The virus having been accidentally released from the lab doesn't require that the virus was modified in or by the lab between the time of leak and the time of collection.
No, but a virus suddenly showing up that was pre-adapted to replication in human bodies and didn't follow the usual zoonotic origin scenario of traceable series of mutations over time in both animal and human hosts, along with the sudden appearance of a furin cleavage site not found in any other relatives of said virus, points to (1) likely serial passage through human-gene-modified mice and human cell cultures and (2) CRISPR-related insertion of a human-like furin cleavage site into the adapted virus.
This kind of research is dangerous and the risks far outweigh any putative benefits. There are literally hundreds of mammalian viruses out in nature that pose zero risk to humans but which could be modified by these procedures to generate novel pandemic diseases with which the human immune system has had no prior experience.
Despite having a novel furin cleavage site in the exact location as stated in a grant proposal, a furin cleavage site that happens to make the virus extremely infectious towards humans all while leaving no trace of how it adapted this feature.
This seems to me more like a desperate attempt to avoid any regulations or attention drawn to this reckless research conducted all over the world!
No, it is amazingly unlikely that you'd see an insertion like that arise through some kind of random serial passage.
In nature that happens by recombination which takes many millions of infections to emerge. In the lab you are just replicating that process by serial passage through animals where you might have a dozen animals serially infected. And the chances are probably lower because it is less likely the lab animals would wind up coinfected with another virus that would act as the source material. "Gain of function" research isn't magic.
A strange document. Clearly written for public release but containing reactions of apparently sensitive clarification markings.
Moreover it contains absolutely nothing of well publicized US involvement in relevant coronavirus research with WIV.
I'm definitely curious of what DOE facilities have scientists and researchers who would have useful opinions on coronavirus. This article just reminded me more of that question.
DOE lab Sandia at least was closely involved with analysis of the anthrax powder in the letters mailed to Senators Daschle and Leahy on 10/09/2001. Note that this research didn't support the Bruce Ivins hypothesis as he didn't have the technical capacity required:
> "Not only did the Sandia researchers spot silicon, they also found tin, oxygen, and iron all within the spore. The researchers, led by Sandia chemist Joseph Michael, have presented their findings at various scientific meetings since 2008, reporting the presence of all the elements found. But because silicon had always been in the investigative limelight, tin never got much attention. Until now. The new paper puts the spotlight on tin, which the authors claim has been brushed under the carpet by FBI investigators. The FBI has "avoided public mention of the extraordinary presence of Tin," the paper says."
While it's perhaps not widely known, the DOE National Labs have the best technical capabilities for investigating anything related to nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons whether of nation-state, terrorist-group, or lone-nut origin.
It’s amazing that we’re literally talking about a major geopolitical rival’s negligence leading to the deaths of millions of people, but the right wing talking point continues to be “how can we pin this on Fauci?” Americans have been taught to hate each other more than anyone else.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. You've posted good comments in the past, so this should be easy to fix.
Conservatives need for the lab leak theory to be correct as they were wrong about basically all other points on covid. They refused to believe in masks, lockdowns, and social distancing and paid the ultimate price at a much higher rate. [0]
Lockdowns were a failure, hence why millions of children were irreparably damaged by them socially and academically.
The legacy of lockdown proponents is plummeting test scores and massive IQ drops, because children were merely collateral damage to their hypochondria. [1] [2]
I don't think your link proves your point like you think it does. It's a correlation, not causation. The question is, what other variables may impact conservatives.
One of the main factors in if you die from getting covid is age. And conservatives tend to be older.
I would love to see an age normalized version of that data. I'd bet it would be about a wash.
The only people in my circle of friends and family who died from COVID were middle age or older obese men who were ideologically opposed to taking a vaccine. I do have a number of conservative friends & family who did vaccinate, none of them got more than the sniffles.
Anecdotally, there are plenty of people with obesity or other risk factors who died despite being fully vaccinated.
Meanwhile, I had a confirmed COVID infection early on, before vaccines were available, and had nothing more than the sniffles. I then had two more confirmed infections after having three vaccine doses, and had the same sniffles.
These anecdotes, like yours, are not very useful since they only confirm what we already know: no vaccine is 100% effective, and no risk factor is a death sentence.
Huh, the vaccine uptake where I live was aberrantly low. Highly conservative. I know lots of older people, including many retired, of retirement age. I don't know anyone who has suffered a fatality from the disease - and many of those I do know who contracted would have contracted the alpha variant prior to vaccine deployment.
i had no idea the lab leak theory was conservative. i suppose it was silly of me not to realize every opinion that a person can have has already been claimed by liberals or conservatives, such that holding that opinion means you're more liberal/less conservative, or more conservative/less liberal.
> i suppose it was silly of me not to realize every opinion that a person can have has already been claimed by liberals or conservatives
It's a political topic, so it naturally has positions staked out by both sides. There's not much reason to care about it one way or the other unless you have a tribal viewpoint.
Unfortunately, American politics end up being very divisive. The right has been calling this the China virus since the beginning. Anything that can be used to show that's 'true' will result in the right's echo chamber amplifying it.
As for the left, well I am not sure there is an official position other than waiting for more data. China is definitely sus but they are always like that from a western perspective so I don't know that I weight it much.
Other than the smugness in watching the right be wrong again, I am not aware of anyone on the left that is invested in either outcome.
It's a matter of waiting for the crucial data being found. How long did it take us to pin point the source of other pandemics?
In anticipation of vindication, does the "left" not themselves then hope for the release of information which runs counter to their opponents, thus by consensus, a sword to fall on? Since without it their silly little sports team would be on the losing side. And of course in the event they're wrong they can run back to their echo chambers and self-manufacture plausible deniability. As will the right if proven wrong. In both cases either side wants to be correct — just for that little hit of "I told you so."
Of course this is all just silly bullshit. I have some inkling of hope that the truth will be made plain, but that's so implausible given current regimes and political paradigms that the only reasonable thing to do is ignore whatever is concluded, at least anytime in our lifetimes.
As someone that believed in masks from the very beginning. The CDC and Fauci himself said masks were useless at the start of the pandemic. Stop being a pawn.
My understanding is that they said that as a path to avoid hoarding of N95 supplies which they knew were in short supply for those who most needed it at the time, medical professionals.
That doesn't aren't right, precisely because it validates conspiracy minded people.
The point is that Fauci and the CDC lied to the public about the efficacy of masks, even if they lied with "good" intentions. They simply could've explained that supplies were low and asked people not to hoard them. Instead they lied (one of many times) and acted surprised when people started distrusting them.
> That doesn't aren't right, precisely because it validates conspiracy minded people.
That’s putting it far too lightly. It proved a “conspiracy” 100% true. I had masks early in the pandemic only because a “nutty” colleague said “they’re going to try to take the masks from us” and he brought me a box.
That's the explanation they came up with for why they were lying, but these people are self-admitted liars so why would you believe their lies any further?
If you are in charge of government and worried about mask availability, the right thing to do is pass laws seizing mask supplies. This is easy because they were almost all being imported from China anyway.
The worst possible thing to do would be to assert with 100% confidence that for scientific reasons masks don't work to the entire population including healthcare workers, and then later invert your position over night. Anyone who thinks this is a reasonable way to manage material logistics is clearly far too stupid to be in charge of anything, let alone critical government functions.
Wow, what a statement considering literally everything you just listed turned out to be a complete joke. I could not have made a better argument to prove a point.
conservatives want the lab leak theory to be correct? They controlled the levers of power at the time and didn’t do anything about it, didn’t get redress for the death, suffering, loss, and economic harm. I would expect they’d want the waters as muddy as possible.
