The sourcing and style will raise eyebrows. The revelations are valuable, and clear enough to be verifiable through one channel or another.
And given that we are at 7 days remaining before the 90-day WIV intel disclosure deadline, old journo hands expect that info leaks are more likely to happen.
I love how people who don’t read the article ask “did you read the article”. Agree there’s nothing new here, and most things presented as new are mostly conjecture or hear say
They will not, because those accusations came from people who intended to use them to discredit Chinese people in general, or that closely associate the leak with the Chinese way of doing things and so on. These accusation led to racist attacks against Asian people all over the us.
Ok, so the original motivations for some making that claim were suspect. Should that automatically excuse or prevent discussion that better safety protocols should be used or a better “ways of doing things” should be undertaken when handling viruses and pathogens that are capable of killing 7M people? I think it’s a valid topic and important one that should be verboten lest the next time we accidentally kill 14M with carelessness as the cause.
If the people making that claim had been sane, instead of pushing it in the middle of; "it's not deadly, just a flu," "masks do nothing," "maybe a bit of bleach is fine in the lungs," "hydroxychloroquine cures everything," "no, wait, it is horse paste that cures everything," "the vaccine will kill you in X months, guaranteed," and "GREAT RESET," it'd be easier to transition into a serious discussion about studying deadly viruses in labs.
I honestly don’t see much difference in the level of extremism between everything you listed vs people deciding a specific topic is off limits just because the theory may not be politically correct, or because the alt opinion may have some factual basis.
Yes, of course, everyone should treat disingenuous propagandists as if they were attempting to have a serious discussion. If anyone objects to that, it is "deciding a topic is off-limits," which is insane. Of course we should let them run their horse paste grift and just patiently repeat over and over, "no, no, studies show it doesn't work. Please wear a mask to reduce spread."
Considering that you are intentionally misconstruing that ivermectin position that folks were discussing at the time using the same tired and dishonest “horse paste” media talking point, I’ll assume that “disingenuous propaganda” runs in many directions.
The middle ground always gets pushed to the extremes when there's a strong push to alienate some views.
Covid was worse than the flu, but the flu is also deadly and we should be paying more attention to vaccinating it. The deaths aren't evenly distributed, either, young healthy people have less to worry about, but "less" isn't "nothing." For masks, you really wanted N95 masks, not cloth, and you still have to avoid large indoor gatherings.
Nobody said that bleach in the lungs was good. Trump mentioned disinfectant presumably butchering a description of the HealLight which would use UV to destroy the virus, effectively "disinfecting" the lungs. There are always idiots poisoning themselves with bleach, though, but nobody pays much attention to the poison control stats most of the time. HCQ and Ivermectin had some promising studies but no real effectiveness for the things people wanted them for. There probably is some rise in myocarditis due to vaccines... but they're still a lot safer if you look at mortality rates. "Great Reset" was from an actual policy proposal someone put out, but doesn't really stand for the things the conspiracies say it does.
All of these things got pushed into extreme caricatures depending on what side you trust.
I thought that Ivermectin was proven to be helpful in places where parasitic infestations are extremely common (most of the world).
The problem being that treating someone with steroids also strengthens parasites, which burdens the immune system even more.
So in parts of the world where parasites are common, it makes sense to treat with an anti-parasite drug from the beginning (no need to test for actual parasites).
In parts of the world without widespread parasite infections (for example, the US), the costs outweigh the benefits.
This caused lots of confusion because there were quite a few papers promoting Ivermectin as part of treatment. The fine print said “in developing countries” but nobody reads the fine print.
So you want to let the conspiracy theorists dictate discussion. And not everyone claiming there could have been a lab leak was pushing for those other things. There were sane claims. You seem to want to ignore the possibility that the Chinese and American governments had something to coverup, if there was a lab leak given the kind of research done there.
Science is in agreement that it is most likely not natural and was engineered. The missing piece is where it originated and majority agree that it most likely originated from the wuhan institute of virology.
> but it isn’t a “scientific” question in the first place.
... which is true of the pandemic response in general. "Science" doesn't tell society how to react to something. Science is a process to test hypothesizes--it isn't a book of facts or direct answers on the trade-offs of various mitigation techniques. It can only inform, not dictate.
So, science doesn't have a problem when results of experiments are faked, because science doesn't ask this question, it's a question for politics, forensics, and history? Nice try! Still your move.
Yes, you nailed it properly. If results of experiments cannot be reproduced and confirmed by two independent researchers at least, then it's not a scientific process. History of science is full of fakes.
The communist party is sensitive doesn't want it to be known that a Chinese lab leaked a dangerous virus (see also "how does RBMK reactor explode?")
The ecohealth alliance that Fauci and Dazack were involved in don't want it widely known that they had a hand in the WIV GoF (that Obama banned stateside) and worked early in the pandemic to obscure their own involvement in it.
Trump doesn't want it widely known that his administration contributed $100k to the Ecohealth alliance.
Lots of powerful people working to not take responsibility and obfuscate reality.
One of the allegations is that one or more lab workers were sick with covid in 2019.
Their colleagues - the scientific community - cannot through science alone determine if this was true.
If it happened then they went to a nearby hospital. To investigate there is possibly a police matter, certainly a health matter, a political matter and many things - but is not answered by waving the magic science wand. And so on.
People who claim it’s a science question are shallow or deceitful.
I disagree, it is a scientific question. Whether we can answer it in isolation of politics and prejudice is the question for me.
But if you observe some gravitational waves in a single event, you can correlate it to optical or radio observations, you can try to analyse the signals to match them to existing hypotheses of gravitational waves origination etc. The singularity of the event doesn't make it not science. Same as the emergence of a novel virus.
It is just a shame that most of the evidence is subjective and non-scientific. But the question itself is well posed scientific endeavour.
I think it's splitting hairs, but even then I disagree. I can't see how the evolution and emergence of a virus is not a question of applied science.
That it is commingled with a million political questions, yes it's true. But to me that's a nuisance variable, not fundamentally changing the underlying question.
The lab leak theory started in China. It has never been about xenophobia. The only people pushing the whole xenophobia thing was the CCP. Chinese news called it wuhan virus long after it was given the name Covid-19.
Protect them from what? Being blamed? What does that do except stoke fear? There are actual things to talk about like their aggressive naval horseshit why do we have to make them nefarious mind controllers or secret world saboteurs or whatever this lab leak hypothesis is supposed to prove.
Knowing how the virus leaked allows us to figure out how to try and prevent it happening again.
When you cover it up, prevent investigations, destroy data, and try to blame the rest of the world. That does not help understand how we can prevent it happening again.
If China was open and honest from day 1, countries would have actually tried to help. But instead all the CCP did was hide it and blame everyone else.
It’s clear that you side with the CCP. You don’t want to prevent another pandemic or make sure people are safe. All you seem to want to do is defend them and get angry at everyone who wants to discuss the issue.
1. Lab leak hypothesis being proven is not a requirement for any kind of prevention
2. If everyone was honest all the time life would be roses
3. These lab leak articles don't make anyone safer they just cause conspiratorial thinking.
I don't trust the China for shit, but I'm sick of Americans suckered in by lazy bullshit thinking. I can't think of anything positive to say about China, but you can't say this because it is all a dead end useless thing that serves no purpose.
How about putting back in our observers like Trump kicked out, arguably hobbling our view into what was going on. We still have not done this. Instead we're here dicking off about shit that doesn't matter. Way to be people.
I agree sort of with this sentiment, but it ultimately doesn't matter even if it is that china is covering up their bioweapon accident just like anyone might. We'll never know, and we don't need that to hold them accountable for many many many other wrongs, and we don't need it to start working to prevent the next pandemic either.
That's the very point I'm trying to make about this dubious article and all the people posting conspiracy theories here. How can we say they aren't trying to cause xenophobic feelings?
Sure yes, that is a fair point, but this conversation doesn't ascribe that kind of limitation in the argument, because we're already talking about other motivations. Maybe (probably lol) they were negligent, maybe it was an accident, my point is if we are also trying to get people to think for a moment "or maybe they did it on purpose" then it follows that people are pushing that idea, if false, for xenophobic reasons.
Ah, so when people disagree with you, it's because they're conspiracy theorists and you're ready to make wild assumptions about their motives. How perfectly reasonable of you.
This article literally explores and lays out theories about how potentially events and people could've conspired to our present day. I don't think that is intellectually helpful.
Science very much does ask that kind of question - what is the origin of some thing. With SARS1 it also answered it easily - testing showed if came from palm civets at the market. This time though scientific investigation has been blocked by the politics.
This is the kind of writing you need to properly discuss the lab leak hypothesis. It's not perfect, there are no good links to sources which suggests a lot of it is made up.
However, this kind of writing should only happen after years or months of investigation. You can't do the lab leak panic 2 days into the pandemic. You can't even really do it half way through the pandemic.
I'm glad such investigations are being caried out. I only wish links to whatever is declassified from the investigations to be made public for such publications. Authors need to prove their research effort when it comes to such news.
I mean... There are references to names, institutions carrying out certain investigations, references to experiments done prior to the pandemic. Yeah, some of it can be congecture. Which is why I really want the direct links to data, not just mentions to the events.
I'm not sure it's a conspiracy theory. I think it's a legitimate thing to investigate by an international entity like the UN (not the US), and the outcome (if it turns out to be true) should likely be some proportional sanction/payments by China.
Russians started to clean up evidence, which points to BSL4 lab "Vector".
IMHO, this article is a part of their disinformation campaign. The name of their vaccine "Sputnik V" (Follower 5) suggests that there was "Something","Sputnik I", "Sputnik II", "Sputnik III", "Sputnik IV" before "Sputnik V".
It's impossible for Russians to produce 5 vaccines in row in such short span of time, just few months, which took billions of dollars and year of time for western companies.
IMHO, Russians started developing of their vaccine since SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2003.
It was named after the satellite Sputnik 1 and the V is not a roman five but stands for victory, multiple sources consistently claim? Sounds reasonable that this was just PR propaganda to connect to prior great successes in Russia..
(Even without that knowledge I'd find this theory a bit far fetched, there could be many other good reasons for that naming).
"Sputnik" is a regular Russian word, which means "one who travels together with another" (s-put-nik s-=with, -put-=travel/road/journey, -nik=somebody).
Victory is Latin word. Russian word for victory is "pobeda" (po-beda po-=after, -beda=bad/something very different from good, "after bad times").
It looks like 5 in the name is from Ad5 component of vaccine.
Moreover, the vaccine produced by Vector is called EpiVacCorona[0].
> It's not perfect, there are no good links to sources which suggests a lot of it is made up.
Existing evidence points to another lab: BSL4 lab "Vector" in Novosibirsk, Russia. They worked on their "Sputnik" vaccine when blast in laboratory on September 16 2019[2] caused chain of incidents: broken windows, unprotected soldiers break in, which checked rooms for signs of fire, equipment stolen from BSL4 lab by those soldiers[0][1], epidemic of unknown virus in Siberia, Military World Games in Wuhan[3].
Leaving aside the question of where and how the virus emerged, it's interesting to note that the lab was nigh useless during the pandemic, despite its main specialty was investigating Coronaviruses! It looks like a lot of dangerous research went on, and even if nothing bad happened because of that research, nothing was gained. A lot of risk for nothing.
HN should limit the rate of comments per user per post. This user is seriously worked up to mute this discussion and spams in every comment thread. Edit: this user wrote 26 out of 88 comments here.
HN already has a rate limit. You get the message "You're posting too fast" when you exceed it. Though I think it's also tied to karma and might not trigger when all those comments get upvoted. And if you try to downvote them all, you'll run into the protections against mass-downvoting. Tuning the feedback loops to encourage good discussions while damping flamewars is a difficult problem.
Once you have some post history, I’m pretty sure the harsh rate limit, the one that would stop someone from posting in every comment thread, is only triggered manually by the mods if you’re a prick (personal experience).
The basic new account rate limit and the one you get from getting downvote quickly are too weak to stop what they are complaining about.
No it is not an ad hominem attack to say that your argument is childish and stupid. You're not even having a debate. You're just spamming the forum with drivel.
We will know, eventually, hopefully. I think it really matters. To better prevent future pandemics and to establish frameworks for restitution. And it definitely matters for future economic reparations.
If negligence is the cause of a multi-million death, multi-trillion dollar response it needs to be corrected to prevent future similar errors.
They're not implying anything. They're nearly making the observation that the supposed reason this lab existed was to research dangeours viruses like covid, and yet the lab itself did nothing to help during the pandemic.
> yet the lab itself did nothing to help during the pandemic.
Which people in this thread are somehow believing as truth instead of the bald-faced propaganda it is.
Do you actually think a virus research lab in the epicentre of an outbreak would not be put to use?
From Wikipedia:
> As the virus spread worldwide, the institute continued its investigation. In February 2020, a team led by Shi Zhengli at the institute were the first to identify, analyze and name the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), upload it to public databases for scientists around the world to understand,[28][29][30] and publish papers in Nature.[31] On 19 February 2020, the lab released a letter on its website describing how they successfully obtained the whole virus genome.[32]
Gene sequencing is table stakes with modern tech, and many countries did that during the pandemic. We don't need a BSL-4 level lab in the middle of a large city to do a gene sequence. It happened that they published early what many other labs would have done (and did do). On the other hand, the vaccines and effective cures had nothing to do with their work. The benefit/risk ratio seems very poor here.
You really missed the whole point of their post didn't you? If we are going to allow a BSL-4 lab to exist and introduce the risk of possible leaks or other problems, we need to get something in return. That "something" needs to be more than what other lower security labs can already do. It is fascinating that a lab which was supposedly researching coronavirsuses for so long (and which may have led to the outbreak, but regardless) was unable to do anything that other labs could not.
Afaik they weren't even applying BSL4 security to their coronavirus research. On top of that, before the outbreak, the Pasteur institute, who was incidentally supposed to be a research partner but was kept at arms' length, raised an alarm on their apparent general lack of safety compliance.
That and the fact that the Chinese dicatorship blocking any inquiry into the matter are enough to put the blame on that lab until proven otherwise.
> It looks like a lot of dangerous research went on, and even if nothing bad happened because of that research, nothing was gained. A lot of risk for nothing.
Your previous comment is clearly incorrect as shown by the parent, something is a lot more than nothing.
I'd like for high risk biological research to be done under the same security arrangements as nuclear weapons research. Covid and influenza have together killed several orders of magnitude more humans in the last 150 years than nuclear weapons/accidents have. Thus GoF research presents a potential human cost much higher than nuclear weapons, and should be treated as such.
If that makes it "too expensive and slow" then so be it. Perhaps there are some things humans should not be doing.
Well, historically, you know, nuclear weapons research involved a lot of cavalier scientists doing dangerous things with limited knowledge, and of course in the early days, there was plenty of above-ground range testing; is that something you want included as well?
If my information is correct, I believe that nearly all nuclear testing these days is 100% simulation on supercomputers, which is as safe as safe can be, as long as you can trust supercomputer simulations to render the correct answer to those trusting researchers.
Yes, the whole virus hunting grift that Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance and PREDICT tout has been exposed as ineffective. Now they are doubling down with further funding and blanket denials that it could have come from a lab accident. They never mention the nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. And that happens to be where WIV sampled.
I remember still when it was considered a conspiracy theory and we got downvoted here and banned on reddit for even implying the possibility. Unfortunately something similar is happening with AI x-risk right now.
We still have no strong evidence for lab leak from BSL4 lab in Wuhan, while we have some evidence (two early strains of SARS-CoV-2: A, then B; B was in Wuhan in December; where and when was parent of A and B?) that suggests start of epidemic outside of China in mid-September 2019. Russians start to delete videos about blast at their BSL4 lab "Vector" in Novosibirsk on Sep 16 2019[0], which suggests that this information may cause harm for them.
So, "Lab leak" theory may be right, while "lab leak from BSL4 lab in Wuhan" theory may be wrong.
We are playing with words. Accusation vs possibility vs open to options vs etc. The problem is that it was called which hunting anything that was not natural origin.
Same with pointing out at the first studies that indicated that the virus was airborne. I got downvoted to oblivion here for posting a link to the study.
I don't think that's true with AI. Loads of people worry about it and I've never heard that called a conspiracy theory.
It's true with covid though and I always thought the allegation a bit unfair. I mean suggesting the origin of X is from the nearest source of X has never seemed much of a conspiracy to me.
I had long messages on the Wikipedia discussion before they allowed the idea to be mentioned without a this is conspiracy disinformation disclaimer, after many months of fighting.
> You infect the mice, wait a week or so, and then recover the virus from the sickest mice. Then you repeat.
From The Hardware Hacker (2017) by "bunnie" Huang:
> So, a single base-pair change--simply flipping two bits--might be all you'd need to turn the H1N1 swine flu virus into a deadlier variant... for just over $1,000.
> [Influenza] packs a deadly punch in 3.2 KB... and we [still] haven't eradicated it. Could influenza do hacks like the one I just described on its own already? The short answer is yes.
> ... on average, every copy of an influenza virus has one random mutation.
> [H1N1] was probably just a couple of mutations away from being a bigger health problem.
> ... novel H1N1 acquired a mix of RNA snippets that gave it high transmission rates and made it something humans weren't innately immune to. That's the perfect storm for a pandemic.
> If there were a computer analogy to this RNA-shuffling model, [random relinking of virus "files" at runtime]... would also proliferate a diverse set of viruses in the wild...
Fortunately for swine flu at least,
> ... a patient [had] a novel antibody... to confer immunity to all 16 subtypes of influenza A.
Against Covid, research by Dr. Weismann and Dr. Karikó led to the development of the mRNA vaccine:
> Witnesses are said to have told the US investigation that Zhou fell from the roof of the Wuhan institute, although this has not been verified.
This guy who published a suspiciously early patent on a covid 19 vaccine fell off a roof three months later?
That’s kind of buried in the article a bit but was this claim been made anywhere else?
Also, the section on activity at the lab at the time of the outbreak does not mention analysis of private app data.
IIRC, one of the early discredited reports suggesting lab origin had relied, in-part, on commercially available app data. The kind of adware built into “free” apps that violate user privacy.
This data supposedly showed clear activity supporting a temporary shutdown of the Wuhan lab.
This information always seemed the easiest to latch on to. Not to prove origin but at least offer an important fact for a pattern.
US military bases have had their locations and perimeters out on the public web thanks to fitness apps.
Was the WIV associated app data not real? If it was, why isn’t it included in this article?
The article relates a study “by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid.”
How would this be more compelling than raw app data showing movement of employees or security workers in and around WIV?
>This guy who published a suspiciously early patent on a covid 19 vaccine fell off a roof three months later?
>That’s kind of buried in the article a bit but was this claim been made anywhere else?
As someone who's followed the debate closely, (with the submission history to demostrate that), I can tell you that the parent article is the first time the assertion that Zhou fell from the roof has ever been made in tbe public-facing side of the debate.
After a quick read of the article, it presents no new data, and is replete with innuendo pointing at the Wuhan lab, rather than any direct evidence.
Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an indication of any ill-intent. Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab. Further, genetic clocks show that RaTG13 and SARSCoV2 diverged almost 50 years ago.
The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab [0]. Furthermore, several different isolates were found in the market, indicating that SARSCoV2 had been circulating before the epidemic took off.
No, not all labs working on viruses do research on dangerous viruses. Bacteriophages for instance, are a deep research topic, and (aside from potential effects on our microbiome) are completely benign to humans. That's just one of many counterexamples.
Those viruses are slightly more related to SARSCoV2 than RaTG13, however note 1) that they were found even further away from Wuhan than was RaTG13 and 2) that they still remain too different from SARSCoV2 to be its direct ancestor.
One of the things we know for sure is that that about 50 years of evolutionary changes separate RaTG13 and BANAL-52 from SARSCoV2, so they are not its direct ancestors.
>50 years of evolutionary changes separate RaTG13 and BANAL-52 from SARSCoV2
Do you have a source for this?
Also, I'm no biologist, but is comparing the base rate of evolutionary changes still relevant if SARSCoV2 wasn't of natural origins? E.g. through creating chimeras or 'serial passaging' as described in this article? Wouldn't that create an environment where 50 years could pass in a way shorter timeframe?
>Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID- 19 pandemic
>Divergence dates between SARS-CoV-2 and the bat sarbecovirus reservoir were estimated as 1948 (95% highest posterior density (HPD): 1879–1999), 1969 (95% HPD: 1930–2000) and 1982 (95% HPD: 1948–2009), indicating that the lineage giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating unnoticed in bats for decades.
You should also know that SARSCoV2 1) is not a chimeric virus, and 2) that the present study includes viruses linked to RaTGP13 but more distant from SARSCoV2, i.e. it includes evidence from viruses unassociated with the pandemic.
What about Ralph Baric's method for splicing viruses? It's apparently really hard or impossible to detect, and that's plausibly something that could be used to make a chimeric coronavirus.
> You should also know that SARSCoV2 1) is not a chimeric virus,
There is no basis for this claim. Genomic evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a chimera of any two previously-known viruses. No possible genomic evidence could exclude a chimera of two previously-unknown viruses, and the WIV was the world's leading collector of such novel sarbecoviruses from nature. They proposed to make chimeras of them in DEFUSE. That proposal wasn't funded, but this article now reports explicit claims they did such work:
> They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.
You're basically rehashing Andersen's "Proximal Origins" here, and even he has moved on to more sophisticated (though still unconvincing) arguments like Pekar. As David Relman wrote almost three years ago:
> This argument [that SARS-CoV-2 must be natural since it doesn't use a known backbone] fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory.
We know SARSCoV2 is not a chimeric virus because similar viruses have been identified from other locations, and the pattern-matching (sequence alignment) shows that SARSCoV2 does not have any insertions or deletions that have a different evolutionary origin compared to its close relatives.
That doesn't make any sense. I'm assuming by "chimera" that you mean, for example, the spike from natural virus A on the backbone of natural virus B. The WIV could have taken the spike from a virus similar to BANAL-20-52, the backbone from a different, unpublished virus that they'd sampled from nature, and a human-designed FCS. This is basically what they proposed in DEFUSE (in collaboration with Baric at UNC), and what this Times article is now saying they did internally after DEFUSE got rejected.
Of course such a virus could also have evolved naturally by a similar path; lots of sarbecoviruses are just a single mutation away from that FCS, and perhaps there's some yet-unknown natural animal host where that gets selected for. The point is that no genomic evidence can distinguish between these two cases, though.
For emphasis, it seems like you're assuming that we know all the natural viruses that the WIV was working with. Sampling of novel coronaviruses from nature was a core part of the WIV's research, so that's not a reasonable assumption. RaTG13 was sampled in 2013, but not fully published until 2020. At least one novel coronavirus was identified in contamination of rice samples sequenced on the same equipment that the WIV used:
That's a merbecovirus, so it couldn't possibly have any relationship to SARS-CoV-2; but if they had one unpublished novel virus, then it's hard to reject the possibility that they had more.
I don't understand this line of argument. The facts are that 1) the virus outbreak was in Wuhan, 2) that there ws a local lab working on virus samples that come from all over the world and 3) as far as we know, the particular strain that affected Wuhan is not local. Altogether, this should add confidence to the lab leak theory, not detract from it.
Ok but in that scenario, a natural emergence would have come from a strain from Wuhan, while the lab leak theory explains why a virus from relatively far away had an outbreak in Wuhan.
The nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. Both areas WIV sampled prior to the pandemic and they haven't shared their records with WHO or the NIH.
The distance from Wuhan of the discovery site of RaTG13 is irrelevant, if (as the article implies) a senior team at the Wuhan lab were working on RaTG13.
The article is not suggesting that Covid19 evolved from RaTG13; it is suggesting that Covid19 is a chimaera made with RaTG13.
The NYT is a reputable organ, known for checking it's sources. Unlike Wikipedia, newspapers don't generally cite their sources; but if a reliable source states something like that as fact, they've probably checked. You're right: they haven't said they can prove it.
[Of course, it could be propaganda, government or otherwise; or it could be a damned lie concocted by the reporter or editor. They've said they have sources, they haven't named them, so it's not unreasonable to suppose they have sources that don't want to be named.]
Yes, the article suggests they had a closer precursor. The nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. They are both areas WIV sampled in studying the spillover risk of SARS-related coronaviruses. They haven't shared their records with WHO or the NIH.
IIRC, this is still true if you exclude the spike protein and use a higher similarity threshold.
Why would one do that? Well, two reasons. First, the spike more variable as it is subject to greater evolutionary pressure as the major component of the viral surface. Second, in coronavirus reverse genetics typically the virus is segmented into multiple pieces, most of which compose the non-spike backbone and a subset which compose the spike protein. This is intentional to enable the swapping of spike proteins. So, if SARS-CoV-2 is spike-swap or spike variant assembly, a RaTG13-like virus could be the "backbone" of SARS-CoV-2.
Moreover, a hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 backbone could exist in the viral sequences list the WIV took down in Sept. 2019. They sequenced RaTG13 a few years prior. The lab's raison d'etre is collecting and sequencing coronaviruses poised for spillover. And, with modern DNA synthesis technology, it's not difficult to print out arbitrary backbone contigs for a viral assembly.
> Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses.
That is completely untrue. Agricultural labs for instance research plant viruses which are _incompatible_ with humans completely. Still these plant virus would have to be researched under stringent isolation because of the damage they may pose to crops.
> Most importantly, the general reader should know
> Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an indication of any ill-intent.
What exactly are you trying to say here anyway? If they were researching some other virus type it wouldn't be getting a look. But they were researching coronavirus.
The Huanan Seafood market paper has been heavily critized.
Especially the fact that covid was not found in a single animal sample does make the evidence rather weak.
In addition it seems that the lack of sampling from outside the market and the fact that the market is a busy place in the center of the city where the virus would likely be once it's spreading from person to person , does not really lend support to the conclusions in the paper at all.
>The Origins of Covid-19 — Why It Matters (and Why It Doesn’t)
>More than half of the earliest Covid-19 cases were connected to the Huanan market, and epidemiologic mapping revealed that the concentration of cases was centered there. In January 2020, Chinese officials cleared the market without testing live animals, but positive environmental samples, including those from an animal cage and a hair-and-feather–removal machine, indicated the presence of both SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-susceptible animals.5 Recently released findings included raccoon dog DNA, pointing to a possible SARS-CoV-2 progenitor.
> Humans brought the virus to the market. It's screamingly obvious and always has been.
Well of course, the racoon dogs et al all come in via human transport.
Testing infrastructure was poor, and maybe it still is. Chinese government interest was not in finding facts, but in taking action to 'solve the problem'. It's hard to find facts when the people with power just want the problem to go away. IMHO, that doesn't weigh in favor of either explaination. The wuhan local government and the chinese national government would have likely taken the same actions regardless of the source, because they're both not very interested in facts.
US health authorities pushing on the market theory are just doing their typical behavior of taking what little information is available and pushing it with no nuance. I enjoyed seeing the cdc stickers telling me not to use a mask out in public areas when the cdc was requiring them; the congitive dissonance was so palpable.
Just to be clear, there weren’t animal samples available for testing. It’s not that they tested a bunch of animals and didn’t find covid. I know that’s what you meant but not everyone is familiar with the paper and it’s important to be meticulous here.
I don't actually think that is what they meant. If there are no animals to even sample, you don't describe that as "that covid was not found in a single animal sample". No one would phrase it that way.
Raccoon Dog DNA was still found at the market. That was previously denied.
I'm not making the argument that the DNA samples indicate that the Raccoon Dogs that the samples were from had SARS-CoV-2. I'm just arguing that previously it had been stated that there were no Raccoon Dogs in the market at all and that has been proven wrong.
Right? As if any handling or safety gear and equipment is 100% perfect. Never any needle stick or glove failures. Respirators and protective clothing always 100% perfect. Everyone perfectly followed all lab safety precautions with no absent minded failures. Just perfect all the time forever.
I’ve always thought it was a handling contamination that got into community spread. It’s a very parsimonious explanation.
If they were doing experiments with serialized passage through so-called humanized mice and they escaped you'd have the engineered virus suddenly showing up being carried by many different species at the wet market in spite of natural viruses jumping species much more slowly.
The map showing the clustering around the lab is not labelled in the article. It looks like the map from the senate report which used internet search history. I recall that their point in the original report was that there was a cluster of internet searches for flu-like symptoms clustered around the institute, rather than the market.
There is no new direct evidence in the article, simply the weight of existing indirect evidence synthesized together. There does not seem to be another hypothosis for how the virus emerged that has as much indirect evidence pointing towards it?
The main gist of the article is:
* The institute applied for funding for a specific piece of research (inserting a furin cleavage site).
* The institute claims it did not perform the research.
* Covid is what we would expect if somebody did perform that research.
* The research would have been performed at the time and place where covid emerged.
It is not direct evidence, but under a weaker burden of proof (e.g. balance of probabilities) it is fairly convincing.
Research applications, in particular to obtain funding.
It is common for researchers to apply to grants/funding for work they are already doing. They tweak the research application to meet whatever the funding criteria is using knowledge they have from existing experiments.
• WIV added FCS's to coronavirus(es?) exactly as described in DEFUSE, according to a US lab collaborator.
• Zhou Yusen "fell" off the roof of the WIV in May 2020
• WIV was working on a 'closer [than published] unpublished variant'
• Of all caves/mines, only scholarly attempts to access the Mojiang mine made touched off access denial and confiscation of samples from other mines from the authorities. While alluded to in the past, (https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-coronavirus-pandem... ) this is the first time to my awareness that the Mojiang mine has been uniquely & unequivocally associated with the authorities' clamp-down efforts, that too with attribution to Alice C Hughes, PhD
> Zhou Yusen "fell" off the roof of the WIV in May 2020
I mean, this is a pretty significant and concerning new finding right? Someone associated with the lab researching COVID early on just mysteriously disappearing
in China?
This was news in the summer of 2021 and still seems a concerning (albeit not new) finding as he had reportedly filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine in Feb of 2020 prior to dying in May of 2020.
• an item covered that isn't strictly new but is probably unfamiliar to many even so, is:
Of the researchers who the Jan 2021 State Dep Fact Sheet described as having fell sick with 'Covid-like symptoms' in Nov 2019
• they were taken to hospital, desoite being in their 30's and 40's (age)
• one of their relatives died
• they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory
The WaPo journalist Josh Rogin who is known for maintainibg quality confidential sources in DC, had long ago tweeted the above. While some aspects may have been covered in intervening press, this is the first time to my knowledge all of tbese items are asserted explicitly with a quote attributed to one of the anonymous investigators.
---
my take fwiw:
While intriguing, vis-a-vis a seasonal illness null hypothesis, it's never been discussed whether they were unique cases at that time with such symptoms (more likely covid), or if many others both in and out of the WIV had similar symtoms at the time (more likely seasonal illness)
Just updating my above comment that the observations about the sick researchers did actually make it into print in 2021 thx to Ian Birrell in DailyMail:
> It is not direct evidence, but under a weaker burden of proof (e.g. balance of probabilities) it is fairly convincing.
- We have a bunch of evidence of WIV engineering SARS-1-like viruses because they talked about it before the pandemic.
- We have zero evidence of them ever doing experiments on live SARS-2-like virus
- We have zero evidence of the existence of a SARS-2-like progenitor virus
- Before the pandemic they had no reason to be more secretive of any SARS-2-like work than their SARS-1-like work
- The spread of SARS-CoV-2 looks exactly like it originated in the Seafood market.
- If it was transported to the seafood market by someone who worked at the lab that is highly coincidental that the place they infected first just happened to be the most likely place for zoonotic spillover
- The hypothetical infected labworker didn't spread it all over their residence or create any other superspreading incidents clustered elsewhere around Wuhan
On the balance of probabilities I'm going with zoonotic spillover. The coincidence that the lab happened to be in the city is much less of a coincidence than the lab causing a leak of a virus that there's zero evidence the lab ever had, causing a pandemic that looks exactly like it came from zoonotic spillover.
The nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. The only known link to Wuhan is the Wuhan Institute of Virology sampled both areas.
They refuse to share their records with WHO or the NIH. That's a crucial caveat when saying there is no evidence they held a precursor. We don't know as they have refused to share their database.
The Times article is interesting as it suggests the work in DEFUSE to add furin cleavage sites went ahead and they passaged the virus in humanized mice. This would explain the furin site not seen in other sarbecoviruses and why humans topped the list for binding affinity from the outset.
Note the cases near the market are based on what David Relman described as "hopelessly impoverished" early case data. There was also sampling bias in retrospectively counting cases as market link was often required. WHO hasn't accepted market origin in part as there were likely much earlier cases than those in December linked to the market where no animals tested positive.
> why humans topped the list for binding affinity from the outset
This is an unbelievable coincidence that makes the zoonotic spillover hypothesis laughable. To a biologist, the likelihood of this happening by chance is clear: virtually 0. But explaining the size of the space of optimal solutions to a given binding problem versus the space of good solutions to the general public, well, that's really hard too. So an obvious and completely non-circumstantial piece of evidence is the last one in the public's mind. And we are still acting like there is a question of where the virus came from, and we will be for decades, or at least until the average level of biology education is raised by a few sharp degrees.
That's untrue. Viruses which spillover may spread across humans at a low level of efficiency for months, mutating for higher affinity towards humans, and only becoming pandemic once a high level of affinity has been achieved.
All viruses which have higher affinity for humans spilled over, didn't they?
That's what happened with H1N1 but we know that hasn't happened with Sars2 because Sars2 only spreads efficiently with a furin cleavage site but the furin cleavage site also makes it more pathogenic so it would definitely not spread undetected.
Studies have found that people living near bats in Yunnan have immunity against this class of coronaviruses due to exposure, which would strongly blunt pathogenicity. There is also more to pathogenicity than you let on.
> If it was transported to the seafood market by someone who worked at the lab that is highly coincidental that the place they infected first just happened to be the most likely place for zoonotic spillover
If we're going with highly coincidental pairings, it seems like we can't ignore "the disease originated in the only city in China to have an institute that specializes in virology, viral pathology and virus technology."
I'm not convinced of any particular conclusion as to COVID's origin, but I don't down-weight the coincidence of the city of origin hosting WIV nearly as much as you appear to.
Also, zoonotic transfer happening naturally in any particular time and place is extremely unlikely, even in places where the conditions are optimal.
I always thought this was a good test for whether someone can apply Bayesian reasoning. It turns out not many can, including a lot of highly educated people.
Without hard evidence to contradict it, lab leak should have always been the default hypothesis. That it hasn’t is a case of political propaganda winning out over basic statistics.
Where's the part with the virus being collected and brought to a lab in Wuhan where gain of function research was done prior to the outbreak? Feel free to include that in your formula.
There is no evidence SARS-COV-2 was being studied.
But even if you were to accept that, the bayesian reasoning would be that you'd say that the probability it's from Wuhan it's a leak is 100%, and 0% for any other city. You could go further and look at the viruses that have caused zoonoses in China in the past (the evidence is that hundreds of SARS-like coronaviruses have) and compare it to what was being studied. Even then, if you apply Bayes' formula, you'd have overwhelming odds towards a natural origin.
Your prior should be that it was just like the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak which happened in a different city without this research lab and also involved in a spillover in wet market of a virus whose closest known relative was found hundreds of miles away in bats (in close to the same area that RatG13 was found).
Which one do you mean by “the denial argument”? (and why do you use that term instead of something unambiguous like “lab leak” or “zoonotic origin” hypotheses?)
As to which of the two hypotheses is more predicated on politics, I think there are more generally left-leaning people who are swayed by the lab leak (circumstantial) evidence, than there are right-leaning people who are swayed by the zoonotic origin (circumstantial) evidence. This perception may be mistaken, but assuming I’m correct, this would suggest that the zoonotic origin hypothesis is more likely to be predicated on politics.
> The spread of SARS-CoV-2 looks exactly like it originated in the Seafood market.
Huh? No it doesn’t. The discussion of a possible SARS outbreak started weeks before the seafood market incident. The lab leak theory started in China BEFORE the seafood market was pinned as the cause.
I don’t think ill-intent is the accusation, I think the argument is that the lab has poor safety protocols and made errors. I haven’t studied the “lab leak theory” extensively, but everything I read seems to be about lab failures resulting in a leak, not anything purposeful or ill-intentioned.
Unfortunately, the article states explicitly that there was ill intent and extensive PLA involvement with the lab.
The military was also given positions of responsibility in the Wuhan institute, according to a US Senate report. A book published in 2015 by the military academy discusses how Sars viruses represent a “new era of genetic weapons” that can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed”.
The authors are PLA researchers, and one of the book’s editors has collaborated on numerous scientific papers with Wuhan scientists. They discuss how Sars can be weaponised by fusing it with other viruses and “serial passaging” the resulting mutant to make it more dangerous.
The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.
If true, it's probably good that they were incompetent in leaking the virus and incompetent in making a vaccine to front run the virus. Wonder if that would have started world war 3 of they successfully vaccinated their population then either accidentally or on purpose released the virus.
Given how people are reacting here, they could literally release it at the same time as mass vaccinating their own population with pre-stockpiled vaccine, assert that it was simply the massive superiority of Chinese science that allowed it and western governments/media would immediately swallow this story whole.
The evidence about what was happening is not only overwhelming but notice how not a single government is going to lift a finger about it. The NIH just refunded this work and the Biden admin doesn't give a shit. They're all deep in denial at this point and will never even admit to what has happened, let alone start WW3 over it.
The article claims that Chinese army researchers were at the lab researching viral weapons. That sounds like ill-intent to me.
It also states that Covid-19 is the only Coronavirus discovered with a furin cleavage site on the spike, and that the lab had applied for funding to research the insertion of such a site.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that the lab deliberately launched a pandemic by deliberately releasing the pathogen on its own doorstep.
Well, no one knowledgeable about the field. I have, unfortunately, heard otherwise intelligent people saying that the Chinese government doesn't mind sacrificing it's own people, and did launch it in its own city on purpose (which is, to be clear, ridiculous).
"Never ascribe to conspiracy, what is adequately explained by incompetence".
I think the evidence is pretty clear that at least the Chinese government believes that the covid-19 virus came from their lab (they could, of course, be mistaken about that).
The problem with Wuhan lab is that the Chinese dictatorship blocks any independent inquiry into it. If they had nothing to hide, they wouldn't be hiding everything. If that was a criminal case, this kind of behavior would be taken as a evidence of guilt.
> If they had nothing to hide, they wouldn't be hiding everything. If that was a criminal case, this kind of behavior would be taken as a evidence of guilt.
No, it would not. First, dictatorships hide things all the time, whether there is something or nothing. It's just how they operate. (Many democratic governments do to btw. How often do we need freedom of information requests just to find out that it was totally benign, the government just stone-walled because they could).
Second, not saying anything is not evidence of guilt in any criminal case in the civilized world. Everyone has the right to silence.
Governments have neither rights nor duties, so saying they don't owe you anything is essentially the same thing. Governments do what they can get away with doing.
"Your honor, you can't blame my client for messing the victim's body, he's a known necrophiliac, and since the evidence is tainted you can't prove he was the murderer."
They have witheld records from the NIH which funded some of their SARS-related coronaviruses spillover research. They eventually terminated their subaward last year as a result. WHO has also been asking for lab data. Given the nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos where the WIV sampled it seems fairly clear what happened here.
Countries and governments are not individuals. The fact that a virus emerged in China and proceeded to kill millions of people globally and the Chinese government has completely obstructed any independent investigation is outrageous and criminal. You don't get to throw your arms up and say "No Entry" when millions of lives have been lost.
“Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”
The rate of hospitalization among 18-49 year olds with flu in the US was 54.1 per 100K in 2019-20. It’s rare, sure, but that kind of absolute statement from an anonymous researcher doesn’t instill confidence.
Stats say nothing of relative severity, why do you think they’re relevant in any way?
Edit: is your argument seriously “uhm actually, event X happens 0.054% of the time, so when you said {more rare version of X} doesn’t happen you’re wrong”
Um, those are the numbers for hospitalization. So yes, there’s information about severity there.
And yep, that’s my argument! The frequency of deadly viruses escaping from a bio lab is even lower, so if we’re going to eliminate possibilities based on percentages there are a few others that should get thrown out.
It’s a minor point but, as I said, it’s sloppy reasoning. If the anonymous researcher had said “low probability” I wouldn’t care. Instead, this reads like someone who’s willing to hand wave specifics for the sake of rhetoric.
Hospitalization doesn’t mean severity. It has more to do with your confidence in your immune system and health insurance than anything else, though the hospital’s extra capacity and desire to make a buck off you is up there too.
But if you’re here to be put off by the smallest use of rhetoric, sure pop off on that.
If I reversed it and said “this can’t be a lab leak because lab leaks never happen,” would that be okay? They’re certainly rarer than serious cases of flu among adults in the age range.
It’s a contentious, difficult debate. I do actually think it’s bad to dismiss arguments you disagree with with casual rhetoric.
If that rhetorical device led me to research and discover reputable data suggesting the frequency of such occurrences was indeed so minuscule as to be disregarded entirely, I’d welcome it upsetting my preconceived notions.
> The point is the young and healthy don’t get very sick. You get it, have the sniffles for a day or two, and move on with your life. Same for covid.
We could have just embraced that blessing and let children continue to go to school and not experience massive declines in intelligence. But here we are.
“Think of the really old people” was truly hilarious. Indeed, all we could do was “think” when my grandpa died alone because visiting the nursing home was banned.
One thing to consider is not so much an individual's health and risk of getting serious ill, but rather that as the numbers grow geometrically, health care systems like hospitals can (and in fact, did) become severely overwhelmed.
What really happened, as stated in the very source you gave, was that if you had a heart attack at home an ambulance would come to “deal with you” (because of course they would), but if they attempted to resuscitate you for 20 minutes and you still didn’t recover they wouldn’t then take you to the hospital.
You should know the survival rate of a heart attack is far far lower than most expect, especially after 20 minutes of failed active attempts to resuscitate. The only real reason to take someone into a hospital after that is if they’re hypothermic or just so you can say “we did everything we could”.
> What really happened.... an ambulance would come to “deal with you”
At one point, LA had to resort to Fire Trucks because ambulances were unavailable.
If you don't think health care services were severely stretched, in some cases beyond breaking point (incl. staff unavailability because they themselves were sick), I really don't know what to say. This happened in New York as well.
Of course there are also other places where that wasn’t the case, so there you could be less conservative with restrictions, but you may not know the risk in advance.
Fire trucks and ambulances both feature staff trained as EMT’s. The provisioning of the vehicles might be slightly different, but the medical training is the same. And I’m sure the provisioning could be adjusted based on the circumstances.
Staff being unavailable because they’re sick is quite literally “normal day to day operations” that every company must be able to account for, not “beyond the breaking point”.
But if you “don’t know what to say” beyond vague emotional appeals unsupported by the very sources you claim to cite, I’m glad we agree on that at least.
There are many [1] many [2] many [3] many [4] many [5] many [6] many [7] examples of people who died as a result of our hospital systems being overloaded and being forced to ration care. This is what was meant by the geometric growth of hospital patients and how many hospital systems were close to outright breaking. You are ultimately factually wrong and extremely unaware of how much stress this put on our hospital systems and how many people died because of what you were suggesting. Now imagine how much worse it would've been if we did nothing.
And how many millions of children have ongoing severely stunted development in both academics and social skills? More than 7 million. By some estimates 77 million, in fact.
The real question is how many more will die as a result of our horribly irresponsible treatment of our most valuable national resource: the children.
It really shouldn't be phrased as an absolute. But read charitably, when you have low N combined with rates that low, to expect that you wouldn't see noticeable illness in a small group of young, healthy people.
Also, before one draws conclusions based on the _kind_ of virus that is researched, coronaviruses aren't even uncommon. So better evidence is clearly necessary than innuendo.
It's not just a coronavirus, it's a sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site never seen before in sarbecoviruses. The nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. The only link with Wuhan is WIV's sampling in both locations.
In 2018, WIV was part of a proposal with EcoHealth Alliance and UNC to add furin cleavage sites into novel SARS-related bat coronaviruses. DARPA declined to fund it. This investigation suggests the work went ahead. Something Nick Patterson suggested often occurs even when funding is declined. WIV had both NIAID and CAS grants to study spillover risk of SARS-related coronaviruses. They were also doing classified work with the PLA from 2017.
I’m sure most of this is true or at least true-ish but to be appropriately skeptical, all evidence which has a Chinese source here should be considered as potentially made up.
Regardless of whether or not there was a coverup, the Chinese government has certainly acted like it was covering something up.
The circumstantial evidence is sort of ridiculous here though. An institute with weak safety controls experimenting with creating novel pathogens has an outbreak of a novel pathogen next door? No no, it’s because of climate change (an actual argument I have seen).
They may cover up something completely orthogonal to Covid. For example, they may cover up a corruption scheme, to steal money granted for research, or they acted as proxy for Russians, to spy at USA, or they mismanaged facility and leaked virus from the lab in Wuhan second time, AFTER the initial outbreak (1.5-2.5 month of delay between projected start of epidemic in mid-September-mid-October and start of epidemic in Wuhan in December must be explained somehow), etc.
The “circumstantial evidence” is only novel if the event in question is novel, which the emergence of a new strain of a virus is not.
It is certain that a new strain of some virus is emerging right now next to a lab that works with viruses, because that is a thing that happens continuously in nature, and labs exist within nature. It’s also likely that such a new strain will not cause human illness, as most viruses do not.
SARS-COV-2 only looks novel to humans because it made a lot of humans sick. There were tons of allegations that HIV was created in a lab too. This says more about our self-regard than about the virus itself.
This would all be more compelling if the WIV were not explicitly experimenting with creating viruses like SARS-COV-2! If HIV had emerged proximal to a lab experimenting with creating viruses like HIV then that lab origin theory would be much more credible!
Saying “viruses like SARS-COV-2” only makes sense for broad applications of the word “like.”
As other comments have pointed out, while that lab was working with coronaviruses, none of the strains were genetically close to SARS-COV-2. Coronavirus is a broad category of viruses.
Betacoronaviruses with SARS-like attributes and natural reservoirs in bats is supposed to be a “broad application of the word ‘like’”? Bit of a stretch, no?
I’m reading this as sarcasm, am I wrong? If so, it is such a bad faith response. It is well reported that China was highly uncooperative in providing records about the research that was occurring at WIV.
No its quite serious. China covered up the existence of susceptible animals at the market. If you want to take the actions of a cover up as being proof, then you have to look at that cover up as well. What people do instead, though, is pick and choose -- the actions surrounding the lab are evidence China is hiding a lab leak, while the actions surrounding the market are not evidence China is trying to hide a zoonotic spillover. There's nothing "bad faith" about that at all, unless you're so bought into the lab leak theory that any question of it is bad faith.
Do you have a link showing that China suppressed evidence of the presence of raccoon dogs? I just looked and couldn’t find, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
It’s a fair point that if suppression of evidence is to be considered an indication of guilt, it has to work both ways.
My position hasn't changed for years: if covid was really a lab creation we'd know, because someone would have told us. An email dump, a memo, a document, an interview. Something would have leaked out. The incentives are just too high and the access is too pervasive[1] to believe otherwise.
Is it possible? Sure! Is it likewise possible that some of the circumstantial claims about WIV are true? Sure! But if someone made this thing, someone else would have told us by now.
[1] This is science! There are notes and logs and backups and email and chat and whiteboard photos and conference attendees and visiting scholars, all spread around a population all trained to compete with each other.
What is the time limit a secret of this magnitude could survive without being revealed by someone? A year, two years? If we look at our history, we will only see secrets that were revealed within that maximum period?
Snowden revealed quite shocking information, and I think it is safe to say the secret of mass surveillance was going on for much longer than 4 years.
And if such information pops up, I will (with great surprise) re-evaluate my priors. Nonetheless I think history bears out my intuition here. The overwhelming majority of conspiracies likes this, especially ones in fundamentally civilian organizations like science labs, don't survive a year if that.
I have no certainty, that's the point! The evidence for natural evolution is pretty reasonable (it matches every other pandemic ever -- these are hardly unknown!), the evidence for lab genesis is at best circumstantial and frankly pretty heavily spun by everyone dealing in it.
You want the fact that I can't prove you wrong to be evidence that you're right, and that's not how logic works.
"The overwhelming majority of conspiracies likes this, especially ones in fundamentally civilian organizations like science labs, don't survive a year if that."
How do you know that the overwhelming majority of conspiracies don't survive a year if that? It's like sampling sick people and concluding that all people are sick. Without an estimate of the number of conspiracies that actually are kept hidden (which to me seems nearly impossible), how could you possibly know the proportion as you claimed?
It's an intuition based on a lifetime of watching dumb bureaucrats try to hide stuff and failing. But your logic is symmetric: where are all the successfully hidden conspiracies then? Obviously your response will be "we don't know by definition because they're hidden", which sorta makes your point non-falsifiable, doesn't it?
I'll put my money on bureaucrats being dumb over globalist nation state super autocracy every day.
His point would be non-falsifiable if he claimed to the opposite of your claim. He didn't. What he claims is the logic flaw of yours and argues deductively.
And I repeat, that logic is specious because it works both ways. The same unfounded assertion (that there are conspiracies we can't know about) wrecks the math "deductively" in both directions.
I don't think it's very much a stretch to believe that pervasive observations of bureaucracies leaking and making mistakes serves as evidence that genuinely true Hidden Conspiracies are vanishingly rare. But you do you.
> And I repeat, that logic is specious because it works both ways. The same unfounded assertion (that there are conspiracies we can't know about) wrecks the math "deductively" in both directions.
You're still missing the point: GGGP didn't argue in any “direction” at all; all they said was you can't know for sure what you claim.
> I don't think it's very much a stretch to believe that pervasive observations of bureaucracies leaking and making mistakes serves as evidence that genuinely true Hidden Conspiracies are vanishingly rare.
Sure. But don't then put your “hopefully not a stretch” guess in such cocksure terms.
