How could lab-leak ever become a theory? A theory is an explanation of some repeatable pattern of phenomena that is observed in nature and that can be empirically verified. "Lab-leak" is a single possible event, that may or not have happened. The most that can happen is for strong evidence to emerge for or against the hypothesis that this specific event occurred.
There’s plenty of debated scientific theories around single events such as what killed off the dinosaurs or how old the universe is etc. Testability happens when you accurately predict what evidence will be found, ie there’s excess iridium globally at the K-T boundary.
Similarly there’s theories around collections of events such as the timing of the ice ages which are collectively significant.
I don't agree because there are plethora of possible details depending on level of conspiracy. Was the virus synthesized at least partly? Was the virus selected from a number of not so harmful viruses? Was the virus went from naively non-infected bat when the fact is that it was infected? Was the lab-leak done intentionally, kind of something able to pause WW3? And so on and on.
It didn’t. There’s some evidence (taken in isolation) that might point to such a thing could potentially occur but data and historic evidence points to the wet market.
At this point I feel like the argument is over some broader meta-argument that the lab leak hypothesis was dismissed too aggressively and the consensus formed too quickly over the wet market.
> but data and historic evidence points to the wet market
Because almost no-one has covered this news, you may have missed that the data pointing at the wet-market (from Worobey et al) has been thoroughly debunked using solid scientific data.
You empiricists often loose the plot when it comes to these sort of matters.
A thought experiment:
A murder during a fancy dinner party. Victim was shot in the head with a 9mm round. Guest A is very evasive and was in the vicinity where the body was found. Guest A is known to have a 9mm handgun. Guest A quickly destroys his handgun and forensics cannot recover any information from it. Guest A writes a letter explaining that the shot came from outside the house, without any mention of his potential role in the murder, and his friends at the local newspaper not only run the letter, citing him as a expert, but run hit pieces that anyone claiming otherwise is a racist.
Reason allows us to know Guest A was involved. In the absence of evidence sometimes reason is all you have. This is one of those cases, no science is required just a little life experience.
This analogy gets a little strained when wild Glocks breed in the vicinity of the home, and have randomly shot people fairly regularly over the course of the house's existence.
"Guest A quickly destroys his handgun" is, thus far, not supported by evidence in the lab leak hypothesis, which posits but has never proven the existence of samples of SARS-CoV-2 in the lab.
Science and theories has been used politically for centuries.
Such as malthusian theory and Darwin's survival of the fittest to support colonialism. To free market and competitive advantages as a way to destabilise domestic economics in global south.
western people will believe in the wuhan virus leak and some others will believe in Fort detrick virus leak theories. You also had Russians finding a lot of virus labs in ukraine etc.
The world will split into multiple realities and histories.
Not really. We can build vinegar and baking soda volcanoes in our kitchens, but we can't build particle accelerators.
You will never personally prove where COVID-19 originated, so if you don't want to rely on trusting other accounts, you'll need to permanently abstain from holding an opinion either way.
- Science is the institution that requires trust to be believed?
Folks might interpret your comment to mean we should trust the institution, when of course we all know it's a grave error to trust institutions. Institutions get captured, usually by low-iq lifers
Richard Feynman: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts... science - a.k.a. research - is in the making, belongs to the (unknown, yet to be discovered) future, while expertise is based on the past, with in-built obsolescence"
It's always interesting that the conspiracy theorists go after their own government and don't seem to stop and think how easily all of Science can be manipulated by a motivated intelligence service. It's easy enough for actual scientists to get away with fabricating data. Imagine what a motivated adversary could do to misdirect Science. Scientists can be far too trusting.
I'm not sure why it's supposed to matter. In both cases, China did a bad thing; in both cases, it's a good idea to review and possibly improve biolab safety protocols and also to end wet markets as the latter were obviously a biohazard even before the pandemic.
The WIV lab was built by the French with money from many different countries and the research was being done by EcoHealth Alliance with US funding so blaming it on the Chinese is probably not the whole picture.
EcoHealth alliance made a grant application to DARPA and DARPA turned them down because it was too risky but it seems pretty obvious that they got the money somewhere else.
China? Look into Peter Daszak, he even mentioned his bias when the WHO sent him to investigate his own lab. Fauci was involved in funding the research via NIH, and he didn't mention this when shit hit the fan. The goal of the research was to manipulate the virus to see if it could transfer to humans, ie gain-of-function. There's a reason it was conducted in China and it's not the chinese.
And it gets worse, even though EcoHealth Alliance lied in their books they recently received another grant to keep doing similar research. It was discussed here at the time. What could go wrong?
It's a rabbit hole but you might be surprised how corrupt it looks. Don't get fooled by those trying to shift your focus to China.
"Here look instead at the other people who did bad things too" is a great way to repeat every disaster and accident across history and learn zero lessons.
The government of any place gets to take the blame for things happening in that place, even in more extreme cases where deeds were fully funded by a hostile government who sent in secret agents. ("The buck stops here").
So, if you want to blame $meme_de_jour as well, then go for it — but even if guilty, regardless of whether that's malice or incompetence or bad luck or a novel failure that nobody could have foreseen, that doesn't exonerate anyone else who dropped a ball, which China absolutely did more than once regardless of the origin, as they also tried to downplay the initial infections.
Of course it matters. It affects the priorities and the costs. If there was indeed a lab leak that caused the pandemic, you can justify having far more oversight, and more safety precautions even at great expense, because you have evidence that failing to do so killed millions of people.
Also, this would call for greater scrutiny and regulation of organizations such as the Ecohealth Alliance that are providing funding for such labs.
In addition, saying it doesn't matter rewards a coverup.
If someone breaks your leg, saying you should eat more calcium and be careful walking down the steps, and it doesn't matter if someone actually hit your let with a tire iron, isn't that helpful.
> If there was indeed a lab leak that caused the pandemic, you can justify having far more oversight, and more safety precautions even at great expense, because you have evidence that failing to do so killed millions of people.
If it's even reasonably plausible, and this is as good a chance as any to take a close look and find out, then you should spend this money to prevent such an outbreak even if COVID didn't happen this way.
Likewise in reverse, that wet markets were already seen as likely to cause the emergence of a new zoonotic disease, they should be changed or closed anyway because that risk is exactly the same now as in 2018 regardless of whether or not it was the origin of COVID.
> In addition, saying it doesn't matter rewards a coverup.
Only for people whose attention span misses that I also wrote "both cases, it's a good idea to review and possibly improve biolab safety protocols".
(I suspect this is quite a large percentage; people anchors on single points very easily, no matter how hard you try to make it clear "two things: what about both?")
> If someone breaks your leg, saying you should eat more calcium and be careful walking down the steps, and it doesn't matter if someone actually hit your let with a tire iron, isn't that helpful
In this case it's more like:
Doctors and lawyers trying to work out if your broken leg was caused by the cage fights you do every weekend, or by your recent slip down a very long and excessively polished staircase in a building that might or might not have be up to code at the time.
And the options are:
"Stop fighting in cage matches", and/or "see if that building was up to code and if it was campaign for better building codes".
Technically, the lab leak hypothesis has not officially been suppresssed as a conspiracy theory. It is has been ranked from "extremely unlikely" to "likely with low confidence".
The reason why you may think it has been suppressed as a conspiracy theory is probably because the people pushing the more for it actually use conspiracy theory patterns. In reaction, report about these loud yeller providing out-of-context, with often ridicule arguments, are dismissed as conspiracy theories.
There is nonetheless some objective reports a lab leak hypotheses and how improving lab security is important to prevent this kind of things either way.
It absolutely was suppressed at the beginning. A small cadre of scientists, in coordination with a high-level government official, published claims they knew or suspected to be unsupported or misleading in a leading medical journal. This is public knowledge now.
Social media platforms were removing content discussing lab leak theories, and there's enough evidence of government officials colluding with those platforms generally to suspect they could have played a role in that.
That's apart from the scientific community itself, which is what this hearing is ostensibly about.
The problem was that a lot of the 'evidence' of a lab leak and genetic engineering of the virus was contrived, exaggerated misinformation. So if you want to exclude contrived exaggerated deliberate misinformation from your platform, what are you going to do?
Personally I have been from the start saying that a lab leak was possible, on the basis that lab leaks have happened before, and should be investigated. That makes me a lab leak theory supporter as a possibility from day one. I've never got silenced, banned, insulted or de-platformed for saying so. I have no common cause or sympathy for people knowingly spreading lies and contrived 'evidence' to push the lab leak hypothesis though.
It's an unrealistic expectation that no evidence posted online is contrived or exaggerated. Even a cursory examination of "legitimate" channels such as academic work, or communication from governments, will find plenty such examples.
It was absolutely suppressed, at both the scientific investigation level and at the public discussion level.
There was gain of function research going on in the same city as the origin of SarsCov2, with the exact same class of virus, and a hand-wavy paper appears claiming only natural origin is reasonable? And the recipients and/or funders of the gain of function research put their names on the paper without declaring conflicts?
> The reason why you may think it has been suppressed as a conspiracy theory is probably because the people pushing the more for it actually use conspiracy theory patterns
Maybe it's because Fauci himself called it a conspiracy theory and tried to suppress the idea from further discussion. I think many would consider that "official", even if not technically.
It always amazes me when people attempt to rewrite history that people lived through just 2 years ago
Lab Leak was absolutely suppressed on all major tech platforms, and calls a xenophobic conspiracy theory by all major news outlets in 2019 and 2020, 2021 it started to shift to "hey maybe that is possible" and now in 2023 is "extremely unlikely" to "likely with low confidence".
