Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it
rootclaim.com
rootclaim.com
> Pangolins and bats don't usually cohabitate, making this somewhat unlikely in nature.
Horseshoe bats are nocturnal animals that roost in caves during the day but sometimes practice perch feeding at night [1]:
> The other strategy is known as perch feeding: Individuals roost on feeding perches and wait for prey to fly past, then fly out to capture it.
Pangolins [2] and palm civets [3] are nocturnal and arboreal. The bat viral RNA sequences come from anal swabs of netted animals so they are primarily gastrointestinal infections. All of these animals are found in the Lancang/Mekong [4] catch basin. Bat guano seems like a good vector for the virus.
Gain-of-function experiments require two viral isolates that recombine during passage. The lab theory assumes that the RNA sequence of the original viral isolates were never shared. I find this scenario unlikely but I am open to changing my mind based on evidence. SARS-1 is evidence of a very similar zoonotic scenario.
Humans that encounter bat guano in this region also seem like a good host for a recombination event.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_bat#Diet_and_foragin...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangolin#Behavior
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_palm_civet#Feeding_and_d...
So are you proposing that a pangolin from Lancang was transported more than 2000km to a seafood wetmarket in Wuhan?
At face value, this sounds like a very unlikely scenario for a zoonotic event/origin.
[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/04/coronavir...
Assuming a zoonotic origin in China, it's much more likely that an infected individual from rural Southern China happened to travel to Wuhan and that the seafood market just happened to be the kind of location where such a virus would spread. There is some evidence that there is a degree of immunity to COVID-19 in areas that had SARS-outbreaks. It would therefore be plausible that an initial COVID-19 outbreak in Southern China, the epicenter of SARS1, could have gone unnoticed.
The actual animals sold at the market would then be irrelevant, but there's a narrative that "animal cruelty and human encroachment are to blame for COVID" that is being pushed here.
(1): I probably should use "unidentified", it was noticed that there was a unusual spike in pneumonia related death. It was just not linked to a "new" virus.
Likewise, Italy contained the virus from May to September, then it exploded again. Nothing particularly happened in September, yet by chance it spiked.
Just speculating though, I’d like to hear others’ opinion on this thought.
There is no direct air flight from Italy to Wuhan without going through Amsterdam Schipol or Beijing. There are no Shipping ports in inland Wuhan.
Do you truly believe it is a realistic scenario that a virus this infectious could traverse from northern Italy to Wuhan, Hubei, without creating multiple infection hotspots along the way?
If I am to put on my tinfoil hat this is exactly the sort of disinformation I would expect from CCP propaganda in order to fight US politician memes of the "China Virus".
Assuming that Wuhan is the Orginal point of infection and there not being any previous infections spreading it to some parts of china including (or mainly) Wuhan is the actual extraordinary claim.
> There is no direct ...
Doesn't matter people travel. My sister had during that time a roommate from China from a large city without any direct flights or port or similar if that would have been Wuhan here bringing the virus to Germany before any travel restrictions started would have been well in the area of possibitly (and no joke as far as I remember it actually was Wuhan but I'm not fully sure about and no Virus was transmitted in this case it's just an example that the argument why virus transmittance is unlikely is IMHO not making much sense)
EDIT:
> without creating multiple infection hotspots along the way?
1. There where other hotspots then Wuhan.
2. Detection and reporting of SARS-Cov-2 was initially not very responsive.
3. Look at how SARS-Cov-1 spread.
4. You just need a exchange student from Wuhan to Italy.
Could we also stop dropping "CCP propaganda" everytime someone writes something others disagree with?
What facts support a European source for SARS-Cov2, that then stealthily traversed two continents, to then super spread in Wuhan, Hubei?
Now, I believe that the claim about Italy was a bit tongue in cheek but at the same time it is reasonable based on facts and should be thought provoking:
We now know that there were cases of Covid-19 in Italy and France, and perhaps US iirc, at the same time, and perhaps before, the outbreak around that market in Wuhan, as early as November. (So, yes the virus did stealthily traverse continents, by the way)
Now, based on that why would the origin necessarily be Wuhan? Logically, the earlier the cases the closer they are from origin.
The origin of infectious diseases is always tricky to establish. After years we're still not sure about the origin of MERS and possibly SARS. It took decades to pinpoint that HIV appeared in the 1920s, almost 60 years before it can to the world's attention.
While it is still most likely that Covid-19 arose in China we do not know where and when.
Can you provide a peer-reviewed source that documents this timeline, you claim "established facts" but to my knowledge there aren't any?
> While it is still most likely that Covid-19 arose in China we do not know where and when.
On that we can both agree.
In Italy people were contaminated even earlier than that, apparently [4].
These are not wholly surprising because, again it is likely that the virus had been circulating for some time in humans before it exploded and was detected. It is quite contagious but many people do not experience any symptoms or only mild, common symptoms, which IMO makes it relatively easy to go undetected until it goes out out of hands, as it did in Wuhan first.
It's good to ask for proof but then you should ask for proof of all claims, not only the ones you do not like.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52526554
[2] https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-report...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/new-evidence-race-find-fr...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-...
> His previous experience has shown that such antibody tests for the coronavirus' RBD can create a lot of false positives, Rutherford told Live Science. And because this is "such an unexpected finding," it should be confirmed with other antibody tests such as those that look for antibodies against another one of the coronavirus' proteins, an outer coat called a "nucleocapsid," which is also unique to the novel coronavirus, he said.
> Still, "it's not totally outside the realm of possibility," that the virus circulated in Italy earlier than thought. because there is a lot of travel back and forth between China and Italy, especially northern Italy, he said. But considering the earliest COVID-19 case in Wuhan was reported to be in November, "it really gives me pause to say let's really make sure we got this right before we try and explain it," Rutherford said. [0]
[0] https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-circulating-italy-ea...
I'm puzzled by your attitude and unclear about your aim but you do what you want.
Seems like you are trying to ridicule me just because you disagree with me.
'Wuhan Institute of Virology' (China's only BSL4 lab) is less than 14km from 'Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market'.
The 'Wuhan Centre for Disease Prevention & Control' is 1.4 km from the 'Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market'.
Both are public institutions with published research on both virus classification and gain of function experiments.
This is circunstancial evidence. Unlike the previous origin investigation for SARS-Cov1, there has been little transparence or effort to investigate the origin of SARS-Cov2.
Let's agree to disagree. If indeed the origin is a Southern China zoonotic event, which then happened to have a superspreader event in Wuhan, then it is in the interest of the Chinese government to investigate this and disclose this evidence to dissolve international doubts and concerns.
In France; December 2019: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7196402/
No, we can't drop "CCP propaganda" fact. Man, they put DOCTORS doing their job to prisons ! Actually we shoud be more concerned about such idiocy ! Where is logic in that ? Looks more like mentality from few hundreds years ago reborn in autocratic country. Communists usually give orders for achievements :>
But yes, as you pointed, not everything is "CCP propaganda" and such meme is often trown in unresponsible way.