> The program also provides innovative analysis to anticipate new and developing terrorist threats involving the use of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive weapons and investigate opportunities to counter them. Z Program also works to understand the state of foreign weapons of mass destruction programs; informs U.S. counterproliferation decisions, policies, and efforts; and develops supporting technology solutions to dissuade or prevent states from acquiring WMD-related technologies, materials, and expertise.
Basically their nuclear expertise plus the Cold war (and 9/11) caused them to become a central actor within the US government to look into biological, chemical, and related weapons. So they have a lot of cross discipline expertise there now.
Doesn't explain why the WIV database of in-house coronavirus sequences was removed from the web by what, late August 2019? Also molecular clock approaches of known genomic sequences of different Sars-CoV2 isolates point to an emergence somewhere in the Sept-Oct range IIRC, and that's probably an underestimate. The fact that the military took over the labs and their ventilation system was redone around this timeframe also points to the Chinese government knowing they had a problem around three months before it became public knowledge.
I think the problem is that America's Director of National Intelligence just isn't saying what people had hoped to hear.
"We continue to have no indication that the Wuhan Institute of Virology's pre-pandemic research holdings included SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic."
"All Intelligence Community agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon."
I just read the executive summary, but based on it I'm assuming this is just the bare minimum they're willing to do to comply with some congressional order.
Lab leak theorists don’t believe Covid was developed as a weapon. They believe it was an accidental leak from a lab doing normal, non-warfare virological research. The quoted phrasing makes me think that they know it was a leak but redirect the conversation by saying it wasn’t a biological weapon.
They address all of the possibilities. They aren't redirecting, they are being through. Summarizing it, the intro says, "Some agencies think that the first person to get the virus got it naturally, some others think that the first person to get it was exposed to it from the WIV. No agencies think that it was bioengineered."
Many conspiracy theorists have claimed it was a bio-weapon, along with other batshit stuff like Bill Gates & 5G. Read both quotes, not just the last one.
When I wrote “lab leak theorists” I had in mind experts who think it was a leak. I was not thinking of kooks. I should have been more explicit. In general, I think it best for intelligence agencies not to write things to counter what looney people think. Such people can’t be convinced of anything that is contrary to their lunacy.
A public statement is for the public, kooks included, and when some of those kooks are political figures that makes it even more reasonable to make such a statement.
Apparently it was written with kooks in mind. I’d guess you are right in that they are writing for Congressmen. There are kooks there. Overall, I think it a bad idea for intelligence agencies to write public statements to combat nutty ideas (unless such ideas are held by Congressmen).
Poisoning the well. Not alot of people subscribe to the COVID is 5G sickness theory aside from Facebook boomers, while Bill Gates' ideology and history of dodgy dealings in foreign countries is not even remotely comparable.
It sure seemed like you were saying the "Bill Gates wants to kill/control you with COVID-19/Vaccine" conspiracies had more merit than the "5G Causes COVID-19" conspiracies. Both of them were crackpot theories.
Professionals holding this believe it was probably an accidental leak. Conspiracy theorists and laypeople believe it's probably a bioweapon. It's hard to have discussions about this because the two positions get lumped together.
Lab leak proponents contain multitudes. Some believe it was developed as a weapon, and some believe it was being studied normally. Some believe the leak was accidental, and some believe it was a result of sabotage. Some seemingly can't decide what they believe, deploying arguments with no clear regard for which actual scenarios a given argument would support as long as it pokes a hole in the mainstream narrative.
> "All Intelligence Community agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon."
This strawman is getting old.
A tiny portion of people believe or assert it's a bioweapon. That is relatively unlikely and even less likely to be proven true, even if it is. Many people suspect it leaked from the lab. That's relatively likely. But let's just completely ignore that and focus on debunking a crazier theory that few people believe.
I think a biological weapon deliberately released makes more sense than an accidental release from a lab that happens to look exactly like it spilled over at a wet market.
SARS-CoV-1 had an accidental "lab leak" and instead of infecting a market it killed the mother of the researcher who was infected with it.
But it does not appear to have spilled over at the wet market. The Chinese CDC published a paper stating it was just a super spreader event. Plus the samples were taken way too long after the virus has been spreading. The market just reflects sampling bias.
the first quote is claiming an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.
we don’t really know which information actually was gathered here (it could literally be zero and that sentence would still be true), so there’s no way to turn that sentence into evidence of anything. it’s fairly meaningless.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology was working on adding a unique furin cleavage site to a bat coronoavirus strain to make it bind to human ACE-2 receptors.
This is factual, because the grant proposals are out there and DARPA in the US turned them down:
Suddenly, we have a global pandemic featuring a bat coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that binds to human ACE-2 receptors, out of Wuhan, China, directly next to the lab where they were studying this.
What are the chances?
We know what they were studying because all of the grants, emails, and other information from NIH to EcoHealth Alliance have been acquired via the Freedom of Information Act:
Neither of those are definitive sources of evidence. Grant proposals that were denied and statements that the furin site could've evolved naturally or been lab manipulated, aren't really evidence that COVID-19 leaked from a lab.
definitive sources of evidence ? no
statements about furin sites being evidence of a lab leak ? no
But clearly enough for quite a number of people in scientific leadership positions to state publicly that any discussion of a lab leak is a conspiracy theory and to ridicule and censor anyone who thought so.
In fact, these scientific leaders were so good, and so on top of things, that they were able to do the research and examine the evidence, and come up with these strong unequivocal conclusions only a few weeks after covid started to spread worldwide (feb 2020)
Even if you had literal witnesses it wouldn't be 'definitive' evidence, I'm not sure why you're using this argument as if you can't make claims about things you didn't directly observe.
Well I don't even think there's enough evidence here to win a civil trial where the bar is lower than criminal. Don't act like you have the answer while citing sources that literally say your claim might not be what happened. Y'all just want to jump to a conclusion.
Ok…but why is that so important to you? I guess I am trying to understand the motivation behind people who are insisting on splitting hairs to downplay or denigrate the circumstantial evidence that points toward a lab leak.
I mean I can understand if there was an accidental lab leak of an engineered virus that killed millions was created in a Chinese lab with American tax dollars why those involved might want that information suppressed and to go away but why is it important to Klinky to take up that cause?
That’s the thing, I am certainly interested if governments are engineering a possible plague and accidentally this plague leaked out and killed many. That has a widespread obvious general interest to the public. What I don’t understand is why laypeople with no connection to the possible groups and government supposedly involved would be motivated to take up the cause against the speculation. What motivates them? I don’t see the general interest value to cause them to choose that side of the debate.
I literally said speculate all you want. Just don't expect your speculation to be magically accepted as truth when that's not what the evidence supports.
Have you spoken about your concerns with your congresspersons & asked them to support bans on risky gain-of-function research? That'd be something tangible you could do than just speculating on top of speculation.
Why deflect here? What is your motivation to discount and argue against using circumstantial evidence to draw a conclusion possibility when neither side of the debate has the definitive evidence that you seek?
Does it somehow bother your politics in some way? Are you just being a contrarian for contrary sake? Your desire for evidential purity in a situation where you are most likely not involved is really strange. I am just interested in why that is. What is motivating you here? Please articulate it.
> discount and argue against using circumstantial evidence
Didn't discount or argue against using circumstantial evidence, nor did I argue against speculating. I am stating the evidence only supports the possibility, it does not prove it happened. Please stop making up false arguments.
>neither side of the debate has the definitive evidence
The original comment you replied made no claim that those two links were definitive proof of a lab leak, only that they were known to be factual. They may be circumstantial but circumstantial evidence can still be provably true. You made the leap to assume that original commenter meant it as definitive proof of a lab leak in your comment.
I read the comment to mean thatit was offered as a strong circumstantial evidence because it was indisputably true due to the public records that support it.
