This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1]
This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world. We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.
An eerily prescient quote from a paper[0] published in 2015, two of the authors of which are with Wuhan Institute of Virology:
> Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future.
China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I think it’s silly to presume CCP engineered a virus as part of some warfare strategy, or even to vilify/sanction them for a lab leak if it indeed was the cause (mistakes happen). However, CCP’s resistance to a proper thorough study of the origins of COVID is IMO not exactly appropriate.
Active research was taking place in the vicinity of suspected ground zero. Lab escapes happen—there are well-documented cases of the original SARS virus leaking from a lab in Beijing in 2004 (killing at least one person). Why was this time such a scenario discarded as so ridiculously impossible at first, and is still considered “extremely unlikely”? Is it politics?
> However, CCP’s resistance to a proper thorough study of the origins of COVID is IMO not exactly appropriate.
It is, in fact, highly suspect. I’m not at all positive that it indeed leaked from a lab in Wuhan, but the fact they won’t let an independent investigation anywhere near it makes me lean more strongly towards that as a possibility.
The description of the last investigation into the origins of the virus felt more like a ‘guided tour’.
I think many bureaucrats everywhere view the press as an annoyance, but in places where they're used be being able to push the press around, pushing the press around becomes standard operating procedure even when there's nothing in particular to hide. Also, without a free press, nobody is incentivized short-term to dig deeper if a cursory investigation doesn't turn anything up. The end result is predictable stonewalling if a cursory investigation came up with nothing, even if the officials are pretty sure they have nothing to hide. (Also, due to incentives, it's harder for officials to be certain they really have nothing to hide.)
Having been in Hong Kong for just under a decade, I've seen several cases of bureaucrats making tone-deaf statements partly because they aren't used to dealing with a free(-ish) press. I have journalist friends, and I wish the relationship with the press were different, but bullying the press is less a sign of a cover-up when officials aren't used to dealing with a free press.
For that very reason, we cannot accept their narrative at face value. We certainly don't have enough information to confidently eliminate the lab escape theory. The media has largely suggested that the lab escape theory has been disproved.
The smoking gun is that labs in Wuhan were studying different coronaviruses in bats at the time the virus emerged. One of those labs was right near the seafood market which had one of the first documented outbreaks.
It's all circumstantial evidence of course, but that's really all you're going to get with a country like China. We can be damn well sure that they would never admit to the virus originating from a lab leak. To me, this is the clearest and most likely source of the outbreak.
> The smoking gun is that labs in Wuhan were studying different coronaviruses in bats at the time the virus emerged.
As far as I know, those labs always study coronaviruses in bats -- it's a large part of what they do. That makes it less of a suspicious coincidence than your way of putting it implies.
By which I don't mean it didn't happen. There's just not enough information one way or the other.
If anything, it makes it inevitable. The probability of a coronavirus from a bat eventually escaping a lab that regularly studies coronaviruses in bats almost certainly approaches 100% over time.
Also, it's not like they can actually find out what happened now, a year later. Not without a time-machine or perfect recordings showing some sort of ridiculously straightforward sequence of events. E.g. They find a recording showing a bat biting someone in a lab and that person hiding it and then later showing him touching fish at the market. Come on, who thinks it'd be that easy?
What they'd most likely output is a "report" with "findings" that "point to" or "suggest" certain things like bad protocols or insecure procedures or disconnected safety sensors etc. Hardly evidence, and not really actionable even if they were allowed to get there and eventually publish it.
This is the same kind of crap as with the "election" report in the US. They couldn't find hard-evidence because despite this being 2020, camera's aren't everywhere, evidence isn't readily available, and not everyone is keep ridiculous-level audit logs and collating as much info as we want. All they eventually put in their report were discrepancies, not-installed windows updates, internet-connected machines, etc. No smoking gun, and understandably so because even if it did happen, there is no easy and straightforward way to prove it.
> What they'd most likely output is a "report" with "findings" that "point to" or "suggest" certain things like bad protocols or insecure procedures or disconnected safety sensors etc. Hardly evidence, and not really actionable even if they were allowed to get there and eventually publish it
The WHO team wasn't even allowed near the labs, much less enter it. They got a very curated tour of Wuhan (which isn't surprising).
This article, and some top comments, are shifting the narrative to how we must not "demonize" China, and must work to deal with lab leaks in future, in effect, presuming the assumption that China is unequivocally to blame, covering it with the mere color of reasonableness and fairness. So with such careful narrative massaging, we get to hold onto our desire to pretend China is 100% to blame, but frame it reasonably.
This sort of bias, or propaganda, or narrative massaging, under the guise of reasonableness, and non-demoization is pernicious.
These sentiments are like, we can frame our China-blaming as reasonable, via pretending the assumption[0], so under the guise of "not demonizing China", "giving credit were due but still holding to account" we can hold onto our excuse to blame China, we can pretend the assumption that China is unequivocally to blame.
Bullshit. Unhelpful, bs. If you want to pretend that you are doing this under the guise of actually discovering the cause, you can to satisfy your own need to pretend that, but it's dishonest, and not actually helpful to discovering the cause.
Blaming the enemy of the day for the pestilence of the season is as old as the hills, and makes boring, and biased, history. And makes you all propagating such cant, useful idiots, manipulated puppets.
Also, how is everyone forgetting the childhood lesson that the one so eager to point the finger of blame is often the one with something to hide, so desperate to deflect suspicion away from themselves?
Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC) is 300 m from the market.
Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), with the more highly classified work, is 14 km away, but linked to the PLA Hospital, WHCDC and seafood market on Line 2 of the Wuhan metro:
The idea it spread via the seafood market has been largely debunked even by CCP and WHO -- there were cases before those occurred, there were no traces found there, etc...
It can be pride over shame of incompetence maybe ? the wuhan labs are said to be lacking in standard safety biohazard practices.. so investigating may reveal that.
Every time when there's a question about China's bad behaviour, someone will point out that it happens everywhere.
Yes, but in a vastly different degree, China goes to an extreme of making it political and look good.
In US, most leaks don't look good. Sure, US tries to make some problems look good, but they don't try very hard (or there's more balance in how an issue is investigated with multiple different parties).
That is true, but the difference is the lack of accountability, which is cultural/societal/political - there are virtually no external forces to counter a potentially dishonest official narrative.
A one party state means that there is no pressure from political opponents (political battles inside the party will never trump the party itself). And there is no pressure from journalists - China has the worst score for press freedom [1] (bar Eritreaa, Turkmenistan and North Korea) with a downward trend over the last decade. If there's no one to hold your feet to the fire, there's little incentive to self-incriminate.
In theory that might be true, and it's the way they teach it in American civics class.
In practice, Xi went on an 'anti-corruption campaign' that purged all his political enemies from power as his first initiative. The exact opposite of what your theory predicts, and actually a stronger cyclical purge than our typical repubs->dems->repubs one.
The campaign was a unique event in decades of party history and the Wikipedia page for the campaign lists 4 different theories for political motives. I'm not sure you can view it as a sign of a culture of healthy accountability.
The point remains that they have politics. It's not some lockstep monolith.
As far as which culture has more healthy accountability.. plenty of corruption to go around on all sides, the comparison would be pretty nuanced.
I'd say that China has a lot more low-level corruption, as a bigger % of their economy, what with large swaths of the country being pretty third-world, but also more accountability for senior people who fuck up badly. They executed a baby food exec who poisoned kids, while nobody saw a day in jail for poisoning the city of Flint. Rick Snyder probably has a nice lobbyist job.
Or, look at Covid -- the mayor of Wuhan and governor of Hubei were sacked over their poor initial handling. Is NY gonna elect a Republican over it? TX elect a Democrat? No way in either case. Maybe we have less accountability in some ways specifically due to the 2-party system's polarization. Arguably Trump lost over it, but the guy literally got covid, right before the election, after downplaying it for 6 months and still got the 2nd most votes in history.
I think it is probably more accurate to say that they have "factionalism," rather than "politics." China has had a one-party system with strikingly low participation (~6% of national population) for the past seven decades.
They have politics, but (in the absence of parties) not partisanship in the narrow sense. Elections and parties aren't politics, they are just key mechanisms of politics in liberal democratic states.
>Or, look at Covid -- the mayor of Wuhan and governor of Hubei were sacked over their poor initial handling. Is NY gonna elect a Republican over it? TX elect a Democrat?
I mean, whoever they replace the mayor of Wuhan and governor of Hubei with will certainly still be members of the Chinese Communist Party. NY and TX might not flip their governing parties, but I'd be much more willing to assure you that the process of choosing their replacements will be more transparent than that for Wuhan and Hubei.
They won't flip parties and no incumbent is ever at serious risk of a primary challenge. You can call it transparent I guess but it's also a foregone conclusion.
It’s certainly widespread but the cultural component is important to how strong the reaction is. China certainly isn’t alone in having it but the political stakes are a powerful amplifier.
I don't know about China, but the whole science around COVID seems to have a really strong cultural component that before was totally unfamiliar to me.
When looking at some German Epidemiologist blog I found something like: "Next thing on the list is to proof that government measures worked"
I would have expected something like: "I'm looking at data - and want to find out what helps"
Okay, think about that one a bit: in the U.S., power shifted peacefully and a bunch of Republicans left the Bush administration to the private sector and academia because we have a strong tradition of not pursuing political opponents. That is not true of China’s system and not having separate power hierarchies means that you can’t just say, pull a Katrina, and fail upwards into a well-paid private job with no impact on your family. Nobody’s kids are being banned from going to Yale because their dad was publicly shown as incompetent or dishonest. The more that isn’t true, the more it’s unsurprising to see people have the instinct to reach for political damage control when the problem is still raging.
yeah I agree that political context acts as an amplifier.. every country have it's own flavor but China like USSR is still fond of secrecy and murder..
If hypothetically a novel virus caused a global pandemic originated within the US they certainly would say the magic words "national security" and refuse to cooperate and take a hardline against whistleblowers if one of their government labs was suspected. The US Government has a pattern of slapping top secret on their mistakes because people getting rightfully mad at them would be "bad for national security".
It is fucked up and not but governments are reflexively secretive so I don't think it says much about China. A superpower or nation-with-delusion-of-superpowerdom would refuse to disclose something like that regardless unless forced by internal political pressure - meaning there isn't anything to read in. They would likely rationalize resistance as "going transparent because enough of the world thinks this opens up rumormongering as a form of intelligence!".
I uh, don’t see anything in this article except fluff? It basically says ‘researchers were in wuhan’.
The original I read had such helpful statements as ‘the chinese government insisted that every outside researcher was accompanies by a chinese partner’, ‘the government took days to procure the data, and when they finally did, a lot was missing’ and ‘a visit to x was denied for unclear reasons’.
I’m sorry, I’m vaguely remembering these, so they may not be 100% accurate.
Then the western researchers made one gloriously ambiguous statement while still in China, and turned about after they left the country.
Also an interesting thing - the WIV used to put all their virus sequences in a publically available database. Around autumn 2019 they took it down they said because people were trying to hack it. I think it's still confidential even to the WHO. I mean if they were worried about hackers they could just publish a copy of the data.
> It emerged last week that the team had not even asked to see the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s online database, locked since September 2019 and taken down altogether in the spring of 2020. That database is known to contain 22,000 samples, mostly of viruses, 16,000 of them from bats. These include eight viruses very closely related to the virus causing the pandemic but whose genome sequences have not been published. They were collected in 2015 from a disused mineshaft, a thousand miles away, where in 2012 six men fell ill with a disease very like Covid.
Fair points about the one year delay etc., and the initial WHO response. The Chinese government is hardly renowned for transparency. I was just replying to a claim that the investigation hadn't been allowed anywhere near the lab: they did get a cursory visit after a one year delay.
I make no moral judgement about impartiality. Work out the implications yourself.
I make no comment about the content of the video linked in GGP's post.
That being said, the following is publicly known (but unverified by me) and quite apt to affect impartiality (whether under his control or not, whether consciously or not):
1. He was persecuted in China by the authorities and barely escaped with the posessions on his body.
2. He is currently under attack by brigades and agents of the persons he is critical of. The attacks follow standard psychological warfare patterns, including death threats to himself and the family.
Additionally, some speculation from me:
3. He has no journalistic training, both his business partner and his peers in the wider YT/Patreon business don't have either, and to me it seems both content producer and audience have come to a shared understanding that the shows are primarily entertainment and should not be held to the same rigour of journalistic integrity one would expect from e.g. a traditional print periodical. Adv Media's income entirely depends on YT/Patreon, and employing sensationalism – which results in uneven amplification of the reported reality – brings in more money. I haven't seen a completely sober/dry video.
Have you seen their older videos? They had to hold back any criticism, and everything was mostly peachy. Now, the gloves are off, and they do have an ax to grind, unquestionably. However, just because they have to respond to tons of wumaos and tankies doesn't mean what they say isn't true. Furthermore, they do not pretend to be journalists, so I don't think this criticism has integrity.
Their experiences living in China line up with mine.
I haven't seen an instance of them compromising their integrity.
You have not understood me well. I did not say that I think "what they say isn't true". I did not say that I think they "pretend to be journalists". You interpret things into my post and attempt to refute that are not there, which is a shame because I took great deliberation to formulate it precisely the way it is. The topic under discussion is impartiality, not integrity! Be mindful of the difference.
> Have you seen their older videos?
I am subscribed since late 2016.
> Their experiences living in China line up with mine.
I see, I agree. I don't think it's a particularly insightful observation to say they are impartial- they have a very clear voice. When I hear someone labelled impartial, I assume that's an attempt to discredit their character.
My impression was that "lab escape" was conflated with "deliberate release" by conspiracy types early on, and once that took hold it became impossible to talk rationally about the accidental escape hypothesis.
What I saw was the opposite: proponents of "came from a lab" were generally clear about distinguishing whether they meant "escape" or "release", while anyone trying to discredit them were the ones conflating the two - by starting with the ambiguous phrase "came from a lab", ignoring the rest of the argument, and then debunking "created + deliberate release".
Maybe people in general don't know about any "good" reasons to keep viruses in labs (eg research for new vaccines), and would reinterpret anything they heard as "intentionally released" or "bioweapon".
So I wonder if, even if trying to be clear about any virus escape probably having been an accident, maybe somewhat many people still would have interpreted it differently (as if it was intentional), and that type of "news" gets more attention, spreads faster, right.
Some of the debunking relied on the analysis showing that it wasn't the result of Gain of Function research. Whereas an accident could certainly be a release of a natural sample they were originally working on.
The original article that our thread here is about cites a Wuhan researchers relief that the wild virus is not genetically close to anythibg they had in their lab. That's a complete contrast to what you are speculating.
My impression is that China and China influenced corporate press in the US conflated "lab escape" with "deliberate release" so as to be able to demonize anyone who was asking serious questions. This is a pretty standard propaganda move, pretend the accuser said something that is adjacent to the real accusation but also relatively absurd, then argue against that. Never address the serious accusation.
Another example of this happening is the corporate press conflating "lab created" with "gene editing" instead of using the broader interpretation which would include things like "gain of function research" (much more likely). This allowed China and the WHO to explicitly claim they did not create the virus (by gene editing) while cautiously never really addressing whether it was created via gain of function research.
What do you call a cabal of American newspapers, tech companies (policing social media), and politicians (attacking Trump/conservatives) simultaneously conflating the two theories (malicious artificial virus versus leak of natural virus), attacking anyone suggesting an accidental lab leak aggressively, and censoring discussion of the same? It isn’t just “China influenced corporate press”. It’s the entirety of the left and left-leaning institutions (news, tech) that voluntarily participated in this mass gaslighting.
People often stir up fears of foreign influence but in the last few years it really has seemed like the biggest sources of inorganic influence and “propaganda” has been domestic.
There has been a massive, concerted effort by the PRC to deflect culpability. I'm a long time china observer/sinophile, and Chinese social media was abuzz with conspiracy theories that the virus was released by the US military before all the nonsense conspiracies started in the States. In review, China has accused the USA, Japan, Italy, Korea, and probably some others I'm forgetting for releasing the virus.
> conflating the two theories (malicious artificial virus versus leak of natural virus)
I have certainly been puzzled by this, for example in a Washington Post article. By conflating the two, lab escape became a "fringe conspiracy theory" rather than a hypothesis that should be investigated.
The people who work at these institutions were often educated in the best universities in the country. And yet they speak in lockstep fashion in this "sloppy" manner. I think you give them too much credit.
> My impression was that "lab escape" was conflated with "deliberate release" by conspiracy types early on
No, the conflating was done by the media and this is exactly how I know it’s actually the most probable theory. The same thing happened for other few big "accidents", where the media/government were prompt to demonize a particular option and push a less convincing one.
Conspiracy theorists are always going to weave conspiracy theories, though. That doesn't absolve the media or the rest of us from being the adults in the room.
Yes but when when people consistently bring up the mostly unfalsifiable theory that is most associated with conspiracy theories it's basically impossible to separate the conspiracy theorists from everyone else, and sadly much more productive to just not engage.
There's an evolutionary theory of conspiracy theories (that I just made up) that they self-select for plausible unfalsifiability. If a theory has a weakness can be proven incorrect, people will eventually patch it with an ephemeral insinuation that "you know what happened here" and move on.
But some things make no sense at all. The most populated country on the planet - a vast, vast population across the area almost as big as the US - has been inexplicably reporting almost zero infections since like March 10, 2020 (way before any vaccines) while the rest of the world (except small and isolated regions), the richest and presumably the most advanced societies still can't get their shit together, are still FUDdding over the upcoming Nth wave and locking down again (see EU today). How???
Australia, NZ and many countries in Asia did just fine. You just need a government that has its shit together and a populace that complies with the government. When you're missing one or both of those elements of course you're going to have problems with a pandemic.
So both China's government and 1.4B populace have their shit together, fully solved at ~0 infections pre-vaccine for one full year now, but the US, the EU, the newly non-EU UK, and (to a lesser extent) Japan all failed miserably?
It's not so much about having their shit together as having a terrifying autocratic government of the kind the UK government are still pretending (unconvincingly) they don't dream of emulating.
Also there may well be areas of China where the virus never reached. I gather internal travel isn't massively widespread, and the severity of the lockdowns they imposed exceeded anything seen in the US or UK.
I haven't compared the severity of lockdowns or intensity of travel in China and other countries. I've never been to China. But, I've read that it's a very complex society with tons of different ethnic groups, massive inequality, massive migration waves back to the cities and forth, massive problems like tuberculosis rate 20x the TB rate in the States, so saying how they just lock every single human down seems like a bit of an oversimplification to me. But what do i know.
There is no silver bullet here - China is not exactly your friendly democracy.
Also beware that there are reports of China having started vaccinations long before safety and efficacy results.
The flipside of exponential growth is exponential fall: In the best case if you can eliminate all social contact for 5-14 days the virus is essentially gone. But very few Western democracies are able to agree on super strict lockdowns, and if they do, they need their neighbouring countries to follow.
The difference is that the US, EU and UK are highly individualistic democracies, where governments are really weak at enforcing anything. It's no surprise that they suck at handling disease compared to societies with effective authoritarian governance.
Individuals who don't care exist everywhere, but in China government can force them to do the right thing. In the West it can't do that easily. I guess it's the price of individual freedoms.
I remember China had uncontrolled community spread for about a month and a half before even admitting there was a new virus, let alone taking action (earliest confirmed case was backtracked to mid-November).
After china finally admitted it and spoke out warnings, america did not admit its dangerious for months to come, some european countries basically run the same shit campaign. Splitting society more than anything else in recent history
If you disobey the CCP, you won't stay around for long. Also they have ironclad grip on the press, so it's no surprise that they are reporting zero cases. Not to put a tinfoil hat on, but it's not exactly like the Soviet Union, and China in the past, haven't been known for prettyfing their news.
It took NYC, which is much richer than any part of China, 100 years to build the Second Avenue subway line, whereas China can build several new subway systems every decade.
Wealth doesn’t necessarily translate to organizational agility.
Not just sick people. Videos showed how this was done on entire apartment buildings, if you happened to live in one you’re out of luck even if you didn’t get infected.
FWIW my office works closely with an office in Nanjing. They've all been back in the office for ages (and we can see the conference room on the video call). If they were having outbreaks like the rest of the world, there would be bodies piling up like mad. They tried to hide the bodies back in Jan / Feb 2020 and failed, so I don't think they're hiding bodies now. Which means there aren't any bodies; which means their lockdown must have actually been effective at containing the virus.
The rest of us could have done what Taiwan did, and almost entirely avoided becoming infected. Or we could have done what China did -- clamp down hard for three weeks and then go back to normal.
A lot of the area is countryside and is to large extent ignored. Read articles on one-child policy, which was mostly followed in large cities only and resulted in millions of “extra” children growing up essentially outside of the system with no access to healthcare or education.
It seems plausible that infection stats from deep country are not faithfully reported or even collected. That said, what they did do is really complicate domestic travel, which means infections stay contained as a result.
That's been my impression too fwiw. There's now a large segment of people who are primed to immediately accept the conspiracy theory over the Hanlon's Razor principle:
"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity (or accident)".
The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
A coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan China miles away from a Virology Lab that studies coronavirus and has in the past exercised gain of function research on cornoviruses specifically with novel lung ACE2 bind may have had a lab accident and a live virus broke out if the lab.
The problem is the media labeling common sense as conspiracy and conflating the two.
Exactly. If there were an Anthrax outbreak in Ft. Detrick, MD, everyone would be immediately assuming the lab was involved. Wuhan is the Ft. Detrick of Coronaviruses.
I wrote this on 2020-01-24 (when that speculation was fairly new), and wonder why that sort of simple statistical argument has rarely been made explicit:
It certainly is an interesting coincidence that the only lab in China that can deal with it happens to be in Wuhan. The question is, how big of a coincidence.
If the disease hit a random person randomly uniformly anywhere in China, the probability that it would have happened in Wuhan is a bit less than 1% (as there are about 10+m people in Wuhan, and 1400+m people in China).
If you think it might have struck randomly any city above a million people in China uniformly, it’s also roundabout 1% (as there are about 100 of those).
So this is by no means proof that something fishy happened, but it is significant enough to warrant investigation.
If you assume that this could only have happened in a city with, say, more than 5m people, Wuhan is one of about 15 to 20 of those (so we're just above the "usual" 5% significance threshold).
Still, an independent investigation of that lab seems warranted. Of course it’s China, so unlikely to happen...
(I must say that I think the comment has stood the test of time, so far.)
If this was an attack it would be similar to being locked in a crowded elevator, getting into a fight with another passenger, and deciding to throw a hand grenade at your enemy instead of taking any other approach.
Many countries have shown they are stupid/shortsighted enough to do this, history makes this very clear.
Study the actions of SAIMR in Africa and their plot to drive Africans to extinction using the AIDS virus and fake vaccines, purely for the sake of controlling African resources...that was the UK/US/SA/etc... govts and IA at work...they even assassinated a UN secretary general in the process.
I wish man/nation-states/intelligence-agencies were as wise as you assume but history says no.
That's kind of my point. Your examples still show planning into the selection of the attack vector and preparing for its effects... even if this is some 4D-chess to move the US off of the global supply chain, there are cheaper ways (and better germs) to do it.
Interesting that UK/US/SA always the "bad" actor in your posts? Axe to grind? Couldn't this just as easily be construed as a 4D-chess move by China/Russia/SeaLand/MoonPeople to weaken the US economy since pandemic conditions naturally favor governments that can enforce stricter lockdowns? At the end of the day this type of speculation is a waste of time without substantiation.
I can't ascribe specific motives to the actors but it is clear (has been clear for the past century) that large western economies/powers know exactly what they will lose with China rising.
>Interesting that UK/US/SA always the "bad" actor in your posts? Axe to grind?
China doesn't have a history of attacking Africans (ref. to my earlier example) or foreign countries in general for that matter...I specify this group (UK/US/SA/etc...) because they have a long history of putting economic interests over human life (especially foreign/indigenous life), continue to show that propensity to this day (zero sum mentality), and have deployed bioweapons around the world at various points over the centuries, in most cases, specifically for economic reasons.
History says the shoe fits...not too long ago the US was testing bioweapons on their own unaware domestic population, older Californians are aware of this history.
Yup, though to nitpick, Occam's Razor actually says that the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely the correct one. Subtle but important difference. Otherwise, /agree, especially with the media being confused.
Why do people rush to differentiate, e.g, the diffs bt correlation and causation, but never question Occam's razor (I'm officially leading the charge to cease its capitalization), which isn't science, isn't a law, but merely a design principle.
It's been treated as an irrefutable endpoint at best and as a spell at worst. I find it a convenient false authority for lazy thinking.
Consider a statement like: "an expressive programming language is necessary to manage a resource distribution system such as a food production, processing, and delivery system." One could quote Occam and say "nah let's hunt and gather," but how is that consistent with our values? Ergo, Occam's quote is a selectively applied false authority. We need to use our heads and put it to bed!
I invoked Occam's Razor when I wondered what was more likely: that it was spread via a wet market or escaped from a lab with biosecurity protocols staffed by professionals?
Of course I still don't know and my ideas regarding the latter have changed because of this article but I'm now pretty sure that I don't have enough information to invoke Occam's Razor in any kind of insightful or effective way.
When the virus broke out there was an early paper, later retracted, which tried to link the virus with engineered HIV carrier strains.
Undoubtedly after looking at the sequences of that paper, there were some alignments, but how they were structured doesn't point to being engineered, but rather of co-infection, which did not match the conclusions of the paper.
What they do actually indicate might even be more politically inflammatory. That the virus evolved out of a recombination event in an HIV infected person infected with a SARS-like virus, and repackaged as a new SARS-CoV-2 virus.
It happens in the comments here still, and not necessarily a malice. A kneejerk reaction to any claim amplified by the former administration, even if it's "the sky is blue". Same reason many otherwise sane folks mourned Soleimani.
Nobody was mourning Soleimani. This is a ridiculous straw man. Soleimani's assassination was problematic on a number of fronts, and people were right to criticize it.
Plenty were mourning Soleimani, and Twitter just couldn't shut up for a while about how the world is on the way to WW3 over this. It however turned out to be perhaps the most useful FP action of that administration.
If there was a lab leak.. The resistance to independent investigation, the disappearing of doctors who reported on this early on and such makes them just as guilty as if it was done on purpose.
At this juncture maliciousness or negligence is just splitting hairs. How they handled the negligence might as well have been malicious.
It's not eerily prescient at all. It has been known a long time and the subject of much research that viruses jumping from bats to humans is one of the most likely, and most dangerous sources of new infectious diseases in humans.
> [...] China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I think it’s silly to presume CCP engineered a virus as part of some warfare strategy, or even to vilify/sanction them for a lab leak if it indeed was the cause (mistakes happen). [...]
Maybe it‘s just me, but I do not have enough trust in humans that they will say „hey shit happens, do just better next time“. I mean, we are pretty good today in blaming others just so someone gets blamed.
Its not inappropriate. They know they are dealing with characters in the US govt who have a track record of cooking up stories about Aluminium tubes and WMDs to push the herd in whatever direction they want.
My naive reasoning on why China didn’t create COVID-19 with the intention of using it is that I suspect (unburdened by education or the thought process) that engineering a virus is as difficult as coming up with a vaccine or treatment. If you are developing some kind of super virus to shut down the world economy and then immunize your own people to take advantage of the situation, wouldn’t you have the cure ready to go?
Now, an unintentional leak would be theoretically possible with these initial intentions but then wouldn’t China still have a leg up on developing treatments? If so, wouldn’t we have seen that in their vaccine development?
Of course you this is all uneducated speculation. Quite possible that engineering a deadly and very infectious virus is easier than creating a cure or a vaccine by orders of magnitude.
From what I read, it’s only about researchers looking to publish something interesting rather than some complicated planned CCP plans.
It’s rather simple to do the so called ’gain of function’, you let the virus have it’s run with bat cells and add lots of human cells in petri with them. Because there is no immune system, the virus have not much to stop it. Slowly it adapt to human cells, you can change the type of cells so it can adapt to other receptors and so on.
Those articles where published before the whole crisis erupted.
While there's some use to gain of function studies (they give us what genetic markers to look for for particularly human-adapted pathogens), researchers have been concerned about laboratory accidents for a long time. Like, it was a keynote talk at a conference I was at in 2008, which estimated a GoF study had an expected number of deaths of, IIRC, 1500. Every one - obviously in the form of a long-tailed but highly consequential outcome.
One of the keys there is that's not uniquely Chinese as a problem. Those researchers were talking about American labs.
It's not about creating a virus from scratch, but taking an existing virus and performing gain-of-function research to select for certain things (like transmissibility).
Also doesn't necessarily have to be that, maybe the guy who went in the cave to collect samples got sick on the way home. Or maybe some guy harvesting guano for his farm got sick on the way home. The only thing we know for sure is we'll probably never know, and also that the CCP is sketchy
I'll not conclude anything, but I will say that engineering a virus is an order of magnitude easier than a vaccine.
It's a pure mapping problem. There are thousands of known viruses that affect humans. But most viruses don't have thousands of vaccines.
Additionally, there are constraints. The only contraint on a virus is that is needs to reproduce, and cause harm. Any kind of harm will do, and any kind of spreading is fine. But the vaccine needs to not hurt the person (at least, don't hurt them worse than the virus would).
Even if both processes involved similar techniques, the constraints on virus production are more favorable to the researcher than vaccine production.
To get back to whether China or any nation would intentionally create a biological weapon, however...: most industrialized countries realized a long time ago that bioweapons tends to be a bad strategy. Most western countries stopped their bioweapons programs back in the 70s for the simple reason that there was no reasonable use-case for a bioweapon that isn't done better by simply bombing something (or more recently-hacking their infrastructure). Bioweapons are strategically useful for small nations, and terrorist groups.
an immediate immunization of your population would drive to a raise of suspicion and if someone found china guilty of that, would mean a world war against them.
By that sort of reasoning, when a nation rolls tanks into your borders, you should just let them do it because more people would die if you fight back.
If a nation actually did that (release a bioweapon and pre-immunize their own citizens)... well World War is probably overselling it, but I could certainly imagine contained conflicts, sinking of cargo vessels, shooting down of planes, targeted assassinations... etc. It's very likely that every nation would have highly vested interests in making sure that whoever authorized that weapon was removed from this planet.
To be fair, "designing" a vaccine is not the same as testing it to show that it is acceptably safe and effective in humans. That said, the time from design to deployment was amazingly short.
I know my argument is not solid at all. But you seeing a headline that is demonstrably not what we are even talking about does not convince me. If it took two days to create a cure and manufacture a billion doses we would be all fine now. Clearly nobody had a leg up on anyone in the race to a vaccine otherwise someone would have come out with “we have the vaccine and all the doses ready to go” in mid 2020.
China is demonized not because of an accident (if it was one). Even if it's confirmed that a lab accident was the cause, China holds the blame for hiding the truth, telling the world it's all okay, and arresting people that dared to speak out (even causing their deaths). No matter what was the origin, China is responsible for the outbreak.
Btw, I don't think we can ever find out the truth. It's been over a year, and China has all the time to clean up and conceal every piece of evidence. The WHO scientific team's visit to Wuhan is no difference to investigating a murder scene a year after the event, with the murderer living in it all that time. Nothing but a joke.
I couldn't agree more. There is so much evidence of China suppressing information I don't understand how so many people dismiss their role in spreading the virus beyond their borders.
They had a choice to make: country-wide lockdown and travel ban or lie about it and make it spread worldwide.
The former would leave their economy in a disadvantaged state while the latter would level the playing field for the rest of the world and give China opportunity to even earn some dough in the process (PTE sales). Now, this may be a cynical view but so are China's leaders. If you're someone who strongly believes this scenario could not have transpired, you're just naive.
China did a harder lockdown than any other country has done. Right from the beginning. Took an immense toll to its economy, right from the beginning. A WHO team was there investigating and gathering information on public health from the beginning.