Shouldn't an oppressive regime change the math here? The ability to suppress potential whistleblowers means the absence of whistleblowers isn't all that convincing. Compared to moon landing conspiracy theories, where this argument is very convincing imo
Again, these are scientists. You really don't think one of them could move to a post at Stanford or wherever and spill the tea? No one has an old copy of an incriminating memo they can forward to a friend in Taipei? And regardless, the PRC does not in fact have a great record in the opsec department even within its military and espionage arms. How many "Chinese spies" get arrested every year?
Part of any conspiracy theory is positing a great totalitarian enemy who is able to keep all these important truths from The People. The PRC is economically large and somewhat questionably ambitious. It's absolutely not the kind of super state people want to imagine.
If the military was indeed involved, then it seems highly plausible that they would have been able to keep communications under control and that they would be able to repress a few dozen workers. Threats against them and their families would probably work pretty well.
> You really don't think one of them could move to a post at Stanford or wherever and spill the tea?
When? There's a pretty short window where a WIV scientist might have known the subject they were studying had escaped the lab before the PRC did. Certainly by January 2020 the PRC could've clamped down on those scientists.
Spies caught outside the country don't tell me much about internal operations.
ETA: I think my thinking here is pretty colored by Tank Man, whose name is unknown. The CCP claims they don't know anything about him. Even if that's true, presumably he had friends, family, and fellow protestors who have decided it would be a very bad idea to even give his name.
> You really don't think one of them could move to a post at Stanford or wherever and spill the tea? No one has an old copy of an incriminating memo they can forward to a friend in Taipei
Not after the top PLA vaccine researcher, Zhou Yusen died, allegedly "falling off the roof of the WIV" in May 2020. That sends a loud message.
Yikes. I mean, yes, in this sense you're right. We've never found conclusive disproof of the various conspiracy theories around the assassination and have been forced into a consensus that, y'know, Oswald shot him. But you don't believe that. And nothing is going to make you. So from you're perspective "we still don't know". WIV is going to be the same. You'll never get the disproof you demand, so you'll continue to disbelieve the consensus opinion.
Yours is a world where disproof rules, and conspiracies are assumed true until proven false. I'm sure it's entertaining, but it's not "true" any more than mine is.
In my world, Oswald probably shot JFK and covid was probably a natural virus, because those are the hypotheses that demand the least of the existing evidence. I'm willing to change my priors with more evidence, but not because of the lack of disproof of an entertaining counter-hypothesis.
We also did not know that Cuba housed missles from Russia during the crisis. We also did not know to the extent that Cuba's leadership explicitly did have plans to strike the US alongside their Soviet allies.
It took until 1992 for what appears to be the truth to be discovered, 3 decades with far more people involved in the process, and a much darker outcome than a man being assassinated.
The us had credible satellite evidence of soviets building housings for nuclear warheads in Cuba during and before the crisis.
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/photos.htm
(perhaps I misunderstand your argument; 1992 was when our knowledge was formally confirmed, IIUC)
Sverdlovsk was instantly and correctly interpreted in western intelligence communities as evidence for a weaponized anthrax program. It wasn't admitted to be so until the 90's. It's true this wasn't a "leak", but only because there was no one to leak to (the civilian world was mostly unaware it had even happened). I'm not sure I understand why you think this is evidence for the ability of the USSR to keep it secret or otherwise control perceptions?
The civilian world was quite aware of the incident; they just mostly swallowed the cover story whole. A Harvard prof (Matthew Meselson) went to Russia to investigate, and came back with a public report agreeing that the anthrax came from tainted meat. Obviously some people doubted that, but until the fall of the USSR there was no incontrovertible evidence, just the same circumstantial patchwork as we have for SARS-CoV-2 now.
Even closer to the SARS-CoV-2 case, the 1977 flu pandemic killed ~700k people and near-certainly arose from a research accident, probably a failed vaccine trial:
> The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event, as the genetic sequence of the virus was nearly identical to the sequences of decades-old strains.
That article argues that vaccine trial accident doesn't count as a "lab accident", which seems like legalistic wordplay to me; but I believe the historical context is good.
But in 1978, the WHO wrote:
> Laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time.
It took decades for the consensus to change, and there's still been no official admission (though note the unverified personal communication from C. M. Chu via Peter Palese in Gronvall's paper, 27 years after the accident).
>I'm not sure I understand why you think this is evidence for the ability of the USSR to keep it secret or otherwise control perceptions?
The USSR successfully manipulated many prominent Western civilian scientists (and subsequently Western newspapers) into buying the "bad meat" Soviet cover-up story, hook, line, and sinker: to the point that they publicly chided the American military for still believing in the "anthrax factory leak" theory:
> But Dr. Alexander Langmuir, a former director of epidemiology at the United States Centers for Disease Control, who presided at the session, said Tuesday that based on what he knew so far, "the current position of the U.S. military needs thorough re-
examination; that is clear.'
> Dr. Philip Brachman of Emory University, a U.S. anthrax expert who has advised the Central Intelligence Agency on the incident, said the Soviet talk was a "landmark report" providing "a pretty good indication that this incident was an outbreak of gastrointestinal anthrax" from eating contaminated meat.
> Dr. Alexander Langmuir, a former chief epidemiologist for the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, agreed that the Soviet account was "very credible so far" but added that he hoped to obtain further details during the Soviets' weeklong stay.
How did this happen? Why did this work so well? Because scientific methods designed for operation in adversary-free environments are catastrophically unfit for drawing dependable conclusions when intelligent motivated adversaries have tampered with the available data. The Western civilian scientists were thinking like...scientists, so they got easily manipulated into producing and disseminating literal Soviet disinformation while believing they were furthering the causes of science and of fighting anthrax. Oops:
> Three Soviet officials came to visit the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., on 11 April: Pyotr Burgasov, retired deputy minister of health; Vladimir Nikiforov, infectious diseases chief at the Moscow Institute for the Advanced Training of Physicians; and Vladimir Sergiyev, director of the Institute of Parasitology and Tropical Medicine. They gave the same explanation as in 1980, but provided many more details, convincing some long-time doubters that the account was true. U.S. intelligence officials still maintain a military facility was involved.
Spoiler alert: Pyotr Burgasov was part of the response to the leak and part of the Soviet biowarfare program.
The argument for a natural origin of Sverdlovsk anthrax is tragically familiar: establishing a highly plausible way it could have been zoonosis, along with providing evidence consistent with a zoonosis. From the _Science_ article:
> The citizens of Sverdlovsk did not have to look so f...
It took over a decade to confirm the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak was the result of an outbreak. In that case intelligence did suspect an accidental cause although scientists argued contaminated meat was the cause. Information can be tightly controlled under authoritarian regimes. Recall those who even reported the outbreak in the community faced recriminations.
What is known is the nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. Both areas WIV sampled and they refuse to share their records with WHO or the NIH.
There has been stuff leaking out. The DEFUSE paper for example. As to why someone in the Wuhan lab wouldn't leak direct info, you are dealing with a military related lab in the country with the highest number of executions in the world. That could be a disincentive.
The article is only facts and direct evidence. Where is the innuendo? It covers specific experiments they were doing, in order and in detail, complete with specific biological information and funding sources. It also provides extensive evidence of constant coverups by the lab, like this one:
There was also no mention of the mouse deaths in the grant renewal application Daszak filed to the NIH later that year. In this account, he said the mice had experienced “mild Sars-like clinical signs” when they were infected with the mutant virus. It had actually killed six of the eight infected humanised mice.
Daszak eventually provided details of the experiment’s deadly results to the US authorities in a report after the Covid-19 pandemic. He now says his 2018 statement about the “mild” illness was based on preliminary results — even though the experiment in which the mice died had taken place several months before he issued the statement
So these people are all known liars. The US Government banned GoF research, they got around it by claiming their work was urgent and safe, they ignored reporting requirements, when they finally did report what they said was a lie, and now they're still lying to try and cover previous lies.
So when these people say they want to insert furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses, a coronavirus appears right next door that has a FCS - the first one ever seen - and they say, oh well we changed our minds and never did it, well, with overwhelming probability they're lying again.
And of course Daszak is known for loudly proclaiming that no one is allowed to even think about whether Covid-19 could have been leaked from a lab. His credibility is reduced, to put it mildly.
The article implies (but doesn't state) that RaTG13, although discovered in the Mojiang cave, was worked on in the Wuhan lab. It does state that it was being worked-on by Shi Zhengli ("Batwoman") and her team at the lab.
> The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab
Is this a case of yet another heat map being a population density map? I assume the wet market is a popular local destination and gathering place, while the lab is not. You would expect there to be more cases where there are more people.
I speculate in ignorance of the actual social dynamics in the city of Wuhan.
It's against the site rules to accuse other users of being shills in this way. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again. Instead, if someone is wrong or you feel they are, please explain how they are wrong and provide correct information without taking swipes.
It is excusable for a lab to accidentally leak a contaminant. It is not excusable to cover it up and prevent a full investigation, like China has done.
The NIH terminated the Wuhan Institute of Virology's subaward for continued refusal to share records last year. WHO is still pleading with the PRC to share data on both the animal trade and Wuhan labs.
The Times is not a great source. It’s just tabloid style journalism targeted at a higher ‘reading age’. Can’t remember the exact figures but something like 16 compared to ‘The Sun’ which targets 10. A better source would be The Telegraph, if you like your opinion pieces right leaning. The Economist, The Financial Time and The Guardian are also good sources if we’re talking about British newspapers here.
> Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab.
Maybe I'm deeply confused, but the Wuhan lab was reported by NYMag to be the one that discovered RaTG13.
> How Did It Get Out? 1. The Tongguan Mine Shaft in Mojiang, Yunnan, where, in 2013, fragments of RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARSCoV-2, were recovered and transported to the Wuhan Institute of Virology; 2. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Shi Zhengli’s team brought the RaTG13 sample, sequenced its genome, then took it out of the freezer several times in recent years;
There is no reason to suspect Ill intent. Accidents happen. It is well known the WIV were doing gain of function research on SARS-related CoVs. It is also known that the WIV were partners in a proposal to insert human specific cleavage sites into SARS+related CoVs
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
The probability that a novel SARS-related CoV would emerge naturally in the city in China that was used as a seropositivity control -and the location of the worlds largest SARS-related related research lab, and which had very low wildlife consumption compared to Southern coastal cities is < 1/1000
> all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses
There should be more attention on this. We're busy worrying about AI that can troll at a college level, while scientists are still busy making frankenviruses after a pandemic plausibly caused by a lab leak.
You've jumped from "do research" to "making frankenviruses" - which beyond being a sensationalist term with no formal definition, isn't necessarily the sum totality of viral research. Just the bit that the popular press likes writing lurid articles about.
Fair enough, but I'd file gain of function research in that category, it's common, and seeing a possible outcome of it, it's something we need to rethink very carefully.
In that regards, I actually agree with you. It's been the better part of a decade since I saw a talk by a colleague I immensely respect arguing against it, and I think it's value (whether it caused this outbreak or not) is speculative at best.
But I should not that not all viral engineering is gain of function, and while it gets a lot of attention, even in laboratory virology is relatively rare.
Actually, the closest natural viruses to covid were sent to Wuhan for study. I mean, that is what the Wuhan institute of coronaviruses was built to do right?
The indirect evidence of a lab leak theory is overwhelming frankly. And it doesn't require any malice. No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon.
Gain of function research is real, scientists intentionally make viruses which could start a pandemic. They do this for the purposes of knowledge and preparedness for the inevitable natural spillover events that will happen. It isn't nefarious.
But it is risky, and there many people now and before who thought it was a practice that should be curtailed because of the risk.
> No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon.
To add to this, most countries have turned away from infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control. The the release of them might harm your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself. It is like trying to cut off your enemy's leg by cutting off your own arm. It ends up kinda being like MAD except you're also the aggressor. The threat of a infectious weapon is not from other nations, but from a terrorist organization (which of course dramatically reduces risk). Not to say that this can't happen, but it is well known enough that were a contagious disease to get out, it would be more likely accidental. It would also be odd to release the disease into your own community first. I'm not saying it was or wasn't a lab leak or bioweapon, but if we're discussing weapon vs accident, there's good reason to believe a weapon is unlikely. Gain of research has significant value outside weapons and this also shows you why the weapon arguments against GoF aren't of high concern to those that are close to the work. Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances).
It is quite clear that they did amplification research as they’ve planned. And had inserted the furin site into the coronavirus . And they’ve mismanaged the research and they’ve let the virus to spread. This had caused a lot of damage, in particular the deaths, economical damage, long-covid damages, mental illnesses and diminished IQ (covid brain fog). There’ve been some positive sides: diminished air travel, diminished carbon emissions, transition to work from home, more pedestrian zones in the cities, mRNA vaccine technology. But the negative side from the pandemic is still overwhelming.
Arguably this lab should be sued out of existence for damages.
> And had inserted the furin site into the coronavirus
A claim was made about that, but it’s far from settled. One could argue it has been debunked. See “SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was not engineered”: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119
> And they’ve mismanaged the research and they’ve let the virus to spread.
That’s speculation. Irresponsible speculation, in fact, which has been pushed by people who should have known better. But they pushed it for jingoistic reasons.
> Arguably this lab should be sued out of existence for damages.
That’s an emotional reaction which you’re not examining rationally. If you remove the confirmation bias you’re applying to the evidence, there’s simply no substantial basis for the conclusions you’re reaching.
Engineered is a very careful word choice. None of the properties they call out are things you would not expect from research involving gain of function by evolutionary means.
There is a lab that had planned and did the research. This is well documented. The virus spread had started nearby. There is nothing else that you need to know.
There is evidence that the Chinese authorities were suppressing information about the leak (information about that virus had leaked accidentally, by an ophthalmologist that saw cases spreading in his hospital).
Yes, it is not clear exactly, how the furin site got there. Was it a long series of mutations and a recombination with another virus in a lab animal? Was it spliced? We’ll never know, unless the scientists responsible would decide to tell how it had happened.
But I’m not particularly emotional about that virus. If you read the above, you’ll see that I see positive and negative after effects. Viruses and mistakes happen.
But it’d be a good idea to make a point and get rid of that lab. Failures like that should not be rewarded with continual existence.
The citizens of China have suffered, but that doesn't really matter to the CCP. Covid has been great for strengthening their central government and all of the technology tools of suppression.
> To add to this, most countries have turned away from infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control.
Most countries ( small to mid-tier ) lack the expertise, will or reason for it. But most major countries are working on biological weapons. If you think the US, Russia, China, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, etc aren't running bio-weapons labs, then you are being too trusting at best or too naive at worst. Or maybe I'm just being too cynical.
> The the release of them might harm your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself.
Never prevented intentional disease warfare throughout history. What makes you think leaders aren't willing to hurt their own countries to hurt their enemies? More importantly, what makes you think these countries will develope bio-weapons, but not vaccines for them?
> The threat of a infectious weapon is not from other nations, but from a terrorist organization (which of course dramatically reduces risk).
Every major terrorist organization is or was created, funded and controlled by major nations.
> Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances).
And yet, all weapons labs in history were created by big/rich countries. You so desperately want a world without bio-weapons that you are blinded to the contradictions in your argument.
> But most major countries are working on biological weapons. If you think the US, Russia, China, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, etc aren't running bio-weapons labs, then you are being too trusting at best or too naive at worst. Or maybe I'm just being too cynical.
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch... covers this in some detail (it's geared towards chemical weapons, but biological weapons are the same boat). In short, chemical and biological weapons just aren't useful. For any platform you put it on, conventional explosives will do more damage. For major militaries, there's no point in using them, which is why the "big" military powers have all signed up to the anti-chemical weapons and anti-biological weapons treaties, but not the anti-nuclear or anti-cluster munitions or anti-landmines, etc.
> For major militaries, there's no point in using them, which is why the "big" military powers have all signed up to the anti-chemical weapons and anti-biological weapons treaties
If chemical and biological weapons aren't useful, why does one need a treaty to ban them? Makes one wonder? Is there are treaty to ban feathers as weapons? The fact that there is an anti-biological weapons treaty is proof enough that countries are working on biological weapons, just like the anti-nuclear weapons treaty is proof that countries are working on nukes.
The ability to think is a far greater tool than reading silly blogs. Take it from someone who has read too many silly blogs and watch too many silly youtube videos.
Also, pretty much every treaty ( international and intranational ) has been broken. Some even say treaties are meant or created to be broken.
Your attempts at "gotchas" here are unpersuasive. If the point of treaties is to be broken, why bother signing up to them in the first place? Perhaps more interestingly, why would a country sign up to some treaties banning weapons but not others, if its intent were to use all those weapons?
Yes, countries can break treaties. But there is a real cost to doing so. The point of treaties (especially the anti-war treaties) is essentially to break a prisoner's dilemma: all parties can agree to do something that is mutually beneficial for everybody, but only when no one defects. The first arms control treaty was the Washington Naval Treaty, which was signed when most countries were literally unable to find the resources to keep up with the naval arms race and proposed by the one country that could.
If you read the post I linked (I suspect you did not, as you are only reacting to my comments and not other material within the post), you'll see that there are many other lines of evidence we can use to ascertain the inutility of chemical weapons, not least of which is the lack of its use in conflicts after WWI, even in existential state conflicts like WWII or the Arab-Israel wars.
> If chemical and biological weapons aren't useful, why does one need a treaty to ban them?
The same reason why we have laws against murder. The existence of the treaty isn't to keep people from doing something useful (indeed, if you look at which treaties are acceded to, it's the treaties that keep people from doing something useful that don't get the signatories). Instead, it's to signal the unwillingness to use it and to pressure others not to consider its use. And if you know sufficiently few people are willing to use it, then you can avoid spending the money on countermeasures to chemical weapons.
> Your attempts at "gotchas" here are unpersuasive.
It's not gotchas. It's just history and reasoning. Logic. It's persuasive to people who are willing to think. But no amount of reason will convince someone with an agenda.
> If the point of treaties is to be broken, why bother signing up to them in the first place?
As your buddy godelski pointed out, governments do things for optics, political grandstanding, etc. Why did germany and the soviet union sign the nonaggression treaty? Also to appease the naive masses who believe in fairy tales. So that naive people can say nobody is working on chemical or biological weapons since a treaty says so. See, this nonaggression treaty is proof germany and the soviet union will never attack each other. Genius logic.
> The first arms control treaty was the Washington Naval Treaty, which was signed when most countries were literally unable to find the resources to keep up with the naval arms race and proposed by the one country that could.
No. It was proposed by the one country that had isolationist political pressure against naval buildup due to our history and founding fathers warning against standing armies. It was proposed by the one country to kneecap british attempts to enforce navy limits. Also, the Washington Naval Treaty was a complete failure? It set the stage for japan to build more resentment which led to ww2.
> not least of which is the lack of its use in conflicts after WWI, even in existential state conflicts like WWII or the Arab-Israel wars.
Chemical weapons were used in iraq-iran war. In the syrian war just a few years ago.
> The same reason why we have laws against murder.
There are laws against murder because murder exists. People murder. So the treaty against chemical weapons must exist because chemical weapons exist?
It would be great if chemical, biological, etc weapons are never used. But you'd have to be absolutely naive to think that every major nation isn't working on chemical or biological weapons. It's like all the naive people who claimed that government agencies stopped collecting our data after getting caught in the 70s. Of course they didn't stop collecting data. They increased the gathering of data.
I live in a country where biological weapons wiped out a significant portion of the native population. Do you think such a country is working on biological weapons? If one major country is, then so is every major nation around the world.
The real world isn't an utopian fairy tale. No matter how much one wishes it were. But it's a free country. Believe whatever you want.
> Also, the Washington Naval Treaty was a complete failure? It set the stage for japan to build more resentment which led to ww2.
1. Attributing the whole of Japan's imperial ambition to the Washington Naval Treaty is farcical.
2. This chart of battleship displacement by date of construction plainly reveals that the Washington Navy Treaty was a massive success. Yes, treaty-breaking ships were constructed, but you cannot look at this graph and conclude that the treaty did not succeed in substantially disrupting the arms escalation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty#/media...
FWIW, I agree with you that the development and research into chemical and biological weapons never stopped. However it is likely that most countries no longer maintain up-to-date stockpiles of these weapons. Research continues for game theory reasons, but the treaties (and moreover the general public sentiment against such weapons, particularly the sentiment that use of those weapons would constitute the use of "WMDs" to which a nuclear response would be warranted) had the effect of greatly reducing the risk that such weapons would be used en masse. To this point; these sort of weapons have not yet been used in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, despite most late-cold war analysts believing that the Soviet Union would use chemical weapons during their anticipated war with NATO.
> If chemical and biological weapons aren't useful, why does one need a treaty to ban them?
Serious question, are you surprised governments do things that aren't useful? That they'll focus more on signaling than utility? That's literally 80% of politics: show.
> The fact that there is an anti-biological weapons treaty is proof enough that countries are working on biological weapons, just like the anti-nuclear weapons treaty is proof that countries are working on nukes.
Now that we got the above out of the way, maybe notice that China, Russia, and the US have all signed the Biological Weapons Convention[0] (outlaw bio weapons). All signed during the cold war. Then maybe notice that China, Russia, and the US have NOT signed the ban on the use of nuclear weapons[1].
> The ability to think is a far greater tool than reading silly blogs
I agree. I mean just the dichotomy of [0] and [1] really tells a lot. You make a good point that governments are difficult to discuss because you can't take anything they do at face value so you have to dig in and think about their actions and what signals they are making.
> If you think the ... aren't running bio-weapons labs, then you are being too trusting at best or too naive at worst.
No, they are. But that's a bit different. Though I understand the confusion. Gain of function research can be classified as weapons. You got to develop weapons to defend against them. And of course, momentum. Especially in politics, where once funding is given it is hard to take it away, though not hard to reduce. I'm more saying if they would seriously deploy such a weapon and how serious the research is.
> What makes you think leaders aren't willing to hurt their own countries to hurt their enemies?
Some yes, some no. I think most countries have learned that the Russian strategy doesn't lead to great outcomes. Then again, you think Russia would have learned it too. But most countries realize that you can't rule over the dead. But you're right, that I may be too trusting. As far as vaccines, it is hard to keep those secret. Especially if we're talking about a country like China with a billion people, where you have to distribute at least a few hundred million. You don't think a few are going to fall off the truck? There'd be a lot of money for such a situation. Or even just the recipe. I mean vaccines don't confer 100% immunity so it still comes with big costs to yourself. But you're right, Russia keeps doing the Russian strategy. Though this is more easily done in an authoritative country. This is a lot of what jcranmer is pointing to. One more thing to consider, it is hard to invade this region after. You might think the same thing about nuclear but there's a reason they've focused on increasing the explosion and decreasing the radiation. Same reasons.
> Every major terrorist organization is or was created, funded and controlled by major nations.
Not quite true, but if they were, then the above arguments would apply there so that no terrorist organization would get the bio weapons from the big countries. You might want to ask why there haven't been any dirty bombs, despite that this should be easier, especially after the collapse of the USSR where many nuclear materials went missing. They all went somewhere (smaller countries and probably bigger countries too, to keep away from smaller countries), but we'll probably never know the full extent.
> And yet, all weapons labs in history were created by big/rich countries.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. Not all weapons were created in big countries. But weapons like nuclear, bio, and others were from big countries because to have such a program is quite expensive. Currently bioweapons, of the kind we're discussing, are still fairly expensive. This may change as things become cheaper. But regardless, these types of weapons are more attractive to the crazy anarchist who wants to watch the world burn than the angry dictator. They just aren't practical in the modern globalized world.
But there's got to be a logical reason for well over a century of research in the area and not seeing it used in practice. If it were a good weapon, it would have been used.
If some are, then "everyone" has to, especially major powers. Just think about it.
> This is a lot of what jcranmer is pointing to.
I debunked what he wrote.
> the Russian strategy
What's that?
> Though this is more easily done in an authoritative country.
No. It's done more easily in a democracy. An authoritative country never developed nuked and used it on innocent civilians. It was one of those wonderful democracies. Just like a wonderful democracy and our democratic friends overthrew the ukrainian democracy and now another wonderful democracy is invading ukraine. Most of the horror in this world has been done by democracies. Funny how all parties involved in ukraine are democracies...
> Not quite true
No. Absolutely true.
> I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here.
You wrote "Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances)."
And I was pointing out that all "contagion weapons" were created by big/rich countries. I was simply debunking your claim.
> But there's got to be a logical reason for well over a century of research in the area and not seeing it used in practice.
Has it not been used "in practice". Biological weapons have been used since ancient times. Biological weapons have been used more often than nuclear weapons.
The blind and naive were adamant our agencies don't collect data and spy on us. And were absolutely shocked when it was revealed they do. Of course they do. As I said, people who are too naive or too trusting believe otherwise. I guess the third option are state actors or those who brainwashed by the media. Or maybe I'm just too cynical.
I'd link it to you, but you said you don't want to read "silly blogs". So I'm not sure how I can communicate anything to you. I don't feel like it'd help. I think we're done here.
No. It's game theory. It's geopolitics. It's why russia, britain, france and china developed nukes. It's why india and pakistan developed it.
> That's a strong word for what you wrote.
Not strong or weak. Just reality.
> I'd link it to you, but you said you don't want to read "silly blogs".