And yes, pointing earlier cases in Europe is good to know too. But in Europe there was cases (x-rays photos, can't find info about dead cases) in September / November but in China there was EPIDEMY in early November. Still, all that is not a proof about origin of patient zero. And Wuhan could be it.
Sure - I'm not quite sure what the issue is.
A single person X becomes infected mid-week in Europe. Monday they leave for China. The next Thursday, they have a business meeting in China where they are symptomatic but have suppressed obvious symptoms with OTC cold medication - who wouldn't if you flew thousands of miles for a meeting?
A dozen people sit in a room in Wuhan with some infected person for several hours.
---
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
An "extraordinary claim" is along the lines of UFOs, ghosts and goblins.
There are hundreds of millions of international passengers a year. That an unknown infectious disease could travel from Europe to Asia undetected is hardly an "extraordinary claim".
Pending any hard evidence at all, it can only be described as a hypothesis.
> Shi’s team used the antibody test to narrow down the list of locations and bat species to pursue in the quest for genomic clues. After roaming mountainous terrain in most of China’s dozens of provinces, the researchers turned their attention to one spot: Shitou Cave, on the outskirts of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, where they conducted intense sampling during different seasons over five consecutive years.
Distance from Kumming to Wuhan: 1,566 km [2].
Distance from Kumming to Foshan (SARS-1): 1,315 km [3].
I am saying that horseshoe bats, pangolins, palm civets, and humans overlap in Yunnan province and along the Langcang/Mekong. This is the most likely ground zero for a natural recombination event. When and how the first SARS-CoV-2 virus made its way to Wuhan is a separate question; I'd think a human on a train is the most likely vector.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Wuhan,+Hubei,+China/Kunming,...
[3] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Foshan,+Guangdong+Province,+...
"In May 2020, George Gao, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said animal samples collected from the seafood market had tested negative for the virus, indicating that the market was the site of an early superspreading event, but it was not the site of the initial outbreak.[43]"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-rules-out-animal-market-a...
I can't find references now but the idea that the virus started in Wuhan roughly early November and that the Huanan market was just a notable superspreading event which brought attention to the virus is pretty accepted in scientific circles. The virus was too well adpated to humans initially and has not evolved significantly since its first detection then (D614G and the new variants aside).
The animals that carried the virus in the Huanan market were probably just an infected human, and not particularly close to the origin case.
It was just detected there because it was a superspreading event that happened in the backyard of the nearby lab.
The most plausible explanation I've heard as an origin is that it jumped from bat to human in the process of bat guano farming. This would have obviously happened in the rural area outside of Wuhan, but the virus found its way through spreading events into the higher density city, where it was eventually detected. Cryptic spread would have been happening for at least a month or more as it adapted to humans.
The furin cleavage site may also be the result of a recombination event between two coronaviruses (coronaviruses don't just mutation and reassortment like influenza, they also recombine and dual infection with two coronaviruses in an animal or human can shuffle parts of genes):
https://jvi.asm.org/content/84/7/3134?ijkey=b8e66cb01995eeb4...
So if you just assume that trajectory from bat guano farming to city center, along with a missing link to provide the furin cleavage site, then the title articles analysis really falls apart. Not surprising that the bats are far away, the furin cleavage site may be not surprising if we manage to find a similar virus in nature, and mostly what is left is that it wasn't detected until it was right on the doorstep of the virology lab (where the virus found the people who were likely to set off the alarm about it) and the rest some mild cover-your-ass at the lab would be entirely expected.
But that means that there's some bats with answers somewhere outside of Wuhan but China has been stalling efforts to go find them.
The often believed but not proven
>"start of this pandemic was in 'Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market' in Wuhan."
To:
> It was produced in a Lab.
Is IMHO a fully unreasonable jump of conclusions. Given that analysis in the recent year showed that the virus spread much earlier and initially undetected to the EU it is quite feasible that the epidemic in China started earlier and potential in different places then Wuhan.
Also one big point ignored is both pangolin and bat are captured (sometimes alive) and kept/transported potentially close together. So even if there is a natural place where they would interact there are "unnatural" places created by the nature of the (not just seafood) marked in Wuhan...
Bats can easily come in close contacts with people and cattle even when they are not actively hunted.
You also make a good point that we're discovering very early cases in the EU and US, which show that this all started earlier than the explosion in Wuhan.
I seem to recall reading articles suggesting that the jump to humans may have occurred more than a year before Wuhan.
My question is, why? What does it matter whether the virus originated from a lab or from a wet market - it isn't any more dangerous if it came from a lab, nor does knowing the origin really help dealing with this crisis at all.
It is certainly interesting to know where it did originate, and that knowledge could inform a debate on the future of (respectively) wet markets and animal husbandry practices, or BSL facilities, but these don't strike me as particularly emotionally charged topics, and in any case the posts I'm referring to don't mention these debates...
Anybody care to explain why you would respond so strongly to claims of lab origin?
idk I'm just an outsider
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug
here is an essay written by his guest:
https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
It probably just is my quirk, does anyone else share this gut feeling?
The reason is that if you have a less widely accepted opinion and someone states it and you can add additional info to it which makes it "stronger" you are likely to do so.
Which still doesn't mean I believe it. As far as I know the scientific majority believe is that the virus doesn't show any indication of potential human manipulation and is very unlikely to be human made assuming China isn't years ahead wrt. virus manipulation (which doesn't mean it doesn't escaped from a lab, btw.).
But as I'm not to much involved in this I would need hours to collect sources and trace them back to their original source to provide any useful links. So no credibility to this post.
This is a whole other ball game if it's malice/incompetence.
America destroyed Iraq on lies, but what has that liability cost them?
The only action China could do would be to start a world war 3 in response.
That being said, I tend to agree with your assertion.
There is also no need to ban such markets, but to further regulate what and how things can be sold is reasonable.
One problem often ignored is that because of differences in general wealth it's e.g. not always/every where feasible to require selling only pre-processed (cut apart) meat (and other body parts) as the necessary fridge infrastructure doesn't exist and would be to expansive.
"Wet market" just distinguishes from "dry market" where durable goods like electronics are sold.
China never banned wet markets, which makes about as much sense as saying someone has "banned supermarkets". They banned the sale of certain items at wet markets.
(I live in Asia and shop at a wet market multiple times a week.)
Factory farming of eg, chickens and pigs has previously led to avian and swine flu outbreaks, so there's strict monitoring of viruses around those farm monocultures. But in the wet markets of Asia there's often multiple species together that would rarely encounter each other in the wild.
Traditional Chinese Medicine uses bat feces, pangolin scales and other exotic products, with an emphasis on live animals. Bats and pangolins are a vector for virus and cross-species virus transmission.
Moving wet markets indoors into sanitary conditions, and banning the sale of live produce would go a long way to preventing future outbreaks.