The key part is "scientifically supported". There's no science supporting the lab leak theory, i.e. actual scientific data linking the lab with SARS-CoV2.
That, plus that the ease with which the virus jumped back to animals (deer, hamsters, mice, ferrets, cats, dogs) makes the search for a reservoir animal very difficult, as well as the fair chance that there were few enough of those (possibly only one) that that part of the evidence chain may well remain broken.
Wouldn't our extensive records of the variants so far make it possible to see if a variant discovered in bats tomorrow is newer than the one that started the original outbreak in humans?
If the differences are large enough: yes. If not then it may remain undecided. The closest match found in the wild so far is 96% or so, which is good but not good enough (and it was found in a bat, but relatively far away from the spot where it was first found in humans). I think that is the most recent state of affairs.
> but relatively far away from the spot where it was first found in humans
But not far away from humans who had been to where the bat virus was found to bring back samples for analysis and experimentation in their laboratory [1]
[1] spoiler alert: the Wuhan Institute of Virology
The only reason that that bat was far away from where it was first found in humans is simply because we haven't found a better sample, yet. This was iirc a sample taken long ago, so there was plenty of time for migration. Bats fly insanely long distances and can have multiple roosts.
What all lab-leak theory adherents seem to forget: if the Chinese really had ready access to the very earliest strains of COVID they could have easily falsified evidence of where it originated. The fact that this hasn't happened is - especially given what is at stake here - pretty good circumstantial evidence that they not have access to that strain.
I suspect it will take a long time (years, maybe as much as a decade) before the whole picture will come out and if not then too bad, it will be one of those things we'll never know. Which is entirely in line with expectations, and with the historical record of other discoveries like that. In the meantime: speculation is pointless. Either you have evidence or you don't.
And [] do not confer any special insights unless actually accompanied by a citation, preferably of something that is not written by the same author.
> That, plus that the ease with which the virus jumped back to animals
It is trivial to tell whether a variant is antecedent - this is how the absurd 'double jump' of lineage A and lineage B was necessary for Worobey to justify his thesis that the wet market was the origin of covid... twice
> It is trivial to tell whether a variant is antecedent
I'm sure all of the evolutionary biologists would love to have your level of confidence.
It's trivial when the differences and the timescales are large (and even then we get it wrong plenty of times). But it isn't trivial at all when the differences are minor and the timescales are close, in fact it can be really, really hard. Fortunately with COVID19 a lot of evidence was gathered in real time and preserved so there are a lot of theories that can be ruled out based on that.
One of the hardest problems is to figure out when there is an individual where more than one virus took hold at the same time and genetic material was exchanged between two strains rather than just a mutation. There is some - but inconclusive - evidence that this happened more than once during the COVID pandemic.
> I'm sure all of the evolutionary biologists would love to have your level of confidence.
It's easy to say this, as neither you nor I have the requisite knowledge to prove/disprove your assertion. But I read threads like this one [1] or resources like this one [2] and realize that there are experts who are able to distinguish earlier and later variants.
Incidentally, I noticed that you edited your first response several times while I wrote this. The tone of what you wrote first was a bit less considered than the what I'm responding to now, but I hope it's ok to just leave it at this.
> It's easy to say this, as neither you nor I have the requisite knowledge to prove/disprove your assertion.
I actually do have that knowledge, you just speak for yourself. The fact that experts are able to distinguish earlier and later variants doesn't mean that this is trivial, nor does it mean that this is something that is error free. So your statement simply does not stand. Whether or not you can make a statement about the order in which mutations happened (which is the genetic basis for all evolutionary biology) hinges on a large number of factors and not all of those may be in agreement.
I've been somewhat involved in a bunch of issues around determining the sequence in which a plant mutated historically and in spite of a good idea of the overall picture the final call was less solidly supported than the parties involved would have liked. And that's before we get into the thorny issues of gaps in the record and sequence alignment, which by themselves can give rise to all kinds of interpretations.
> Incidentally, I noticed that you edited your first response several times while I wrote this. The tone of what you wrote first was a bit less considered than the what I'm responding to now, but I hope it's ok to just leave it at this.
Yes, I added some more information but the gist of it stands: this isn't trivial. Not by a long shot.
> The fact that experts are able to distinguish earlier and later variants doesn't mean that this is trivial
So you are arguing with my loose assertion that it is trivial whereas what I should have been more clear about, was that I consider it possible by experts with the requisite expertise.
There's nothing difficult about the two lineages at the market. What it indicates is that SARS-CoV2 had been circulating for some time before the pandemic took off. We now know that it can spread asymptomatically.
The differences between the lineages is very small, amounting to a few weeks of the same kind of random variation frequently observed in real time during the pandemic.
What is does indicate is that those first diagnosed with SARS-CoV2 most likely contracted it from different sources, rather than as a consequence of encountering the same infected person or animal.
And in fact the two linages only different by 2 bases, something that can occur in a single host, it in no way indicates there were two jumps. All you need is for a virus to be circulating in humans for like a week.
As Stanford Biologist Michael Lim points out:
>indeed he goes straight from seeing 2 lineages to concluding there were 2 jumps from wildlife days apart. That : (a) assumes the jumps were from wildlife, not people. (b) hides the fact that >2 mutations are being made in each host anyway, so separate events not needed
>Indeed Worobey seems to think "Lineage A" and "Lineage B" are some profoundly different lineages but the tree he shows confirms they are different by only 2 bases. The "A" root has 2 fewer mutations than the "B" root. He doesn't point this out. Yet he must know.
It isn't the fact that there are two mutations that defines two lineages. One lineage is different from the other at two positions. The mutations defining these two lineages could have occurred in either animals or humans.
What it does imply is that SARS-CoV2 was circulating at the Wuhan market for at least weeks or months before the first samples were collected.
However, two base changes is very little data from which to construct a phylogenetic relationship or make "molecular clock" calculations.
False! It took MONTHS to find an intermediate host for both SARS and MERS.
SARS1 they found infected civet cats with an almost identical virus within a few months:
>”Civet cats, a raccoon dog, and a ferret badger in an animal market in Gunagdong, China, were infected with a coronavirus identical to the one that causes SARS in humans save for an extra 29-nucleotide sequence" which demonstrated that these animals had a very close ancestral virus circulating within their populations.
For MERS it took a little longer since by the time they discovered it in dromedary camels only 500 people were infected. But they still found it in less than a year!
You've made this false claim before. I responded correcting you, and you didn't respond to me. At this point, it seems like you're willfully posting misinformation.
As I noted previously, the likely proximal zoonotic host for SARS-1 was discovered within about a year. The article that you've linked discusses different related bat viruses. These provide important information about the evolutionary history of the human virus, but are more genetically distant from the human virus than the civet and raccoon dog viruses found within that ~year.
Ah, fair and interesting. Thanks for pointing this out. I think it's more that it's harder to keep track of when people comment on your stuff. I'll make a note not to share anymore!
Thanks, and sorry for my impatience; I've seen that claim in enough places (from many other people) that I got frustrated. The absence of a clear proximal host certainly isn't proof that SARS-CoV-2 arose unnaturally, especially since the PRC's preferred origin story (imported on frozen food) would require them to cover that up too. It's not what anyone expected though, since it's different from SARS-1 and MERS.
>Research scientist said he and his colleagues wanted to “disprove any type of lab leak theory.”
So some members of Congress took this to mean they had a motive, rather than an attempt to 'disprove the null hypothesis'... and that's the entire basis for calling this a "cover-up"?
The only thing I find somewhat frustrating about this is that lab leak is nearly impossible to disprove. Because even if you can convince folks that the science shows it was natural in origin, that still doesn't mean it wasn't being studied in a lab somewhere.
I agree with the other commenter who says that "it's a good idea to review and possibly improve biolab safety protocols and also to end wet markets as the latter were obviously a biohazard even before the pandemic." I see at least some discussion of the former, but almost none of the latter. Is there anything we can do about wet markets? Use trade negotiations as leverage? I don't even see a discussion.
Asking another culture to their way? Could luck w/ that. There's nothing stopping us from bringing it up but I can't picture a diplomat hinging a deal on wet markets.
I had some relatives ask me about this at the time. My work is tangential to the biological sciences so sometimes they think I know things I don't :)
I always chose my words carefully. To them, when they'd ask me if it was a "lab leak" they always meant something untoward was happening at the lab. Researchers studying artificial superbugs, etc. But there's a very big difference between "natural phenomena that found its way to a lab and then out" and "artificial phenomena created in a lab and then out". So I'd respond with things like "probably not man-made", which they often took as me saying not a "lab leak".
EDIT: to be more clear about the point I was raising, I was agreeing with the parent's point. Some of this language is politically/socially charged, and one needs to take that into account when discussing the matter.
But lots of aspects and features of SARS-CoV2 point to it being a natural virus with a human specific furin cleavage site inserted into it. In fact it looks almost exactly what you would expect from the type of experiments outlines in the DEFUSE Proposal https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop...
The fact that the location happens to be in the exact location proposed in experiments and commonly used in virology, and the fact that SARS-CoV2 binds to Human ACE2 more efficiently than any other species really stands out:
> Spike protein exhibited the highest binding to human (h)ACE2 of all the species tested. . .
> These findings show that the earliest known SARS-CoV-2 isolates were surprisingly well adapted to bind strongly to human ACE2, helping explain its efficient human to human respiratory transmission
> Our observations suggest that by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV. However, no precursors or branches of evolution stemming from a less human-adapted SARS-CoV-2-like virus have been detected
Not to mention that it's absurd to think that such an infectious virus would have been circulating in Raccoon Dogs or Civets and just simply disappear after the first human was infected with zero traces to be found. Like when humans passed covid to white tailed deer that did not stop the virus from circulating in humans.
