Would you immediately jump to conspiracy theories if an outbreak of a novel flu started in Galveston Texas? Or Atlanta? Or Boston?
And that's just some of the BSL-4 facilities in the US. Coronaviruses can be studied in BSL-3 labs, which China has tons of, basically one in every major city (much like the US).
The CCP has ordered the destruction of evidence at those places and imposed gag orders on the scientists involved. Again, just facts, not a conspiracy theory.
The CCP has furthermore suppressed the spread of information on the initial outbreak and has been uncooperative regarding investigation on the origin of the virus. A large amount of the initial cases had no connection to the Wuhan seafood market. Factual.
Note that none of these facts support the conspiracy theory that the virus has been engineered or intentionally released.
Source?
> A large amount of the initial cases had no connection to the Wuhan seafood market. Factual.
But misleading. The article you cite notes the much likelier cause: the long incubation period means that those who did come into contact with the market infected others.
> The CCP has ordered the destruction of evidence at those places and imposed gag orders on the scientists involved.
Correct, but the Wuhan CDC is also where most of the early analysis of covid was being done after it was discovered. The CCP also silenced doctors in hospitals, they generally tried to cover up covid in general. Keeping the scientists working on it silenced isn't any different than how they treated hospital workers.
Let's suppose we had to decide between two scenarios, which one of these two sounds more probable?
A virus endemic to bats from southern China was first transmitted to a researcher working at one of two specialist centers in central China, while performing research on bats and/or bat coronaviruses, under a questionable safety regime.
A virus endemic to bats from southern China was first transmitted to a human in the wildlife market in central China where no bats are sold, presumably through an intermediate host such as a pangolin.
Which of these two scenarios is preferable to the ruling party of China?
Which is feeding the narrative that "human encroachment on nature is dangerous" (bad thing is dangerous), as opposed to "scientific research can be dangerous" (good thing is dangerous)?
> The article you cite notes the much likelier cause: the long incubation period means that those who did come into contact with the market infected others.
How is that more likely? The finding is that there is no epidemiological link to the seafood market in 13 out 41 patients, including the earliest known patient.
Your interpretation is the opposite of what the paragraph regarding the incubation period says:
"Lucey says if the new data are accurate, the first human infections must have occurred in November 2019—if not earlier—because there is an incubation time between infection and symptoms surfacing. If so, 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 virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace,” Lucey asserts."
How likely is it that a virus endemic to bats in southwestern china was first transmitted to humans in a wildlife market in southeastern china where bats are not sold?
Well that's exactly what happened with SARS-1. The disease was passed to humans via civets. And in Wuhan the carrier seems to have been pangolins. Seems completely believable, given that it happened once already.
Patient zero in SARS-1 was a farmer from Guangdong, the same area where the novel coronavirus is suspected to have emerged among bats, where farmers have been found to carry bat coronaviruses. Wuhan is more than 600 miles away from that area.
The initial outbreak of SARS-1 was literally where you would expect it to be, among the population where you would expect it to occur. Civets were suspected as transmitters, but that link is neither proven nor necessary to explain the initial outbreak.
> Seems completely believable, given that it happened once already.
I'm not asking if it is believable. Both scenarios are believable. The "pathogen escapes from lab" scenario happened before as well.
I'm asking, which of these appears more likely?
Which of these would you be more inclined to believe, if you want to be as far away from right wingers as possible? Which scenario caters to your pro-environmental and pro-science stance?
Correct.
> the same area where the novel coronavirus is suspected to have emerged among bats,
Incorrect, that's Yunnan.
> where farmers have been found to carry bat coronaviruses.
Yunnan.
> Wuhan is more than 600 miles away from that area.
I suggest you go find Yunnan, Guangdong and Hubei on a map.
Bat caves in Yunnan are full of potentially dangerous coronaviruses, but the farmers living close to the caves are already immune to the strains they're in frequent contact with, so the only way for an outbreak to get big is by long-distance transportation carrying the virus somewhere else.
"Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...
> Bat caves in Yunnan are full of potentially dangerous coronaviruses, but the farmers living close to the caves are already immune to the strains they're in frequent contact with...
They're not going to be immune to newly evolved coronaviruses.
>... so the only way for an outbreak to get big is by long-distance transportation carrying the virus somewhere else.
All it needs is for someone who is infected to travel to the nearest population center.