No. What I actually wrote: "The ability to think is a far greater tool than reading silly blogs. Take it from someone who has read too many silly blogs and watch too many silly youtube videos."
What do you think "take it from someone who has read too many silly blogs" means? You aren't going to link to anything I don't already know.
As I said, wishing there was no biological weapons is a noble thought. But believing nobody is working on biological weapons is naive. No serious rational intelligent person could believe it. But like I said, maybe life has made me too cynical.
Hey chief, these white men aren't going to take any more of our land. Here's the treaty we signed with them proving that. Hey stalin, germany isn't going to attack us. Look at this non-aggression pact we sign with them.
So do you. But you've got an agenda and a worldview that prevents you from accepting it. Imagine being naive enough to believe that there isn't chemical nor biological weapons in this world. Believe what you want. This discussion is getting pointless and I'll end it here.
> [...] infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control.
You mean contagious, not infectious. Biological weapons which are infectious but not particularly contagious, such as anthrax, are much easier to control and have been the focus of most biological weapons research. Biological weapons are banned and aren't, used not because they don't work, but because other things work better and with less political fallout.
And FWIW, very contagious pathogens could be used as weapons for strategic effect if you had reason to believe they would hurt your economy less than your enemy's. For instance, if you believe your authoritarian government will allow you to flatten the curve but liberal governments will have a disordered response that precludes this. I'm not saying they did it, but the possibility isn't patently absurd.
In my opinion, gain of function is too dangerous with current security measures, and we should consider a moratorium. Lab biocontainment is exceptionally hard.
I saw an interview with a virologist, but I don't remember where (somewhere on YouTube). He said that there _is_ a moratorium on gain of function research, but that it's a joke because virology is pretty much about studying gain of function.
There was a NIH moratorium, but it was lifted in 2017.
I don't agree about the point of virology being just about studying gain of function. There are tons of things you can study in virology without needing to create novel viruses.
Even better: modern gene therapy is done with lentiviruses which were derived from HIV. This is commonly done; thousands of research labs around the world do this as a regular practice. We typically call them lentiviruses, rather than HIV-derived, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lentiviral_vector_in_gene_ther...
Lentiviral vectors are engineered to make them less harmful (and hopefully beneficial) to humans. They're also tested to ensure they're replication-incompetent, so that even if they did turn out to be harmful they couldn't spread from patient to patient.
The gain of function research of concern takes viruses already capable of sickening and killing humans (or their close relatives), and deliberately makes them deadlier and easier to spread among humans. This is a tiny fraction of virology, and has yet to deliver any practical benefit.
There's a legitimate concern that an overbroad ban on gain-of-function research could restrict safe and beneficial activities. The WIV's work was pretty far at the dangerous extreme, though--Ralph Baric's work was already controversial, and the WIV was working with a greater diversity of viruses, at lower BSL.
While many people define gain-of-function in virology as "enhancing existing attributes which would promote virulence", molecular biologists in general are more open to the idea that other functions, such as gene therapy, would also qualify as gain-of-function.
Either way my point was that we actively use a known highly transmissible virus, with some parts removed, under the general assumption that it's safe, and it's been demonstrated to not cause large issues (compared to other problems in gene therapy). I think people should be aware of that and in some sense I am surprised there isn't more attention placed on this practice.
I said "gain of function research of concern", which is vague but seems to have become the standard phrase to convey that narrower sense. There's definitely some grey, but the WIV's work was pretty deep in the black.
I'm reading more about lentiviral vectors now, and not totally comforted to see all the ways the earlier generations could regain replication competence. That still seems much less frightening to me than GOFROC, which is deliberately just one containment failure away from a novel pandemic.
More specifically there were a few lab escapes of coronaviruses (SARS) in China that Beijing copped to in the early 2000s [1]. It happens to everyone, way more than it should. Yes, including America. [2]
[edit] To be clear, I'm not saying this definitely did or did not happen, I don't know. I'm saying if it came out later that it did, I wouldn't be surprised.
In the mid 1960s, my mom worked in an infectious disease lab. One day, her and her colleagues were tasked with cleaning out a freezer full of samples. Shortly thereafter her and everyone else in the lab got a flu-like illness that did not clear up for many days.
It really makes me wonder how many lab leaks may have happened during this time period when we started collecting and storing samples but we didn't yet have the ability to track diseases like we do today.
Back in 2009 I used to date a girl in Connecticut. She was attending Yale. She was a very nice person but very sloppy. She would always break something or spill something, it was her nature. One day she told me she's running late with school stuff so "meet me at the lab". I came in, got thru security and went to her lab. There she was feeding some 200 mosquitoes sick with malaria, buzzing in a rather small jar, all packed there nicely. This was her assignment for 3 weeks that she had to do twice a day. I could never get over the fact how little security was in place and how, if jar would break, there was absolutely no way to catch them all, in the middle of summer, with all windows wide open. I will never forget this story...
> Actually, the closest natural viruses to covid were sent to Wuhan for study
Please don't "actually" something with an uncited statement without backing it up with any sort of detail. A news article? Anything, honestly.
> that is what the Wuhan institute of coronaviruses was built to do right?
Really? It's "Wuhan institute of virology". Not "coronaviruses". Right?
I have no specific horse in this race but I feel like I'm losing my mind every time I read any discussion on this subject because there's always folks throwing around random statements as if they're established fact and I feel like at this point, on this specific subject, on this website, we should know better, geez.
> The institute has been an active premier research center for the study of coronaviruses.[6]
> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[17][21]
The evidence is pretty damning, and points to way too much to be coincidental. It's not solid evidence, but that would be impossible to get since China blocked anyone from visiting or doing independent investigations.
My major and Msc are related to microbiology (which is highly related to virology), and I'd estimate it's a 95% chance of having originated from the lab.
I've got a PhD in infectious disease epidemiology who got his start in researching respiratory pathogens and whose work on coronaviruses has been cited 387 times.
I'd both put my estimate at much lower than 95%, and I'd be substantially less confident in it, since my expertise kicks in about two weeks after an initial spillover event occurs.
It is fact that a group that funds research in Wuhan (Eco health alliance) submitted a grant request to DARPA to fund research to engineer a coronavirus which could infect human lungs by inserted a specific cleavage site. Covid has that mutation exactly where the grant proposal planned to insert it. And no viruses in teh wild have been found to have that feature. This grant proposal was submitted in 2018.
For covid to be natural it would have had to mutate in the same way as planned in the grant proposal within 2 years of the grant proposal, and then travel hundreds of miles not infecting anyone on the way until it got to the city where this research was planned to be done.
Did you consider that maybe the reason this proposal was written was because this mutation was the most likely way this kind of virus could mutate to infect humans?
I don’t understand why people keep throwing around all kind of unsubstantiated facts like if they suddenly made things clearer.
The facts are not that complicated. Could the pandemic be linked to an accidental leak from a gain-of-function study at the Wuhan lab? Most certainly. Do we have evidence that it did? No, we don’t. Could it come from somewhere else? Sure, it can. Was there a properly done inquiry with full collaboration from the lab and the host country? Absolutely not, China was extremely uncooperative and did all it could to control the narrative surrounding the pandemic.
From that, I conclude that it’s highly unlikely we will ever learn anything definitive. Therefor, discussing this is pretty much pointless.
Discussing this isn't pointless just because we don't have definitive proof. We need to determine what happened based on what we do know. 7+million people are dead. Gain of function is happening in labs all over the world. Humanity can do something here to reduce risk.
Despite rather intense searching the closest strain to C19 in the wild split ca 50 years ago. Please tell how do you introduce this famous mutation not into any of the commonly found covid viruses but create C19 differing from these.
Who in a right mind (just leaving for a moment how) would do that? As: create a separate strain of coronavirus just to introduce one specific mutation.
It's an appeal to Occam's razor. The most simple explanation of why a novel virus started infecting people in a city with a virology lab is that the written plan to make covid in that lab was executed.
I read this in a non-paywalled source a while ago, but this is all that easily came up in my search now. Maybe you think the title is sufficient to back up my claim, maybe you don't, IDK.
> The indirect evidence of a lab leak theory is overwhelming frankly.
There was some indirect and even some more direct evidence of Iraq doing nuclear weapons research in some capacity at some point too, this is incredibly dangerous line to go own without being 250% sure. Indirect evidence simply doesn't cut it.
> No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon.
It may not be someone 'credible', but within the current context of the U.S. preparing for what increasingly looks like a direct confrontation with China, it sure suits a lot of neocons in Washington, who seem to always be failing upwards in the ranks despite having lost all credibility over a dozen times in the last decade alone.
No, it doesnt. All the “indirect evidence” of the lab leak hypothesis could be interpreted multiple other totally reasonable and likely ways, and it would be irresponsible to motivate foreign policy on that “indirect evidence”.
"Reasonable" could be simply truly accidental like someone carried a vial, drops it and then someone gets sick from that?
The point the parent comment is trying to make is all we have is speculation and you can speculate either way. Just make whatever you want up in your head that doesn't include malice.
Oh you're right, i'm supposed to support "not lab leak".
Bats -> humans in the market.
Point remains the same. We're all speculating because I agree with the statement that trying to create foreign policy based on speculation creates so many problems - Iraq war for one (but, being fair, supposedly that was credible).
The fact that we only have speculation is due to yet inability to find a natural source of covid and China's refusal to be a decent member of the world and instead chose to obstruct and hide as much as they could.
But, I'm sure china would admit to the world that their research lab was the fuck up that killed millions of people. It isn't like china would ever try to censor and control information that makes them look bad.
You're complaining to a thread that already knows this. We can complain all we want about lack of transparency and truth.
But, it's from where we stand, not where we want to be. We stand in pure speculation, and cannot create foreign policy based on "we're, like, pretty sure you did it... in our heads!"
This kind of system of policy creation leads to guantanamo bay and the iraq war. We hold people against their will swearing they have information. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. So we resort to torture and have murdered plenty in the name of it. What if they actually don't have the information? Then we're just torturing/murdering innocents.
Is it worth it? Personally I say no. But it won't stop us from parading around the success cases screaming "the ends justify the means".
Saddam intentionally let the WMD claims be made unchallenged because he wanted Iran to be reluctant to attack while Iraq was too weak to defend itself.
There is a huge difference though between “lab leak” meaning “a wild virus collected and stored at the Wuhan lab escaped”, vs. “biomedical engineers manufactured a super weapon which escaped.” I think the evidence, or at least the plausibility, of the former is excellent. For the latter, it’s poor.
That's not correct. There's evidence of genetic engineering in the genome of the virus. There's a 2018 DARPA DEFUSE proposal from scientists at WIV/UNC/EcoHealth Alliance which essentially predicts what SARS-COV-2 would look like.
Why is the gain of function thing always thrown in? This makes the case much harder to prove and seems entirely unnecessary. The family of viruses is already very contagious and potentially dangerous with covid19 hardly being the worst combination of the two properties.
Because the virus was never found in the wild, so it seems likely.
Also because gain of function research is risky as hell with seemingly little benefit. The same lab had requested funds to do it on viruses that were much deadlier.
It doesn't appear that there is a clear zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-1 and MERS either. The case is circumstantial in a similar way to SARS-CoV-2. Yes there are several animal reservoirs that carry similar viruses, but there wasn't a specific one found from which any of the 3 strains came.
Covid has a novel mutation never seen in any natural coronavirus. Further there was a grant proposal from 2018 to insert the identical mutation as found in covid. There was a plan to engineer covid 2ish years before covid existed.
But I'm sure nature evolving this exact mutation coincidentally in a relatively short period after scientist documented their plans to engineer it is an equally likely outcome.
"""However, with analogy to influenza, it was shown many years ago that the simple insertion of a polybasic site into an H3 virus does not result in a high pathogenicity phenotype7 and is likely to only function in the context of a series of other genomic changes provided by a process of natural selection."""
"But what was really notable about this grant proposal was that they proposed to insert cleavage sites, similar to the mystifying furin cleavage site in the SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence, and to insert those into their coronavirus sequences to see if it would make them more infectious. And to many people, when that was exposed, that DARPA grant — and it only got exposed, I believe, last year — that really looked like a kind of smoking gun, which was that the research that was being proposed in the DARPA grant looked like a kind of directional arrow to a SARS-CoV-2-like virus. So that was quite significant."
- https://theintercept.com/2022/05/06/deconstructed-lab-leak-c...
"Farzan was “bothered by the furin site and has a hard time explaining that as an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely).” On the question of whether the virus had a natural origin or came from some sort of accidental lab release, Farrar reported that Farzan was “70:30” or “60:40” in favor of an “accidental-release” explanation and that “Bob” — an apparent reference to Robert Garry — was also surprised by the presence of a furin cleavage site in this virus. Farrar quoted Bob saying: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. … it’s stunning.”
- https://theintercept.com/2023/01/19/covid-origin-nih-emails/
I'm not qualified to evaluate the claims either, but I'm not convinced the authors are trustworthy. They say:
"Harrison and Sachs (1) allege that scientists at NIH and elsewhere, including myself and colleagues, conspired to suppress theories of a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. This is false. A possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 was discussed in our earlier publications"
But there absolutely was a conspiracy to suppress the lab leak theory. This conspiracy is why the infamous letter published in the lancet that admonished the lab leak theory as a 'conspiracy theory's was retracted by the lancet. Peter daszak was one of the signers of the letter, but it came out he attempted to avoid signing the letter even though he arranged the entire thing. The reason he didn't want to sign it? In his words:
Why might he feel that way? Well for one his name was on the DARPA grant proposal from 2018 to engineer a coronavirus with the same mutation covid has.
There are a number of details about it which are the same as the plans from 2018. I don't think it's reasonable to think the plans of scientists don't get revised as they work. And as soon as the virus starts spreading, even in test mice in the lab, it will start to mutate. So it is entirely possible that what leaks from a lab is a natural mutation off of an engineered virus.
Trying to use difference in details in this case to sow doubt isn't reasonable in my opinion because it's details that are realistically impossible to nail down.
This is an interesting line of thinking. We can have all the evidence imaginable that scientists did a thing that caused a pandemic, but since they were trying to predict the next pandemic you just dismiss the evidence as meaningless.
It seems like the standards applied in this discussion by some are essentially that nothing short of irrefutable proof even qualifies as evidence.
Because if it so happens that gain of function research accidentally caused a global pandemic, we need to know so we can properly evaluate the risk of continuing such research. Which could also be part of the motivation for governments to cover that up. I'm not saying that's necessarily true, but I haven't seen that it's false either, and the way China and other officials and related expecrts have acted, trying to dismiss the lab leak theory as just wild conspiracy theories or politically motivated, makes me suspicious.
There were serious attempts to completely shut the conversation down and prevent investigations into there being a lab leak.
So it would be okay if it was a lab leak where gain of function was used because similar viruses almost caused a pandemic? I doubt the general public would see it that way.
The discussion isn't whether labs need to be secure, or if a lab leak is bad. The discussion is whether it not it's likely that SARS-CoV-19 was a lab leak.
>> No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon.
The latter is what the article above is suggesting, that the Wuhan lab was working for the Chinese military to develop a virus for biological warfare research. For example, if you look at the ridiculous hero image of the article, you'll see someone who looks like they might be a Chinese military officer holding a clipboard and wearing a mask, while the Chinese flag's star is surrounded by what look like little stylised coronaviruses.
> No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus
Half this very thread. "you couldn't mention the lab without being called a racist" and then they proceed to talk about china bioengineering weapons instead of an accidental lab leak.
The constant "the news suppresed this because of trump" is also a pretty loud dogwhistle.
The idea that a lab could have a leak was studied, there were multiple papers on it. The evidence did not add up to much, other than the circumstancial. The zootropic evidence had a bit more weight but still came up with "we might not have enough data to come up with a conclusive answer".
Because scientists said they leaned on that evidence the popular science outlets explained it as "origin is a bat not a lab leak" which should have had more nuance in the headlines but popular science outlets try to summarise hard science into easy to understand articles and they are fairly guilty of clickbait (how many times have we cured cancer, or some physics experiment done something close to a black hole). And between that and a number of bad actors starting conspiracy theories about the lab being a hidden bioweapon lab and China releasing it intentionally the discourse got all sorts of distorted.
The problem is Bioweapon dudes hid behind lab leak concerns and the lack of evidence from a scientific prespeective gave the wet market Patient 0 more visibility. To this day, half this thread is people with conspiracy theories hidding behind the lab leak. Makes a conversation about it almost entirely useless when you engage with someone and a few messages in they say the media is jewish and wanted to destroy the economy with lockdowns to make trump lose (this is a comment on this very thread further up, although i think they have been shadowbanned already)
Half of this very thread is saying that China intentionally released this virus? Let’s grant you that half of this thread is saying that China likely engineered Covid as a weapon (very arguable). Are you unable to distinguish that assertion from the assertion that the engineered weapon was intentionally deployed? I don’t understand why you’re conflating the two.
> Half of this very thread is saying that China intentionally released this virus?
I was being slightly hyperbolic. A good chhunk outright said it, another good group was using plausible deniability, which means if pressed they might say thats not what they meant. Makes separating them quite hard
> Are you unable to distinguish that assertion from the assertion that the engineered weapon was intentionally deployed?
I am not. The issue is not that either. The issue is "The origin of COVID-19".
When it came out two main theories appeared. Either the wet market where it was first noticed, or a lab leak in a lab over an hour away that was studying coronaviruses.
The two were studied by the scientific community, china put a lot of hurdles and the best availeble evidence pointed towards the wetmarket.
While this was happening, a number of conspiracies started, many of which pointed towards China as a bioweapons manufacturer (something that is very illegal). Those theories included that china was not studying viruses but manufacturing them (that is a very key distinction) and the theoreis then spawn over if China leaked it to test it, or infected its own population etc. Theories adjacent to this were heavily repeated by a number of news outlets, mayorly OAN a far right news station. The great smoke screen was that when pressed they could always fall back on "the lab leak theory" which is way more sensible.
Essentially the problem is the lab leak theory meant two very different things. It should have been called the accident leak and the bio weapon theory, but both were called lab leak and people who mean bioweapon hide behind the larger, more defensible lab leak umbrella.
The thing with Wuhan Institute of Virology is they were particularly studying the spillover risk of SARS-related coronaviruses. The nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. One clear link with Wuhan is the fact Wuhan Institute of Virology sampled both locations.
You can't read much into the early case data that David Relman described as "hopelessly impoverished". There were likely much earlier cases based on excess mortality data (a key reason WHO haven't accepted market origin). Also, there is a clear sampling bias in the cases in the article cited above.
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23
Exactly. The lab leak theory is a story of cherry picking evidence to match your conclusion.
Why was the wet market on the other side of the city the only identified outbreak site if it came from the lab? There were/are many markets on the other side of the river that would be much more relevant to residents living and working on that side.
People looking up flu symptoms in the middle of winter is not evidence of anything abnormal.
I don’t understand the intellectual effort going into the lab leak theory… it feels like some kind of state run propaganda piece, I assume to just keep a negative view on China in people’s minds. It’s crazy given that whatever the truth there is no consequence… literally an inconsequential endeavour
That’s not what people are doing, they are trying to prove a lab leak theory, else all this effort would be in “how’d it get to that wet market” if you can’t answer that, then you do not have a logical chain to its true origin lab leak or not.
Because right now that is the origin point. But we also know it was there for quite some time before it hopped to humans. It wasn't in a lot of places... it was just at the wet market as far as we know, we have no earlier outbreaks than that.
>> it feels like some kind of state run propaganda piece, I assume to just keep a negative view on China in people’s minds.
China is a fantastic country filled with amazing people, culture, history and so on. It is quite possible to recognise a country's positive characteristics while questioning specific actions by some of the people within that country. This is as true of China as it is of any other country.
>They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.
That procedure is pretty much exactly what you'd have to do to make covid in a lab. Assuming that's true, it's pretty much a smoking gun.
For a smoking gun, I'd expect evidence. This is just reporting on a diffuse claim of hearsay, allegedly by what might be labeled a party with geopolitical interest in the public narrative. It may be disinformation just as well. (Especially, as similar claims were already repeatedly made based on what turned out to be false links, like the Wuhan Institute being just around the wet market.)
Well yes, is the claim true or not? The article has:
>The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. They said the Wuhan scientists...
So presumably The Times has the names of the researchers and someone like the FBI could investigate and see what correspondence if any they have with Wuhan about it.
> Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab.
As others have noted, this is mostly wrong. The WIV is the only lab in the world ever to publish a genome for RaTG13. They'd published a portion (under a different name, Ra4991) before the onset of the pandemic. The similarity to SARS-CoV-2 made it obvious they had something relevant, so they published the rest after. Perhaps you meant there's no evidence that the WIV ever had live RaTG13, and that's true--indeed, there's no evidence that anyone ever has, and some highly speculative claims that it might be an in silico fraud.
It's also not the closest relative anymore. From your other comments here, I believe your knowledge is about a year behind; you're repeating many old arguments that even those arguing most strongly against a possible research-related origin have long since abandoned.
> The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab [0].
The market was the first big cluster, but the earliest cases show much less structure. See the paragraph beginning "A later study by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid", which I believe is intended as explanation for that map (though that's not completely clear to me).
In any case, there's no reason to expect the first identified cluster in the same location as the first introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 must have been introduced into other continents at airports and seaports; but the first clusters were elsewhere, at nursing homes, choir practices, and other locations where the (a) the virus spread easily, and (b) the patients are likely to get sick enough for people to notice.
> Furthermore, several different isolates were found in the market, indicating that SARSCoV2 had been circulating before the epidemic took off.
I guess you're referring here to Pekar et. al? Their "different isolates" are literally just two SNPs apart. Roughly 1/10 of human-to-human transmissions result in two lineages at least that different, so this seems intuitively like it could easily evolve in cryptic human spread. Pekar did some complicated epidemiological modeling that claims otherwise, but I don't think it means much; see for example the criticism at
> Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses.
I'm curious how you came up with this heuristic. It seems to me that there's plenty of incentives to study benign viruses: the primary one being to develop a deeper understanding of the biology of viruses in general.
> Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab.
The article says that the viruses from Mojiang were transported to the Wuhan lab and studied there.
It may just be that they went looking for covid cases there and found them. If they looked around the institute they may have found clusters there too.
May be a good idea to get acquainted with inference to best explanation, and to understand that 'direct evidence' should not automatically be awarded epistemological primacy over 'circumstantial evidence' (or what you're calling 'innuendo').
Reference the statement that several employees were ill in the months leading up to the outbreak, these were tested and (reportedly) did not have Covid antibodies - this also seems to be missing from the article.
Only three labs in the world had Coronaviruses and this lab specialized in it. Yes the first cases were traced to the market, but it's in the same town as the one lab in the world that specializes in very similar viruses (which were never naturally observed nearby). It is objectively quite a coincidence if the virus didn't leak from that lab.
Source? Coronaviruses (e.g. SARS and MERS) have been researched all over the place as it was years ago (before COVID outbreak) already stated as one of the major virus groups with potential for pandemics.
Prolly you'll have a hard time finding a metropolis which wasnt researching corona viruses.
> genetic clocks show that RaTG13 and SARSCoV2 diverged almost 50 years ago.
Converting the distance in phylogenetic analysis to evolutionary distance is based on natural gene drafting rate, which does not consider passaging with human selections.
>the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab.
If anyone's in for a long read, despite the hokey sounding name, I found this to be one of the best contemporaneous explorations of Covid in china that I've seen to date:
Because exploring the truth is a worthwhile endeavor particularly in the face of an oppressive regime that made it very clear they did not want the truth to be explored.
Just to be clear what I posted seemed like Chinese people exploring what actually happened more than a blame based document or fear mongering based document.
I would really encourage you to give it a chance because it is very impressive investigative work and, really, an impressive exercise of investigative journalism from a country that hates investigative journalists.
Lol. If the treatment of their own people wasn't bad enough and it took a pandemic conspiracy theory to hate them, then I feel like you need to read more.
The purpose of that article is not to bring down china. It's not ideologically opposed to china. It was not some conservative agenda article. It's a group of people who want to understand what happened. The article comes from a stance of curiosity. What I linked is very compatible with the HN mindset and not particularly ideological.
You clearly have not read it because your comment makes no sense in the context of that article.
Because if we're relying on the people who are funding bioweapons research in hostile countries to tell us how to treat said viruses, under the delusion that they'd learn something useful, it's the kind of thing we need to know about before waking up three years later and finding out (per the Northwestern study) that we could have avoided a lot of deaths by simply following the sort of treatment regimen we used for more common flu varieties and given the patients azithromycin.
I'd avoid loaded terms like "smoking gun" in this discussion. My point is that if the pandemic was caused by a leak, then that would be a prior that could aid in future decision-making.
I don't understand your position that we should not seek the truth. Somehow knowing the truth about a past event can have no bearing on the future?
It’s possible aliens came from space and dropped the virus off to see how we would handle it. How much effort should we put into preventing that pandemic path?
Nearly every airline regulation that results in air travel being so safe today is because we spend such an enormous amount of resources investigating the root causes of accidents with the NTSB. Try suggesting to them “it doesn’t matter why the plane crashed, let’s just push for generic improvements to planes”. You’ll get (rightfully so) laughed out of the room.