No one who lives in Asia around wet markets uses it that way.
Regardless, it doesn't change my point that China never banned wet markets, not even for one day.
See "Infectious diseases emerging from Chinese wet-markets: zoonotic origins of severe respiratory viral infections" [2006]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16940861/
Will we ever learn the truth about China and the pandemic?
Two inquiries are 'cloaked in secrecy'
WHO lets Beijing vet investigators and it
appoints British scientist with links to Wuhan
Someone mentioned in another comment that some on the left were tying criticism of China with racism, and I'd like to point out that those identity politics only benefit the right. I think this link is mostly coming from some of the US liberal class (financially well off, lives aren't directly affected by election outcomes, centrists, etc.) and not from The Left (socialists, left of Bernie types).
Blame a government, not its people. There is plenty of criticism to throw at China without being racist. But if anyone is claiming that blaming China is racist then they are just as misdirected as the people that use criticism of a county to be racist against its people.
Furthermore, we should talk about ethical disclosure responsibilities that all countries can agree on for outbreaks going forward as well as what will happen if those rules are not followed. For example, countries around the world should agree that if a country experiences a pandemic outbreak and they don't take certain measures to stop an international spread and disclose updates to the world, they will be liable for the extended outbreak. Allowing a virus like this to spread internationally while covering up details where now more than a million people have died is really grounds for war. Even if the virus was not created in a lab or intentional in any way, any limitation on communication and disclosure can have massive impact.
I don't think more disclosures would have helped a lot of the countries. China locked what 10M people in January and lots of the world essentially went "huh". There were reports of welding people into their homes when UK rates were in double digits. We seem to have done little with the already very public information so what would have happened with more?
The link made it pretty clear that the vast majority of the world already refuses to fund the type of research that could have led to the virus.
If there was anything that showed it was in any way artificial it would have been detected by all mainstream experts by now and that information would have been publicised one way or another. Yet these claims and 'evidence' are only reported as coming from fringe people if not likely paid 'agents' (I'm thinking about that HK 'scientist' girl that fled and is in the US now, doing the rounds of all tabloids on the planet).
On the other hand, there are known virii extremely similar to it in the mild (90-95% similar and related).
I don't know if the hypothesis that it may be artificial is plausible to start with, but the facts seem to weigh heavily against it while the interests of some to create this "conspiracy theory" is pretty obvious as are the interests of some to expose China if they had actual evidence.
It is perfectly possible and sensible to state that finding the origin of this virus is important, like it is important for all new viral diseases, without engaging in conjectures, especially wild ones.
Judging by the comments on HN many people (even more educated than average) are not able the see through this, are not able to distinguish facts from fiction and baseless conjectures. FUD works and is dangerous.
Really? I usually see a lot of plain disagreement based on reasonable lines of thinking, but only a very small proportion of "_extremely_ strong" wording. Are you sure you're not just interpreting a multitude of similar opinions as creating a feeling of that opinion being "extremely strong"? Or that you're not just thinking of the cases where people are responding to the overtly political conspiracy hyperbole that sometimes comes as a wrapper around the proposal?
This is not just me being salty about reactions to my own comments, I've personally never made a comment on the origin of the covid on Reddit, as I don't feel like I have anything of value to add yet. It's just something I've witnessed over and over again.
Like the GP of this thread I've never understood why such a relatively harmless claim would be so contentious. I've always assumed it was something political that as a non-American I simply don't know the context of. It reminds me of the drama around hydroxychloroquine, where mentioning it on Reddit would get you tarred-and-feathered as a loony Trumpist, even though it seemed like a non-issue to me. Obviously HCQ doesn't really work, but believing it does never seemed to deserve such harsh treatment, which I'm again assuming has roots in a political context I don't fully understand.
There is never absence of evidence for zoonosis, because by association all other viruses came to be via zoonosis. So, before you do any further investigation, it's the default. And then, when you do, zoonosis is already the null hypothesis as it was the most likely before you being your further investigation.
What are you talking about? Zoonotic origin is the source of the majority of viruses:
> Approximately 60% of the known infectious diseases and 75% of the new emerging or re-emerging diseases infecting humans came from animals. SARS-CoV-2 is the latest addition to the seven coronaviruses found in humans, and experts said that all of these viruses either came from bats, mice, or domestic animals.
> More so, bats are the source of the Ebola virus, rabies, Nipah ad Hendra virus infections, Marburg virus disease, and influenza A virus.
https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/26492/20200717/covid-1...
> An estimated 60% of known infectious diseases and up to 75% of new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic in origin (1,2). Globally, infectious diseases account for 15.8% of all deaths and 43.7% of deaths in low-resource countries (3,4). It is estimated that zoonoses are responsible for 2.5 billion cases of human illness and 2.7 million human deaths worldwide each year (5).
A paper in the lancet early in the year reported that the Wuhan Seafood market not only did not sell bats, but that many of the early patients reported never visiting the market.
At this point, it may be too late to ever discover the true origin of the virus.
Ironically one of these researchers, Daszak, was politically targeted for his connections to this Wuhan lab [1], even though he and Wuhan scientists have been trying to get the attention to this problem for some time. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02473-4
For one thing, this is a classic example of correlation != causation. Let’s say you had a shark attack on some beach and there was a team researching shark attack located right in that area. Would you then conclude that the team engineered the shark attack? The simple reality is that the most likely reason the team studying shark attacks is located in that region is simply because that region either has a history of shark attacks or even if it doesn’t have a history, is likely to have shark attacks. That’s why a team studying shark attacks would decide to locate themselves there.
The same is true here. Wuhan hosts a bat virology research institute because bat viruses are a higher risk here than in most places.
The other factor is that there is probably an infinite number of things that could look suspicious if there is such a disaster. It could be the presence of a bat focused research institute. It could be a conference that was held out there in the past few months. It could be a scientist from that region predicting a bat virus a few weeks before. It could be a district updating its pandemic protection plans in the weeks before. Etc.
The odds of any specific one of them happening are extremely low and would rightly make one suspicious. But the odds of at least one of the infinite suspicious things being true is almost 100%. And that’s probably all there is to it here. The presence of the bat research is just the 1 of many suspicious things that just happens to be true.
That being said, I think the strongest explanation is that Wuhan was considered a likely source of bat virus infections and that’s why the research was focused there.
Except the bat in question doesn't originate in Wuhan. I can't remember the cave exactly but the Wuhan researchers documented the capture thousands of miles from the lab, several years ago.
I believe I originally saw it here on HN.
> The bats carrying CoV ZC45 were originally found in Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which were more than 900 kilometers away from the seafood market. Bats were normally found to live in caves and trees. But the seafood market is in a densely-populated district of Wuhan, a metropolitan of ~15 million people. The probability was very low for the bats to fly to the market. 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.