Every study I see leaning towards a lab leak origin conclusion tend to be pretty specific to use words like “likely” or “probable” because of the lack of definitive evidence. Circumstantial evidence can be powerful, especially when the other side does not have a set of similar or better circumstantial evidence in their favor.
>made no claim that those two links were definitive proof
They implied their confidence through the rhetorical use of "What are the chances?". That was not a genuine question.
> circumstantial evidence can still be provably true
Circumstantial evidence MUST be true to be usable.
The circumstantial evidence provided in the articles was:
- There was a denied research grant that was going to look into modifying the furin site of coronaviruses. It was denied though, and as far as we know, never done.
- The furin site was complex, but could've evolved naturally.
- Some scientists think it could have been of lab origin.
- Some scientists think it could have been zoonotic origin.
All of this is true, but it doesn't mean a lab leak is "probable" or "more than likely".
>Every study I see leaning towards a lab leak origin
So even the studies that lean towards the theory qualify that the evidence is not definitive. We're back where we started.
Definitive or Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: No
Probable or More Likely Than Not: No
A strong possibility: Yes
There is not a consensus on the origin of COVID-19 at this time.
> Have you spoken about your concerns with your congresspersons & asked them to support bans on risky gain-of-function research? That'd be something tangible you could do than just speculating on top of speculation.
US law already bans US funding of gain-of-function research.
Is this true? I saw NIH lifted a moratorium in 2017. There's currently an unpassed bill to stop Fed funding of gain-of-function research. It does not seem banned either completely or from federal funding.
Why is that not important to you? I am not "splitting hairs" or "denigrating" anything. I am reading the sources cited and not jumping to a conclusion. The evidence here probably isn't even enough to win a civil trial.
No matter if it was lab leak or not, my problem with the Chinese government is the way they tried to handle it. Can help but draw parallels to the Chernobyl accident.
> It does seem odd they would want to set up a lab in close proximity to what they wanted to study
The lab was nowhere near the site of what they were studying.
The coronavirus strains came from a cave 600 miles away and brought to Wuhan for further study.
Again, none of these viruses have a unique furin cleavage site for ACE-2.
If you read the FOIA document requests, one of the people who got grant money said "I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature . . . it’s stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted.”.
This person afterwards did a complete u-turn and signed onto the infamous publication in The Lancet. A lot of people quickly did a u-turn around the exact same time.
> The lab was nowhere near the site of what they were studying.
> The coronavirus strains came from a cave 600 miles away and brought to Wuhan for further study.
The best theory I've come across is that patient zero was a person collecting bats in caves for the lab in Wuhan. By all records, they wore woefully inadequate PPE (unlike the people in the lab itself who had well-established procedures).
This theory explains the jump from animal to human, the geographic origin, the reason why China didn't allow any outside investigations, and why most geneticists believe it likely had a zoological origin. (Yes, that last bit remains true no matter how badly the conspiracy theorists want it to be false.)
Whenever I see a claim of this type, I always wonder how you back it up?
I'm not saying that most geneticists don't believe what you're saying, because I have no clue what most members of any profession believe about anything. I have plenty of gut feelings, but how do you go beyond that?
Did you mean most geneticists that you know? That you've seen articles from?
> The best theory I've come across is that patient zero was a person collecting bats in caves for the lab in Wuhan.
There are literally millions of people in China who live in close proximity to bats. You don't have to invoke the 1-in-a-million lab worker here (who will be much more careful than the other 999,999 people, anyways). There are literally people who go shovel bat poop out of caves for a living. Then there are all the millions of farmed animals that have contact with bats - this is how the original SARS got into people.
A lab worker getting infected in a cave and then going back to Wuhan is not the best theory. It's an extremely improbable explanation for the pandemic, when you realize just how much contact people and farmed animals have with bats.
Can you point to a non-biased source that explains this in more detail?
I'm not a biologist, I don't have the slightest idea what the heck a furin cleavage site is, and so whether this is a red herring or a smoking gun.
But if you think this is such a smoking gun, can you point to somebody who explains in detail for a general audience what it means, why it's true, and how statistically unlikely it would be for it to be natural?
I just don't have anywhere near the background to know whether your comment is valid, but would like to know more.
If it were fairly controversial, why are you citing a paper in PNAS, the Journal Of Last Refuge for shitty science?
The only benefit of being a member of the academy of sciences is that you can dump into PNAS whatever hot trash you couldn't sell to any other journal, because they almost never reject papers from members.
Sorry, not going to do the “your cite doesn’t count because I don’t like some ineffable thing about it” game.
There’s a scientific claim in there; I will freely admit that I don’t know enough about viral genetics to have a valid opinion about it. What I do know is that people disagree about the implication of the furin cleavage site and it’s poor form not to acknowledge that.
Unique furin cleavage sites are very common in coronaviruses (see below paper). In fact, one of the papers linked from the intercept article you posted even mentions HCoV-HKU1 which also has a unique furin cleavage site at s1/s2.
I found all of this in about 10 minutes of googling and 15 minutes of reading. Which means I’m as qualified to weigh in on the subject as anyone else here now.
There are other coronaviruses (broad category) with furin cleavage sites, but there are not other sarbecoviruses (more narrow category) with furin cleavage sites. What those two facts tell you about the origin of Covid-19 is beyond my pay grade.
They are not common, and "10 minutes of googling" isn't going to get you anywhere.
Read my link to the FOIA documents. There are many redacted, for "national security".
Why would they be redacted for US national security if this came from a natural animal origin? It should at least give you pause to think. Possibly because the US was funding it via NIH grants to EcoHealth Alliance, which puts everyone in quite the bind? 6+ million dead and finger pointing between global superpowers probably isn't the outcome they had in mind.
"In April 2020 correspondence with EcoHealth Alliance, NIH wrote that it "received reports that the Wuhan Institute of Virology ... has been conducting research at its facilities in China that pose serious bio-safety concerns."
Page 54.
Or this, where the NIH is requesting the location of a scientist who disappeared?
Page 235.
"The Wuhan institute sequenced the genome of the new virus in January after receiving patient samples. In addition to requiring EcoHealth Alliance provide a sample of the sequenced coronavirus, the NIH said in its letter that EcoHealth Alliance must “explain the apparent disappearance” of a scientist who worked in the Wuhan lab."
There are too many other pages (between all the pages of redactions) worth reading to mention them all.
> Why would they be redacted for US national security if this came from a natural animal origin?
Because US intelligence has an asset in the lab perhaps?
I've heard it said that intelligence briefings are often 90-95% what you can find in any newspaper (or website nowadays), but the last few percentage points use various 'assets and techniques' that the other side doesn't want to get out.
Often it's not about knowing the what of actions and events, but the why.
I think there's some confusion and rewriting of history going on here.
The left wasn't denying the possibility that it leaked from the Wuhan lab. This was a theory very early on and it wasn't "denied" more that it wasn't substantiated.
It became political when it was asserted by people on the right, without any actual research or investigation, that was an intentional release from China.
Majority of that blame falls on Trump's inability to understand or articulate nuanced topics, particularly within geopolitical contexts. Instead of figuring out how to defeat the virus, majority of their energy went into pointing the finger at who to blame--a far easier task than being an actual leader.
Candidly, I think that this comment is actually the one rewriting history. There absolutely, 100% was complete denial, all originating on the political left, that a leak from a lab in China was a possibility. No confusion about intentional vs accidental - total denial of the possibility in any way shape or form. Suggesting it was possible, much less plausible or even likely, was labeled racist. Attempts were made (with limited success) to suppress discussion about it, by removing the topic from social media feed recommendations and what not.
Someone else can look up sources for all of this if they want, but I don't feel the need to. It was just a couple years ago, and I remember it perfectly.
