturally in the same city as the world's biggest laboratory collection of sarbecoviruses (which I do agree is possible), then you must agree that weird coincidences do happen sometimes? A wet market is crowded and poorly-ventilated, so it's a great place for a respiratory virus to spread, regardless of how it got introduced.
There's also the question of ascertainment bias, whether cases were found in the wet market simply because that's where the authorities looked. I assume you've seen those endless debates, which seem basically unresolvable to me given the limited information available.
The pandemic happening in the same city as WIV isn't really that much of a coincidence. The virus needed a large densely packed city to really take off. Wuhan is the biggest city in central China. The catchment area around Wuhan for where a virus would follow the animal trade to the city is probably large. Wuhan is also a good candidate for a centrally located lab. That only seems like a 5-10% low probability chance, which happens (it is also the second time it happened in China and the first time looked like this one, only it hit Guangzhou where there was no lab).
The infected lab worker causing exactly one massive superspreading event in the wet market without infecting anyone else, making it look exactly like zoonotic spillover, without leaving any other contacts around Wuhan is much less believable to me. That sounds like a thousand to one odds or much worse.
> The infected lab worker causing exactly one massive superspreading event in the wet market without infecting anyone else,
That's indeed unlikely, but it's a strawman. As I've noted repeatedly above, most lineages die out. If the introduction into humans occurred outside the market (naturally or otherwise), then it's quite likely that patient infected others outside the market; those lineages just died out. I remember Trevor Bedford showing genomic evidence of all the failed introductions into Seattle before the spread finally went exponential, early in the pandemic.
Pekar et al. is basically a more sophisticated version of your argument, with numerical models of the phylogenetic and epidemiological dynamics. I don't think it's convincing (since they chose their power law pretty arbitrarily), but at least they acknowledge and purport to model that stochasticity.
If you are not a native English speaker, you may want to know that you are pretty drastically misreading parents comment. He is not saying "I know this specific virus is present" but "the lab studied SARS related coronaviruses" which you in fact seem to agree with.
they collected dozens if not hundreds of samples of various viruses. not all the work gets published. in fact majority of scientific effort doesn't get published. experiments either don't work or you don't get interesting results etc... doubly so if a global pandemic started before you were done with your current project
Because what good does it do to actually dealing with the outbreak? I assume the government just made a decision that it was politically less desirable to do for a number of reasons. Mainly, probably the continuing attempts at thawing of relations with China.
If China is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again. Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to the world
What they were doing was downplaying the severity of the problem until it was sufficiently widespread that it was not just a China problem. I'm not saying that was the plan from the start, but it definitely morphed into that.
The genie is more or less out of the bottle on that one. If it is a lab leak there is no stopping it from happening again and China is not doing anything special. There are hundreds of these labs all over the world, they have containment breaches all the time [1], and given the way of international politics it is effectively impossible to shut them all down. Probably undesirable as well given that labs like those are the reason we had the medical knowledge to create a vaccine.
I strongly disagree that they are not doing anything special. They are literally going out into remote bat caves and harvesting coronaviruses and bringing them into large population centers to study.
If USA is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again. Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to the world
The money for WIV risky reasearch mostly came from the USA.
I actually completely agree. We SHOULD know the true origin and causes; I just have zero faith anyone in the US will put pressure on China or accuse them publicly. That was more the gist of what I was getting at.
You're commenting on a report that the (US Government's) DoE is saying it was lab leaked, so... the US isn't actively supporting any cover up, or they're doing a profoundly terrible job.
Just to clarify, because the nuance is getting lost, they are not suggesting it was lab made. A naturally occurring virus can be studied and then accidentally leaked from a lab.
But yes, there's no indication that the US is trying to cover anything up. And China is secretive about all sorts of things, they're an authoritarian government.
Everybody remembers it. Some try to crimestop it, but everybody knows it happened. The right thing would be to admit the screw up, apologize to people who were unjustifiably accused and suppressed, and try to do better next time. But I don't see much readiness to do this, unfortunately.
Sometimes, answers are more clear when questions are more clear.
“Why is the US waiting to secure a convincing case that produces useful diplomatic leverage instead of indulging public speculation by making an early call that wastes the opportunity?”
There’s a lot to lose by making a case that other nations can dismiss, and a lot to gain by having a case that they can’t. If there was a culpable lab leak, the game comes down to China making it easy for its partners to plausibly deny while others try to collect thorough enough evidence that they can’t. The tidbits that feed conspiracy circles might be 100% right and very convincing to individuals, but are too thin to put world leaders on the spot. For now.
Maybe they don't have enough evidence to support the lab leak hypothesis. Or maybe they want to prevent China from supplying weapons to Russia for the time being and they're playing the cautios stance while they don't have enough evidence. We will find out eventually in five to ten years or so. The lab leak hypothesis is quite probable.
As a thought experiment, who would have access to the most information in the world outside of the sitting POTUS? The richest man in the world? Surely Trump of all people would be the most qualified to make such a claim.
Trump was... not an ordinary president. In particular, he didn't pay very much attention to his briefings. He may have had access to the information, but there's less indication that he used that access, and plenty of indication that he frequently shot his mouth of contrary to the facts. Whether he did so in this case is not proven, but the parent's argument doesn't work for the particular president in question.
I don't think Trump is patient enough to sit and read. It's more likely he wanted people to tell him what's important that he needs to know about.
I'm speculating of course but if you think about it, can you imagine him sitting patiently reading documents first thing in the morning? He would get bored so quickly he would end up on twitter to complain or gloat.
While he may have been less than attentive to these things, he would use every bit of information that was available to him to advance his agenda and he had people around him who read/in those briefings who knew and support his agenda. Certainly his agenda pre-pandemic as it related to China was pretty much an economic war for lack of a better description.
If your intention is to motivate Americans away from Chinese products, what better way to do it then to use a scary virus that seemed to emerge from China to that end.
"a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV itself."
Here's a 2015 paper on successful gain of function work done at the University of North Carolina under the leadership of Ralph Baric. The work involved characterizing a synthetically constructed chimeric virus comprising a SARS-CoV backbone and a bat SARS virus spike.
It received special permission to continue despite a prohibition on gain-of-function research (Refer to the section: Biosafety and Security).[0]
Quoting:
Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.
And from the footnote describing author contributions:
[SHI Zhengli] provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids
As everyone knows by now, Shi is the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[1]
It's pretty clear that Shi subsequently continued that gain-of-function work at Wuhan.
My question is, what is the correlation between the spike sequence Shi supplied
for the 2015 paper and that of the early variants of SARS-CoV-2?
There is also a 2013 paper, written by Peter Dazak and Shi Zhengli, "Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor".[2] Peter Daszak has been centrally involved in the US funding of the Wuhan Institute, in his capacity as president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York.[3]
American Virologists feared that their field would be blamed for the pandemic, and used motivated reasoning to convince themselves that the field could not be responsible for the pandemic. And the US was gripped by Trumpism, so anything in any way connected to Trump automatically became verboten.
Some of the leading voices in opposition to the lab leak hypothesis such as Peter Daszak had close academic connections (collaboration, grants etc.) with the BSL4 lab in Wuhan.
The Energy Department is no longer a Trump organ. I don’t see why the senior bureaucrat who oversees it - who is a Biden appointee - would be doing anything to help out Trump here.
“Jennifer M. Granholm was sworn in as the 16th Secretary of Energy on February 25, 2021.”
Biden admin might strategically decide to do the lab leak investigation as part of their anti-China plan. That would be a balance decision, but I could see it coming down on lab leak investigation.
And this is precisely why BSL4 labs exist. And accidents also happen at BSL4 labs. But in the west, at least we have reasonably transparent and trustworthy governments, with some notion of accountability for enforcing rules.
My source of information is the hundreds of hours of This Week in Virology episodes I have listened to since March 2020, so with that in mind as my bias: Reputable western scientists who have worked with Wuhan virologists professionally have a lot of respect for the Chinese scientists and the Wuhan lab generally.
But the fact that many virologists have professional friends at the Wuhan lab does not rule out that the lab was being poorly managed or that an error might have been swept under the rug by the CCP.