Are we supposed to just accept SARS-CoV2 spillover was the result of an "Immaculate Infection">?
>The only thing I find somewhat frustrating about this is that lab leak is nearly impossible to disprove.
I don't think that's really true and I think that statement comes from ignorance of the volume of work done in epidemiology and public health. Lots of natural spillover events have been pretty well figured out in the past through contact tracing and finding animal reservoirs with plausible proximity to index patients and stuff like that. When that much evidence piles up, it'd be pretty unscientific to conclude a lab-leak occurred.
In this case though, a lab-leak remains a fairly plausible possibility. Natural spillover does too! We don't (and we may never) really have definitive evidence either way, but there are good reasons to suspect both.
I'll obviously disagree my statements come from ignorance!
I think our views are nearly perfectly aligned, in fact. We're talking about a rhetorical difference with me saying "disprove" versus what you called "plausible proximity." But I don't think we disagree about anything.
Perhaps it is indeed a semantic argument then, it's just there's a big difference between assigning truth probabilities of 55% natural to 45% lab-leak vs. 98% natural to 2% lab. While in the latter case, it hasn't technically been "disproved", it pretty much has. And for many previous spillovers (NIPAH, HENDRA, ebola, various hauntavirus outbreaks, etc.) It's very definitive that it was indeed natural spillover. So basically I think it is indeed possible to disprove a lab-leak in many many cases.
There remain several oddities about COVID that haven't led to that sort of truth probability. However, I still think it's possible we could shift those probabilities with COVID, particularly if the CCCP weren't being so shady about the whole thing above and beyond their usual lack of transparency. (Taking the genetic db offline, policy changes regarding lab safety etc.)
The problem here is what does "lab leak" mean. Obviously at its core it means that the virus was stored at the lab and then found its way out somehow.
However, to many people in the world it has other implications. And thus discussion around it needs to be careful. For instance there's an enormous difference between "virus was 100% as found in nature, stored in lab, leaked" and "virus was 100% synthetic, stored in lab, leaked". And of course the real answer in a lab leak scenario is likely somewhere in the middle.
But when discussing the matter, one needs to take care to understand what "lab leak" *means* to the people on the other side of the conversation.
>We don't (and we may never) really have definitive evidence either way,
I think your statement agrees with the parent comment that the "lab leak is nearly impossible to disprove." This isn't a disagreement with any other point you've made in your comment, but I think the parent was effectively saying that even if it were true that this did not come from a lab leak, it would probably be impossible remove that doubt from the public discourse because of the lack of definitive evidence that you point out.
I think people need to have a more reasonable expectation of what is knowable. It's very much against human nature to accept uncertainty, but here it's the adult thing to do.
Currently the best working hypothesis is the natural origin, but that doesn't mean we have certainty around what the origin is. We need to stop bickering over unproductive questions.
lab leak is dead simple to disprove. all you have to do is find an animal that you can infect with covid and will spread it and you have your proof. many people have been spending a lot of money for years trying to do this and the longer they continue to fail the higher the probability of lab leak becomes.
I think you misunderstood my comment. In that scenario, it still wouldn't rule out the possibility of a lab leak, since like I said they still could have been studying that natural origin inside of a lab.
> still wouldn't rule out the possibility of a lab leak
but finding an animal that can spread covid with a plausible story for how it cross over to humans in wuhan is a threshold that has not been crossed yet. if anyone could meet that threshold test it would be treated as proof of natural origin.
but supposing that it was a natural virus that came from an animal in the lab at wuhan then it would be very easy for people with access to that information to identify the natural source, and since that has not happened, it means the virus is either from a natural source that was not in the lab, or it was created in the lab.
the longer time that passes without finding a natural source outside the lab the more likely it is that it was created in the lab.
> the longer time that passes without finding a natural source outside the lab the more likely it is that it was created in the lab.
This is not correct. It may well be that the evidence existed but was lost.
The idea that biology will just sit around and wait until we catch up with it is fundamentally mistaken. Some things happen just once and that's that. Some things happen all the time and you can observe them as they happen. Some things leave ample evidence. Biology is not a static system, it isn't a computer program and it isn't a piece of hardware. Your 'bug' may simply not be reproducible even if it in fact did occur just once.
if the virus crossed over from animals to humans then it must be able to cross back over. viruses evolve quickly, but animals don't, and we have plenty of samples of the original virus. all you have to do is find the right species and infect them with a sample of the virus and show that they can spread it to prove natural origin.
the only scenario where your theory could be true is if the origin species suddenly went extinct after starting the pandemic, which is very improbable.
"Scientists collected 1,522 nasal swabs from free-ranging deer in 83 of the state’s 88 counties between November 2021 and March 2022. More than 10% of the samples were positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and at least one positive case was found in 59% of the counties in which testing took place. Genomic analysis showed that at least 30 infections in deer had been introduced by humans – a figure that surprised the research team."
“And the evidence is growing that humans can get it from deer – which isn’t radically surprising. It’s probably not a one-way pipeline.”
Still, this doesn't disprove a lab leak; it proves something other than a lab leak is plausible.
But humans infected the white tailed deer, and guess what when humans passed on SARS2 to different species it did not suddenly stop circulating within humans which seems to have been the case with SARS2. For SARS2 we have a single spillover event hundreds of miles away from the nearest SARS reservoir and then some how the strain that was circulating in whatever intermediate host it may have come from simply vanished! Despite being so extremely infectious SARS2's spillover seems to be a case of an immaculate infection!
But like virgin births, I find immaculate infections to be implausible.
Thus providing clear evidence this virus jumps fairly readily between mammals. (Especially when you count that it has also been found to have jumped to quite a few other animals; cats, dogs, hippos, anteaters, manatees; it's clearly not picky. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/...)
> guess what when humans passed on SARS2 to different species it did not suddenly stop circulating within humans which seems to have been the case with SARS2
I assure you that SARS2 is still circulating within humans, lol.
> For SARS2 we have a single spillover event hundreds of miles away from the nearest SARS reservoir
Not being the same disease, this isn't all that surprising.
> some how the strain that was circulating in whatever intermediate host it may have come from simply vanished
"Hard to find" is not the same as "vanished".
We've never conclusively found the reservoir for Ebola, either. Not for lack of trying.
Which is strange for a virus as you stated. "found to have jumped to quite a few other animals; cats, dogs, hippos, anteaters, manatees; it's clearly not picky". So why is it so hard to find the virus that spilled over into humans, this virus would have been better adapted towards their own species and would have not been replaced by the human variants. We find SARS circulating in animals all the time, but they all descend from the human variant.
Or, more mundanely, whatever mutation allowed it to be not-very-picky might be recent. The Black Death likely came about when Yersinia pestis went aerosolized, for example, despite the bacteria probably being around at least back to Roman times.
It looks like you've been posting about this single flamewar topic and almost nothing else for years now. That's not ok - we don't allow single purpose accounts on HN, and ban them when they show up, because pre-existing agendas aren't compatible with the curiosity we're trying to optimize for.
I'm not going to ban you right now because if I scroll back far enough, your account used to be more in keeping with the intended spirit of the site. But please go back to that so we won't have to.
of course it is plausible. a priori there is no reason why lab leak is more likely than natural origin. it just comes down to the evidence of what actually happened.
what you need to show natural origin is transmission in an animal population with an animal that can be linked to the outbreak location. that hasnt been found after 3 years of tremendous effort.
everyone associated with the wiv has millions of lives and trillions of dollars in damages on their heads if it was a lab leak so these people are definitely highly motivated to prove a natural origin. it has been 3+ years and nothing has been found. the more time that passes the less likely it becomes.
A priori the evidence is squarely in the 'zoonosis' favor, because that's how viruses spread before we ever had labs and there are thousands of examples for such spreading and very scant evidence for lab leaks.
But: this doesn't prove or disprove either and just like in the discussion about that superconductor, there is absolutely no need to commit to either hypothesis even if there is a historical pile of evidence, because that's not proof that this case is the same.
So I would advice anybody that really wants to jump to a conclusion to do so with the historical data in mind and for everybody else to just wait until there is conclusive evidence with the caution that such evidence may never be found. Ironically, the Chinese moved with such speed against the market that they may very well have destroyed the evidence that would have proven that they weren't directly involved. At the same time there is some support for the theory that the market itself wasn't the place where 'patient zero' got infected, and that still doesn't prove or disprove a lab leak.
People love to have someone or something to blame when there is a big problem, and with natural disasters we sometimes are in fact able to show how humans are a direct or proximate cause. But biology is super messy and even if there is a human cause at work here we may never know it, likewise we may never know for sure that it was a zoonosis.
If I had to bet I would bet zoonosis because the stats are in favor. But I don't have to bet so I'll just wait. I do hope that anybody that favors one theory over another will come forward to admit that they were wrong to jump to conclusions if there ever is a resolution, and that they will learn something from that. But they won't be much more or less wrong than those that backed the other side. Finally: there are some viruses that are known to have jumped from the animal kingdom to people many times in the past and in spite of hunting them for decades we still haven't found the reservoir. It could happen again tomorrow and there might be a breakthrough, but so far there is nothing. So absence of evidence doesn't prove a thing.
> nybody that favors one theory over another will come forward to admit that they were wrong to jump to conclusions
a probability statement is not wrong just because the less probable thing turns out to happen. lab leak of a non-natural virus that was created through purposeful gain-of-function using transmission is currently the most likely scenario based on all available evidence. even if natural origin is proven, my probability statement will still be correct. i dont discount the probability of natural origin. it is just very unlikely now.
> The only thing I find somewhat frustrating about this is that lab leak is nearly impossible to disprove.