I'm sorry, but in this case, China is the country who told the rest of the world what to do and the west, with its superiority mentality over the east, ignored it and got a while year economy down the drain.
In my book, conspiracies will always make their way to those who want to believe them.
China pissed and moaned when the WHO was considering recommending banning Chinese air traffic in precaution. Then swiftly banned Western air traffic when the shoe was on the other foot.
Many such examples exist. China did not lead by example, at all. What a strange take.
The CCP didn't do it right from the beginning. It took them almost two months to even acknowledge the virus was spreading between humans and was dangerous.
All they did was try to downplay it and cover it up, until it had spread not only throughout China, but the rest of the world. That's despite having systems in place for exactly the purpose of catching viruses like covid-19 early and quickly.
It's a great example of why ineffective bureaucracy, combined with a bad system of governance and a culture where saving face is hugely important, is harmful to humanity.
I like how china's over the top, authoritarian measures, sometimes including sealing people in their homes physically, is idolized by people in the west.
We could have double the death rate and I still wouldn't concede this. And I wear a mask, wife and I wfh. Kid is still at home.
Seems the same behaviour with any other country. Can you name just one that would behave different? So this is no accusation but just business as usual.
Besides, why at all trying to blame anyone on this? It's a natural disaster that could happen to anyone anywhere. The real culprit is, that as long as the wealthy don't try to vaccinate everyone in this world as quickly as possible, the virus still has potential to mutate to sth. where current vaccines don't protect against ..
>a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world.
not that outbreak. US stopped doing that GoF research and funded it in those Wuhan labs instead - basically like any other outsourcing of environmentally dangerous manufacturing/etc. to China. My pet conspiracy theory is that as part of that GoF the virus was tested on humans there - say some prisoners happily volunteering for a couple weeks break from hard labor to spend it in a nice hospital with a "flu".
And if the virus had totally natural - accidental freak of Nature - origin, why would you give 4 year prison to a journalist who was covering the beginning of the pandemic in Wuhan?
The suppression of any information is totally in-line with some deep f&ck-up and/or government potentially looking very bad if real picture sees the light of day. Even Chernobyl wasn't suppressed to that degree.
> And if the virus had totally natural - accidental freak of Nature - origin, why would you give 4 year prison to a journalist who was covering the beginning of the pandemic in Wuhan?
I really wouldn't attach that much meaning to the prison sentence handed out. It is entirely in line with the CCP's behavior in the past. They strongly repress any information or people they perceive as causing them to lose face or look bad.
Not saying this is a conspiracy, but it does make it easier to forcefully cover up a conspiracy if they always react harshly to even small "infractions".
There is no requirement that bats be transported to Wuhan. It's close to a known bat virus, and that's all we know. There are local bats in Wuhan, needless to say. Other species can easily be involved. The truth is that there is nothing particularly surprising about the way this virus evolved. Fundamentally this is a pandemic like any other. They happen in some species or another every year.
And that, more than anything else, is why we should be suspicious of "exotic" theories like human intervention. It's an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary proof. You seem to be arguing the opposite, when Occam is clear that we should be betting on natural evolution.
It's not just that the closest known virus is a bat virus. The closest known virus, RaTG13 was discovered in a cave in Yunnan, and brought to Wuhan by WIV researchers where it was sequenced, and probably other experiments done on it. WIV has also changed its story twice about the history of RaTG13, first, the date of first sequencing (They initially claimed 2020, and then changed their story to 2018), and second, they did not disclose for months that it was in fact the same virus as BtCoV/4991, which they had previously published a partial sequence of.
Transportation by lab personnel is the only way that RaTG13 is known to have come to Wuhan. Any animal transport is possible but only speculative. This entirely flips what should be the assumed scenario vis a vis Occam's razor.
The Bayesian probability suggests the odds that it would evolve by chance AND first become an issue right next to one of the top three bat virus research centers in the world are pretty slim.
It would be like a new mosquito disease first being an issue in human population next the CDC headquarters in Atlanta instead of somewhere in Africa of South America. Sure - there are mosquitos everywhere - but the chance that a new disease would start in Atlanta are very slim.
To me another simple explanation is that the disease was first identified near the labs because it is a lab that deals with viruses. I may be mistaken, but I recall it as one of the top ones in the world that virologists from around the world go to.
Also waste water samples from Spain and Italy show COVID-19 much earlier than reported in Wuhan.
Plus COVID-19 positie blood samples in France from Nov/Dec 2019. That alone is reason for me to believe that the Wuhan lab has nothing to do with it. It just so happened that Wuhan was the first major outbreak.
That being said, I don't know how the origin would help us right now. We have working vaccines. So the solution is to push vaccinations as fast as possible. The origin of the virus isn't that important right now.
1 sample isn't conclusive enough to form an opinion, lab contamination is more likely. It's embarrassing they even released that information without further analysis.
Exactly - people may very well be mixing up cause and effect.
It could be that a precursor was already spreading prior to the major outbreak but only detected when it hit Wuhan because so many coronavirus experts were concentrated in that area.
> The specific bats that host the ancestor of COVID-19 are quite a bit far away from those labs.
This is wildly misstating the science. That bat virus is a relative, not an "ancestor". And it's not known to be limited to those "specific, far away" bats, that's merely where it was documented. Believe it or not we don't routinely test every animal species for an exhaustive catalogue of virus variants. It's just shotgun science.
And as it happens there was a close relative to covid found on the same continent in a species group that exists in a broad continuum basically everywhere. A bat-to-bat transmission to Wuhan is a bleedingly obvious hypothesis.
And yet we have to talk about all this Andromeda Strain nonsense anyway, based largely on jingoist US politics.
One should also note that being detected and actually starting somewhere are two different things.
"Has this been causing small, stochastically limited outbreaks for some time before we picked it up?" is a question that has dogged several recent outbreaks.
It is exotic to claim that the virus was engineered by humans, but that is not what this article (or myself) are claiming. Just that there is a lab outbreak.
Researchers have gone to a particular region of China and otherwise gone to great effort to find these particular bat viruses. I agree it is possible that they could be ignorant of the fact that the virus is in their own backyard. But it must a lower probability event that people got infected by such city bats given that we already know for certain the labs were transporting the bat viruses directly. Additionally, I would be surprised if they have not been testing nearby bats for such viruses since the outbreak happened. If they got a match it would be highly publicized.
> But it must a lower probability event that people got infected by such city bats
There have been examples of bats excrement contaminating fruits on fields as a transmission chain. Accounting for these, often undiscovered, interactions is extremely difficult in terms of probability.
> we already know for certain the labs were transporting the bat viruses directly
In research from 5+ years ago, research which warned exactly about the fact how the virus already had overcome critical barriers to infect human cells [0]. A very plausible interpretation here can also be that said research was a warning about things to come, and is now mistaken as the original cause for it.
> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute [Wuhan Institute of Virology] published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[11][12]
One of the sources for that part is: "A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence" [0]
The other source is a nature news article [1] which has by now following disclaimer:
> Editors’ note, March 2020: We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.
It also states at the end:
> Without the experiments, says Baric, the SHC014 virus would still be seen as not a threat. Previously, scientists had believed, on the basis of molecular modelling and other studies, that it should not be able to infect human cells. The latest work shows that the virus has already overcome critical barriers, such as being able to latch onto human receptors and efficiently infect human airway cells, he says. “I don't think you can ignore that.” He plans to do further studies with the virus in non-human primates, which may yield data more relevant to humans.
So it might just as well be that these experiments warned us about that potential, and now that it actually happened, some people interpret the original warning as the cause.
Right. There is a very reasonable explanation for the work they were doing. They were trying to modify existing non harmful viruses, to determine if it could evolve into a harmful virus. In order to do this, they created a harmful virus. As long as the biocontainment is perfect, this is potentially useful research.
Unfortunately, SARS-CoV-2 is a very contagious virus, so it's hard to contain. A lot of ink has been spilled about the Wuhan BSL-4 lab, but these viruses were only considered to be a BSL-3 pathogen, and were handled in Baric's lab at UNC in their BSL-3. I would assume that they would also have been handled at the WIV's BSL-3. There had been reports of biocontainment lapses at the WIV, and there have been a number of lab escapes of various pathogens including SARS at other Chinese labs.
It tells you that that kind of analysis is extraordinarily difficult. How many documented three+ species viral evolution paths can you cite from the literature?
It took nearly a century to somewhat establish the geographical origin of the Spanish flu and even these results are still a bit controversial to this day [0].
The reality is that epidemiology is not a straight forward nor simple field of research, finding concrete and solid answers is usually way more difficult than most people assume when they want answers to point fingers.
what I'm saying is that until the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 is known to be exactly the same virus that was researched in Wuhan institute of virology, it's obvious that lab leak should be number 1 hypothesis. That wouldn't be so, if covid started in Beijing or Nanjing. Or if Wuhan wouldn't be home to one of the two BSL–4 labs in China. And the only lab to my mind that investigated SARS-CoV-2 closest known relative before the outbreak. But since all those facts are true, I really have a hard time considering other hypotheses.
SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in Wuhan, but it's not that clear that it's where it originated. The genetic divergence between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 is explained with about 20 years of natural evolution, which puts the common ancestor somewhere in late 2000s, and given that bats migrate, the ancestor occurred potentially anywhere in Eurasia or even Africa.
Post-hoc analysis of waste water and patient samples in Europe shows that it was circulating in Europe by mid-late 2019, way before the patient 0 in Wuhan.
So the leak hypothesis, while feasible, would have to address why the virus was seemingly abroad before it became a problem in Wuhan itself.
Of course it's a reasonable hypothesis, but putting it as number 1 is kind of reframing the whole picture.
"Post-hoc analysis of waste water and patient samples in Europe shows that it was circulating in Europe by mid-late 2019, way before the patient 0 in Wuhan."
> ROME (Reuters) - The new coronavirus was circulating in Italy in September 2019, a study by the National Cancer Institute (INT) of the Italian city of Milan shows, signaling that it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought.
It is plausible that the virus was spread before recognized and treated as a global pandemic. Few flights were banned for months. Chinese tourists were in Italy up until the lockdowns.
But very often this "appeared outside China" is deflection and falsely invoked. Mind you that Reuters write: "it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought". Not: It came from Italy to China, and only became problematic in Wuhan. Every time China is reluctantly forced to move back the timeline on its patient 0, it starts pushing a narrative of COVID outside of China just a few months before their patient 0. It is a tiring use of an obvious and plausible bait-and-switch.
We already knew that Western expats and their relations in Wuhan got viral pneumonia in November 2019, while by January 2020, China did not consider it wise to inform the world of human-to-human transmission.
> We already knew that Western expats and their relations in Wuhan got viral pneumonia in November 2019, while by January 2020, China did not consider it wise to inform the world of human-to-human transmission.
We now know about viral pneumonia in November 2019, but hindsight is a very comfortable position to judge from.
Going from that to establishing that by January 2020 China should know everything about the virus and disease is reaching quite a bit.
That whole argument reminds me way too much of that propaganda narrative by Fox citing a WHO tweet [0] about one preliminary Chinese investigation not finding evidence for H2H, in that particular investigation, to turn that around into: "WHO and China say there is no H2H!".
But a lack of evidence in one particular investigation is not the same as claiming there's no H2H.
H2H isn't just some binary thing, it's a spectrum of vectors that take time and effort to properly establish, that's why all the official recommendations from the WHO at the time was to treat this as very H2H.
It was not hindsight. Those expats were interviewed ("locked in Wuhan") and broke the "official" timeline.
In my mind, it can not be excused that China either: did not know about H2H, when the West, as an outsider, was well aware of the raging crisis. Or worse, it did know, but tried to stall. I am not giving China the benefit of incompetence, so in my mind, it is worse.
I did not say: China claimed there is no H2H. I said: China did not thought it was wise to inform of H2H. I agree that these are different, and that Fox pushed a narrative there.
It takes time to establish patient 0, and find epidemiological explanations. But they had doctors falling severely sick at start of December! That should ring a bell about H2H!
> official recommendations from the WHO at the time was to treat this as very H2H
No, WHO sat in China's lap, and tweeted out your quote tweet: No strong evidence for H2H. We had to trust that China could keep this internal, without outside help, but they completely botched one of the basic things to figure out. WHO official messaging was: Do not wear masks, only wear one if you are ill, when China was already buying up protective equipment en masse.
> It was not hindsight. Those expats were interviewed ("locked in Wuhan") and broke the "official" timeline.
Do you have anything concrete on that? Because right now I'm drawing a blank what you are even trying to allude to.
But for additional context I should point out that in November 2019 China also recorded an outbreak of the pneumonic plague [0], something that gets conflated a lot with the COVID-19 narrative.
> I said: China did not thought it was wise to inform of H2H. I agree that these are different, and that Fox pushed a narrative there.
How is it different when you are pretty much exactly pushing the Fox narrative there? You stipulate that China knew about H2H in January and allegedly had it well established but didn't share it with the rest of the world, where is your actual evidence for that?
Sounds a lot like that whole Taiwan e-mail to WHO mess where Taiwan claimed to have warned the WHO about H2H, when the actual e-mail didn't say anything like that.
> But they had doctors falling severely sick at start of December! That should ring a bell about H2H!
"Ringing bells" is not the same as having solid and established H2H vectors. Which, as I mentioned before, is not something that's binary. Something isn't just "H2H or not", there are different vectors and different gradients, establishing them is not easy, that's why even one year after the fact we still struggle to fully map out transmission routes and vectors.
You can't hand-wave such a complicated problem away when it persists to this day.
> No, WHO sat in China's lap, and tweeted out your quote tweet: No strong evidence for H2H.
This is 100% the Fox news interpretation. The WHO tweet was about that one particular Chinese investigation, all it said how that particular investigation didn't yield evidence.
Which is not the same as saying "there is no H2H", interpreting it like that is misinterpreting very concise language on purpose while ignoring literally every other release from the WHO at the time. Case in point: Here are the WHO interim guidance for laboratory testing of human suspect cases of NCoV infection from 10 January 2020 [1].
Read trough them and you will realize that the WHO was and is very vocal about respiratory transmission and how to best prevent it. That's only one out of the many WHO releases at the time that warn about the very real, but yet having to be established with actual evidence, H2H nature of the virus.
> Do not wear masks, only wear one if you are ill, when China was already buying up protective equipment en masse.
This is once again completely wrong, WHO messaging was to prioritize masks for at risk groups and HCWs due to the massive mask shortages at the time. Case in point: Here are the WHO's interim guidance on use of masks from 29 January 2020 [2]
It's astounding that over one year after the fact this kind of misinformation is still circulated, out of all the places here on HN.
The reality is that the WHO was a bit slow to react for one simple reason: They have become way more reluctant about "crying wolf" after the 2009 pandemic didn't turn into the deadly thing they feared it would. Which back then resulted in wide-spread criticism of the WHO for allegedly being "alarmist" when the multi-million death toll didn't actually materialize.
Trying to turn this into "WHO in pocket of China!" is just trying to tie this whole narrative into the current US foreign policy context of antagonizing China. That's also why US officials were among the first [3] to globally spread conspiracy theories about this being an engineered Chinese bio-weapon escaped from a lab.
> bit slow to react for one simple reason: They have become way more reluctant about "crying wolf" after the 2009 pandemic didn't turn into the deadly thing they feared it would.
That is not the simple reason you think it is. It is the WHO, who should prioritize world health above all, not worry about "crying wolf" when every graph with heavily underreported numbers showed that COVID was going to crash Swine Flu and leave it as nothing but a memory. But they were slow to react, due to politics.
When the CDC was confronted with an outbreak of Hantavirus in 1993, they found some relations to Indian tribes, and news media picked up on that. This lead to panic and fear of Indian tribes. They learned lessons there that they now implementing.
> This is 100% the Fox news interpretation
Just because US media is ugly, showtime, broken, and partisan, does not give you the right to beat down anything when it happens to align with one of your hated "news" channels. But perhaps CNBC is more to your liking: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/02/china-delayed-releasing-coro...
Yes, there is a logical difference between: "China knew masks would help. China communicated that masks would not help, but started hoarding protective equipment" and "China knew masks would help. China communicated nothing about that to the WHO or the world, but started hoarded protective equipment."
We saw that unwillingness to communicate with masks and H2H. (The doctors who treated the doctors who fell ill in start of December, treating pneumonia patients, started falling ill mid-end December, can you not hear the bell toll?). We saw blatant lying when China was fighting interdomestic flight of 5 million people from Wuhan, threatening to nail them on the pillars of shame for eternity, while actively instructing the WHO to say there was zero reason to ban flights from China. This was repeated every meeting, alongside the "decreasing window to act", up until having to call a pandemic (all technical qualifications were already there, this was not WHO acting rapidly and decisively). Mike Ryan was far from happy with the pressures applied on the WHO.
Not talking about the expats, as I realized there are some things too dangerous to speculate about. You can ignore that.
> > This is once again completely wrong, WHO messaging was to prioritize masks
> A tale of two billboards:
And? Many countries had the progression of "only health workers" to "only health workers and people with symptoms" to "everyone" according to the available supply, even though many others skipped the mid step.
> But very often this "appeared outside China" is deflection and falsely invoked. Mind you that Reuters write: "it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought". [...] We already knew that Western expats and their relations in Wuhan got viral pneumonia in November 2019
Let's backtrack a bit.
First patient in France confirmed to be in late December 2019[0].
Retrospective wastewater analysis in Brazil shows the virus was present from November 2019 onwards, 3 months before their first reported case.[1]
Further down the line we have SARS-CoV-2's RdRP specific antibodies found during retrospective testing of samples of 111 (of 959) healthy volunteers of a lung cancer study in Italy[1]; samples taken in October 2019, meaning they got infected at least at some point in September 2019, 4-5 months before the first detected case. These antibodies also target RaTG13's RdRP, given that this protein is identical in both.
Even further down the line, and widely interpretable, we have the Barcelona case:
> "Coronavirus traces found in March 2019 sewage sample, Spanish study shows. The discovery of virus genome presence so early in Spain, if confirmed, would imply the disease may have appeared much earlier than the scientific community thought." [2]
The paper is here [3]. The fact that IP2/IP4 fragments of the RdRP gene are perfect match means that at least a virus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 (and RaTG13, its closest relative) was present in Spain back in March 2019.
It's not conclusive, as other markers tested negative, but it's also true that these other markers tend to degrade faster (for example, N1 marker wasn't detectable in May 25 2020, despite the pandemic ongoing). But this fact also rules out a case of sample contamination, because then N1 would have been detectable. It's also remarkable that the positive sample is from 2 weeks after the World Mobile Congress, leading to a self-contained outbreak hypothesis.
Now take all that information and combine it with the fact that no trace of SARS-CoV-2 has been found on any sample from Wuhan before December 1st, 2019.
While there's high probability that SARS-CoV-2 appeared within Chinese borders, mainly because the closest viral relatives have been known to live there (or Japan and South East Asia, if you ignore RaTG13), it's still highly speculative.
What is clear is that everything points in the direction of Wuhan, and the Huanan Seafood Market in particular, being just the first detected superspreading event, and the WIV was the reason why it was detected first, rather than the source of the virus itself.
>The truth is that there is nothing particularly surprising about the way this virus evolved.
I beg to differ. How many pandemic causing viruses have their ground zero right outside an instition that for the last decade has been cranking out study after study derived from GoF research? A place that also was receiving information from American university researchers on how to develop chimeric mutations? Which just happened to share genetic material with strains known to have been researched for bioweapon applications? All at the same time as an uptick in censorship of academic papers.
There's coincidence, and then there's coincidence. I don't think anyone was out to make the darn thing, or intentionally release it. When I see a bunch of virology going on, and a pandemic starts up next door, I'm not looking 1000 miles away for the source.
It’s probably important to point out that a “lab leak” is a result of human-clumsiness or similar, and not the sci-fi movie bad guys engineering a virus. A lot of the non-HN crowd don’t get the difference.
I get what you're saying, but it seems slightly more nuanced. From my understanding WIV did do gain of function research. e.g. purposefully make virus' more deadly or infectious to study them.
Definitely not a super villain at least I hope/highly doubt the intention was a weapon (you could surely create a better weapon?).
I'm not judging the value of that research, it does sound valuable but maybe not more so than the (small?) risk of an accident.
There is also reporting WIV was doing top secret research for CCP military.
"Should" is a pretty strong statement. GoF studies, like social media-based disease surveillance, are one of those things that has a compelling "Just So" story justifying its existence, but has yet to show that it actually does what it's supposed to do.
Also, the alternative is not burying our head in the sand. It's monitoring and studying nature, instead of forcing the issue in a lab, and investing in infrastructure and capacity that work against a broad range of pathogen threats.
Eventually, computational biological modeling is going to be good enough for mutation exploration purposes. From the papers I've seen during this pandemic, it largely already is.
At that point, it becomes straightforward (not easy, but not unknown) to share and realize those modeled organisms.
But at some point, we don't know what we don't know. And putting strains into biological models is important.
Investing in infrastructure and capability against a broad range of threats is important too. mRNA-based rapid vaccine platforms (and especially lipid encapsulation) will probably win a Nobel in a few years, and thank god we've spent the last 30+ years working on them.
>Every BSL-certified lab should be doing gain of function research.
Its far from settled that the benefits of gain of function research outweigh the benefits. This is a debate that has raged among the scientific community for years (a debate which would over if it was discovered that COVID came from a lab involved in gain of function research).
I don't know enough to say if GOF has provided enough 'value' but I do know that there is no way china, the US military, etc would allow a 3rd party to inspect their labs lol.
The article of this post talks a lot about how we do have inspections in the US, and that the inspectors are often the same department as the lab!
To be better it seems like we need some damn strong consequences & a regulatory power that can't be overruled.
That would certainly be the most likely kind of lab-based hypothesis. Especially considering the overt flouting of rules people engage in for other kinds of animal research, in the rush to compete for results and publications.
But it would still result in heads rolling and a constant stream of embarrassing revelations. Consider the Fukushima investigation. Every revelation of bad process and ignored warnings is another news cycle with everyone outraged at them. "Bad luck" is something you are not forgiven for if there's any negligence to point at.
I agree. Personally I’ve not dismissed this possibility at all. But as it stands, it’s just a hypothesis with suggestive information, but nothing concrete. There are verified wrongs to criticize them for right now, and can be a starting point for remediation, rather than drum up hate and criticism of mere hypothetical wrongs. (And of course, one such example of a verifiable wrong could be proof of Chinese institutions destroying evidence of the disease’s origin...)
The problem is that discussing this hypothesis in any form is often labeled as "offensive" and "racist". The generally accepted theory even in the West is the lab leak was somehow disproved. It's always baffled me, because the only way you could really disprove the lab leak theory would be by finding the original source of the virus.
Instead, the media often attempts to disprove the lab leak by pointing out that COVID-19 differs from the viruses that were being worked on in the Wuhan Lab. But that in itself implies that China is being transparent. To the contrary, we know that China would take every measure to obfuscate the lab leak if they believed it was the origin of the virus.
The lab leak theory originally came from netizens in China, and then it gained traction in the West. There was some sketchy stuff going on at the WIV, personnel disappearing from their website, etc.
Regarding the accusations of racism, it's really annoying to be someone somewhat in the know after living in China having my firsthand experience discounted because it doesn't line up with the SJW perspective. I really like China. However, if I say that sanitary conditions there are abhorrent, it seems like pointing that out here gets me in trouble. It's just really frustrating seeing lots of people regurgitate what they've read or seen on tv from shoddy or biased reporting.
You’re exaggerating. I’ve seen plenty of valid and serious coverage of this from big outlets (NPR, Economist) explaining the plausibility of the scenario, not “disproving” in any manner. Which “the media” are you referring to?
I’ve also seen plenty of valid conversations about this on various web forums where it didn’t come to name calling.
I’ve also seen plenty of aggressive and disingenuous arguments by angry people, who proclaim their suspicions are true facts instead of probability assessments, and then perch their discussions on the assumed truth of those suspicions.
Exactly. Frankly, I'm tired of this tip-toed attitude - there hasn't been any sort of consequences suffered or imposed on the Chinese government for how they surreptitiously dealt with the virus, initially.
I'm not condoning or advocating conspiracy theories, but where they are wrong, they should be penalised.
The Chinese government also started limiting domestic flights in January 2020 but allowed foreign flights out until late March 2020 (https://english.alarabiya.net/features/2020/04/09/Coronaviru...). That seems like they were containing damage that affected them but were happy to risk the rest of the world. I’m not sure if this was an economic decision or something more malicious but it doesn’t matter - how are they not held accountable for this obvious export of the virus?
Meanwhile in the US, hysterical partisans attacked Trump for correctly naming the virus along with its origin. This resulted in a societal unwillingness to direct blame at the Chinese government for all their numerous missteps, starting with suppression of early reports of a new pneumonia like illness in late 2019. How many deaths could have been avoided with just the most basic level of transparency and responsibility?
> Meanwhile in the US, hysterical partisans attacked Trump for correctly naming the virus along with its origin
He spent months doing nothing in preparation, and denying there was an issue then when it turned out there was an actual problem decided it was all China's fault ... even though they had it largely under control by that point. That's why people were "hysterical" - he saw it coming, did nothing and refused to take any responsibility, but blamed someone else. He wasn't trying to accurately identify the source of the virus, he was trying to save his own skin.
Sure it's frustrating that we only found out in (I think) December that it was spreading human-to-human, and it'd be good to see some actual investigation from China. But Trump's finger-pointing was all just desperate attempt to save face and deflect from his own poor management and nothing more. Your question should be rephrased "How many deaths could have been avoided with just the most basic level of competency?" and directed at Donald Trump and his administration.
> But China knew about the virus in 2019 and kept it quiet.
I don't think it would have mattered. We had documentaries such as The Lockdown [1] in the end of February 2020, yet still most Western countries spent much of March 2020 still debating whether they should react somehow or not.
This is the truth. We don't have evidence that the virus came from a lab (how could we when China refused investigation?), but we have evidence that the whistleblowers were arrested. Some are dead and some aren't seen again. Are we not supposed to blame this regime?
I feel like only one thing matters. If regular people find out that gain of function research (or something similar) resulted in a lab leak that killed millions of people, then regular people will demand this kind of research stop.
None of the people most qualified to speak on this issue want their funding cut or the research to stop.
This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world.
In general, yes. In this case, no so much.
The feart that it could happen here is why the USA restricted gain of function research in 2014. And only reopened it in 2017 with stricter safety controls.
If China had made the same policy decisions, would COVID-19 have become much less likely? That's an important question to answer. Whether or not it DID happen that way, as a planet we need a more consistent way to evaluate such risks.
An alternative hypothesis is that a human was infected near the bat caves, then traveled to Wuhan and spread it to other humans and animals at the seafood market. There's no specific evidence for that, but we can't rule it out either.
That's not the correct calculation because you've selected the research lab hypothesis post-facto. The correct calculation is to roll a dice representing all the locations of possible human bat interactions and see how many of those land next to some landmark that you can form some sort of conspiracy about.
The only thing that evolves faster than this virus are the conspiracy theory memes[1] that the internet collectively weaves from circumstantial evidence where more and more compelling narratives become more and more widely shared. I'd wager that 100% of pandemics, regardless of origin, will have some compelling conspiracy attached to them. Compelling conspiracy theories is what the internet manufactures, particularly in the absence of direct evidence of anything.
The seafood markets sell bats and other wild animals as well. When they butcher the bats, dogs eat the leftovers then someone else eats the dog. Plenty of ways for the virus to mutate.
> This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world. We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.
Then why hide information and prevent world-wide collaboration then?
imagine if this happened in the USA and they prevented any international investigations or collaboration... and instead just started to blame other countries. Then a long time later allow people in who they choose and basically tell them what happened and call that a investigation.
No need to demonize China, or better said, the Chinese Communist Party. They already behave in ways that are the envy of actual mythological demons.
Social scoring, mass surveillance, the Great Firewall, forced labor, harvesting organs from healthy people, Uyghur genocide, Falun gong murders, Tiananmen square massacre...
And actively trying to cover up every crisis, torturing and murdering anyone who speaks up. From environmental disasters to COVID-19 to party corruption.
So there are only two alternatives, and we just need to compare which sounds more likely? Or could it be that you exclude about a million other alternatives here, while also ignoring that just a little bit more information about context often makes unlikely scenarios more likely and vice versa?
Not arguing any of the theories here, just looking at the approach. The first task might not be to make assumptions, but to understand the situation better.
We need to demonize China for all the things they have done to keep it secret in the early days and even upto now, not that the original leak did happen if at all we ever find out about it.
China is actively engaging in genocide and nobody wants to even speak up about it because "cultural differences". I think we should much rather be scared of running even more cover for them, than less cover for them. They already have enough people white knighting for them.
Western companies are demonizing the west for profit, and running cover for china for profit, just another example of how capitalism always wins.
All of this is sickening and it needs to stop now.
It's really ludicrous that anyone gets conspiratorial about the CCP spreading a bioweapon that originates in their own country. They snuck military scientists into the US to tap into coronavirus research. The most simple litmus test I can think of is if China led the race for a vaccine, but they didn't.
People really need to stop and think, because next time that lab could be in your country. With icebergs and permafrost melting, you can bet there's going to be more pandemics in the pipeline. This really isn't a time for people's crass and nihilistic takes on foreign governments, science, or even your own government. When you leave room for people and systems to screw up, then things get better; if you're hypercritical then all you incentivise is the burying of evidence and lies.
we had a issues with the CCP few years back, they shipped deadly viruses out to the Wuhan lab.
"We have a researcher who was removed by the RCMP from the highest security laboratory that Canada has for reasons that government is unwilling to disclose. The intelligence remains secret. But what we know is that before she was removed, she sent one of the deadliest viruses on Earth, and multiple varieties of it to maximize the genetic diversity and maximize what experimenters in China could do with it, to a laboratory in China that does dangerous gain of function experiments. And that has links to the Chinese military."
i doubt their narrative because they where not transparent and kept making up conspiracy theories that it came from the US, then it was Italy, frozen fish etc etc all the while preventing any international investigations.. We also know labs do leak and even China had many leaks in the past including SARS and other viruses so its not unbelievable to think it was just a accident and if they where doing gain of function we need to know and we need to figure out a plan and have better systems in place to prevent leaks.
> We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.
I think it was western scientists like Peter Daszak who suppressed lab leak theory in fear that their research will be demonized forever.
It wasn't CCP who called everyone consipiracy theorists it was Peter Daszak and co [1]. I don't understand how he can be the WHO investigator of his own lab [2].
We will never know the truth to the extent that China would admit this.
It’s obvious in hindsight that what you say is likely true, but there is no feasible political route for the CCP to take blame, as their lives would be at stake due to unrest.
I can’t find the link but the virus they took from sick miners to study and what is now called covid-19 were 95-99% the same. A fellow did their masters thesis on it in 2016 or so
Couple of clarifications. (The fact that the term 'Mojiang' does not show up in the comments yet is telling about where awareness currently is on the topic).
1. RaTG13 came from the copper mine in Mojiang in 2013. (The TG in RaTG13 refers to TongGuan, a township in Mojiang, all per Shi Zhengli's accounting of the sequence's provenance).
2. Prior to which and also in 2013, six miners in this same Mojiang mine came down deftly ill with a respiratory illness. Three of them died from their illness.
3. One report on their cases says they had IgM antibodies to SARS. Another report says they had IgG.
4. There's been no data to support Shi Zhengli's assertion that they died of a fungal infection. (That said, independent of her account, there is a background precedent that there have been examples of people who have had strong fungal infections from exposure to bat guano in certain caves).
5. Shi Zhengli's team returned to the same Mojiang cave again and again to sample for viruses from the mine's bats and rodents. (Goal for this and the broad purpose of her teams' research is to demonstrate for pandemic prevention purposes which viruses are evolutionarily close enough to be able to hop to humans).
Multiple coronaviruses gathered from this mine remain unpublished, despite a year into the pandemic and an entire WHO-convened study group to Wuhan.
https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1372383456081027076?s=...