My personal opinion synthesizing all that I have read and heard on this topic for three years is that the lab leak is plausible because China is an autocracy and does not have the rule of law. It’s in the CCP’s interests and within their capabilities to hide a lab leak quite successfully.
> It’s in the CCP’s interests and within their capabilities to hide a lab leak quite successfully.
tbh the general impression given by China's known attempts to cover anything up tend to give the opposite impression, precisely because of their default to autocracy. This is a government party that generally covers up stuff by banning it from being talked about, regards "she regrets making that comment and wants to stay at her home and not play tennis or talk to the media any more" as a reasonable coverup, and made such a clumsy attempt to silence the doctor first raising the alarm COVID symptoms that be became a hero inside China and the officials responsible got their wrists slapped. Allowing lab staff to communicate with the outside world and release papers on COVID origins considered plausible by uninvolved overseas virologists would be an uncharacteristic way for the Chinese government to act if they suspected there was something to be uncovered...
Forget the government. Do we have transparent and trustworthy lab staff?
After working in a BSL3 lab, I've seen some fairly poor working practices including someone infecting themselves, presumably due to sloppy working practices. There is a reason why lab leaks are common, if not vastly less consequential than the lab leak under discussion. It's because people are people, and they make mistakes, whether that's accidental or deliberately breaking the rules. It does make one question whether we can work on dangerous pathogens safely. I'd have to say, after direct experience of work on multiple diseases of varying types, that for many of them I have serious doubts. When it comes to Gain of Function, I think it should be banned worldwide. We aren't capable of working to the required level of stringency to guarantee safety.
To provide a concrete example, look at the German researcher who infected herself with Ebola. In a BSL4 facility. Not even involving GoF research, just the regular virus. Even top researchers slip up. This one made the news due to the severity, but how many are quietly buried, or not even reported within the organisation at all for fear of the consequences. It happens, and I've seen it first-hand.
What will make this information dangerous is if people misconstrue “lab leak” to mean “human designed”. The report specifically says it was not from a bioweapons program. I’m sure they took pains to verify that because the implications of THAT conclusion would be explosive.
You’re already seeing that exact type of confusion strewn about this comment section.
Some people interpreting “lab leak” to mean deliberately designed, others to mean deliberately released, others to mean an accident involving a natural research virus.
So yeah this whole conversation will continue to go nowhere because in reality it is full of conspiracy theorists who make the conversation impossible to have.
The research out of this lab didn't help develop the vaccine, so what were they doing in the first place? Weapons research, it's as simple as that. As soon as the virus started circulating through the public, that was their chance to shine! They could have released everything they knew and jump-started vaccine development.. but they didn't. They covered it up, because fighting bugs was never their interest in the first place.
Why should anybody believe otherwise? Principle of charity? Please.
Even if I were to accept the (ridiculous) premise, it's still wrong.
Wuhan Institute of Virology did actively contribute to the development of the Vero vaccine by Sinopharm.
Regarding the premise, there's no reason to believe that a lab working on coronaviruses (quite common) that did not happen to contribute directly to a successful vaccine development effort (profoundly uncommon) was necessarily working on a bioweapon.
FWIW, there are ~59 operational BSL-4 labs in the world, and only a BSL-3 is necessary to work on potentially airborne diseases like coronaviruses. According to this study[1] of published research papers, there are probably about 150 BSL-3 labs in the United States alone. Are those all bioweapon programs because they didn't contribute to the vax development programs?
The discussion during the pandemic only lead to the "human designed" blame game, so the similarities are striking. It is a view that everyone can share, regardless of political affiliations, a perfect way to get a mob going. It is interesting to discuss how the views on this has changed though.
The human designed blame game is different from the “bio weapons” blame game mentioned in the parent. I get people are discussing human designed but that’s different from bioweapon.
I am not very good at bio, so I equate the three to some part. The lab leak story is really bad in itself on a political level, I do not know how we can have a sane discussion about it.
The most dangerous interpretation of "lab leak" is the one backed by the most evidence - that they were artificially enhancing viruses so they could develop vaccines against them. The Pfizer guy who got caught on camera by Project Veritas said they were considering doing the same thing.
Selling people vaccines for viruses the scientists created specifically to create vaccines for, is about the worst conflict of interest you can imagine and one with global implications, not just for US/China relations.
Gain-of-function research serves a legitimate purpose, but if this lean stemmed from GoF work, that is not apparent from the SARA CoV-2 genome. See my link elsewhere in the comments to a TWiV podcast episode that discusses the lab leak hypothesis, and the analysis of the genome sequence suggesting it is not the result of human engineering work.
,, Gain-of-function research serves a legitimate purpose''
While this is true, at this point we have evidence that even the highest level security lab can have lab leak with devastating results.
The main problem is not that, but that people can't really talk about it publicly, as the rules should be stricter (for example an international body should be checking the procedures of other countries...the problem is not with the rules, but not enough verification of keeping the rules).
I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I always found it it little odd that the guy who became the de facto pandemic era “leader” in the U.S. was also the same guy that personally approved funding for the lab in Wuhan.
How is "top" virologist measured? If it's simply by years of power, this is accurate I suppose. However I think "most powerful" is a better term than "top".
Like it or not this is how scientific output is usually measured. He is a prolific scientist in his field and has been for decades, well before COVID happened.
> In a 2022 analysis of Google Scholar citations, Dr. Fauci ranked as the 44th most-cited living researcher. According to the Web of Science, Dr. Fauci ranked 9th out of 3.3 million authors in the field of immunology by total citation count between 1980 and April 2022. During the same period, he ranked 22th out of 3.3 million authors in the field of research & experimental medicine, and 715th out of 1.4 million authors in the field of general & internal medicine.
2019 and prior Google Scholar shows him cited about 8,000 times per year. In 2020+ that only jumped to 10,000, so his ridiculous statistics here are not entirely (or even mostly) due to COVID related stardom.
1) That’s a big assumption you’re making, even if it was a lab leak (which is itself a big leap from what’s known today)
2) It also wouldn’t be “weird” at all. That’s like saying you find it weird that a firefighter got burned or a nuclear safety researcher caused a nuclear safety incident.
No it's not. Not at all. Everything risk is increasing exponentially. BSL-4 labs are expanding 1 per year, or around 2% extra risk. CRISPr and CRISPr cas9 are only 10 and 20 years old. How much added risk is that per year? 10,000%?
Then to send money to actively seek out bat viruses in the place thought to harbor the worse or most diverse viruses?
And to do all that in partnership with a hostile enemy who most certainly isn't going to tell you all the extras they have planned above and beyond the controllable.
No, I think you are dead wrong. The default assumption from now on is lab leak unless proven otherwise, because that's the risky world we live in. Period. No getting around it. And the risk gets higher every year.
There are literally tens of thousands of BSL-3 labs in the world. They aren't sitting empty doing nothing. They are busy trying to "save us".
I can't really tell what position you're arguing against here. I personally find the risk of GoF research to probably net out to "not worth it," but that's an entirely different conversation than "did Fauci cause this."
And no, it's nowhere near acceptable to just assume that every new virus is a lab leak. Especially when the subtext of this line of inquiry is usually that we're going to "hold 'them' accountable" somehow. Combine those two thoughts and you get something like, "anywhere that a novel virus appears in suddenly gets smacked by the international community," and I'm not sure you could create a stronger disincentive to early pathogen detection and alerting if you tried.
P.S. There's almost certainly not anywhere close to "tens of thousands" of BSL-3 labs. Probably in the few hundreds to maybe thousand or two, but that'd be a stretch, and "tens of thousands" is not supported by any data I can find: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/mapping-biosafety-le...
Incorrect. Lab leak is de facto default from now on in the world we live in. Even if you disagree, it will be in 5 years. The tech, the databases, the labs, the money. It's all increasing. Every single year the risk of a lab leak goes up, to the point where we are expecting a covid per decade out of the labs. But hopefully the rest of the world is more ethical than the chinese and their new and novel virus creation strategy and we get relatively harmless versions of the flu etc. Rather than pathogens with zero prior human cohabitation.