Source: https://archive.is/r4Yac
Now, I don't suggest that the virus was created in the lab, or deliberately leaked. But it had to be brought into Wuhan somehow. I just don't consider it dismissible, yet, that an inadvertent leak from the lab could have been the cause. I look forward to all new evidence that may emerge.
If the market was indeed the cause, then in the interests of global safety, wild animal markets of this nature should be prohibited.
The concentration of early cases in Wuhan, hundreds of kilometers of away, would imply that the asymptomatic traveler(s) only traveled to one city, and didn't infect any other people along the way.
It's possible, but you have to consider the probability of all these events, hence the Bayesian analysis performed here.
This makes the hypothesis very plausible as a starting point, but afaik there is no confirmed reservoir for SARS-CoV-2, the pangolin and bat hypothesis have not been confirmed.
The lab was publishing research for many years. We know they grew bat viruses in HeLa cells that had been modified to have bat features. One would expect, as a simple matter of evolution, that the viruses would adapt to replicate without reliance on the bat features. It's breeding.
Now, is that zoonotic or engineered? Reasonable people could argue either way. Does the term we use matter so much? William Shakespeare wrote that "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
Either way, that is some seriously hazardous research with an obvious potential for permanent worldwide consequences. Somebody needed to say "NO".
Again, I don’t think there was that much, let alone enough to swing the election, but we can’t even discuss any of it honestly.
The media is more than happy to report on early detections out of China, and let suggestions that the vape lung (now linked to vit. E cutting agent) is COVID run free.
We left the realm of rationality long ago, when the government did a tribalism on behalf of all of us.
(Nationalism is a hell of a drug. The govt still funds crackpots to argue against Chinese people originating in africa, to call greco-roman and egyptian history faked, and don't even get me started on their insistence on 5k years.)
Wait what? The Chinese government does this? Who do they claim faked Greco-Roman and Egyptian history, and to what end? And what is 5k years supposed to be? The age of the earth or something?
I believe it's the claim that China has 5,000 years of written history. I'm not knowledgeable on this however, so this is a vague memory semi-confirmed by a cursory internet search.
Please don't spread nonsense.
"'Sinicization' - the thesis that all of the non-Han peoples who have entered the Chinese realm have eventually been assimilated into the Chinese culture--is a twentieth-century Han nationalist interpretation of China's past." "The online and print cultural materials of the Confucius Institute present a vision of[1] https://www.dw.com/en/why-is-the-us-targeting-chinas-confuci... [2] http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/27901/1/The_Confucius_Institut...
In the other link I posted from professor Evelyn Rawski of U of Pittsburg, she explained that the last Chinese dynasty was the Qing who were ethnically Manchu. The Qing saw themselves as ruling five peoples, of which China was the most important. The Qing ruled China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Uighurs, and Tibet. When the Qing collapsed, Chinese nationalists, although they detested the Qing who were foreign conquerors, wanted to lay claim to all the territory the Qing ruled. I would do the same thing. But they used this strange construction of "Han Nationalism" and claimed that all the territory was really Han because the Qing was really Han. This is where the 5000 years of unbroken history propaganda comes from. Professor Rawski explains if you read the official Qing records which is in written in Manchu, the Qing did not "sinicize" or adopt Han culture. The Chinese liked to think they did but that is simply not true.
An interesting side note is that this bizarre cultural legitimacy argument cuts both ways. A few years ago, a Korean professor made the argument if you follow this line of thinking... you can argue that China really belongs to Korea. The founder of the Liao dynasty which once ruled Northern China was ethnically Khitan or "Qi Dan" in mandarin. The Khitan lands bordered Korea. There is some obscure record that conflates or can be construed that Yelu Abaoji is Korean... therefore China is really Korean. Bizarre. I don't remember the Korean professor's name but it caused a ruckus at the time.
My next question would be “why”? What would be the CCP’s motives to study and modify the virus?
Is it to test whether different changes would make the virus more/less communicable?
Is it to prevent another MERS SARS?
Is it to tailor disease for certain ethnicities? CCP doesn’t appear to have qualms about getting rid of troublesome minority populations, as long as they have some amount of deniability to rely on.
Is it to stress test global medical science and institutions?
I’ll keep an open mind in that if (and it’s a large if) there are respected scientists who present evidence of it being a lab modified virus, then the motive must be understood and fast.
Edit: I will say that China isn’t helping its case by impeding research and publishing of any studies simply trying to establish whether COVID even crossed from local (wild) bat populations; and promoting only theories that claim COVID came from elsewhere.
I’m a complete nobody, but the internet has a way of amplifying things.
EDIT: I misspoke slightly by referring to "bioweapons," so I decided to post the full quote here:
> It turned out that the Soviets were conducting vaccine studies using live, attenuated H1N1 influenza viruses in the very area where the new H1N1 was first detected. During our research, we uncovered a letter from the Soviets to the US government requesting that we share with them the 1976 Fort Dix strain of H1N1 for their vaccine studies. I have little doubt that the appearance of the 1977 H1N1 virus and its rapid global transmission in just several months was the result of a release of the virus in the course of the Soviet vaccine studies. We don’t know exactly what they were doing with the virus. What we do know is that it got out, either accidentally or on purpose, causing a local outbreak in lab workers that subsequently spread around the world. Either way, the powerful lesson here is that if an influenza virus accidentally escapes or is intentionally released, expect that it will spread around the world in short order. This is the proverbial single match being able to light a global forest fire. The possibility for a DURC research study using a potentially dangerous influenza virus should scare the hell out of everyone.
The problem with this argument is that Covid is not tailored to avoid people of Chinese ethnicity. Indeed, in the UK, they have been especially vulnerable. Asian countries have done better because they have better policies in place.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29246
> Why do these distinctions matter? If we find more concrete evidence of a “spill-over” event with SARS-CoV-2 passing directly from bat to human, then efforts to understand and manage the bat–human interface need to be significantly strengthened. But if SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab to cause the pandemic, it will become critical to understand the chain of events and prevent this from happening again.
It seems the crux of the argument is to better react in the short term, but it looks to my untrained eyes that we already passed that level of investigation if we have effective means to prevent infection.
I also guess we’d still need to explore all other tracks anyway (we can’t just focus on lab spills for instance, if that was the root cause, and stop to care about the bat/human interface, nor should it be assumed that any other path will be less important in the future)
Basically I see it as preparing to win the last war.
Viruses used for gain of function research are selected for high rates of mutation and adaption. If we had known this from day one we would likely have made several changes to how to protect against it in the long term, especially with regards to cross-species transmission.
Throw some confirmation bias on top of it. The easiest group to blame for bad things is the group you already disliked. Traditionally this means foreigners, other races, and heretics. Blaming China both let's people have their imagined just world and vindicates whatever pre-existing hard-line stance they had on China. It's no secret that a lot of people already had a hard-lie stance on China for unrelated reasons (Eg the trade war).
In conclusion the human logical apparatus is bugged, no one is releasing any patches, and the whole issue is emotional because who you blame is tribal signaling dressed up as rational interest.