(source: Bloom Lab of Fred Hutch Institute)
If you're interested in learning more, I would highly recommend following members of the Washington Post-cited DRASTIC team.
The DRASTIC folks, some of them postdocs themselves, have been at this for a year, gathering & archiving evidence like the case reports described above (that unsurprisingly typically become scrubbed from the source after getting brought to light).
The twitter hashtag #DRASTIC is a reasonable place to start.
Of course not. You could not take the goods from China, and want to make them take the responsibility of investigation just like re-education camps in Xinjiang. Although there are some people or photos pointing out the issues.
It's lack of motivation for us to boycott the China. They are too far away from our live. We may take it serious until the nuclear submarine appearing offshore.
We don't know the New Appeasement would come out with real peace or WWIII. The deaths caused by CoVid are already more than the number of American killed in WWII.
The discussion is good, but we are not ready to face the issues come up with China. It's helpful for the labs in other countries to have new SOP. However, the problem is still there.
There is no difference between WHO and China. For this problem, I don't think WHO would give any help. We would never know the true. IMHO, we shouldn't dismiss the possibility of leak, but sadly we could only dismiss it.
just a year ago on HN, we cannot openly speculate or discuss the viruses origins without first getting a barrage of downvotes, today it seems the tides are changing, it's not just WHO integrity or credibility is at stake, our entire future is
imagine another lab-virus just as contagious but one with higher infant mortality, we'd be extinct!!
This comment is a noticeable step into nationalistic flamewar. Please don't do that in HN comments. That way lies hell, and we're trying for a different sort of discussion here.
Taking a step back, does he not at least bring up some valid points?
The CCP did bar scientists from early investigation and has gone to considerable lengths to suppress national news outlets from properly reporting on the issue at hand.
Of course. The issue is simply that it needs to happen within the site guidelines, for example this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Commenters here need to learn the difference between posting in the flamewar style and having curious conversation. The issue is not the topic—it's which mode people's nervous systems are functioning in as they discuss it. Here is what to watch for:
(1) One mode is battle mode, in which people use grandiose, aggressive rhetoric to try to defeat an enemy, and take any opportunity they can to twist what the other side says to gain an advantage...
(2) ... and the other is curiosity mode, in which people explore together to find the truth and are interested in what each other are actually saying, thinking, and feeling.
(3) You can tell which mode you're in by sensing into your level of activation while posting. If you're not sure about it yet, or if you're feeling agitated, slow down before posting, set an intention to observe your own state, and it will soon become clear.
Another way of explaining this is the distinction between reflexive and reflective responses: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... Reflexive responses are lightning fast, associated with high activation, and oriented towards threat assessment and defense. They come from the fight-or-flight layer that we're all dealing with in ourselves. They're also highly repetitive, because they basically come from cache—that's why we're able to generate them so quickly. The reflexive system is not about responding to or creating anything new. It's there for survival and to prevent the recurrence of past painful experiences.
Reflective responses are slow, come from the drive to explore and learn, and have to do with new responses to new information—which take time to come together. They lead to conversations and outcomes that aren't simply replays of past reactions. They aren't primarily about past traumas and threat defense. In order to function this way, the nervous system needs a certain baseline of safety. One way to get there is simply to wait until the initial wave of reactiveness subsides, and then look around and orient to what's specifically new and interesting in the present situation.
Empathy comes into this too, because the ability to put oneself in the other person's position, instead of quickly scanning their comment for weaknesses to exploit, is a complex process that requires the slower cognitive systems to come online.
Wow, this is def the next level of what you have been getting at with posting and moderation. Making me think deeply about my consumption and interaction here on yet another axis; my best posts are my most highly edited so why not edit first?
You always make me think, dang. Criticisms by me and others aside, thanks for doing your job.
Admiring your efforts as an admin to maintain a civil discourse. I wish the remaining handful of scientists who dismiss lab-associated escape pathways as unworthy of investigation would be so civil: https://twitter.com/BlockedVirology
Particularly the mudslinging ('It's plausible she can't assemble them [referring to a Broad Institute genomicist supporting investigation into both lab-leak & zoonosis], but that's because of a lack of expertise'): https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1373027946684837893?...
The truth hurts. China released a deadly virus into the world. It tried to cover it up. It tried to blackmail Australia. It is extorting Africa.
China and the Chinese people must accept their responsibility for this catastrophe. They must let the rest of the world, in the guise of the UN, come in and sort out how much of this crime was intentional and how much incompetence.
China must be held accountable. It should pay reparations. It should be forced to suspend any and all biomedical research until it can provably meet western safety standards.
Are you aware that you're posting in exactly the flamewar style that we're asking people not to? I realize that this is a high-emotion, high-activation topic, but there are certain principles here that everyone needs to respect. That is what the site guidelines are for.
A comment like this one (and worse, "we need to shame China and the Chinese people" – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26548441 - I can't believe that anyone who has been here over 10 years would post something that horrible to HN) takes us deeper into the hell that we're trying to stay out of. I'm not going to ban you for these, because if I imagine myself into your position, my guess is that simply re-reading what you posted, once you've cooled down, will be punishment enough. But if you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Thank you for showing more restraint than I did. I'm sorry for being incendiary, I did not mean to use any slurs. I've removed what I thought might be construed as slurs from my comments. I won't post further on this topic. Thank you for shaming me, I feel guilty and will do better.
I was trying to avoid shaming you, but I'm sure I could have done a better job of that, especially because I'm posting from a position of authority and that magnifies such effects by a million times.
One of my teachers once told me "I did a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford and I learned just one thing from it: that punishment is not good for learning." Hopefully we can get to a state where there's less punishment and more learning. I think examples are good for learning, so I hope you can stop feeling guilty and just take it as an example.
Thanks for illustrating so well the flamewar mode dang just mentionned.
--"The truth hurts"
You are just accusing people of refusing to see "the truth" which may be true but is not a argument about the validity of your thesis. That common rethoric. That also preemptively invalidates any counter-argument to your thesis because you know we're just deceived out of (fill in what you want).
-- "China released a deadly virus into the world."
China is not just one person. Even the Chinese gov is too big an entity to be given a single will and agency. This kind of abstraction is fine for everyday talk but must be discarded whenever you try to have an intelligent debate about something.
--" the Chinese people must accept their responsibility"
Wow, like if I am working as a coal miner in remote China I must be held accountable by "my" poor control of high tech labs? Come on I live in a "democracy" that has conducted nuclear trials in the Pacific nearby living places which I was totally against. Do I need to be held responsible?
-- "this crime"
Plain flamewar mode
--" it can provably meet western safety standards"
Pangolins were an early suspect, but Alina Chan discovered that the multiple pangolin papers were all from the same batch of smuggled pangolins. This makes it much more likely that the pangolins were infected by something else, in the same way that housecats get infected by their human owners.
Because of this, Nature has placed an editor's note on their pangolin paper:
> 11 November 2020 Editor's Note: Readers are alerted that concerns have been raised about the identity of the pangolin samples reported in this paper and their relationship to previously published pangolin samples. Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved.
No one is seriously proposing pangolins anymore, not even Daszak and the Chinese. The proximal host for MERS (camels) was identified in a little over a year, and for the original SARS (palm civets) in a little less. For SARS-CoV-2, despite the much greater effort, we're still waiting.
My understanding of the author's central thesis is this: the US, despite its world-class virology and disease study labs, regularly has lapses in procedure that regularly lead to situations in which the public might be exposed. Given that this is happening in our own backyard, we might reasonably expect countries of similar status (like China) to experience similar lapses.
That reads as reasonable to me, but raises a subsequent question: if these lapses are so common and so many countries possess the capacity for serious mistakes, why don't we see more regular outbreaks (if not full-blown pandemics) caused by labs? In other words, what makes COVID special? I didn't find a satisfactory answer to the latter question in the article.
It's my (uninformed, uneducated) opinion that the severity of the author's claims don't correspond to the reality of the last few national and international disease crises (AIDS, Ebola, Zika, COVID). Which isn't to say that we should absolutely dismiss the possibility that COVID originated in a lab, only that claims that it did amount to currently unsubstantiated claims about COVID's special status among other recent pandemics.
The biggest difference between all of those and this virus is that those were leaks of already-known viruses. SARS-CoV-2 wasn't known to exist before 2019 and there's no known precursor virus. There's a somewhat closely related virus that infected the miners in Yunnan but it was only 96% similar. There's nothing at all in this article on how SARS-CoV-2 was discovered or created.
The problem I have is that China isn't interested in investigating the start of the pandemic. They've thrown away their wastewater samples, there's some evidence WHO found of SARS-CoV-2 spreading locally prior to December 2019, but no backtesting of any samples. Nobody seems to be looking at the bats in Hubei for sarbecoviruses.
By blocking study of the zoonotic origin of the pandemic, they can use the theory it was imported in food for domestic propaganda. For external propaganda they're happy to have conspiracy theories flying about this lab leak theory creating a "firehose of falsehoods" and distractions. They can rely on American scientists to get engaged with the conspiracy theory and debunk it, wasting their efforts and then they can use that also for domestic propaganda.
Meanwhile nobody gets fucking outraged that China isn't properly investigating the origin of the virus and isn't aggressively looking at the bats in Hubei and any animal farms in the surrounding area. My suspicion is that animal farms (like minks) functioned as a bioreactor that had many opportunities to spillover from bats and then the close contact allowed it to spread well and mutate to optimize it for a more human-like ACE2 receptor, then the mink contact with humans allowed multiple spillover events until it started to spread epidemically in humans.
CCP would also not release serology from blood banks and other blood from before dec which from what I understand would be a gold mine showing earlier spread.
Which wouldn't that be in China's interest?
I don't get why the 'cover up' (maybe i'm too biased with that term, utter lack of cooperation) beyond just the top down controlling nature of the CCP.
Their actions don't lend us any trust so we do have to ask why..
I’ve come to terms in understanding China’s actions by this assumption, which is made up by me, but seems true enough and maybe even true for most nation states when pushed against a wall:
They are acting without any concern for the outside world - not for how they are perceived, not for any consequences. They are acting with pure self-determination. This works because they know they can be self sufficient and have a long term plan to get there.
Controlling the information/narrative domestically is the only variable they need to manipulate that matters. So as an outsider, it all seems quite inexplicable, but if you see it as a way to achieve long term political and infrastructure goals while maintaining social harmony locally - most of their actions make sense, even if they may not be morally justifiable to some/many/all people in some/many/all situations :)
I think this is an oversimplification. Chinese culture places a lot of value on saving face — so low and mid-level bureaucrats will massage the numbers so as not to appear to be the weak link in the chain. Do this at every level of an enormous country and you can see how hard it is to even know the truth when the first instinct is to cover everything up, even if it’s a scandal that won’t be published outside China.
Of course, all this allows the media to disclaim the party’s responsibility for basically everything.
Also, yeah; they view China as a self-determined empire stretching back 5000 years. The Chinese generally view Americans as arrogant children and not that smart. I suggest any white person who doesn’t understand racism go to China — they don’t give a fuck that you’re white and in many places will actively disdain you. If you tried to date a Chinese woman outside the large coastal cities you’d likely be literally run out of town. They are reaching the point where they don’t really need us; their own internal consumption is overtaking their exports to the US.
I've read a lot about this structure where local party leaders lie - often times to save face - and keeps getting passed up.
Chernobyl is a great example of this with deadly consequences. COVID is far worse sadly.
I don't think we could have contained it within China if they had a best response it was already out - well maybe 99.99% chance a not that educated guess - but we could probably have given ourselves a good amount more time. And hard shut down borders quickly if we knew the true vast numbers & death rates in early Wuhan. Then put out the 'embers' locally.
Gives at least some countries a chance of keeping it under control within their borders. Though I don't have faith our (US) CDC would have been up to the task...
Because the intermediate animal is likely animal farming, and they don't want to take the economic and political hit of shutting down an entire industry. We don't have the will to do that either, we still haven't shut down our mink farms.
And just for domestic propaganda reasons. If it came from China they could be blamed for it, and they want to deny/deny/deny and defect blame. Serves their propaganda purposes to have people believe it was imported and generates an us-vs-them bunker narrative where the rest of the world is unfairly blaming them. That leaves their citizens questioning the rest of the world and not their own government.
Those wildlife farms were linked to the Huanan Seafood Market which we pretty much at this point know were not the source. That was not ground zero. It is more likely that larger and more economically important fur farming or agriculturally significant animals were responsible. The articles you link to all talk about shutting down exotics (which confines the economic and political damage for China).
>The problem I have is that China isn't interested in investigating the start of the pandemic.
Why should they be interested? We know how SARS type viruses can spread to humans, we know what other species are vulnerable, and we know what things make it more or less likely. A new outbreak was not a surprising result. What benefit is there to aggressively investigating the exact transmission method?
If your mink idea was found to be accurate, would you advocate closing mink farms? It being the source this time doesn't make it likely to cause the next transferrable virus.
Science is about collecting data, verifying, collecting more, in a repeating never ending cycle. Stopping science (especially in areas of active present day research) in the belief that we know and are done with it, just isn't sound logic. Viruses are not yet solved.
I am not arguing to stop science, I don't see the benefit we're hoping to get out of aggressively researching various theories about how exactly the 2019 covid virus spread to humans.
Presumably a better understanding of the origins of the 2019 virus would be useful for predicting the likelyhood of a similar outbreak from the same source, or allow people to alter practices to reduce that likelyhood.
Our current understanding of everything you mention is already good, and there have been no indications that I'm aware of that this case happened in a way that would alter that understanding.
To show my point, even if we aggressively investigate the source and discover it did not originate in a lab, nobody would then argue that it's alright to lower security on such biolabs.
I think this data will only lead to results orientated thinking, where we ignore all the other sources we know possibly could have caused it. Heavily financing research into finding the exact source provides no benefit I can find, and could cause further harm.
Why would we not "aggressively" research it? What if we could have stopped it by catching it early?
Knowing whether it was a lab leak or zoonotic would be a massive hint in the direction to invest in. N=1, but it's a big 1 that would have massive public support.
>What if we could have stopped it by catching it early?
So we should be aggressively researching all the known possible future causes, not wasting time trying to figure out what the exact cause this time was.
>Knowing whether it was a lab leak or zoonotic would be a massive hint in the direction to invest
We know both are possible causes, investing in just the one that caused this leaves us open to the other.
That means that mink, and particularly the practice of mink farming is likely to lead to another outbreak (or whatever the actual species is determined to be). That animal would have sufficiently similar biology to humans, including the ACE2 receptor so that zoonotic transmission could happen. Those farms would definitely need to be closed.
I have not researched this mink idea, so I don't know how likely they are to lead to cross species contamination, but remember the swine flu? We already know pigs are capable of such transmission and we still farm them.
Lots of mammals are capable of this, and we can determine which ones are even if we don't isolate the cause of thie pandemic.
Minks (and other mustelids) are extraordinarily capable of transmitting human respiratory viral diseases. Ferrets (same genus as Minks) are used as an animal model for human influenza research for that reason.
SARS-CoV-2 also spreads exceptionally well on mink farms. Out of a total of 128 mink farms in the Netherlands, at least 69[0] had an outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, with more suspected cases. On at least two farms, there were confirmed transmissions from the animals to farm workers. It is likely mink would form a natural reservoir SARS-CoV-2 if allowed to spread in the wild.
Mink farming has subsequently been banned since early 2021 in the Netherlands.
In any case, the original statement is silly in light of the fact that the origin of the much smaller SARS epidemic was still diligently researched and traced for 15+ years until it was finally found, in 2018: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9
While I have you: could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...
In general labs are not both a) bad at safety, and also b) doing gain of function research to make dangerous viruses more infectious to humans. The latter has been banned a few times due to the risk (see below). Both A and B were happening in Wuhan.
"In 2014, after a series of accidents involving mishandled pathogens at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the NIH announced that it would stop funding gain-of-function research into certain viruses — including influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) — that have the potential to unleash a pandemic or epidemic if they escaped from the lab. Some researchers said the broad ban threatened necessary flu-surveillance and vaccine research."
p.s. The US NIH did ultimately stop funding that research locally, but continued funding it in Wuhan. Including the exact type of virus we're dealing with now.
You don't even have to be bad at safety, just less than completely perfect.
There is also the matter of biosafety levels. Something like smallpox is studied at biosafety level 4, which is very intrusive and difficult. The alleged gain of function research would have been BSL 3 or even 2, meaning a lot fewer precautions are taken, and a leak is correspondingly more likely.
It's purposely evolving diseases to spread faster or be more dangerous, for the sake of research. As I understand, it's at least a bit controversial. So maybe there's not as much of it going on as other research? If so, there probably wouldn't be as much opportunity for it to escape. But now that it has (per the hypothesis), it's ready to be very contagious right out of the gate. Thus, pandemic.
Established fact. Biowarfare is often coated as "defense": we need to develop vaccines for future viruses or engineered pathogens. The offense is top secret.
SARS-COV are classed Category C pathogen by CDC, in line with Hanta virus. SARS-COV is documented as a viable bioweapon, precisely for the things we have seen in the last year, and studied as such by all capable militaries around the world.
The hypothesis is that this lab (and labs in Iran, China and Iran share biowarfare research) was conducting gene-targeted coronavirus research. Using proxy DNA-testing companies serving Western populace to get their data. A good weaponized coronavirus would have an extremely high R. It would look similar to the flu in the first stages. Then at a later stage (after two weeks) it would deliver a "payload" in the brains of the targeted populace, stopping breathing or causing haemorrhage. The non-targeted races would just have a flu and contribute to the spread. Other engineered viruses focus on plausible deniability, straining the hospitals with patients with vague symptoms, hard enough to visit the hospital and contribute to the strain on public services, soft enough not to actually kill them. It would throw the targeted country into chaos and unprepared for a war.
COVID hits the sweet spot of infectiousness, asymptomatic spread, incubation time, and low mortality. I would expect the R of Ebola to be pretty low in developed countries. People wash their hands more often when every place you go to has running water, and if you show Ebola symptoms, you're going to the hospital, and if it's a hospital with a city that has a BSL4 lab, there isn't going to be an outbreak - someone will recognize what it is, and you'll be in an isolation unit in no time and your contacts will be quarantined.
I would expect such a case to make the headlines, but it's quite possible it would be quietly swept under the carpet. How well known was Reston back when it happened? If that didn't make the news, would a lab-originated outbreak?
With COVID, a worker could get infected, hide the exposure out of fear/shame, never show any symptoms... and yet start a pandemic.
With a low-probability high-impact event like a global pandemic, near misses are the only indicator you have until the one time it does go catastrophically wrong.
Not disagreeing with your general point that SARS-CoV-2 is an interesting mix of infectiousness and low mortality.
From what I've read Ebola has killed many healthcare professionals because they infected themselves when disposing off PPE. As a result a disproportionally large portion of deaths were healthcare workers.
> With COVID, a worker could get infected, hide the exposure out of fear/shame, never show any symptoms... and yet start a pandemic.
In many countries workers are actually incentivised to come to work sick and infect others.
I've described SARS-CoV-2 as an RPG character who shows up to a session with a stat block you'd describe as "Okay", and then in the first encounter, you realize everything lines up well for a scary rules interaction.
It's not exceptional in many of the ways viruses can be. It's not as deadly as Ebola. Or as durable as Norovirus. Or as transmissible as Measles. It's just...really good at its job.
The lack of fomite transmission for SARS-CoV-2 has saved a lot of healthcare workers.
I'm not claiming that they don't! The article has multiple examples of viruses escaping either individual containment or the lab outright.
What I'm claiming is that the volume of attributed escapes indicates that the average escape has relatively local consequences. In other words: historically, when everything goes wrong, it hasn't resulted in a global pandemic. What, then, made or makes COVID special?
Maybe the answer is raw numbers, and that it was bound to happen eventually. But "one of these incidents was bound to cause a global pandemic" is the exact same reasoning as the (original, still mainstream?) "wet market" theory. What I'd personally like to know is why I should believe one over the other, apart from human propensity to believe conspiratorial claims.
COVID-19 is special because it doesn't cause severe illness in most people. SARS killed a far far higher percentage of people it came in contact with, and made 100% of them sick, so it was much more easily detected, and therefore contained.
COVID-19 is one of the few serious diseases that can transmit when the carrier is asymptomatic. That could be a credible reason why a potential lab leak went unnoticed for long enough to begin uncontrolled community spread.
> COVID-19 is one of the few serious diseases that can transmit when the carrier is asymptomatic.
Is this actually true? It is certainly not true for HIV, and of course is not relevant to diseases like Zika that are transmitted by mosquitos.
Edit: I found the answer to my own question: https://www.kff.org/infographic/ebola-characteristics-and-co... (see second bullet point). Given that this lists Hep C, HIV, Influenza, Malaria, Polio, and Tuberculosis as possible to transmit while asymptomatic, I'd say "COVID-19 is one of the few serious diseases that can transmit when the carrier is asymptomatic." is most definitely false.
As always, it is not a 1-0 situation, but a question of degree.
You can catch flu from an asymptomatic person, but Covid has a much higher reproduction factor. During the winter lockdown in England, regular flu was completely eradicated - literally not a single case was detected in entire England [0]. At the same time, Covid was still spreading happily. The measures that stopped flu in its tracks only slightly inconvenienced SARS-Cov-2.
Covid is simply too good at spreading, compared to other similar diseases.
(As an analogy: I can swim, Michael Phelps can swim, we can both call ourselves swimmers, but we are not really comparable.)
I can clarify it: COVID-19 is just about the only serious respiratory disease that undergoes rapid exponential spread and is transmissible while asymptomatic. That's a lot of qualifiers, but it makes for a uniquely scary pandemic threat.
Or sharing needles! There's a small outbreak in Newark of injection drug users that's one of my favorite "Weird epidemiology papers" for journal clubs.
I've seen this study shared around anti-vaxer groups trying to claim that asymptomatic spread is unlikely. But this study does not prove that at all. They screened 10 million people with no symptoms, and found 300 asymptomatic cases. Then they re-screened 1200 contacts of those cases and didn't find any more cases that they missed. This doesn't prove that asymptomatic spread is unlikely. It proves that the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 when they did the screening was very low, and that 100% of the cases they found were asymptomatic. I'd be careful to draw conclusions from just one Chinese study, but if anything, this study suggests the opposite of what you're claiming.
> I can’t quite follow the line of reasoning here. Can you simplify or rephrase?
I was pretty clear, and so was the original study you linked from nature.com. If you can't follow the reasoning of something that simple, should anyone take your claims to be coming from someone who knows what they're talking about?
From the second meta-study you linked:
> We found significantly higher secondary attack rates from symptomatic index cases than asymptomatic or presymptomatic index cases, although less data were available on the latter. The lack of substantial transmission from observed asymptomatic index cases is notable. However, presymptomatic transmission does occur, with some studies reporting the timing of peak infectiousness at approximately the period of symptom onset.
They state very clearly that though their analysis showed a lower secondary attack rate from asymptomatic index cases (0.7-4.9%), they have limited data from which to draw that conclusion, and that presymptomatic transmission does occur. Which means, you can catch SARS-CoV-2 from someone who doesn't know that they're sick.
That's according to the study you linked, and it's far from the claim you made that asymptomatic spread is "actually highly unlikely".
You really have tabs on all the innumerable factors involved in a scenario where someone goes to a party and later becomes infected - and pinpoint the reason ?
At the party, there were 42 people present. 16 got sick. In many cases husbands got sick first, then wives. All of these are in a close social network (they either work together, or are married to an employee) - so keeping tabs on each other is very likely. Many of them were socially distancing before hand (I can attest to 4 of them, directly) - so external infections are unlikely, but possible.
Due to the timing, the general consensus is that the husbands contacted the disease from one male (close hugging or extended talking) and then gave it to their wives that night.
Covid is special because it's highly contagious and has delayed symptoms.
However in my opinion, chinese governments (esp. lower levels) like to lower the severity of any issue / risks and they like to repress / solve the issue with local power until it is solved or gets too big. The central gov that like to hide wrongdoings aren't helping either.
In case of covid, they either underrate the severity or tried to suppress the outbreak locally, which they failed and it already spread too wide enough to be contained.
If covid outbreak happened in europe or us, I believe it'll spread almost the same, albeit slower and you'll knew faster since it'll be in news faster.
The armies of statisticians and (human) computers working for the war department found that most munitions fired off don’t hit people. One figure often used is 25,000 bullets per casualty (where casualty does not imply killed). How many disease bullets have been accidentally fired since we’ve had disease study labs?
The difference is easy. It’s an aerosol. Known leaks from biological weapons programs are mostly things like anthrax.
That also makes the biological warfare scenario less likely — armies like to control where the bomb goes.
The other factor to discount this conjecture is that if you hear about covid as a biological weapon, it’s less likely to be true as it would potentially expose research in other places. If China is doing this, the US, Russia and others are too.
> if these lapses are so common and so many countries possess the capacity for serious mistakes, why don't we see more regular outbreaks (if not full-blown pandemics) caused by labs? In other words, what makes COVID special?
Perhaps it is not special. One might as well ask what was special about a coin that lands heads three times in a row in its first three flips.
There's been a number of very short transmission chains. One of the things that's difficult for infectious diseases is that they have extremely long-tailed distributions. "This has happened before, and it got a couple people sick" is a distinct possibility. It also happens relatively frequently with diseases that have a lower pandemic potential than a coronavirus.
So the answer to "What makes COVID special?" is possibly "We failed our pandemic save."
I did some research during the early stages of the West African Ebola epidemic, when a lot of people were asking why, instead of the usual sporadic, self-limiting outbreaks of the past, we were seeing something larger and different. As it turns out, if you use the parameters people estimated from the older, smaller outbreaks, there's a small but not breathtakingly so probability of a very large epidemic. It's sort of the null hypothesis for pandemics.
Honestly if it was the source, its probably just probability. It is not 100% guaranteed that an outbreak happens from an accident, but there is a chance. And with enough of them happening, eventually one of them will spread.
If this Wuhan lab theory is correct, I think the wet markets play a huge role in the outbreak. They place a huge number of diverse, weakened, living animal in a relatively confined area. This seems to give an ideal breeding ground for a leaked virus - which perhaps can be incubated in a host species found at the wet market. Either the animals are in too poor of condition to notice the infection or they're a natural reservoir - eliciting no symptoms.
My understanding is most other countries don't have wet markets like China does. Even if a virus escapes, it may not have access to the hosts it needs truly become problematic.
Lab 257 is an amazing book about germ research labs. It fascinated me both with how hard it is to contain diseases under ideal conditions (lab 257 was on an island miles from anything inhabited) and how poor of a job people who should have known better, the actual virologists and people with MDs, did at containing diseases they were researching.
> A discredited 2004 book entitled Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory fueled the conspiracy theories. Archived specimens show that Lyme disease was endemic well before the establishment of Plum Island laboratory. Additionally, Lyme disease was never a topic of research at Plum Island, according to the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Agriculture.
Also, the Obama administration banned gain of function research broadly due to "biosafety incidents" at federal research labs in the US. The announcement explicitly called out research on SARS: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/10/17/doing-d...
Also important to remember that the WIV had ongoing research in bat coronaviruses. Now that isn't unusual after SARS, but it does slightly make the theory more plausible.
Peter Daszak, member of the WHO Covid origins team, was also the project lead for the US funded gain of function research of novel coronaviruses that was going on at the Wuhan BSL4 lab.
There is historical precedent of authorities blaming local meat markets to cover up a lab leak.
Peter Daszak was also signatory to this weird paper "in support of Chinese scientists".
> We sign this statement in solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China who continue to save lives and protect global health during the challenge of the COVID-19 outbreak. We are all in this together, with our Chinese counterparts in the forefront, against this new viral threat. The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.
Scary piece of propaganda, considering it was China who started rumours and misinformation, and tying the lab leak hypothesis to not supporting health professionals. All-in-all, a grave conflict of interest for a supposed objective investigation into the origins.
I'm not a virologist but every TWiV episode I listened to, there was convincing talk about natural reservoirs being the most likely source of the virus.
AFAIR they also expect similar events to happen increasingly all over the world due to side effects of the climate crisis and global heating.
>I'm not a virologist but every TWiV episode I listened to, there was convincing talk about natural reservoirs being the most likely source of the virus.
In no way whatsoever does that detract from a potential lab leak. The vast majority of viruses used in gain of function research are taken from natural reservoirs.
That we’re finally seeing some mainstream discussion around this hypothesis should not change the scary fact that months ago governments, scientists and media happily and immediately rejected it as a xenophobic conspiracy theory. The messaging and subsequent ease at which public opinion was influenced should make everyone pause and think hard about other ways they might be being manipulated.
It's amazing how much ridicule I took for seriously suggesting this theory last year. My friends twisted and exaggerated the extent of my claims (implying I thought it was an intentional action on China's part, or an engineered virus, and not a result of mundane research + accidental containment failure), and called me a crazy conspiracy theorist.
I had been reading every journal article I could get my hands on about the virus since February, but of course how could my interpretation be trustworthy? I'm no expert, or anything. If something I read in a journal article contradicted something on the news, the latter always seemed to "win".
After all that, now that the lab thing is on the mainstream news, I'm afraid to even bring it up with my friends. They can figure it out for themselves.
Agreed. However my reaction when first hearing about the lab leak (middle of last year?) was that the leak stories were meant to be malicious/propaganda against China. I didn't take any of this seriously until an article in Politico a week or two ago.
But here's the kicker. Let's say this was a lab leak and as a reporter (which I'm not) I thought the evidence was good enough to warrant reporting. I'm not sure I would share it. The previous occupant of the white house did a great disservice in giving this whole thing a racially charged tone. I'm genuinely scared by the increased acts of violence against southeast Asians in the US and worry that stories like this will make it worse. I'm hoping that the new US government is secretly taking steps to help prevent what may have happened in that lab -- in addition to the large effort needed elsewhere to improve our handling after things had begun to spread.
Anyway, main point is that this was the first time in a long time (ever?) where I really wondered whether, given the circumstances, if it was good to share "the whole truth" (as best we know it) given that we don't know what happened and the potential real-life implications to many people in the US.
What bothered me is when a few scientists came out and said the virus showed signs of human manufacturing I posted to a few forums like reddit askscience about how from a science perspective was there any validity or was this unfounded conspiracy and there was no discussion.
Ive no axe to grind politically, simply think its interesting to explore and understand what indicators/benchmarks there would be etc. One of the claimants to human manufactured was a Nobel prize winner, which doesnt mean he is correct but to me seems to add weight to its worth discussing.
I did not see any real 'lets talk about the science' discussion anywhere. And on my post on /r/askscience I could see my post in new list logged in but not when I went in via a new browser... so not sure if a glitch/timing/etc or they have some ninja ban system but it triggered my interest for sure.
While I have no idea what the truth is this kind of thing and not trying to push views down any path, this lack of discussion and that maybe ninja removal really pushes me to more consider something is being actively obscured and therefore why. Ultimately, I suspect we'll never know the truth.
I've seen my supposedly smart and well-read friends dismiss the lab-leak theory out of hand; rejecting all discussion and labelling me with the right-wing conspiracist label despite the fact I'm heartily left-leaning.
And, I have a lot of experience with political posts on Reddit being "ninja-banned"; appearing in New but not in the main feed; disappearing even from new for an hour and then re-appearing, comments ninja-removed without trace, even from their OP's direct comment feed.
Just in case you didn't understand what the article was saying: "Labs in Wuhan might not have played any role in the origin of the pandemic. But a year later, no source has been found, and the world deserves a thorough, unbiased investigation of all plausible theories that is conducted without fear or favor."
It did NOT say the virus was definitely released from a lab. It did NOT present any evidence it was. All the article said was that given the author's experience with labs like this, she thinks the chances the virus escaped are not as remote as the scientists investigating it claim it is. That's all! Your theory might be correct, but as of now, you have no reason to think you've been vindicated.
Interesting take. I did not interpret their statement as vindication of being correct but rather that this version of events is a possibility that can't currently be dismissed.