Funny how all the datapoints, including new and novel to humans get ignored.......
Without meaning to take a position either way, as a non-American, why does the Energy Department have a position on this?
I’m aware that the Energy Department has sone degree of responsibility for the US nuclear arsenal, but even taking that into account, it seems out of scope.
Firstly, the DOE has expertise in areas such as biosecurity, biodefense, and biological threat reduction, and is responsible for managing national laboratories and supporting research in various scientific fields.
Just one example of this is the HAMMER facility at Hanford, WA, where DOE can train people to deal with all manner of disasters. https://hammer.hanford.gov/
Given the potential for a laboratory-originating virus to pose a significant threat to national security, the DOE may be interested in studying the origins of SARS-CoV-2 to better understand the risks associated with biosecurity and to inform its efforts to prevent and respond to biological threats.
Secondly, the DOE has collaborated with other agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in conducting research related to COVID-19. The origins of SARS-CoV-2 are an important aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic and understanding its origins can inform public health responses and the development of treatments and vaccines.
Finally, the DOE has a stake in global scientific cooperation and the international research community. The origins of SARS-CoV-2 are an area of intense global interest, and understanding the virus's origins is important for future pandemic prevention efforts. By contributing to the scientific understanding of the virus's origins, the DOE can help to advance international collaboration and cooperation in addressing global health threats.
If your point is that the department of energy is badly named, you are 100% correct. It's more like the "department of applied science towards security, energy, and nuclear bombs"
DOE and the national labs have done extensive work with biological weapon detection systems and various forms of analysis related to delivery systems. E.g.
>"A team of scientists at DOE's Sandia National Laboratories recently revealed their involvement in the more than six-year investigation led by the FBI surrounding anthrax spores that killed five people in the fall of 2001. Their work, using transmission electron microscopy, was the first to link the spores from several of the letters as coming from the same source."
Actually as a side question, why does the reporting on this story in particular use the somewhat unusual phrase “US Energy Department?” It is the Department of Energy, right?
I seems like a little nitpick, but there are lots of agencies in the US, sometimes there’s a little nobody agency with a name similar to a big deal one… as a style thing, reporters should stick to the common names for big agencies, so we can be sure they aren’t mixing things up.
I think in cases where there are two large agencies that can be abbreviated to the same acronym people who work for those agencies tend to use names that don't lend themselves to that abbreviation. So in this case it's the Energy Dept and Education Dept rather than something that might be turned into the ambiguous DoE.
I wondered if WSJ must have a style guide that tells their writers to use this construction but there seems to be a mix of both (Energy Department and Department of Energy). Yes, DoE is the correct name, but I see ED used commonly in journalism.
The placement of the national labs in DOE is mostly a historical artifact of the time they were born. They cover most sciences these days and it isn’t uncommon to hear people with DOE jokingly refer to it as the “department of everything”.
The DOE runs national labs with research into biology. In fact, they funded the human genome project earlier than the NIH (who later swooped in after realizing they were missing out). They also have labs that work on biosafety. Lots of scientists.
I thought it was xenophobic and dangerous to suggest that it was a lab leak? does this mean it's OK to talk about it?
Sarcasm aside, this is ridiculously overdue. It was never xenophobic to want inquiry into Covid being a lab leak. The outrageous politicization of finding the source of the outbreak is shameful.
I'm fairly confident posts like these are artificially weighted to fall off the front page..that seems to happen when a COVID related post gets popular on HN. This post has more points and comments than the majority of stuff on the front page but it's currently on page 3.
I've casually noticed something similar over the past ~18 months with posts related to COVID.
Is “because I think they become too toxic” a good reason to flag a post? I flag spam, shitposts, unsubstantiated or patently false articles. You, like other people, are abusing your flagging powers.
Yeah, an opinion I share, and if enough people share that opinion, HN is designed to react.
I'm not going to stop flagging this kind of content, and dang is here to overrule me/others when he feels the need to, which is also how HN is designed.
The post is up, the system is working as intended. We all have roles to play here, no need to worry!
I find it interesting that this story was picked up by the WSJ and has not yet hit the NYTimes. The WSJ editorial staff is well known to have a conservative bias, but their newsroom editors are considered to be quite centrist.
That NYT doesn’t think this story is newsworthy is itself newsworthy.
It’s a WSJ exclusive, negotiated by the journal. You can read that fact in red above the headline. What it gave the deep state in return for the exclusive is unknown
Why? What's the thinking in that decision? This kind of post draws out the lowest quality comments and attracts accounts that comment only on this kind of post.
As a non-American, the whole thing seems crazy to me.
It seems like Trump said it from the start, and the media negated him based on political views, not facts.
And now, only years later, there is a reconciliation with the facts.
Now, I'm not that aware of the politics or the media in the US. But I think the way I see it may be the way many others saw this story roll.
Whether or not it's true - it is a big reason that many people don't trust the media. And this may be the bigger story for us all going forward.
And all those with different opinions were cancelled... Doctors quickly learned to tow the line or you lost your job and license while the masses cheered. Hard to find "valid dissent" when you punish and disqualify everyone who tries.
And yet, these people seemed to have conducted their research without trouble. Weird, how approaching a problem scientifically and not bombastically elicits a more measured response...
I don't understand "these people", your response is somewhat ambiguous. If you are referring to skeptics... Then I find your conclusion inaccurate. The response is not "measured". Shunned and ridiculed is what I have mostly observed.
Society generally had adopted intolerance and seeks to punish detractors. Both sides are doing this. Again, this is not... measured...
Trump said that not because he had some particular insight, but it was just a way to deflect blame, and that's why it was super amplified across the right wing, but lacking any sort of evidence or proof. Also back then there was a strong suggestion that it was bioengineered at Wuhan on purpose to tank the western economies.
Note that he also said covid wasn't a serious thing several times. If that's the case even if there was a lab leak it wasn't a big deal? Note that both of those were to benefit his administration and deflect blame from his admin's response in Feb 2020 to not take covid seriously.
Trump was a stopped clock on this. I don't think that's paren't point. The point, to me, is that the entire establishment treated the lab leak hypothesis as misinformation for no better reason than that Trump had endorsed it. That is, on no better evidence. And then aggressively censored it.
>The point, to me, is that the entire establishment
And the Energy Department that the sole source behind this story isn't part of the so called establishment? Especially under the Biden admin which people who use words like 'the establishment' and 'deep state' consider the establishment.
Looks like 'the establishment' wants to blame China now, hence the story must be fake and there was no lab leak?
My impression is that Trump started calling it the "China virus" and then there was an increase in physical attacks on people of Asian-appearing ancestry in the United States and that's when and why the pushback started.
When Trump made accusations of a lab leak, there were few facts pointing to that conclusion. Furthermore, the statements he made were dangerous to Asian Americans in the US. Later, as more facts came to light, the lab-leak theory became more plausible.
Guessing right in the absence of evidence shouldn't grant a person any kind of vindication in retrospect
As president, the guy said a lot of things that were outright untrue [1]. By 2020, he had lost any expectation of credulity just on the virtue of his being president in my eyes, and in those of many other Americans.
Now, if he had claimed the virus originated as a Chinese lab leak, and the intelligence community came out supporting that contribution, then that would have been a different story. Information from these sources didn't start becoming public until 2021, and was still mixed at that point[2].
I love this reaction, because Trump, of all people, was getting some of the least useful briefings of any modern US president, due to his inability to pay attention.[0][1][2]
So it's entirely possible that just watching the news casually would leave you better informed than the US president during the years of 2017 to 2021.
Or someone at the briefings said there was a possibility that the origin of the virus was a lab leak and that was the only thing he actually heard and just said that the origin of the virus was a lab leak.
No, it isn't entirely possible(any more than anything else is technically possible). In the rolling stone article:
> "Clapper agreed with Gistaro, telling Helgerson, “Trump doesn’t read much; he likes bullets.” Instead, during the Trump administration, the briefer would summarize aloud key points since the last briefing and provide three documents (none more than a page) about new developments abroad. This was all part of an effort to make the PDB “shorter and tighter, with declarative sentences and no feature-length pieces.”