Maybe this is pedantic, but the introduction to humans could have happened in a wet market whether the virus itself originated in a lab (where bats could have escaped or been smuggled out and sold, etc.) or zoonotically.
If it turns out the party to blame is a geopolitical frenemy, all the better for the people who thirst for vengence.
Internally they are heavily pushing the preposterous claim that the virus is of foreign origin, possibly imported via frozen food.
Objectively lab origin seems likely. The virus started in the city housing the only P4 laboratory in China. This laboratory is known for its lax security (see the 2018 American embassy cables and the declarations of multiple sources in France who participated in its construction) and research on bat coronavirus transmission to humans were conducted there. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder if an accident didn't happen especially considering that we still can't find the missing link which would firmly establish a zoonotic origin.
Of course, as China is extremely uncooperative on this question, we will probably never know.
But without question their internal propaganda is about it is super questionable.
In my "bat-shit insane" worldview, wars (including recent ones such as Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) are fought for power and control over resources and global policies. They are not fought for the reasons given such as deposing dictators because they are dictators.
So in this "insane" worldview, the activities of some states take on a less altruistic character and more a brutal practicality. In this worldview, the operating paradigm is not essentially civil. It is "might makes right".
Now if you go further and put the deployment of nuclear weapons into that context, you will have an even more "extreme" worldview.
So in this paradigm, China may, like other countries before it, seek to improve it's access to resources and general power. And like other countries before it, it would be operating in the "brutally practical" paradigm.
So if one was brave and "crazy" then one could speculate that the Covid-19 event may have been the Hiroshima of the bioweapon age. And even if it wasn't intentional, it could be said to serve that purpose.
Even "crazy" people hope that isn't truly part of the paradigm now. But some of the braver "crazies" might still be able to admit some slight possibility.
However, labeling the perspectives in heroic terms does a disservice to your ability to more accurately predict the future. Most people with crazy theories end up being crackpots.
But in many social groups such as HN you do have to be kind of brave to suggest it might have been a bioweapon. People who say things like that are often ostracized in many places online. Or at the very least you get called a crackpot.
It is and always has, since the beginning of conflict. That's the only rule that can't be broken.
>Hiroshima of the bioweapon age.
It's not crazy, it's certainly plausible. I've heard theories that China would suffer the outbreak better because they would be better at locking down the population than the West and therefore suffer less economic damage. Such a thing could destroy the Western economy, particularly the US economy (no safety nets) so China could recover more ground or possibly take the economic lead.
It's the, "lets both take poison but I have built up an immunity," strategy as seen on The Princess Bride. Total lockdowns being the immunity.
Having said that, if it did come from a lab, I suspect the lab was designed to counter outbreaks (China has been wearing masks for several years now due to various outbreaks), and an accident happened. Due to the contagiousness during the incubation period and lack of serious symptoms in much of the infected, it had spread and already taken hold of the population before the government could effectively react.
That’s why both conspiracy theories about this being a man-made conspiracy of the USA/China stem from the populist camps (ie Trump and Xi).
I'm not a virologist, but the stories about reinfection are weird too.
I don't believe in those theories, I just think "what if?".
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296...
It is like putting an earthquake lab in the middle of a seismically active area, then blaming the lab when an earthquake occurs.
Oddly enough, it seems the virus will end up transmitting the Chinese control over its people to several western countries.
At least where I live a quite scary addendum to the current epidemic law has been presented. If passed, it will grant the possibility to test people at an event and fine those that won't comply.
That is not the case, the outbreak in Wuhan came as a surprise even to the virologists there.
The region where you would expect this to happen is Southern China, where there's bats living close to humans, not Wuhan, where there aren't any bats at all.
The virologists in Wuhan had to travel hundreds of miles to Southern China to collect samples from bats.
This is a really bad analogy, though.
Seismic lab doesn't contain self propagating "seismic seed" that has the danger of being let loose and spread across the world, whilst virology lab _regularly_ handle dangerous pathogen.
The major reason people suspecting lab origin is not simply due to the existence of WIV next door. It is due to how the ccp purge information on WIV[1], have the lab taken over by the military[2], and the sentencing/disappearance of numerous civil journalists (陈秋实 Chen Qiushi, 李泽华 Li Zehua, 张展 Zhang Zhan are the ones that come to mind).
- [1](https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6181529370001)
- [2, Chinese](https://sa.sogou.com/sgsearch/sgs_tc_news.php?req=gNWjMh9kjp...)
>The most similar coronavirus is found among bats that don’t live nearby, and scientists have not been able to pinpoint the exact point where SARS-CoV-2 transferred to humans
With how contagious we know COVID-19 to be, there is no way it started in Southern China and then infected a significant amount in Wuhan and only Wuhan first, of all places.
Wuhan is the 9th largest city in China and also more "blue collar" than cities like Beijing or Shanghai, so the odds that the most visible outbreak of all would occur in Wuhan by chance alone aren't as low as you think.
That is, the actual ground zero of the outbreak would be Southern China, where you would expect an outbreak of a novel coronavirus to occur, not Wuhan.
I won't put $100k against this, but I'll put $10k against it, because "the truth" is worth it. I'll pool $10k into a $100k stake behind a debate team that can debate this (and validate that this is actually refutable). This is valid until 2021-03-01.
That's the simplest explanation at least. This rootclaim.com process is new to me, there could certainly be other explanations.
Kudos to purplecats for making that offer as well, assuming this whole thing is on the up and up.
edit: below was my post when it was first upvoted, prior to edit.
> Not gp, but to me it seems smart and common to put an expiration date on financial offers.
> Kudos to purplecats for making that offer as well.
And all contractual obligations including thing like NDAs. Maybe it's a number of years, but never enter one for a lifetime. Ever.
If someone organizes something credible I'd also be in for 10k.
However, I suspect root claim wouldn't go through with it but would just update their model to incorporate more information. They hint at that possibility on their site.
The comment you've replied to is a counterexample to this claim.
For example, the meaning of the word "ambiguous" is not ambiguous. If somebody were to ask what the word meant because they did not know the definition, it wouldn't make the word's meaning ambiguous. It would make that person uninformed.
"Looking for an unambiguous calendar-and-clock format that is internationally understood? It’s time for ISO 8601."
"ISO 8601 tackles this uncertainty by setting out an internationally agreed way to represent dates:
YYYY-MM-DD
For example, September 27, 2012 is represented as 2012-09-27."
The posting says the startup "claims COVID-19 originated in a lab", whereas the Twitter post says it "has likely originated in a lab."
There's an important distinction between fact and likelihood of fact.
No idea how credible that analysis is, but it seems to me like it's done in good faith.
At best this is a startup company seeking publicity so 'good faith' is to be taken with more than a grain of salt.
They're stating the facts of the results of the probabilistic analysis, not the facts of the actual situation. Their only comment about the actual situation is that it's "likely".
