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Comment by DevX101 | Hacker News Reader

I'm bordering on conspiracy theory territory here, but I'd also like an real investigation into whether the virus actually originated from the Wuhan Biosafety Laboratory. It's the only level 4 (BSL-4 highest rating) lab in all of China designated to handle the most dangerous pathogens. And it's located 20 miles from the reported epicenter in the wildlife market. It was first opened two years ago and at the time multiple scientists worried that the lack of an open culture could lead to potential security problems.

Was there some breach in containment security? Were experimented animals not disposed of properly? We don't know.

There might be nothing here, but it's a hell of a coincidence and if there's some broader security problem, it should be acknowledged and fixed.

Background on the lab: https://www.nature.com/news/inside-the-chinese-lab-poised-to...

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This seems rather unlikely. We have the genome sequence of the Wuhan seafood market coronavirus, and it's consistent with it being a so far unknown relative of the SARS virus and other coronaviruses (see my other comment where I have posted links to the sequence alignments).

So did the Wuhan BSL-4 lab virologists discover a new relative of the SARS virus, study it in their lab, didn't publish it, then accidentally set it free? Sounds substantially less likely to me than people coming in contact with it while handling bush meat. That happens all the time, unfortunately ...

Does that contradict the idea that a similar virus was found and then modifed in the lab?

So...the Wuhan scientists are modifying viruses in their BSL-4 lab (which is no joke when it comes to safety standards) and then just letting these things escape? Sorry, that’s very far fetched. Why can’t people accept that a virus like this could evolve naturally?

Its more likely to be accidentally released like by a worker with stuff on them as has happened previous times with SARs etc in similar viral lab in China ( and happened in other cases and countries including the UK) than intentionally released.

But it's also a hundred times more likely that the source is nature. However we should not discount the possiblity that viruses get out by accident as it's not uncommon even with top bio safety labs.

Define "naturally"

Without human intention: yes.

Without repeated patterns of humans activity: no.

If meat agriculture, and meat-eating in general, were almost nonexistent, the risks of evolving a pandemic would be several orders-of-magnitude lower than exist today.

> >The former Israeli military intelligence doctor also said suspicions were raised about the Wuhan Institute of Virology when a group of Chinese virologists working in Canada improperly sent samples to China of what he said were some of the deadliest viruses on earth, including the Ebola virus.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/24/virus-hit-w...

Why is Canada sending Ebola to China?

a group of Chinese virologists working in Canada

So the question is what sort of controls are in place vs what sort of controls should be in place. It isn't Canada sending the samples, it's Canada not preventing them from being sent.

By all accounts all procedures were followed, beyond that apparently some intellectual property protections weren't.

China studies major viruses too. They are a party to the research. That part isn't so insidious.

I think it's a perfectly valid question, although the wildlife market is equally valid on the evidence we have. We know that the Chinese Government is hugely overreacting to public information at this point in time - terrible as the published numbers are they are not that out of whack with a normal bad flu epidemic, which also causes significantly higher death rates.

So it's either the actual death rates are higher (well, almost certainly), and/or they know or suspect something more serious.

Bearing in mind too, that even China doesn't trust China on reporting - witness the central committee order a few days ago to the regions to be accurate with reports or else.

We know that the Chinese Government is hugely overreacting

Do we know that? All of the criticism I've seen has been of the government under-reacting. In fact, in a speech yesterday Xi told the local authorities that they weren't doing enough.

Non-Chinese estimates (as of 24 January) are that there's 6,000 people infected vs. 1,300 from the Chinese government.

The 6,000 figure comes from the Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems at Northeastern University in Boston: https://www.mobs-lab.org/2019ncov.html

It seems like the local government under-reacted, and now the central government is (hopefully) over-reacting.

It seems like they are reacting too late, and under-reporting.

It seems like they are reacting just in time.

“that even China doesn't trust China on reporting”

Will the federal gov just trust the state gov, especially when the it's a republican president versus a democrat governor? Of course not. That kind of overly abstract wording is what lead to misunderstanding of actual problems.

> I'm bordering on conspiracy theory territory here

Yes.