SARS-CoV-1 was also found in civets in Guangdong sold at a wildlife market. It is unknown whether the first human transmission went through civets or through bats, but the local civets probably didn't take a trip to Yunnan to get infected.
Either way, it doesn't make a difference whether it is Yunnan, Guangxi or Guangdong, those are the areas where these bats live and where you would expect a human transmission to occur.
You wouldn't expect it to occur in Wuhan. That's not my personal assessment, that's the assessment of the virologist that personally led the expedition to that Yunnan cave - I quoted her in my previous reply.
Actually my understanding is that that is, in general, the scientific consensus on the matter (including from the scientist you quoted in your prior reply)
> or that it first spread to humans in the region - who then somehow carried it to Guangdong
Correct, this is unlikely. The leading theories are that an intermediate animal, like a civet for CoV-1 and perhaps pangolins for CoV-2 were the infection vector.
> Either way, it doesn't make a difference whether it is Yunnan, Guangxi or Guangdong,
Well yes, yes it does. Guangdong and Wuhan are similarly distant from Yunnan. If, as the consensus appears to be, the virus started out in Yunnan, traveling to Wuhan via an animal intermediary is no less likely than traveling to Guangdong via an animal intermediary.
> You wouldn't expect it to occur in Wuhan.
I made no such claim. I made the claim that the transmission vector for Cov-1 and cov-2 were similar. That they both started in Yunnan and travelled east hundreds of miles via some method, likely a combination of bat migration/movement, civet/pangolin migration/movement, and human movement of captured animals.
If you read the updated article, you'd find that she no longer believes the virus could have leaked from her lab, since
> its genetic sequence does not match any her lab had previously studied.[0]
Of course, she could be pressured into silence by the Chinese government.
[0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...
That is not my understanding, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, given a statement of hers to that effect.
> Guangdong and Wuhan are similarly distant from Yunnan
Yes, but Guangdong and Yunnan are bat country, unlike Wuhan.
Could it have spread through other wildlife? Yes. I'm not ruling that out at all, I never have. I'm pointing out that somehow the dominant narrative is the one that appears relatively unlikely even in the assessment of a leading expert.
> I made the claim that the transmission vector for Cov-1 and cov-2 were similar. That they both started in Yunnan and travelled east hundreds of miles via some method, likely a combination of bat migration/movement, civet/pangolin migration/movement, and human movement of captured animals.
As a reminder, this is your original claim:
"Bat caves in Yunnan are full of potentially dangerous coronaviruses, but the farmers living close to the caves are already immune to the strains they're in frequent contact with, so the only way for an outbreak to get big is by long-distance transportation carrying the virus somewhere else."
> If you read the updated article, you'd find that she no longer believes the virus could have leaked from her lab
It may well be true that it didn't come from her lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is several miles away from the seafood market.
However, the Wuhan CDC is right next to the seafood market and they performed experiments with hundreds of live bats there[1]. A likely vector could've been improperly disposed lab garbage.
[1] https://img-prod.tgcom24.mediaset.it/images/2020/02/16/11472...
As for the claim that the Wuhan cdc is tight next to the seafood market, I direct you to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23096524 which thoroughly and completely debunks those claims.
Indeed, I oversaw that it was "yorwba" who put that comment into "our" thread, not you. My apologies.
> As for the claim that the Wuhan cdc is tight next to the seafood market, I direct you to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23096524 which thoroughly and completely debunks those claims.
That's not a "thorough and complete" debunking, that's an erroneous assessment regarding the functions and location(s) of the Wuhan CDC, based on a cursory glance at websites.
A little bit more research would've revealed that the Wuhan CDC indeed was performing experiments on bats and that it has several facilities (including one near the seafood market).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovnUyTRMERI&feature=youtu.be...
https://map.baidu.com/poi/%E6%AD%A6%E6%B1%89%E5%B8%82%E7%96%...
1. There is a WHCDC facility at the location claimed, close to the seafood market
2. There was research on bats at the WHCDC
In other words, the person who "thoroughly debunked" the paper just didn't have a clue where to look.
I'm getting tired discussing this. The "lab escape hypothesis" is not a debunked conspiracy theory. It's a plausible scenario. Pathogens - including SARS-CoV-1 - have escaped from labs several times.
The wildlife market transmission is a plausible scenario as well, it just seems "out of place" in Wuhan. That doesn't mean it's wrong, of course.
First of all, they conducted experiments with deactivated samples of bat coronaviruses, not with live virus or with bats.