I can see how it could be interpreted in the way you suggest, but if you read it from the perspective of discussing the probabilistic analysis, I don't think they're intending to mislead. But, again, I also don't know how strong the analysis is. It could be that the analysis is weak, in which case I still wouldn't think the tweet is likely deliberately misleading, but simply wrong.
Is it a fact that this virus has "anomalies" in its DNA?
If the answer is 'no' then there is no point discussing their 'analysis' further.
> 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.
The whole likelihood basically hinges on the fact that the outbreak occurred in Wuhan and that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been working for decades on enhancing coronavirus strains. That's quite strongly circumstantial but it's not evidence. Possible chimerization and furin-cleavage insertion seem a lot more interesting imo but are weighted much lower.
Based on their report [1], most of the likelihood of lab-escape (almost 50x weight) just stems from the fact that the outbreak is in Wuhan. They state that it's because of the proximity to Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the lab's gain-of-function research - only one of 5 locations world-wide.
That single "bullet-point" re-weights zoonotic origin from 97% to 56% and lab-escape from 1.4% to 42%. Otherwise their final likelihoods would be: "zoonotic" 85.5%, "lab-escape" 8.5%, "bioweapon" 6%.
[1] https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/what-is-the-source-of-cov...
The initial prior of zoonotic origin simply because that was usually the case in the past is just as circumstantial, but also just as solid in bayesian terms.
The Harbin Veterinary Research Institute in Heilongjiang is another BSL-4 lab
>Furin cleavage sites are not common in other related coronaviruses.
However, this claim appears to have been investigated and debunked [1]
>Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
1. This isn't the product of researchers. It's the product of an algorithm that also happens to be a product that is being advertised.
From the "About Rootclaim" page:
"Proven probabilistic inference models – The model breaks down highly complex issues into small questions that are each answerable by humans, and then uses these answers to reach mathematically indisputable conclusions.
Openly crowdsourced evidence and claims – Anyone can impact an analysis by contributing evidence, rational explanations, past examples and statistics. Unlike polling or voting, a strong claim by one person can beat many widely supported weaker claims."
2. Reputable researchers publish before going to the media. Would this analysis pass peer review?
3. The company is a startup, and is looking for press.
4. Like many conspiracy theories, this claim is not easily falsifiable. No matter how transparent the Wuhan Institute of Virology tries to be, as an institution associated with the Chinese government, accusations of a coverup will be nearly impossible to conclusively refute. International trust in anything related to the Chinese government is currently very low.
- there is a long track record leading to this low trust. Based on this we should place a very low prior belief in what ccp says
The claim that the virus originated in nature and spread through unknown intermediaries to humans in Wuhan, of all places, is equally hard to falsify.
Previous outbreak of SARS could be traced to bats in Southern China, MERS could be traced to camels.
The hypothesis that the virus escaped from a lab that hosted samples from Southern China is at least plausible.
This technique looks reminiscent of "superforecasting".
Caveat that their conclusion hinges on their assumptions, and we would expect that about 2/10 of their 80% predictions would actually be false if we could score them all.
I don’t know what good will come of this discussion, unless all countries are willing to discontinue gain-of-function research if this claim is found to be true. However that’s a lot of “ifs” and there is too much opportunity to simply place blame, which won’t help anyone.
[1] https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/what-is-the-source-of-cov...
This was the original link
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
If you Google “lancet ban on gain function” the first link is gone now.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/time-for-a-reality-che...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/world/europe/coronavirus-...
[3]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/29/8008132...
Australia: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9024311/China-claim...
India: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8993667/Now-Chinese...
Italy: https://www.the-sun.com/news/1824950/china-accuses-italy-sta...
US Army: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-claims-that-the-u...
Since the common belief is that COVID originated in China, they stand to benefit from an independent inquiry that proves any of their above claims.
https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-coronavirus-pandem...
I ran a large forecasting research project for 4 years so know this field quite well.
The "willing to bet" thing seems nonsense - there are no bet resolution criteria stated anywhere I can see.
They seem to be using a "Superforecaster"-like method of breaking down a prediction into smaller parts, and trying to work out the liklihood of each.
But their approach for doing it is crazy. The "escaped from lab" odds increase the most because they guess (and it is a guess) that the Wuhan lab does "20% of the gain-of-function research in the world"
That only makes anything resembling sense if they can establish that C19 is caused by gain-of-function research - but they haven't done that.
The whole hypothesis chain is full of this weak reasoning. For example the "lab dissociated itself from bat research" claim uses an unreferenced article by Miranda Devine in the NYPost as a source. Devine is an Australian columnist who left Australia after being forced to apologise for making up a story that a 9yo boy with dwafism was running a scam[1]. If this site was being honest in their approach they'd include that as evidence her claims on this story might be made up too.
Edit: and in (sarcasm) astonishing news, they also think the Syrian chemical attacks weren't carried out by the Syrian regime[2].
[1] https://junkee.com/miranda-devine-apology-quaden-bayles/2715...
[2] https://www.rootclaim.com/claims/who-carried-out-the-chemica...
The potential cost of a new virus is so enormous that measures reducing the probability of its occurrence, even marginally, are ridiculously cheap bargains even if they're expensive in absolute terms. But we need to know what really happened in order to take the right measures.
I admit that I do find the lab-escape hypothesis plausible. I'm not certain of it, but there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that points in that direction. Perhaps one reason this hypothesis hasn't been publicized more is that those most qualified to assess it aren't eager to learn that some of the research they do is insanely dangerous, and that members of their profession may have committed a screwup of world-historical proportions.
Also, it is more likely a something like this gets discovered in a major city vs some rural backwater, because they have more educated doctors there and more patience to detect a pattern.
[1] https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
I wish all arguments about everything ever had a page like this; ideally with Wiki-style features like forks and suggested edits or something like that. At the moment I think they just rely on comments rather than something like a Wiki, but the overall model seems really appealing.
And, also, with respect to the COVID-19 topic, here people can actually argue about explicit and delineated claims rather than jumping into politics, which I think is way more interesting and productive. If I were dang (and I know I'm very much not) I'd keep the thread open but enforce a strict rule that all comments should be directly related to this page and not derail into the usual heat and noise.
I'm glad they put money behind it, but dislike that they're expecting $10,000-$100,000 in risk from submissions. They hyped up the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, but - as far as I can tell - that challenge didn't require the applicants to take on such risk.
I get that they want to stem the tide of low-quality submissions, but doing it this way really takes the wind out of their James Randi spiel.
With the paranormal challenge, you could say "the lack of applicants indicates they know the claim is false." With this, the lack of applicants could just as easily indicate a lack of funds/risk tolerance.
How did the UK virus suddenly get 17 mutations at once if it's not a new engineered release by someone?
I'm not a biologist, but that part had me wondering.
Any biologists here who want to explain for a layman?