The same reflexive denial happened on HN. Yet the lab leak theory has always been consistent with the situation. It's also always been the best fit to the behaviour we've seen from the various actors.
Yes, it's interesting, but ultimately pointless. This kind of manipulation is very easy if you get everyone onboard. Once something is politically unpopular enough, everyone will swear on an <insert holy book of choice here> that they disbelieve it (even if they secretly believe it). So really, your friends perhaps believed the lab theory, but if someone spouts politically unpopular opinions like that, they will seek to bring you into alignment or else distance themselves from you, all without revealing that they believe it also.
I just chipped into the debate on Wikipedia where it is still regarded as a xenophobic conspiracy theory which I think is a shame as open discussion there would be useful.
At the time most of what I was hearing wasn't an accidental leak but that they intentionally released it which feels like it crosses over into the xenophobic conspiracy territory. Things also get shaded by who is actually suggesting the idea and we'd had 4 years of China scapegoating in the US.
That's the problem with people. They hate Trump so much that when he says up, they say down. I also hate Trump, but will call a spade a spade whenever it needs to be done. The CCP's behavior with this was very suspect. And look who benefitted and who lost from it.
That's not true, there were plenty of mainstream media reports of these suspicions and the vast majority of them were correctly pointing out the same as they are pointing out today, namely that there is no concrete evidence for the theory and it therefore remains speculation. We would presumably know more if journalists from all over the world could report freely from China, but realistically speaking their work possibilities are limited there.
It's a bit annoying that so many adults continue to mix up speculation with real evidence, and make up their minds based on gut feelings. That is not to say governments shouldn't put pressure on China to be more transparent, of course they should. But judging from the actual information available, the virus most likely jumped from an animal to humans due to the bad conditions of wet markets in China.
While China is to blame for such markets, people need to bear in mind that the same can happen in many other places where animals are farmed closely together with humans. Even if it was true, the Wuhan lab theory would unfortunately distract from this real problem.
I found this to be an extremely engaging read and compelling story.
TLDR; The likelihood of it being lab related is high. The likelihood of it being directly malicious low.
My Take form reading it: The lab in question needed to collect bats for research. A person who collected the bats did so with insufficient safety and is likely patient 0.
> TLDR; The likelihood of it being lab related is high. The likelihood of it being directly malicious low.
And this sounds like a reasonable possibility to be explored. Accidents happen. Lapses in procedures happen.
The problem is that early on, and still in some circles, lab related equates to malicious bio-weapon and/or China purposely attempting to destroy the world. It's important to separate the two, and hopefully this is a cautionary tale for all labs to review their policies and procedures.
I agree that the leak was likely accidental. That said, I think you gloss over the fact that Gain of Function Research (artificial selection) was certainly taking place inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that US intelligence has concluded that the WIV was engaging in classified research for the Chinese military, unbeknownst to the rest of the world.
So, its not quite as simple as a collection mistake.
I don't find that compelling. Our own US scientists specifically stated they did not see the biological markers of tampering, and I don't see any reason we shouldn't be trusting them. I think there are a lot of people who want to believe China is evil incarnate and things are just as black and white as that. I think that's a mental shortcut with easy emotional payout. I would encourage you to read the link.
> In this study, we investigated the receptor usage of the SL-CoV S by combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules of human, civet, or horseshoe bat.
This is all circumstantial, of course. But, that combined with the fact that COVID originated in Wuhan, thousands of kilometers away from the bat caves of Yunnan province, yet in the same city as the only BSL-4 laboratory in China, that's hard to ignore.
"Did not see evidence of tampering" is too weak to trust for me.
Military-funded scientific biowarfare research should be different (use different, more advanced, tools) than run-of-the-mill bioinformatics research which US scientists work with. So if the scientist is not working on military research, their guess is as good as: "it was not engineered using common industry-standard known methods". It is misattributing authority, like quoting bio science experts saying "COVID can't be a weapon because the mortality is too low". No, you have zero idea about the military applications of biowarfare. If the scientist really was a military researcher, then they won't disclose signs of tampering to a news outlet or academic journal.
Another is that, for obvious reasons, military research would like to obfuscate its engineering. So it is unlikely they use easily detectable methods for that. It is perfectly possible to breed viruses in a lab, inside natural hosts. Then you won't see any biological markers of tampering, but the virus was still engineered by cross-breeding captured fruit bats or manually creating a zoonotic transmission chain to humans. So even without biological signs of tampering, the lab leak remains plausible.
Based on your takeaway, I'm looking for this to convince me that it's more likely that it's a researcher caught it first than anyone else handling bats.
This article is written by a journalist who is clearly knowledgeable about safety practices and mistakes in US labs, but does not consider the extensive knowledge we have about the sequence of SARS-COV2. The preponderance of evidence supports a natural origin of the virus.
This is no way exonerates the Wuhan government from possible culpability—indeed government officials did deliberately suppress information—but this investigative opinion doesn’t pass scientific muster. Misinformation.
In roughest form, Andersen is saying "SARS-CoV-2 doesn't closely resemble any existing known virus, so it wasn't produced by genetic manipulation of existing known viruses".
I think that's true, but it ignores the possibility that the WIV was working with new viruses with unpublished genomes. The WIV routinely organized expeditions to remote bat caves to collect samples. There's naturally some delay between sampling, sequencing, and publishing, no conspiracy required. For example, RaTG13, the closest known animal virus to SARS-CoV-2, was collected by the WIV in 2013 but published only after the start of the pandemic.
The WIV had a private database of viral genomes; but they took it offline in September 2019, they say due to hacking attempts. They haven't brought it back up, and the WHO has declined to ask for a copy.
SARS-CoV-2 certainly could be a naturally-evolved virus first transmitted from an animal to a non-scientist human. It could also be a naturally-evolved virus collected and accidentally released by the WIV, or a recombinant of multiple such viruses, or the descendant of such a virus after serial passaging. Nothing in Andersen's argument distinguishes any of these possibilities.
But don't trust me; check out Marc Lipsitch's Twitter feed today, or David Relman's article:
> Some have argued that a deliberate engineering scenario is unlikely because one would not have had the insight a priori to design the current pandemic virus (3). This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory.
This isn't a conspiracy theory, and it's not even a fringe viewpoint anymore. It's just a reasonable step in investigating the yet-unknown origin of what could be the worst industrial accident in human history.
I now think the lab leak hypothesis is worth considering, and regret labeling as a conspiracy theory, although I maintain the characterization that the lab leak hypothesis is frequently found alongside other conspiracy theories.
I also would maintain that the current consensus is that SARS-COV-2 came from natural spillover, and the leak hypothesis is a minority opinion, but one held by credible scientists with well-thought arguments and therefore worth considering. I wish the original article would cite this work.
Thanks, and I appreciate the openness to new information, far too rare. I also suspect that most people who believe that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a lab accident believe so based on wildly faulty reasoning; but there's unfortunately a real case too.
Not to go too off topic - but out of curiosity, wouldn't you consider something like the four pests campaign to be a much worse industrial accident in human history? Or is that stretching the definition of industrial a bit much.
Fair example. It feels different since the implementation was wrapped in more politics, since they deliberately intended a big ecological change (just a good one rather than a bad one). The root there was indeed a scientific mistake, though.
Well, we do have statements from the WIV that none of their samples closely match the earliest SARS-CoV-2, but we can just assume they are just outright lying, right?
So, except for the fact that you must believe WIV did all these experiments in total secrecy (so that nobody outside heard of it while visiting, etc) and now won't admit to having done them, it's not a conspiracy theory.
I don't think it's reasonable to assume that they're lying, but neither is it reasonable to assume that they're telling the truth. When a lot is at stake, we don't usually take people at their word--financial statements are audited, nuclear facilities are visited by international inspectors, and so on. I don't see why this should be different, but the Chinese government has continuously obstructed any such attempt.
And again, RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, was sampled by the WIV in 2013 and published only post-pandemic. So it's unquestionable that they had at least one unpublished virus similar to SARS-CoV-2 in their collection; the only question is how many others.
It's likely that the only people who know the answer are under the physical control of the Chinese government. Even if they're sometimes briefly abroad, they likely have loved ones behind. So it doesn't take any voluntary conspiracy to keep them quiet, just a direction from a government that has amply demonstrated e.g. in Xinjiang its willingness and ability to punish anyone who discloses its secrets.
As I mentioned earlier, a proximal animal host would greatly increase my confidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated from natural zoonosis. Is there any evidence short of a direct admission from the WIV that would decrease yours?
Finally, Marc Lipsitch and David Relman are Harvard epidemiology and Stanford microbiology profs respectively. I'd rather people engaged seriously with the evidence than just relied on credentials; but are you saying they're conspiracy theorists too?
Any evidence they have been misleading in their responses to direct questions about their samples would be a start.
And you are making a claim about them lying, this comes unavoidably from saying that the VIW is the origin of SARS-CoV-2 as the VIW themselves are publicly claiming they have nothing closer than RaTG13.
It seems simply inconceivable to you that the WIV would lie? Theranos managed to build a $10B company with 800 employees based entirely on a scientific fraud, and they kept it up for ten years with only David Boies to threaten whistleblowers. If the WIV is lying, then it's probably a smaller group of people, for a shorter time, with far nastier tools to keep them in line.
I noted above that the WIV had a database of viral genomes. Public access to that database was removed in September 2019. They say this was due to repeated hacking attempts. They've taken no steps to restore access, or to make the database available in another format (e.g., a dump on a flash drive) that would clearly present zero information security risk. Do you believe their explanation?
And for emphasis, I don't think it's certain that they're lying (about RaTG13 being the closest known relative, at least; I can't see how anyone with the slightest domain knowledge would believe the "hacking" claim), just as I don't think it's certain that a company is lying about their financials when I want to see audited results. The point is that I don't know, and it's normal for people making an important claim to actively want transparency, to build confidence so people don't have to trust them. The WIV's behavior here is the opposite of that.
> Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
You're the one spreading FUD, intentionally misinterpreting the original article and making up a fake argument that "lab leak" hypothesis somehow contradicts "natural origin" and implies that the virus was "designed". (If I understand the article correctly, "purposefully manipulated" means "genetically manipulated", not "gain of function".) Flagged.
If you’re open hearing new information and revising your position, please consider listening to the podcast from Nature that I linked to in another comment. It’s not controversial nor misleading to say that [edit: much of] the scientific community views the “lab leak” hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. The main segment starts around 6:30.
Edit: wanted to highlight that, while the Lancet and other publications have highlighted the mainstream views that “lab leak” is a conspiracy theory, that there is a prominent minority of scientists that disagree: https://undark.org/2021/03/17/lab-leak-science-lost-in-polit...
The virus can be of a natural origin and still be leaked from a lab. Virology labs study copies of viruses regularly through various techniques (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gain_of_function_research). People keep conflating the possibility of an engineered virus with the possibility of a lab leak. They don't have to go together.
> [Dominic Dwyer, a medical virologist at New South Wales Health Pathology in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the WHO team] says that the team didn’t see anything during its visits to suggest a lab accident. “Now, whether we were shown everything? You can never know. The group wasn’t designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practice.”
Even if they were appropriately equipped for such an investigation, what's the use when China had blocked their visits until a year later, when they've had ample time to cover any evidence. The whole situation is highly suspicious, from the initial suppression of news reports of the virus, to delaying international lab visits, to the deletion of studies from that Wuhan lab (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13701168/covid-cover-up-china-...).
I recall China passed an urgent law at lightening speed to enforce safe practice in the bio-virus-labs across the nation a few weeks after the outbreak. It might tell you something.
Also it refused fiercely to let foreign experts in to investigate, which is also hard to explain other than something MUST be hidden at all costs.
"urgent law at lightning speed" is unnecessary and extreme bias. It might tell me something if you included a source.
A rational actor would take the opportunity to do this regardless of whether or not the source was known at the time. If it were even a possibility, you would hope they would use the outbreak as a reminder to take containment practices as seriously as possible.
Whether or not to allow foreign investigators is a political decision. Maybe they calculated it would appear as an admission of guilt or incompetence.
Let’s remember this is China we’re talking about. Before you hand wave that away, consider the emphasis that China places on keeping-up-appearances at practically any cost
Honestly this is not relevant. My comment was not "what i think happened", it was "your argument is tilted crap". The action allegedly taken is not evidence of guilt, is all I was saying.
I read carefully last year on related news, it's said the animals used in those labs are sometimes taken out secretly and sold to the wild-animal-market, and some rubber gowns and gloves are also resold because they're so sturdy for reuse. Incidents occurred a few times already(including recurring SARS) because of similar wrongdoings before COVID-19.
When SARS came out the initial reaction was also to hide, until it's leaked to the west, China then opened the door to let foreign experts help. This time it obviously acted very differently, after more than one year, no serious investigation can proceed still.
The author is irresponsibility propagating a conspiracy theory and elevating its status in the public’s mind.
I’m a bioscientist. It’s frustrating to respond with evidence and in good faith, and be downvoted by those who simply disagree. But sadly it appears that the loudest voice prevails over reason.
Could you explain why evidence that the virus evolved naturally contradicts the lab-leak theory? I'm all ears and waiting to hear the reasoning. As others have pointed out, lab-leak does not imply artificially developed.
> I’m a bioscientist.
And I'm a Bayesian analyst. Surely your position is that it is a coincidence that:
- the virus appeared to originate in Wuhan
- genome sequences from patients were 96% or 89% identical to the Bat CoV ZC45 coronavirus originally found in Rhinolophus affinis
- The bats carrying CoV ZC45 were originally found in Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which are more than 900 kilometers away Wuhan
- According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the market
- Wuhan is home to two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus
- Within ~280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention
(WHCDC). WHCDC hosted animals in laboratories for research purposes. In one of their studies, 155 bats including Rhinolophus affinis were captured in Hubei province, and other 450 bats were captured in Zhejiang province
- one of the researchers described that he was once by attacked by bats and the blood of a bat shot on his skin. In another accident, bats peed on him. He was once thrilled for capturing a bat carrying a live tick
Not conclusive by any means, but I have yet to hear reasoning by which we should exclude the lab-leak theory, besides that the virus evolved naturally, which does not contradict the lab-leak theory whatsoever.
Also, from your article:
> As a team of researchers from the WHO
This WHO? [0][1] Doesn't instill much confidence in me, to be sure.
There are a lot of bats in Wuhan. There are a lot of bats carrying coronaviruses. Coronaviruses have triggered past epidemics. Ergo, there’s an institute for virology in Wuhan.
Listen starting at 6:30 in the podcast I posted from Nature. There is indeed strong correlation but no causal relationship established.
Except everything I've read indicates the bats carrying the most closely related virus are not in Wuhan, not even close:
> The SARS-CoV-2 virus is most closely related to coronaviruses found in certain populations of horseshoe bats that live about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away in Yunnan province, China. [0]
So why would the virus so strongly appear to originate in Wuhan, and not in another city, closer to the bats' native regions? Appears quite statistically unlikely.
What you’re saying is all possible. But there’s no evidence to support leak from a lab, and there is a lot of evidence supporting the natural spillover hypothesis. As such, the latter interpretation is more likely to be correct.
For example, there were cases as early as December 2019 that did not come from Wuhan. Wuhan was no doubt a key early hotspot.
I read the article, but it only states that the first case from December was not linked to the seafood market ("wet market"), but not that it occurred outside of Wuhan. Did I misread something?
By the way, early on I believed that the virus jumped to humans at the seafood market, which was the prevailing theory at the time, it seemed. But as evidence like the above article came out - noting that many early cases had no link to the seafood market, while still being in Wuhan - it raised suspicions, and lent credence to the lab-leak theory.
> There has been rigorous scholarship done on this question. I recommend reading it given your interest in the subject.
I do, but I'm not convinced. A lot of reporting either relies on appeal to authority ("I'm a PhD, and this couldn't possibly happen, so don't question it"), or is purposely obtuse, confusing lab-leak with lab-synthesized, and by dodging the point, hardly alleviates suspicion.
You must understandably excuse me for being a sceptic. I started wearing masks back in February or March, against the advice of the CDC who was telling me masks increase the rate of spread. At the same time I believed that borders should be closed to limit the rate of spread, while the WHO was telling me that closing borders would do no such thing.
So I am not going to believe something just because an expert tells me to, nor do I find it at all scientific to dismiss politically inconvenient possibilities.
No you didn’t misread, I did, my apologies. And I appreciate your skepticism! While responding to you I did a lot more reading, and I’m more sympathetic to the possibility of “lab leak” than when we started discussing. Ultimately this needs a transparent investigation to resolve, but as it stands the data best supports a natural spillover hypothesis. But I regret the extent to which I characterized this as a foregone conclusion.
> For example, there were cases as early as December 2019 that did not come from Wuhan.
No.
This isn't deducible from the article YOU linked!
Not having a link to the seafood marketplace in Wuhan != originating from outside Wuhan.
> The paper, written by a large group of Chinese researchers
> Their data also show that, in total, 13 of the 41 cases had no link to the marketplace.
> the virus possibly spread silently between people in Wuhan—and perhaps elsewhere—before the cluster of cases from the city’s now-infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was discovered in late December.
The article that you linked, if anything, offers more support for a lab leak.
Chiefly, it says that there is evidence that not only did the virus NOT originate from an animal source in the seafood market, but they suggest that Chinese officials knew that it did NOT originate in the Market, yet they issued statements saying that it did anyway.
> And I'm a Bayesian analyst. Surely your position is that it is a coincidence that...
Then you ought to know that seeing more circumstantial evidence for A than B does not imply that A is more likely. What would imply that A is more likely is if you find more circumstantial evidence for A than whatever amount you would expect to find if A didn't happen.
That's why good Bayesians place so little weight on circumstantial evidence: because it's difficult or impossible to predict the expected amount of circumstantial evidence for something that didn't happen. It would involve answering questions like, "When a novel coronavirus moves from the animal population to humans without a lab accident, what are the odds that it will happen within X miles of a lab studying such viruses?" That's pretty difficult to answer, given that we don't know a lot about how or why that happens yet.
And it shouldn't even need to be said that this all goes double when the thing being argued over is political (because, even if you personally are unbiased, the people gathering and publishing the evidence you rely on may not be) and treble when the evidence is technical and outside your area of expertise.
Viruses behave very differently in different species. For example, I think ebola can be airborne in pigs because it binds to receptors in pig lung cells and is more of a respiratory disease for them. It doesn't have a great affinity to human lung cells however so it's NOT airborne in humans.
I'm not suggesting that either fluid was the pathway by which the virus jumped to humans, nor do I know how it happened, only that evidence suggests researchers interact closely with the animals.
And I am not ready to dismiss the theory but I am always open to hearing evidence to exclude the theory.
Can you explain why you are calling a plausible theory a "conspiracy theory" when it is something that indeed has happened in world history more than once?
Empirically, HN collectively gets things like this right much more often than not. It’s been right about the coming pandemic as early as beginning of Feb, it’s been right about masks when it was dismissed by CDC, and lab leak hypothesis has been dismissed as crank the whole time while building more and more of an implausible case that it wasn’t lab-leaked. HN has been coming around to that too. Of course, nothing is conclusive yet but you’re actually furthering the damages caused by misinformation by grouping this into it. If lab leak comes to fruition, there’s just going to be further outrage against traditional authority sources of info that gets things wrong, railing against people like you who called their correct hypothesis misinformation.
ive been here for a decade... its my opinion that HN very much does NOT get things like this right more often than not. its very hard to even guage what the hn opinion is to begin with
> "its very hard to even guage what the hn opinion is to begin with"
Not sure how to square this with the fact you're saying HN collectively gets it wrong. Either you can't even determine what it is they're getting wrong or you're exceptionally good at gauging what the HN opinion is. Because of your quote, I'll assume you're not accurately gauging what HN's majority opinion is on issues, because it's "very hard." I spend a lot of time here and don't think it's difficult at all. While there's a lot of debate and disagreement, most issues have fairly clear >2/3 majorities.
Classically liberal, anti-trumpism, climate change urgently needs addressing, anti-BigTech, static typing, Rust/Go > Java/C#, anti-CCP, anti-surveillance, pro-encryption / pro-privacy, pro-fasting, pro-lifting, decriminalize drug use, pro-rationalist, crypto mostly snake oil, more Twitter use/discussion than IG/Snap/TikTok though it's less popular, etc.
You keep reposting this Nature article but it is vacuous. There are many "guilt by association to Trump", "false equivalency to outrageous conspiracy theories", etc. and other non-good-faith argumentation that the author relies upon. This does not give confidence in her motives.
There are a few much more substantive sites with analysis into the genetics and circumstances around the virus, which emerged since the April 2020 which your Nature article cites as its primary source.
We really need to do better with scientific communication. As scientists we are evaluated too much on our communication with other scientists (ie paper publishing), while communication with the public is not weighed much for career advancement. I wish this structural problem would be discussed more so it can be addressed.
But not all of this is on the scientists. The public must do better. We can’t just blindly trust what a senator says on Fox News for political expedience, or “trust our gut”.
There are other results, too. For instance ...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jmv.26478 "However, the SARS‐CoV‐2 host tropism/adaptation pattern has significant discrepancies compared with other CoVs, raising questions concerning the proximal origin of SARS‐CoV‐2. The flat and nonsunken surface of the sialic acid‐binding domain of SARS‐CoV‐2 spike protein (S protein) conflicts with the general adaptation and survival pattern observed for all other CoV" . https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca... : “There are indeed many unexplained features of this virus that are hard if not impossible to explain based on a completely natural origin.” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, wrote that he’d been concerned for some years about the Wuhan laboratory and about the work being done there to create “chimeric” (i.e., hybrid) SARS-related bat coronaviruses “with enhanced human infectivity.” Ebright said, “In this context, the news of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan *screamed* lab release.”
>However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.
The fact that covid's features are found in nature seems a weak argument to disprove lab involvement.
On the other hand covid seems well adapted to humans which could have come about by serial passage in a lab. Perhaps they were doing something like in vivo characterisation of spillover risk as mentioned in Daszak's grant application for the WIV?
Or something like:
>We performed in vivo experiments in transgenic (human ACE2 expressing) mice and
civets in 2018 and 2019 in the Institute’s biosafety laboratory. The viruses we used were bat
SARSr-CoV close to SARS-CoV. (Shi Zhengli)
On the contrary. A leak implies that something was contained. Notwithstanding the complete lack of evidence for a leak—and one could waste a lifetime trying to disprove claims that have no evidence-if of natural origin, the virus was already infecting animals and/or people.
If a bio research lab is accidentally allowing the public to come in contact with anything it is studying, this is something we need to
1. investigate
2. identify
3. prevent
Saying "it's possible this could have happened anyway" is not meaningful. I would prefer we identify how it did happen. If a lab leaked it, this would inform future discussions on what lab practices and research projects have acceptable risk/reward.
Ignoring the possibility this leaked from a lab until you have bulletproof evidence is nonsensical, particularly when investigator access is restricted. This, more than anything, is the point the article is making. Lab containment failures have a well documented history.
You have no way of knowing that it diverged decades ago. That's a guess based on the number of mutations. But as we've seen with COVID-19, these viruses have more of a punctuated equilibrium behavior around mutations. "Decades" worth of mutations can happen in a single immune-compromised host in a matter of weeks. (And fwiw I'd love a source for that "decades" claim. The strains are much more closely related than that.)
RaTG13 is the closest virus found in the wild to SARS-CoV-2. Samples of it were shipped to the Wuhan lab, which does so-called "gain of function research"--AKA experimenting with artificially sped up mutation rates. Not very long thereafter, SARS-CoV-2 shows up in the surrounding metropolitan area with a very, very similar genome. They're the nearest siblings on the phylogenetic tree.
It's only politics which keep people from calling this the smoking gun it really is.
It's much more than just a "guess." Calling it a "guess" is trivializing quite well established evolutionary biology.
> "Decades" worth of mutations can happen in a single immune-compromised host in a matter of weeks.
SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating for a year now. The number of mutations it has undergone is a tiny fraction of the number of mutations separating RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2.
> fwiw I'd love a source for that "decades" claim.
A paper in Nature Microbiology estimates the most recent common ancestor of RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 to be in the 1960s. The latest possible time of divergence is 2000.[1]
> RaTG13 is the closest virus found in the wild to SARS-CoV-2. Samples of it were shipped to the Wuhan lab, which does so-called "gain of function research"--AKA experimenting with artificially sped up mutation rates.
First of all, gain-of-function does not mean "artificially sped-up mutation rates." It normally refers to specific, targeted changes to the genome, done in order to test a particular hypothesis. What you're describing is a type of experiment never done before: passaging a virus thousands of times in order to generate a massively different virus. This would be an massively time- and labor-intensive experiment, with no apparent motivation.
Second of all, RaTG13 has never been isolated. It exists as fragments of RNA in a fecal swab. Its genome has been reconstructed from sequences of RNA samples, but actually extracting a replicating virus from a fecal swab is a major undertaking. To date, the WIV has only isolated three SARS-related coronaviruses, all of them much closer to the original SARS than to SARS-CoV-2. Before 2020, nobody cared much about viruses that are 20% different from the original SARS. If you read papers from the WIV before 2020, they're all about viruses like WIV-1, which is closely related to the original SARS.
> Second of all, RaTG13 has never been isolated. It exists as fragments of RNA in a fecal swab. Its genome has been reconstructed from sequences of RNA samples, but actually extracting a replicating virus from a fecal swab is a major undertaking.
The lab in question was sent tissue samples extracted from the miners who died of RaTG13. These presumably would have live virus on them.
WIV received serum samples, not tissue. Nobody knows what the miners died of, because several different viruses have been discovered in the same cave, and the miners' samples tested negative for SARS-related coronaviruses. If they had RaTG13 or SARS-CoV-2, it didn't show up in antibody or PCR tests.[1]
However, the miners' story shows you why virologists consider natural zoonosis overwhelmingly likely. Miners, people who raise livestock, butchers, and millions of other people throughout China are in close contact with possibly infected animals every day. Spillover events are probably not uncommon: it's estimated that most (about 95%, in the countryside) spillover events of SARS-CoV-2-like viruses do not cause sustained outbreaks.[2] A few people get sick, and then the virus dead-ends. The virus' best chance is if someone who's infected travels to a major population center, where the virus has a higher chance of spreading. The virus' chance of survival is estimated to increase to about 30%, in that case.
There are cases in Wuhan which predate the wet market cluster. That appears to have been a super spreading event but not the origin.
The bats this disease come from we’re not being sold in the market at this time. They’re out of season. So already the theory is assuming a multi-animal hop (some other wild animal got in contact with a bat and got infected, then captured and moved a thousand kilometers to the wet market and killed).
Meanwhile the bio lab in Wuhan received a sample of infectious coronavirus just months prior to the earliest known case. Within a few weeks of the outbreak while China was still downplaying the disease, the central government passed a rushed emergency safety rules update for these labs, starts pushing back on requests for access, and using state media to throw out a bunch of crazy theories about external origin.
If it was within a few weeks of the outbreak, then it wasn't likely the cause. As seen in other countries, the # of cases takes a while to ramp up, and it wouldn't go from a release to a couple thousand deaths in such a short time span.
The virus likely didn't jump from bats to human directly, there are intermediate hosts involved. The hosts could be from anywhere, like SEA, nobody can locate the particular host and the particular moment.
Connecting dots == You believe because you want to
Unless someone came with causal evidence that someone gets infected from the lab, it is only your belief and there is no way to prove it.
You can believe whatever you like, so do the others.
There is direct evidence of a similar disease outbreak in 2012 among miners who came in contact with bats in caves. Maybe even the same disease. It was being studied in the Wuhan lab.
The theory that there must be intermediate hosts is attempting to fit the natural origin theory to the evidence, not the other way around. It is perfectly capable of jumping straight to humans, but there is no way for it to make that jump in Wuhan at that time so therefore it must have come through another species. That’s the logic.
Note that when the WHO team asked for similar wastewater samples from China, they were told the samples had been discarded:
> They had sought wastewater samples from central China to check if the virus could be detected in sewage from late 2019, but were told those had been discarded, per standard policy, after a month, said Dr. Koopmans.
So while it's very likely that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating in Italy back in October, it's entirely possible (and likely, I believe) that it was circulating yet earlier in Wuhan; but the evidence to confirm or refute was destroyed.
And I'm replying to myself to note that the Italian study has also received an expression of concern. So "very likely" may be an overstatement, and if anything that further reinforces my point (that so far, there's no reason to believe SARS-CoV-2 was spreading outside Wuhan before it spread inside).
This has honestly been my unbiased opinion since essentially day 1. I believe that the release was almost certainly a complete accident, but there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus. The denialists, including the WHO and CDC and everyone else, need to get real and own up to what happened and figure out how to stop it from happening again. This has nothing to do with the PRC or anyone or anywhere else, it could have happened at any biological facility in the world and will eventually happen again somewhere unless scientific honesty and cooler heads prevail.
> there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus.
I think that it is at least somewhat likely that it was the result of the lab's activities, but your assertion here has a huge dose of selection bias.
If the virology labs studying coronaviruses were placed randomly around the world, you'd be correct - but they're not. They're placed near locations where novel coronaviruses have crossed the species barrier in the past, and where they are likely to do so in the future.
It would be equivalent to say that lighthouses cause ships to run aground, because many teams when ships run aground it's near a lighthouse.
Another selection bias is that we can't say if the virus originated there, but only that it was first detected there. Even if it originated in the countryside hundreds of miles away it makes sense it was detected only after it spread to a city with the labs to discover the virus.
What I mean is that a small countryside hospital won't be able to notice there is a new type of pneumonia, while bigger cities have teams to detect that. It's the same reason why we probably had the virus circulating in europe in january but we only noticed after we started looking for it.
I have seen estimates of thousands of wet markets in China and perhaps 10000 in all of Asia. Why the one wet market closest to a lab doing GOF research, and previously questioned on its containment rigor.
Because it is the largest city near the bat habitat - with the largest wet market.
Wuhan is like Chicago in China. It's not some random small town. If an outbreak occurred in some rural area (which it might have previously), it's possible that it just fizzled out.
Take a look at this on a map. Mojiang (where RaTG13, the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2, was reportedly sampled) is closer to Chongqing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, or HK than to Wuhan. Pu'er is roughly Chicago-sized, and it's 150 km away. Kunming is more people than two Chicagos, and it's 200 km away. It makes sense that this first emerged in a city, but Wuhan is far from the obvious geographic choice.
Maybe folks in Mojiand have some immunity because other variants spread there before? Maybe that's why Vietnam (cause Hanoi is close too) have been largely spared. Maybe Wuhan has a bigger market for "wild meat" than rural places - that wouldn't surprise me. Maybe RaTG13 is present in a lot of places. Maybe there are some even closer relatives to sars-cov-2 closer to Wuhan.
Again, none of this is conclusive. It's all speculation. maybe maybe maybe. There are lots of potential ways for this to have happened natually.
FWIW, I do suspect cross-immunity will eventually explain a lot of mysteries of this virus, including why the Asia-Pacific region has been so lightly-hit compared to Europe and the Americas. So I do agree it's possible that weaker population immunity in more distant regions more than offsets less frequent spillover, and paradoxically makes them the more likely regions for an outbreak (although that's not what experts including Zhengli Shi had originally guessed).
But there's lots of other distant cities in China too, and none of them have virology institutes with the world's biggest collection of novel SARS-like viruses. So whatever your prior was for lab accident vs. natural, I do believe the location in Wuhan should significantly increase that. Certainly far from conclusive, but a possibility that requires serious investigation.
People keep saying this, but it's not true; SARS-like viruses haven't been found in nature near Wuhan. In the words of Dr. Shi herself:
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
You've said elsewhere that you think it's reasonable to to suppose they have unpublished samples that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2, indeed that's your central claim. So why do you trust this statement about their sampling results but not the one about not having anything closer than RaTG13 [18.5, p6]?