I presume you just spend your time consuming healthier discourse than I do, which probably means you make some better choices in your free time than I do, so I'm not accusing you personally of this - but the walking back of all the effort made to deny and suppress discussion about this issue and pretend it never happened feels a lot like gaslighting.
Yeah that's what I remember too. Pelosi made a big statement about going to eat in Chinatown in response, and in general it was quickly an issue that the left pounced on so they could say Trump was an idiot and a racist.
> There absolutely, 100% was complete denial, all originating on the political left, that a leak from a lab in China was a possibility.
Well, that's just patently wrong. There was not "complete denial" by any means, as the majority of scientists were open to any and all possibility of origin. As such, the left--who was following those scientists--maintained the same position.
Saying that "there is no evidence that it was leaked" is not blanket denial. It is just that--there is no evidence, thus the possibility remains open but shouldn't be entertained as decisive.
Yet many politicians on the right, despite there being no evidence, dug their feet into the ground, convinced it was.
Not sure how you got the impression that not having evidence of something equates to "complete denial", but it's incorrect.
> Suggesting it was possible, much less plausible or even likely, was labeled racist.
We knew the virus originated in the Wuhan region of China. Don't pretend that suppression occurred because of simple discussion of the topic--it was predominantly due to politicians raging xenophobic wars by trying to rename it "The China Virus".
My recollection is closer to GP's than to yours, fwiw. Not exactly the same, but I do recall that a lot of the pushback from the left was because every publication on the right was busy hitching the "it originated as a lab-modified virus" motte to the "it was intentionally released/it was a bioweapon" bailey.
> There absolutely, 100% was complete denial, all originating on the political left, that a leak from a lab in China was a possibility. No confusion about intentional vs accidental - total denial of the possibility in any way shape or form. Suggesting it was possible, much less plausible or even likely, was labeled racist.
You are ignoring a few simple facts here.
1. The left doesn't congregate and worship at the cult of personality like the right does.
2. The first cases were in Wuhan. The right/Trumpets immediately blamed China. And this blame had exactly zero to do with any facts at the time. And in blaming China, hate crimes against all Asians increased dramatically, not even just Chinese.
3. It wasn't being called racist just saying it. It was racist being racists. Most people admitted it was a possibility, but definitely not confirmed in any way
The fact of the matter is it was turned into a political talking point.
The right says "IT IS THIS WAY BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT I BELIEVE AND IF YOU DON'T AGREE YOU ARE RADICAL LEFT"
Er, both sides are saying the same kinds of things: "it is this way, I believe the science says so, and if you don't agree with me you are xxxxx, yyyyy & maybe zzzzz."
This isn't a both sides situation. There was no science indicating that the virus was leaked from a lab.
One side said "the virus was leaked from a lab! we should call it Kung Flu or The China Virus!" and the other side said "there is no evidence that the virus was leaked from a lab".
They're not equal and opposite positions. One was kneejerk and unsubstantiated, the other was scientific.
I'm certain there were some people out there who took the lack of evidence as proof that it wasn't, but those people were wrong and unscientific as well.
The "wet market" theory that was pushed oddly hard at the start is probably the most racist theory. If you strive to be the least racist you would have to go with "engineered in collaboration with west lab leak".
Trump did use the terms "Kung Flu" & "China Virus". That kinda sums up his capacity to handle the crisis. It felt very much like the initial solution was to just blame China so much it'd magically go away by Easter. This rhetoric did have a negative impact on Asian communities.
Reality is there is still no definitive evidence of a lab leak and China is never going to admit to it. Trump's racist finger pointing didn't actually tangibly help US citizens. Even if he did prove it was China's fault, what was he going to do? Go to war with China? Cutoff trade our economy is inextricably tied to? It felt very much like a dog chasing a car. The dog has no clue what it'd do if it actually caught the car.
In the US, it's because this claim, or rejection of it, is strongly tied to political identity. Because the US is highly polarized right now, once political identity comes into play, you've left the realm of rationality and entered the realm of tribalism.
Your cited comment doesn't back what the commenter you're replying to is saying. It's just making a generic political statement. It does not have an opinion on the claims they're making.
My stance has always been that Lab Leak required the least number of assumptions. Intent was never factored in, just that it seems awfully strange to so vehemently deny even the possibility of it being a lab leak and not want to investigate. Could it have been the wet market? Sure, but it seems less likely.
There may be some interesting reckoning happening in a few years, but probably not. Like safe and effective vaccines. It turns out, that if you did a RCT with two placebos and only called the people with placebo A vaccinated after two weeks, and called them unvaccinated if the got COVID in those two weeks. Placebo A would have the same efficacy numbers as the vaccines they rolled out.
I also thought RFK Jr was full of shit when he said the current childhood vaccines have not been tested against placebo. I was wrong there. Turns out they only test against previous versions of the vaccines, some of which are known to have serious side effects, and most of the time the previous version goes back to a time when they didn't do much testing either.
My memory was that it was being called a "genetically engineered" virus in a way that made it sound like the focus wasn't a lab leak (accident) but an intentional weaponization.
At the start of the pandemic, the conspiracy nuts embraced option 4, and the left by reflex embraced option 1 and accused anybody who believe in 2 or 3 of believing in 4. Only later did options 2 and 3 gain more acceptance
I think with the modified virus you don't just have the intentional vs accidental release dichotomy, but two additional items: (1) was the intent of the research plainly scientific or oriented towards weaponization, and (2) whether changes in virus traits are due to "genetic engineering" or not.
Because there are ways in which both of these can have answers less satisfying than a law of nature, they add another degree or yelling past each other to at least the range of 3 to 4.
Man you are rewriting history for sure. Twitter was banning Wuhan lab theories as misinformation and Fauci's leaked emails show him asking the NIH to further "put down" the lab leak theories.
If I claim that aliens are manipulating our weather and that proof exists, when it doesn’t, that is misinformation. There is no evidence to support my claim, and it is wrong, even if I believe it to be true. If aliens show up tomorrow and announce they have been messing with the weather, then we have the evidence and it is true, but I was still spreading misinformation.
No. He had evidence, based on direct observation. The claims made at the time with Covid and the lab leak theory had no evidence and were made entirely for political purposes.
Any unsubstantiated claims presented as fact are misinformation, and when that misinformation is causing mental and physical harm, keeping it off your platform is the easy, correct decision.
I'm not sure if you remember, but the early lab leak suggestions were leading to a lot of abuse, threats, and in some cases even violence towards people of Asian decent.
While Twitter, a private company, censored posts, Biden's White House said that they wouldn't rule out any possibility, including the virus being leaked on purpose.
He also ordered US spy agencies to do an investigation into the lab leak hypothesis.
"The left" wasn't denying anything. It just wasn't willing to jump to conclusions prematurely. Trying to rebrand it as "The China Virus" was a transparent attempt to focus blame and hate in a particular direction.
Interesting you just ignored the direct quote I gave of Fauci asking the NIH to put it down.
I'm pretty sure Twitter had pressure from the Virality Project which worked with Stanford and federal agencies so I think it's disingenuous to act as if they weren't denying anything or trying to play it down.
The China Virus thing has nothing to do with what I said
Your "direct quote" doesn't exist. So you may want to get your facts in order, especially if you're going to argue that it portrays something it clearly does not.
In fact, it's the opposite of what you were asserting.
Early on, virologists Michael Farzan and Robert Garry were on a call with Fauci and Collins about the potential that the virus could've leaked.
Following that, Fauci's released emails (another correction, since you called them "leaked") was part of a chain between him and Collins:
> Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy.
- Collins, April 16, 2020.
> I would not do anything about this right now. It is a shiny object that will go away in times.