A population of animals infected with virus genetically ancestral to the earliest human infections would absolutely disprove any theories of genetic engineering. For example, the discovery of BANAL-20 has pretty strongly excluded any theories that SARS-CoV-2's spike evolved in hACE2 mice (but not that the spike evolved naturally and was used in a laboratory recombinant, as in the unfunded DEFUSE proposal). Such a population wouldn't absolutely disprove theories of research-related spillover without lab manipulation of the virus (e.g., a researcher sampling bat caves gets infected in the field). It would significantly weaken those though, especially if that population was far from any known pre-pandemic sampling trips.
In the previous two coronavirus spillovers (SARS-1, MERS), animals (palm civets and raccoon dogs, camels) infected with virus near-identical to the human virus were discovered within about a year. For MERS we also see genomic evidence of multiple spillovers, separated by an evolutionary distance that makes cryptic zoonotic spread essentially certain. For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting. That was the goal of the original pangolin papers; but that turned out to be multiple reports all derived from the same batch of smuggled pangolins, making it much more likely that humans infected those pangolins in the same way that many humans infected their housecats.
The absence of that evidence doesn't mean SARS-CoV-2 is certainly of unnatural origin; the zoonotic path for some unquestionably natural viruses (e.g. Ebola) is still unknown. It's not what anyone expected, though.
> Is there anything we can do about wet markets?
Reckless agricultural practices need to be stopped. The West is guilty too; there's less taste for exotic mammals here, but routine use of antibiotics in healthy animals may be remembered as a crime against humanity. That's a lot harder than stopping a tiny subset of government-funded research with no clear benefits, though. So it seems reasonable to me to work first on that much more achievable goal.
Really setting aside the divisive political positions that have poisoned the debate in the US, I find it really interesting that really solid science has been done by scientists truly studying the data with appropriate scepticism and the scientific method, while proponents of the zoonosis origin of Covid have characteristically lied and manipulated data, and also generally addressed the scientific findings that contradict their standpoint with personal insults and ad hominem attacks.
Here are just a few of the people that have studied the data scientifically - and have destroyed the supposed 'raccoon dog' theory, the cherry-picked and manipulated data used by Worobey et al, and obviously the lies that went into the infamous 'Proximal Origin' document - which the authors themselves did not believe:
PS: please at least spend a few seconds looking at the links here as it's disheartening that there are so many negative responses within a few seconds of my posting this in good faith. None of these experts are fringe activists or crackpots.
> Really setting aside the divisive political positions that have poisoned the debate in the US
yeah but if you believe lab leak then you are probably also an anti-fauci anti-vax anti-masker qanon trumper who gets all your news from tucker carlson and laura ingraham
> yeah but if you believe lab leak then you are probably also an anti-fauci anti-vax anti-masker qanon trumper who gets all your news from tucker carlson and Laura ingraham
I can't tell whether this is sarcasm? I don't even know who Laura Ingraham is and though I've heard of Tucker Carlson I've never seen or read anything he's written or said (on TV?).
I'd characterize myself as a normal, left-wing European who initially totally believed the zoonosis origin of covid. But being genuinely curious about the science, I've read more and more of the abstracts analising the available data, and gradually realized that all the actual facts - even though some of them circumstantial - point with much higher likelihood towards an accidental lab-leak (which incidentally happen all the time), than the very unlikely 'double jump' of two separate lineages infecting people at the market - but not infecting anyone else in the entire delivery chain from capture or animal farming, to the market itself.
That's a really funny comment, but is also kind of a gut-punch.
So many people have their entire world view and sense of self tied up in political narratives (left or right) that they are actually unable to objectively explore a subject.
Much easier to just downvote the "others" because they are obviously wrong.
Because if they aren't wrong - maybe, just maybe - the ideological shield we use to cope with the world would start showing cracks.
The impression from your comment is that the lab leak proponents are all doing good science, but are being attacked by the zoonosis proponents who all lie and manipulate data.
That you then give some cherry picked selections and demand that everyone Do Your Own Research is not a convincing argument. It is, in fact, the go to for crackpots everywhere.
I have zero bias for either outcome. It isn't my field or expertise. It should continue to be studied in depth so we can prepare for the future, and clearly there are very smart, very capable people arguing sincerely for both positions, as is often the case when there is a lack of data to more conclusively prove anything.
At the same time, people should realize that the "lab leak" theory got suppressed not because by itself there was anything evil with it -- labs do have accidents -- but that it was proximal with bad people and bad arguments and got tainted by association. e.g. The Assholes of society were almost universally proponents of the lab leak theory because it's pat, fits in loads of conspiracies and racist overtones, and lets you stomp your feet in anger. Those people basically tarnished the position.
> Did you really post this in good faith? Come on.
I'm not sure how to respond. I want people to look at posts like this one[1], that actually reference solidly researched studies like those done by Bloom Labs, instead of the manipulated and cherry-picked data used by Worobey and others who support the wet-market scenario (at least in public).
There are a lot of crackpots out there, and I try to ignore their anti-vax nonsense. But just because it's convenient for them to align themselves with what they seem to think is some sort of anti-China hypothesis, it's no reason for me to discount the clear and growing evidence that a lab accident infected workers, and spread from there, wherever it might have been in the world.
The current state of the debate is that there are credible, lauded experts arguing both positions. If it was a straw-vote among the most respected figures in the field, it it would still lean towards a zoonic origin, I suspect. But almost all of them believe the data is incomplete.
I questioned the faith of the post because your post implies pretty clearly that there is all of the evidence on one side, and all of the charlatans, liars and fake data is on the other. That seems...unlikely. But you see it because you chose a position and everything then fits that position. Eh.
Almost all of the researchers throwing ad hominems at scientists who support a lab origin are NOT that lauded. Most had very low H-index scores prior to the pandemic. Especially Angela Rasmussen from the University of Saskatchewan.
>>At the same time, people should realize that the "lab leak" theory got suppressed not because by itself there was anything evil with it -- labs do have accidents -- but that it was proximal with bad people and bad arguments and got tainted by association
Must be nice to have one of those jobs where you get to decide whether to indulge in the "Noble Lie" or not, just in case all the rest of society (which is obviously never as smart as you or your friends) draws different conclusions.
The fact that you even think it's borderline acceptable for the lab leak theory to be suppressed just because of who was in charge at the time is disgusting.
Both when this was initially discussed in 2020 and following, I've maintained that:
(1) at the time it didn't matter what the source was; what mattered at the time was not flaming international conflict which the US leadership was aiming to do. Now that we have survived and moved forward, it's absolutely appropriate to discuss the source if there is any reasonable evidence towards one source or another: lab, meat market, random chance
(2) ideological conflict won't lead to better lab safety
(3) if it was a lab leak, what a shame.
Frankly, I don't really care what the source was as its identification doesn't change my life in a meaningful way. If it was a lab leak, glad it wasn't something worse and hope we can institute better policies.
Well I care, I have family members who died due to this pandemic, and covering up a lab origin to protect dangerous research is not a valid reason. Given how common lab leaks are and the massive growth of this type of research playing down the possibility prevents needed regulations and bans on something that could kill millions more.
It is bound to happen again if we do not do anything!
So you want better lab safety, and that is reasonable. How would Covid-19 being a lab leak, or not, change your desire for safer lab work? How would the outcome of a lab leak determination change your life outside of your desire for safer labs?
It's sad that it's so politicized, because there was definitely a coverup of at least the appearance of a lab leak and probably of a lab leak itself, but I disagree with the politics of basically everyone with that opinion. I know you guys probably haven't read the Vanity Fair reporting by Katherine Eban because I mean what hackers would read Vanity Fair but it was pretty convincing, especially if you read the supplementary materials and if you have any background in life sciences.
There was a recent NYT article about this (why ppl believe the lab leak hypothesis). Was eye opening for me. I read the Vanity Fair article and believed it, too.
-early people said it may have leaks (and these people subsequently retracted those statements after research)
-china
And that’s literally it. What exactly is so convincing? People who actually study virus origins still seem to believe that Covid has markers of natural evolution. Lab leak theory tends to side step that fact though.
The lab leak conspiracy theorists put more weight in to a head of department of energy over the virologists who state that he’s probably wrong.
Do you have any papers from scientists that back up the lab leak?
The thing I find annoying is that the lab leak narrative has shifted to: 1. Repeat the same things we've known since mid-2020. 2. Declare the lab-leak hypothesis vindicated. 3. Complain about being suppressed/censored.
Repeating the same thing does not count as an argument, dammit.
I think the point being made by the “other side” is not so much that the lab leak is probable, not even that it is possible, but rather it’s about whether we’re being told the truth and treated like adults and allowed to make our own judgements.
I really don’t give a fuck what random perpetual contrarians have to say. The biologists who study viruses say that it has markers of natural evolution with at least 2 hops from human back to animal back to human.
No one is asserting that SARS-CoV-2 initially spilled from human to animal to human. You're perhaps misunderstanding the assertion from Pekar et al. that it spilled from animal to human twice (i.e., from Animal A to Human A forming Lineage A, and from Animal B to Human B forming Lineage B), in "The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2". I think their argument is weak, and mostly agree with the criticisms in
I can at least repeat their argument correctly, though.
You've also grossly mischaracterized the evidence for a research-related origin. For example, it's not that "labs around the world work on SARS viruses"--the WIV was one of only two labs in the world (with UNC) genetically manipulating coronaviruses in ways consistent with SARS-CoV-2, and has the largest collection of novel sarbecoviruses anywhere.