The limit is five why's and often you can't even get that. Planes still crash. Perhaps we've pulled on this thread as much as we can. Especially with long ass articles like this that say nothing new.
Seriously, what are we expecting to learn. This is like a plane at the bottom of the ocean never to be found. We'll never know what happened to this plane, and we don't have to.
We know that situation was probably poor pilot mental health but pilots still have to lie about antidepressants. We don't need to find that plane to fix that.
Only after it became effectively impossible to find it or recover anything useful. That’s not anything like the Wuhan lab, which still exists and has many survivors and still has tons of evidence that hasn’t been corroded away by years of seawater.
You edited in your quip about antidepressants and it just made your point even worse. There was still a significant amount to learn about what he did to the copilot and what the actual flight route was.
There were multiple parties outside of the plane that had to be incompetent in many of the possible flight paths for MH370. Your solution of “stuff more antidepressants down everyone’s throats” will not work for the coverage gaps in ATC monitoring and handoffs between boundaries.
Your lackadaisical approach to “well we spent a few days looking into this and can’t see anything obvious or think there is anything to gain by knowing the truth” is far from acceptable in any root cause analysis related to loss of life.
How do you unequivocally know that this can’t be traced back to a manufacturing or design flaw in a piece of containment equipment used by many BSL labs around the world?
The answer is that you can’t because there is no investigation right now. Burying your head in the sand is never good enough, not even if it’s politically convenient.
> The limit is five why's and often you can't even get that. Planes still crash.
This is a shockingly ignorant statement or willfully misleading. Air safety has improved by at least an order of magnitude[1] because of the culture of seeking out the truth, regardless of how disruptive or inconvenient.
It is very rare to have a commercial airline crash now and significantly rarer to not understand exactly why (MH370 being a notable exception).
Wherever you got that “often you can’t even got that” is complete and utter bullshit.
Its a good compilation that I saw in mid 2020 that was one of the sources of data leading me to question the zoonotic spillover hypothesis that I had read in Zhou et al (RaTG13 paper) and Anderson et al. That the WIV was conducting exactly the type of research that could have led to a highly human infectious novel SARS-CoV was poo-pood and cast as a conspiracy theory. As Ian Lipkin stated following the Fauci teleconference "we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to deal with"
And helpful that it's hosted on GitHub. PRC can't block Github on a strategic level. So content can be hosted there that gets through the GFW that PRC netizens can see.
> The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.
This part doesn't make sense to me. Coronavirus is known to mutate constantly and rapidly. Having a vaccine against a strand might provide a temporary advantage, but that advantage would subside quickly. Coronaviruses would make poor bioweapons considering how impossible it would be to control them.
If an army wants to develop a virus-based weapon wouldn't there be better viruses to base it from than COVIDs?
Viruses mutate because they are constantly exposed to the immune systems of people who were already previously infected, so they have to mutate in order to dodge prior natural immunity. That isn't a concern if most people who get infected die.
Moreover, the first SARS-CoV-2 variant took a long time to start mutating and even then it was only minor mutations. If you release an extremely infectious very deadly virus and you have a vaccine for it, then at that moment it's a Deus Ex scenario and whoever can manufacture the vaccine can take over the world because your enemies are now collapsing and will do anything to obtain the vaccine including giving up their own autonomy. Guess that's the theory, at least.
As to why SARS-CoV-2: because it's airborne and can spread long distances via gas-like clouds (which is why lockdowns, masks, wiping surfaces etc didn't work). You can't really get better if you want to very rapidly infect a whole country.
To be frank, given SARS-CoV-1 as well as MERS, and the known prevalence of coronaviruses in and near China, if I was the military I think I'd be justified into looking at viruses not as potential bioweapons but as a force readiness problem.
The U.S. has done this, and indeed, most of our public health infrastructure is an outgrowth of it.
You don't do research and development on things that are already perfect. You do it on things you hope one day might be refined into something more useful. Similarly you don't halt all research on all other possible avenues because one single avenue _might_ be better.
You're not meant to ask questions. You're meant to blindly swallow this non-sense because it agrees with your pre-existing prejudices, political views or just emotional need to feel like you're part of a group of special people with inside knowledge trying to wake up the sheeple or something...
I haven't checked the "publicly available references" but many who inssist on a natural cause read about the bat theory in the first few months and then haven't updated & aren't willing to update their models.
If you find any faults that can really change the results in the analysis Rootclaim made, I would be interested.
> But why do you think it is important to prove a lab leak?
Perhaps because it is slightly interesting what caused the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu? Because millions of people died? Because knowing the cause could perhaps prevent something similar happen again? Perhaps prevent millions of deaths?
You can't in one comment complain about investigations using "made up priors" and then in another complain that we are investigating something which could actually provide a measured prior.
Could! But hasn't... Otherwise yes good points. I don't see how they measure all the rest of the probabilities and the article seems to be designed to settle arguments among dumb people or something? It is not even remotely scientific.
> I think the whole premise that arbitrary priors and dreaming up probabilities and then washing them all together isn't applicable to a unicorn type event.
Now I believe you said it. Maybe not exactly "made up priors" so pardon me for the misquote. But I'd be interested to see if you can make a distinction.
I remember when this was first released, everyone clowned on it (including me) for a few reasons the biggest one being the classic problem with these sorts of Bayesian analyses. That being, the individual weights per piece of evidence are pretty arbitrary.
Meanwhile, it seems quite likely to have produced the correct results so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Regardless of the merits of the lab leak theory, David Martin is a NWO-level conspiracy theorist who thinks that Pfizer colluded with Bill Gates and the US government and infected the whole world with a virus, on purpose, just to push their vaccine on people. The conference that you allude to has nothing to do with the European union. It was organized by two equally nutty far right EU-politicians in one of the parliament's public rooms to give a false legitimacy to their "conference" and mislead people to think that it was an official event.
He seems to have worked on projects that are questionable in importance / authenticity but likely to have made profits. Claiming that the video filmed in EU was from an "official EU conference" would be uniformed or mispresenting him, indeed. But I think it's worth watching; Phizer's patent application and other claims he made are interesting and haven't been repeated elsewhere (from my perspective).
> If you find any faults that can really change the results in the analysis Rootclaim made, I would be interested.
This is an interesting way to analyze the problem but the set of criteria and weights applied at each step are made up.
The flaw is that you can use this form of analysis to reach any conclusion you want.
For example, the "Already well adapted" section -- a "2x" factor for lab escape. We wouldn't even be thinking about this virus if it wasn't well adapted to spread among humans. So that's baked into the ground and isn't a factor of anything.
Then take "Furin cleavage" -- a whopping 8x factor for lab escape relative to zoonotic. This is the same thing as already well adapted, so now we've got a combined 16x for something that should be 1x.
The weight for "Chimera" -- another whopping 8x for lab escape relative to zoonotic -- seems really high for something that is found both in nature and in labs that merely "seems less likely to combine in nature". We should probably be arguing about whether this is 1.5x or 2x.
The real conclusion is we don't know. The Chinese probably do, but it would be a very closely guarded secret and obviously they would never admit to a lab leak. I lot of people hate ambiguity and want an answer, but in this case it doesn't seem that we are going to get one.
> it would be a very closely guarded secret and obviously they would never admit to a lab leak
A complicating factor is that some (much?) of the funding came from the US. Which means admitting to a leak is against the interest of not only Chinese but also the US government which would have a hell of a time explaining to taxpayers how pandemic was engineered on their money doing research banned in the US. (Though I don't think US government played any part in resisting the research tbh, CCP probably did all that at their accord.)
I think all in all we shouldn't give up, and even if we don't find the actual data I don't see the world can be okay without big fat follow up over not some lab making a mistake (humans make those) but all obstruction of research into the origins of what could have been an extinction level event if the virus was a bit better engineered, whether it came from Chinese communist party or US scientists scared for grant money.
Community / site for collective truth-seeking. Possibly integrated with Metaculus.
One can submit new pieces of evidene which would be commentable (in threads), votable, and programmable (to toggle / affect of other submitted evidence threads).
Users can adjust the weights, vote on them (to generate a certain consensus / prediction), and even toggle of pieces of evidence manually.
The site automatically gives the probabilities for different scearions. I don't have an instant vision on how "all" possible scenarios would be chosen.
It's intended for any one user to evaluate ther priors and see how they stack up all together. like that your idea woukd aggregate & have comments & a voting mechanism,
resistance to manipulation can probably come from things like more substantial evidence + personal reputation or identity confirmation.
By the way, why do people weigh zoonotic spillover so high relatively to lab leak accident? There were lab leaks before even in Beijing, eg. of the original SARS when it was researched. That SARS kills faster so it didn't get to infect too many people... And that's only what's documented, considering it's China there could've been any number of other times.
Intentional leak chance is low but accidental leak is so likely it's surprising this pandemic didn't happen before considering security practies that were known and raised questions before the pandemic. But everyone magically forgets about it. All because some US scientists wanted grant money too much and so laughed everyone who disagrees out of the room.
That Rootclaim analysis seems sloppy as hell. From the "Show More" of the outbreak location section:
>Thus, the ratio of zoonotic:bioweapon:zoonotic collection:modified lab escape is 2:5:100:50, or a reduction of a zoonotic origin by 50x, a bioweapon origin by 20x, and a lab escape by 0.5x.
Those aren't the same ratio.
>To account for the possibility that there is a yet unidentified reason why Wuhan is a more likely location for a zoonotic outbreak, these numbers are
generously
adjusted to a reduction of a zoonotic origin by 20x and a bioweapon origin by 15x, with lab escape remaining at 0.5x.
But what they actually apply is a reduction of a zoonotic origin by 20x and a bioweapon origin by 15x, with zoonotic collection at 2x. Which isn't the result of applying that adjustment to either of the original ratios, so apparently they've just applied the lab escape factor to wrong category
You're right that Daszak and the Ecohealth Alliance are culpable, but it must be noted that various USG orgs were not supportive of his actions
> The report he finally did submit stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and killed 35% of the humans it infected. The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide. (A chimeric virus is one that combines fragments of different viruses.) These revelations prompted the NIH’s grant specialists to ask a critical question: Should the work be subject to a federal
moratorium on what was called gain-of-function research?
> But the [2015 research paper he cited](https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985) was not particularly reassuring. In it, Shi Zhengli and a preeminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina, Ralph Baric, mixed components of SARS-like viruses from different species, and created a novel chimera that was able to directly infect human cells. (Baric did not respond to written questions seeking comment.)
> If anything, the MERS study Daszak proposed was even riskier. So he pitched a compromise to the NIH: that if any of the recombined strains showed 10 times greater growth than a natural virus, “we will immediately: i) stop all experiments with the mutant, ii) inform our NIAID Program Officer and the UNC [Institutional Biosafety Committee] of these results and iii) participate in decision making trees to decide appropriate paths forward.”
> This mention of UNC brought a puzzled response from an NIH program officer, who pointed out that the proposal had said the research would be performed at the WIV. “Can you clarify where the work with the chimeric viruses will actually be performed?” the officer wrote. Ten days later, with still no response from Daszak, the program officer emailed him again. On June 27, Daszak responded, buoyant as ever:
> “You are correct to identify a mistake in our letter. UNC has no oversight of the chimera work, all of which will be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology…. We will clarify tonight with Prof. Zhengli Shi exactly who will be notified if we see enhanced replication…my understanding is that I will be notified straight away, as [principal investigator], and that I can then notify you at NIAID. Apologies for the error!”
> Allowing such risky research to go forward at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was “simply crazy, in my opinion,” says Jack Nunberg, director of the Montana Biotechnology Center. “Reasons are lack of oversight, lack of regulation, the environment in China,” where scientists who publish in prestigious journals get rewarded by the government, creating dangerous incentives. “So that is what really elevates it to the realm of, ‘No, this shouldn’t happen.’”
In general, his actions make clear he's much more aligned with the Chinese government than the US, so extending Daszak to US govt purely based off of nationality seems unjust.
> On January 30, Daszak went on CGTN America, the U.S. outpost for Chinese state television, and said two things that proved to be spectacularly wrong. “I’m very optimistic…that this outbreak will begin to slow down,” he said. “We’re seeing a small amount of human-to-human transmission in other countries, but it’s not uncontrollable." He went on to conclude that the Chinese government was taking all necessary steps “to be open and transparent, and work with WHO, and talk to scientists from around the world, and where necessary, bring them in to help. They’re doing...
Summary: The Case for a Lab Leak, from a Sunday Times investigation (C):
(1) The institute sought funding to research something (A), which Covid could result from. (Said later they didn't do the planned research), but funding from the military appears to have been given.
(1.1) They planned to do the research at the time and approximate place where Covid later emerged.
(2) Protections at the lab were not what they should have been.
(2.2) Lab scientists had previously created a highly infectious super-coronavirus (not Covid-19) with a very high kill-rate that in all probability would never have emerged in nature. Their tests showed no known (at that time) way to effectively limit its spread were it to leak.
(3) NO animal testing was reported in a wide vicinity around the the Hunan market. Samples of Covid found in the market were NOT from animals (B).
(3.1) The market is a busy place in the center of the city where the virus would almost certainly be once it's spreading between people.
(3.2) There is some evidence that researchers from the lab were hospitalized with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019, and one of their relatives died.
(4) The biggest hotspot of people reporting illness via social media (in the month before the province was locked down on January 23) was at the institute, though this was partly hidden in initial reports. The first case in Britain was recorded a week later.
(A) The Wuhan Institute of Virology sought funding for inserting a furin cleavage site. The institute is a 40-minute drive from the Huanan Seafood market.
(B) In January 2020, Chinese officials cleared the market without testing live animals. The presence of SARS-CoV-2 was from environmental samples (animal cage, hair-and-feather–removal machine, etc). Covid-susceptible animals were present but NOT tested. The study of those samples was criticized for not having any animal samples.
(C) Information above drawn from archive.ph/L2BSO and comments and links here in this HN thread.
---------------------------
"The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak. The closest relatives to Covid known were too far from Covid to have developed into Covid on their own in a short time. So bringing in dangerous viruses and accidentally leaking them is an unlikely cause." Earlier reporting by the Times: archive.ph/Mkqox
Genome statistical estimates indicate the "relatives" are decades away from Covid. In February 2020, RaTG13 was identified as the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, sharing 96.1% nucleotide identity. It was found near the town of Tongguan in Mojiang county in Yunnan, China. However, in 2022, scientists found three closer matches 530 km south, in Feuang, Laos, designated as BANAL-52 (96.8% identity), BANAL-103 and BANAL-236. However, it is alleged that one virus at the Wuhan institute was an even closer match to Covid-19 than RaTG13. Note that bat viruses had never been known to harm humans. Intermediate animals apparently catching a virus from bats and passing it to humans had been known to happen.
In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In published papers, military scientists are listed as working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is the military academy’s base.
Overly-speculative information supporting a lab leak:
"Scientists with close relationships with the Wuhan Institute of Virology said it was their belief that there was vaccine research going on in the fall of 2019, pertinent to Covid-19 vaccination"
"Investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power."
In May 2020, one of the key researchers died from unconfirmed causes at age 54.
"On November 19, the safety director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences made a visit, according to the institute’s website. He addressed a meeting of the institute’s leadership with important 'oral and written' instructions from China’s president, Xi Jinping, regarding 'a complex and grave situation'. "
"In the first months of the pandemic, many Chinese scientists visited bat caves in Yunnan to see whether they could find a place where Covid may have originated.... 7 scientists attempting to visit were told the Moijang mine (known source of at least one Covid-like coronavirus) was closed, so they sampled bats in another abandoned copper mine nearby. On the first day of their work, police arrived, seized the samples and took them to their station, where they were interrogated and detained for 48 hours. Officers also went to their hotel and seized the samples they had collected from elsewhere. Even though the team had approval to test in the area, they were ordered to leave. Searching for bat viruses was banned in Yunnan in early 2021"
The idea that Covid19 was accidentally leaked from the Wuhan lab has moved from conspiracy theory to mainstream view of many US gov't agencies with the most classified information available to them.
John Ratcliffe, former Director of National Intelligence: “My informed assessment, as a person with as much or more access than anyone to our government’s intelligence during the initial year of the virus outbreak and pandemic onset, has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense. From a view inside the IC, if our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed side-by-side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a naturally occurring “spillover” theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long and overwhelming while the “spillover” side would be nearly empty.”
The Furin cleavage site is one of the more compelling pieces of evidence. 1.5 years before the outbreak, the Wuhan Institute applied for a grant from Darpa to explore mutating coronaviruses to make them more infectious to humans, particularly through the addition of a Furin cleavage site. (Darpa declined to fund the research).
The Covid-19 virus is notable for being the only coronavirus to have a Furin cleavage site. Not only that, but it appears to be basically a perfect mutation that specifically modifies the 12 nucleotides necessary for the Furin site, without modifying other base pairs.
Here's a quote from email excerpt included in the recent Congress hearing:
"Before I left the office for the ball, I aligned nCoV with the 96% bat
CoV sequenced at WIV. Except for the RBD the S proteins are
essentially identical at the amino acid level – well all but the perfect
insertion of 12 nucleotides that adds the furin site. S2 is over its
whole length essentially identical. I really can’t think of a plausible
natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar
to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide
that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function
– that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t
figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment
of the spikes at the amino acid level – its stunning. Of course, in the
lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you
wanted."
(That latter quote is Tulane virologist Robert Garry. Like his peers he would go on to downplay the LL hyp in the wake of the Feb 1st conference call organized by then-head of Wellcome Trust Jeremy Farrar.)
1,027 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 445 ms ] threadAnd given that we are at 7 days remaining before the 90-day WIV intel disclosure deadline, old journo hands expect that info leaks are more likely to happen.
https://twitter.com/mbalter/status/1667668700885819395?s=20
“Whether the virus emerged as a result of a leak from a laboratory or from nature has become one the most controversial problems in science.”
The words “in science” are my problem here: people thinking this is a “scientific” question.
It’s a history question, a political question, and could be made into a forensic question. But science does not ask this kind of question!
Is it possible for a lab to leak a virus? That’s a question science can ask, but it doesn’t answer this one.
So we end up with a belief that scientists can answer this question… but it isn’t a “scientific” question in the first place.
Subsequent scientific have disagreed.
But this isn’t purely historical.
Covid was worse than the flu, but the flu is also deadly and we should be paying more attention to vaccinating it. The deaths aren't evenly distributed, either, young healthy people have less to worry about, but "less" isn't "nothing." For masks, you really wanted N95 masks, not cloth, and you still have to avoid large indoor gatherings.
Nobody said that bleach in the lungs was good. Trump mentioned disinfectant presumably butchering a description of the HealLight which would use UV to destroy the virus, effectively "disinfecting" the lungs. There are always idiots poisoning themselves with bleach, though, but nobody pays much attention to the poison control stats most of the time. HCQ and Ivermectin had some promising studies but no real effectiveness for the things people wanted them for. There probably is some rise in myocarditis due to vaccines... but they're still a lot safer if you look at mortality rates. "Great Reset" was from an actual policy proposal someone put out, but doesn't really stand for the things the conspiracies say it does.
All of these things got pushed into extreme caricatures depending on what side you trust.
The problem being that treating someone with steroids also strengthens parasites, which burdens the immune system even more.
So in parts of the world where parasites are common, it makes sense to treat with an anti-parasite drug from the beginning (no need to test for actual parasites).
In parts of the world without widespread parasite infections (for example, the US), the costs outweigh the benefits.
This caused lots of confusion because there were quite a few papers promoting Ivermectin as part of treatment. The fine print said “in developing countries” but nobody reads the fine print.
... which is true of the pandemic response in general. "Science" doesn't tell society how to react to something. Science is a process to test hypothesizes--it isn't a book of facts or direct answers on the trade-offs of various mitigation techniques. It can only inform, not dictate.
It’s just sloppy work, but when you’re there for 12 hours a day for 5-6 days a week, you’re bound to get sloppy
The communist party is sensitive doesn't want it to be known that a Chinese lab leaked a dangerous virus (see also "how does RBMK reactor explode?")
The ecohealth alliance that Fauci and Dazack were involved in don't want it widely known that they had a hand in the WIV GoF (that Obama banned stateside) and worked early in the pandemic to obscure their own involvement in it.
Trump doesn't want it widely known that his administration contributed $100k to the Ecohealth alliance.
Lots of powerful people working to not take responsibility and obfuscate reality.
Their colleagues - the scientific community - cannot through science alone determine if this was true.
If it happened then they went to a nearby hospital. To investigate there is possibly a police matter, certainly a health matter, a political matter and many things - but is not answered by waving the magic science wand. And so on.
People who claim it’s a science question are shallow or deceitful.
I disagree, it is a scientific question. Whether we can answer it in isolation of politics and prejudice is the question for me.
But if you observe some gravitational waves in a single event, you can correlate it to optical or radio observations, you can try to analyse the signals to match them to existing hypotheses of gravitational waves origination etc. The singularity of the event doesn't make it not science. Same as the emergence of a novel virus.
It is just a shame that most of the evidence is subjective and non-scientific. But the question itself is well posed scientific endeavour.
In order to investigate it, many many many smaller questions may be asked, some of which are scientific.
That it is commingled with a million political questions, yes it's true. But to me that's a nuisance variable, not fundamentally changing the underlying question.
So stop trying to protect the CCP.
When you cover it up, prevent investigations, destroy data, and try to blame the rest of the world. That does not help understand how we can prevent it happening again.
If China was open and honest from day 1, countries would have actually tried to help. But instead all the CCP did was hide it and blame everyone else.
It’s clear that you side with the CCP. You don’t want to prevent another pandemic or make sure people are safe. All you seem to want to do is defend them and get angry at everyone who wants to discuss the issue.
1. Lab leak hypothesis being proven is not a requirement for any kind of prevention
2. If everyone was honest all the time life would be roses
3. These lab leak articles don't make anyone safer they just cause conspiratorial thinking.
I don't trust the China for shit, but I'm sick of Americans suckered in by lazy bullshit thinking. I can't think of anything positive to say about China, but you can't say this because it is all a dead end useless thing that serves no purpose.
How about putting back in our observers like Trump kicked out, arguably hobbling our view into what was going on. We still have not done this. Instead we're here dicking off about shit that doesn't matter. Way to be people.
What do you mean? Ofc it's possible and has been done hundreds of times in the past with different viruses and lab security levels.
However, this kind of writing should only happen after years or months of investigation. You can't do the lab leak panic 2 days into the pandemic. You can't even really do it half way through the pandemic.
I'm glad such investigations are being caried out. I only wish links to whatever is declassified from the investigations to be made public for such publications. Authors need to prove their research effort when it comes to such news.
I'm not sure it's a conspiracy theory. I think it's a legitimate thing to investigate by an international entity like the UN (not the US), and the outcome (if it turns out to be true) should likely be some proportional sanction/payments by China.
IMHO, this article is a part of their disinformation campaign. The name of their vaccine "Sputnik V" (Follower 5) suggests that there was "Something","Sputnik I", "Sputnik II", "Sputnik III", "Sputnik IV" before "Sputnik V".
It's impossible for Russians to produce 5 vaccines in row in such short span of time, just few months, which took billions of dollars and year of time for western companies.
IMHO, Russians started developing of their vaccine since SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2003.
(Even without that knowledge I'd find this theory a bit far fetched, there could be many other good reasons for that naming).
Victory is Latin word. Russian word for victory is "pobeda" (po-beda po-=after, -beda=bad/something very different from good, "after bad times").
It looks like 5 in the name is from Ad5 component of vaccine.
Moreover, the vaccine produced by Vector is called EpiVacCorona[0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EpiVacCorona
No, a regime known for throwing people out of windows if they say one word too much isn't so dumb to hide a hint like that in plain sight.
Existing evidence points to another lab: BSL4 lab "Vector" in Novosibirsk, Russia. They worked on their "Sputnik" vaccine when blast in laboratory on September 16 2019[2] caused chain of incidents: broken windows, unprotected soldiers break in, which checked rooms for signs of fire, equipment stolen from BSL4 lab by those soldiers[0][1], epidemic of unknown virus in Siberia, Military World Games in Wuhan[3].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w7SAeNcXA8
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200407175030/https://www.youtu...
[2]: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/17/health/russia-lab-explosi...
[3]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7813667/
The same document that turned out to have been paid for and produced despite having numerous errors and lies, simply to turn a narrative?
Let’s hold everyone to the same standard shall we?
In other words, censorship
I see the irony (gain of function)
The basic new account rate limit and the one you get from getting downvote quickly are too weak to stop what they are complaining about.
If negligence is the cause of a multi-million death, multi-trillion dollar response it needs to be corrected to prevent future similar errors.
Which people in this thread are somehow believing as truth instead of the bald-faced propaganda it is.
Do you actually think a virus research lab in the epicentre of an outbreak would not be put to use?