- Fauci's response
What's more, Robert Garry clarified it further:
> One thing that could be misconstrued is that neither Dr Fauci or Dr Collins suggested in any way that we not write the Proximal Origin paper. Likewise, neither one suggested that we not mention the possibility of a Lab origin.
The title is “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins”
It opens with:
> The rumor appeared shortly after the new coronavirus struck China and spread almost as quickly: that the outbreak now afflicting people around the world had been manufactured by the Chinese government.
> The conspiracy theory lacks evidence and has been dismissed by scientists. But it has gained an audience with the help of well-connected critics of the Chinese government such as Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist. And on Sunday, it got its biggest public boost yet.
It’s worth noting that the conspiracy they mention is that the virus was manufactured by the Chinese government. However, the only direct quote they provide from Cotton is this:
> “We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there,” the senator said, “but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving evidence on that question at all.”
This was just the first result from a quick Google search: “nyt 2020 lab leak conspiracy”. There were definitely many other examples.
> What incentive do people on the left have to deny the obvious conclusion that it came from the lab?
Huh, isn't that kind of obvious?
A big part of left wing ideology is progressivism, which is an exaltation of progress. The exact definition of progress changes over time, but the idea is at heart about having the most intelligent and specialized people being granted power to re-organize society for the greater good, as they see it. It is explicitly against the public making their own decisions in a decentralized way (neither via markets nor politicians), because it's assumed they're too stupid to do so with good outcomes.
Core to this worldview is the belief that there are such people as neutral experts, wise intellectuals, morally uncorrupted regulators and so on. You have to believe these people exist and in large numbers, otherwise the core progressivist project falls apart because who would be in charge of society? So the left are very keen on regulators, NGOs and especially "scientists", by which they don't mean corporate scientists but academics and government lab workers. They see in such people the core of the progressive project. Motivated by the greater good rather than self-centered profit, they deploy their superior skill and wisdom to make the world better.
So COVID comes along and it appears at first to be the perfect vehicle for validating the progressive project. Nature attacks, and who will defeat it? Not politicians or ordinary people! It will be the scientists and public health officials - but they say they can only do it if they're awarded total power over our lives, if politicians and markets are disposed of entirely and if we're all forced to act in concert (so we get collectivism as well as progressivism). Ideal!
The lab leak conspiracy turns this progressive dream into a nightmare. Suddenly the experts, the public health officials etc aren't the heroes of the story anymore, they're the villains. It turns a story about the virtues of progressive power into a story about how supposedly intelligent people killed millions through a foolish, careless and ultimately useless pursuit of abstract "progress" without regard to risks. And if they lied and covered up that then what else might they be lying about? How can anyone defend these people as superior leaders when they behave this way?
So depending on whether or not it came from a lab, the conclusions can switch from total validation of left wing goals to total repudiation. Of course they will never accept that it came from a lab leak.
No words are ascribed to anyone, so you're off base there. It's just an attempt to analyze the behavior of a group of people by seeking underlying themes and rationales, like millions of other such explanations out there.
You can't read those words up there? Literally the entire diatribe is ascribing motivations, internal dialogs, ideas, words and actions to entire groups of people you don't likely know.
It doesn't ascribe words to anyone. For the rest, yes, that's what political analysis is. Do you find all political commentary illegitimate or just the stuff you don't like?
"Putting words in someone's mouth" is different. It means ascribing a quote to them that they didn't actually say. It doesn't cover all speculation about what people think.
Pedantry - claiming ideas in other's heads is not much different.. That kind of 'political analysis' is similar to playground taunting - "you so stupid, you go gaa gaa gaa!" while making faces. Too shallow, broad and general to be useful as anything but rationalization.
Do you think it has anything to do with a particular political faction spending the past decade or two rabble-rousing Americans to feel incredibly passionately about all sorts of internal goings on in China[1], as a distraction from poor domestic governance?
[1] Most of which have nothing to do with them, of course.
Claiming something was/is "too politicized" is typically just a tactic to say you disagree with something politically with a false air of superiority that you're not "making it political", while you actually are the moment you bring up politics.
Off topic, does anyone else remember the videos from December/January 2020 coming from China that showed young healthy adults dropping dead in the streets like it was a zombie plague?
Going off of China’s own numbers, none of that was reality, so what the heck was that?
Some ridiculous psyop? For what purpose? To what end?
Are you sure you didn't just watch Contagion and get confused? I do not recall anything of this sort, in fact until March 2020, no one thought Covid was anything serious as far as I can really remember.
I recall most people believing my employer over-reacted when they shut down the offices. I don't think people would have felt this way if what you were describing had been a thing.
(Note that there were some people advancing the bioweapon theory, although I won’t argue with anyone who says esr’s comment section was populated by fringe conspiracy theorists by 2020.)
Why would you do that? Their numbers are factually fiction [1]. I know someone who had weekly reports, through their business relations, of where outbreaks were when, according to China, there were zero cases and deaths. They weren’t allowed to travel or do business in those areas.
> Some of the WIV's genetic engineering projects on coronaviruses involved techniques that could make it difficult to detect intentional changes. A 2017 dissertation by a WIV student showed that reverse genetic cloning techniques which are standard techniques used in advanced molecular laboratories left no traces of genetic modification of SARS-like coronaviruses.
What practical, beneficial purpose would this serve?
As a non-American, I find it frustrating how American partisanship hijacked this discussion.
Forget Republicans and Democrats. A priori, a lab leak, at least accidental,.is a totally plausible hypothesis. Evidence is hard to find either way so who knows.
But then these became shibboleths for American polarisation and you can't say "lab leak" without being labelled a white supremacist.
I'm not saying it did or did not happen, only that there is no substantive evidence for any one hypothesis so it's ok to consider other ones.
It does matter. Because if it came from a lab, it means the restrictions and regulations surrounding that lab were completely insufficient to contain the leak. It means that we are all under a constant threat that other, worse leaks, will happen, and that millions have died and a good percentage of the GDP of the entire world was lost due to gain of function experiments done without enough precaution. It deeply matters, and if we are adults we need to handle this with investigations and preventative action plans and a global regulatory framework.
This research allowed us to create a vaccine within weeks of discovery. If this was not a lab leak, and we had not done that research, many might still be dying from Covid-19. But it's clear that governments cannot afford to allow even a single research facility to be un-regulated or poorly managed.
jaybrendansmith made a good response. I would say more broadly, COVID happened, and could happen again. We need to understand how.
If it was natural in origin, we need to identify risk factors that we can minimize going forward.
And if it was lab-bourne somehow... Well ditto! Maybe we shut down this kind of research. Maybe we need better safety protocols. I don't know.
I know people are dead and won't undie if we understand this. But it seems to me to be totally against the essence of science to say, let's not investigate because it doesn't matter. It massively does. Just as understanding of the origin of the Universe, or our Solar System matters, or the human evolution, even though there too, at face value, such information has no use.
Yes but we know it was one or the other, and I think we need to follow both paths regardless. We are unlikely to ever know definitively which one it was.
And all of the effort debating lab leak or not just distracts time and attention from actual efforts to prevent it from happening again.
Well we don't really, and to me that's part of the problem. Until we know, we don't know.
> And all of the effort debating lab leak or not just distracts time and attention from actual efforts to prevent it from happening again.
In America perhaps, and other polarized polities. As a scientist, again, I cannot comprehend how anyone can see this as a waste of time. We will surely learn a lot from tracking it through time.
I see that the polarising labels got stuck to this issue, and it's unfortunate, but it is in no way inherent to the question.
185 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadedit - Still, makes me curious about the redacted parts of those lines.
This kind of research is dangerous and the risks far outweigh any putative benefits. There are literally hundreds of mammalian viruses out in nature that pose zero risk to humans but which could be modified by these procedures to generate novel pandemic diseases with which the human immune system has had no prior experience.