David Relman (of Stanford) published a note in 2020, which I believe has aged quite well:
Many other impeccably-credentialed academics consider this origin to be an open question. Bluntly, I don't think you're well-informed here. (Did you know that the 1977 flu killed ~700k people, and is uncontroversially accepted to have arisen from a research accident? If not, does that shift your priors on research-origin pandemics?) I would urge you to learn more from scientific sources, instead of repeating shallow headline claims.
The papers are hard to publish since the politics pervade the peer reviewers and editors. But I've seen some in my Twitter feed from scientists that I follow, including one who became independently wealthy by making accurate predictions about how the pandemic would play out, which he was able to capitalize on since people weren't using their heads and so he had an advantage.
I think you've mentioned there currently there is only circumstantial evidence. However, broadly speaking circumstantial evidence can be very convincing for people. (and 'being convincing' is not the same thing as 'being true.') It's further the case that there is no hard forensic evidence (at least that I'm aware of currently) that this is natural. In other words, because there's not really a lot of hard forensic evidence available to people, it makes the the circumstantial evidence weigh heavier in people's minds.
I also haven't followed this very closely, so if there is great specific evidence that I'm unaware of, I apologize. I'm not trying to advocate a particular position here, just trying to explain why the lab leak theory is convincing to people. In fact, I think a lot of people would take the list of evidence you've presented and draw the opposite conclusion that you have -- ie, that with the list you've provided, the lab leak is the likeliest conclusion.
Just to reiterate, I'm not suggesting that circumstantial evidence _does_ prove anything, I'm only making the point that circumstantial evidence successfully convinces a large number of people.
Also keep in mind all the evidence in support of a natural origin is also circumstantial. So much so Worobey's paper included a photo Eddie Holmes took on his iPhone in 2014 of animals at a market as evidence. So we are working with ufology levels of evidence here.
The fact that we lack so much data to support zoonosis when compared to the two previous coronavirus outbreak really stands out.
We are missing:
- an intermediate host being identified. Something that was identified within months for SARS and MERS.
- Lack of non human mtDNA reads
- Missing point mutations as the virus adapts towards humans.
- Explanation on how the virus binds better toward human ACE2 than any other animal species.
- Separate spillover events
Many in this thread have remarked on there being two version of "lab leak", 1) that it was manipulated in a lab, then escaped, or 2) that it was a natural virus that escaped from the lab.
The evidence is that it is a natural virus, so 1) is excluded by scientific data. As to 2), the problem is that there is no evidence that SARS-CoV2 was ever at the Wuhan Lab before the pandemic, and also that the first people to become infected were also not at the lab. There is however evidence that the market was the origin of the pandemic.
So, there's no evidence for either version of "lab leak", and evidence against them. It's as simple as that.
> In a back-and-forth with Andersen that sounded something like a rudimentary lesson in scientific hypotheses, Representative Jamie Raskin (D–MD) brought up an email in which the Scripps Research scientist said he and his colleagues wanted to “disprove any type of lab leak theory.” Republican members assert that this betrayed Andersen’s ill intent. “You meant pursuing the scientific process by which you have a hypothesis, which stands unless it’s disproven, is that right?” Raskin asked Andersen. “That is correct,” Andersen said. “I’m referring to the concept of what’s called falsification.”
If any scientist reads this, if someone privately says they want to "disprove any type of lab leak theory" then they aren't talking about a good faith experiment. That's not how scientists talk about questions they are trying to find the actual answers to. But on the other hand I wouldn't want some guys in suits and American flag lapel pins subpoenaing my DMs or all up in my FOIA requests every time I did a research on a politically adjacent research topic, and if they were then I'd certainly make the argument that these guys are making, that they are humble scientists doing the scientific method just like Bill Nye says on TV.
>But on the other hand I wouldn't want some guys in suits and American flag lapel pins subpoenaing my DMs or all up in my FOIA requests every time I did a research on a politically adjacent research topic
Agreed, but when the research topic at hand involves millions of deaths worldwide sometimes it is necessary. Especially when said scientists openly discussed how to deceive journalists asking questions.
Next question is whether the pandemic scenario was exploited by a coalition of interests to push their narrow agendas (digital id, privacy law exceptions, data collection and surveillance, mail-in voting, censorship, undermining of fundamental freedoms of movement and association, etc.) These also absolutely occurred and cannot be denied rationally.
The real question of the pandemic that I think people need to ask themselves is, did you demonstrate courage and compassion? If you fell for it all and became a persecutor of others, consider the capacity of courageous and compassionate people to forgive, and take some time to reckon how you would act if you had the chance to make those choices again. I'm pretty sure you're going to get the opportunity soon.
The primary thing I don't understand about lab leak and bioweapon theories surrounding SARS-Cov-2 (And if you're an advocate of ideas in this vicinity I'd love a deeper explanation) is this:
If this disease has human origins, accidental or otherwise, why allow it to spread unrestrained?
We know the disease spreads through aerosol transmission. We know that it presents serious long term risks for people who catch it, even those who only have a mild asymptomatic case. Hazard ratios for most "scary" health impacts (strokes, heart attack, diabetes, etc) sit anywhere from 1.75 to near 3, even in broader meta analyses. We know that reinfection can magnify the risk profile of the disease. Estimates for pasc/long covid sit any where between 10 and 30% of all cases for at least 6 months after infection.
Community transmission, as measured by waste water numbers, has been at or above the levels observed during the delta wave for more than half of the months since the omicron wave. We've abandoned masking, destroyed testing infrastructure, indoor air quality is still not substantially better than it was pre 2019, and we have done nothing to bring ANY interventions back.
Isn't all of this just a failure? Or at least a contradiction? If you believe that this disease originated in a lab, why does it make sense to welcome it into your body without any protective measures? Every person on this subcomittee is talking about this lab leak while making sure that they take no visible measures to protect themselves from it, at a time when there's still nonzero community transmission. And now, of course, wastewater numbers are increasing and we are on the precipice of another period of delta-wave-level community transmission.
If this was some nefarious bioweapons play, isn't the response to let it spread and to give up on the disease a confirmation that that such bioweapons are a viable strategy? Why aren't rational actors that believe in these theories of covid's origins doing everything to ensure that they do not get the disease and in turn everything to bring transmission of the disease down to 0?
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadI am not so sure about this assertion. And definitely, the lab leak hypothesis should not have been so forcefully suppressed as a conspiracy theory.
science is the thing you do.
Science is the thing you trust.
Similarly there’s theories around collections of events such as the timing of the ice ages which are collectively significant.
I don't agree because there are plethora of possible details depending on level of conspiracy. Was the virus synthesized at least partly? Was the virus selected from a number of not so harmful viruses? Was the virus went from naively non-infected bat when the fact is that it was infected? Was the lab-leak done intentionally, kind of something able to pause WW3? And so on and on.
At this point I feel like the argument is over some broader meta-argument that the lab leak hypothesis was dismissed too aggressively and the consensus formed too quickly over the wet market.
Because almost no-one has covered this news, you may have missed that the data pointing at the wet-market (from Worobey et al) has been thoroughly debunked using solid scientific data.
A thought experiment:
A murder during a fancy dinner party. Victim was shot in the head with a 9mm round. Guest A is very evasive and was in the vicinity where the body was found. Guest A is known to have a 9mm handgun. Guest A quickly destroys his handgun and forensics cannot recover any information from it. Guest A writes a letter explaining that the shot came from outside the house, without any mention of his potential role in the murder, and his friends at the local newspaper not only run the letter, citing him as a expert, but run hit pieces that anyone claiming otherwise is a racist.
Reason allows us to know Guest A was involved. In the absence of evidence sometimes reason is all you have. This is one of those cases, no science is required just a little life experience.
"Guest A quickly destroys his handgun" is, thus far, not supported by evidence in the lab leak hypothesis, which posits but has never proven the existence of samples of SARS-CoV-2 in the lab.
western people will believe in the wuhan virus leak and some others will believe in Fort detrick virus leak theories. You also had Russians finding a lot of virus labs in ukraine etc.
The world will split into multiple realities and histories.
Not really. We can build vinegar and baking soda volcanoes in our kitchens, but we can't build particle accelerators.
You will never personally prove where COVID-19 originated, so if you don't want to rely on trusting other accounts, you'll need to permanently abstain from holding an opinion either way.
- science is the methodology,
- Science is the institution that requires trust to be believed?
Folks might interpret your comment to mean we should trust the institution, when of course we all know it's a grave error to trust institutions. Institutions get captured, usually by low-iq lifers
Richard Feynman: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts... science - a.k.a. research - is in the making, belongs to the (unknown, yet to be discovered) future, while expertise is based on the past, with in-built obsolescence"
The WIV lab was built by the French with money from many different countries and the research was being done by EcoHealth Alliance with US funding so blaming it on the Chinese is probably not the whole picture.
EcoHealth alliance made a grant application to DARPA and DARPA turned them down because it was too risky but it seems pretty obvious that they got the money somewhere else.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
And it gets worse, even though EcoHealth Alliance lied in their books they recently received another grant to keep doing similar research. It was discussed here at the time. What could go wrong?
It's a rabbit hole but you might be surprised how corrupt it looks. Don't get fooled by those trying to shift your focus to China.
The government of any place gets to take the blame for things happening in that place, even in more extreme cases where deeds were fully funded by a hostile government who sent in secret agents. ("The buck stops here").
So, if you want to blame $meme_de_jour as well, then go for it — but even if guilty, regardless of whether that's malice or incompetence or bad luck or a novel failure that nobody could have foreseen, that doesn't exonerate anyone else who dropped a ball, which China absolutely did more than once regardless of the origin, as they also tried to downplay the initial infections.
This is major gaslighting by saying that.