All of the initial cases are people who have been to a specific seafood market, which also sells wild animals.

You would be suggesting that somehow Biosafety Laboratory dropped it's virus specifically in that market, which sold animals known to naturally carry the coronavirus.

I call bs based on principal: Simple explanation is almost always right over complex ones.

Points of view ... for me the simplest explanation seems to be one linked to the other.

The good news is that we are rational and able to find explanations based on evidence. Let's see what comes out in a few weeks.

"No link with seafood market in first case of China coronavirus, Chinese scientists revealed"

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3047646/no-l...

> Simple explanation is almost always right over complex ones.

What's more likely?

An amazing coincidence:

  - The origin of this novel disease is 20 miles from a research lab.
  - The research lab is actively studying zoonotic viruses.
  - The genome suggests a ~10 years lineage from the closest bat coronavirus (96% identical). This strain of Bat coronavirus has gone under the radar for that long?
  - Despite the numerous mutations it has the exact same envelope protein to that closest bat coronavirus. This is extremely unusual even for closely related viruses.
  - China is 'overreacting': has quarantined 50 million people, stationed armed guards in hazmat suits and is scrambling to build overflow hospitals.

Someone responsible for disposing of test animals (bats) decided instead to make a quick buck selling them to a market 20 miles down the street?

To be fair, it might have been first identified there because there was a lab equipped to isolate it, but I don't really know. I mean, China has had a problem with things like fake eggs, so who knows?

Its DNA seems to have been sequenced and made available online. If it's anything that has obviously been tampered with by a lab, I expect someone to point that out sooner or later. That said, I have no idea what sort of thing could be detected in the first place.

Fake eggs are known to cost more than real eggs. Much like fake meat today. Where do you get that information?

I saw it long ago so I'm not sure, but it was probably from this:

https://www.chinasmack.com/shanghainese-netizen-finds-fake-c...

Also from Nature (2017):

"Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus — and suggests new outbreak could occur"

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9

(Wuhan lab apparently carried out the research)

You forget thise one : https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...

The original paper is provided by virologists researchers and two of them are from Wuhan Biosafety Lab (Zhengli-Li Shi & Xing-Yi Ge)

This paper claims that their "work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations," which is opposing the theory that the virus originated from Wuhan Biosafety Laboratory.

>and suggests new outbreak could occur

An outbreak caused _by bats_, which is opposed to GP's theroy.

The odds of this naturally occurring in China are probably close to 1 in 4. And the odds of it happening in Wuhan are probably close to 3%.

The odds of the Chinese government making a super virus based on Coronavirus seem smaller than that, and the odds of it escaping the laboratory might be decent, but when you combine them, it's pretty slim.

If this were some super strain of Smallpox, that would make a more convincing conspiracy.

The odds of there being some plausible conspiracy by now are high.

> The odds of the Chinese government making a super virus based on Coronavirus seem smaller than that, and the odds of it escaping the laboratory might be decent, but when you combine them, it's pretty slim.

I don't think anyone is arguing that this is an outbreak of an unusually dangerous virus. It's just an unexpected outbreak of a new flu-levels-of-dangerous virus, and it happened suspiciously close to a BSL-4 facility. A facility like that stores dangerous viruses and works on them, it's not at all implausible somebody fucked up and something escaped containment.

It’s funny because bats (and bat caves) are reservoirs of many viruses contained in BSL-4 facilities and they have no containment and frequently come into human contact.

I didn't even realize that until now.

>I don't think anyone is arguing that this is an outbreak of an unusually dangerous virus.

It's not unusually dangerous. Viruses kill lots and lots of people every year. This one doesn't seem to be more dangerous than any other. It's just new.

> it happened suspiciously close to a BSL-4 facility

This facility is more likely placed because of opportunity for study in a high risk area. The consumption of random "sweet jungle meat" at the local markets likely has a legacy notoriety for such outbreaks.

I really hope nobody is working on the (insanely irrational) idea of creating a super virus. There's no way in hell you could use that as a weapon of war because there's no way you could ensure it doesn't leave the target country. And even the act of trying to make one is insanely dangerous; if it accidentally gets out, which is easily possible, now you're killing all your own people.