Despite having a novel furin cleavage site in the exact location as stated in a grant proposal, a furin cleavage site that happens to make the virus extremely infectious towards humans all while leaving no trace of how it adapted this feature.
This seems to me more like a desperate attempt to avoid any regulations or attention drawn to this reckless research conducted all over the world!
In nature that happens by recombination which takes many millions of infections to emerge. In the lab you are just replicating that process by serial passage through animals where you might have a dozen animals serially infected. And the chances are probably lower because it is less likely the lab animals would wind up coinfected with another virus that would act as the source material. "Gain of function" research isn't magic.
Moreover it contains absolutely nothing of well publicized US involvement in relevant coronavirus research with WIV.
I'm definitely curious of what DOE facilities have scientists and researchers who would have useful opinions on coronavirus. This article just reminded me more of that question.
Very strange paper.
> "Not only did the Sandia researchers spot silicon, they also found tin, oxygen, and iron all within the spore. The researchers, led by Sandia chemist Joseph Michael, have presented their findings at various scientific meetings since 2008, reporting the presence of all the elements found. But because silicon had always been in the investigative limelight, tin never got much attention. Until now. The new paper puts the spotlight on tin, which the authors claim has been brushed under the carpet by FBI investigators. The FBI has "avoided public mention of the extraordinary presence of Tin," the paper says."
https://www.science.org/content/article/new-challenge-fbis-a...
While it's perhaps not widely known, the DOE National Labs have the best technical capabilities for investigating anything related to nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons whether of nation-state, terrorist-group, or lone-nut origin.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. You've posted good comments in the past, so this should be easy to fix.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/03/03/the-changing...
This is the most persuasive point I've read on HN the entire week, thank you.
The legacy of lockdown proponents is plummeting test scores and massive IQ drops, because children were merely collateral damage to their hypochondria. [1] [2]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/06/21/1183445544/u-s-reading-and-ma...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/12/children-born-...
One of the main factors in if you die from getting covid is age. And conservatives tend to be older.
I would love to see an age normalized version of that data. I'd bet it would be about a wash.
Meanwhile, I had a confirmed COVID infection early on, before vaccines were available, and had nothing more than the sniffles. I then had two more confirmed infections after having three vaccine doses, and had the same sniffles.
These anecdotes, like yours, are not very useful since they only confirm what we already know: no vaccine is 100% effective, and no risk factor is a death sentence.
It's a political topic, so it naturally has positions staked out by both sides. There's not much reason to care about it one way or the other unless you have a tribal viewpoint.
As for the left, well I am not sure there is an official position other than waiting for more data. China is definitely sus but they are always like that from a western perspective so I don't know that I weight it much.
Other than the smugness in watching the right be wrong again, I am not aware of anyone on the left that is invested in either outcome.
It's a matter of waiting for the crucial data being found. How long did it take us to pin point the source of other pandemics?
This stuff takes time.
Internet speculation only takes seconds.
Of course this is all just silly bullshit. I have some inkling of hope that the truth will be made plain, but that's so implausible given current regimes and political paradigms that the only reasonable thing to do is ignore whatever is concluded, at least anytime in our lifetimes.
As someone that believed in masks from the very beginning. The CDC and Fauci himself said masks were useless at the start of the pandemic. Stop being a pawn.
That doesn't aren't right, precisely because it validates conspiracy minded people.
That’s putting it far too lightly. It proved a “conspiracy” 100% true. I had masks early in the pandemic only because a “nutty” colleague said “they’re going to try to take the masks from us” and he brought me a box.
But now people use those statements to say "aha you people are silly for wearing masks" when that old comment is clearly, well, out of date.
If you are in charge of government and worried about mask availability, the right thing to do is pass laws seizing mask supplies. This is easy because they were almost all being imported from China anyway.
The worst possible thing to do would be to assert with 100% confidence that for scientific reasons masks don't work to the entire population including healthcare workers, and then later invert your position over night. Anyone who thinks this is a reasonable way to manage material logistics is clearly far too stupid to be in charge of anything, let alone critical government functions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Division
From another source:
> The program also provides innovative analysis to anticipate new and developing terrorist threats involving the use of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive weapons and investigate opportunities to counter them. Z Program also works to understand the state of foreign weapons of mass destruction programs; informs U.S. counterproliferation decisions, policies, and efforts; and develops supporting technology solutions to dissuade or prevent states from acquiring WMD-related technologies, materials, and expertise.
Basically their nuclear expertise plus the Cold war (and 9/11) caused them to become a central actor within the US government to look into biological, chemical, and related weapons. So they have a lot of cross discipline expertise there now.
Edit: also see: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/01/z-di...
"We continue to have no indication that the Wuhan Institute of Virology's pre-pandemic research holdings included SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic."
"All Intelligence Community agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon."
This strawman is getting old.
A tiny portion of people believe or assert it's a bioweapon. That is relatively unlikely and even less likely to be proven true, even if it is. Many people suspect it leaked from the lab. That's relatively likely. But let's just completely ignore that and focus on debunking a crazier theory that few people believe.
SARS-CoV-1 had an accidental "lab leak" and instead of infecting a market it killed the mother of the researcher who was infected with it.
we don’t really know which information actually was gathered here (it could literally be zero and that sentence would still be true), so there’s no way to turn that sentence into evidence of anything. it’s fairly meaningless.
This is factual, because the grant proposals are out there and DARPA in the US turned them down:
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
Suddenly, we have a global pandemic featuring a bat coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that binds to human ACE-2 receptors, out of Wuhan, China, directly next to the lab where they were studying this.
What are the chances?
We know what they were studying because all of the grants, emails, and other information from NIH to EcoHealth Alliance have been acquired via the Freedom of Information Act:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23793974-tobias-v-hh...
Damning evidence? Yes.
But clearly enough for quite a number of people in scientific leadership positions to state publicly that any discussion of a lab leak is a conspiracy theory and to ridicule and censor anyone who thought so.
In fact, these scientific leaders were so good, and so on top of things, that they were able to do the research and examine the evidence, and come up with these strong unequivocal conclusions only a few weeks after covid started to spread worldwide (feb 2020)
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Can someone explain to me what the harm is in this practice?
I mean I can understand if there was an accidental lab leak of an engineered virus that killed millions was created in a Chinese lab with American tax dollars why those involved might want that information suppressed and to go away but why is it important to Klinky to take up that cause?
Have you spoken about your concerns with your congresspersons & asked them to support bans on risky gain-of-function research? That'd be something tangible you could do than just speculating on top of speculation.
Does it somehow bother your politics in some way? Are you just being a contrarian for contrary sake? Your desire for evidential purity in a situation where you are most likely not involved is really strange. I am just interested in why that is. What is motivating you here? Please articulate it.
Didn't discount or argue against using circumstantial evidence, nor did I argue against speculating. I am stating the evidence only supports the possibility, it does not prove it happened. Please stop making up false arguments.
>neither side of the debate has the definitive evidence
Agreed.
I read the comment to mean thatit was offered as a strong circumstantial evidence because it was indisputably true due to the public records that support it.
Every study I see leaning towards a lab leak origin conclusion tend to be pretty specific to use words like “likely” or “probable” because of the lack of definitive evidence. Circumstantial evidence can be powerful, especially when the other side does not have a set of similar or better circumstantial evidence in their favor.
They implied their confidence through the rhetorical use of "What are the chances?". That was not a genuine question.
> circumstantial evidence can still be provably true
Circumstantial evidence MUST be true to be usable.
The circumstantial evidence provided in the articles was:
- There was a denied research grant that was going to look into modifying the furin site of coronaviruses. It was denied though, and as far as we know, never done.