Honestly, I don't fully. From a standpoint of a lab accident, evidence of natural zoonosis near Wuhan would be exculpatory and they'd have no reason to conceal it. But the CCP also seems to be pushing to exclude any origin whatsoever within China, like with their frozen food theory (which is thoroughly rejected by almost all scientists physically outside China, but which the WHO team nonetheless seems to be considering).
So I think it's entirely possible e.g. that China has confidently determined the non-lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, but that it's from an agricultural practice so reckless that they've decided it's better for their reputation to leave everything shrouded in doubt. It's much more obvious to me that China is concealing something than what they're concealing. (Of course, that's usually how concealing stuff works.)
That said, I still think zoonosis near Wuhan is unlikely. In a pre-pandemic publication with no incentive to lie, the WIV studied antibodies to SARS-like viruses in the blood of people living near bats in Yunnan province. They used blood from people living in Wuhan as a negative control:
> As a control, we also collected 240 serum samples from random blood donors in 2015 in Wuhan, Hubei Province more than 1000 km away from Jinning (Fig. 1A) and where inhabitants have a much lower likelihood of contact with bats due to its urban setting.
> They're placed near locations where novel coronaviruses have crossed the species barrier in the past, and where they are likely to do so in the future.
Are they? I'm not aware of this trend, or of any other major species barrier crossings in Hubei. (If you're thinking of the original SARS, that started in Guangdong, two provinces to the south.)
Sensibly, yes, but not their location isn't based on geographic proximity but rather what is a sensible location for the group building and staffing the lab.
Wuhan is around thousand kilometers away from where this virus supposedly originated from.
But the Wuhan lab did receive samples in 2019 from miners who died in 2012 from an infection of a novel coronavirus that resulted in symptoms very similar to COVID-19.
> It would be equivalent to say that lighthouses cause ships to run aground, because many teams when ships run aground it's near a lighthouse.
But if a lighthouse manufactured coral reefs, and the coral reefs on which ships were running aground displayed features of those that a given lighthouse manufactured, it might be more accurate.
Sometimes diplomacy means you smile when you don't want to smile. WHO has to play politics until we get this virus under control (ie, vaccines distributed worldwide). If WHO blames China now, in the thick of things, it would damage the world's ability to further study the origins of the virus and the results of Chinese research. Chinese vaccines are being used and studied in many countries worldwide and that is a good thing. Apart from the obvious benefits of those vaccines, better access to data gives us an inactivated vaccine counterfactual with which to evaluate the mRNA and protein subunit vaccines.
CDC and other US government officials, on the other hand, must ratchet up their criticism of China as well as WHO. I agree with you there. It's alarming that there are so few PR ramifications for China. From the looks of it, either their unsanitary bushmeat consumption got the world sick, or their irresponsible laboratory containment procedures did. Both are a reflection of China's culture, and were only exacerbated by authoritarian crackdown upon the early warnings issued by Chinese medical professionals. The US government shouldn't defend bad practices and systemic problems in the name of multilateral cooperation. That variety of ethical blindness forgives bad faith from our counterparts and damages our hegemony.
I don't understand why WHO is selling it's creditiblity in trade for politics. What is there to gain? Perhaps I am too short sighted but I cannot believe that this is ever the right compromise to take.
I also don't understand why they even had the slighest faith in a reliable investigation. After all these months of pushing back on researching accessing the site, they still bowed to their whims. How does this help the argument that it's better to just suck it up?
One thing I am really interested in to read more on is a historians analysis of the parallels one can draw from the period rising up to World War 2, and more importantly, how the rest of the world acted back then. When Germany was dissolving all their democratic processes, and started labellling jews, what did the rest of the world do? What did their neighbours do? Did they just happily keep on conducting business?
I have read slightly into it, but placing the responses of the countries at that time in the right context really requires some solid knowledge of history. If anyone knows interesting articles to read about the responses of the world during that time: I'm very interested.
> I don't understand why WHO is selling it's creditiblity in trade for politics. What is there to gain?
You reason about WHO as an institution, while disregarding the principal-agent problem. The leaders of WHO are very strongly influenced by China, and as a result the institution is working to please China, rather than working to fulfill its nominal mission. Its leaders will see ample rewards for corrupting the institution.
I was not aware of the name for the principal-agent problem, thank you for that. I do wonder though if it's just ample rewards. I believe the most efficient mode to let others do your biddings is by threatening harsh backlash on refusals to cooperate, and providing ample rewards on cooperation, this to make the incentive even bigger. So perhaps you can also add to it that WHO leaders will face strong backlash by _not_ corrupting the institution.
I recently read a very good book that was not so much a broad overview, but rather a closer look at the American ambassador and his family in Germany in the 1930s. I can wholeheartedly strongly recommend it.
>I don't understand why WHO is selling it's creditiblity in trade for politics. What is there to gain?
Might have something to do with the fact that the leader of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom, was hand picked by the Chinese communist party and won the position over the US and EU's favored choice.
"During its 140th meeting in January 2017, the Executive Board of the WHO shortlisted Tedros as the front runner out of six candidates through two rounds of secret voting. He collected the most votes during both rounds.[citation needed] Tedros "was supported by a bloc of African and Asian countries, including China, which has considerable influence with those members" while "the US, UK and Canada... lent their support to... the British doctor David Nabarro." One observer called it "a really nasty" election."
Basically: "Oh, someone else can play the same game we've played for a century with UN, WHO, IMF, etc. - how dare they?"
You mean the proxy states, lackeys, and funded warlords and dictators setup by EU in Africa, to safeguard the ex-colonial pocessions and make sure they continue to get their resources and control on the cheap?
Or the several Middle Easter/Asian/African countries bombed, invaded, toppled, etc by the US (3-4 of them in the last 20 years alone).
The somewhat accountable and transparent free republics spent like 200 years completely dicking over Africa & China to the tune of millions dead. Not really a position of moral superiority.
How bad of a deal it is to sell your credibility should have been obvious since April 2020.
The lies about masks may have helped with shortages in the short term. The result is now that people rightfully distrust everything their governments say.
Seriously wtf. We're trying to combat disinformation and distrust in info from authorities on the subjects, and the CDC and Fauci comes out with that blatant "noble lie." I can't take these institutions seriously the same way again.
> When Germany was dissolving all their democratic processes, and started labellling jews, what did the rest of the world do? What did their neighbours do? Did they just happily keep on conducting business?
The 1936 Olympic Summer Games are a good starting point in my opinion.
> CDC and other US government officials, on the other hand, must ratchet up their criticism of China as well as WHO. I agree with you there. It's alarming that there are so few PR ramifications for China.
The US relies on Chinese manufacturing. If trade ends, the West will suffer. Consumer and industrial goods can't be built, which could incredibly damage the economy.
Manufacturing is shifting to other countries - Vietnam, India, etc. It's been driven by rising costs in China, but we're seeing an acceleration to de-risk the supply chain. TSM is being asked to build fabs in the US. Slowly, the most strategic pieces are being maneuvered.
China is building up its navy to protect itself. If they lose the South China Sea, they could be blockaded and starved of energy, resources, and food. They're building to reach parity with the US Navy or even outgun it, and they're trying to stall long enough that they can win should there be an encounter.
The US and its allies are ramping up criticism of China, and you can see it in diplomatic activity, news, and social media. The rhetoric will grow until they're ready to shift from soft negotiations to taking a hard line.
> China is building up its navy to protect itself. If they lose the South China Sea, they could be blockaded and starved of energy, resources, and food. They're building to reach parity with the US Navy or even outgun it, and they're trying to stall long enough that they can win should there be an encounter.
China has absolutely no chance to meet head-to-head against a US Carrier Strike Group on neutral territory. Absolutely none, and the US has TEN Carrier Strike Groups.
Ex: If China + US decides that we need to fight over in Antartica, the US will win in nearly every feasible encounter.
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China's plan isn't to win or even challenge the Navy on the high seas. Instead, China's plan is to assert military strength with the seas it is close to: asserting military might against Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Korea, and other local minor powers.
Furthermore: Chinese air-forces can launch from Mainland China to support any hypothetical naval operations.
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EX: Its not trying to beat US in a fair fight. China is likely aiming to beat the US in an "unfair fight": any fight close to China's territories + air force + cruise missile range might stand a chance against a US Carrier Strike Group.
A few powerful Chinese ships under the protective cover of cruise-missiles + Chinese airforce is probably the plan. It only will be effective when close to the Chinese coast, but that's all China really cares about.
> China has absolutely no chance to meet head-to-head against a US Carrier Strike Group on neutral territory. Absolutely none, and the US has TEN Carrier Strike Groups.
Right now. But take a look at the shipbuilding output they've achieved. In ten to twenty years, China could easily rival the US Navy.
China has many smaller Missile Destroyers or Frigates, and has far more production than the USA right now. True.
However, smaller ships aren't going to do jack-diddly squat against a Carrier Strike Group in a neutral situation (ie: both sides meet in Antarctica). F-18s have an effective strike range of over 1000-miles.
Submarines might have some theoretical advantages, but the 110,000 ton Ford-class Carriers moves faster than pretty much every submarine on the planet, so Submarines literally cannot speed up fast enough to engage.
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Those smaller Chinese Ships are going to rely upon a lot of Air support + Cruise Missile support from the mainland if they ever wish to actually engage with a US Carrier Strike Group.
Staying within the protective cover of SAM (against air threats), Cruise Missiles (against the CSG themselves)... and providing a launch platform for various missiles, Chinese Destroyers probably can do a job in a hypothetical fight vs US Navy within the confines of the South China Sea.
But once they leave the protective cover of China's mainland... its all over. Swarms of F18s will just launch missiles at all the Destroyers, while the Carrier Strike Group sits back a thousand miles away.
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That's why the question isn't about those small Chinese ships (even though China is making a lot of them). The big question is about the performance of those Chinese Carriers. At 70,000 tons or so, they're much lighter than the 110,000 ton Ford-class carriers.
> In ten to twenty years, China could easily rival the US Navy.
People said this 20 years ago. We've already started to see the CCP losing ground (see HK), and I'm quite bearish on the Party going forward. Jinping is 67, and I expect to see a major power struggle which will leave the Chinese Communist Party crippled when he dies.
>We've already started to see the CCP losing ground (see HK)
How is violating the Sino-British Joint Declaration and getting away with it "losing ground"? The Hong Kong protests failed and Hongkongers now have less freedom than before.
Foreign investment in HK was down 34.4% in 2019 versus the prior year [0]. Apart from the immediate ramifications of a year of protests, Beijing's effort to clamp down on HK was an economic self-own that opens the floodgates for Western hawkishness on Taiwan, Xinjiang, and every other area where China's expansionism overlaps with its economic ambitions. Beijing could have allowed HK to remain as it was, using it to entice the West. Instead, their authoritarian tack has reminded the frog to check the temperature of its bath.
I don't think they got away with much. Even if foreign investment rebounds in HK, Western complacency toward China will not find its voice again for many decades, and in that time, every Chinese treaty negotiation will be viewed as a bad-faith caricature of real diplomacy.
Why do you think so? The CCP and Xi has shown they are more than saavy enough to avoid a power struggle. He has at least 10-15 more years left as well, and the battle for Taiwan will probably take shape within that time frame.
HK they won easily. Western countries like UK and especially Europe are completely useless. Only the US can coordinate and shore up a coordinated response against China.
I mean, yeah, five out of 6 cited experts have ties to EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has funding ties to one of the two virology labs in Wuhan, but that's, like, just a coincidence. If it wasn't, I'm sure NPR would mention it.
And then Peter Daszak himself went to Wuhan with WHO team to investigate and didn't find anything conclusive. Peter fucking Daszak. You're not going to tell me that someone who was interviewed and cited on this subject by NPR, CNN, CBS, Slate, Democracy Now, Washing Post and The Guardian could be full of shit, right?
You're also forgetting that these people are scientists. Scientists only look at the facts and are completely unbiased - they aren't like normal humans, who might be worried about their entire livelihoods being cancelled (or worse) if the world realises their research is too dangerous to exist. And scientists who work for political organisations are the most unbiased of all. /s
I have no strong opinions on this matter, but I'm having difficulty understanding the sarcasm here. Can someone translate for me? Is the un-sarcastic version of parent's argument that most of the claims against this being a leak were put forth by a single organization, EcoHealth Alliance, which has an agenda for convincing people that this is not a leak?
> EcoHealth Alliance, which has an agenda for convincing people that this is not a leak?
Exactly that. The first paper which discredited the lab leak theory published in The Lancet early last year by a number of scientists was later found out to have been organized behind the scenes by EcoHealth, which also asked for it's name not to appear on the paper.
I'm with you, the parent's sarcasm is really malformed. They're claiming that EcoHealth has conflicts of interests that led them to disavow the WIV lab theory.
It doesn't seem to me like parent is disputing the factual accuracy of the argument, but rather saying that the sarcasm was not well constructed (possibly because of the multiple negatives, which require a certain amount of gymnastics to understand), and is thus not as effective as it could be.
A proper investigation would not include Peter Daszak at all, due to his immense conflicts of interest on this topic, and his behaviour since the outbreak occurred.
The whole thing is a bureaucratic cya masterpiece. We deny the wuhan lab leak but, just in case, we also deny we had any means to actually investigate it
"Look, dude," RNA mutates due to many environmental factors.
It's why living organisms typically now use DNA and only short-term usage of RNA for copying purposes, certainly not as the primary data store.
RNA mutations mimicking proteins are precisely how a non-living entity can, like a bike-thief trying combinations randomly, unlock the lipid or protein sheaths on animal cells and gain direct access to the inputs of a genetic reproduction machine inside the cell.
So, aside from the fact that these folks only have some circumstantial evidence and woo to suggest a lab hypothesis, (not EVEN a theory, not EVEN a hypothesis, nay, mere speculation with a vested political axe to grind, hello) and that fact that all factual evidence of how all previous cross-species virus hops occurred point to this being a relatively common occurence (1918 avian-porcine-human connection occurred in Kansas by the way, not "Spanish")
I subscribe to this theory. I didn't subscribe to it originally because it seemed to dystopian. However on reading the recent politico article (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...) really changed my opinion about it. To be clear I think it would have been an accident at a Chinese government lab that was underfunded and overworked. Seems to me like the likeliest candidate. I don't think the current US administration wants to point the finger at the Chinese government since it will cause a lot public anger. That and the Chinese government most certainly covered all their tracks by now.
I'd also assign a small but non-zero probability to the US not wanting to point the finger because they prefer the scenario where the general population comes to believe that the lab accident was responsible, but no hard evidence is ever produced.
Why? Because it seems like US institutions and people (right up to Fauci) were involved in this research and may not want the domestic blowback.
Conveniently the CCP don't want a paper trail either.
I'd be pretty sure the various scenarios have already been gamed out in both countries.
Edit: Not sure why this is being downvoted, but just in case it’s a reflex because I mentioned Fauci: yes, he was head of NIAID, and yes, the NIH did fund this type of research at the WIV. The grants are public information.
Both led by Peter Daszak who is now also the lead WHO investigator. The same person who decided the WHO didn’t need to see the deleted virus databases, and the same person who co-ordinated the Lancet statement which minimised the lab leak theory early on (and let to it being considered a conspiracy theory).
Here he is on This Week In Virology, describing this sort of work. It’s worth watching the whole thing, but gets most interesting from minute 27 onward:
For example he confirms it’s easy to modify these viruses in the lab, and mentions collaborating with Ralph Baric at UNC. Baric invented Remdesivir (with Gilead) - the “cure” that turned out not to work very well. His lab was doing gain of function experiments before the ban. Shi Zhengli (“bat woman” from Wuhan) worked very closely with Baric and Daszak.
Seems like there continues to be more to this story. Still doesn't change my opinion that that is likely the source of the outbreak. I will adjust my priors as more information becomes available. It does complicate things quite a bit - would be great to know how much funding the US portion is vs the Chinese.
I agree the Wuhan lab leak remains the most likely explanation. I think these additional details support that theory, as they verify that this activity was indeed taking place in Wuhan, while also helping explain the unusual behaviour of all the people who should be investigating but seem instead to be constantly deflecting.
Agree seems like we have the incentives lined up and the least plausible scenario without new information. Likely will never get to the bottom of this.
The Politico article is extremely dishonest. Josh Rogin has been claiming for a year now that US diplomats raised red flags about the WIV's safety. He wrote an article to this effect a year ago, based on diplomatic cables he had seen. Then the Washington Post obtained the full cables, and it turned out that Rogin had seriously mischaracterized them. They do not claim that the WIV has unsafe practices - only that its newest lab is still (2 years before officially opening) training personnel and can't yet run at full capacity. It asks the US government to continue its training program for WIV scientists. Yet Rogin continues to misrepresent the cables.
Also - i did do a check on Josh Rogin and it does seem he has done some underhanded reporting practices in the past. Not saying that discredits him completely but does muddy his work. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
That said - it doesn't yet change my priors about the likely source of outbreak which seems most plausibly at WIV.
What about that article convinced you? All I saw was some concern about safety protocols 2 years before the outbreak, some content free insinuations, and a whole lot of "we don't have any evidence."
It's not a crazy theory by any means, but, if it happened, then there's evidence. So, where is the evidence? Literally, where is there any actual evidence it happened?
So the Chinese government 100% scrubbed down any data and silenced anyone working there. They stonewalled the WHO and world at large during the beginning of the out break, likely to cover their tracks.
What changed for me is how much circumstantial evidences exists and probably a stronger signal: there hasn’t been another plausible starting point. When something smells this fishy there’s likely a reason. It’s starting to feel like, Occam’s razor - ie that a lab leak is the simplest explanation.
Really? Why would there be evidence TODAY? Those bats have likely been destroyed, and all records of sequences taken from them have likely long since been shredded and burned.
Then, why wasn't evidence uncovered earlier? Surely the theory had just as much plausibility a year ago as today.
Are you asking me to believe a theory for which all the evidence was either not uncovered or destroyed? Why is that more plausible than origin from outside the lab?
I mean, isn't that obvious? The Chinese did not allow anyone to investigate WIV because they don't want to be blamed.
I agree that conclusions should not be drawn without evidence - but by the same token, you cannot rule this out as a possibility because no effort was put into investigating it.
If you put two columns: zoonotic transfer, lab leak. And you list circumstantial evidence for both. Your zoonotic transfer column will be terribly empty in comparison. There is no patient 0, and the wet market was not the source, and we still do not have a zoonotic chain established. All those facts could be added to the lab leak hypothesis instead. For the most prominent clue of a biological attack is Single cause of a certain disease caused by an uncommon agent, with lack of an epidemiological explanation.. If you look at the history: SARS-1 naturally arose once in China. SARS-1 escaped a lab twice in the few years after. Chinese spies infiltrated Western gain-of-function virus-and-cancer-research labs, then smuggled back vials to China in a sock in their check-in luggage.
The evidence is with the intelligence agencies of Western nations. Trump and Pompeo (Pompeo was sanctioned by China hours after new President took office) did not make up their "China Virus" as some racist dog whistle. They were informed.
The WHO, when pressured by the UK for China not sharing information, nor allowing access to a team for investigation, said: Now is not the time to point fingers. We need China cooperation for now. The UK replied that it then has to assume the worst possible and prepare for a pandemic. It did.
Actual tangible evidence is rare, but it is pretty damning that: China blocks Australian-led world-wide investigation into the origins of COVID -- re-sentencing Australian prisoners to death penalty and messing with trade relations to hurt Australia's economy. They'd do that for a natural zoonotic-base virus that was out of their control? Phone location records show containment procedures around Wuhan lab around October 2019. Former military analysts in Israel pose the lab leak hypothesis as plausible, betting their reputation on it.
It is not too fair to ask actual tangible evidence, if evidence could mean a hot war or severely strained relations during a pandemic where people need to work together. And what is your tangible evidence for the popular zoonotic hypothesis? Just some experts saying that zoonotic base is most likely when interviewed for a popular news outlet? The most likely hypothesis should be the easiest to find actual support for. Why not?
I think a lot of criticism on the drastic measures to contain a relatively low CFR virus would be dispelled if the general public knew what the decision-makers then knew: a strange novel virus which seems extremely adapted to infect humans, and shows more similarities to the lab viruses worked with in biowarfare, than with captured and documented cave bats. Similar to the "airborne COVID" -- first publicized by the head of the WHO -- we seem to be managing the factual information flow to avoid panic, geopolitics, and xenophobia. It is right now not important that the general public knows it is dealing with an engineered virus or lab leak. Or at least... other things are more important right now.
So, you're saying I should just believe it escaped from a lab because reasons? And you're asking me to believe the administration of a president who lied publicly 30,000 times over 4 years and who may soon be facing criminal charges? Sorry, but that's just not good enough. Actual evidence in the zoonotic origin column greatly surpasses that in the lab leak column. I'll go with what I can see, thanks.
Believe whatever you want. If you believe the zoonotic origin, ok sure, but your circumstantial evidence for that is weaker than the circumstantial evidence for a lab leak.
Yes. You are supposed to believe the administration of a president when they claim: The virus came from China. Whether deliberate or accidental, it likely originated in a laboratory. If you don't, I reckon you have bigger problems than a pandemic. If you can't trust your government on such critical matters, if you really believe the US government would stand for the secretary of State spreading lies, then you should probably flee to China and ask asylum there.
> Sorry, but that's just not good enough.
But experts saying: "Virus is likely zoonotic, but we have no idea" is good enough? Again, demanding others to proof that a teacup is orbiting Venus is reasonable. But not when you can't even show the existence of teacups or Venus yourself.
> Actual evidence in the zoonotic origin column greatly surpasses that in the lab leak column.
There is no actual evidence. Actual evidence of zoonotic origin would establish the transmission chain and identify patient 0. There is none. You have "Bats can be the original carrier". So your hypothesis could be true. It is circumstantial. Any actual evidence would instantly kill one of the hypothesis. So you share some responsibility there.
For an example of how to turn the BBC article into circumstantial evidence for a lab leak, is to study the franticness that went on with sequencing and publishing. Wuhan lab published the sequencing of bats captured in 2017 in 2020. It was complete PR management campaign, with scientists blaming "Mother Nature" not their research, information black-outs, and sharing of "secret" sequences years after the fact in support of zoonotic chain, while blocking any outside investigation into the origin which would support/not support the zoonotic origin.
For myself, the biggest circumstantial evidence I've seen is the manipulation of discourse on social media by state-sponsored trolls and bots. Whenever the downvote bots, US #metoo, charges of racism, and astroturfing begins, there is usually a big thing they are trying to hide. Even when discarding lots of evidence tainted by politics, this one remains. What would be the motive?
Another thing of note. A large percentage of the opposition to the lab leak hypothesis seems to stem from anti-Trump sentiment. In January 2020 the media first mentioned and entertained the lab leak hypothesis (interviewing military intelligence analysts) and seemed to treat it in a factual manner. Intelligence community knew that COVID was a thing before December (and China knew), even when China was saying the first case came in January. Then China deployed 1000s of online trolls and their diplomats would start spouting "no-you!" conspiracy theories, such as "US military brought COVID to Wuhan during Military World Games". In response, Trump started referring to COVID as the "China virus", and told reporters he thought the lab leak was likely, just not sure about accident or deliberate. Then with the anti-Trump sentiment this messaging was attacked for its crude irresponsible generalization (there are many Chinese origin people in US, just wanting a good life, without being spat on for importing the "China Virus") and interpreted purely as a political play by Trump to get the racist vote and being strong against China. So any mention of the "China Virus", and soon after, the lab leak hypothesis, became an indirect vote for far-right Conservatives or the basis of a racist conspiracy theory. Full circle when popular news started listing "COVID is leaked bioweapon research" as a conspiracy on par with Bill Gates being the Anti-Christ.
Very similar things happened with hydrochloroquine. HCQ was known effective for SARS-1, and prelim research showed it also was effective for SARS-2 (less grave symptoms developed) in the middle of February. Just did not help when the patient was already severely sick, so was not a cure, as touted by trigger-happy Trump months later. But then all of HCQ was discredited as being useless snake oil, and responsible for killing Americans when they drank aquarium cleaner. It was a political hit job on science, to punish Trump playing lose and politics. None the wiser or the healthier.
Finally. When the virus was not yet a pandemic (but clearly on the way there), the right prepper movement started talking about masks, self-treatment in case of hospital crisis, and food and vitamins (vitamin D and selenium were chosen for their effects against other viruses) to keep immune system healthy. Meanwhile in the US, progressive politicians held mask-less photo opportunities at China Town restaurants to signal their support and that fear is unreasonable. Democrat politicians, former presidents, and public health officials were stating to not buy N95 masks for these were not effective and wearing them would signal you were ill. Then Trump went muh-freedom-america on masks, and the progressive-left opposition to not mask wearing grew overnight.
On all these flip-flops, the US held conflicting positions, and any science was an afterthought. I classify your objection to the official US position on lab leak as lies as part of this politics game. It makes you think of your entire government as a single "bad" figure, blatantly lying or skipping over their intelligence agencies and geopolitics experts, because their irrational hatred for China feels deserving of a big lie. Trump and Pompeo fabricating the lab leak hypothesis seems like a bigger story than the Trump-Ukraine scandal. If you have any actual evidence for that (or strong circumstantial evidence beyond Trump playing loose with facts) then it is your duty to inform the American public of that radical conspiracy.
This is as well my strongly held belief, and the most likely cause.
And people making the really odd responses below. They're, not saying it, but insinuating that the lab would be where there is lots of bat coronavirus? The lab is in the city of Wuhan. A city with a population of 11 million people. This isn't some rural town.
There was a lab that studied this type of coronavirus, had published papers on it. And in a country the size of the USA had an outbreak within just a few miles from that lab. Then the govt came and refused to let anyone outside investigate.
To me that leads pretty strongly that it was an accidental lab leak. And they weren't able to control the spread.
My hopeful opinion is that this leads to more stringent worldwide rules for reporting leaks, and checking of safety practices to avoid this happening again
> My hopeful opinion is that this leads to more stringent worldwide rules for reporting leaks, and checking of safety practices to avoid this happening again
A leak that results in 2.7 million worldwide deaths will not result in "more stringent worldwide rules for reporting leaks". It would result in economic reparations and possibly war.
Leak or not, it's in China's interest to prevent the blame from falling on them. The narrative here is an incredibly powerful geopolitical tool.
I don't really have a stake in this, and no real idea how plausible the lab accident theory is.
That said, don't you think that the location of a lab like that would be highly correlated with the location of dangerous natural viral reservoir? Or put another way, if you wanted to study zoonotic viruses, wouldn't you put your lab in a place like that?
If we have no say in whether or not scientists should be creating super viruses (a.k.a. weapons of mass destruction), I'd prefer they do so somewhere like Antarctica or on a space station, not in the middle of a city.
It's also been reported that it wasn't the season for the bat species.
Those in favour of the lab leak hypothesis point out that the virus showed up on the scene with all the evolutionary capability to spread amongst humans i.e with batteries included.
With previous Sars viruses my understanding is that each zoonotic jump was traceable with examples of previous forms in prior animal hosts to corroborate the lineage.
What makes Covid-19 interesting is that these zoonotic jumps or the gain of functions can be accelerated in the lab with the purpose of preparing us ahead of time for a dangerous forms of Sars style viruses. It looks like covid-19 may be that type of strain, not man made, but given the lab conditions for it to gain the capability. It may have escaped.
It's worth exploring the lab leak hypothesis but I would say that it's not politically expedient for any of the scientists or parties involved. We will never really know the truth and that is something we need to grow comfortable with.
You are mixing two theories here:
A) A lab leak
B) Gain of function research.
My understanding is that A) is very much possible because it has happened before (SARS), but we have no evidence yet (and might never acquire).
For B) however, from my limited understanding, there is no strong evidence. We only know about a fraction of existing coronaviruses out there and given we observe one, that has caused a pandemic, the (conditional!) probability that it is well adapted is extremely high (survivorship bias).
If you have a credible source that claims B) please share it.
> What's more, Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists have for the past five years been engaged in so-called "gain of function" (GOF) research, which is designed to enhance certain properties of viruses for the purpose of anticipating future pandemics. Gain-of-function techniques have been used to turn viruses into human pathogens capable of causing a global pandemic.
> This is no nefarious secret program in an underground military bunker. The Wuhan lab received funding, mostly for virus discovery, in part from a ten-year, $200 million international program called PREDICT, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and other countries.
I'm not doubting that at all, see also this statement by a US embassy [1].
What I'm saying is that we don't have strong (any?) evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of gain of function research. It is entirely possible but the majority of the scientists who do gain of function research say it's unlikely (given what we know today, which might change).
Again, a credible source saying the opposite is appreciated.
>What I'm saying is that we don't have strong (any?) evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of gain of function research
There is analysis that suggests that SARS-CoV-2 wasn't engineered. However, if you were intentionally giving it to a bunch of animals in batches with some interspecies mixing, you wouldn't really expect it to look any different than a natural jump.
Isn’t he referring to a lab leak of a virus which was engineered with ‘gains of function’. I’m particularly convinced of this theory because it explains the glaring weakness of the Covid-19 virus to UV radiation (ie sunlight).
If Chinese researches were modifying viral samples to gain functions (evolutionary or otherwise), weakness against sunlight is a believable oversight, considering it wouldn’t have been subjected to it indoors.
If I wanted to study zoonotic viruses, I would put labs in places filled with universities or government agencies focused on disease, like Boston, Atlanta, Maryland.
I've done security audits and related consulting work upon research labs in my past and the biggest issue they had was - extremist animal activists.
Now I was aware of some reports (nothing official or confirmed) that the Wuham lab was broken into in the summer of 2019.
Interestingly enough their was a lot of political tension at that time involving Hong Kong.
I'm also mindful how China has been rather good at sweeping things under carpets.
So I could speculate how things played out in a way that fits events, but without any smoking gun - it would be just speculation and joining dots that may or may not of been there.
Though even if it was something along the lines of what I'm thinking happened (animal activists with HK connections being politically motivated/manipulated and possibly no idea what type of lab it was beyond they may be hurting animals), the lab was researching virus's from the wild - seeing how they mutate and progress in an effort to see what lays ahead.
So lab event or no lab event - this virus was already in existence in some form and was not a case of if, but when.
One thing I do know, it sure did shine a spotlight upon how connected the World is and also how fragile many supply lines are.
Molecular dating studies place a hard limit on index cases at October 2019. Anything earlier and the virus should have mutated more than it has.
Someone who broke into a Wuhan coronavirus research lab in summer 2019 and broke containment of our hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 precursor virus samples would have been infected too early for our timeline.
> there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus
Why not? Wuhan is the 43rd largest city in the world. Meanwhile, the earliest cases of CoVid were all connected to the same wet market. Doesn't that have a higher probability being the origin?
Your source cites the WSJ, which itself cites the Wuhan Virology Institute, which is trying to imply that China may not be the origin of CoVid at all, so I don't believe it.
I'm not sure that this virus even behaves in this way where a BSL-4 worker could become infected. What we know now is that you need a concentration of virus particles over time in order to come down with the disease (in other words, you are most likely to catch it drinking in your friends living room for 4 hours with an infected person, than in a grocery store where an infected person might cough on you in line but there is no long term exposure). I can't imagine where there is a situation in a lab environment where you would have the equivalent of an infected person drinking beer with you for hours in terms of exposure. Even a rip in your PPE wouldn't expose you to very much particulate compared with an infected person spitting in your face conversationally for hours.
The other thing to note is this virus hops to new species super fast. its already in pretty much every mammal we interact with now. You going to tell me this super fast spreading - super species hoping virus was waiting in a cave somewhere and never spread?
My favorite conspiracy theory bend on this is that it’s the best place to intentionally release it too, especially if WIV is absolutely not studying anything like COVID-19 because it looks so appealing to dig into the bio safety level four lab, but there’s probably nothing there so it will be eventually dismissed.
All that said I think it is really unlikely and a pointless effort as government bureaucracies wouldn’t be able to even formulate a reaction to an intentional or even accidental release so I think we will not try too hard to imply that for political reasons.
> but there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus.