Second of all, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a world-class BSL-4 lab. They do not operate under "unsafe conditions."
> native to southern China, not Wuhan
A couple of things:
1. It is widely suspected that there was an intermediate host species between bats and humans, just as was the case in the last two major coronavirus outbreaks, SARS and MERS.
2. Nobody knows where, exactly, the virus first spilled over into the human population. Wuhan is just the first place where it was detected. A virus like this can spread for quite a while, particularly in the middle of flu season, before it is detected. There's nothing to say it didn't emerge in some rural village in Yunnan first.
> A large amount of the initial cases had no connection to the Wuhan seafood market. Factual.
With human-to-human transmission, this is entirely consistent with the first outbreak (or super-spreading event) occurring at the market.
> The CCP has ordered the destruction of evidence at those places
Did the CCP order that, or did the Chinese government order that? I've noticed a trend in which people who make extremely anti-China posts refer repeatedly to the "CCP." I strongly suspect that these people are just using that terminology for the shock value.
Beyond that, the news report (from Caixin) that I believe is the origin of your claim about destruction of evidence says that after the virus was identified, low-security Chinese labs were ordered to either transfer their samples to high-security labs or to destroy them. I recall this being a safety measure, in other words, though you could ascribe other motives if you wanted to.
Like I said, if a novel flu-like virus appeared in Atlanta, would your first guess be that it leaked from the CDC facility? That's what you're faced with, not smallpox.
If a new flu virus, quite more virulent that the usual flu, popped up in Atlanta 10 miles from the BSL4 facility and the closest known relative is endemic in polar bears, yeah, I'd be asking questions. Both about BSL4 and about the zoo. And maybe there are private citizens raising polar bears in Atlanta. I'd ask about them too. Especially if it were already known that polar bear viruses can be quite dangerous, see SARS episode 1.
But then again, these discussions are by now futile. It is obvious that the conversation has been politicized. One side will try its best to dismiss and discredit the slightest mention that there was ongoing bat coronavirus research in Wuhan, including WTF moments like creating chimera viruses for the specific purpose of infecting humans. The other will overhype all the scary innuendo that can possibly be created around WIV, whether it relates even remotely to SARS-CoV-2 or not.
I don't have the energy to elaborate the full decision tree in every post. Have fun!
Couple more points:
* Asking questions is a legitimate activity, even if the answer turns out to be negative. It's the fundamental mechanism for truth finding. I'm appalled, but not surprised, at the aggressive censorship strain that is spreading like wildfire in our society. Not only some people know all the correct answers, they know all the correct questions as well.
* Think hard about the wisdom of proliferating BSL4 centers in the middle of population centers of the size of NYC. That single fact is a scandal in itself.
Yes, but "just asking questions"[0] is also a rhetorical trick common enough to have a name, especially when the questions are leading, as some of yours are. That isn't to say that you're intentionally being nefarious, but hiding behind "I'm just asking questions" doesn't absolve one of responsibility for applying their own logical thinking.
> To the best of my knowledge, they do not naturally occur anywhere near Wuhan.
As I mentioned elsewhere, this is exactly the same story as with SARS-CoV-1. Bats from Yunnan are the source of a virus first found in humans in Guangdong, around 1000 miles away. So we have literally the exact same thing happening, in essentially the same area, in modern times. Given that, I have a question for you:
Which is more likely: that SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 had essentially the same transmission path, or that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a government lab, but as far as we know, none of the early infections were related to said lab, meaning that it would have had to spread into the community without any of the lab employees getting infected (this reduces the reasonable escape paths significantly)
> * Think hard about the wisdom of proliferating BSL4 centers in the middle of population centers of the size of NYC. That single fact is a scandal in itself.
Yeah, I'm not seeing the issue here. We stick nuclear reactors in population centers, and I'm unaware of any known leaks from BSL-4 labs anywhere ever, so they have a better track record.
The wisdom, by the way, is that you need researchers and infra to support BSL-4 labs. You can't stick them out in the middle of nowhere, they usually need things like attached universities.
Your turn.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23072574
> As of your first point, there may be another natural virus, as of yet unidentified, possibly carried by a different species, that brought the disease to Wuhan. From the virologist chatter I hear, the genetic difference between RaTG13 is too large to have RaTG13 a recent direct precursor of SARS-CoV-2, either through genetic manipulation, or via culturing.