That is why it would have been important to keep infection rates down until there's a vaccine - because it is more than likely now that there's a strain of coronavirus somewhere that has a different spike protein and so is not caught by the existing vaccines.
Normally we should have sampled a number of strains with fewer of the same mutations, shouldn't we?
That would make sense, if it was the 17th mutation that (possibly together with the rest of the mutations) gave it this advantage.
[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/uk-variant-puts-spot...
How can someone "prove" it is Zoonotic in origin, to "win" the bet?
Is this a false challenge; Someone may be able to prove that this started in a lab, but no one can prove the opposite. Free publicity.
As an aside, it looks like they list "No whistleblowers" and "No reported infections at WIV" as increasing the odds it is not Zoonotic, which makes no sense.
>Since there is no lab test or clear-cut way to determine whether a Rootclaim analysis is correct, we have to rely on outside expert judges.
I haven't been able to find any place where it says who the judges are for this challenge.
I am not a virologist but not far away from it. It is well possible that the virus escaped from a lab. But never claim maliciousness for something that can be easily explained by stupidity. When working with Chinese in the lab I experienced them as never working very clean (e.g. with radioactive stuff).
"There is some weak evidence regarding lax security and procedures at the Wuhan Institute of Virology." No, there is actually strong evidence. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
This alone shows the guys don't know what they are talking about.
There is no evidence that the virus was artificially altered (But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).
This being said, it seems to me that Corona COULD be used as a weapon. China is coping much better then the EU or the US with the virus. We know this now. How about 3 more viruses in the next three years? Will the west survive this? While I STRONGLY believe that China is not really to blame for the outbreak, I am sure the development has raised eyebrows in China.
The National Academy of Sciences published an opinion piece from a reputable scientist containing fairly strongly worded (for PNAS, anyway) conjecture regarding a possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. [0]
(you might recognize Relman's name from his work on identifying the human gut microbiome.)
This is particularly strongly worded for this publication:
""" 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. Alternatively, the complete SARS-CoV-2 sequence could have been recovered from a bat sample and viable virus resurrected from a synthetic genome to study it, before that virus accidentally escaped from the laboratory. """
The realm of what is 'possible' is extremely large. This is exactly a reason why serious people without an agenda tend not to play this conjecture game and stick to evidence-based facts.
What has he to prove and to whom?
I'm as distrusting of establishment forces as anyone (and heck, maybe that's part of what predisposes me to take this more seriously), but everything about this seems genuine to me. And while I don't think he's entirely above reproach, I think he's a really good guy and someone who is unlikely to mislead or engage in the kind of undue speculation you're talking about.
The most interesting - where public opinion was against and Rootclaim was for, and it was later shown Rootclaim was far more likely to be right - seem to be the deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman [0] and that MH370 vanished due to pilot suicide [1].
I think where the rubber would meet the road is if they're ever shown to be correct about the Syrian chemical attacks [2], where they draw the opposite conclusion Bellingcat did, and of course about the COVID-19 origin.
If they do turn out to be right about those, that would grant them major credibility points, I think; though the conclusions there may never be known one way or another. If they are right about COVID-19, it would also make me view Bret Weinstein with a lot more credibility, since he's been advocating the likelihood of the lab leak hypothesis for a while.
[0] https://www.rootclaim.com/rootclaim_track_record#barry_and_h...
[1] https://www.rootclaim.com/rootclaim_track_record#MH_370
[2] https://www.rootclaim.com/rootclaim_track_record#syrian_chem...
Serologic testing of U.S. blood donations to identify SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies: December 2019-January 2020
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...
So maybe the lab theory is true and it was a leak from a US lab
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavi...
Incidentally, most of Ralph Baric's research ended up in Wuhan with Zhengli-Li Shi and his team, where their research continued.
Imagine it did come out that it was an accidental lab-leak. Public opinion around the world would be super critical of China. The US would have to step in, demand certain investigations and lab inspections from China, who would of course disagree. This could very well be World War 3 brewing. Sometimes it's better for these things to stay silent.
Leaks have happened in other countries too but I don't the consequences.
Everyone is focused on the genetics of the virus, but honestly that doesn't really tell us anything about how it was introduced into the human population. Frankly someone could have been legitimately studying the virus which was was circulating naturally in the bat community, with zero intention of trying to weaponize the virus, but anyone with access could have easily stolen some of the virus and deliberately infected themselves or someone else.
I read an article on December 13 or 14 of 2019 about a 20 cases of a "strange new flu" circulating in Wuhan. When the Chinese publicly admitted they had a problem at the end of December, they said they only had a handful of cases.
Finding 20 cases of a 'new flu' that has the same symptoms as the regular flu is impossible, there wasn't a test available for months, so the Chinese would have had no way to identify a 'new flu' at the time of infection.
There is only 3 ways for the health officials to know they have a 'new flu' circulating based on cases:
1) There are significantly more cases of the flu circulating than during a peak year. 2) There are significantly more flu deaths relative to the number of patients. 3) The cases have significantly different symptoms than the regular flu.
None of these situation was present for Wuhan during the early days of the virus. So that means the Chinese needed some other way to identify that they had a new flu circulating, and identify it with so few cases. Even when the COVID19 was peaking in China they still didn't have enough cases that would be significantly higher than the number of flu cases they would have during the same period.
A deliberate release or an accidental lab release is the only real way to know that a 'new flu' is circulating, when there are so few cases, and symptoms that are identical to the flu.
I believe the Chinese were studying the virus, and then due to an accident, or just sloppy lab work, even in China the lab techs are overworked and underpaid, someone got infected. Knowing human nature, the person who had the accident or was sloppy tried to cover up what happened, because they didn't want to lose their job. Unfortunately the person was infected, and maybe became ill, they also spread the infection into the community. At some point the person who originally got infected was forced to admit their mistake, either because they were sick, or because people they knew were getting sick, and trying to cover what happened became impossible.
Once the Chinese government learned of the accident/sloppy lab work it would be really easy to do contact tracing and identify a handful of cases, it would also be really easy to tell the world that that virus started in the wet market, because those markets have already been idenified as a potential risk for a pandemic level virus.
If you disagree with my opinion, that's fine but please explain how the Chinese could possibly know they had a new virus/flu circulating, with almost no data, cases, deaths, or novel symptoms. They knew because it was a accidental lab release, that's how they knew.
To me, the most likely explanation is that one or more researchers became ill or died and WIV triggered the release protocol. This isn't the fault of PRC but this plus the treatment of Uigher, illegal fishing, IP theft etc. Can we just say F China as this point and bring our manufacturing back to the US and its allies? China has good people but their government shouldnt be allowed superpower status given their transgressions.
There's very few diseases with a similar presentation to COVID-19 that we don't already have tests for.
This is how new illnesses are almost _always_ detected: patient has illness with specific symptoms, test for illnesses correlated to those symptoms, if those tests (and follow ups) come back negative then you might have something.