What better place to put a lab studying bat viruses than near a place where they originate?
The WHO will never look where they don't want the answer to be found and will actively work against it.
The chair of the WHO (Tedros Adhanom) [1] was a communist rebel (Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front) fighter in north africa and his career has been sponsored and guided by China for this reason.
They won't suppress findings made internally because it would be too hard to cover up - but they will 'do the least' with respect to finding answers.
Only the US has enough power and wherewithal to even try to do something, but they'll be kept out direct, so it boils down to how sophisticated the US clandestine efforts are in China.
My completely speculative guess is that US operating ability in China is 'really bad' and that they've already barked up that tree and found nothing conclusive.
Covid is the COrona VIrus Disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is somewhat, but not extremely closely related to the SARS-CoV-1 virus, which caused the original SARS disease.
I'm also waiting for people to admit that the dubious ban of Zero Hedge from Twitter (later reinstated) for bringing up this theory and "doxxing" the lab head was all made in bad faith (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/01/twitter...). It's crazy how words like "doxxing" can lose all coherent meaning and be used to describe this blog post, where they simply posted the publicly listed information of the public face of the lab, fully visible from the Wuhan lab's own website. This authoritarian act of censorship and the biased news media coverage that followed led to further censorship, where discussions exploring the possibility of accidental lab leaks were banned on places like Medium or other social media. This is why free speech matters as a fundamental principle and this is why we must hold all tech platforms accountable to protect free speech.
there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus
If it came from somewhere else, why wasn’t the outbreak noticed there first, is the million dollar question. It requires some serious mental gymnastics at this point to believe it didn’t originate in that lab. The only real question is if it was released deliberately.
Because winter is flu season, and most of the time the symptoms are impossible to distinguish, even when you're looking?
Sure, China has way more public health capacity than it used to, but we know that COVID can spread silently in a community for a month without anyone noticing, even when we are looking. It happened in California and Seattle in January 2020. Why wouldn't that have happened in, say, rural China in October?
There were apparently already people with COVID symptoms in Italy back in December 2019. That said, China was already aware of the virus in late 2019. It's all well known.
Well, that's what I mean. Nobody knew COVID was circulating in Italy at the time either. It's easy to miss a new respiratory virus. For it to originate one place and by chance end up exploding in a different metropolitan area doesn't seem unlikely at all.
In fact, simply from a modelling perspective, this is very likely scenario.
If you take an unknown diseases with an R of 2-3, what you will see is a number of smaller clusters, some dying off, before you get the one cluster that becomes the pandemic.
This reminds me of the conspiracy theory book, Lab 257. There was a lab on Plum Island in the Long Island Sound that studied infectious diseases.
If you trace back the spread of Lyme disease in time, you get two points. One in Connecticut, and one on Long Island, where workers got on the boats to Plum Island.
The lab was studying diseases similar to Lyme disease at the time.
All those are facts.
The conspiracy theory is that Lyme disease was accidentally released by that lab.
> Archived specimens show that Lyme disease was endemic well before the establishment of Plum Island laboratory.
> Additionally, Lyme disease was never a topic of research at Plum Island, according to the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Agriculture.
> The 2010 autopsy of Ötzi the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old mummy, revealed the presence of the DNA sequence of Borrelia burgdorferi making him the earliest known human with Lyme disease.
Unless it's got conclusive evidence of a functional time machine, it's gonna struggle to explain how a town in Connecticut predates a prehistoric mummy.
I remember reading this article in the WP a year ago which seemed to conflate viral escape with bioengineering and imply that lack of the latter implies lack of the former:
"Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked"
I look forward to seeing this article being retracted and taken offline, banned from being posted on social media, the author fired, and seeing people "cancelled" for sharing this article anywhere.
You know... as happened only a few months earlier to people who wrote similar articles and discussed similar theories with very similar hypotheses, but who were NOT writing for a certain publication of a certain leaning.
I also look forward to being down voted and told why "it's totally different now".
Should we care a lot about the safety and security of places where dangerous infectious diseases are studied? sure!
I think we should care A LOT MORE about our [apparent total lack of] ability to quickly deploy effective public health responses to new infectious diseases (regardless of their source).
Maybe it was an accident at a sloppy lab, ok, so labs on the other side of the planet in sovereign countries we do not control might make mistakes. We should get better at responding fast to save lives.
Maybe it was a sinister bio-terrorism plot. We should get better at responding fast to save lives. Bio-terror/warfare plan looks a whole lot like a good public health plan IMO.
Maybe gasp it really was from bats or something. We should get better at responding fast to save lives. This stuff DOES happen.
Maybe s/.*/I don't care where it came from/g. We should get better at responding fast and saving lives (my opinion).
> I think we should care A LOT MORE about our [apparent total lack of] ability to quickly deploy effective public health responses to new infectious diseases (regardless of their source).
Then we shouldn't be doing _gain of function_ research on the types of viruses that can cause these outbreaks.
> Maybe it was an accident at a sloppy lab, ok, so labs on the other side of the planet in sovereign countries we do not control might make mistakes. We should get better at responding fast to save lives.
What's the cost-benefit analysis for running the lab in the first place? Was any of it's research used in producing the vaccine? If it's all about saving lives, can't we be mad at both the lacking response and the laboratory at the same time?
> I don't care where it came from [...] We should get better at responding fast and saving lives (my opinion).
Those two goals seem in conflict with each other. Good offense is something we should aspire too.. but that doesn't mean we should entirely ignore defense as well.
I agree with parent's point to focus on defence, because a) defence is where the US leadership, but arguably also large parts of society, horribly failed and b) defence lies within your locus of control.
Before the pandemic, the US was actually rated #1 for endemic preparedness. No one had imagined that wearing a piece of cloth to protect others would become a political statement. No one was dreaming of the loss of half a million (!) American lives being remotely acceptable.
I would even go so far as to argue that from a psychological perspective the situation is similar to losing a war. US society will have to come to terms with what happened and how to prevent it in the future, and that's at the heart of parent's post.
Let's be accurate: This research wasn't "banned." NIH paused granting new funding pending a review [1]. After the review, it was determined that the benefits outweigh the risks and was resumed [2].
Worrying about where it came from is misdirection to distract us from the real issue that you pointed out: That nearly all countries totally failed to effectively deal with it and contain the spread, resulting in a body count that should be totally unacceptable. We got extraordinarily lucky that it wasn't super deadly. Imagine if the next COVID is 20X deadlier and hits uniformly across age ranges. We're doomed if we take the approach we took this time around.
And maybe people should not have dismissed it as a crockpot idea that should be dismissed out or hand and had Twitter suspensions over mentioning it.
And maybe if it was a leak and the world had been warned of the dangers then they would have locked down movement to and from the origin before it began to spread internationally.
An excellent case against twitter's "fact checking" and censorship. They are not experts, and as this whole debacle proves, experts are fallible too, and it is not twitter's place to determine and censor dissent from consensus.
This reads like “we shouldn’t worry about the cause, only the effect”. As in, I’m unable to see another interpretation of your remark.
No! We should worry about the cause and also concern ourselves with managing the effect.
If we can prevent this, we should try. And, if our (American) politicians can be held to account for mishandling the situation, the WHO and China should be scrutinized on the international stage.
I imagine if it were deadlier, people would have been more incentivised to deal with it. Bodies piling up on the streets is a much better motivator for staying inside and socially distancing than news reports of regional hospitals being gradually overwhelmed by a predominantly mild or asymptomatic virus.
The fact is that even ignoring government response, all of our medical institutions seemed to presume that this was yet another [avian, swine, bird, ...] flu outbreak and it would be about as minimally impactful for the west as the rest have been. Which indicates that doctors and hospital administration were either not reading the literature coming out of China as early as last january 2020, or they simply disregarded it as sensationalist and/or sloppy. And, to be fair, given the state of crisis that our research institutions are in globally, I can't entirely blame them, though I still think it was irresponsible that no one seemed to make any preparations for months after the outbreak was apparent. It's as if everyone sat on their hands waiting for the government to tell them it was serious.
Medical professionals are commonly wildly uninformed about recent research. Most GPs don't keep up on new research decades old let alone cutting edge research out of lancet.
Yes and no. The response would have been far greater if the virus was more deadly. This virus was not that deadly (relatively), so ended up getting half measures.
> We should get better at responding fast and saving lives (my opinion).
I think you're wrestling with a strawman here, no one's arguing the inverse. But in any investigation (arson, murder, etc.) the details do matter -- where, how, what weapon, when, and so on.
Respectfully, there is still a sizeable contingent of the US population that thinks that the pandemic is "no worse than the annual flu" and that efforts to combat the pandemic are at best a wild over-reaction and at worst some kind of sinister plot by the government.
> Respectfully, there is still a sizeable contingent of the US population that thinks that the pandemic is "no worse than the annual flu" and that efforts to combat the pandemic are at best a wild over-reaction and at worst some kind of sinister plot by the government.
Respectfully, this just simply isn't supported by the data and the dozens upon dozens of polls available[1]. Sure, there's a bunch of QAnon weirdos out there or staunch Alex Jones acolytes, but most regular folks have been taking it more or less seriously: social distancing and mask-wearing has been almost universally adopted. Last year in April and May, the percentage of people that "weren't worried" about Covid-19 was in the single digits. And there is some mistrust out there, but it's been well-earned: 15 days to flatten the curve has turned into 365 days of economic and social limbo.
The data clearly demonstrates at this point that the virus is indeed comparable to the flu, except with higher R value. This is also an implied strawman, that sizable contingent that you are alluding to is questioning whether the price of the lockdowns, and continued lockdowns, and approach to lockdowns, are worth the mitigation.
Clearly the virus is only a major issue for elderly and infirm patients, where the vast majority of people under the age of 30-40 present mildly or asymptomatically. And if that's indeed the case, then perhaps forcing the entire population to shelter in place for more than a year makes less sense than, say, recommending protective measures primarily for the vulnerable.
Would you write the same response about chemical or nuclear weapons research? I hope not.
Yet we've just spent the last year proving that biological warfare will be potentially more deadly than chemical or even nuclear warfare.
Decades ago we banned research into those other weapons and implemented international treaties and inspection regimes.
Even the possibility that this could have been a lab leak should scare the whole world and motivate a massive reform of these labs and the experiments people are conducting.
I hope the people in power don't share your complacency.
In particular, if true that it 'leaked' ... it's not like other nations are leaking pathogens which kill millions and cause 5 Trillion in destruction. It would literally change the geostrategic equation overnight and be seminal, defining world event certainly bigger than 9/11. On the scale of a WW.
If it was quasi-intentional (this is definitely not true, but since you speculated...) then it would be an act of war and the most damaging attack on the US (and other nations) ever. The US and the world would have to go to war with China over this. (Again this surely is not the case).
All while the US/EU/Rest of Word 'get better' at the above.
As has been pointed out, it will happen again no matter what. The vectors of deadly disease occurring are huge. The response is the piece we can properly control.
If it is shown that this occurred because scientists took a virus and made it much more infectious to humans, banning that sort of research would mitigate a lot of the risk.
Would it ? I mean it’s the same for nuclear. You can try to Ban it but someone will eventually get it. The difference here is that Nuclear Weapons aren’t formed in nature will virus can be.
Viruses may be formed in nature, but we've been dealing with that for all of our evolutionary history. Gain of function experiments are new and introduce much greater dangers.
Knowing the environment in which the virus developed can help us better understand it, which will strengthen our ability to appropriately respond to it, now and in the future.
You should care about knowing where it came from if you want to save lives.
Maybe, just maybe you can care about two things at the same time? Maybe, just maybe, a Wuhan lab leak was concealed by the Chinese gov't to save face, thus shrinking the amount of time we had to respond fast in order to save lives?
Western nations had plenty of time to react, relatively speaking. The US was hit especially hard, though, by policies which dismantled the government's ability to handle this sort of event, the discarding of a practiced playbook for responding to this sort of event, and government and right-wing lies and conspiracy theories.
Given that the US government's response was basically to do nothing until it was too late, and then to do nothing except hinder the states' abilities to respond, it's hard to imagine that an extra six months' time would have made any difference, other than giving them six more months to downplay and dismiss the problem.
So yeah, we can care about whether the Chinese government was trying to save face, but in the end does it matter whether that's the case or not? The only thing we can change is our own countries' responses to pandemics like this.
The virus was ripping roughshod through Northern Italy and New York City in January. It's nothing but an anecdotal data point but my friend had a suspicious cough in the middle of February and I tested positive for antibodies in May.
The EU was hit especially hard too, is that somehow the US's right-wing's fault too? Maybe the fact that the virus is incredibly contagious is at fault for there being a global pandemic...?
Yes, exactly. I would add, though, that the "Wuhan lab leak theory", in many people's minds, seems to be combined with a suspected intentional act by the Chinese government, to unleash a dangerous virus on the rest of the world. I think we should dismiss that part of the theory (it's of course not impossible, just not likely, mostly fun fodder for conspiracy nuts). But as far as infectious disease labs all across the world being dangerous places that need strict safety and security measures, duh, yes.
Let's also add in that the "Wuhan lab leak theory", combined with the "China virus" nomenclature, has resulted in huge increases in racist and white supremacist violence against people of Asian descent.
There were 49 incidents of anti-Asian hate crime in 2019 and 122 in 2020. I get that those numbers should be zero. But am I way out of line in saying that something that affects ~.00006% of Asian-Americans, and makes up ~1.6% of total hate crimes, should have no bearing on how we approach this subject?
My genuine apologies if I am crossing a line. I know this is a potentially touchy subject. Hate crime is serious and has many negative externalities that other crimes and accidents don't carry. They have also been on the rise, and could continue to grow more significant. It just feels very strange to me that 70 additional crimes in a year that saw thousands of additional murders has been such a common talking point for months now.
The 9/11 attacks killed less than 3,000 people. Or if you want percentages, resulted in the deaths of about 0.0009% of the U.S. populace. Yet it sent our country to war and has had an impact on millions of people. It is in the very nature of terrorist acts that they "terrorize" the wide populace, while only a tiny fraction are ever victims of terrorism. It is similar with hate crimes.
Human psychology deals with numbers strangely. There are many who seem to think 500,000+ deaths (many preventable) from Covid are not something to be overly concerned about. Some of these same people are deeply worried about "Extremist Muslim terrorism" that has had very few victims.
So, yeah, from what I understand about growing anti-Asian crime, I do think it makes sense to be concerned. In particular, because this increase seems to be a (predictable) response to actions by many over the past year to demonize China, which any sane person knew would create a generalized animosity toward Asian-Americans. It's not like things like this have never happened before. They have, and they're quite predictable.
I'd like to first take an aside and apologize for a previous error. I divided incidents by population and came to 0.0006. This is off by an order of magnitude. But that is not the worst of it. This number belongs in the context of crime rates. Gallup [1] tells me that 1-3% of people are victims of violent crimes. So I must further multiply by 100 and conclude that hate crimes represent 0.6% of the total violent crimes experienced by Asian-Americans. And once again, I have to add that I did find numbers that suggested Asian-Americans may be victimized much less than the general population, although these numbers were from 2006. 0.6-6% is the final answer. This is a massive misrepresentation, and I want to be clear that this was not intentionally manipulative. It was quick thinking and poor judgment.
I agree that the US response to the threat of terrorism was also very much an overreaction, so at least you can say I'm consistent.
From what I understand, the total number of hate crimes decreased in 2020. I haven't been able to find the data and if, for example, this is because the number of hate crimes against whites dropped, the following is false. But in my mind this fits a model where X people are going to attack minorities in a given year, and this year, for obvious and insane reasons, they typically targeted Asians.
I understand the frustration and pain and cause for pushback. I say this because the next part will come across as cold. From a utilitarian perspective, there is not any material difference between worlds where different minorities are victimized. Changing the targets doesn't solve anything.
Then the solution is to teach people not to mistake Chinese people for the CCP, not to police language. And this narrative of "white supremacist" violence is a concoction by the media. Whatever increase that can't be accounted for by increased reporting is most likely not coming from the white supremacists or even the white demographic. It's an increase in inner city tensions that have been around for decades. And the people predominantly committing these acts (and I assure you statistics point to a single demographic in particular) are probably not the type to follow Trump's speeches.
It's infuriating. I'm not sure what the solution is though. We can just not talk about the very real lab leak hypothesis because some people are dangerously unstable.
You could even go back another step and recognize that the person you're replying to has made completely unsubstantiated and fabricated claims about:
1. An increase in violence targeted specifically at Asian people that is in excess of the already-documented rise of violence in general experienced across all groups in 2020.
2. An attribution that this imaginary excess violence is "white supremacist" in nature and intent.
3. A direct causal connection between this imaginary and poorly-attributed violence stemming specifically from the origin of the virus.
It's easier to defend freedom to hypothesize when you realize that the people advocating against said freedom are, themselves, simply making shit up.
you can just call it covid-19 instead of the insert racist nickname here for it and then discuss where the origin it may be from. those two things are not mutually exclusive. hell, the spanish flu is generally not thought to be originated in spain but they were the only ones talking about because the other countries had a gag on discussing it.
perhaps. I mean having the leader of the free world spout conspiracy theories and give credence to them certainly hurts.
in the past you'd have crackpot conspiracy theorists spouting off their "knowledge" at the bar to anyone that would listen but most would shy away from the crazy person. now you have a mainstream leader saying crazy stuff and have a huge following of people spouting that off because you can get misinformation and half truths at the speed of sound. yeah some vetting of information should be there.
a lot of the "proof" I've seen have been from being ignorant of what scientific terms mean, deliberate mis/disinformation, and wholly not understanding cause and effect. the other thing that lets these propagate is the downright innumeracy of our societies.
my brother has gone down a dark path of this shit to the point that I am very disgusted by the "truthers" poisoning the minds of people. he used to be a decently intelligent man but he's gotten hit with the gish gallop of disinformation and lies.
Compensation for damage inflicted, for one thing? If a country is inept at handling deadly viruses, tries to handle them anyway and in result causes millions of deaths and trillions of dollars worth of financial loss, they should be liable for the damage they've done?
We should care about it because it will help prevent the next outbreak. Not only that, we should hold the CCP accountable on suppressing reports of COVID-19 early on, which delayed the world's understanding/preparation/response. Furthermore, China should have shut down all their ports much earlier. Take a look at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how..., an article titled "How China locked down internally for COVID-19, but pushed foreign travel"
Yes, but getting better at dealing with infectious diseases that we had ~1.5 months of advance warning for doesn't score political points among the base. The base does not like most of the machinery that is required to 'get better' at epidemic control.
If your goal is not good governance, but getting re-elected by your base, that is not something you need to optimize for.
cool. i agree, we need to git gud at public health. that notwithstanding, we should also know if this virus was made or not, if we can know, because if it was, that needs to be addressed from a public health policy perspective. imho, natch.
How? Following your line of reasoning, it makes the US response look even worse. No enemy of the US would have imagined that US citizens will turn wearing a mask into a political statement. Before the pandemic, the US was rated #1 in epidemic preparedness. No one had imagined that it will become societal consensus to sacrifice 500k American lives.
We had 1.5 months [1][2][3] of clear warning that this is a serious epidemic.
When China locks 35 million people in their homes, and this makes the New York Times, and we don't do anything to respond for another month, and we don't do anything meaningful for a month and half... What we have is a domestic, not a foreign problem.
These articles made the news on January 8th, January 23rd, and February 7th. The first travel ban, that only covered China was on... January 30th. The first travel ban on Europe was on March 11th (At this point, Europe had ten times the active COVID cases that China did at the end of January. Why did we wait so long to stop travel from it?)
The first state lockdown was in New York State, on March 22nd.
Exactly how much advance warning did we need to deal with this pandemic? Three months? Three years? Do you think that a president who would constantly deny reality, to the point of claiming that there would be zero cases in the US by April would have handled this crisis any better, regardless of how much lead time he was given?
I'll also eat my shoe if the CIA and/or the NSA weren't at least as aware as the NYT of the seriousness of the situation in China (It can't be hard, my co-workers with relatives in China were all aware of it from, you know, talking to folks back phone. On the phone.) And if they weren't - why on Earth are we wasting billions of dollars on their cloak-and-dagger budgets, when I can get a better take on current events by having lunch with my team?
Let's go back even further. There was a respiratory pandemic a few years ago. Perhaps not as deadly but still a pandemic. That resulted in no N95 or PPE stockpile. We knew we dodged a bullet yet no prep for next time?
This ^^^ so very much. Think of it like infosec angle: Yes, it's interesting to identify and neutralize hostile actors, but the 100% more effective solution is to have defense-in-depth and system resilience in place - because you control that, but you can't control the external actors unless you have a god-complex.
What sort of defence in depth can work against a virus that's been engineered to infect humans very easily, and which can only be stopped by shutting down the world economy and waiting months or years for vaccination? I think the last year has proven comprehensively that we simply cannot implement any sort of defence in depth and need to try very hard to eliminate these problems at source. Just like we do with chemical and nuclear weapons. We don't wait to clean up the damage afterward, because the damage is so horrendous.
How about reasonable health insurance without employment requirement?
The defense is NOT to stop the virus (unrealistic defense solution) - it's to make sure we can withstand/resist it so things like vaccines can be put into place so we can go back to some sort of normal (e.g. New Zealand)
The USA (only major western country without healthcare) was unique in how many deaths we had. 90% of those were unnecessary.
Many European countries have better health insurance and higher deaths per capita than the USA. They also had severe lockdowns, and are now entering a third wave while being way behind the USA on the vaccine rollout.
USA was not unique and isn't even in the top ten for deaths per capita. Plenty of lockdowns happened in Western Europe and yet Portugal, UK, Belgium and Italy all had higher rates than the US.
While the headline talks about covid, I found other bits of the article scary. For instance the supposed lax handling of pathogens like smallpox. While I would trust the worldwide scientific community for covid origin theories, I cannot look past the egregious safety violations reported in the article (if true).
>While I would trust the worldwide scientific community for covid origin theories
Which scientific community are you referring to? There are countless scientists who have been arguing against the risks of gain of function research for many years. Why are pro-gain of function scientists deathly silent now about the supposed benefits of their research?
I had the same thought. Maybe it's just the crowd I run with, but criticism of gain-of-function research (certainly including informed speculation of a lab escape for this coronavirus) seem very mainstream to me.
I believe grand-parent was talking about a lab leak, not necessarily with gain of function research being involved, and scientists dismissal.
Which is not a dismissal at all. What scientists are saying is that both zoonotic transfer and lab leak are plausible, but that we don't have evidence for the latter (yet!) and the former is more likely.
In many media articles this simplifies to 'scientists say virus origins are zoonotic'.
Seems like the only consensus is that the origin was (lab-leak || zoonotic). Given the unlikelihood of ever knowing the true origin story, future epidemic mitigation efforts should just assume both causes. History is rich with examples of both.
Mainstream media shouting "discredited", "already debunked!", "fringe", "conspiracy theory", "xenophobic" in unison last time Tom Cotton brought this up was a sign for me that there is actually something to investigate here.
I remember that a year ago, such conversations would get a person banned/shadowbanned from Twitter, FB and other media sources. I wonder how many lives were lost unnecessarily because of censorship.
The problem is that this is a too rational theory. Not enough of a conspiracy (these people prefer to think it was released on purpose to control global population etc). The other end of the spectrum the rationalists and scientists fear that they may go down a slippery conspiracy slope so they dismiss it the first moment another fellow scientist says so. Then the politicians don't want this hot potato in their hands, it could cause global wars economic or otherwise and half the planet resenting the other.
My conspiracy theory is that, if the virus intentionally or unintentionally escaped from that lab, and the CDC,CIA, whatever, etc already know this, probably everyone prefers to shut up and deny it, because otherwise it might lead to a war with china and it would be a lot worse for everyone.
Over the last year there seemed to have been such an outright refusal on the part of relevant sections of the scientific community to countenance the possibility that this virus had leaked from a lab which had been conducting Gain of Function research into bat coronaviruses that I got the impression this must have been motivated by fear that it could lead to political strife, including war, or that it might result in sweeping new restrictions and funding cuts to particular types of research.
I think that people can easily develop a misplaced sense of humanitarian responsibility where they are under the impression that they are called to serve a higher purpose and that they feel as though they are beholden to use their power and influence to prioritise (for instance) pacifism and internationalism above the public search for knowledge, where these have the potential to conflict. There can also be a sense in which the scientific establishment pursues its own independent, technocratic public policy. We have seen the huge amount of political power and influence wielded by high-ranking members of the scientific establishment, and no doubt the stakes were raised for this by the fact that it was an election year.
The only war with China is a trade war and that is only fought by convincing the public to endure the pain. I think everyone would welcome the ability to cut China out of the global supply chain if they could, it’s just about getting the people to go along with it.
Theory? Isn't that even an expected result? The virus started in the exact city where one of the top labs in the world. This was either a breach of higienisation protocols or intentional. Of course, claiming it was intentional is a conspiracy theory and likely won't be able to be proven ( even less likely as some doctors were knowingly suicided ).
China ended 2019 in a huge crisis and 2020 as the number one world economy. Quite a dramatic change for a year, no?
It seems that the common trend of explaining why China covered up the information and didn't let external third parties investigate is due to possible backlash.
My simple question is, why fear backlash if it wasn't a leak either due to incompetence and malice? If bats from outside the lab truly started it, why not let observers see this? Why hide it?
It is not impossible that the authorities in China don't actually know what happened, but are afraid that it could have been a lab accident. Thus, they cover up from observers just in case, even though it might not actually have been the source. But, I share your concern.
Pretty incredible how far the US media will go to deflect attention from how bad the US response to the pandemic was to China.
"Let me be clear: Labs in Wuhan might not have played any role in the origin of the pandemic. But a year later, no source has been found, and the world deserves a thorough, unbiased investigation of all plausible theories that is conducted without fear or favor."
Okay. So basically this author has no evidence other than the fact that it's very difficult, maybe impossible to identify the site of first transmission. I don't know what progress would look like, but maybe sampling animals in the wild to find a carrier with a genetic signature that looks like an early version?
This is just speculative nonsense to try to hype the government's pivot to China. That's why its in the opinion section, the worst part of the newspaper.
Did you know officials sent a warning in 2018 about the Wuhan Institute of Virology warning that their experiments were dangerous and the facility was run poorly, risking a new Sars-like pandemic?
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52318539
Did you know viruses have escaped from labs before? It is a known risk.
You can say the evidence is not conclusive and you would be right. But it's far from "speculative nonsense."
One wonders if you would be similarly skeptical of claims relating to COVID's cause being something much more speculative and vague... say, global anthropogenic climate change, for example. I'm sure you'd be pumping the brakes just as hard on any speculation to that effect, right? ;-)
"The Washington Post newspaper reported information obtained from diplomatic cables on 14 April. They show that, in 2018, US science diplomats were sent on repeated visits to a Chinese research facility.
Officials sent two warnings to Washington about the lab. The column says the officials were worried about safety and management weaknesses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and called for more help."
...
"What kinds of security failures were the cables describing?
The short answer is we don't know from the information provided in the Washington Post. But, generally speaking, there are multiple ways that safety measures can be breached at labs dealing with biological agents.
According to Dr Lentzos, these include: "Who has access to the lab, the training and refresher-training of scientists and technicians, procedures for record-keeping, signage, inventory lists of pathogens, accident notification practices, emergency procedures.""
In other words, all the information is non-public and coming from the entirely unreliable US Intelligence services whose job is to lie and make the US government look good. If these reports had been published (meaning in public documents) prior to the pandemic OR there was an admission by the Chinese government, this would be far more credible.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
They did not warn that the lab was dangerous or in any way poorly run. That's the spin that Josh Rogin has repeatedly tried to put on the diplomatic cables. The actual cables (written by diplomats, not experts) merely stated that a lab which had not yet opened did not yet have enough trained staff to operate at full capacity. The cables said that in order to ask the US government to continue its training program for staff at the lab. The cables actually complain that the Chinese government's safety regulations are too strict - not allowing the lab to work with Ebola.
For one people actually believe Chinese's numbers, something no Chinese national will ever do.
China is a totalitarian country, they have the monopoly of the press. That means official numbers are not real numbers because if you go against the official numbers you just dissapear. You can not compare numbers given in a free press country against numbers being given by a totalitarian country.
That happened for decades with Soviet Russia, while Lenin and Stalin made tens of millions of people die of starvation, their official numbers were fantastic. They even exported grain.
There is no evidence because China made impossible for scientists to study the origin of COVID for almost a year. They closed their laboratories and removed all possible evidence with bleach.
It's amusing that you post this under a US propaganda piece trying to convince people based on zero evidence that China did something bad. The US press is just as propagandistic and vehemently denies it as large sections of the US population lose trust in it (so called "fake-news").
I think you are referring to an event in Ukraine where some of the peasantry burned crops, but some exports were still bound for the cities. In the Irish potato famine, the UK exported food from Ireland even as people starved to death. In the US, farmers burned crops and poured out milk in the great depression as people starved.
Juxtaposed, there is little reason to treat foreign governments as inherently worse than our own and much reason hold them to similar evidentiary standards. My hope is that the standard would be high for both domestic and foreign stories.
No, the evidence is there's a relevant viral research lab in the epicentre with known history of safety issues and no animal transmission link have been confirmed.
There's evidence that many things are possible. Conspiracies are possible, but they are primarily a diagnosis of exclusion OR if there is specific evidence pointing in that direction.
The US media has made an art out of turning speculation into exciting narratives that large fractions of the population believe that turned out to be completely fabricated but retain adherents for years or generations after.
You're alleging the CCP is covering up their role a global pandemic. That's a conspiracy as there is a group of powerful people hiding something from the public.
I believe in many conspiracy theories that have substantive evidence for them (e.g. the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was faked), so I don't dismiss the idea of a conspiracy as impossible, they happen every day. However, there is no substantive evidence presented here other than the mere possibility that someone might have done something bad.
It's not a conspiracy in the sense of pre-meditated plan by a group of villains.
It can well be a cover-up, which is a daily life in places like China. In USSR, every technological, radiologic or biological disaster was covered up, surfacing only when it was impossible to conceal.
I urge you to google "cover-up" and "conspiracy" and see how often those words are used together.
Yes, governments tend to avoid releasing embarrassing info. Witness the way the US government failed to prepare for the virus and pretended everything would be fine and then only made changes when they couldn't possibly do anything else which probably is responsible for killing 500,000 people.
There is a reason these are two different words: they describe somewhat overlapping, but distinct concepts.
I'm not sure why you bring the American COVID response into this: its ineptitude was never even close to a secret, and the role of 45th administration in it is hardly disputed. If this is a kind of a "no u" response, well am not an American anyway.
Epicenters of a disease like this (respiratory disease with asymptomatic transmission) are likely to be in an urban area, so it's not surprising it's in a large city.
In a typical city the size of Wuhan, what are the odds it has some sort of viral research lab? If this happened in (picking a city at random...) Chicago, you could work backwards, find a viral research lab in say, University of Illinois, and make the same claim. "No link to animal transmission has been found, and the original epicenter was known to have a viral research lab. QED."
Well, we know for a fact that the outbreak started in Wuhan, not in Chicago. Had it happened in Chicago, am certain the university lab would be under suspicion.
And no, the vast majority of cities do not have viral research labs.
Maybe, but I think it's fairly obvious that this is naturally a hard problem (e.g. having teams of people sample potentially millions of animals in the field) unless you get lucky or catch it in the act.
Naturally hard and then a giant government is doing everything in their power to stymie it at every turn. Regardless of the debate on if this is a logically or morally appropriate thing to do, but one can conclude they wouldn't be doing this if they didn't think there was some possibility of it.
Regardless of its origin, what I cannot possibly figure out is why China didn't close its own borders while they were putting travel restrictions within.
Think of it from a perspective of game theory and geopolitics. You have an epidemic raging in your country that has led to lockdowns, casualties and severe economic damage. Now you have two options:
1. Warn the world, lock your borders down, suffer economic damage whilst the rest of the world will prevent your citizens from entering their countries and can prepare for a proper response. Experience a setback on the stage of geopolitics and a loss of soft power.