> “Trump had his own way of receiving intelligence information—and a uniquely rough way of dealing publicly with the IC,” Helgerson wrote, “but it was a system in which he digested the key points offered by the briefers, asked questions, engaged in discussion, made his own priority interests known, and used the information as a basis for discussions with his policy advisers.”"
> "These and other difficulties agencies encountered under Trump led Helgerson to conclude that, “The system worked, but it struggled.”"
He clearly had access to more information than any civilian, and was engaging with it.
I'm always fascinated by the dichotomy of the evil hitler hyper-competent sub 100IQ billionaire who became president illustrated in every one of these types of comments.
You could literally just read his executive orders to figure out what you said is false.
“The virus accidentally leaked from a highly sophisticated lab in China” is somehow racist and dangerous, but “Chinese people can’t stop eating weird stuff at a wet market and the virus jumped to humans from there” isn’t.
To be fair the lab leak theory implies those working at the lab knew what they were doing, had a decent idea of the risks, continued to do so anyway, then were incompetent enough to allow the leak to occur. Or worse, deliberately released it.
Viruses spread from animals to humans with some regularity all over the world and such an occurrence doesn't imply incompetence among those who should know better etc.
Just clarifying my take (can't comment on what others think): I think the "Chinese people eat weird stuff" narrative is also racist and dangerous. It's not a dichotomy, and in the absence of evidence, I would rather avoid both.
My personal belief over the last few years has been "it could be zoonotic transmission through food, it could be a lab leak, it could be something else. I don't know, so let's wait and see."
Also, as a side note: non-Chinese people eat weird things too (and even worse - sometimes live with animals inside their homes). For example, the Black Death in Europe and the 1918 Flu pandemic which likely started in the US both had a significant zoonotic component.
“People eating weird things” isn’t the only alternative theory to “lab leak!!!”
A farmer handling infected guano (which is used for fertilizer) could’ve been patient zero. A scientist studying bats in a cave could’ve been exposed, and I guess that could count as a lab leak, I guess, but it’s not as sexy as “mad scientists were manually recombinating viruses for the interest of authoritarian regimes!”
Trump presented it as an intentional biological attack from China. This is why everyone was running as fast as possible from "lab leak". Nobody wanted to add WW3 to our problems with an unknown pandemic looming at the horizon.
> It seems like Trump said it from the start, and the media negated him based on political views, not facts.
Trump's insinuations were that the virus was engineered as a bioweapon and intentionally leaked from the lab in Wuhan. This is not the same as the virus being studied in the lab and leaking. Just because the statements involved the work "leak" doesn't make them equivalent.
That's inevitable when most science is funded by people in power; you don't get funded if you're the kind of person who tells people in power what they don't want to hear.
I wonder how the classified intelligence report responds to the fact that the early cases clustered around the Huanan Market not the Wahun Institute of Virology...
Do people typically gather in the parking lot of the WIV in large numbers? What was the reproductive rate of the initial version? What was the probability of an infection turning into a severe enough case to register to epidemiologists months later? For a relatively low reproductive rate or severity, you will need a lot of human contact to have detectable cases. The fact that the initial detectable cases are clustered within a nearby population center that manifests many close contacts should be expected.
"Near" is a relative term. In the context of all the places in China this novel virus could have popped up, it is definitely near. It's also a 45 minute drive from WIV (as stated in another comment). In the context of a location that will attract people from all over the city, it is also near.
The market was an early superspreading event (or actually multiple superspreading events), I don't know why people conflate spread at the market with a spillover at the market. I guess it made more sense when the virus was thought not to be airborne.
It's widely accepted that the Huanan market cases are an early super-spreader event and not the first human infections. Basically we don't know who and where the first infected humans were. We do know lots of people got infected at the market and that became the first time a new pneumonia was noticed in hospitals.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 374 ms ] threadhttps://www.reuters.com/world/us-intelligence-releases-repor...
We are coming to the time when people are forgetting what lockdown were like and just want to move on with live. The near future is when the lab leak hypothesis can become the de facto default of scientists and intel agencies.
Same applies for the vaccines. 4 months of study for top level review of vaccines as a metastudy. 6 months of journal review for meta analysis of existing papers. 6 months of journal review, 4 months to parse the data.
Already, before the narrative can change, 20 months need to pass since the end of the dataset. If you want relevent data on covid and vaccine outcomes, then it's Jan 2021-Dec 2022.
First two years of preliminary data won't be finalized and combined and analyzed to a sufficient degree to potentially flip the narrative until about September 2024.
Want real data on covid and the vaccine? 5 years worth? You can have it in September 2027.
Why bother having the CIA release shit when you can just have the scientists do your dirty for you and time slide relevent information into 2024+?
Its all coming out. Just a matter of timing.
If they release evidence of a lab leak, China will deny it and relations will deteriorate. How do either of those things help the US? It's not going to make China a pariah in the world (and even if it did, that may or may not be a good thing) - the world is already very clear on their profound human rights abuses of Uyghurs, but nothing happens because they're too economically important.
We'd maybe gain some theoretical moral high ground, but that doesn't make the world safer or better.
Only after several days of failing to resolve the balloon matter diplomatically. Shooting it down was not their first resort, and that's probably because diplomatic considerations with China were being weighed against the domestic political situation. When the diplomatic situation can be kept relatively smooth and normal by keeping the public in the dark, that's the 'rational' choice.
Looking at this another way, until today, the most common hypothesis was that the virus crossed into humans because of contact with wild animals. A lab leak probably also involved contact with wild animals. It’s just now the Energy Dept. has gotten their hands on intelligence supporting this notion in particular.
I kinda figure Omicron was a developed "vaccination version" of COVID.
If it was actually a lab leak, then it’ll definitely rank as the most costly and fatal mistake in the 21st Century. I can hardly wrap my head around it; human error causing damage on a mythical scale. Scary stuff.
The worlds billionaires, combined, made more money in 2020-2022 than the previous 20 years combined. When there’s that much money involved, one must be a little suspicious.
What do we do if it leaked? Dangerous thing are handled in labs. We should double check the handling protocols based on the unknown possibility that it was a leak, just to be safe. I bet there are more dangerous things than COVID in all sorts of labs.
ALL categories are going up. Ergo, risk is going up exponentially.
No need for conspiracies. Just a proper parsing of the words "lab leak"
Or has the term "conspiracy" just been fully redefined to mean "a thing that can't happen" at this point?
A good question, but worth noting that they do seem to have in fact done so. I struggle to think of a single-higher up of any significance who was felled by SARS-CoV-2, despite the fact so many of them are octogenarians. Colin Powell maybe, but his blood cancer was clearly the more proximate cause of his death. A few in Iran, but, well.
Ah, but the century is still young.
BSL-4 labs have gone from 40 to 60ish in the last 25 years with another coming online almost every year.
BSL-3 labs are virtually uncountable and are in the 13000ish range in the USA alone (sorry, can't Remeber source)
Put it all together, and only an idiot STARTS with natural origin.
Also, there will be many many more.
"We must not allow a mine-shaft gap!:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybSzoLCCX-Y
[I miss Peter Sellers!]
But little by little people will start accepting that.
What should the consequences be? At the very least a tightening of the controls around labs doing bio research. Of course, this amounts to nothing if someone is allowed to outsource research to labs in countries that don't follow the stringent procedures. So, anybody who does such outsourcing shares the full responsibility if things go wrong.
What about Covid itself? China and America need to provide reparations. How much? Clearly in the trillions, maybe double digit trillions.
How about those who obstructed the investigations? I think they should face justice, and it's not unreasonable to expect that some would go to prison for their obstructions.
Both in China and America? For sure in America, where the arm of justice has a long reach. In China, if Xi wants a well functioning Party, yes, he should sent those who obstructed to jail, for if he tolerates that, his Party will go in decay.
We need treaties tightly regulating all biolabs around the world. Any countries not agreeing with the treaties should be blacklisted from entering entering or exiting countries that are part of the treaty, perhaps even restricting trade as well.