I want to say that all government see the logic of this and haven't so much as attempted it. I don't think China would be this foolish.

There are powers definitely working on it. "Super" just doesn't mean "kills as much people as efficiently as possible". Ability to control the destruction is a crucial feature of any weapon. In the past, this perhaps meant viruses that fizzle out quickly, so they could be deployed on enemy territory. Today, with recent breakthroughs in genetic engineering, that likely means aiming for high selectivity - targeting ethnicity or lineage.

Ultimately, people will be working on it no matter what, because bioweapons are to molecular biology as nuclear weapons are to nuclear physics. A crude and violent application of a field of knowledge of vital, cross-cutting importance to many areas of life.

Do you have a source about people working on it?

Or is this a blacks op kind of thing so no one would admit to it publicly anyway, thus making it an unfalsifiable statement?

I don't have a source per se, just somewhat high level of confidence based on the following (weak, circumstantial) evidence:

- There was a lot of bioweapons R&D done in the XX century[0]; it all seems to have been abandoned between the 70s and the 90s, but since the desire for it is not gone, it would be atypical for humanity if it really all ended;

- Biological sciences keep progressing; each year, developing bioweapons is easier than it was the year before, and since our control over biological systems grow, so (I believe) the allure of a controlled bioweapon.

- You have people like John Sotos - Intel's Chief Medical Officer and a colonel in the Air National Guard - delivering talks like [1], going all serious about the threat of future bioweapons. He seems to think that this is a real danger.

- My general tried and true heuristic that if something is within realms of technological feasibility and promises a clear economic or political benefit, it will be attempted, no matter how horrible it is.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_warfare#List_of_BW_...

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY

This is a good question. The answer is pretty definitive, that yes, this is a thing that superpowers have been confirmed to do in the past. There's much less to go on about current work, but we can look at the type of specialized equipment that is getting built or purchased by various nations and make inferences, and trust that intelligence agencies are making substantiated conclusions. To excerpt from a Congressional Research Service report[0] in 2008:

"No nation publicly acknowledges either an offensive biological weapons (BW) program or stockpile. Examination of unclassified sources indicates that several nations are considered, with varying degrees of certainty, to have some BW capability. These are: China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and Taiwan."

The most data exists on the Soviet Union. Defectors from the soviet union had a lot to say about Biopreparat.[1] Not all of the rumors have been substantiated, but they did have a number of incidents that strongly suggest they had the souped up versions of several agents defectors claimed they did like anthrax[2], smallpox[3] and marburg[4]. In particular, the smallpox incident[3] that occurred had a high percentage of cases that progressed to the hemorrhagic form which indicates unusual virility in the strain.

There is also evidence of at least ongoing research on those agents. One researcher at vector died in 2004 from pricking herself with a needle filled with Ebola[5]. Whether that's offensive in nature is very difficult to determine. However there's definitely some transparency issues that have increased with time at this facility after a change in leadership in ~2004 or 2005.

[0] http://usiraq.procon.org/sourcefiles/CRS_2-20-08.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopreparat

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_smallpox_incident

[4] Placeholder. Having a hard time finding where the info on Dr. Ustinov came from. This might be worth a read: https://weaponews.com/history/65348565-strain-u-the-tragedy-...

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/25/world/russian-scientist-d...

Most subject matter experts seem pretty convinced this is happening.

> Lab-made coronavirus related to SARS can infect human cells.

https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...

Two of the researchers are from Wuhan Biosafety Lab (Zhengli-Li Shi & Xing-Yi Ge).

"Did China Steal Coronavirus From Canada And Weaponize It?"

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/did-china-steal-coron...

From the article:

"In March 2019 ... a shipment of exceptionally virulent viruses from Canada’s NML ended up in China. The event caused a major scandal with Bio-warfare experts questioning why Canada was sending lethal viruses to China. Scientists from NML said the highly lethal viruses were a potential bio-weapon.