From Wikipedia:
> As the virus spread worldwide, the institute continued its investigation. In February 2020, a team led by Shi Zhengli at the institute were the first to identify, analyze and name the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), upload it to public databases for scientists around the world to understand,[28][29][30] and publish papers in Nature.[31] On 19 February 2020, the lab released a letter on its website describing how they successfully obtained the whole virus genome.[32]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology
That and the fact that the Chinese dicatorship blocking any inquiry into the matter are enough to put the blame on that lab until proven otherwise.
Your previous comment is clearly incorrect as shown by the parent, something is a lot more than nothing.
If that makes it "too expensive and slow" then so be it. Perhaps there are some things humans should not be doing.
If my information is correct, I believe that nearly all nuclear testing these days is 100% simulation on supercomputers, which is as safe as safe can be, as long as you can trust supercomputer simulations to render the correct answer to those trusting researchers.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/us-military-missing...
To add to your point, regardless of safeguards and protocols, accidents happen.
We still have no strong evidence for lab leak from BSL4 lab in Wuhan, while we have some evidence (two early strains of SARS-CoV-2: A, then B; B was in Wuhan in December; where and when was parent of A and B?) that suggests start of epidemic outside of China in mid-September 2019. Russians start to delete videos about blast at their BSL4 lab "Vector" in Novosibirsk on Sep 16 2019[0], which suggests that this information may cause harm for them.
So, "Lab leak" theory may be right, while "lab leak from BSL4 lab in Wuhan" theory may be wrong.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200407175030/https://www.youtu...
What happened several years ago was a clown show of the highest order.
It's true with covid though and I always thought the allegation a bit unfair. I mean suggesting the origin of X is from the nearest source of X has never seemed much of a conspiracy to me.
I had long messages on the Wikipedia discussion before they allowed the idea to be mentioned without a this is conspiracy disinformation disclaimer, after many months of fighting.
> You infect the mice, wait a week or so, and then recover the virus from the sickest mice. Then you repeat.
From The Hardware Hacker (2017) by "bunnie" Huang:
> So, a single base-pair change--simply flipping two bits--might be all you'd need to turn the H1N1 swine flu virus into a deadlier variant... for just over $1,000.
> [Influenza] packs a deadly punch in 3.2 KB... and we [still] haven't eradicated it. Could influenza do hacks like the one I just described on its own already? The short answer is yes.
> ... on average, every copy of an influenza virus has one random mutation.
> [H1N1] was probably just a couple of mutations away from being a bigger health problem.
> ... novel H1N1 acquired a mix of RNA snippets that gave it high transmission rates and made it something humans weren't innately immune to. That's the perfect storm for a pandemic.
> If there were a computer analogy to this RNA-shuffling model, [random relinking of virus "files" at runtime]... would also proliferate a diverse set of viruses in the wild...
Fortunately for swine flu at least,
> ... a patient [had] a novel antibody... to confer immunity to all 16 subtypes of influenza A.
Against Covid, research by Dr. Weismann and Dr. Karikó led to the development of the mRNA vaccine:
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/how-drew-weissman-and-katal...
This guy who published a suspiciously early patent on a covid 19 vaccine fell off a roof three months later?
That’s kind of buried in the article a bit but was this claim been made anywhere else?
Also, the section on activity at the lab at the time of the outbreak does not mention analysis of private app data.
IIRC, one of the early discredited reports suggesting lab origin had relied, in-part, on commercially available app data. The kind of adware built into “free” apps that violate user privacy.
This data supposedly showed clear activity supporting a temporary shutdown of the Wuhan lab.
This information always seemed the easiest to latch on to. Not to prove origin but at least offer an important fact for a pattern.
US military bases have had their locations and perimeters out on the public web thanks to fitness apps.
Was the WIV associated app data not real? If it was, why isn’t it included in this article?
The article relates a study “by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid.”
How would this be more compelling than raw app data showing movement of employees or security workers in and around WIV?
>That’s kind of buried in the article a bit but was this claim been made anywhere else?
As someone who's followed the debate closely, (with the submission history to demostrate that), I can tell you that the parent article is the first time the assertion that Zhou fell from the roof has ever been made in tbe public-facing side of the debate.
Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an indication of any ill-intent. Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab. Further, genetic clocks show that RaTG13 and SARSCoV2 diverged almost 50 years ago.
The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab [0]. Furthermore, several different isolates were found in the market, indicating that SARSCoV2 had been circulating before the epidemic took off.
[0] The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
Did a coronavirus leak from the lab?
As of 2022, this is no longer true.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaTG13
https://www.business-standard.com/amp/article/current-affair...
One of the things we know for sure is that that about 50 years of evolutionary changes separate RaTG13 and BANAL-52 from SARSCoV2, so they are not its direct ancestors.
Do you have a source for this?
Also, I'm no biologist, but is comparing the base rate of evolutionary changes still relevant if SARSCoV2 wasn't of natural origins? E.g. through creating chimeras or 'serial passaging' as described in this article? Wouldn't that create an environment where 50 years could pass in a way shorter timeframe?
>Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID- 19 pandemic
>Divergence dates between SARS-CoV-2 and the bat sarbecovirus reservoir were estimated as 1948 (95% highest posterior density (HPD): 1879–1999), 1969 (95% HPD: 1930–2000) and 1982 (95% HPD: 1948–2009), indicating that the lineage giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating unnoticed in bats for decades.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4
You should also know that SARSCoV2 1) is not a chimeric virus, and 2) that the present study includes viruses linked to RaTGP13 but more distant from SARSCoV2, i.e. it includes evidence from viruses unassociated with the pandemic.
There is no basis for this claim. Genomic evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a chimera of any two previously-known viruses. No possible genomic evidence could exclude a chimera of two previously-unknown viruses, and the WIV was the world's leading collector of such novel sarbecoviruses from nature. They proposed to make chimeras of them in DEFUSE. That proposal wasn't funded, but this article now reports explicit claims they did such work:
> They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.
You're basically rehashing Andersen's "Proximal Origins" here, and even he has moved on to more sophisticated (though still unconvincing) arguments like Pekar. As David Relman wrote almost three years ago:
> This argument [that SARS-CoV-2 must be natural since it doesn't use a known backbone] fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2021133117
Of course such a virus could also have evolved naturally by a similar path; lots of sarbecoviruses are just a single mutation away from that FCS, and perhaps there's some yet-unknown natural animal host where that gets selected for. The point is that no genomic evidence can distinguish between these two cases, though.
For emphasis, it seems like you're assuming that we know all the natural viruses that the WIV was working with. Sampling of novel coronaviruses from nature was a core part of the WIV's research, so that's not a reasonable assumption. RaTG13 was sampled in 2013, but not fully published until 2020. At least one novel coronavirus was identified in contamination of rice samples sequenced on the same equipment that the WIV used:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2
That's a merbecovirus, so it couldn't possibly have any relationship to SARS-CoV-2; but if they had one unpublished novel virus, then it's hard to reject the possibility that they had more.
We don't know as for unknown reasons the database of specimens collected by the Wuhan lab was taken down in September 2019.
The distance in years between two viral strains you mention makes no sense at all, as the mutation rate is extremely dependent on environment.
The article is not suggesting that Covid19 evolved from RaTG13; it is suggesting that Covid19 is a chimaera made with RaTG13.
[Of course, it could be propaganda, government or otherwise; or it could be a damned lie concocted by the reporter or editor. They've said they have sources, they haven't named them, so it's not unreasonable to suppose they have sources that don't want to be named.]
Why would one do that? Well, two reasons. First, the spike more variable as it is subject to greater evolutionary pressure as the major component of the viral surface. Second, in coronavirus reverse genetics typically the virus is segmented into multiple pieces, most of which compose the non-spike backbone and a subset which compose the spike protein. This is intentional to enable the swapping of spike proteins. So, if SARS-CoV-2 is spike-swap or spike variant assembly, a RaTG13-like virus could be the "backbone" of SARS-CoV-2.
Moreover, a hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 backbone could exist in the viral sequences list the WIV took down in Sept. 2019. They sequenced RaTG13 a few years prior. The lab's raison d'etre is collecting and sequencing coronaviruses poised for spillover. And, with modern DNA synthesis technology, it's not difficult to print out arbitrary backbone contigs for a viral assembly.
That is completely untrue. Agricultural labs for instance research plant viruses which are _incompatible_ with humans completely. Still these plant virus would have to be researched under stringent isolation because of the damage they may pose to crops.
> Most importantly, the general reader should know
Speak on our level, don't baby us.
What exactly are you trying to say here anyway? If they were researching some other virus type it wouldn't be getting a look. But they were researching coronavirus.
Especially the fact that covid was not found in a single animal sample does make the evidence rather weak.
In addition it seems that the lack of sampling from outside the market and the fact that the market is a busy place in the center of the city where the virus would likely be once it's spreading from person to person , does not really lend support to the conclusions in the paper at all.
>More than half of the earliest Covid-19 cases were connected to the Huanan market, and epidemiologic mapping revealed that the concentration of cases was centered there. In January 2020, Chinese officials cleared the market without testing live animals, but positive environmental samples, including those from an animal cage and a hair-and-feather–removal machine, indicated the presence of both SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-susceptible animals.5 Recently released findings included raccoon dog DNA, pointing to a possible SARS-CoV-2 progenitor.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMp2305081
Well of course, the racoon dogs et al all come in via human transport.
Testing infrastructure was poor, and maybe it still is. Chinese government interest was not in finding facts, but in taking action to 'solve the problem'. It's hard to find facts when the people with power just want the problem to go away. IMHO, that doesn't weigh in favor of either explaination. The wuhan local government and the chinese national government would have likely taken the same actions regardless of the source, because they're both not very interested in facts.
US health authorities pushing on the market theory are just doing their typical behavior of taking what little information is available and pushing it with no nuance. I enjoyed seeing the cdc stickers telling me not to use a mask out in public areas when the cdc was requiring them; the congitive dissonance was so palpable.
They prioritized healthcare workers to wear masks
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/21/science/covid-raccoon-dog...
And the behavior of China behind that whole story looks very much like China tried to cover up the existence of susceptible animals at the market.
https://news.yahoo.com/raccoon-dogs-did-not-start-covid-19-n...
I'm not making the argument that the DNA samples indicate that the Raccoon Dogs that the samples were from had SARS-CoV-2. I'm just arguing that previously it had been stated that there were no Raccoon Dogs in the market at all and that has been proven wrong.
I’ve always thought it was a handling contamination that got into community spread. It’s a very parsimonious explanation.
A tourniquet won’t do anything for a needle stick injury. That’s pretty silly. A virus landing in a capillary bed takes 1 minute to reach the heart.
If the tourniquet somehow did stop fast enough, what will they do? Debride the entire area? Sounds like total bullsh.
There is no new direct evidence in the article, simply the weight of existing indirect evidence synthesized together. There does not seem to be another hypothosis for how the virus emerged that has as much indirect evidence pointing towards it?
The main gist of the article is:
* The institute applied for funding for a specific piece of research (inserting a furin cleavage site).
* The institute claims it did not perform the research.
* Covid is what we would expect if somebody did perform that research.
* The research would have been performed at the time and place where covid emerged.
It is not direct evidence, but under a weaker burden of proof (e.g. balance of probabilities) it is fairly convincing.
It is common for researchers to apply to grants/funding for work they are already doing. They tweak the research application to meet whatever the funding criteria is using knowledge they have from existing experiments.
https://twitter.com/BlockedVirology/status/16676623250907463...
• WIV added FCS's to coronavirus(es?) exactly as described in DEFUSE, according to a US lab collaborator.
• Zhou Yusen "fell" off the roof of the WIV in May 2020
• WIV was working on a 'closer [than published] unpublished variant'
• Of all caves/mines, only scholarly attempts to access the Mojiang mine made touched off access denial and confiscation of samples from other mines from the authorities. While alluded to in the past, (https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-coronavirus-pandem... ) this is the first time to my awareness that the Mojiang mine has been uniquely & unequivocally associated with the authorities' clamp-down efforts, that too with attribution to Alice C Hughes, PhD
I mean, this is a pretty significant and concerning new finding right? Someone associated with the lab researching COVID early on just mysteriously disappearing in China?
The WaPo journalist Josh Rogin who is known for maintainibg quality confidential sources in DC, had long ago tweeted the above. While some aspects may have been covered in intervening press, this is the first time to my knowledge all of tbese items are asserted explicitly with a quote attributed to one of the anonymous investigators.
--- my take fwiw: While intriguing, vis-a-vis a seasonal illness null hypothesis, it's never been discussed whether they were unique cases at that time with such symptoms (more likely covid), or if many others both in and out of the WIV had similar symtoms at the time (more likely seasonal illness)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9410163/US-State-De...
https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/9/6/402
if I understand correctly it concludes that the cluster correlates with population density and a concentration of elderly population in that area.
Unfortunately that wasn't mentioned in the senate report (nor in the news article)
- We have a bunch of evidence of WIV engineering SARS-1-like viruses because they talked about it before the pandemic.
- We have zero evidence of them ever doing experiments on live SARS-2-like virus
- We have zero evidence of the existence of a SARS-2-like progenitor virus
- Before the pandemic they had no reason to be more secretive of any SARS-2-like work than their SARS-1-like work
- The spread of SARS-CoV-2 looks exactly like it originated in the Seafood market.
- If it was transported to the seafood market by someone who worked at the lab that is highly coincidental that the place they infected first just happened to be the most likely place for zoonotic spillover
- The hypothetical infected labworker didn't spread it all over their residence or create any other superspreading incidents clustered elsewhere around Wuhan
On the balance of probabilities I'm going with zoonotic spillover. The coincidence that the lab happened to be in the city is much less of a coincidence than the lab causing a leak of a virus that there's zero evidence the lab ever had, causing a pandemic that looks exactly like it came from zoonotic spillover.
They refuse to share their records with WHO or the NIH. That's a crucial caveat when saying there is no evidence they held a precursor. We don't know as they have refused to share their database.
The Times article is interesting as it suggests the work in DEFUSE to add furin cleavage sites went ahead and they passaged the virus in humanized mice. This would explain the furin site not seen in other sarbecoviruses and why humans topped the list for binding affinity from the outset.
Note the cases near the market are based on what David Relman described as "hopelessly impoverished" early case data. There was also sampling bias in retrospectively counting cases as market link was often required. WHO hasn't accepted market origin in part as there were likely much earlier cases than those in December linked to the market where no animals tested positive.
This is an unbelievable coincidence that makes the zoonotic spillover hypothesis laughable. To a biologist, the likelihood of this happening by chance is clear: virtually 0. But explaining the size of the space of optimal solutions to a given binding problem versus the space of good solutions to the general public, well, that's really hard too. So an obvious and completely non-circumstantial piece of evidence is the last one in the public's mind. And we are still acting like there is a question of where the virus came from, and we will be for decades, or at least until the average level of biology education is raised by a few sharp degrees.
All viruses which have higher affinity for humans spilled over, didn't they?
If we're going with highly coincidental pairings, it seems like we can't ignore "the disease originated in the only city in China to have an institute that specializes in virology, viral pathology and virus technology."
I'm not convinced of any particular conclusion as to COVID's origin, but I don't down-weight the coincidence of the city of origin hosting WIV nearly as much as you appear to.
I always thought this was a good test for whether someone can apply Bayesian reasoning. It turns out not many can, including a lot of highly educated people.
Without hard evidence to contradict it, lab leak should have always been the default hypothesis. That it hasn’t is a case of political propaganda winning out over basic statistics.
The probability that a virus would crop up in Wuhan out of all cities in China is 1/70.
Feel free apply Bayes' formula.
But even if you were to accept that, the bayesian reasoning would be that you'd say that the probability it's from Wuhan it's a leak is 100%, and 0% for any other city. You could go further and look at the viruses that have caused zoonoses in China in the past (the evidence is that hundreds of SARS-like coronaviruses have) and compare it to what was being studied. Even then, if you apply Bayes' formula, you'd have overwhelming odds towards a natural origin.
As to which of the two hypotheses is more predicated on politics, I think there are more generally left-leaning people who are swayed by the lab leak (circumstantial) evidence, than there are right-leaning people who are swayed by the zoonotic origin (circumstantial) evidence. This perception may be mistaken, but assuming I’m correct, this would suggest that the zoonotic origin hypothesis is more likely to be predicated on politics.
Edit: typo
Huh? No it doesn’t. The discussion of a possible SARS outbreak started weeks before the seafood market incident. The lab leak theory started in China BEFORE the seafood market was pinned as the cause.
I would share family chats if they hadn’t been deleted. But we heard about it a few days before Xmas.
I don’t think ill-intent is the accusation, I think the argument is that the lab has poor safety protocols and made errors. I haven’t studied the “lab leak theory” extensively, but everything I read seems to be about lab failures resulting in a leak, not anything purposeful or ill-intentioned.
The military was also given positions of responsibility in the Wuhan institute, according to a US Senate report. A book published in 2015 by the military academy discusses how Sars viruses represent a “new era of genetic weapons” that can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed”.
The authors are PLA researchers, and one of the book’s editors has collaborated on numerous scientific papers with Wuhan scientists. They discuss how Sars can be weaponised by fusing it with other viruses and “serial passaging” the resulting mutant to make it more dangerous.
The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.
The evidence about what was happening is not only overwhelming but notice how not a single government is going to lift a finger about it. The NIH just refunded this work and the Biden admin doesn't give a shit. They're all deep in denial at this point and will never even admit to what has happened, let alone start WW3 over it.
It also states that Covid-19 is the only Coronavirus discovered with a furin cleavage site on the spike, and that the lab had applied for funding to research the insertion of such a site.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that the lab deliberately launched a pandemic by deliberately releasing the pathogen on its own doorstep.
"Never ascribe to conspiracy, what is adequately explained by incompetence".
I think the evidence is pretty clear that at least the Chinese government believes that the covid-19 virus came from their lab (they could, of course, be mistaken about that).
What evidence are you referring to?
The US does weapons research it does not mean ill intent. The Chinese does weapons research for the same reason the US does it.
No, it would not. First, dictatorships hide things all the time, whether there is something or nothing. It's just how they operate. (Many democratic governments do to btw. How often do we need freedom of information requests just to find out that it was totally benign, the government just stone-walled because they could).
Second, not saying anything is not evidence of guilt in any criminal case in the civilized world. Everyone has the right to silence.
Top notch defense right there.
https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/nih-to-terminate-ecohealth-a...
“Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”
The rate of hospitalization among 18-49 year olds with flu in the US was 54.1 per 100K in 2019-20. It’s rare, sure, but that kind of absolute statement from an anonymous researcher doesn’t instill confidence.
Edit: is your argument seriously “uhm actually, event X happens 0.054% of the time, so when you said {more rare version of X} doesn’t happen you’re wrong”
And yep, that’s my argument! The frequency of deadly viruses escaping from a bio lab is even lower, so if we’re going to eliminate possibilities based on percentages there are a few others that should get thrown out.
It’s a minor point but, as I said, it’s sloppy reasoning. If the anonymous researcher had said “low probability” I wouldn’t care. Instead, this reads like someone who’s willing to hand wave specifics for the sake of rhetoric.
But if you’re here to be put off by the smallest use of rhetoric, sure pop off on that.
It’s a contentious, difficult debate. I do actually think it’s bad to dismiss arguments you disagree with with casual rhetoric.
One thing to consider is not so much an individual's health and risk of getting serious ill, but rather that as the numbers grow geometrically, health care systems like hospitals can (and in fact, did) become severely overwhelmed.
Even with measures in place, here in Los Angeles we were at a point where for example if you had a heart attack at home, an ambulance / hospital couldn't deal with you.m https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/05/us/los-angeles-county-califor...
You should know the survival rate of a heart attack is far far lower than most expect, especially after 20 minutes of failed active attempts to resuscitate. The only real reason to take someone into a hospital after that is if they’re hypothermic or just so you can say “we did everything we could”.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-cpr-expectations-i...
At one point, LA had to resort to Fire Trucks because ambulances were unavailable.
If you don't think health care services were severely stretched, in some cases beyond breaking point (incl. staff unavailability because they themselves were sick), I really don't know what to say. This happened in New York as well.
Of course there are also other places where that wasn’t the case, so there you could be less conservative with restrictions, but you may not know the risk in advance.
Staff being unavailable because they’re sick is quite literally “normal day to day operations” that every company must be able to account for, not “beyond the breaking point”.
But if you “don’t know what to say” beyond vague emotional appeals unsupported by the very sources you claim to cite, I’m glad we agree on that at least.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/agenda/2021/10/26/lack-hospita...
[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-us-hospital-icu-bed-short...
[4] https://www.whsv.com/2021/08/27/man-dies-waiting-icu-bed-fam...
[5] https://www.businessinsider.com/man-covid-dead-doctors-icu-b...
[6] https://www.ketv.com/article/auburn-man-dies-in-des-moines-h...
[7] https://www.newsweek.com/kansas-man-dies-after-waiting-icu-b...
And how many millions of children have ongoing severely stunted development in both academics and social skills? More than 7 million. By some estimates 77 million, in fact.
The real question is how many more will die as a result of our horribly irresponsible treatment of our most valuable national resource: the children.
> “Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”
> It’s rare, sure
Then what makes an article terrible when you agree with the statement?
In 2018, WIV was part of a proposal with EcoHealth Alliance and UNC to add furin cleavage sites into novel SARS-related bat coronaviruses. DARPA declined to fund it. This investigation suggests the work went ahead. Something Nick Patterson suggested often occurs even when funding is declined. WIV had both NIAID and CAS grants to study spillover risk of SARS-related coronaviruses. They were also doing classified work with the PLA from 2017.
Regardless of whether or not there was a coverup, the Chinese government has certainly acted like it was covering something up.
The circumstantial evidence is sort of ridiculous here though. An institute with weak safety controls experimenting with creating novel pathogens has an outbreak of a novel pathogen next door? No no, it’s because of climate change (an actual argument I have seen).
It is certain that a new strain of some virus is emerging right now next to a lab that works with viruses, because that is a thing that happens continuously in nature, and labs exist within nature. It’s also likely that such a new strain will not cause human illness, as most viruses do not.
SARS-COV-2 only looks novel to humans because it made a lot of humans sick. There were tons of allegations that HIV was created in a lab too. This says more about our self-regard than about the virus itself.
As other comments have pointed out, while that lab was working with coronaviruses, none of the strains were genetically close to SARS-COV-2. Coronavirus is a broad category of viruses.
Scientists' best guess is that the precursor of the most common "M" virus jumped from the Cameroon chimps to humans sometime before 1931.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/virus/origins....
Yes, they covered up the existence of racoon dogs and other susceptible animals at the market.
It’s a fair point that if suppression of evidence is to be considered an indication of guilt, it has to work both ways.
Edit: typo
Is it possible? Sure! Is it likewise possible that some of the circumstantial claims about WIV are true? Sure! But if someone made this thing, someone else would have told us by now.
[1] This is science! There are notes and logs and backups and email and chat and whiteboard photos and conference attendees and visiting scholars, all spread around a population all trained to compete with each other.
Snowden revealed quite shocking information, and I think it is safe to say the secret of mass surveillance was going on for much longer than 4 years.
Im not aware of any way you could know that or the relative proportion of each.
Where do you get your certainty here?
You want the fact that I can't prove you wrong to be evidence that you're right, and that's not how logic works.
"The overwhelming majority of conspiracies likes this, especially ones in fundamentally civilian organizations like science labs, don't survive a year if that."
How do you know that the overwhelming majority of conspiracies don't survive a year if that? It's like sampling sick people and concluding that all people are sick. Without an estimate of the number of conspiracies that actually are kept hidden (which to me seems nearly impossible), how could you possibly know the proportion as you claimed?
This seems like a base rate fallacy to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
I'll put my money on bureaucrats being dumb over globalist nation state super autocracy every day.
I don't think it's very much a stretch to believe that pervasive observations of bureaucracies leaking and making mistakes serves as evidence that genuinely true Hidden Conspiracies are vanishingly rare. But you do you.
You're still missing the point: GGGP didn't argue in any “direction” at all; all they said was you can't know for sure what you claim.
> I don't think it's very much a stretch to believe that pervasive observations of bureaucracies leaking and making mistakes serves as evidence that genuinely true Hidden Conspiracies are vanishingly rare.
Sure. But don't then put your “hopefully not a stretch” guess in such cocksure terms.
> But you do you.
And you, obviously, you.
Part of any conspiracy theory is positing a great totalitarian enemy who is able to keep all these important truths from The People. The PRC is economically large and somewhat questionably ambitious. It's absolutely not the kind of super state people want to imagine.
When? There's a pretty short window where a WIV scientist might have known the subject they were studying had escaped the lab before the PRC did. Certainly by January 2020 the PRC could've clamped down on those scientists.
Spies caught outside the country don't tell me much about internal operations.
ETA: I think my thinking here is pretty colored by Tank Man, whose name is unknown. The CCP claims they don't know anything about him. Even if that's true, presumably he had friends, family, and fellow protestors who have decided it would be a very bad idea to even give his name.
Not after the top PLA vaccine researcher, Zhou Yusen died, allegedly "falling off the roof of the WIV" in May 2020. That sends a loud message.
Yours is a world where disproof rules, and conspiracies are assumed true until proven false. I'm sure it's entertaining, but it's not "true" any more than mine is.