The decontamination protocols and entry / exit procedures for every biolab should be unified, worldwide, with strict and regular third-party circular auditing around the world. This allows labs to maintain their secrets; only the perimeter / filter are subject to this.
That would be the sensible course of action as a matter of Earth defense.
The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years. Allow the development of vaccines for extant viruses, but completely ban all Dr Frankenstein activities with viruses. No more "invent a virus in a lab to beat nature to the punch" horse shit, with is flagrant weapons development under the cover of civilian research. As soon as the virus started circulating through the population, did these researchers share their knowledge and help develop a vaccine? No, they buried their involvement and covered up everything they knew. They were no help at all, and never intended to be. Burn their books which describe how it is done, and silence the people who already understand it with the threat of criminal imprisonment for sharing their knowledge. Encourage major religions to amend their rules with strong taboos against this research, and institute harsh economic sanctions against any nation that doesn't participate in this ban.
Does this seem extreme? It shouldn't. This field of research has the power to kill billions and no demonstrable upside. It is even more dangerous than nuclear weapons; because at least a technician at a nuclear weapon production facility would be hard pressed to release his work on the global public of his own initiative. Smuggling a virus out of any lab is trivial, all it takes is a single madman's willingness to sacrifice himself as patient zero.
We're the villagers in an "evil wizard" scenario. The wizards have been meddling in dangerous forces beyond the understanding of common people, and it's getting people killed. The solution is to storm the wizard's tower and throw the wizards off the top of it.
This kind of sloppy hyperbole is tremendously damaging, feeding the false narrative that we must choose between the benefits of modern virology--smallpox wasn't eradicated until 1977!--and the catastrophic risks of experiments on novel potential pandemic pathogens.
Almost all modern virological research involves either existing pathogens already present in humans, or novel pathogens in systems incapable of replicating in humans. The WIV's research was a narrow exception, and one that was controversial long before this pandemic. For example, here's David Relman asking Ralph Baric a question about those risks, back in 2014:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw-nR6-4kQQ&t=2466s
That narrow area carries almost all the risk of a catastrophic research accident, and has yet to deliver any significant benefit. It could be banned with minimal impact on almost all modern virological research. That narrow regulation is what we need, and there are people (like the new NGO Protect Our Future) working to draft and enact it. Your conflation between modern virology in aggregate and that narrow area doesn't help them, and I hope you will stop.
THE HACKERNEWS?!
wtf????????????? I have no idea what you are on about
[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_R01AI110964_7529
1. Too many first world countries do not want to open up that can of worms because it might come back to bite them in the ass over the various things they have inflicted environmentally on the rest of the world.
The US and Europe for example are responsible for the overwhelming majority of greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere--yes some other countries are now emitting comparable amounts to current US/EU emissions, but because CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years the US/EU emissions from the past 200 years still massively dominate and will for a long time.
2. Calculating the reparations amount due to a given country would require an analysis of how much of their losses were due to their poor handling of COVID. There's too much risk that such analysis could conclude for many countries that their net losses were way higher than they would have been had the country handled it better.
If you suffer $X loss but then only get say 1/10 $X in reparations because that analysis concluded that 90% of your loss could have been avoided if you'd handled it better, your citizens aren't going to be happy their government got the 1/10 $X in reparations. No, your citizens are going to be annoyed their government botched things making COVID 10 times worse than it had to be.
If history is any indicator, no, and there isn't any.
But if you're interested in establishing precedent for reckless behaviour damaging the world economy, and the health of millions of people, I understand that would open the developed world to a mountain of liability in the arena of climate change.
Hard to compare, admittedly.
I'm all for complaining about US tactics, but it's 100% incorrect to try and claim that the Iraq War was "worse" than COVID-19.
Also almost all of the violence post war should be somewhat attributable to the invasion; we broke the basket to secure oil rights (and some argue to also keep the petrodollar as the world reserve currency)
The cost was way more than the cherry-picked stats you present
> "An estimated 151,000 to 1,033,000 Iraqis died in the first three to five years of conflict."
Then that famous video of "Madeleine Albright Saying Iraqi Kids' Deaths 'Worth It'" talked about half million children.
https://www.newsweek.com/watch-madeleine-albright-saying-ira...
In "costly and fatal", I also include that the Iraq War arguably marks the end of the US as the world's only superpower. Both in terms of cost and moral status, it was a huge abdication of status.
If that's the case it'll just slowly outscale any singular event like the Iraq War over multiple human generations of deaths and damage.
Whatever assurances you want will be a fantasy.
There has never been accountability among the elite class and there won't be, because whatever mistakes they make only affect everybody else.
It's like a video game - imagine the game characters you 'mistreat' asking what consequences you will be facing. You'd cackle at game designers having thought of such an amusing feature and proceed to go right back to doing as you please.
It's about the same in real life.
Which people? Should a lab tech in China receive consequences because religious people in America believed in the promises of their pastor and went to church and were sickened?
Huh? The previous President of the US frequently called it the "China Virus".
> GOP conspiracy to bring down Biden
Biden wasn't President for the first year of the pandemic, not sure how that works out.
> Are American progressives so fragile in their identity that they avoid agreeing with conservatives for fear of guilt by association?
I personally don't care whether the virus was man-made or natural. It bares next to zero importance on my life. At the end of the day what are we really arguing about? Lab practices in China? The Chinese should be better about lab safety and wet markets. But there was a pandemic which has killed millions of people. It seems like the people most invested in this question are also the ones most invested in downplaying the pandemic, which is just evil.
That's really surprising to me, because in my opinion the answer truly does matter, and sticking my head in the sand feels defeatist. I suppose that's a difference of opinions, though.
I’m seriously baffled how people say this.
It’s it obvious that if true then BSL4 virology and gain of function work needs international supervision and agreement for humanity.
Also keep in mind where the info was coming from in the US: it was being introduced by Trump. This is someone who regularly spouses countless baseless conspiracies whenever he needs some sort of ammunition to blame a group he doesn't like. There is plenty of fair reasons to not have believed this story.
I don't know what you mean by this. The Science said it wasn't a lab-leak, and we trust The Science, so it couldn't have been anti-science.
In fact the only real evidence, and all of it tenuous and circumstantial, is in support of a lab leak. There is actually not a single piece of direct evidence AFAIK for zoonotic origin, except that that route is possible (ie no mutations that would be impossible naturally, etc) and the overwhelmingly usual route for novel pathogens.
Also it's not particularly appropriate to use the label "conservative" for those trying to buck societal institutions. The actually conservative position was to follow public health advice.
I don't think it was tribalized by American media; I think covid hit when much of the world, not least the US, was embroiled in tribalism. I wanted to know whether it had come from a lab leak, but at the time a lot of the lab-leak rhetoric was packaged along with racist and nationalist vitriol, to the point where people who appeared to be of Asian descent were being attacked in the street.
So sensible people who suggested the virus may have come from a lab were out-shouted by people saying things like The election was stolen, Jews will not replace us, China virus, execute Fauci, being asked to wear a mask in Starbucks is like the Holocaust. I can forgive people for not wanting to try to pick out valid points from that particular torrent of bullshit. I think the resistance to the lab leak theory was less that people were dismissing science and more that the zone had been flooded and they were up to their neck in it.
However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan, quite legitimately - and they produce good science from this work. But because this is China, if a lab accident happened, it won’t be getting reported in the media. It’s a state secret.
The Energy Department gave a low probability to their assessment, but this is still a bombshell. Imagine the legal liability for China in international courts if the evidence is solid enough for litigation.
1. https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/tag/lab-leak-hypothesis/
Other than securing more funding for more research, and trivia for virologists, what good science has come from this lab?
The Wuhan institute was celebrated as an improvement over the facilities at which dangerous viruses had previously been studied in China. The 2004 SARS outbreak originated in a lab: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/
On the contrary, look at covid aftermath — it quite did! /s
This is news to me. The article you referenced opens by saying [0]:
> The World Health Organization has confirmed that breaches of safety procedures on at least two occasions at one of Beijing's top virology laboratories were the probable cause of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) there last month, which infected nine people, one of whom died.