2. Don't warn the world, suppress free flow of information, impose internal travel bans to stop the virus from spreading within your country, let your citizens carry the virus to the rest of the world, be the party with asymmetrical information advantage, exploit the situation to further strengthen your position on the global chessboard of geopolitics and expand your soft power.
What people in the West tend to forget is that Chinese strategic thinking is older than most Western civilisations. Chinese rulers study Chinese philosophy deeply, whereas Western rulers have little philosophical education. Chinese rulers think fundamentally different from Western rulers and have asymmetrical information advantage in politics as well: hardly anyone in the West really understands Chinese philosophy as it requires you to learn the language to grasp it fully; but it is easy to understand what motivates Western politics.
This situation reminds me of one of the Thirty-Six Stratagems.
Disturb the water and catch a fish (渾水摸魚／混水摸魚)
Create confusion and exploit it to further one's own goals.
First of all, China shut down all travel - both domestic and international - from Hubei province. For people outside of Hubei province, the government made international travel more difficult.
Second of all, what country has ever prevented its own citizens from leaving the country because of an outbreak? The Hubei lockdown was already the most dramatic response by a government in modern history to an outbreak. A province with 60 million people was put strict lockdown. Almost nobody was let out of the province, and people were told to stay in their homes.
Most of the media coverage and consensus, from the Washington Post to Nature, seems to be that:
- the lab escape theory has been thoroughly debunked by science
- the WHO investigation put the final nails in the coffin of this theory
- therefore, lab escape continues to be a fringe conspiracy theory at best
- coverage of the lab escape theory is politically motivated rather than scientifically motivated
- continued coverage is largely a combination of irresponsible journalism, disinformation and anti-China political propaganda
Does the USA Today article indicate a shift in this perspective, or is it just an outlier? Has something changed, for example new information coming to light?
The WHO investigation DID NOT eliminate this theory. From what I remember, while the WHO was investigating, one member said "it didn't come from a lab". Then when everyone returned to their home country, some members suggested that it was possible - and I don't think their official report opined on it coming from a lab.
The official report isn't complete yet, but at the press conference, it was clearly stated that the team as a whole viewed a lab leak as extremely unlikely. More recent statements from team members have elaborated that that was a unanimous judgment of the scientists on the team.
It's less what new information has come to light, and more what hasn't. For MERS and for the original SARS, the proximal animal hosts were identified within about a year. For SARS-CoV-2, we haven't found that yet. (See my comment history if you're thinking pangolins; they're pretty much abandoned.)
So a year later, despite the considerable effort spent looking for evidence of natural zoonotic origin, we still have nothing. We also have no evidence of lab origin, but that investigation has been thoroughly obstructed--for example, the WIV's private database of viruses went offline in September 2019, and any reporter who approaches the mine where SARS-CoV-2's nearest known relative (RaTG13) was discovered gets turned away by Chinese police.
As you can see, besides WaPo, WSJ editorials & op-eds also figure prominently among those calling for investigation inclusive of lab-associated pathways. New York Magazine, Politico.
Then you can see Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists right in there.
My point was not about what is true (which we really don't seem to know) but rather about what I've observed in the reporting on the subject, and wondering whether there is a shift going on in said reporting.
Someone did note a shift in WP's coverage, which is interesting to me.
No, nothing has really changed. It's an opinion article that's basically saying since lab accidents happened elsewhere, a lab accident could have happened in Wuhan. No smoking gun here.
The thing that really lends credibility to this theory is that nation states have been suspicious of this from the first few months. These are not ding bat facebook groups but countries that have a fair amount at stake by voicing these concerns and yet they still brought it up. I'm 7/10 that the lab leak theory has legs.
I believe US intelligence already knows this was lab leak because one of the Biden's intel guys said it was probably "gain of function" research that led to leak. But I think it was accidental not on purpose because the US would retaliate as fiercely as it was retaliation to Japan for Pearl Harbor.
Shouldn't we see rather distinct spread patterns for the two scenarios (a lab accident and contaminated frozen food at the market)? I guess, the patterns, social contacts, habits and locations of a typical lab worker or scientist is quite distinct from those of a typical person working at the market, even in the CPR.
(In the first case, the market may be expected to be just another case in a wider spread pattern with a gravitational center involving typical contacts and residential areas of lab workers, in the second one, we may expect to observe an initial spread around the market and the living quarters of those, who work there.)
Even without a patient zero, there should be some indications regarding clusters in early observations.
Huh, I remember a certain "conspiracy group" that was demonized and declared a terrorist organization trying to think more deeply about a theory like this. Now a mainstream media outlet publishes this and nobody bats an eye. Pun intended. ;)
I find it odd that there's no mention at all of the University of North Carolina in any of these articles and threads concerning the handling of deadly pathogens.
Before the BLS4 facility in Wuhan was established in 2017, there was a lot of SARS / Coronavirus research going on at UNC (alongside people from Wuhan's Institute of Virology).
This included 'gain of function' research which attempts to create the means to 'deliver' pathogens via aerosol.
I'm not saying UNC had anything to do with Wuhan itself, but I do notice many articles avoid mentioning that very similar work goes on in other parts of the World.
(I was also amazed that the distance from the Wuhan lab to the fish market is startlingly close).
What evidencewould be sufficuent to disprove this theory?
And if no evidence is good enough is it really a theory?
How does it fit the detection of the virus in the material collected months before officual discovery in places far away from the place of official discovery?
'A lab leak isn't 100% certain but it seems to be the only logical source of Covid': Washington expert who led inquiry into the cause of the virus reveals three Wuhan lab scientists fell ill in November 2019
Brett Weinstein spoke about this theory several times in the last year. You can hear him discuss it on his Dark Horse podcast relatively often. Here is one episode dedicated to it entirely: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bret-weinstein-and-yur...
A lot of the discussion I see on this hinges on possibility and not strongly believing the claim is false. Sure, this theory is "possible" in some sense but I rarely see anyone presenting concrete evidence for it and I don't think I've seen anyone who supports it suggest a piece of evidence that would change their mind on it.
If most of the discussion on an idea is about how people dismiss it or how any evidence is being covered up the idea might not be that strong.
I believe it's quite possible (p ~ 0.5) that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic originated from a lab accident. If the proximal animal host were identified--as it was for both MERS and the original SARS within about a year--then I'd drop that probability by at least a factor of ten. For references see
well that's a start, kudos for the probability and evidence that would shift it.
Like most people I haven't looked into any of this much before the last year so I'm far from knowledgeable here but:
.5 is a surprising number without any additional explanation because it suggests you think this is about as likely as a zoonotic origin (or at least
not specifically the result of an accident). Does that probably extend to other viral outbreaks or is it specific to something? My baseline probability would be significantly lower (although non zero because I'm not denying the possibility; the article makes the case that lab safety is a concern worldwide) based on my, admittedly limited, understanding of past outbreaks. Is it the case that you think about as many viral outbreaks were due to lab accidents as not? or maybe this is more specific to coronaviruses or this specific virus? I'm curious how you'd model this, even if informal.
I don't fully agree with either analysis, but it shows the evidence and basic form of the argument. Most human pandemics historically have originated from natural zoonosis, but the 1977 flu pandemic was very likely a lab accident. So my prior knowing that a pandemic has occurred but nothing else would be small but not zero, perhaps a few percent.
That the pandemic occurred in a city that (a) lies far from expected natural spillover regions for SARS-like viruses, and (b) contains the lab with the world's biggest collection of SARS-like viruses increases that probability. That the lab staff say they weren't working with any viruses close to SARS-CoV-2 decreases it, but the obstruction of any attempt to verify that independently increases it back again.
The absence of a proximal host also increases that probability. China has every opportunity and motivation to find that, and so far they've failed. I guess it's possible that they found it and they're lying, because they seem determined now to show that the virus originated outside China; but the lab leak has become a sufficiently established part of (politicized and largely science-free) anti-China rhetoric that I'd guess they'd welcome the chance to prove it false.
Of course that could just mean the pandemic originated from a very rare but natural event. But that then raises the possibility of a naturally-evolved virus released by WIV staff, whether by way of the lab or just from a researcher who gets infected on a sampling trip--WIV collection activity is a small fraction of total human activity in spillover areas, but a large fraction of human activity travelling from the most remote virus-rich regions back to Wuhan.
If you're interested in this, I'd suggest Alina Chan's Twitter feed. She's taken a tremendous reputational risk here, and quite a lot of abuse both from virologists who find it unthinkable that their work could lead to such a catastrophe, and from genuine conspiracy theorists disappointed when what they thought was their ally debunks their science-free claims.
If China didn't have any covering up beyond low/middle-level CCP members that wanted to save face... they would be heavily incentivized to allow a thorough investigation. This would let them save face across the world: "Thorough WHO/UN Investigation Shows China Largely Followed Proper Pandemic Procedures"
Of course, they don't allow a thorough investigation and thus are trying to hide something.
If there are "so many dangerous terrorists" worthy of trillions of dollars of military spending to protect me (I'm in the US, but all governments invoke terrorism as justification), why aren't those terrorists utilizing viral weapons like this person describes? Is there something that could stop this kind of threat, if it is as real as described?
I think accident happened. And it is fierce competition among scientists to get the SAR virus under control. Like things to remember recent case of a doctor bought some cell from mainland to hk for cosmetic operation, it just happened and if unchecked will happen again.
Whether it is deliberated it is harder. But if it is an accident.
And let Wu Han people to fly away to the world ...
I see three broad dimensions to any lab origin theory:
1. It was human made or found. Human made is common QAnon fodder. I don't believe anyone serious finds that idea credible. Nature is probably far better at concocting new viruses than humans are. And if it was found, where did it come from? I'm honestly surprised DNA sequencing hasn't been more effective in answering this question thus far;
2. Whether it was deliberately released or accidentally leaked. Note that a deliberate release doesn't have to be state-sponsored. It could be a rogue employee like the Anthrax letters from ~20 years ago; and
3. Whether the lab knew what they had or they didn't. Coronaviruses are studied by Chinese labs. They could have hundreds of samples without realizing that one in particular can infect humans and be transmissible effectively and asymptomatically. I suspect that in any version of the lab origin theory that it's more likely they didn't know what they had. That would take human testing.
What does seem clear is that the CCP isn't particularly interested in getting to the bottom of this. I wouldn't take that as evidence of them having more knowledge of this than we do. I suspect they simply don't want to know. More to the point, I think the CCP sees efforts to find out as a direct attack on China.
Serious coronaviruses have jumped into people like, twice in the last 20 years entirely naturally[0], and so many more people have contact with animals outside of labs than within labs (orders of magnitude!), that it seems much more likely that SARS-CoV-2 jumped the same way than any lab-leak idea. Like, it's physically possible, and it would be important to know if that's what happened- people shouldn't dismiss it!- but I don't know how much it should be entertained as a real likelihood.
[0] natural insofar as humans intruding onto wildlife is natural
The link between the Wuhan lab and the virus is circumstantial, sure it's strange the virus shows up in a city with the only level 4 biolab in China where they research corona viruses, but only if the virus did originate from Wuhan. I don't think we know all the corona viruses in the wild and who was patient zero was.
Someone please explain to me how the Chinese were able to identify that that had a new virus.
I’ve done pandemic drills with homeland security. They said they way you know you’ve got a new virus floating around is either new symptoms; significantly more “flu like” cases; significantly more cases escalating to pneumonia; increased deaths.
Covid presents like the flu, so much so you need a test, but early on a test was not available. So the symptoms are not unique.
Early on there was not a spike in cases, so that would not have sparked an interest.
Early on there was not a significant uptick in flu cases turning to to pneumonia, so that would not have sparked interest.
Early on there was not a spike in deaths, so that would not have e sparked an interest.
In fact when the Chinese discovered covid, there was absolutely no evidence that anything out of the ordinary was taking place.
But somehow the Chinese knew that they had a very contagious, bat based virus circulating, based on no information.
Everyone is focused on the wrong thing, I want to know how they discovered it with no information?
I’ve always believed this was an lab accident by a technician that needed their job so they covered it up until they and too many family members got sick and it was obvious something was wrong.
They knew about the virus because it was being studied, and that’s the only answer that makes any sense.
You should look up some of the leaked videos on the Internet. There was in fact a huge spike in cases early on and people were dropping dead in the street. That was the freak out that led to the Communist Party not being able to keep a lid on the whole mess. It wasn't just sick people showing up in hospitals in huge numbers, it was dead bodies lying in the streets.
The thing is that whether this came from a lab or not is of limited relevance. Viruses have been hopping from animal hosts from humans for a while and if anything this one was late and long expected. Either way the kind of preparations we need to make for future events are the same.
>You should look up some of the leaked videos on the Internet. There was in fact a huge spike in cases early on and people were dropping dead in the street.
Which is also weird because we all know Covid doesn't make people suddenly drop dead in the street.
>Covid doesn't make people suddenly drop dead in the street
They do if they don't get treatment. Usual course for deadly covid is, high fevers, feeling terrible, then there's an improvement in symptoms for a couple of days, then blood oxygen levels drop and the person drops dead
Any source on that? Genuinely curious as I seem to have completely forgotten about the early videos from china until now and what they pictured was very at odds with what we now know the virus can do.
Wouldn't everything you described happen gradually? as in people wouldn't be able to walk normally before reaching the point where they drop dead from oxygen levels low enough to be immediately lethal? From my own experience and based on what I've read, covid can cause a quick deterioration in respiratory function but across at least hours or days.
The videos also pictured people that weren't really showing any trouble breathing, it felt more like the plague than any respiratory illness. But maybe the videos were meant as "PSA's" for local consumption to get people to treat the disease more seriously? Because they were really over the top
I haven't seen any videos, but you wouldn't necessarily have to have people "walking" in the streets to have people dying in the streets. Major cities often have plenty of people who are sitting or standing in the street all day long.
Yeah I'll need to check again but I seem to remember a video where elderly people were literally dropping dead "casually"? Weird how I seem to have memory holed myself lol.
People anthropomorphize the CCP far too much. It's 100 million people.
What happened politically should be straightforward to anyone who's worked in a corporation: Wuhan mayor and Hubei governor tried to keep a lid on it, counterproductively, so their reports upstairs wouldn't look bad. They couldn't, higher authorities noticed, blew up the visibility on it, instituted nationwide programs to counter it, and fired the afore-mentioned mayor and governor.
> The thing is that whether this came from a lab or not is of limited relevance.
It has plenty of relevance. If lab leaks are the source of the virus, any serious solution will need to include improvements to lab containment and practices. Knowing what happened in a hypothetical lab leak could also help identify the original animal to study. Understanding how viruses hop & adapt from animal hosts to humans begins by studying specific cases of it.
For example, past US lab virus leaks including SARS have led the Obama administration to temporarily suspend and investigate the risks of Gain of Function research in 2014. At least one of the Wuhan labs were conducting Gain of Function research at the time of the outbreak.
> There was in fact a huge spike in cases early on and people were dropping dead in the street
Wasn't this happening well after they knew the virus existed? From my understanding, they knew the virus existed very early on. Much early than when people were dropping dead in the streets or getting dragged out of their apartments.
I remember seeing these videos in January 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. Young, healthy-looking people, too. I'm very surprised that there were not similar instances outside of China.
> Early on there was not a spike in cases, so that would not have sparked an interest.
My understanding on this was that doctors local to Wuhan noticed a surprising and sudden uptick in pneumonia that did not respond to antibiotics. The Chinese government managed this badly[1]. Your timeline doesn't reflect how things happened at the time - there was a "slowly" (over two months?) growing problem in Wuhan that locals noticed and authorities suppressed.
Pneumonia is both bacterial and viral. It wouldn't be surprising if it didn't respond to antibiotics. It was the CT scans of the lungs that showed glassy nodules that was the new symptoms.
Your statement is completely orthogonal to the point. Doctors know that pneumonia is both bacterial and viral. If it didn't respond to antibiotics, it wouldn't be surprising at all and wouldn't indicate that a new disease was causing it.
You’re repeating this claim as if it’s well established - do you have a citation?
There are some indications that it might have been spreading possibly as early as September but the coverage I’ve seen was preliminary and researchers were cautious about concluding anything without more comprehensive tests to rule out things like cross-reactivity with other coronaviruses. The generally accepted patient 0 for the outbreak must have been infected in November to be symptomatic in early December but I haven’t seen any credible claims that anyone in China had identified this as a new disease until late December.
Flagged for misinformation. There definitely was an uptick in deaths and pneumonia. Scans of patient's lungs showed new symptoms not normally associated with pneumonia. This happened over the course of a few months and is what tipped off doctors in Wuhan that there was something new spreading.
And another point that cements this was the Reddit “china_flu” subreddit’s creation in December 2019, when word was spreading outside China that _something_ was spreading, probably flu, and nobody knew what
This episode of Frontline does a really good job of walking through the timeline of what was discovered and when, and how long they sat on that information before taking action.
This isn't correct. It wasn't just looked upon like the flu.
In December there were reports of an uptick of people dying of pneumonia. When they did CT scans, they saw that their lungs had glassy nodules which was not normal. This was the way that they identified something new was spreading.
> I want to know how they discovered it with no information?
tl;dr: mNGS [1]
Longer answer as I think you may need to be mansplained because you wrote a long post which could be answered by a simple Google search and Wikipedia article:
Step 1: Doctor wonder why their patients were so sick, looks like infection but no pathogens identified, this is actually not that rare as there are many obscure pathogens even for experienced doctors.
Step 2: Patients agrees to pay for mNGS. Nurse draw their blood, send to lab.
Step 3: mNGS matches every DNA "pieces" from the patients' blood against a database. One of those pieces matched the original SARS with about 90% similarity.
Step 4: Chaos in the lab, the hospital and the government.
Several doctors were discussing it in a WeChat group in December 2019 and were basically arrested and forced to apologise for spreading “misinformation”. The main person who became famous for sounding the alarm (Li Wenjiang, an ophthalmologist) later died of the disease.
>They knew about the virus because it was being studied, and that’s the only answer that makes any sense.
This is because you don't know how pathology works and what technologies (specifically sequencing) are available to identify pathogens of unknown origin.
I'm just a dude, but early videos showed people collapsing on the streets. If you have a few people like that in one area you start to think it's more than a flu I guess.
From what I've read when you have pneumonia you receive antibiotics. If that doesn't work, they test a lung wash sample against the usual bacterias/viruses. If that doesn't match anything, it's called unexplained pneumonia, and that gets escalated and the sample is sent to top labs for sequencing. When they did this, they got a 90% match to SARS and raised the alarm.
> I’ve always believed this was an lab accident by a technician that needed their job so they covered it up until they and too many family members got sick and it was obvious something was wrong.
Really drove me nuts how early on everyone, everyone was working overtime to try and dismiss the possibility that this was some sort of lab leak. I’m sorry but the way China went absolutely DEFCON 1 (welding people into their apartments, blocking the roads out of town, nightly fumigations of public spaces) within a short period of time strongly suggests that they had a “oh crap, _that thing we were working on got out_” moment. Never understood why people were so eager to dismiss this possibility.
You don't go defcon 1 over the sniffles but you do go defcon 1 over an unknown virus that closely matches a highly lethal virus we encountered about ten years earlier (SARS classic).
There is nothing in china's outbreak response that suggests guilt.
I think a lot of westerners want to believe the conspiracy theories in part because it’s hard to admit how much more we could have learned from SARS. Ignoring China, the Taiwanese government doesn’t take orders from them and certainly wouldn’t help with a cover up but because of SARS all it took was Li Wenliang‘s post leaking for them to activate a comprehensive response. The key part was recent memory overriding the “it’ll be awfully inconvenient” reflex which is hard to avoid when you’ve been comfortable for many years.
It wasn't Li Wenliang's post that activated the Taiwanese response. It was the Chinese government's public alert on 30 December 2019 about a cluster of patients with "pneumonia of unknown etiology" that triggered the response.
That announcement came after top Taiwanese medical officials had seen those social media posts, realized how serious they looked, and started asking China about them.
> In the wee hours of Dec. 31, 2019, CDC deputy chief Lo Yi-chun could not sleep and was scrolling his phone when an online post shared in a CDC chat group caught his attention.
> Quoting information from Chinese websites, the post that appeared on PTT, one of Taiwan's largest internet bulletin board systems (BBS), warned about the potential danger of a SARS-like disease that was spreading in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
> "The post came out (on PTT) at 2 a.m., and at 3 a.m., I saw it being shared on a chat group by another sleepless CDC doctor," Lo said at a press conference Thursday.
> Lo said the post immediately caught his eye because unlike other unsubstantiated online messages this one included a chest CT scan, a hospital test result and what appeared to be a screenshot of messages sent by a doctor to his colleagues, warning them of a highly contagious virus.
> That announcement came after top Taiwanese medical officials had seen those social media posts, realized how serious they looked, and started asking China about them.
The first announcement from the Chinese government came on 30 December 2019, one day before the events described in your second article. ProMED-Mail sent out an alert on 30 December 2019,[1] and the next day, the outbreak was even reported on CCTV.[2] Social media posts gave additional information, but the existence of an outbreak of likely viral pneumonia was publicly declared before those posts, and people who follow emerging infectious diseases were following the story.
The virus acquired the traits that made it infectious to humans either through natural selection or bio-engineering.
If it was through natural selection, then it was likely such virus was going to cause a pandemic whether it was leaked by the lab or not, since presumably there's a natural reservoir of the virus.
(1) Let's address the glass windows in our own house first and tighten the US policies and culture. Secrecy is not a good idea here. Without even reflecting on Covid, it is clear the author has been dealing with this a while, and the US needs to improve. I am reminded of discussions on the old '50s/'60s nuclear culture...
(2) A year later, it may not be possible for the most honest, the most painstaking, the most independent reconstruction of the Wuhan lab events to properly track what occurred. Nor would it be per se politically doable. It might, however, be feasible for the Chinese official position to commit to an enhanced tightening of policies and culture around lab handling of specimens, in light of current events and looking forward.
(3) To a first approximation (the same one where Pi = 3), I don't care if Covid comes from a lab, a bat, a pig, or a chicken. I care that there are dead people, and that there was massive dysfunction globally & in a multipartisan way in the response, leading to more dead and disabled people...
1. I think this perspective is basically "Whataboutism the US house...", Whataboutism aside, the US does examine and iteratively improve standards...but either way, we aren't talking about that house.
2. I only think a thorough investigation is not possible because the Chinese government is not going to allow that such a honest investigation to occur.
3. If a flowerpot fell from a balcony and killed your loved one, you wouldn't care if it was intentionally thrown, negligently left there, or simply a freak act of god? I think almost everyone cares about the cause of this event. If not for reasons of closure and blame, for reasons of understanding and improving out future actions.
My ability to pressure the Chinese government is remarkably limited compared to my ability to pressure my Senator, which is also not large - on a good day.
China isn't a transparent society - on a good day, either. That's facts.
There is also what might be called diplomatic pragmatism, a realpolitik. So, let's fix what we can fix, and make a point of not being a fricking embarrassment if we ask other governments to come clean.
edit:
The problem here is several-fold. (1) There's opacity that is over Wuhan, and time does not help this; the Chinese government (at some levels) tried to cover it up. There may not be evidence any more of what happened. Ordinary time shuffling may have removed it. Period. The author is experienced at observing the open society's sloppiness with these sorts of accidents, and thinks there's at least a plausible case that it may have been released.
(2) The open society's ability to pressure China into being fully cooperative is partially conditioned on its reputation and soft power at demonstrating how good things can be. Which, it has not been.
(3) I am really really not in a meaningful position to call for changes to happen outside of a very limited location. That is because I am a citizen of the USA, resident in WA state. So. I would like to see the USA clean up its act; I would particularly like WA to clean it up. I can most effectively contact officials, etc, and attend meetings & interest groups in relation to this sort of event. This is not whataboutism, this is dealing with the parts of the world I can affect.
(4) If Covid was released from a military/research lab because someone goofed on a security protocol, what does that matter to me, compared to someone who got sneezed on by an animal? Seriously. I don't think it matters in the wash. Health systems have to be resilient to novel pathogens, regardless of the etiology of patient zero.
1. The virus did not originate in our own house. Seems like a deflection to say we should focus on ourselves when we're starting at evidence that Chinese missteps could have caused a global pandemic that has killed millions and upended life for billions.
2. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We should also acknowledge that an investigation much earlier on could have happened if it were not for Chinese government obstructionism and cover-ups.
3. Why do you not care about where it came from? The allegation at hand is that China's irresponsible scientific experimentation "created" this virus (intentional oversimplification) and allowed it to leak. If the truth never comes out, and China is never held accountable, the same thing could happen again. Why is your sole interest the global response to the pandemic as opposed to the missteps that caused the pandemic in the first place?
1. Even if this particular virus didn't originate in our own house, if we want to demand openness and security from other countries, we in the US should start by being open with records of accidents and enhanced measures to prevent future accidents.
Safety issues at US labs are not kept secret, as the author of the linked article has literally reported on them before, and they have also never caused a deadly global pandemic.
Would you then say that irresponsibly treating the virus within the US & other western countries actually caused the pandemic to be bigger than it should have been?
Even the Western countries that "responsibly" treated the virus are having pretty serious surges now. I guess anything short of a total and complete lockdown was irresponsible.
I'd say that the release of a highly transmissible and moderately lethal pathogen was the primary issue.
hahahaha.
New Zealand has locked down for very little time. Weeks total. They've been open for concerts and everything else in between.
The lockdowns would be over if countries had actually done them properly.
The cause of this virus while concerning. Is nothing to the hysteria created from this virus, remember how this virus was branded at the start. Basically brave yourself for death, a interesting study is to look at news articles over time.
Its an example of bait and switch. This virus is not something that should have gained this much attention.
A bayesian inference shows that death when looking at a age stratification chart, who died compared with how many were expected to die in this cohort vs how many where expected to die were it a average flu outbreak in that same population.
I was building a model for local hospitals, with information back in march 2020. I grew disheartened when I realised that this killer virus was hardly more deadly than a bad flu year.
That brings up the excess deaths, why is it so high? Its hard to find good numbers in this, especially when you apply related increase in violent crime in 2020. Murders increases by 40% in NYC for example. More needs to be done to look into these numbers.
The death rate in all countries is died with, nor from. For example the UK lists all deaths who died within 30 days if a positive reading as a covid death. So to get the true numbers you need to apply a bayes model to see what we should have seen in a normal year.
A person over 70 has a 10% change if dying each year.
So if a virus that had no affect but turned your hair green killed 10% of people in an aged care home this would be branded as a deadly virus. Because of collerlation.
Now this virus kills much more than 10%, flu outbreaks have been reported to kill 12-16% of people in aged care homes. Covid is still more however.
I am now rambling, I have not squared the circle just yet. I still don't understand the hysteria, but it reminds me of post 9/11. Where people were acting crazy and full of anger.
I don't know what comes next, but I can tell you it won't be logical.
This is the most details study of long term affects. 6months vs other studies at 3 months.
Nice study.
But it didn't show where these people were from looks like hospital inpatients in the first Wuhan cluster.
Also I would like to see their results compared to non covid positive of the same age.
A member of my family got swine flu in 2009/10 they had very adverse health affects for three years after. So its not uncommon to have long term affects from flu like illnesses
Virus coming from a lab is just an effort to not invest against the next pandemic. This wasn't the first pandemic, and it isn't going to be the last one.
Regardless of what happened inside a lab, or how it got out, it's how we responded to it that ultimately matters. What did we learn from it? How are we prepared to deal with another outbreak in the future? ARE we prepared to deal with another outbreak in the future? If so, how long are we prepared to do so before we let our guards down?
The people who are most interested in where it came from instead of how we handled it are those who are politically motivated to disregard safety in general. They need a boogeyman to deflect blame onto for their ridiculous dereliction of duty.
People are injecting politics into this instead of medical science and science of human behavior.
China got caught with their pants down on pandemic prevention given their past research into bat virus and their own initial warning in 20127. That does not mean that combine that with politics about the CCP to jump to a lab accident conclusion.
Even the US Defense Intelligence structure has jumped to such a conclusion.
I mean, seriously. How many such labs, specialized in research of Coronavirii, are there in China? It certainly looks like a weird coincidence that the first know hotspot is actually close to such a lab.
But of course there are many reports about the virus circulating long before the Wuhan cluster was exposed. Maybe the lab was responsible for that cluster but not the actual first outbreak?
All these speculation pieces and theories without any proof at all.
My issue with the theory is it lights a fuel under people for more racism against asians in general. Until there's solid evidence, everyone should dismiss it as just that - a theory.
Right. If everyone wants a scapegoat there is a real one that we can all focus on: meat consumption. 1918 flu pandemic probably started on a pig farm. This one at a wet market. We encroach on nature to make more corn and soy for meat, the outcome will be more diseases and death, and that doesn't even include the health issues and dangerous conditions required for cheap meat.
This isn't a theory, unfortunately, but since it requires self reflection it will never be a popular story in the US media. I admit I have seen it discussed in print several times.
Science, like journalism, is supposed to be about facts and about getting to the truth.
No source of covid-19 has been found.
Similar lab leaks happen frequently.
BUT.. you're not allowed to discuss it with the undertones that you're a bad person. If you say china virus you could be accused of being a racist. But if you say South African or British variant it's okay. The mental acrobats are insane. If you suggest people aren't thinking critically about it you will be accused of flamebaiting or trolling. If you call out people who are trying to silence your comments you'll be accused of "making boring reading".
I think it should be discussed, debated and seriously considered. There is a suggestion in here to assume both the animal farm and the lab were the cause and to respond appropriately. With lack of further evidence I think this is the best idea.
There is no blame or antagonism towards British or South Africans implied by the use of those terms. No British or South African communities have seen a rise in violence against them in the last year.
It's not mental acrobatics. It's pragmatism and empathy.
There were several terms that came into common use very quickly and none of them included the word "China". When a president with a history of racist statements started using it constantly, and Asian Americans started to get harassed and attacked at an increased rate, it became obviously unethical (to most people) to try and replace the existing, widely used terms with one that has a racial and national component.
I've only heard "China virus" being used with xenophobic intent. Back in January 2020 before it has an official name it was referred to as the Wuhan virus.
I would think that the reason that people calling COVID the "China virus" are accused of racism is that there is really no reason to use that term for the virus outside of trying to offend others.
I think that's a pretty loose assumption that _all people_ are using it with ill intent.
Anything can be said or used with ill intent, because intent matters and is separate from actual language. That's why we have tone in speaking and writing to help distinguish this. Our nonverbal cues say a lot more than the words themselves.
A rise in violence against Spaniards cannot sloppily be attributed to the use of "Spanish Flu" to describe a virus that some believed to either come from Spain, or affected Spain the worst.
It's morbidly irresponsible to assume negative intent when people are trying to name and classify a virus based on its best known origins, and attribute "racism" towards a people group of that same origin as being caused by the naming of a virus.
This is a fine example of: correlation does not imply causation.
A person who cannot separate the two concepts cleanly is the person who needs deep understanding for why they are wrong, especially when there is no credible data to support that assumption.
The media outlets reporting hate crimes caused by the naming of a virus are, in effect, assuming that all or most Americans are too stupid to act reasonably and understand these two very different concepts, so they declare the correlation however they see fit and expect their viewers to latch on and make the same poor and irresponsible assumptions blindly.
We are so much smarter than this. Pay close attention to the way journalists mold and shape the narrative based on assumptions and opinions to get you to believe their take. Also pay attention to the fact that CNN and others called this virus "the Chinese virus" well before our 45th President used the phrasing.
How does a media outlet get to blame behavior they created without first examining themselves?
> I think that's a pretty loose assumption that _all people_ are using it with ill intent.
Some people drop the N-bomb without ill intent either. There's plenty of precedent for agreeing that certain words and phrases just can't be used anymore in good faith.
Are you suggesting that those in the Black community using the N-word isn't in good faith?