- The furin site was complex, but could've evolved naturally.
- Some scientists think it could have been of lab origin.
- Some scientists think it could have been zoonotic origin.
All of this is true, but it doesn't mean a lab leak is "probable" or "more than likely".
>Every study I see leaning towards a lab leak origin
So even the studies that lean towards the theory qualify that the evidence is not definitive. We're back where we started.
Definitive or Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: No
Probable or More Likely Than Not: No
A strong possibility: Yes
There is not a consensus on the origin of COVID-19 at this time.
US law already bans US funding of gain-of-function research.
No matter if it was lab leak or not, my problem with the Chinese government is the way they tried to handle it. Can help but draw parallels to the Chernobyl accident.
The lab was nowhere near the site of what they were studying.
The coronavirus strains came from a cave 600 miles away and brought to Wuhan for further study.
Again, none of these viruses have a unique furin cleavage site for ACE-2.
If you read the FOIA document requests, one of the people who got grant money said "I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature . . . it’s stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted.”.
This person afterwards did a complete u-turn and signed onto the infamous publication in The Lancet. A lot of people quickly did a u-turn around the exact same time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_(COVID-19)
> The coronavirus strains came from a cave 600 miles away and brought to Wuhan for further study.
The best theory I've come across is that patient zero was a person collecting bats in caves for the lab in Wuhan. By all records, they wore woefully inadequate PPE (unlike the people in the lab itself who had well-established procedures).
This theory explains the jump from animal to human, the geographic origin, the reason why China didn't allow any outside investigations, and why most geneticists believe it likely had a zoological origin. (Yes, that last bit remains true no matter how badly the conspiracy theorists want it to be false.)
Whenever I see a claim of this type, I always wonder how you back it up?
I'm not saying that most geneticists don't believe what you're saying, because I have no clue what most members of any profession believe about anything. I have plenty of gut feelings, but how do you go beyond that?
Did you mean most geneticists that you know? That you've seen articles from?
There are literally millions of people in China who live in close proximity to bats. You don't have to invoke the 1-in-a-million lab worker here (who will be much more careful than the other 999,999 people, anyways). There are literally people who go shovel bat poop out of caves for a living. Then there are all the millions of farmed animals that have contact with bats - this is how the original SARS got into people.
A lab worker getting infected in a cave and then going back to Wuhan is not the best theory. It's an extremely improbable explanation for the pandemic, when you realize just how much contact people and farmed animals have with bats.
I'm not a biologist, I don't have the slightest idea what the heck a furin cleavage site is, and so whether this is a red herring or a smoking gun.
But if you think this is such a smoking gun, can you point to somebody who explains in detail for a general audience what it means, why it's true, and how statistically unlikely it would be for it to be natural?
I just don't have anywhere near the background to know whether your comment is valid, but would like to know more.
The only benefit of being a member of the academy of sciences is that you can dump into PNAS whatever hot trash you couldn't sell to any other journal, because they almost never reject papers from members.
There’s a scientific claim in there; I will freely admit that I don’t know enough about viral genetics to have a valid opinion about it. What I do know is that people disagree about the implication of the furin cleavage site and it’s poor form not to acknowledge that.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
I found all of this in about 10 minutes of googling and 15 minutes of reading. Which means I’m as qualified to weigh in on the subject as anyone else here now.
Read my link to the FOIA documents. There are many redacted, for "national security".
Why would they be redacted for US national security if this came from a natural animal origin? It should at least give you pause to think. Possibly because the US was funding it via NIH grants to EcoHealth Alliance, which puts everyone in quite the bind? 6+ million dead and finger pointing between global superpowers probably isn't the outcome they had in mind.
"In April 2020 correspondence with EcoHealth Alliance, NIH wrote that it "received reports that the Wuhan Institute of Virology ... has been conducting research at its facilities in China that pose serious bio-safety concerns."
Page 54.
Or this, where the NIH is requesting the location of a scientist who disappeared?
Page 235.
"The Wuhan institute sequenced the genome of the new virus in January after receiving patient samples. In addition to requiring EcoHealth Alliance provide a sample of the sequenced coronavirus, the NIH said in its letter that EcoHealth Alliance must “explain the apparent disappearance” of a scientist who worked in the Wuhan lab."
There are too many other pages (between all the pages of redactions) worth reading to mention them all.
Because US intelligence has an asset in the lab perhaps?
I've heard it said that intelligence briefings are often 90-95% what you can find in any newspaper (or website nowadays), but the last few percentage points use various 'assets and techniques' that the other side doesn't want to get out.
Often it's not about knowing the what of actions and events, but the why.
The left wasn't denying the possibility that it leaked from the Wuhan lab. This was a theory very early on and it wasn't "denied" more that it wasn't substantiated.
It became political when it was asserted by people on the right, without any actual research or investigation, that was an intentional release from China.
Majority of that blame falls on Trump's inability to understand or articulate nuanced topics, particularly within geopolitical contexts. Instead of figuring out how to defeat the virus, majority of their energy went into pointing the finger at who to blame--a far easier task than being an actual leader.
Someone else can look up sources for all of this if they want, but I don't feel the need to. It was just a couple years ago, and I remember it perfectly.
I presume you just spend your time consuming healthier discourse than I do, which probably means you make some better choices in your free time than I do, so I'm not accusing you personally of this - but the walking back of all the effort made to deny and suppress discussion about this issue and pretend it never happened feels a lot like gaslighting.
Trump did that to himself with his response by trying to stir xenophobic hate by calling it "The China Virus".
> There absolutely, 100% was complete denial, all originating on the political left, that a leak from a lab in China was a possibility.
Well, that's just patently wrong. There was not "complete denial" by any means, as the majority of scientists were open to any and all possibility of origin. As such, the left--who was following those scientists--maintained the same position.
Saying that "there is no evidence that it was leaked" is not blanket denial. It is just that--there is no evidence, thus the possibility remains open but shouldn't be entertained as decisive.
Yet many politicians on the right, despite there being no evidence, dug their feet into the ground, convinced it was.
Not sure how you got the impression that not having evidence of something equates to "complete denial", but it's incorrect.
> Suggesting it was possible, much less plausible or even likely, was labeled racist.
We knew the virus originated in the Wuhan region of China. Don't pretend that suppression occurred because of simple discussion of the topic--it was predominantly due to politicians raging xenophobic wars by trying to rename it "The China Virus".
You are ignoring a few simple facts here.
1. The left doesn't congregate and worship at the cult of personality like the right does.
2. The first cases were in Wuhan. The right/Trumpets immediately blamed China. And this blame had exactly zero to do with any facts at the time. And in blaming China, hate crimes against all Asians increased dramatically, not even just Chinese.
3. It wasn't being called racist just saying it. It was racist being racists. Most people admitted it was a possibility, but definitely not confirmed in any way
The fact of the matter is it was turned into a political talking point.
The right says "IT IS THIS WAY BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT I BELIEVE AND IF YOU DON'T AGREE YOU ARE RADICAL LEFT"
The left says "We can't say that yet"
Learn the definition of gaslighting
One side said "the virus was leaked from a lab! we should call it Kung Flu or The China Virus!" and the other side said "there is no evidence that the virus was leaked from a lab".
They're not equal and opposite positions. One was kneejerk and unsubstantiated, the other was scientific.
I'm certain there were some people out there who took the lack of evidence as proof that it wasn't, but those people were wrong and unscientific as well.