This seems to be saying they traced the illness in nine people there at the lab back to two leaks at the lab, not that the entire disease outbreak originated in a lab.
There a lot of other studies, referenced in this wikipedia article [1], which explain that the first SARS virus originated in bats:
> Phylogenetic analysis of these viruses indicated a high probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and spread to humans either directly or through animals held in Chinese markets.
> In 2004, scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention of the University of Hong Kong and the Guangzhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention established a genetic link between the SARS coronavirus appearing in civets and humans, confirming claims that the virus might have transmitted from the animal species to humans.
In the last 15 years people have fallen ill of the plague, cowpox, meningococcus, h5n1, anthrax, and zika due to lab leaks in the Unites States [2]. These are just the leaks where people got sick and/or died, all lab workers I believe. There were others affecting animals, and others where nobody got sick. None of that means these labs originated these diseases. The origin of a disease is separate from a localized outbreak.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-1#Origin_and_evolutio...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
No it isn't. The were studying SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1.
They sequenced RaTG13 but that is too far away from SARS-CoV-2 with a thousand random mutations across its genome. And there's no evidence that they ever recovered culturable virus from RaTG13 or were able to culture it--there's a vast gap between sequencing a virus and culturing it.
We also know about their SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1 work because they published it. Before the pandemic they had no reason to keep work on RaTG13 secret.
This is a case of Schrodinger's BSL4 lab. We know they built chimeras of other viruses because they told the world about that, we know they sequenced RaTG13 because they published that sequence, but there's a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor backbone that they found, which for some reason they picked to be the backbone in a new set of experiments, which they had perfect secrecy over and nobody has ever found any evidence of it.
Regardless of what actually happened in this case (FWIW I still believe a natural origin was most likely), the Chinese authorities covered up everything to do with the lab and destroyed potential evidence before a proper investigation could take place. In court cases we have a norm that evidence you destroy is treated as evidence against you, for good reason.
Destruction of evidence is considered only evidence of consciousness of guilt and cannot be used to prove guilt alone. The court also has to consider that an innocent person may commit destruction of evidence to avoid wrongful prosecution from situations that look damning.
> Early in the epidemic, the Chinese government discouraged its press from reporting on SARS, delayed reporting to WHO, and initially did not provide information to Chinese outside Guangdong province, where the disease is believed to have originated.[19] Also, a WHO team that travelled to Beijing was not allowed to visit Guangdong province for several weeks.[20] This resulted in international criticism, which seems to have led to a change in government policy in early April.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002–2004_SARS_outbreak
There was no BSL4 lab in Guangzhou and they didn't sterilize the market there right away, so in that case they were able to eventually track the virus to its origins--yet the reaction of the Chinese government was basically the same.
Americans have a fairly severe problem with assuming that other nations and people's will react with transparency to the US if they have nothing to hide. This is the same problem we saw with Hussein and the way that he tried to block the weapons inspectors and it turned out by his own admission that it was due to him not wanting to appear weak in the view of Iran and Hussein was preoccupied with Iran: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/02/saddam-hussein...
At a minimum the US government should not be funding any biological research in places without adequate transparency/controls.
We can't do it because of the CCP, not because of epistemological reasons.
They somehow had tighter controls than Apple developing a new iPhone, before they had any reason to.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517719113
Pretty bad secrecy.
We knew WIV1 existed as well because they published it 3 years earlier:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389864/
Your point? I'm not sure if you had one. Next time, just post the date up instead of some snarky RTFM that doesn't even fit the thread.
It’s a bit like Jaime Meitzl (sp?) said - for the first time in history you find a unicorn (furin binding site in a coronavirus) next to a lab that asked for funding to make regular horses into unicorns. But the lab says it’s “natural origin”.
Other coronaviruses have an FCS and they have evolved multiple different times, independently:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
The fact that we knew that adding an FCS to a virus would likely enhance its ability to produce a pandemic really isn't a smoking gun that we actually did it, because we're just studying and copying what nature is already doing (who is actually a much better geneticist than we are, with vastly greater tools).
And since you want to talk about suspicious "unicorns" how about the idea that a lab worker was infected in the lab, and then the only thing that they did was visit the wet market. They didn't infect anyone they lived with, or go to any restaurants, or go visit grandma and this Typhoid Mary/Mike has no existence outside of working in the lab and visiting the wet market. And this idea gets worse if you include more workers in WIV having supposedly been exposed.
What fits with the facts better is that they genetically engineered the virus in perfect secrecy and deliberately let it loose in the wet market, which is just insanity--nobody gains anything from doing that, but it is also impossible to argue against.
If your only defense is that this is not the most commonly used way to add a FCS to coronaviruses, that seems pretty thin.
You realize that is going to rapidly descend into circular logic.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fviro.2022.8348...
You might interested in this paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2
"Discovery of a novel merbecovirus DNA clone contaminating agricultural rice sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China"
MERS is really nasty, this is clearly evidence of engineering, and guess what the system is unpublished.
Personally I suspect this paper (which came out a while ago but got "boosted" recently) could be the reason for DOE "confidence update".
Media have not reported on this and "the usual" zoonosis advocates have been remarkably silent about it.
While it is in the same group of beta coronaviruses that MERS is in, the HKU4 virus was first found in Kowloon and the "HK" stands for "Hong Kong" (although it would be a mistake to assume that says much more than where it was found and not what its range is throughout China)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111821/
And coronaviruses undergo recombination (XBB.1.5 is a recombinant which is all over the news) and that produces "Chimeric" viruses in nature. Finding evidence of "gene splicing" in samples and determining it must be humans ignores the fact that nature does it better than we do, and really points at how politically biased that article is.
They want you to believe that WIV imported MERS-like viruses from Saudi Arabia and were fucking around with them in the lab, and not that those viruses are found all over China naturally and nature fucks around them constantly in much higher volume than we can.
This is an engineering product.
As for politics, sure there is a lot of that going around but you can verify this finding yourself with freely available software using the published sequences.
Cadhla (who works for EcoHealth alliance BTW) points out that it was Wuhan University who registered the rice sequence bioproject PRJNA601977 - which is not hugely relevant since the source of the contamination could be from anywhere (that happened to have a HKU4 reverse genetics system...).
Andreas points to incomplete sequence coverage (not unusual in a contamination scenario) and claims it might be "not dangerous work" because the sequence gap leaves open the possibility that the missing bit was non-functional. True but weak. It's 33 NTs of highly conserved sequence, what does he really think was in that gap? I know what Fat Tony would say.
Flo's comments seem to be claiming that https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 is plagiarizing https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr353109 (the team's earlier paper which included a similar finding).
Her claim that a reverse genetics systems for HKU4-like COVs was previously disclosed seems weird since AFAIK it was this team that had previously disclosed it. It's possible I am not understanding what she is saying as it makes no sense to me.
The theory was that it was a virus they'd have sampled from immunocompromised miners working in the same caves that the bats with the most closely related viruses inhabit. They had some references to a report with something like that happening some time prior.
It's so far the only theory I've read that seems to match the evidence.
The evidence doesn't seem to indicate that it was engineered, or that it was a product of gain of function research on animals. I think there would have been more solid evidence pointing in that direction by now, if that was the case. They would have published something related to it, or non-Chinese researchers connected to the lab would have known something.
Yet there's no evidence of any related animal resorvoir, and the virus was very well adapted to humans from the very start. And everything points to the virus passing through the lab somehow. Those things put together seems to point at them having sampled a virus that already made the jump to humans, and that somehow during the sampling, or retrieving the sample from storage, the virus escaped.
https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-r...
There's a lot of economic activity in China that is close to bat habitats and there's evidence that cross reactivity to sarbecoviruses exists in a significant amount in rural china.
The researchers collecting samples were a very tiny slice of the human-to-bat-virus exposure that is going on in China all the time.