I don't think generalizations like these are useful or productive because they contradict themselves when you apply any other context to them. It's double-think in its most overt form.
No. In fact, I just said that people use it WITHOUT ill intent. And a white person could use it to refer to another white person (in a joking way) with no ill intent to any specific or general party. But society (generally speaking) has deemed that inappropriate in proper company.
Words and labels have become a very difficult thing for people to handle rationally. Within a span of just 5-10 years, a big handful of them went from being tools to bond people to being a dangerous virus that haphazardly assumes each and every person is immeasurably fragile.
It's a clear sign when there is a dramatic shift in how comedians are treated and responded to, that our society in general is more quick to jump to ill conclusions than they're ready to use insults and slurs to poke fun at each other and walk away unscathed, laughing with an eye-roll to top it off.
I miss those days when the majority (around me) were more light-hearted and understood that these moments of fun weren't used to harm others, but to build camaraderie by jesting about our differences and unique cultural idioms.
I worked with a very diverse team in the restaurant industry, and the majority of our jokes were racial stereotypes of one another, and it's safe to say, we all went home feeling seen, appreciated, and laughing our asses off.
It was fun that other people knew a few quirks about my origins that I was secure enough to laugh at, instead of feeling threatened by them. Many friendships were formed with light insults (and yes, often racial) used to break the ice.
I'm of two minds (I often am). I agree that humor is a bonding device. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger. And to top it off, it's more fun.
But, what if there was a person in your group that was actually offended? And couldn't say so because they'd be out of the group? Does it matter? (To me, yes). Does it matter enough to change the group's behavior? (Maybe). Does it matter enough to change the entire world's behavior?
These are all wonderful questions, and my only answer to them is that grace, patience, bearing with one another, and the courage & honesty to confront what doesn't feel right have all been made high virtues throughout time for a reason! :)
It's through these that we may move away from disproportionate responses to what feels uncomfortable and find common understanding with each other, but alas, never perfectly.
No, because there are a lot of people of Chinese descent in the US and they have historically been targeted and oppressed by the government and the public. If South Africans in the US started getting attacked (I've met two or three over the years) then we would all want to stop using that phrase as well.
Maybe if the US didn't have a very large number of people who are willing to harass people of visibly different races we wouldn't have to have these discussions and worry so much about our language. But we do, and we have a track record of specific races being attacked when nations that have a majority of that race become embroiled in international issues.
I don't have a position on what to call it myself, but I don't see any reason why someone would be insistent on finding some way to call it "Chinese" unless they were attempting to cast blame in a way that "Brazilian variant," "British variant," etc. do not. If most authorities are not already calling it the "Chinese variant," I don't see why you'd call it that. If they are, then obviously you can call it that.
Ok sure. What did you win? Have you now advanced science and solved all unknown problems in virology? Was the progress of mankind so impeded by the inability to call COVID-19 the Chinese variant? Seriously ask yourself why you are so hung up on being able to call it the China virus. Are doctors around the world completely unable to sequence this virus because they can’t say the word “China virus”, or does it just make you feel better to be able to prescribe blame to a group of people?
I think we can agree there’s open mystery about the origin of the virus without getting caught up in culture war trite. British people aren’t being murdered because of some loose connection to a virus, the very least you could do is show some tact and try not to insert your bias at every opportunity.
The “power” you are exerting is the one killing innocent American citizens. The CCP doesn’t give a flying fuck that you are calling it China virus. That you would put American lives at risk for some superficial insult at the CCP says you care more about your perceived superiority than actually solving problems pertaining to the virus.
Again it is Americans who are dying, not the Chinese.
>I can't imagine a situation in which someone dies because I used the term China virus.
So the huge growth in asian hate crimes year over year is completely unrelated to this misguided effort to somehow blame China for COVID?
>Also the CCP definitely cares.
The CCP cares so much that they never once made a statement to Trump to stop calling it the china virus. Again it's not the Chinese who said stop calling it the China virus, it was Americans who were correctly fearful of being attacked for being Asian.
>Negative PR for a country which is a major exporter is a bad thing for the country.
This is the most laughable comment. The country that had negative PR for decades about children working in sweatshops and factory workers killing themselves is suddenly going to turn heel about the China virus when it's worked up till now. I remember all that "negative PR" being so successful when it came to Hong Kong.
If negative PR actually mattered, American imperialism wouldn't be so successful. CIA-backed coups all over the world never hurt America's economic position.
You can call it the China virus if you want. You can't be cited or sued for doing so. But most people prefer to avoid terms that can reasonably be linked to harassment and violence against minorities.
Your argument also assumes that there is some need to inform people of the origin of COVID-19. There is not. We all know it originated in China and most people now even know the name of China's 9th largest city.
Gee I don't know.. maybe going 100 years back with the Spanish Flu? West Nile virus, Zika virus, Ebola.. all those are okay but saying Wuhan virus is considered racist.
“In recent years, several new human infectious diseases have emerged. The use of names such as ‘swine flu’ and ‘Middle East Respiratory Syndrome’ has had unintended negative impacts by stigmatizing certain communities or economic sectors,” says Dr Keiji Fukuda, Assistant Director-General for Health Security, WHO. “This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected. We’ve seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals. This can have serious consequences for peoples’ lives and livelihoods.”
Diseases are often given common names by people outside of the scientific community. Once disease names are established in common usage through the Internet and social media, they are difficult to change, even if an inappropriate name is being used. Therefore, it is important that whoever first reports on a newly identified human disease uses an appropriate name that is scientifically sound and socially acceptable.
The best practices state that a disease name should consist of generic descriptive terms, based on the symptoms that the disease causes (e.g. respiratory disease, neurologic syndrome, watery diarrhoea) and more specific descriptive terms when robust information is available on how the disease manifests, who it affects, its severity or seasonality (e.g. progressive, juvenile, severe, winter). If the pathogen that causes the disease is known, it should be part of the disease name (e.g. coronavirus, influenza virus, salmonella).
Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations (e.g. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish Flu, Rift Valley fever), people’s names (e.g. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Chagas disease), species of animal or food (e.g. swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox), cultural, population, industry or occupational references (e.g. legionnaires), and terms that incite undue fear (e.g. unknown, fatal, epidemic).
WHO developed the best practices for naming new human infectious diseases in close collaboration with the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and in consultation with experts leading the International Classification of Diseases (ICD).
Well, to be a bit pedantic those aren't the same thing. "China virus", or an alternative that used to be more common, "Wuhan virus", refer to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 - a disease that not everyone who is infected with the virus gets.
I recall many people calling the Wuhan lab leak theory as conspiracy on HN. They were adamant that it came from bats. Interestingly enough, those accounts were all brand new accounts and some haven't been active on HN for several months all of sudden started coming out of the wood works.
That comment was killed by software, similarly to how comments by banned accounts are killed. It was later vouched for by other users, which unkilled it.
Please don't take HN threads on these lame meta tangents. They never go anywhere interesting, and people invariably just imagine scenarios that confirm whatever they already believe and get even more upset about it.
You changed the subject from the original topic to the status of comments on HN. That's meta, because it's an HN comment about HN comments; it's a tangent, because it's a change of subject; it's lame, because meta threads (while superficially exciting to insiders) are highly repetitive and self-referential, and also are nearly always full of inaccurate information as people invent explanations for what they think they're seeing.
Clearly there are a bunch of people voting down anything that is too critical of China.
WHY there are a bunch of people voting that down I leave to others to speculate. But I'm going to vote up any verifiable factual statements that have been voted down.
HN has plenty of people who feel strongly on both sides of this issue. In my experience there are many more on your side than the other (probably by an order of magnitude)—certainly the number of times I've had to moderate comments breaking the site guidelines on China-related topics is over 10x lopsided, and no we're not looking to moderate one side more than the other. (Just the unpleasantness of being accused of ugly prejudice from every conceivable angle is enough to make one scrupulous to the point of paranoia about this.)
Each side is utterly convinced that the other side dominates the site and is sinisterly manipulating/astroturfing the community. None of these feelings is based on any reality that I've ever been able to observe. It's all imagination driven by emotion. When it comes to this topic, the main impression I gets from trying to keep this place in some semblance of guidelines-respecting order is one of mass-psychological, tribally motivated insanity.
However the fact that all of the Chinese supporting votes showed up at once, and then the others show up slowly is supportive of a group of people working together.
I really don't think that's correct. Rather it's the eternal problem that randomness contains sequences that look and feel non-random—these are more likely to get noticed, and then get (over)interpreted to fit a pre-existing narrative.
I don't mean to pick on you personally! Everyone does this.
And we should ask that is. The fact that investigations to find patient 0, either never happened or were covered up is strong evidence for the WIV leak theory.
Can you link to something that proves this is only asking for a reference?
That's what the comment sounded like to me, and why I downvoted it. It does not come across to me as a good-faith request for a reference, and more like an attempt to DOS the conversation, similar to a Gish gallop. For example, it's asking for a specific link that constitutes proof of a general observation of tendency. That doesn't scream "reasonable request."
I don't see how any conversation could work under the standard you're proposing. The original comment was based on a wild assertion about the geographical placement of virology labs; no argument or evidence was offered, and it's not clear to me that there's any real trend it's referring to. If it's unreasonable to ask for a more detailed explanation of the assertion or specific evidence in favor of the assertion, how are people supposed to engage?
You're in a thread that was kicked off with unsourced statements about virology and epidemiology, but suddenly we have an urgent need for sources — actually, not just sources, because the demand was for proof — when we encounter the idea "Labs don't occur by chance in random locations around the globe"?
I would say you're supposed to engage the same way everyone had been engaging with the entire thread up to that point. But if you do want to transition to a more evidence-based approach to the subject — which I could get behind — I don't think the right way to go about it is to suddenly demand proof from the first person whose opinion you don't like.
I just don't think that "suddenly" or "urgent" or "demand" are reasonable characterizations of anyone's comments here. It's a discussion, and challenging claims you don't agree with is a routine part of any discussion.
It's not that wanting sources is bad, but a plausible-sounding claim may as well be argued against by providing sources to the contrary, or defend by providing sources in support. Demanding rigorous proof of an intuitive claim is not a good way to argue against it.
This is, unfortunately, one of the issues that's been extraordinarily moralized. I've encountered more than a few people who argue that questions about the lab leak theory are inherently bad faith.
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. I've spent a lot of time, energy, and words asking people not to do that in the opposite direction [1]. It applies just as much the other way around. Name-calling, flamebait, and nationalistic provocations take the internet straight to hell. We're trying to avoid that fate here, or at least stave it off [2] a little longer.
What country you're in when you make a comment doesn't affect whether it's a good HN comment or not.
Your comment wasn't a good comment for HN because it used name-calling ("yellow journalism", "hating on", "FUD"), and because it was clearly a step further toward conflict between countries in the thread, which is what I mean by nationalistic flamewar.
I'm sure it felt like you were just being defensive and I completely get that, but comments here need to be more substantive and less flamebaity, no matter how wrong or unfair other commenters are, or you feel they are. That's not easy, but it's something we all need to work on, regardless of which side we're on.
Also, I don't think it's accurate to describe this specific article, or most of the comments in this thread (with some bad exceptions) as attacking China. We try to watch out for that and have scolded and moderated many commenters who have crossed that line (including some in this thread). HN's Chinese users, and users with Chinese family backgrounds, are absolutely welcome here, just as welcome as anybody else, and we don't tolerate slurs. You can see some of the long history of this here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Perhaps other MSM publications. The specific article here talks about US accidents in high-standards labs, and posits that those same accidents can happen in other countries. It's not attacking China at all. What you're describing doesn't apply to the discussion in this article or this thread, just seems non-productive.
Outside of some noteworthy scummy politicians and a few partisan media outlets. I really haven't seen much in the way of MSM media pushing that theory as fact.
It doesn't matter if they're pushing this far-fetched hypothesis as "fact" or not, they're pushing it by continuously regurgitating such speculative FUD without evidence.
Please don't. I know it doesn't feel this way, but replying is worse than the original comment.
If people follow the site guidelines and flag such provocations without replying, the thread grounds out. By feeding it, you furnish a circuit and all the current necessary for a prolonged electrocution.
How soon before stuff like this is marked as misinformation if it isn't coming from established media outlets? You know, dangerous conspiracy theories, and all that. Real world consequences, etc. and so forth.
Not OP, but I'm assuming he was arguing that, given that the major social media platforms have said they will remove any Covid information that is misleading, would they even allow posts like this "suggesting the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak is plausible".
That's exactly it. They're not trying to crack down on misinformation, they're just trying to create a monopoly wherein established outlets are able to filter what's True and grey out what is False or Misleading.
They're fact-checking goddamn memes. Recently they "fact-checked" a meme with Joker on it and text "The truth will set you free. Except on Facebook, where it will get you a 30 day ban", and called it "missing context". Now the entire fanpage is gone.
" Claims that it was created by an individual, government, or country
Excluding claims that it was studied in, came from, or leaked from a lab without specifically calling it man-made"
So discussing possibility of a lab leak is not a problem, it's the deliberate bioweapon aspect that they're banning.
"The goal of this policy is to remove common viral hoaxes that have been repeatedly debunked by independent fact-checkers."
The editor's note says there is no evidence that this is the case. There is no strong evidence about anything regarding what are the origins of the virus. But it's still entirely within the realm of possibility that it could be true.
Sure, things aren't black and white and I never said they were. But Facebook will ban you for suggesting that it's possible that the virus is man-made, right? So they're the 'extremists' here.
How are these Fact Checkers to decide on a complicated and political question like a Wuhan lab leak hypothesis? They have a claim to truth, based on what credentials or mechanisms, that the rest of us don't have access to?
No, I was echoing the mainstream media and many articles - including on this very site - pushing and wishing and demanding a crackdown on misinformation. And I sarcastically asked the crowd whether this article means only mainstream media outlets are allowed, permitted, to suggest conspiracies.
It's very possible and shouldn't be dismissed at all. But we will never know since the CCP has already covered its tracks (not saying it was on purpose, but a clearly an accident covered by the CCP).
In a bizarre world where you were presumed guilty, could you do anything? If you submitted evidence that you were on another continent at the time of the crime, doesn't that prove you didn't do it? (Assuming the crime is something you must be physically present to do)
> China is pushing real hard to discount it and try to hype up zoonotic transmission. That should tell you something.
That's what China would be expected to do:
(1) if it knew the Wuhan lab leak theory was correct,
(2) if it knew zoonotic transmission was correct.
(3) if it had no idea what was going on.
(4) if it wasn't a lab leak but a deliberate biological weapons test that went wrong, and they has engineered both their overt argument and the lab leaks story as layers of cover.
You can say German x Spanish flu Uk variant ... you can talk about USA cdc lab issue ... but all is fine with China lab. Who is in charge who is right ...
A friend with access to Merrill Lynch Research told me in August that there was strong consensus around the WIV lab theory. If there's one reliable source of truth in the world, it's the information that banks are betting billions on.
It's obviously super hazy, but it's worth clarifying that being developed in the lab != originating from the lab.
From what I've heard on Chinese social media, there are a bunch of plausible sounding theories.
For a lot of jobs in China, it's expected that there's moderate incompetence or grift.
For example, say the lab has a bunch of extra animal samples (mice, bats, w/e). Someone in the cleaning staff could make a few extra $ by selling those samples to a wholesaler at the local wetmarket (to be turned into dogfood, etc.); maybe they only meant to sell the clean samples, but got things mixed up.
If I’m walking down the street and get surprised with a punch in the face I assume it was intentional, even if there are many scenarios in which it could be accidental.
Why not? There are multiple hurricanes every single year, but I still hear about them. Especially the ones that might affect my area.
But it might be more like: "Yet another hurricane cause by weather." Not really a story, since they all have been. The opposite, though, that'd be a real story: "Hurricane not caused by weather!"
If globalization and wealth concentration/inequality continues, workers will become more malicious and we're going to be seeing more leaks and unexpected threats coming from all sorts of places and industries. Humanity will destroy itself. It's vital that we decentralize capital and bring back fairness to the global economy.
"I have heard so many news about a guy winning more than 100 millions from Powerball. I couldn't image that it won't happen to me in the future." That's my translation of this article.
Their main argument in the podcast is that the scientist in the lab says that they were not working on this virus and "even with the central control of china there is no way they could keep that secret". That argument is not going to hold a lot of water with people
They don't cite any evidence to refute a lab accident, and the 'clubby' atmosphere raises suspicion that they dismiss the possibility on the grounds that 'we're all professionals, free to say what we want, free from government coercion, etc', but perhaps that does not reflect reality.
Podcasts run on a given domain run by domain experts are certainly a good step above, epistemologically speaking, than a lot of news source on said domain. Obviously you can't be 100% sure any statement about the physical world is true, so you know, believe what you want.
Ok then. Let's watch TWiV 615, where they interview Peter Daszak, the virologist which headed the recent WHO origin seeking mission in China.
Listen to him talk about how easy is to modify coronaviruses in labs and how they are actually doing this, mixing and matching viruses at 29:50:
> Well, coronaviruses are pretty good... you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot what happens in a coronavirus. Zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can bulid a protein, and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this, insert into the backbone of another virus, and do some work in the lab, so you can get more predictive, when you find a sequence.
Without any verifiable evident, it just doesn't make sense. There is a continual exchange of information between Wuhan and other centers of disease control. So it would be very difficult to keep such a secret. Besides, if it was a virus that escaped, then the Chinese would already have the means to create a vaccine and so save the planet. Instead they did nothing and sat on it.
Utter bollocks. The most galling thing about this is that the more conspiracy theories get spun out the less people are going to hold the global developing world agricultural sector to account and the more likely this is to happen again.
Like John Lennon sang, “All I want is the truth, just give me some truth”. Very hard to come by these days, especially if it has anything to do with ‘The Orange Man’.
Assuming it was leaked and China didn’t disclose it - so what? Is the idea to blame China for everything? What’s the play?
I honestly don’t see what difference it makes from it coming from a lab in China vs someone eating something they weren’t supposed to be vs a bat, etc.
I’m honestly curious to why it matters - not to say that we shouldn’t pursue the truth but it seems like it doesn’t matter.
These theories without conclusive evidence seems to just blame China - which unfortunately drive anti Sino sentiment.
Why is nobody discussing confirmation bias? Repetitions of "I knew I was right" are really unhelpful.
The fundamentals remain unchanged from when the WHO did their work, nothing said here is adding new evidence, its just the volume of agreement making people feel sure.
> Although they only emerge under artificial conditions in influenza viruses, these furin cleavage sites are found within several branches of the coronavirus family tree. However SARS‐CoV‐2 is the only lineage B coronavirus found with one, and the only other coronaviruses known to have them are only at most 60% identical to this novel coronavirus.
I'm not waynesonfire, but seriously, what is up with people making deliberately misleading claims (e.g. highlighting it is not found in influenza viruses, even though covid virus is not influenza), and then providing a link that specifically debunks the implication they are trying to make.
It's like people just depend on nobody following the links they post.
I am curious to know if this guideline applies only when responding to HN comments, or if it should be applied to source material in article links as well. I've noticed a lot more conspiracy-theorizing comments lately and it's hard to engage when the whole premise of a given comment is accusing someone else of misrepresenting facts.
It totally applies to the articles too. That wasn't in my mind when we introduced that guideline but it turns out to apply just as nicely at that level.
It's really only unusual for lineage B coronaviruses:
> Although they only emerge under artificial conditions in influenza viruses, these furin cleavage sites are found within several branches of the coronavirus family tree.
Even the original quote, "In fact, no influenza virus with a furin cleavage site has ever been found in nature" leaves out something important:
> the fact remains that every highly pathogenic avian influenza virus, defined by having a furin cleavage site, has either been found on commercial poultry farms that create the pseudo‐natural conditions necessary for serial passage, or created in laboratories with gain‐of‐function serial passage experiments.
That is, the authors are defining "in nature" not to include commercial poultry farms.
Do you expect it to be unusual for coronaviruses that manage to cause a pandemic? Even if it is rare, as long as it is not unique, those priors are unbalanced.
As a layperson whose activism only amounts to charitable donations, yard signs, and voting, why should I care whether this virus was a lab escapee or naturally spread?
This is an earnest question, not a blind "I don't care". I think this is interesting, and I can see some amount of merit in these claims, but at the end of the day it doesn't feel like it matters to me which one it was. It seems like the only change would be "China gets more bad PR" and maybe American racists use this as an excuse to be more racist.
History exists for a reason. It's there to learn from.
If we can establish that a lab leak lead to a worldwide pandemic, we'd place much more importance on lab security and better handling procedures.
If it was naturally spread then we'd look at the feasibility of reducing the chances of this happening again, like improving sanitation of wet markets, implementing regulations, or even banning them entirely.
Frankly the notion of it not mattering to someone how covid came to be is absurd.
If you don't want something to happen again, you first need to understand the circumstances that lead to it.
It means culpability. A better understanding of the dangers of experimenting with deadly viruses.
All of this contributes to the history and scientific corpus of what not to do, and lessons to learn from in the future that we can point to as what can happen in lab leak scenarios.
It's hard to accept in good faith the proposition that not knowing the truth of what happened is preferable to knowing the truth.
Except that experts have visited Wuhan and never found evidence of the theory proposed in this article. I think it is time to stop spreading even more disinformation about this deadly disease. If the US government had taken the virus seriously as the Chinese did, we most certainly wouldn't be in this situation.
What makes you think it's "extremely unlikely" that this virus was developed in a lab, and who do you think you're agreeing with?
> “It was very unlikely that anything could escape from such a place,” Ben Embarek said during the Feb. 9 WHO press conference, citing the team’s discussions with Wuhan lab officials about their safety protocols and audits. “If you look at the history of lab accidents, these are extremely rare events.”
> Yet lab accidents aren’t rare.
> What’s rare are accidents causing documented outbreaks. But those have happened, including in 2004 when two researchers at a lab in Beijing unknowingly became infected with another type of SARS coronavirus, sparking a small outbreak that killed one person.
> In the weeks since leaving Wuhan, the WHO’s team has been questioned about its independence and depth, including by the Biden administration, amid media reports that China denied the team access to raw data on possible COVID-19 cases that were identified during the earliest part of the outbreak.
> “We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement last month. “It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government.”
Why is the distinction between development and manufacturing relevant here? Have you read the article?
Not only that, but they're garbage-collected periodically, meaning that if there's any rule there which isn't 'paying' for the space it consumes on that page, we take it out. It's like a codebase that way: complexity is the enemy, less is more, and deleting is at least as important as adding.
If anyone has a cogent case for deleting one of the guidelines, that would be most helpful. If anyone can think of one that should be added, and can't be derived from what's already there, that would also be helpful.
It's very hard to be intellectually curious when I'm only allowed to post 3-4 comments an hour. What if I'm having a conversation with someone? Why am I not allowed to respond?
We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars. We're happy to take the rate limit off if people give us reason to believe that they understand the site guidelines and sincerely want to use HN in the intended spirit. But it's best to email hn@ycombinator.com and ask us to look into it.
I realize it's annoying to be rate limited, but it's one of the few (crude) software tools we have to try to put off the descent of the forum into flamewar, so dropping the mechanism isn't really an option.
It's why the discourse stays on point and doesn't devolve into flame wars, or that's the theory, anyway. Pretty much everything has been designed to make people stay friendly.
Very Brave New World-esque. Make rules to keep everyone friendly, but meanwhile what you're actually doing is silencing people and making it impossible to have any real discussion.
I better be careful, since I'm only allowed to make 4 comments an hour I have to be very selective of the opinions I share.
I think it's possible the virus leaked from a lab in China, but it's also possible it was transmitted in the wild a la "wet markets". Either way, regrettably due to Chinese propaganda and tight controls on speech and the press, it is highly unlikely the world will get an open and honest investigation from the Chinese government. The PRC simply cannot be trusted, which sadly has added immense fuel to all conspiracy theories involving that nation.
I think the Wuhan/COVID/Coronavirus can be compared to the Soviet government's response to Chernobyl. Great efforts were made to keep a lid on that disaster from the people, and the world, until it was too great to ignore. Granted, a long time ago, but it's an example of what a totalitarian government (like China) might do in the face of such catastrophe.
My own idea is a combination of the two. I wonder if it leaked out of the lab by a lab employee trying to make some money on the side by selling lab animals to the wet market. (Note well: This is just my "seems kind of plausible" guess. I have no actual evidence to support it. And no, it's not actually "my own" idea - I heard it suggested by someone, who also had no evidence that I recall.)
This is an extremely poor theory formulated by blindly speculating and then skipping the step where one gathers evidence for or against or even considers whether the idea even makes sense in theory.
Nobody would sell lab animals from a virology lab to markets to eat. The consequences are obvious, animals would be accounted for, the risk would be extremely high to the persons future, and the profits small.
It's the kind of ideas you find on racist conspiracy theory blogs and you shouldn't share it here.
半混蛋
So you say, it was the janitor, with dead lab animals, in the wet market, making some surplus money?
I assumed it was the gardener, in the dining room, with the hatchet..
Its almost as if the whole human species could not be trusted with dangerous tools and regularly drops the ball.
These wet-market are such a medieval relic and all just because of superstitious nonsense about refrigerated food being bad for your chi.
Homeopathy, TMC and how those shamanistic practices are all called wherever by whomever kill. 2.7 million so far...
Even worser, when you think about all those other "tech" miracles enlightenment zealots insist humanity can be entrusted. We blow a nuclear power plant every ten years, drop the vials like they are hot, but hey more power into each pocket.
Cant wait for the first long-range flying car, getting hacked and used in a remote attack. That surely will be the day, someone will admit that tech is limited,not by what can be done, but by who gets to wield it.
Makes one wonder though, that day i entrusted that vital system for millions, to that upstream repo.. was i the janitor that day..
IMO it's very likely to have originated in a lab leak. It doesn't matter much however since there is no evidence, and any evidence of such will likely be covered up.
Being culpable for a disaster on this scale would be unprecedented in the economic reparations, so much so that we'll likely never find the origins.
Surely they’ve been receiving reports on progress, if so I’m sure there could be a match.
Similarly, I believe there were scientists in India who determined the capsule which deploys the virus into cells looks exactly the same as the HIV mechanism.
> it's very likely to have originated in a lab leak
What evidence is informing this belief? i.e. what is your model for assigning "P>0.5" to the probability here? For example do you think the SARS outbreak circa 2002 was also a lab escape?
Do you feel that I was misquoting you because you don't think of it as a belief as you prefaced it with "IMO", or do you take issue with me translating "very likely" to "P>0.5"? (Or maybe something else?)
I wasn't trying to be confrontational about it, just trying to understand why that's your opinion. In particular I was curious about your "very likely", because my priors are that most infectious diseases are not caused by lab leaks, and that there's no particular evidence of a lab leak here (though as you say plenty of reason to believe such evidence would be suppressed). But it's not my field so I'm not strongly attached to those priors.
I'd certainly agree with the article's premise that the lab theory should not be dismissed out of hand, but I think that's a different conclusion than saying "it's very likely to have originated in a lab leak". My takeaway from the article is "it's possible, but still not very likely", though I suppose I'd give a higher % of probability now than before reading the article.
I think that's how so many conspiracy theories spread. "IMO, I think it's very likely that the moon landings were faked. It doesn't matter since there is no evidence of the fake landings and any evidence of such will likely be covered up, like the way they got scientists to pretend that there are retroreflectors on the moon".
As long as people believe that evidence is covered up, then they can believe anything.
It's easier to believe in a grand conspiracy to make one seem special and part of a tribe than accept the banality, incompetence, chaos, and coincidences of reality.
>Being culpable for a disaster on this scale would be unprecedented in the economic reparations
I duno if that would ever really happen. I think much like a lot of things, concerns about Uyghurs it would just dissolve into the diplomatic and economic seas.
Hypothesis.
Theories have evidence.
This hypothesis has circumstantial evidence that a basic study in RNA molecules, virii, hydrolysis, mutation, protein-mimicry, "trying all keys of a combination lock, getting the right one gives you a direct ticket to an animal cell taking you into it's DNA replication process"
The so-called "Spanish Flu" of 1918 had origins in a migratory bird route over large tracts of pig stockyards, and the workers and nearby army base residents were subsequently infected and subsequently brought it over to Europe at the end of WW1.
Given both points above, shame on USATODAY for giving the time of day to such dangerous speculation while much of the planet chafes under lockdown and is irritable and hating on China anyway... shameful demagoguery. Dismissed.
Wildlife farming was a $70B industry that employed around 2% of China's workforce. There was a short-lived ban in 2003 in response to SARS-CoV-1, which was later rescinded.
New coronavirus pandemics like this aren’t novel. It’s thought many of the boring common cold coronaviruses we don’t think much of started as an outbreak sometime in the past crossing animal-human boundaries
One common cold coronavirus that circulates around had a common ancestor in 1890. Suspiciously timed with the Russian “Flu” pandemic of 1890-1891[1]
(Not that we can just discount the Wuhan lab theory, but a naturally occurring pandemic like this not that weird historically)
New coronavirus pandemics like this are novel. Not because it's a coronavirus, but because of how highly adapted and highly transmissible it has been since it was first "discovered". Other such viral outbreaks in recent decades were not nearly as transmissible
That’s curious. I wonder if the frozen seafood origin hypothesis holds any merit, or if it’s just an attempt by the CCP to divert attention from what seems to be the far more likely lab leak hypothesis... I’m inclined to believe that the CCP is being disingenuous.
Please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN—especially on divisive topics. The guidelines are clear on this, and we ban accounts that break them repeatedly. Given that we've had to warn you half a dozen times now, it's time for you to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this.
My apologies, I was simply trying to make a sarcastic observation regarding the ridiculousness of one of the CCP's bogus explanations for the virus origin.
As someone else who has been unfairly flagged on this thread, I will stand up for jtdev. A quick scan of their profile and posts show they have been here 2-3 years. They have a small number of on topic submissions about CEOs, technologies and science. Their posts are normal enough. There's the obvious theme that they're not in the Woke club though.
The issue isn't how long an account has been on HN or the good posts it makes—it's the bad posts. This shouldn't be hard to understand; it's the same principle by which people who always stop at red lights and are nice to supermarket cashiers still don't get to rob banks.
I think the theory should be dismissed because it's not falseable.
Right now, there is no question that say, the US military has samples of Coronavirus. Not for nefarious reasons mind you, but of course it's of military importance to study a global virus if only to work on vaccines and such.
Even if Coronavirus originated in nature, going forward if there is ever a new outbreak, you technically can't prove it wasn't the US military accidentally messing up can you?
You don't know the characteristics of the strain they're holding, and if it originated in nature then any study of it will show it came from nature.
Likewise you can't prove it wasn't the lab. They could have had samples of it from before, how can you prove the negative of that? It's hard to prove you didn't have access to a given thing.
It's weird that this is such an unpopular concept to some people
If a child insists you have cooties (the fictitious ones, not lice) do you fight them to the bitter end?
You can never prove definitively that you don't since, of course they're not real, and the child gets to define the criteria for having them "oh you can't see cooties with a microscope, only I can!"
It's not about implying the Wuhan lab did release the vaccine, but it's about realizing chasing a conclusion that is not falsible is never going to give you a scientific conclusion.
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Most of the current lab leak theories revolve around:
> But it’s also possible that SARS-CoV-2 evolved naturally in the wild before it was brought into a lab to be studied, only to subsequently escape.
At the end of the day you're saying the one thing you can freely observe indicates it was not man-made, but due to factors you can never observe (with an extremely closed country with a government structure that strongly discourages a mistake like this ever being properly attributed even if there wasn't immense pressure to not have this come out as the case)
Well when it comes to pinning blame on a country for releasing a virus that leads to a pandemic, "if it quacks like a duck" doesn't pass does it?
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Why not spend energy looking at how we went from a virus shutting down a city in mainland China to 500k deaths in the US and all the mistakes made along the way there rather than chasing the equivalent of saying another kid gave us cooties on purpose...
This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world. We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.resea...