Reality is there is still no definitive evidence of a lab leak and China is never going to admit to it. Trump's racist finger pointing didn't actually tangibly help US citizens. Even if he did prove it was China's fault, what was he going to do? Go to war with China? Cutoff trade our economy is inextricably tied to? It felt very much like a dog chasing a car. The dog has no clue what it'd do if it actually caught the car.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25587409
In the US, it's because this claim, or rejection of it, is strongly tied to political identity. Because the US is highly polarized right now, once political identity comes into play, you've left the realm of rationality and entered the realm of tribalism.
My stance has always been that Lab Leak required the least number of assumptions. Intent was never factored in, just that it seems awfully strange to so vehemently deny even the possibility of it being a lab leak and not want to investigate. Could it have been the wet market? Sure, but it seems less likely.
There may be some interesting reckoning happening in a few years, but probably not. Like safe and effective vaccines. It turns out, that if you did a RCT with two placebos and only called the people with placebo A vaccinated after two weeks, and called them unvaccinated if the got COVID in those two weeks. Placebo A would have the same efficacy numbers as the vaccines they rolled out.
I also thought RFK Jr was full of shit when he said the current childhood vaccines have not been tested against placebo. I was wrong there. Turns out they only test against previous versions of the vaccines, some of which are known to have serious side effects, and most of the time the previous version goes back to a time when they didn't do much testing either.
1) wild virus, no lab involvement
2) wild virus, accidentally released from a lab
3) modified virus, accidentally released from lab
4) modified virus, intentional release
At the start of the pandemic, the conspiracy nuts embraced option 4, and the left by reflex embraced option 1 and accused anybody who believe in 2 or 3 of believing in 4. Only later did options 2 and 3 gain more acceptance
Because there are ways in which both of these can have answers less satisfying than a law of nature, they add another degree or yelling past each other to at least the range of 3 to 4.
Also who decides what is misinformation?
That was misinformation too, no?
I'm not sure if you remember, but the early lab leak suggestions were leading to a lot of abuse, threats, and in some cases even violence towards people of Asian decent.
He also ordered US spy agencies to do an investigation into the lab leak hypothesis.
"The left" wasn't denying anything. It just wasn't willing to jump to conclusions prematurely. Trying to rebrand it as "The China Virus" was a transparent attempt to focus blame and hate in a particular direction.
I'm pretty sure Twitter had pressure from the Virality Project which worked with Stanford and federal agencies so I think it's disingenuous to act as if they weren't denying anything or trying to play it down.
The China Virus thing has nothing to do with what I said
In fact, it's the opposite of what you were asserting.
Early on, virologists Michael Farzan and Robert Garry were on a call with Fauci and Collins about the potential that the virus could've leaked.
Following that, Fauci's released emails (another correction, since you called them "leaked") was part of a chain between him and Collins:
> Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy.
- Collins, April 16, 2020.
> I would not do anything about this right now. It is a shiny object that will go away in times.
- Fauci's response
What's more, Robert Garry clarified it further:
> One thing that could be misconstrued is that neither Dr Fauci or Dr Collins suggested in any way that we not write the Proximal Origin paper. Likewise, neither one suggested that we not mention the possibility of a Lab origin.
I hope that helps you put things in proper order.
Here is an example from 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...
The title is “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins”
It opens with:
> The rumor appeared shortly after the new coronavirus struck China and spread almost as quickly: that the outbreak now afflicting people around the world had been manufactured by the Chinese government.
> The conspiracy theory lacks evidence and has been dismissed by scientists. But it has gained an audience with the help of well-connected critics of the Chinese government such as Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist. And on Sunday, it got its biggest public boost yet.
It’s worth noting that the conspiracy they mention is that the virus was manufactured by the Chinese government. However, the only direct quote they provide from Cotton is this:
> “We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there,” the senator said, “but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving evidence on that question at all.”
This was just the first result from a quick Google search: “nyt 2020 lab leak conspiracy”. There were definitely many other examples.
nothing is obvious-true because someone likes how simple it is. nothing becomes obvious-false because someone thinks it's not simple enough.
any other thinking is pre-chewed lies faking as news.
Huh, isn't that kind of obvious?
A big part of left wing ideology is progressivism, which is an exaltation of progress. The exact definition of progress changes over time, but the idea is at heart about having the most intelligent and specialized people being granted power to re-organize society for the greater good, as they see it. It is explicitly against the public making their own decisions in a decentralized way (neither via markets nor politicians), because it's assumed they're too stupid to do so with good outcomes.
Core to this worldview is the belief that there are such people as neutral experts, wise intellectuals, morally uncorrupted regulators and so on. You have to believe these people exist and in large numbers, otherwise the core progressivist project falls apart because who would be in charge of society? So the left are very keen on regulators, NGOs and especially "scientists", by which they don't mean corporate scientists but academics and government lab workers. They see in such people the core of the progressive project. Motivated by the greater good rather than self-centered profit, they deploy their superior skill and wisdom to make the world better.
So COVID comes along and it appears at first to be the perfect vehicle for validating the progressive project. Nature attacks, and who will defeat it? Not politicians or ordinary people! It will be the scientists and public health officials - but they say they can only do it if they're awarded total power over our lives, if politicians and markets are disposed of entirely and if we're all forced to act in concert (so we get collectivism as well as progressivism). Ideal!
The lab leak conspiracy turns this progressive dream into a nightmare. Suddenly the experts, the public health officials etc aren't the heroes of the story anymore, they're the villains. It turns a story about the virtues of progressive power into a story about how supposedly intelligent people killed millions through a foolish, careless and ultimately useless pursuit of abstract "progress" without regard to risks. And if they lied and covered up that then what else might they be lying about? How can anyone defend these people as superior leaders when they behave this way?
So depending on whether or not it came from a lab, the conclusions can switch from total validation of left wing goals to total repudiation. Of course they will never accept that it came from a lab leak.
"Putting words in someone's mouth" is different. It means ascribing a quote to them that they didn't actually say. It doesn't cover all speculation about what people think.
[1] Most of which have nothing to do with them, of course.
I recall most people believing my employer over-reacted when they shut down the offices. I don't think people would have felt this way if what you were describing had been a thing.
(Note that there were some people advancing the bioweapon theory, although I won’t argue with anyone who says esr’s comment section was populated by fringe conspiracy theorists by 2020.)
Why would you do that? Their numbers are factually fiction [1]. I know someone who had weekly reports, through their business relations, of where outbreaks were when, according to China, there were zero cases and deaths. They weren’t allowed to travel or do business in those areas.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/30/asia/wuhan-china-covid-intl/i...
What practical, beneficial purpose would this serve?
Forget Republicans and Democrats. A priori, a lab leak, at least accidental,.is a totally plausible hypothesis. Evidence is hard to find either way so who knows.
But then these became shibboleths for American polarisation and you can't say "lab leak" without being labelled a white supremacist.
I'm not saying it did or did not happen, only that there is no substantive evidence for any one hypothesis so it's ok to consider other ones.
If it was natural in origin, we need to identify risk factors that we can minimize going forward.
And if it was lab-bourne somehow... Well ditto! Maybe we shut down this kind of research. Maybe we need better safety protocols. I don't know.
I know people are dead and won't undie if we understand this. But it seems to me to be totally against the essence of science to say, let's not investigate because it doesn't matter. It massively does. Just as understanding of the origin of the Universe, or our Solar System matters, or the human evolution, even though there too, at face value, such information has no use.
And all of the effort debating lab leak or not just distracts time and attention from actual efforts to prevent it from happening again.
Well we don't really, and to me that's part of the problem. Until we know, we don't know.
> And all of the effort debating lab leak or not just distracts time and attention from actual efforts to prevent it from happening again.
In America perhaps, and other polarized polities. As a scientist, again, I cannot comprehend how anyone can see this as a waste of time. We will surely learn a lot from tracking it through time.
I see that the polarising labels got stuck to this issue, and it's unfortunate, but it is in no way inherent to the question.