In my world, Oswald probably shot JFK and covid was probably a natural virus, because those are the hypotheses that demand the least of the existing evidence. I'm willing to change my priors with more evidence, but not because of the lack of disproof of an entertaining counter-hypothesis.
I don't personally hold an opinion one way or another on JFK, but the fact is that the information on what happened still hasn't leaked out.
It took until 1992 for what appears to be the truth to be discovered, 3 decades with far more people involved in the process, and a much darker outcome than a man being assassinated.
See McNamara's recollection of that meeting in 1992.
http://web.archive.org/web/20210621032149/https://www.nytime...
Even closer to the SARS-CoV-2 case, the 1977 flu pandemic killed ~700k people and near-certainly arose from a research accident, probably a failed vaccine trial:
> The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event, as the genetic sequence of the virus was nearly identical to the sequences of decades-old strains.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/
That article argues that vaccine trial accident doesn't count as a "lab accident", which seems like legalistic wordplay to me; but I believe the historical context is good.
But in 1978, the WHO wrote:
> Laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bul...
It took decades for the consensus to change, and there's still been no official admission (though note the unverified personal communication from C. M. Chu via Peter Palese in Gronvall's paper, 27 years after the accident).
The USSR successfully manipulated many prominent Western civilian scientists (and subsequently Western newspapers) into buying the "bad meat" Soviet cover-up story, hook, line, and sinker: to the point that they publicly chided the American military for still believing in the "anthrax factory leak" theory:
> But Dr. Alexander Langmuir, a former director of epidemiology at the United States Centers for Disease Control, who presided at the session, said Tuesday that based on what he knew so far, "the current position of the U.S. military needs thorough re- examination; that is clear.'
> Dr. Philip Brachman of Emory University, a U.S. anthrax expert who has advised the Central Intelligence Agency on the incident, said the Soviet talk was a "landmark report" providing "a pretty good indication that this incident was an outbreak of gastrointestinal anthrax" from eating contaminated meat.
> Dr. Alexander Langmuir, a former chief epidemiologist for the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, agreed that the Soviet account was "very credible so far" but added that he hoped to obtain further details during the Soviets' weeklong stay.
The "bad meat" Soviet coverup story was fawningly parroted in _Science_ in 1988: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.3358121 (full text at https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.3358121) and also ended up in prominent American newspapers like the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/14/world/russians-explain-79...) and Wall Street Journal (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/04/13/s...), from which the above quotes are taken.
How did this happen? Why did this work so well? Because scientific methods designed for operation in adversary-free environments are catastrophically unfit for drawing dependable conclusions when intelligent motivated adversaries have tampered with the available data. The Western civilian scientists were thinking like...scientists, so they got easily manipulated into producing and disseminating literal Soviet disinformation while believing they were furthering the causes of science and of fighting anthrax. Oops:
> Three Soviet officials came to visit the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., on 11 April: Pyotr Burgasov, retired deputy minister of health; Vladimir Nikiforov, infectious diseases chief at the Moscow Institute for the Advanced Training of Physicians; and Vladimir Sergiyev, director of the Institute of Parasitology and Tropical Medicine. They gave the same explanation as in 1980, but provided many more details, convincing some long-time doubters that the account was true. U.S. intelligence officials still maintain a military facility was involved.
Spoiler alert: Pyotr Burgasov was part of the response to the leak and part of the Soviet biowarfare program.
The argument for a natural origin of Sverdlovsk anthrax is tragically familiar: establishing a highly plausible way it could have been zoonosis, along with providing evidence consistent with a zoonosis. From the _Science_ article:
> The citizens of Sverdlovsk did not have to look so f...
What is known is the nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. Both areas WIV sampled and they refuse to share their records with WHO or the NIH.
There was also no mention of the mouse deaths in the grant renewal application Daszak filed to the NIH later that year. In this account, he said the mice had experienced “mild Sars-like clinical signs” when they were infected with the mutant virus. It had actually killed six of the eight infected humanised mice. Daszak eventually provided details of the experiment’s deadly results to the US authorities in a report after the Covid-19 pandemic. He now says his 2018 statement about the “mild” illness was based on preliminary results — even though the experiment in which the mice died had taken place several months before he issued the statement
So these people are all known liars. The US Government banned GoF research, they got around it by claiming their work was urgent and safe, they ignored reporting requirements, when they finally did report what they said was a lie, and now they're still lying to try and cover previous lies.
So when these people say they want to insert furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses, a coronavirus appears right next door that has a FCS - the first one ever seen - and they say, oh well we changed our minds and never did it, well, with overwhelming probability they're lying again.
Is this a case of yet another heat map being a population density map? I assume the wet market is a popular local destination and gathering place, while the lab is not. You would expect there to be more cases where there are more people.
I speculate in ignorance of the actual social dynamics in the city of Wuhan.
For a longer explanation of why we don't allow this, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... The short version is that the vast majority of these perceptions aren't grounded in evidence and we don't want discussions to be poisoned by accusations of bad faith.
p.s. Your comment would have been fine without that first paragraph.
https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/nih-to-terminate-ecohealth-a...
Maybe I'm deeply confused, but the Wuhan lab was reported by NYMag to be the one that discovered RaTG13.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
> How Did It Get Out? 1. The Tongguan Mine Shaft in Mojiang, Yunnan, where, in 2013, fragments of RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARSCoV-2, were recovered and transported to the Wuhan Institute of Virology; 2. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Shi Zhengli’s team brought the RaTG13 sample, sequenced its genome, then took it out of the freezer several times in recent years;
The probability that a novel SARS-related CoV would emerge naturally in the city in China that was used as a seropositivity control -and the location of the worlds largest SARS-related related research lab, and which had very low wildlife consumption compared to Southern coastal cities is < 1/1000
There is no evidence for any infected animals at the Huanan market https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.25.538336v2
There was a known ascertainment bias towards reporting associated with the market https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23
The modelling by Pekar et al inferring multiple spillovers at the market was flawed https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1
Prior to the pandemic, the State department literally warned the US govt. a SARS-related accident was a real risk at the WIV https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
Was that even insinuated?
"no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab"
Wut?
"Between 1 July and 1 October 2012, we received 13 serum samples collected from 4 patients"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9744119/
There should be more attention on this. We're busy worrying about AI that can troll at a college level, while scientists are still busy making frankenviruses after a pandemic plausibly caused by a lab leak.
But I should not that not all viral engineering is gain of function, and while it gets a lot of attention, even in laboratory virology is relatively rare.
The indirect evidence of a lab leak theory is overwhelming frankly. And it doesn't require any malice. No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon.
Gain of function research is real, scientists intentionally make viruses which could start a pandemic. They do this for the purposes of knowledge and preparedness for the inevitable natural spillover events that will happen. It isn't nefarious.
But it is risky, and there many people now and before who thought it was a practice that should be curtailed because of the risk.
To add to this, most countries have turned away from infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control. The the release of them might harm your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself. It is like trying to cut off your enemy's leg by cutting off your own arm. It ends up kinda being like MAD except you're also the aggressor. The threat of a infectious weapon is not from other nations, but from a terrorist organization (which of course dramatically reduces risk). Not to say that this can't happen, but it is well known enough that were a contagious disease to get out, it would be more likely accidental. It would also be odd to release the disease into your own community first. I'm not saying it was or wasn't a lab leak or bioweapon, but if we're discussing weapon vs accident, there's good reason to believe a weapon is unlikely. Gain of research has significant value outside weapons and this also shows you why the weapon arguments against GoF aren't of high concern to those that are close to the work. Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances).
It is quite clear that they did amplification research as they’ve planned. And had inserted the furin site into the coronavirus . And they’ve mismanaged the research and they’ve let the virus to spread. This had caused a lot of damage, in particular the deaths, economical damage, long-covid damages, mental illnesses and diminished IQ (covid brain fog). There’ve been some positive sides: diminished air travel, diminished carbon emissions, transition to work from home, more pedestrian zones in the cities, mRNA vaccine technology. But the negative side from the pandemic is still overwhelming.
Arguably this lab should be sued out of existence for damages.
A claim was made about that, but it’s far from settled. One could argue it has been debunked. See “SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was not engineered”: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119
> And they’ve mismanaged the research and they’ve let the virus to spread.
That’s speculation. Irresponsible speculation, in fact, which has been pushed by people who should have known better. But they pushed it for jingoistic reasons.
> Arguably this lab should be sued out of existence for damages.
That’s an emotional reaction which you’re not examining rationally. If you remove the confirmation bias you’re applying to the evidence, there’s simply no substantial basis for the conclusions you’re reaching.
There is evidence that the Chinese authorities were suppressing information about the leak (information about that virus had leaked accidentally, by an ophthalmologist that saw cases spreading in his hospital).
Yes, it is not clear exactly, how the furin site got there. Was it a long series of mutations and a recombination with another virus in a lab animal? Was it spliced? We’ll never know, unless the scientists responsible would decide to tell how it had happened.
But I’m not particularly emotional about that virus. If you read the above, you’ll see that I see positive and negative after effects. Viruses and mistakes happen.
But it’d be a good idea to make a point and get rid of that lab. Failures like that should not be rewarded with continual existence.
It's in China, not America. Come on now.
The CCP might remove the lab from existence, but they're not gonna do it with a lawsuit.
"The drone's female voice also tells listeners, "Control your soul's thirst for freedom. Do not open your windows and sing.""
Most countries ( small to mid-tier ) lack the expertise, will or reason for it. But most major countries are working on biological weapons. If you think the US, Russia, China, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, etc aren't running bio-weapons labs, then you are being too trusting at best or too naive at worst. Or maybe I'm just being too cynical.
> The the release of them might harm your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself.
Never prevented intentional disease warfare throughout history. What makes you think leaders aren't willing to hurt their own countries to hurt their enemies? More importantly, what makes you think these countries will develope bio-weapons, but not vaccines for them?
> The threat of a infectious weapon is not from other nations, but from a terrorist organization (which of course dramatically reduces risk).
Every major terrorist organization is or was created, funded and controlled by major nations.
> Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances).
And yet, all weapons labs in history were created by big/rich countries. You so desperately want a world without bio-weapons that you are blinded to the contradictions in your argument.
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch... covers this in some detail (it's geared towards chemical weapons, but biological weapons are the same boat). In short, chemical and biological weapons just aren't useful. For any platform you put it on, conventional explosives will do more damage. For major militaries, there's no point in using them, which is why the "big" military powers have all signed up to the anti-chemical weapons and anti-biological weapons treaties, but not the anti-nuclear or anti-cluster munitions or anti-landmines, etc.
If chemical and biological weapons aren't useful, why does one need a treaty to ban them? Makes one wonder? Is there are treaty to ban feathers as weapons? The fact that there is an anti-biological weapons treaty is proof enough that countries are working on biological weapons, just like the anti-nuclear weapons treaty is proof that countries are working on nukes.
The ability to think is a far greater tool than reading silly blogs. Take it from someone who has read too many silly blogs and watch too many silly youtube videos.
Also, pretty much every treaty ( international and intranational ) has been broken. Some even say treaties are meant or created to be broken.
Yes, countries can break treaties. But there is a real cost to doing so. The point of treaties (especially the anti-war treaties) is essentially to break a prisoner's dilemma: all parties can agree to do something that is mutually beneficial for everybody, but only when no one defects. The first arms control treaty was the Washington Naval Treaty, which was signed when most countries were literally unable to find the resources to keep up with the naval arms race and proposed by the one country that could.
If you read the post I linked (I suspect you did not, as you are only reacting to my comments and not other material within the post), you'll see that there are many other lines of evidence we can use to ascertain the inutility of chemical weapons, not least of which is the lack of its use in conflicts after WWI, even in existential state conflicts like WWII or the Arab-Israel wars.
> If chemical and biological weapons aren't useful, why does one need a treaty to ban them?
The same reason why we have laws against murder. The existence of the treaty isn't to keep people from doing something useful (indeed, if you look at which treaties are acceded to, it's the treaties that keep people from doing something useful that don't get the signatories). Instead, it's to signal the unwillingness to use it and to pressure others not to consider its use. And if you know sufficiently few people are willing to use it, then you can avoid spending the money on countermeasures to chemical weapons.
It's not gotchas. It's just history and reasoning. Logic. It's persuasive to people who are willing to think. But no amount of reason will convince someone with an agenda.
> If the point of treaties is to be broken, why bother signing up to them in the first place?
As your buddy godelski pointed out, governments do things for optics, political grandstanding, etc. Why did germany and the soviet union sign the nonaggression treaty? Also to appease the naive masses who believe in fairy tales. So that naive people can say nobody is working on chemical or biological weapons since a treaty says so. See, this nonaggression treaty is proof germany and the soviet union will never attack each other. Genius logic.
> The first arms control treaty was the Washington Naval Treaty, which was signed when most countries were literally unable to find the resources to keep up with the naval arms race and proposed by the one country that could.
No. It was proposed by the one country that had isolationist political pressure against naval buildup due to our history and founding fathers warning against standing armies. It was proposed by the one country to kneecap british attempts to enforce navy limits. Also, the Washington Naval Treaty was a complete failure? It set the stage for japan to build more resentment which led to ww2.
> not least of which is the lack of its use in conflicts after WWI, even in existential state conflicts like WWII or the Arab-Israel wars.
Chemical weapons were used in iraq-iran war. In the syrian war just a few years ago.
> The same reason why we have laws against murder.
There are laws against murder because murder exists. People murder. So the treaty against chemical weapons must exist because chemical weapons exist?
It would be great if chemical, biological, etc weapons are never used. But you'd have to be absolutely naive to think that every major nation isn't working on chemical or biological weapons. It's like all the naive people who claimed that government agencies stopped collecting our data after getting caught in the 70s. Of course they didn't stop collecting data. They increased the gathering of data.
I live in a country where biological weapons wiped out a significant portion of the native population. Do you think such a country is working on biological weapons? If one major country is, then so is every major nation around the world.
The real world isn't an utopian fairy tale. No matter how much one wishes it were. But it's a free country. Believe whatever you want.
1. Attributing the whole of Japan's imperial ambition to the Washington Naval Treaty is farcical.
2. This chart of battleship displacement by date of construction plainly reveals that the Washington Navy Treaty was a massive success. Yes, treaty-breaking ships were constructed, but you cannot look at this graph and conclude that the treaty did not succeed in substantially disrupting the arms escalation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty#/media...
FWIW, I agree with you that the development and research into chemical and biological weapons never stopped. However it is likely that most countries no longer maintain up-to-date stockpiles of these weapons. Research continues for game theory reasons, but the treaties (and moreover the general public sentiment against such weapons, particularly the sentiment that use of those weapons would constitute the use of "WMDs" to which a nuclear response would be warranted) had the effect of greatly reducing the risk that such weapons would be used en masse. To this point; these sort of weapons have not yet been used in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, despite most late-cold war analysts believing that the Soviet Union would use chemical weapons during their anticipated war with NATO.
Serious question, are you surprised governments do things that aren't useful? That they'll focus more on signaling than utility? That's literally 80% of politics: show.
> The fact that there is an anti-biological weapons treaty is proof enough that countries are working on biological weapons, just like the anti-nuclear weapons treaty is proof that countries are working on nukes.
Now that we got the above out of the way, maybe notice that China, Russia, and the US have all signed the Biological Weapons Convention[0] (outlaw bio weapons). All signed during the cold war. Then maybe notice that China, Russia, and the US have NOT signed the ban on the use of nuclear weapons[1].
> The ability to think is a far greater tool than reading silly blogs
I agree. I mean just the dichotomy of [0] and [1] really tells a lot. You make a good point that governments are difficult to discuss because you can't take anything they do at face value so you have to dig in and think about their actions and what signals they are making.
[0] https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/bwcsig
[1] https://treaties.unoda.org/t/tpnw
No, they are. But that's a bit different. Though I understand the confusion. Gain of function research can be classified as weapons. You got to develop weapons to defend against them. And of course, momentum. Especially in politics, where once funding is given it is hard to take it away, though not hard to reduce. I'm more saying if they would seriously deploy such a weapon and how serious the research is.
> What makes you think leaders aren't willing to hurt their own countries to hurt their enemies?
Some yes, some no. I think most countries have learned that the Russian strategy doesn't lead to great outcomes. Then again, you think Russia would have learned it too. But most countries realize that you can't rule over the dead. But you're right, that I may be too trusting. As far as vaccines, it is hard to keep those secret. Especially if we're talking about a country like China with a billion people, where you have to distribute at least a few hundred million. You don't think a few are going to fall off the truck? There'd be a lot of money for such a situation. Or even just the recipe. I mean vaccines don't confer 100% immunity so it still comes with big costs to yourself. But you're right, Russia keeps doing the Russian strategy. Though this is more easily done in an authoritative country. This is a lot of what jcranmer is pointing to. One more thing to consider, it is hard to invade this region after. You might think the same thing about nuclear but there's a reason they've focused on increasing the explosion and decreasing the radiation. Same reasons.
> Every major terrorist organization is or was created, funded and controlled by major nations.
Not quite true, but if they were, then the above arguments would apply there so that no terrorist organization would get the bio weapons from the big countries. You might want to ask why there haven't been any dirty bombs, despite that this should be easier, especially after the collapse of the USSR where many nuclear materials went missing. They all went somewhere (smaller countries and probably bigger countries too, to keep away from smaller countries), but we'll probably never know the full extent.
> And yet, all weapons labs in history were created by big/rich countries.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. Not all weapons were created in big countries. But weapons like nuclear, bio, and others were from big countries because to have such a program is quite expensive. Currently bioweapons, of the kind we're discussing, are still fairly expensive. This may change as things become cheaper. But regardless, these types of weapons are more attractive to the crazy anarchist who wants to watch the world burn than the angry dictator. They just aren't practical in the modern globalized world.
But there's got to be a logical reason for well over a century of research in the area and not seeing it used in practice. If it were a good weapon, it would have been used.
Okay good, I'm glad we are agreed.
> Some yes, some no.
If some are, then "everyone" has to, especially major powers. Just think about it.
> This is a lot of what jcranmer is pointing to.
I debunked what he wrote.
> the Russian strategy
What's that?
> Though this is more easily done in an authoritative country.
No. It's done more easily in a democracy. An authoritative country never developed nuked and used it on innocent civilians. It was one of those wonderful democracies. Just like a wonderful democracy and our democratic friends overthrew the ukrainian democracy and now another wonderful democracy is invading ukraine. Most of the horror in this world has been done by democracies. Funny how all parties involved in ukraine are democracies...
> Not quite true
No. Absolutely true.
> I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here.
You wrote "Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances)."
And I was pointing out that all "contagion weapons" were created by big/rich countries. I was simply debunking your claim.
> But there's got to be a logical reason for well over a century of research in the area and not seeing it used in practice.
Has it not been used "in practice". Biological weapons have been used since ancient times. Biological weapons have been used more often than nuclear weapons.
The blind and naive were adamant our agencies don't collect data and spy on us. And were absolutely shocked when it was revealed they do. Of course they do. As I said, people who are too naive or too trusting believe otherwise. I guess the third option are state actors or those who brainwashed by the media. Or maybe I'm just too cynical.
Very clearly false dilemma.
> I debunked what he wrote.
That's a strong word for what you wrote.
> What's that?
I'd link it to you, but you said you don't want to read "silly blogs". So I'm not sure how I can communicate anything to you. I don't feel like it'd help. I think we're done here.
No. It's game theory. It's geopolitics. It's why russia, britain, france and china developed nukes. It's why india and pakistan developed it.
> That's a strong word for what you wrote.
Not strong or weak. Just reality.
> I'd link it to you, but you said you don't want to read "silly blogs".
No. What I actually wrote: "The ability to think is a far greater tool than reading silly blogs. Take it from someone who has read too many silly blogs and watch too many silly youtube videos."
What do you think "take it from someone who has read too many silly blogs" means? You aren't going to link to anything I don't already know.
As I said, wishing there was no biological weapons is a noble thought. But believing nobody is working on biological weapons is naive. No serious rational intelligent person could believe it. But like I said, maybe life has made me too cynical.
Hey chief, these white men aren't going to take any more of our land. Here's the treaty we signed with them proving that. Hey stalin, germany isn't going to attack us. Look at this non-aggression pact we sign with them.
>> no amount of reason will convince someone with an agenda.
You're exactly right. You already know.
So do you. But you've got an agenda and a worldview that prevents you from accepting it. Imagine being naive enough to believe that there isn't chemical nor biological weapons in this world. Believe what you want. This discussion is getting pointless and I'll end it here.
You mean contagious, not infectious. Biological weapons which are infectious but not particularly contagious, such as anthrax, are much easier to control and have been the focus of most biological weapons research. Biological weapons are banned and aren't, used not because they don't work, but because other things work better and with less political fallout.
And FWIW, very contagious pathogens could be used as weapons for strategic effect if you had reason to believe they would hurt your economy less than your enemy's. For instance, if you believe your authoritarian government will allow you to flatten the curve but liberal governments will have a disordered response that precludes this. I'm not saying they did it, but the possibility isn't patently absurd.
See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...
In my opinion, gain of function is too dangerous with current security measures, and we should consider a moratorium. Lab biocontainment is exceptionally hard.
I don't agree about the point of virology being just about studying gain of function. There are tons of things you can study in virology without needing to create novel viruses.
https://www.criver.com/eureka/why-are-lentivirus-vector-safe...
The gain of function research of concern takes viruses already capable of sickening and killing humans (or their close relatives), and deliberately makes them deadlier and easier to spread among humans. This is a tiny fraction of virology, and has yet to deliver any practical benefit.
There's a legitimate concern that an overbroad ban on gain-of-function research could restrict safe and beneficial activities. The WIV's work was pretty far at the dangerous extreme, though--Ralph Baric's work was already controversial, and the WIV was working with a greater diversity of viruses, at lower BSL.
Either way my point was that we actively use a known highly transmissible virus, with some parts removed, under the general assumption that it's safe, and it's been demonstrated to not cause large issues (compared to other problems in gene therapy). I think people should be aware of that and in some sense I am surprised there isn't more attention placed on this practice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw-nR6-4kQQ&t=2466s
I said "gain of function research of concern", which is vague but seems to have become the standard phrase to convey that narrower sense. There's definitely some grey, but the WIV's work was pretty deep in the black.
I'm reading more about lentiviral vectors now, and not totally comforted to see all the ways the earlier generations could regain replication competence. That still seems much less frightening to me than GOFROC, which is deliberately just one containment failure away from a novel pandemic.
[edit] To be clear, I'm not saying this definitely did or did not happen, I don't know. I'm saying if it came out later that it did, I wouldn't be surprised.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7096887/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
It really makes me wonder how many lab leaks may have happened during this time period when we started collecting and storing samples but we didn't yet have the ability to track diseases like we do today.
But it's intellectually dishonest of you to pretend that was in fact the purpose of the anecdote, and not to serve as evidence of a lab leak.
Please don't "actually" something with an uncited statement without backing it up with any sort of detail. A news article? Anything, honestly.
> that is what the Wuhan institute of coronaviruses was built to do right?
Really? It's "Wuhan institute of virology". Not "coronaviruses". Right?
I have no specific horse in this race but I feel like I'm losing my mind every time I read any discussion on this subject because there's always folks throwing around random statements as if they're established fact and I feel like at this point, on this specific subject, on this website, we should know better, geez.
> The institute has been an active premier research center for the study of coronaviruses.[6]
> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[17][21]
The evidence is pretty damning, and points to way too much to be coincidental. It's not solid evidence, but that would be impossible to get since China blocked anyone from visiting or doing independent investigations.
My major and Msc are related to microbiology (which is highly related to virology), and I'd estimate it's a 95% chance of having originated from the lab.
I'd both put my estimate at much lower than 95%, and I'd be substantially less confident in it, since my expertise kicks in about two weeks after an initial spillover event occurs.
For covid to be natural it would have had to mutate in the same way as planned in the grant proposal within 2 years of the grant proposal, and then travel hundreds of miles not infecting anyone on the way until it got to the city where this research was planned to be done.
Think about it.
Did you consider that maybe the reason this proposal was written was because this mutation was the most likely way this kind of virus could mutate to infect humans?
I don’t understand why people keep throwing around all kind of unsubstantiated facts like if they suddenly made things clearer.
The facts are not that complicated. Could the pandemic be linked to an accidental leak from a gain-of-function study at the Wuhan lab? Most certainly. Do we have evidence that it did? No, we don’t. Could it come from somewhere else? Sure, it can. Was there a properly done inquiry with full collaboration from the lab and the host country? Absolutely not, China was extremely uncooperative and did all it could to control the narrative surrounding the pandemic.
From that, I conclude that it’s highly unlikely we will ever learn anything definitive. Therefor, discussing this is pretty much pointless.
Who in a right mind (just leaving for a moment how) would do that? As: create a separate strain of coronavirus just to introduce one specific mutation.
Incorrect. We need to determine what happened based on all the evidence. We can't just make stuff up to fill in the blanks.
i.e. If what we know doesn't contain facts essential to the determination, we can't just "think about it" harder.
That's the hard-hitting evidence that was missing.
And that's why this topic is so taboo and annoying. People turn coincidence into proof.