Of course it matters. It affects the priorities and the costs. If there was indeed a lab leak that caused the pandemic, you can justify having far more oversight, and more safety precautions even at great expense, because you have evidence that failing to do so killed millions of people.
Also, this would call for greater scrutiny and regulation of organizations such as the Ecohealth Alliance that are providing funding for such labs.
In addition, saying it doesn't matter rewards a coverup.
If someone breaks your leg, saying you should eat more calcium and be careful walking down the steps, and it doesn't matter if someone actually hit your let with a tire iron, isn't that helpful.
If it's even reasonably plausible, and this is as good a chance as any to take a close look and find out, then you should spend this money to prevent such an outbreak even if COVID didn't happen this way.
Likewise in reverse, that wet markets were already seen as likely to cause the emergence of a new zoonotic disease, they should be changed or closed anyway because that risk is exactly the same now as in 2018 regardless of whether or not it was the origin of COVID.
> In addition, saying it doesn't matter rewards a coverup.
Only for people whose attention span misses that I also wrote "both cases, it's a good idea to review and possibly improve biolab safety protocols".
(I suspect this is quite a large percentage; people anchors on single points very easily, no matter how hard you try to make it clear "two things: what about both?")
> If someone breaks your leg, saying you should eat more calcium and be careful walking down the steps, and it doesn't matter if someone actually hit your let with a tire iron, isn't that helpful
In this case it's more like:
Doctors and lawyers trying to work out if your broken leg was caused by the cage fights you do every weekend, or by your recent slip down a very long and excessively polished staircase in a building that might or might not have be up to code at the time.
And the options are:
"Stop fighting in cage matches", and/or "see if that building was up to code and if it was campaign for better building codes".
The reason why you may think it has been suppressed as a conspiracy theory is probably because the people pushing the more for it actually use conspiracy theory patterns. In reaction, report about these loud yeller providing out-of-context, with often ridicule arguments, are dismissed as conspiracy theories.
There is nonetheless some objective reports a lab leak hypotheses and how improving lab security is important to prevent this kind of things either way.
Social media platforms were removing content discussing lab leak theories, and there's enough evidence of government officials colluding with those platforms generally to suspect they could have played a role in that.
That's apart from the scientific community itself, which is what this hearing is ostensibly about.
Personally I have been from the start saying that a lab leak was possible, on the basis that lab leaks have happened before, and should be investigated. That makes me a lab leak theory supporter as a possibility from day one. I've never got silenced, banned, insulted or de-platformed for saying so. I have no common cause or sympathy for people knowingly spreading lies and contrived 'evidence' to push the lab leak hypothesis though.
There was gain of function research going on in the same city as the origin of SarsCov2, with the exact same class of virus, and a hand-wavy paper appears claiming only natural origin is reasonable? And the recipients and/or funders of the gain of function research put their names on the paper without declaring conflicts?
Maybe it's because Fauci himself called it a conspiracy theory and tried to suppress the idea from further discussion. I think many would consider that "official", even if not technically.
It always amazes me when people attempt to rewrite history that people lived through just 2 years ago
Lab Leak was absolutely suppressed on all major tech platforms, and calls a xenophobic conspiracy theory by all major news outlets in 2019 and 2020, 2021 it started to shift to "hey maybe that is possible" and now in 2023 is "extremely unlikely" to "likely with low confidence".
1. that the lab "created" the virus via genetic engineering or something. 2. the virus was natural but the lab was studying it and it escaped.
The paper is explicitly about case one, saying the virus seems completely natural, they explicitly say case two is not off the table.
There are lots and lots of bat caves.
But not far away from humans who had been to where the bat virus was found to bring back samples for analysis and experimentation in their laboratory [1]
[1] spoiler alert: the Wuhan Institute of Virology
The only reason that that bat was far away from where it was first found in humans is simply because we haven't found a better sample, yet. This was iirc a sample taken long ago, so there was plenty of time for migration. Bats fly insanely long distances and can have multiple roosts.
What all lab-leak theory adherents seem to forget: if the Chinese really had ready access to the very earliest strains of COVID they could have easily falsified evidence of where it originated. The fact that this hasn't happened is - especially given what is at stake here - pretty good circumstantial evidence that they not have access to that strain.
I suspect it will take a long time (years, maybe as much as a decade) before the whole picture will come out and if not then too bad, it will be one of those things we'll never know. Which is entirely in line with expectations, and with the historical record of other discoveries like that. In the meantime: speculation is pointless. Either you have evidence or you don't.
And [] do not confer any special insights unless actually accompanied by a citation, preferably of something that is not written by the same author.
It is trivial to tell whether a variant is antecedent - this is how the absurd 'double jump' of lineage A and lineage B was necessary for Worobey to justify his thesis that the wet market was the origin of covid... twice
> It is trivial to tell whether a variant is antecedent
I'm sure all of the evolutionary biologists would love to have your level of confidence.
It's trivial when the differences and the timescales are large (and even then we get it wrong plenty of times). But it isn't trivial at all when the differences are minor and the timescales are close, in fact it can be really, really hard. Fortunately with COVID19 a lot of evidence was gathered in real time and preserved so there are a lot of theories that can be ruled out based on that.
One of the hardest problems is to figure out when there is an individual where more than one virus took hold at the same time and genetic material was exchanged between two strains rather than just a mutation. There is some - but inconclusive - evidence that this happened more than once during the COVID pandemic.
It's easy to say this, as neither you nor I have the requisite knowledge to prove/disprove your assertion. But I read threads like this one [1] or resources like this one [2] and realize that there are experts who are able to distinguish earlier and later variants.
Incidentally, I noticed that you edited your first response several times while I wrote this. The tone of what you wrote first was a bit less considered than the what I'm responding to now, but I hope it's ok to just leave it at this.
[1] https://nitter.net/ydeigin/status/1695588327540347329
[2] https://github.com/jbloom/PRJNA692319_public
I actually do have that knowledge, you just speak for yourself. The fact that experts are able to distinguish earlier and later variants doesn't mean that this is trivial, nor does it mean that this is something that is error free. So your statement simply does not stand. Whether or not you can make a statement about the order in which mutations happened (which is the genetic basis for all evolutionary biology) hinges on a large number of factors and not all of those may be in agreement.
I've been somewhat involved in a bunch of issues around determining the sequence in which a plant mutated historically and in spite of a good idea of the overall picture the final call was less solidly supported than the parties involved would have liked. And that's before we get into the thorny issues of gaps in the record and sequence alignment, which by themselves can give rise to all kinds of interpretations.
> Incidentally, I noticed that you edited your first response several times while I wrote this. The tone of what you wrote first was a bit less considered than the what I'm responding to now, but I hope it's ok to just leave it at this.
Yes, I added some more information but the gist of it stands: this isn't trivial. Not by a long shot.
So you are arguing with my loose assertion that it is trivial whereas what I should have been more clear about, was that I consider it possible by experts with the requisite expertise.
The differences between the lineages is very small, amounting to a few weeks of the same kind of random variation frequently observed in real time during the pandemic.
What is does indicate is that those first diagnosed with SARS-CoV2 most likely contracted it from different sources, rather than as a consequence of encountering the same infected person or animal.
As Stanford Biologist Michael Lim points out:
>indeed he goes straight from seeing 2 lineages to concluding there were 2 jumps from wildlife days apart. That : (a) assumes the jumps were from wildlife, not people. (b) hides the fact that >2 mutations are being made in each host anyway, so separate events not needed
https://twitter.com/michaelzlin/status/1632249640832880640
>Indeed Worobey seems to think "Lineage A" and "Lineage B" are some profoundly different lineages but the tree he shows confirms they are different by only 2 bases. The "A" root has 2 fewer mutations than the "B" root. He doesn't point this out. Yet he must know.
https://twitter.com/michaelzlin/status/1632249637645201408
What it does imply is that SARS-CoV2 was circulating at the Wuhan market for at least weeks or months before the first samples were collected.
However, two base changes is very little data from which to construct a phylogenetic relationship or make "molecular clock" calculations.
SARS1 they found infected civet cats with an almost identical virus within a few months:
>”Civet cats, a raccoon dog, and a ferret badger in an animal market in Gunagdong, China, were infected with a coronavirus identical to the one that causes SARS in humans save for an extra 29-nucleotide sequence" which demonstrated that these animals had a very close ancestral virus circulating within their populations.
Source: https://zenodo.org/record/3949022#.Y9hn9uzMJqs.
For MERS it took a little longer since by the time they discovered it in dromedary camels only 500 people were infected. But they still found it in less than a year!
Source: https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...
As I noted previously, the likely proximal zoonotic host for SARS-1 was discovered within about a year. The article that you've linked discusses different related bat viruses. These provide important information about the evolutionary history of the human virus, but are more genetically distant from the human virus than the civet and raccoon dog viruses found within that ~year.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37095934
So some members of Congress took this to mean they had a motive, rather than an attempt to 'disprove the null hypothesis'... and that's the entire basis for calling this a "cover-up"?
I agree with the other commenter who says that "it's a good idea to review and possibly improve biolab safety protocols and also to end wet markets as the latter were obviously a biohazard even before the pandemic." I see at least some discussion of the former, but almost none of the latter. Is there anything we can do about wet markets? Use trade negotiations as leverage? I don't even see a discussion.
I always chose my words carefully. To them, when they'd ask me if it was a "lab leak" they always meant something untoward was happening at the lab. Researchers studying artificial superbugs, etc. But there's a very big difference between "natural phenomena that found its way to a lab and then out" and "artificial phenomena created in a lab and then out". So I'd respond with things like "probably not man-made", which they often took as me saying not a "lab leak".