And we know that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't last very long on surfaces, it isn't transmitted by fomites. It needs to be aerosolized and breathed in. It isn't likely that the researchers were collecting live viable virus in the samples that they brought back to the lab. What they were sequencing was overwhelmingly going to be "dead" mRNA.
The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened. They didn't start spreading it around their apartment building, they didn't infect people in restaurants, didn't infect elderly relatives who wound up in the hospital, etc.
It makes "more" sense that they deliberately genetically engineered the virus and released it in the wet market entirely on purpose.
Except that SARS-CoV-2's epidemiological dynamics are well-known to be overdispersed? Almost all lineages die out, and a few explode due to repeated super-spreader events. It's therefore unlikely that the first cluster will be discovered at the site of introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 was presumably first introduced to other continents at airports and seaports; but that's not where the first clusters were found.
There's also the question of ascertainment bias, whether cases were found in the wet market simply because that's where the authorities looked. I assume you've seen those endless debates, which seem basically unresolvable to me given the limited information available.
The infected lab worker causing exactly one massive superspreading event in the wet market without infecting anyone else, making it look exactly like zoonotic spillover, without leaving any other contacts around Wuhan is much less believable to me. That sounds like a thousand to one odds or much worse.
That's indeed unlikely, but it's a strawman. As I've noted repeatedly above, most lineages die out. If the introduction into humans occurred outside the market (naturally or otherwise), then it's quite likely that patient infected others outside the market; those lineages just died out. I remember Trevor Bedford showing genomic evidence of all the failed introductions into Seattle before the spread finally went exponential, early in the pandemic.
Pekar et al. is basically a more sophisticated version of your argument, with numerical models of the phylogenetic and epidemiological dynamics. I don't think it's convincing (since they chose their power law pretty arbitrarily), but at least they acknowledge and purport to model that stochasticity.
I've lived in the United States all my life, you're just missing the point.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecuri...
The money for WIV risky reasearch mostly came from the USA.
-- famous politician, responding to a question on a different issue
But yes, there's no indication that the US is trying to cover anything up. And China is secretive about all sorts of things, they're an authoritarian government.
Sometimes, answers are more clear when questions are more clear.
“Why is the US waiting to secure a convincing case that produces useful diplomatic leverage instead of indulging public speculation by making an early call that wastes the opportunity?”
There’s a lot to lose by making a case that other nations can dismiss, and a lot to gain by having a case that they can’t. If there was a culpable lab leak, the game comes down to China making it easy for its partners to plausibly deny while others try to collect thorough enough evidence that they can’t. The tidbits that feed conspiracy circles might be 100% right and very convincing to individuals, but are too thin to put world leaders on the spot. For now.
I'm speculating of course but if you think about it, can you imagine him sitting patiently reading documents first thing in the morning? He would get bored so quickly he would end up on twitter to complain or gloat.
If your intention is to motivate Americans away from Chinese products, what better way to do it then to use a scary virus that seemed to emerge from China to that end.
If it was a lab leak from Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), it was likely from a research program partially funded by USA.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
"a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV itself."
It received special permission to continue despite a prohibition on gain-of-function research (Refer to the section: Biosafety and Security).[0]
Quoting:
Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.
And from the footnote describing author contributions:
[SHI Zhengli] provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids
As everyone knows by now, Shi is the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[1]
It's pretty clear that Shi subsequently continued that gain-of-function work at Wuhan.
My question is, what is the correlation between the spike sequence Shi supplied for the 2015 paper and that of the early variants of SARS-CoV-2?
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Zhengli
There is also a 2013 paper, written by Peter Dazak and Shi Zhengli, "Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor".[2] Peter Daszak has been centrally involved in the US funding of the Wuhan Institute, in his capacity as president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York.[3]
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24172901/
[3] https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
Some of the leading voices in opposition to the lab leak hypothesis such as Peter Daszak had close academic connections (collaboration, grants etc.) with the BSL4 lab in Wuhan.
Bat coronavirus work including chimera creation was done at WIV at BSL-2, not BSL-4.
The Coronavirus work at Wuhan was done in BSL2 environment; the BSL4 lab was still being built at that time.
The lab leak hypothesis doesn't even rule out that it was a natural virus. It just says that the virus leaked from the lab. It could have been:
- deliberately created in the lab (gain on function)
- accidentally created in the lab through repeated cross-species contamination of lab animals
- just stored in the lab from a natural sample
- or even not deliberately stored in the lab but acquired through infection of a researcher on a collection mission.
“Jennifer M. Granholm was sworn in as the 16th Secretary of Energy on February 25, 2021.”
https://www.energy.gov/leadership
Has happened before
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
But the fact that many virologists have professional friends at the Wuhan lab does not rule out that the lab was being poorly managed or that an error might have been swept under the rug by the CCP.
My personal opinion synthesizing all that I have read and heard on this topic for three years is that the lab leak is plausible because China is an autocracy and does not have the rule of law. It’s in the CCP’s interests and within their capabilities to hide a lab leak quite successfully.
tbh the general impression given by China's known attempts to cover anything up tend to give the opposite impression, precisely because of their default to autocracy. This is a government party that generally covers up stuff by banning it from being talked about, regards "she regrets making that comment and wants to stay at her home and not play tennis or talk to the media any more" as a reasonable coverup, and made such a clumsy attempt to silence the doctor first raising the alarm COVID symptoms that be became a hero inside China and the officials responsible got their wrists slapped. Allowing lab staff to communicate with the outside world and release papers on COVID origins considered plausible by uninvolved overseas virologists would be an uncharacteristic way for the Chinese government to act if they suspected there was something to be uncovered...
After working in a BSL3 lab, I've seen some fairly poor working practices including someone infecting themselves, presumably due to sloppy working practices. There is a reason why lab leaks are common, if not vastly less consequential than the lab leak under discussion. It's because people are people, and they make mistakes, whether that's accidental or deliberately breaking the rules. It does make one question whether we can work on dangerous pathogens safely. I'd have to say, after direct experience of work on multiple diseases of varying types, that for many of them I have serious doubts. When it comes to Gain of Function, I think it should be banned worldwide. We aren't capable of working to the required level of stringency to guarantee safety.
To provide a concrete example, look at the German researcher who infected herself with Ebola. In a BSL4 facility. Not even involving GoF research, just the regular virus. Even top researchers slip up. This one made the news due to the severity, but how many are quietly buried, or not even reported within the organisation at all for fear of the consequences. It happens, and I've seen it first-hand.
Some people interpreting “lab leak” to mean deliberately designed, others to mean deliberately released, others to mean an accident involving a natural research virus.
So yeah this whole conversation will continue to go nowhere because in reality it is full of conspiracy theorists who make the conversation impossible to have.
Why should anybody believe otherwise? Principle of charity? Please.
Wuhan Institute of Virology did actively contribute to the development of the Vero vaccine by Sinopharm.
Regarding the premise, there's no reason to believe that a lab working on coronaviruses (quite common) that did not happen to contribute directly to a successful vaccine development effort (profoundly uncommon) was necessarily working on a bioweapon.
FWIW, there are ~59 operational BSL-4 labs in the world, and only a BSL-3 is necessary to work on potentially airborne diseases like coronaviruses. According to this study[1] of published research papers, there are probably about 150 BSL-3 labs in the United States alone. Are those all bioweapon programs because they didn't contribute to the vax development programs?
[1]: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/mapping-biosafety-le...
The most dangerous interpretation of "lab leak" is the one backed by the most evidence - that they were artificially enhancing viruses so they could develop vaccines against them. The Pfizer guy who got caught on camera by Project Veritas said they were considering doing the same thing.
Selling people vaccines for viruses the scientists created specifically to create vaccines for, is about the worst conflict of interest you can imagine and one with global implications, not just for US/China relations.
While this is true, at this point we have evidence that even the highest level security lab can have lab leak with devastating results.
The main problem is not that, but that people can't really talk about it publicly, as the rules should be stricter (for example an international body should be checking the procedures of other countries...the problem is not with the rules, but not enough verification of keeping the rules).