Following investigation, the incident was traced to Chinese agents working at NML. Four months later in July 2019, a group of Chinese virologists were forcibly dispatched from the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory (NML). The NML is Canada’s only level-4 facility and one of only a few in North America equipped to handle the world’s deadliest diseases, including Ebola, SARS, Coronavirus, etc."

If your population is largely inoculated, which you can do secretly by spiking "flu shots" and having a high %age of cooperation in getting said shots, then you can use those viruses as weapons without threatening your own people.

if some genius decided using mustard gas was a good idea, some "genius" somewhere probably decided using bio-chemical super virus is also a good idea.

Actually scientists are working on super viruses, it's called gain of function.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08837-7

China has had wet markets since forever basically, how often do outbreaks of this magnitude occur in other such markets in other cities without those kind of labs. If this was a regular occurrence it might not be significant.

> Were experimented animals not disposed of properly?

It's not inconceivable that a few of them ended up in the wildlife market. Great way for some low-level person in the lab to make a few bucks, and according to many people I know who have spent time in China the culture of "anything for a few bucks" is even more potent than it is in the USA.

I'm sure Chinese authorities are examining this possibility, but they would never talk about it as it would be embarrassing. If anyone is found to have done this they will be in deep 船尾.

It has already happened multiple times in the past, four times in Beijing alone: https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-lab...

I dont know how much is conspiracy theory at this point, but it was said that they had small sars outbreak there before.

Take this with a grain of salt, copied from reddit:

Read this website:

http://virological.org/

Specifically this one:

http://virological.org/t/ncovs-relationship-to-bat-coronavir...

and this one:

http://virological.org/t/missed-orfs-in-ncov/345

Basically

Wuhan virus is essentially SARs

http://virological.org/t/missed-orfs-in-ncov/345

"Anyone notice two ‘accessory’ ORFs not annotated in nCoV? Orf13 (aka 9b) (28284:28577) and Orf14 (28734:28955) . One is ~ 70% ID and other ~ 90% to syntenous ORFs in BAT SARS 2017 ?"

Translation:

Some very specific parts of the genome are matching almost exactly, which only occurs in almost identical viruses. The ORFs are tagged parts of genes, this researcher is discussing how Chinese researchers "omitted" parts of their gene annotation. Some back story is the gene sequences have been shared openly so they can be studied, Chinese messed with how they annotated the sequences.

To understand this better, here is the wikipedia definition of 'accessory gene' (ORF is just a chunk of the gene):

"The variable or accessory genome (also: flexible, dispensable genome) refers to genes not present in all strains of a species. These include genes present in two or more strains or even genes unique to a single strain only, for example, genes for strain specific adaptation such as antibiotic resistance."

The researcher is saying specific strain markers are matching between the 2017 virus and this one. Which is impossible, unless...

Not only that, its extremely similar to a SARs taken from bats in 2017! The comment on this linked thread is from a Harvard researcher, she is hinting at a biological link to a lab strain. This virus escaped from Wuhan lab

Another hint from another researcher

The comment on this page from Kristian G. Andersen is mildly disturbing (http://archive.is/O1vhN)... As Associate Professor, Scripps Research, Director of Infectious Disease Genomics, SRTI etc etc I assume he knows what he's talking about when he states: "That means that the outbreak was detected almost immediately after the first case, which - given that this is flu season in China - is just amazing. Detecting an outbreak of pneumonia (similar to flu) of a novel coronavirus that fast is truly impressive."

Basically they are saying its weird to have found this to be a novel virus so fast. Its so uncommon, how could they have done this? Its an oddity

Washington Times article

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/24/virus-hit-w...

UPDATE

More evidence this virus came from a lab!!!!

Read through this Harvard biologists twitter:

https://twitter.com/AndyBiotech/status/1220377043210317831

Specifically:

"Even has almost identical accessory genes to 2018 bat ‘SARS’ (not all in new database annotations)"

Shes saying this virus has already been seen and is logged in a database!

What is this trying to say? It has been clear that the virus is SARS-like since the analysis published by the Shanghai team: http://engine.scichina.com/publisher/scp/journal/SCLS/doi/10...

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