Clearly, you have an agenda that encourages people to stop looking at facts and instead to make things up they don't have answers for.
Think about it. (This means I'm right, right? This means if you don't agree with me, you aren't thinking, right?)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-05/covid-lik...
There was some indirect and even some more direct evidence of Iraq doing nuclear weapons research in some capacity at some point too, this is incredibly dangerous line to go own without being 250% sure. Indirect evidence simply doesn't cut it.
> No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon.
It may not be someone 'credible', but within the current context of the U.S. preparing for what increasingly looks like a direct confrontation with China, it sure suits a lot of neocons in Washington, who seem to always be failing upwards in the ranks despite having lost all credibility over a dozen times in the last decade alone.
The point the parent comment is trying to make is all we have is speculation and you can speculate either way. Just make whatever you want up in your head that doesn't include malice.
What you described is still the lab leak theory.
Bats -> humans in the market.
Point remains the same. We're all speculating because I agree with the statement that trying to create foreign policy based on speculation creates so many problems - Iraq war for one (but, being fair, supposedly that was credible).
But, I'm sure china would admit to the world that their research lab was the fuck up that killed millions of people. It isn't like china would ever try to censor and control information that makes them look bad.
But, it's from where we stand, not where we want to be. We stand in pure speculation, and cannot create foreign policy based on "we're, like, pretty sure you did it... in our heads!"
This kind of system of policy creation leads to guantanamo bay and the iraq war. We hold people against their will swearing they have information. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. So we resort to torture and have murdered plenty in the name of it. What if they actually don't have the information? Then we're just torturing/murdering innocents.
Is it worth it? Personally I say no. But it won't stop us from parading around the success cases screaming "the ends justify the means".
Also because gain of function research is risky as hell with seemingly little benefit. The same lab had requested funds to do it on viruses that were much deadlier.
In fact COVID seems somewhat unique amongst modern maladies to not have a clear zoonotic origin.
But I'm sure nature evolving this exact mutation coincidentally in a relatively short period after scientist documented their plans to engineer it is an equally likely outcome.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...
"Farzan was “bothered by the furin site and has a hard time explaining that as an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely).” On the question of whether the virus had a natural origin or came from some sort of accidental lab release, Farrar reported that Farzan was “70:30” or “60:40” in favor of an “accidental-release” explanation and that “Bob” — an apparent reference to Robert Garry — was also surprised by the presence of a furin cleavage site in this virus. Farrar quoted Bob saying: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. … it’s stunning.” - https://theintercept.com/2023/01/19/covid-origin-nih-emails/
I'm not qualified to evaluate these arguments on their merit.
"Harrison and Sachs (1) allege that scientists at NIH and elsewhere, including myself and colleagues, conspired to suppress theories of a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. This is false. A possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 was discussed in our earlier publications"
But there absolutely was a conspiracy to suppress the lab leak theory. This conspiracy is why the infamous letter published in the lancet that admonished the lab leak theory as a 'conspiracy theory's was retracted by the lancet. Peter daszak was one of the signers of the letter, but it came out he attempted to avoid signing the letter even though he arranged the entire thing. The reason he didn't want to sign it? In his words:
“so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn't work in a counterproductive way.” - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/wuhan-lab-collaborat...
Why might he feel that way? Well for one his name was on the DARPA grant proposal from 2018 to engineer a coronavirus with the same mutation covid has.
Trying to use difference in details in this case to sow doubt isn't reasonable in my opinion because it's details that are realistically impossible to nail down.
It seems like the standards applied in this discussion by some are essentially that nothing short of irrefutable proof even qualifies as evidence.
There were serious attempts to completely shut the conversation down and prevent investigations into there being a lab leak.
To quote Doyle - "never theorize before you have data [...] you end up twisting facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts".
The latter is what the article above is suggesting, that the Wuhan lab was working for the Chinese military to develop a virus for biological warfare research. For example, if you look at the ridiculous hero image of the article, you'll see someone who looks like they might be a Chinese military officer holding a clipboard and wearing a mask, while the Chinese flag's star is surrounded by what look like little stylised coronaviruses.
Half this very thread. "you couldn't mention the lab without being called a racist" and then they proceed to talk about china bioengineering weapons instead of an accidental lab leak.
The constant "the news suppresed this because of trump" is also a pretty loud dogwhistle.
The idea that a lab could have a leak was studied, there were multiple papers on it. The evidence did not add up to much, other than the circumstancial. The zootropic evidence had a bit more weight but still came up with "we might not have enough data to come up with a conclusive answer".
Because scientists said they leaned on that evidence the popular science outlets explained it as "origin is a bat not a lab leak" which should have had more nuance in the headlines but popular science outlets try to summarise hard science into easy to understand articles and they are fairly guilty of clickbait (how many times have we cured cancer, or some physics experiment done something close to a black hole). And between that and a number of bad actors starting conspiracy theories about the lab being a hidden bioweapon lab and China releasing it intentionally the discourse got all sorts of distorted.
The problem is Bioweapon dudes hid behind lab leak concerns and the lack of evidence from a scientific prespeective gave the wet market Patient 0 more visibility. To this day, half this thread is people with conspiracy theories hidding behind the lab leak. Makes a conversation about it almost entirely useless when you engage with someone and a few messages in they say the media is jewish and wanted to destroy the economy with lockdowns to make trump lose (this is a comment on this very thread further up, although i think they have been shadowbanned already)
I was being slightly hyperbolic. A good chhunk outright said it, another good group was using plausible deniability, which means if pressed they might say thats not what they meant. Makes separating them quite hard
> Are you unable to distinguish that assertion from the assertion that the engineered weapon was intentionally deployed?
I am not. The issue is not that either. The issue is "The origin of COVID-19".
When it came out two main theories appeared. Either the wet market where it was first noticed, or a lab leak in a lab over an hour away that was studying coronaviruses.
The two were studied by the scientific community, china put a lot of hurdles and the best availeble evidence pointed towards the wetmarket.
While this was happening, a number of conspiracies started, many of which pointed towards China as a bioweapons manufacturer (something that is very illegal). Those theories included that china was not studying viruses but manufacturing them (that is a very key distinction) and the theoreis then spawn over if China leaked it to test it, or infected its own population etc. Theories adjacent to this were heavily repeated by a number of news outlets, mayorly OAN a far right news station. The great smoke screen was that when pressed they could always fall back on "the lab leak theory" which is way more sensible.
Essentially the problem is the lab leak theory meant two very different things. It should have been called the accident leak and the bio weapon theory, but both were called lab leak and people who mean bioweapon hide behind the larger, more defensible lab leak umbrella.
You can't read much into the early case data that David Relman described as "hopelessly impoverished". There were likely much earlier cases based on excess mortality data (a key reason WHO haven't accepted market origin). Also, there is a clear sampling bias in the cases in the article cited above. https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23
Why was the wet market on the other side of the city the only identified outbreak site if it came from the lab? There were/are many markets on the other side of the river that would be much more relevant to residents living and working on that side.
People looking up flu symptoms in the middle of winter is not evidence of anything abnormal.
I don’t understand the intellectual effort going into the lab leak theory… it feels like some kind of state run propaganda piece, I assume to just keep a negative view on China in people’s minds. It’s crazy given that whatever the truth there is no consequence… literally an inconsequential endeavour
It wasn't exclusively in the wet market, it was in lots of places.
America was involved with that lab, too. It should really be the rest of the world with a negative view of America and China.
China is a fantastic country filled with amazing people, culture, history and so on. It is quite possible to recognise a country's positive characteristics while questioning specific actions by some of the people within that country. This is as true of China as it is of any other country.
>They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.
That procedure is pretty much exactly what you'd have to do to make covid in a lab. Assuming that's true, it's pretty much a smoking gun.
>The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. They said the Wuhan scientists...
So presumably The Times has the names of the researchers and someone like the FBI could investigate and see what correspondence if any they have with Wuhan about it.
As others have noted, this is mostly wrong. The WIV is the only lab in the world ever to publish a genome for RaTG13. They'd published a portion (under a different name, Ra4991) before the onset of the pandemic. The similarity to SARS-CoV-2 made it obvious they had something relevant, so they published the rest after. Perhaps you meant there's no evidence that the WIV ever had live RaTG13, and that's true--indeed, there's no evidence that anyone ever has, and some highly speculative claims that it might be an in silico fraud.
It's also not the closest relative anymore. From your other comments here, I believe your knowledge is about a year behind; you're repeating many old arguments that even those arguing most strongly against a possible research-related origin have long since abandoned.
> The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab [0].
The market was the first big cluster, but the earliest cases show much less structure. See the paragraph beginning "A later study by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid", which I believe is intended as explanation for that map (though that's not completely clear to me).
In any case, there's no reason to expect the first identified cluster in the same location as the first introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 must have been introduced into other continents at airports and seaports; but the first clusters were elsewhere, at nursing homes, choir practices, and other locations where the (a) the virus spread easily, and (b) the patients are likely to get sick enough for people to notice.
> Furthermore, several different isolates were found in the market, indicating that SARSCoV2 had been circulating before the epidemic took off.
I guess you're referring here to Pekar et. al? Their "different isolates" are literally just two SNPs apart. Roughly 1/10 of human-to-human transmissions result in two lineages at least that different, so this seems intuitively like it could easily evolve in cryptic human spread. Pekar did some complicated epidemiological modeling that claims otherwise, but I don't think it means much; see for example the criticism at
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1
https://twitter.com/NimwegenLab/status/1563490916006264833
https://twitter.com/nizzaneela/status/1509431997713764352
I'm curious how you came up with this heuristic. It seems to me that there's plenty of incentives to study benign viruses: the primary one being to develop a deeper understanding of the biology of viruses in general.
The article says that the viruses from Mojiang were transported to the Wuhan lab and studied there.
May be a good idea to get acquainted with inference to best explanation, and to understand that 'direct evidence' should not automatically be awarded epistemological primacy over 'circumstantial evidence' (or what you're calling 'innuendo').
Prolly you'll have a hard time finding a metropolis which wasnt researching corona viruses.
Converting the distance in phylogenetic analysis to evolutionary distance is based on natural gene drafting rate, which does not consider passaging with human selections.
This is false
A closer relative was found like a year or so later, can't remember the name though.
https://project-evidence.github.io/
Just to be clear what I posted seemed like Chinese people exploring what actually happened more than a blame based document or fear mongering based document.
I would really encourage you to give it a chance because it is very impressive investigative work and, really, an impressive exercise of investigative journalism from a country that hates investigative journalists.
You clearly have not read it because your comment makes no sense in the context of that article.
If you don't want to be curious then don't be.
I don't understand your position that we should not seek the truth. Somehow knowing the truth about a past event can have no bearing on the future?
I guess I also don't see why articles like this are needed to work on pandemic prevention.
I can totally see why people need them for at the very least getting clicks and attention.
Nearly every airline regulation that results in air travel being so safe today is because we spend such an enormous amount of resources investigating the root causes of accidents with the NTSB. Try suggesting to them “it doesn’t matter why the plane crashed, let’s just push for generic improvements to planes”. You’ll get (rightfully so) laughed out of the room.
Seriously, what are we expecting to learn. This is like a plane at the bottom of the ocean never to be found. We'll never know what happened to this plane, and we don't have to.
We know that situation was probably poor pilot mental health but pilots still have to lie about antidepressants. We don't need to find that plane to fix that.
You've decided the truth is unknowable, no good would come from knowing the truth, and searching for the truth is itself causing harm.
You edited in your quip about antidepressants and it just made your point even worse. There was still a significant amount to learn about what he did to the copilot and what the actual flight route was.
There were multiple parties outside of the plane that had to be incompetent in many of the possible flight paths for MH370. Your solution of “stuff more antidepressants down everyone’s throats” will not work for the coverage gaps in ATC monitoring and handoffs between boundaries.
Your lackadaisical approach to “well we spent a few days looking into this and can’t see anything obvious or think there is anything to gain by knowing the truth” is far from acceptable in any root cause analysis related to loss of life.
How do you unequivocally know that this can’t be traced back to a manufacturing or design flaw in a piece of containment equipment used by many BSL labs around the world?
The answer is that you can’t because there is no investigation right now. Burying your head in the sand is never good enough, not even if it’s politically convenient.
This is a shockingly ignorant statement or willfully misleading. Air safety has improved by at least an order of magnitude[1] because of the culture of seeking out the truth, regardless of how disruptive or inconvenient.
It is very rare to have a commercial airline crash now and significantly rarer to not understand exactly why (MH370 being a notable exception).
Wherever you got that “often you can’t even got that” is complete and utter bullshit.
1. https://news.mit.edu/2020/study-commercial-flights-safer-eve...
This part doesn't make sense to me. Coronavirus is known to mutate constantly and rapidly. Having a vaccine against a strand might provide a temporary advantage, but that advantage would subside quickly. Coronaviruses would make poor bioweapons considering how impossible it would be to control them.
If an army wants to develop a virus-based weapon wouldn't there be better viruses to base it from than COVIDs?
Moreover, the first SARS-CoV-2 variant took a long time to start mutating and even then it was only minor mutations. If you release an extremely infectious very deadly virus and you have a vaccine for it, then at that moment it's a Deus Ex scenario and whoever can manufacture the vaccine can take over the world because your enemies are now collapsing and will do anything to obtain the vaccine including giving up their own autonomy. Guess that's the theory, at least.
As to why SARS-CoV-2: because it's airborne and can spread long distances via gas-like clouds (which is why lockdowns, masks, wiping surfaces etc didn't work). You can't really get better if you want to very rapidly infect a whole country.
The U.S. has done this, and indeed, most of our public health infrastructure is an outgrowth of it.
This is consistent with David Martin's speech in Europe: https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1661698114917646336
I haven't checked the "publicly available references" but many who inssist on a natural cause read about the bat theory in the first few months and then haven't updated & aren't willing to update their models.
If you find any faults that can really change the results in the analysis Rootclaim made, I would be interested.
Perhaps because it is slightly interesting what caused the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu? Because millions of people died? Because knowing the cause could perhaps prevent something similar happen again? Perhaps prevent millions of deaths?
I'm astonished by this question.
Now I believe you said it. Maybe not exactly "made up priors" so pardon me for the misquote. But I'd be interested to see if you can make a distinction.
Meanwhile, it seems quite likely to have produced the correct results so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is an interesting way to analyze the problem but the set of criteria and weights applied at each step are made up.
The flaw is that you can use this form of analysis to reach any conclusion you want.
For example, the "Already well adapted" section -- a "2x" factor for lab escape. We wouldn't even be thinking about this virus if it wasn't well adapted to spread among humans. So that's baked into the ground and isn't a factor of anything.
Then take "Furin cleavage" -- a whopping 8x factor for lab escape relative to zoonotic. This is the same thing as already well adapted, so now we've got a combined 16x for something that should be 1x.
The weight for "Chimera" -- another whopping 8x for lab escape relative to zoonotic -- seems really high for something that is found both in nature and in labs that merely "seems less likely to combine in nature". We should probably be arguing about whether this is 1.5x or 2x.
The real conclusion is we don't know. The Chinese probably do, but it would be a very closely guarded secret and obviously they would never admit to a lab leak. I lot of people hate ambiguity and want an answer, but in this case it doesn't seem that we are going to get one.
A complicating factor is that some (much?) of the funding came from the US. Which means admitting to a leak is against the interest of not only Chinese but also the US government which would have a hell of a time explaining to taxpayers how pandemic was engineered on their money doing research banned in the US. (Though I don't think US government played any part in resisting the research tbh, CCP probably did all that at their accord.)
I think all in all we shouldn't give up, and even if we don't find the actual data I don't see the world can be okay without big fat follow up over not some lab making a mistake (humans make those) but all obstruction of research into the origins of what could have been an extinction level event if the virus was a bit better engineered, whether it came from Chinese communist party or US scientists scared for grant money.
Community / site for collective truth-seeking. Possibly integrated with Metaculus.
One can submit new pieces of evidene which would be commentable (in threads), votable, and programmable (to toggle / affect of other submitted evidence threads).
Users can adjust the weights, vote on them (to generate a certain consensus / prediction), and even toggle of pieces of evidence manually.
The site automatically gives the probabilities for different scearions. I don't have an instant vision on how "all" possible scenarios would be chosen.
It sounds a little like this RootClaim (I just learned about here) https://www.rootclaim.com/how-rootclaim-works but with the users adjusting & voting on weights?
This is a strawman demonstrator I'm wware of w r t origins probability surveying & calculation. https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/18631
It's intended for any one user to evaluate ther priors and see how they stack up all together. like that your idea woukd aggregate & have comments & a voting mechanism,
By the way, why do people weigh zoonotic spillover so high relatively to lab leak accident? There were lab leaks before even in Beijing, eg. of the original SARS when it was researched. That SARS kills faster so it didn't get to infect too many people... And that's only what's documented, considering it's China there could've been any number of other times.
Intentional leak chance is low but accidental leak is so likely it's surprising this pandemic didn't happen before considering security practies that were known and raised questions before the pandemic. But everyone magically forgets about it. All because some US scientists wanted grant money too much and so laughed everyone who disagrees out of the room.
>Thus, the ratio of zoonotic:bioweapon:zoonotic collection:modified lab escape is 2:5:100:50, or a reduction of a zoonotic origin by 50x, a bioweapon origin by 20x, and a lab escape by 0.5x.
Those aren't the same ratio.
>To account for the possibility that there is a yet unidentified reason why Wuhan is a more likely location for a zoonotic outbreak, these numbers are generously adjusted to a reduction of a zoonotic origin by 20x and a bioweapon origin by 15x, with lab escape remaining at 0.5x.
But what they actually apply is a reduction of a zoonotic origin by 20x and a bioweapon origin by 15x, with zoonotic collection at 2x. Which isn't the result of applying that adjustment to either of the original ratios, so apparently they've just applied the lab escape factor to wrong category
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-covid-vaccine/f...
Also consistent with:
https://public.substack.com/p/first-people-sickened-by-covid...
> The report he finally did submit stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and killed 35% of the humans it infected. The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide. (A chimeric virus is one that combines fragments of different viruses.) These revelations prompted the NIH’s grant specialists to ask a critical question: Should the work be subject to a federal moratorium on what was called gain-of-function research?
> But the [2015 research paper he cited](https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985) was not particularly reassuring. In it, Shi Zhengli and a preeminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina, Ralph Baric, mixed components of SARS-like viruses from different species, and created a novel chimera that was able to directly infect human cells. (Baric did not respond to written questions seeking comment.)
> If anything, the MERS study Daszak proposed was even riskier. So he pitched a compromise to the NIH: that if any of the recombined strains showed 10 times greater growth than a natural virus, “we will immediately: i) stop all experiments with the mutant, ii) inform our NIAID Program Officer and the UNC [Institutional Biosafety Committee] of these results and iii) participate in decision making trees to decide appropriate paths forward.”
> This mention of UNC brought a puzzled response from an NIH program officer, who pointed out that the proposal had said the research would be performed at the WIV. “Can you clarify where the work with the chimeric viruses will actually be performed?” the officer wrote. Ten days later, with still no response from Daszak, the program officer emailed him again. On June 27, Daszak responded, buoyant as ever:
> “You are correct to identify a mistake in our letter. UNC has no oversight of the chimera work, all of which will be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology…. We will clarify tonight with Prof. Zhengli Shi exactly who will be notified if we see enhanced replication…my understanding is that I will be notified straight away, as [principal investigator], and that I can then notify you at NIAID. Apologies for the error!”
> Allowing such risky research to go forward at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was “simply crazy, in my opinion,” says Jack Nunberg, director of the Montana Biotechnology Center. “Reasons are lack of oversight, lack of regulation, the environment in China,” where scientists who publish in prestigious journals get rewarded by the government, creating dangerous incentives. “So that is what really elevates it to the realm of, ‘No, this shouldn’t happen.’”
In general, his actions make clear he's much more aligned with the Chinese government than the US, so extending Daszak to US govt purely based off of nationality seems unjust.
> On January 30, Daszak went on CGTN America, the U.S. outpost for Chinese state television, and said two things that proved to be spectacularly wrong. “I’m very optimistic…that this outbreak will begin to slow down,” he said. “We’re seeing a small amount of human-to-human transmission in other countries, but it’s not uncontrollable." He went on to conclude that the Chinese government was taking all necessary steps “to be open and transparent, and work with WHO, and talk to scientists from around the world, and where necessary, bring them in to help. They’re doing...
(1) The institute sought funding to research something (A), which Covid could result from. (Said later they didn't do the planned research), but funding from the military appears to have been given.
(1.1) They planned to do the research at the time and approximate place where Covid later emerged.
(2) Protections at the lab were not what they should have been.
(2.2) Lab scientists had previously created a highly infectious super-coronavirus (not Covid-19) with a very high kill-rate that in all probability would never have emerged in nature. Their tests showed no known (at that time) way to effectively limit its spread were it to leak.
(3) NO animal testing was reported in a wide vicinity around the the Hunan market. Samples of Covid found in the market were NOT from animals (B).
(3.1) The market is a busy place in the center of the city where the virus would almost certainly be once it's spreading between people.
(3.2) There is some evidence that researchers from the lab were hospitalized with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019, and one of their relatives died.
(4) The biggest hotspot of people reporting illness via social media (in the month before the province was locked down on January 23) was at the institute, though this was partly hidden in initial reports. The first case in Britain was recorded a week later.
(A) The Wuhan Institute of Virology sought funding for inserting a furin cleavage site. The institute is a 40-minute drive from the Huanan Seafood market.
(B) In January 2020, Chinese officials cleared the market without testing live animals. The presence of SARS-CoV-2 was from environmental samples (animal cage, hair-and-feather–removal machine, etc). Covid-susceptible animals were present but NOT tested. The study of those samples was criticized for not having any animal samples.
(C) Information above drawn from archive.ph/L2BSO and comments and links here in this HN thread.
---------------------------
"The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak. The closest relatives to Covid known were too far from Covid to have developed into Covid on their own in a short time. So bringing in dangerous viruses and accidentally leaking them is an unlikely cause." Earlier reporting by the Times: archive.ph/Mkqox
Genome statistical estimates indicate the "relatives" are decades away from Covid. In February 2020, RaTG13 was identified as the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, sharing 96.1% nucleotide identity. It was found near the town of Tongguan in Mojiang county in Yunnan, China. However, in 2022, scientists found three closer matches 530 km south, in Feuang, Laos, designated as BANAL-52 (96.8% identity), BANAL-103 and BANAL-236. However, it is alleged that one virus at the Wuhan institute was an even closer match to Covid-19 than RaTG13. Note that bat viruses had never been known to harm humans. Intermediate animals apparently catching a virus from bats and passing it to humans had been known to happen.
In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In published papers, military scientists are listed as working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is the military academy’s base.
"Scientists with close relationships with the Wuhan Institute of Virology said it was their belief that there was vaccine research going on in the fall of 2019, pertinent to Covid-19 vaccination"
"Investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power."
In May 2020, one of the key researchers died from unconfirmed causes at age 54.
"On November 19, the safety director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences made a visit, according to the institute’s website. He addressed a meeting of the institute’s leadership with important 'oral and written' instructions from China’s president, Xi Jinping, regarding 'a complex and grave situation'. "
"In the first months of the pandemic, many Chinese scientists visited bat caves in Yunnan to see whether they could find a place where Covid may have originated.... 7 scientists attempting to visit were told the Moijang mine (known source of at least one Covid-like coronavirus) was closed, so they sampled bats in another abandoned copper mine nearby. On the first day of their work, police arrived, seized the samples and took them to their station, where they were interrogated and detained for 48 hours. Officers also went to their hotel and seized the samples they had collected from elsewhere. Even though the team had approval to test in the area, they were ordered to leave. Searching for bat viruses was banned in Yunnan in early 2021"
Also posted on HN 2 years ago with ... zero comments"
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nih.gov%2Fabout-...
John Ratcliffe, former Director of National Intelligence: “My informed assessment, as a person with as much or more access than anyone to our government’s intelligence during the initial year of the virus outbreak and pandemic onset, has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense. From a view inside the IC, if our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed side-by-side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a naturally occurring “spillover” theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long and overwhelming while the “spillover” side would be nearly empty.”
https://oversight.house.gov/release/covid-origins-part-2-hea...
The Furin cleavage site is one of the more compelling pieces of evidence. 1.5 years before the outbreak, the Wuhan Institute applied for a grant from Darpa to explore mutating coronaviruses to make them more infectious to humans, particularly through the addition of a Furin cleavage site. (Darpa declined to fund the research).
The Covid-19 virus is notable for being the only coronavirus to have a Furin cleavage site. Not only that, but it appears to be basically a perfect mutation that specifically modifies the 12 nucleotides necessary for the Furin site, without modifying other base pairs.
Here's a quote from email excerpt included in the recent Congress hearing:
"Before I left the office for the ball, I aligned nCoV with the 96% bat CoV sequenced at WIV. Except for the RBD the S proteins are essentially identical at the amino acid level – well all but the perfect insertion of 12 nucleotides that adds the furin site. S2 is over its whole length essentially identical. I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function – that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level – its stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted."
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Lette...