> In a 2022 analysis of Google Scholar citations, Dr. Fauci ranked as the 44th most-cited living researcher. According to the Web of Science, Dr. Fauci ranked 9th out of 3.3 million authors in the field of immunology by total citation count between 1980 and April 2022. During the same period, he ranked 22th out of 3.3 million authors in the field of research & experimental medicine, and 715th out of 1.4 million authors in the field of general & internal medicine.
2019 and prior Google Scholar shows him cited about 8,000 times per year. In 2020+ that only jumped to 10,000, so his ridiculous statistics here are not entirely (or even mostly) due to COVID related stardom.
2) It also wouldn’t be “weird” at all. That’s like saying you find it weird that a firefighter got burned or a nuclear safety researcher caused a nuclear safety incident.
Then to send money to actively seek out bat viruses in the place thought to harbor the worse or most diverse viruses?
And to do all that in partnership with a hostile enemy who most certainly isn't going to tell you all the extras they have planned above and beyond the controllable.
No, I think you are dead wrong. The default assumption from now on is lab leak unless proven otherwise, because that's the risky world we live in. Period. No getting around it. And the risk gets higher every year.
There are literally tens of thousands of BSL-3 labs in the world. They aren't sitting empty doing nothing. They are busy trying to "save us".
And no, it's nowhere near acceptable to just assume that every new virus is a lab leak. Especially when the subtext of this line of inquiry is usually that we're going to "hold 'them' accountable" somehow. Combine those two thoughts and you get something like, "anywhere that a novel virus appears in suddenly gets smacked by the international community," and I'm not sure you could create a stronger disincentive to early pathogen detection and alerting if you tried.
P.S. There's almost certainly not anywhere close to "tens of thousands" of BSL-3 labs. Probably in the few hundreds to maybe thousand or two, but that'd be a stretch, and "tens of thousands" is not supported by any data I can find: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/mapping-biosafety-le...
Funny how all the datapoints, including new and novel to humans get ignored.......
I’m aware that the Energy Department has sone degree of responsibility for the US nuclear arsenal, but even taking that into account, it seems out of scope.
While LLNL is primarily known for nuclear research, biosecurity is also apparently part of its mission: https://www.llnl.gov/missions/biosecurity
Just one example of this is the HAMMER facility at Hanford, WA, where DOE can train people to deal with all manner of disasters. https://hammer.hanford.gov/
Given the potential for a laboratory-originating virus to pose a significant threat to national security, the DOE may be interested in studying the origins of SARS-CoV-2 to better understand the risks associated with biosecurity and to inform its efforts to prevent and respond to biological threats.
Secondly, the DOE has collaborated with other agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in conducting research related to COVID-19. The origins of SARS-CoV-2 are an important aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic and understanding its origins can inform public health responses and the development of treatments and vaccines.
Finally, the DOE has a stake in global scientific cooperation and the international research community. The origins of SARS-CoV-2 are an area of intense global interest, and understanding the virus's origins is important for future pandemic prevention efforts. By contributing to the scientific understanding of the virus's origins, the DOE can help to advance international collaboration and cooperation in addressing global health threats.
https://web.ornl.gov/info/news/pulse/pulse_v270_08.html
>"A team of scientists at DOE's Sandia National Laboratories recently revealed their involvement in the more than six-year investigation led by the FBI surrounding anthrax spores that killed five people in the fall of 2001. Their work, using transmission electron microscopy, was the first to link the spores from several of the letters as coming from the same source."
I seems like a little nitpick, but there are lots of agencies in the US, sometimes there’s a little nobody agency with a name similar to a big deal one… as a style thing, reporters should stick to the common names for big agencies, so we can be sure they aren’t mixing things up.
Sarcasm aside, this is ridiculously overdue. It was never xenophobic to want inquiry into Covid being a lab leak. The outrageous politicization of finding the source of the outbreak is shameful.
I've casually noticed something similar over the past ~18 months with posts related to COVID.
Please do not do this.
When you do this, it potentially prevents others from being able to to analyze it and form their own judgement.
"Too toxic" is an opinion.
I'm not going to stop flagging this kind of content, and dang is here to overrule me/others when he feels the need to, which is also how HN is designed.
The post is up, the system is working as intended. We all have roles to play here, no need to worry!
That NYT doesn’t think this story is newsworthy is itself newsworthy.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
It seems like Trump said it from the start, and the media negated him based on political views, not facts. And now, only years later, there is a reconciliation with the facts.
Now, I'm not that aware of the politics or the media in the US. But I think the way I see it may be the way many others saw this story roll.
Whether or not it's true - it is a big reason that many people don't trust the media. And this may be the bigger story for us all going forward.
No, the media negated it because all the notable scientists and publications (Nature, Lancet, ..) said it was a crazy conspiracy theory.
Society generally had adopted intolerance and seeks to punish detractors. Both sides are doing this. Again, this is not... measured...
The only people getting shunned and ridiculed are the people who approached the issue unscientifically.
Note that he also said covid wasn't a serious thing several times. If that's the case even if there was a lab leak it wasn't a big deal? Note that both of those were to benefit his administration and deflect blame from his admin's response in Feb 2020 to not take covid seriously.
Unfortunately, it doesn't matter.
It will lead to more people losing trust in the media and flocking into extreme social media silos.
The problem is still here, even if the cause of the problem makes no sense.
And the Energy Department that the sole source behind this story isn't part of the so called establishment? Especially under the Biden admin which people who use words like 'the establishment' and 'deep state' consider the establishment.
Looks like 'the establishment' wants to blame China now, hence the story must be fake and there was no lab leak?
Where is actual evidence of the lab leak?
Guessing right in the absence of evidence shouldn't grant a person any kind of vindication in retrospect
Now, if he had claimed the virus originated as a Chinese lab leak, and the intelligence community came out supporting that contribution, then that would have been a different story. Information from these sources didn't start becoming public until 2021, and was still mixed at that point[2].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-fa...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/us/politics/covid-origin-...
So it's entirely possible that just watching the news casually would leave you better informed than the US president during the years of 2017 to 2021.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/29/politics/trump-intelligence-b...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/29/donald-trump...
[2] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-fa...
> "Clapper agreed with Gistaro, telling Helgerson, “Trump doesn’t read much; he likes bullets.” Instead, during the Trump administration, the briefer would summarize aloud key points since the last briefing and provide three documents (none more than a page) about new developments abroad. This was all part of an effort to make the PDB “shorter and tighter, with declarative sentences and no feature-length pieces.”
> “Trump had his own way of receiving intelligence information—and a uniquely rough way of dealing publicly with the IC,” Helgerson wrote, “but it was a system in which he digested the key points offered by the briefers, asked questions, engaged in discussion, made his own priority interests known, and used the information as a basis for discussions with his policy advisers.”"
> "These and other difficulties agencies encountered under Trump led Helgerson to conclude that, “The system worked, but it struggled.”"
He clearly had access to more information than any civilian, and was engaging with it.
You could literally just read his executive orders to figure out what you said is false.
“The virus accidentally leaked from a highly sophisticated lab in China” is somehow racist and dangerous, but “Chinese people can’t stop eating weird stuff at a wet market and the virus jumped to humans from there” isn’t.
My personal belief over the last few years has been "it could be zoonotic transmission through food, it could be a lab leak, it could be something else. I don't know, so let's wait and see."
Also, as a side note: non-Chinese people eat weird things too (and even worse - sometimes live with animals inside their homes). For example, the Black Death in Europe and the 1918 Flu pandemic which likely started in the US both had a significant zoonotic component.
A farmer handling infected guano (which is used for fertilizer) could’ve been patient zero. A scientist studying bats in a cave could’ve been exposed, and I guess that could count as a lab leak, I guess, but it’s not as sexy as “mad scientists were manually recombinating viruses for the interest of authoritarian regimes!”
Trump's insinuations were that the virus was engineered as a bioweapon and intentionally leaked from the lab in Wuhan. This is not the same as the virus being studied in the lab and leaking. Just because the statements involved the work "leak" doesn't make them equivalent.
If a novel virus once again originates in China from a city with a BSL4 lab, I think we ought to skip the twice is coincidence.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/03/03/1083751...