EDIT: to be more clear about the point I was raising, I was agreeing with the parent's point. Some of this language is politically/socially charged, and one needs to take that into account when discussing the matter.
The fact that the location happens to be in the exact location proposed in experiments and commonly used in virology, and the fact that SARS-CoV2 binds to Human ACE2 more efficiently than any other species really stands out:
> Spike protein exhibited the highest binding to human (h)ACE2 of all the species tested. . .
> These findings show that the earliest known SARS-CoV-2 isolates were surprisingly well adapted to bind strongly to human ACE2, helping explain its efficient human to human respiratory transmission
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8225877/
> Our observations suggest that by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV. However, no precursors or branches of evolution stemming from a less human-adapted SARS-CoV-2-like virus have been detected
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1
Not to mention that it's absurd to think that such an infectious virus would have been circulating in Raccoon Dogs or Civets and just simply disappear after the first human was infected with zero traces to be found. Like when humans passed covid to white tailed deer that did not stop the virus from circulating in humans.
Are we supposed to just accept SARS-CoV2 spillover was the result of an "Immaculate Infection">?
I don't think that's really true and I think that statement comes from ignorance of the volume of work done in epidemiology and public health. Lots of natural spillover events have been pretty well figured out in the past through contact tracing and finding animal reservoirs with plausible proximity to index patients and stuff like that. When that much evidence piles up, it'd be pretty unscientific to conclude a lab-leak occurred.
In this case though, a lab-leak remains a fairly plausible possibility. Natural spillover does too! We don't (and we may never) really have definitive evidence either way, but there are good reasons to suspect both.
I think our views are nearly perfectly aligned, in fact. We're talking about a rhetorical difference with me saying "disprove" versus what you called "plausible proximity." But I don't think we disagree about anything.
However, to many people in the world it has other implications. And thus discussion around it needs to be careful. For instance there's an enormous difference between "virus was 100% as found in nature, stored in lab, leaked" and "virus was 100% synthetic, stored in lab, leaked". And of course the real answer in a lab leak scenario is likely somewhere in the middle.
But when discussing the matter, one needs to take care to understand what "lab leak" *means* to the people on the other side of the conversation.
I think your statement agrees with the parent comment that the "lab leak is nearly impossible to disprove." This isn't a disagreement with any other point you've made in your comment, but I think the parent was effectively saying that even if it were true that this did not come from a lab leak, it would probably be impossible remove that doubt from the public discourse because of the lack of definitive evidence that you point out.
Currently the best working hypothesis is the natural origin, but that doesn't mean we have certainty around what the origin is. We need to stop bickering over unproductive questions.
lab leak is dead simple to disprove. all you have to do is find an animal that you can infect with covid and will spread it and you have your proof. many people have been spending a lot of money for years trying to do this and the longer they continue to fail the higher the probability of lab leak becomes.
but finding an animal that can spread covid with a plausible story for how it cross over to humans in wuhan is a threshold that has not been crossed yet. if anyone could meet that threshold test it would be treated as proof of natural origin.
but supposing that it was a natural virus that came from an animal in the lab at wuhan then it would be very easy for people with access to that information to identify the natural source, and since that has not happened, it means the virus is either from a natural source that was not in the lab, or it was created in the lab.
the longer time that passes without finding a natural source outside the lab the more likely it is that it was created in the lab.
This is not correct. It may well be that the evidence existed but was lost.
The idea that biology will just sit around and wait until we catch up with it is fundamentally mistaken. Some things happen just once and that's that. Some things happen all the time and you can observe them as they happen. Some things leave ample evidence. Biology is not a static system, it isn't a computer program and it isn't a piece of hardware. Your 'bug' may simply not be reproducible even if it in fact did occur just once.
if the virus crossed over from animals to humans then it must be able to cross back over. viruses evolve quickly, but animals don't, and we have plenty of samples of the original virus. all you have to do is find the right species and infect them with a sample of the virus and show that they can spread it to prove natural origin.
the only scenario where your theory could be true is if the origin species suddenly went extinct after starting the pandemic, which is very improbable.
https://news.osu.edu/covid-19-virus-is-evolving-rapidly-in-w...
"Scientists collected 1,522 nasal swabs from free-ranging deer in 83 of the state’s 88 counties between November 2021 and March 2022. More than 10% of the samples were positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and at least one positive case was found in 59% of the counties in which testing took place. Genomic analysis showed that at least 30 infections in deer had been introduced by humans – a figure that surprised the research team."
“And the evidence is growing that humans can get it from deer – which isn’t radically surprising. It’s probably not a one-way pipeline.”
Still, this doesn't disprove a lab leak; it proves something other than a lab leak is plausible.
But like virgin births, I find immaculate infections to be implausible.
Thus providing clear evidence this virus jumps fairly readily between mammals. (Especially when you count that it has also been found to have jumped to quite a few other animals; cats, dogs, hippos, anteaters, manatees; it's clearly not picky. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/...)
> guess what when humans passed on SARS2 to different species it did not suddenly stop circulating within humans which seems to have been the case with SARS2
I assure you that SARS2 is still circulating within humans, lol.
> For SARS2 we have a single spillover event hundreds of miles away from the nearest SARS reservoir
Not being the same disease, this isn't all that surprising.
> some how the strain that was circulating in whatever intermediate host it may have come from simply vanished
"Hard to find" is not the same as "vanished".
We've never conclusively found the reservoir for Ebola, either. Not for lack of trying.
Which is strange for a virus as you stated. "found to have jumped to quite a few other animals; cats, dogs, hippos, anteaters, manatees; it's clearly not picky". So why is it so hard to find the virus that spilled over into humans, this virus would have been better adapted towards their own species and would have not been replaced by the human variants. We find SARS circulating in animals all the time, but they all descend from the human variant.
It is the Immaculate Infection!
I'm not going to ban you right now because if I scroll back far enough, your account used to be more in keeping with the intended spirit of the site. But please go back to that so we won't have to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
of course it is plausible. a priori there is no reason why lab leak is more likely than natural origin. it just comes down to the evidence of what actually happened.
what you need to show natural origin is transmission in an animal population with an animal that can be linked to the outbreak location. that hasnt been found after 3 years of tremendous effort.
everyone associated with the wiv has millions of lives and trillions of dollars in damages on their heads if it was a lab leak so these people are definitely highly motivated to prove a natural origin. it has been 3+ years and nothing has been found. the more time that passes the less likely it becomes.
But: this doesn't prove or disprove either and just like in the discussion about that superconductor, there is absolutely no need to commit to either hypothesis even if there is a historical pile of evidence, because that's not proof that this case is the same.
So I would advice anybody that really wants to jump to a conclusion to do so with the historical data in mind and for everybody else to just wait until there is conclusive evidence with the caution that such evidence may never be found. Ironically, the Chinese moved with such speed against the market that they may very well have destroyed the evidence that would have proven that they weren't directly involved. At the same time there is some support for the theory that the market itself wasn't the place where 'patient zero' got infected, and that still doesn't prove or disprove a lab leak.
People love to have someone or something to blame when there is a big problem, and with natural disasters we sometimes are in fact able to show how humans are a direct or proximate cause. But biology is super messy and even if there is a human cause at work here we may never know it, likewise we may never know for sure that it was a zoonosis.
If I had to bet I would bet zoonosis because the stats are in favor. But I don't have to bet so I'll just wait. I do hope that anybody that favors one theory over another will come forward to admit that they were wrong to jump to conclusions if there ever is a resolution, and that they will learn something from that. But they won't be much more or less wrong than those that backed the other side. Finally: there are some viruses that are known to have jumped from the animal kingdom to people many times in the past and in spite of hunting them for decades we still haven't found the reservoir. It could happen again tomorrow and there might be a breakthrough, but so far there is nothing. So absence of evidence doesn't prove a thing.
a probability statement is not wrong just because the less probable thing turns out to happen. lab leak of a non-natural virus that was created through purposeful gain-of-function using transmission is currently the most likely scenario based on all available evidence. even if natural origin is proven, my probability statement will still be correct. i dont discount the probability of natural origin. it is just very unlikely now.
A population of animals infected with virus genetically ancestral to the earliest human infections would absolutely disprove any theories of genetic engineering. For example, the discovery of BANAL-20 has pretty strongly excluded any theories that SARS-CoV-2's spike evolved in hACE2 mice (but not that the spike evolved naturally and was used in a laboratory recombinant, as in the unfunded DEFUSE proposal). Such a population wouldn't absolutely disprove theories of research-related spillover without lab manipulation of the virus (e.g., a researcher sampling bat caves gets infected in the field). It would significantly weaken those though, especially if that population was far from any known pre-pandemic sampling trips.
In the previous two coronavirus spillovers (SARS-1, MERS), animals (palm civets and raccoon dogs, camels) infected with virus near-identical to the human virus were discovered within about a year. For MERS we also see genomic evidence of multiple spillovers, separated by an evolutionary distance that makes cryptic zoonotic spread essentially certain. For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting. That was the goal of the original pangolin papers; but that turned out to be multiple reports all derived from the same batch of smuggled pangolins, making it much more likely that humans infected those pangolins in the same way that many humans infected their housecats.
The absence of that evidence doesn't mean SARS-CoV-2 is certainly of unnatural origin; the zoonotic path for some unquestionably natural viruses (e.g. Ebola) is still unknown. It's not what anyone expected, though.
> Is there anything we can do about wet markets?
Reckless agricultural practices need to be stopped. The West is guilty too; there's less taste for exotic mammals here, but routine use of antibiotics in healthy animals may be remembered as a crime against humanity. That's a lot harder than stopping a tiny subset of government-funded research with no clear benefits, though. So it seems reasonable to me to work first on that much more achievable goal.
Here are just a few of the people that have studied the data scientifically - and have destroyed the supposed 'raccoon dog' theory, the cherry-picked and manipulated data used by Worobey et al, and obviously the lies that went into the infamous 'Proximal Origin' document - which the authors themselves did not believe:
https://nitter.net/gdemaneuf
https://nitter.net/mbalter
https://nitter.net/jbloom_lab
https://nitter.net/R_H_Ebright
https://nitter.net/EmaNymton90
PS: please at least spend a few seconds looking at the links here as it's disheartening that there are so many negative responses within a few seconds of my posting this in good faith. None of these experts are fringe activists or crackpots.
yeah but if you believe lab leak then you are probably also an anti-fauci anti-vax anti-masker qanon trumper who gets all your news from tucker carlson and laura ingraham
I can't tell whether this is sarcasm? I don't even know who Laura Ingraham is and though I've heard of Tucker Carlson I've never seen or read anything he's written or said (on TV?).
I'd characterize myself as a normal, left-wing European who initially totally believed the zoonosis origin of covid. But being genuinely curious about the science, I've read more and more of the abstracts analising the available data, and gradually realized that all the actual facts - even though some of them circumstantial - point with much higher likelihood towards an accidental lab-leak (which incidentally happen all the time), than the very unlikely 'double jump' of two separate lineages infecting people at the market - but not infecting anyone else in the entire delivery chain from capture or animal farming, to the market itself.
So many people have their entire world view and sense of self tied up in political narratives (left or right) that they are actually unable to objectively explore a subject.
Much easier to just downvote the "others" because they are obviously wrong.
Because if they aren't wrong - maybe, just maybe - the ideological shield we use to cope with the world would start showing cracks.
The impression from your comment is that the lab leak proponents are all doing good science, but are being attacked by the zoonosis proponents who all lie and manipulate data.
That you then give some cherry picked selections and demand that everyone Do Your Own Research is not a convincing argument. It is, in fact, the go to for crackpots everywhere.
I have zero bias for either outcome. It isn't my field or expertise. It should continue to be studied in depth so we can prepare for the future, and clearly there are very smart, very capable people arguing sincerely for both positions, as is often the case when there is a lack of data to more conclusively prove anything.
At the same time, people should realize that the "lab leak" theory got suppressed not because by itself there was anything evil with it -- labs do have accidents -- but that it was proximal with bad people and bad arguments and got tainted by association. e.g. The Assholes of society were almost universally proponents of the lab leak theory because it's pat, fits in loads of conspiracies and racist overtones, and lets you stomp your feet in anger. Those people basically tarnished the position.
I'm not sure how to respond. I want people to look at posts like this one[1], that actually reference solidly researched studies like those done by Bloom Labs, instead of the manipulated and cherry-picked data used by Worobey and others who support the wet-market scenario (at least in public).
There are a lot of crackpots out there, and I try to ignore their anti-vax nonsense. But just because it's convenient for them to align themselves with what they seem to think is some sort of anti-China hypothesis, it's no reason for me to discount the clear and growing evidence that a lab accident infected workers, and spread from there, wherever it might have been in the world.
[1] https://nitter.net/ydeigin/status/1695588327540347329
I questioned the faith of the post because your post implies pretty clearly that there is all of the evidence on one side, and all of the charlatans, liars and fake data is on the other. That seems...unlikely. But you see it because you chose a position and everything then fits that position. Eh.
Almost all of the researchers throwing ad hominems at scientists who support a lab origin are NOT that lauded. Most had very low H-index scores prior to the pandemic. Especially Angela Rasmussen from the University of Saskatchewan.
Must be nice to have one of those jobs where you get to decide whether to indulge in the "Noble Lie" or not, just in case all the rest of society (which is obviously never as smart as you or your friends) draws different conclusions.
The fact that you even think it's borderline acceptable for the lab leak theory to be suppressed just because of who was in charge at the time is disgusting.
(1) at the time it didn't matter what the source was; what mattered at the time was not flaming international conflict which the US leadership was aiming to do. Now that we have survived and moved forward, it's absolutely appropriate to discuss the source if there is any reasonable evidence towards one source or another: lab, meat market, random chance
(2) ideological conflict won't lead to better lab safety
(3) if it was a lab leak, what a shame.
Frankly, I don't really care what the source was as its identification doesn't change my life in a meaningful way. If it was a lab leak, glad it wasn't something worse and hope we can institute better policies.
It is bound to happen again if we do not do anything!
-some US agencies don’t outright reject it
-labs around the world work on SARS viruses
-early people said it may have leaks (and these people subsequently retracted those statements after research)
-china
And that’s literally it. What exactly is so convincing? People who actually study virus origins still seem to believe that Covid has markers of natural evolution. Lab leak theory tends to side step that fact though.
The lab leak conspiracy theorists put more weight in to a head of department of energy over the virologists who state that he’s probably wrong.
Do you have any papers from scientists that back up the lab leak?
Repeating the same thing does not count as an argument, dammit.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1
I can at least repeat their argument correctly, though.
You've also grossly mischaracterized the evidence for a research-related origin. For example, it's not that "labs around the world work on SARS viruses"--the WIV was one of only two labs in the world (with UNC) genetically manipulating coronaviruses in ways consistent with SARS-CoV-2, and has the largest collection of novel sarbecoviruses anywhere.
David Relman (of Stanford) published a note in 2020, which I believe has aged quite well:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2021133117
Many other impeccably-credentialed academics consider this origin to be an open question. Bluntly, I don't think you're well-informed here. (Did you know that the 1977 flu killed ~700k people, and is uncontroversially accepted to have arisen from a research accident? If not, does that shift your priors on research-origin pandemics?) I would urge you to learn more from scientific sources, instead of repeating shallow headline claims.
I also haven't followed this very closely, so if there is great specific evidence that I'm unaware of, I apologize. I'm not trying to advocate a particular position here, just trying to explain why the lab leak theory is convincing to people. In fact, I think a lot of people would take the list of evidence you've presented and draw the opposite conclusion that you have -- ie, that with the list you've provided, the lab leak is the likeliest conclusion.
Just to reiterate, I'm not suggesting that circumstantial evidence _does_ prove anything, I'm only making the point that circumstantial evidence successfully convinces a large number of people.
The fact that we lack so much data to support zoonosis when compared to the two previous coronavirus outbreak really stands out.
We are missing:
- an intermediate host being identified. Something that was identified within months for SARS and MERS. - Lack of non human mtDNA reads - Missing point mutations as the virus adapts towards humans. - Explanation on how the virus binds better toward human ACE2 than any other animal species. - Separate spillover events
And the list goes on, it's honestly shocking
The evidence is that it is a natural virus, so 1) is excluded by scientific data. As to 2), the problem is that there is no evidence that SARS-CoV2 was ever at the Wuhan Lab before the pandemic, and also that the first people to become infected were also not at the lab. There is however evidence that the market was the origin of the pandemic.
So, there's no evidence for either version of "lab leak", and evidence against them. It's as simple as that.
If any scientist reads this, if someone privately says they want to "disprove any type of lab leak theory" then they aren't talking about a good faith experiment. That's not how scientists talk about questions they are trying to find the actual answers to. But on the other hand I wouldn't want some guys in suits and American flag lapel pins subpoenaing my DMs or all up in my FOIA requests every time I did a research on a politically adjacent research topic, and if they were then I'd certainly make the argument that these guys are making, that they are humble scientists doing the scientific method just like Bill Nye says on TV.
Agreed, but when the research topic at hand involves millions of deaths worldwide sometimes it is necessary. Especially when said scientists openly discussed how to deceive journalists asking questions.
The real question of the pandemic that I think people need to ask themselves is, did you demonstrate courage and compassion? If you fell for it all and became a persecutor of others, consider the capacity of courageous and compassionate people to forgive, and take some time to reckon how you would act if you had the chance to make those choices again. I'm pretty sure you're going to get the opportunity soon.
If this disease has human origins, accidental or otherwise, why allow it to spread unrestrained?
We know the disease spreads through aerosol transmission. We know that it presents serious long term risks for people who catch it, even those who only have a mild asymptomatic case. Hazard ratios for most "scary" health impacts (strokes, heart attack, diabetes, etc) sit anywhere from 1.75 to near 3, even in broader meta analyses. We know that reinfection can magnify the risk profile of the disease. Estimates for pasc/long covid sit any where between 10 and 30% of all cases for at least 6 months after infection.
Community transmission, as measured by waste water numbers, has been at or above the levels observed during the delta wave for more than half of the months since the omicron wave. We've abandoned masking, destroyed testing infrastructure, indoor air quality is still not substantially better than it was pre 2019, and we have done nothing to bring ANY interventions back.
Isn't all of this just a failure? Or at least a contradiction? If you believe that this disease originated in a lab, why does it make sense to welcome it into your body without any protective measures? Every person on this subcomittee is talking about this lab leak while making sure that they take no visible measures to protect themselves from it, at a time when there's still nonzero community transmission. And now, of course, wastewater numbers are increasing and we are on the precipice of another period of delta-wave-level community transmission.
If this was some nefarious bioweapons play, isn't the response to let it spread and to give up on the disease a confirmation that that such bioweapons are a viable strategy? Why aren't rational actors that believe in these theories of covid's origins doing everything to ensure that they do not get the disease and in turn everything to bring transmission of the disease down to 0?
Someone, please, make it make sense to me.
It would just be nice if the government and institutions would admit that they censored a quite plausible theory.
Just admit it was because you needed to keep people from panicking.
Also lab leak<>lab made
That’s a generous assumption.