When your patients start dying faster than you'd normal expect that's a great indicator too, which happened(s)
I haven't seen any media try to verify or disprove this claim. Does anybody know any more about this?
"Based on the underlying genetic structure, we have already established that, if COVID-19 was the result of a lab escape, it was from gain-of-function research. "
This claim is illogical and does not stand. For example, a lab could have stored naturally occurring viruses that were then later leaked.
If the article is asserting that the virus could only have resulted from gain-of-function research, then why bother assigning a probability to it being naturally occurring.
With that in mind, I am surprised that no one in this conversation has mentioned Zero Hedge yet. Earlier in the year, Zero Hedge wrote about the possibility that the virus may have originated in a particular Wuhan lab (which was close to wet markets, and advertised research involving bats and coronaviruses). Zero Hedge received a lot of criticism from those who politicized this topic or were anti-Zero Hedge for other reasons. Just like with those other disasters I named above, the critics insisted that there is absolutely no possible way this virus originated from a lab. The same critique then extended to Trump and became further politicized when he correctly suggested halting inbound flights from China as a precaution. The focus on Trump poisoned civil discourse around the coronavirus. In the middle of all this chaos, Zero Hedge was banned from Twitter for "doxxing" researchers at the Wuhan lab (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/01/twitter...) although if you look at the actual Zero Hedge article in question, the researcher they named listed his contact information publicly, as he's the public face of the lab (so there's no doxxing). Zero Hedge later wrote an article covering the extremely biased attacks they were subject to from news media outlets (https://www.zerohedge.com/political/zerohedge-suspended-twit...), which is worth reading if you're into truth seeking. Embarrassingly, Twitter ultimately reversed their "permanent ban" of Zero Hedge (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-zerohedge/twitter...) but the damage was done.
Remember, we have no reason to believe the Chinese government's claims about the virus. They sought to oppress initial reports of the coronavirus, which delayed the world from knowing about it and being able to take the necessary actions (banning travel from China to their countries). The WHO was complicit in this by blindly relaying the CCP's claim that SARS-nCoV-2 does not transmit between humans (https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152), and in refusing to investigate the Wuhan lab themselves (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-world-health-...). And it is remarkable that after all these months of secrecy and denial, the scientists at this lab are only NOW (in December 2020) saying they are open to a visit and probe into the lab - after any evidence would be scrubbed (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55364445). This is obviously an underhanded offer given that the Chinese government just recently sentenced the Chinese journalist who challenged the government's early coronavirus narrative to 4 years in prison (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/world/asia/china-Zhang-Zh...).
All that is a long way of saying: please don't politicize this topic. Let's allow the open discussion, investigation, and research into the possibility that this virus originated from a lab or any other source.
This makes the assumption that the overall stakes are even. What if Alex Jones puts up 100K that boiled frog eyes cure COVID? He could be absurdly wrong, but the additional credibility offered by this may let him sell a million dollars more of boiled frog eyes.
The problem is, there is going to be virtually no research on whether boiled frog eyes are a cure for covid, so it is next to impossible to challenge the claim and made all the more difficult by the potential for human error and the risk involved noted in the challenge.
Probabilistic Estimates:
Labs with lax security and procedures are conservatively estimated as 2x more likely to produce a lab escape.
However, since the reports are not very reliable, this is reduced to 1.5x.
There's no explanation or methodology presented as to how they derive these probabilities based on articles they found in the news and most of their assertions rely on this inexplicable methodology. Another example of just how nonsensical their conclusions are, under the sections 'WIV disassociation' and 'Chinese response' they again rely on news articles to conclude China's response merits suspicion and therefor must be covering up the source of COVID. This assertion is just illogical and fatally flawed. While China may have motivation to cover it up if that were the case, scientists in other countries who have obviously spent a great deal of time examining COVID and concluded it's zoonotic wouldn't have motivation to cover it up. Yet this obvious logical deduction is not factored into their conclusions or even merits a mention.
You can then also do a sensitivity analysis to figure out how much your conclusions change if you modify your priors. So if you, the reader, think the priors are wrong, then you can change them and re-do the analysis.
I think the most interesting thing about this analysis is exactly that: we can look at the priors and come up with a principled conclusion. We can then argue about whether the priors are right.
It's very easy to "make guesses" that present your conclusion, throw in a paltry amount of money, then make bank off the publicity.
This possibility poisons the well for the entire process. If they can make money off this even if they are completely off-base, then it's not rational to build up the trust necessary in their process to engage with their model.
Where'd you get your quote? or did you make it up?
Is it concerning that endocrine disruptors are leeching into waterways? Yes.
Is there a plot to turn frogs gay? I doubt it.
Unless I'm missing something, is there any non-circumstantial evidence that this is true? All I've seen for the past year(!) is "it's not a coincidence that these two things happened in the same place" - which isn't science.
It is part of divining what type of experiment or investigation is indicated to unearth direct evidence.
From the opinion piece in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences I linked elsewhere in this thread:
""" An investigative process should be transparent, collaborative, international, and, to the extent possible, devoid of political interest. Recent, productive scientific collaborations between the United States and China, for example, provide hope that such a process can be achieved. But the kind of effort required will need to expand far beyond what’s taken place so far, and nations other than the United States and China will need to be involved. Conflicts of interest by researchers, administrators, and policymakers on all sides must be revealed and addressed, and all relevant global constituencies must be included. """
Personally, I think their logic is doesn't work and I would like to see someone credible challenges them.
The burden of proof is on them.
In other words, a curiosity that begs to be proven wrong. We have a saying over here.. "A fool throws a pebble in a pond, and ten wise men can't recover it".
1. Open a public "bet" or similar
2. Make it so that you can always wiggle yourself out of the bet (on nitpicking and legalese)
3. If someone challenges you wiggle yourself out hope that person sues you and then use nitpicking and legalese to win the court case about that proof of you being wrong not being applicable for the bet
4. Then claim that the court agreed with you that you have right with your bet (which isn't what the court case was about but people don't know and sometime don't (want to) understand).
There had been some case of this pattern in Germany wrt. to (I think) vaccines and autism. If I remember correctly (I might not) their trick was to require a single scientific paper formulated in a way so that if you paper has other papers it refers to it's no longer eligible for that bet and in turn to win the bet you would have to do multiple large case studies from scratch in cram them into one massive paper covering multiple topics and the joint conclusion. I.e. it's not very feasible.
You definitely can prove a negative.
Just look at this:
However, Wuhan stands out for housing the Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of only a few labs engaged in gain-of-function research.
How does this imply causality? Why do they not consider the simple alternative, that a location that specialises in gain-of-function research of coronaviruses has the highest concentration of people who are able to DETECT novel coronaviruses with a much higher likelihood? If the virus originated in a city that has no lab specializing in these viruses, how would they ever have distinguished it from pneumonia?
The coexistence of the lab and the outbreak of the disease leads them to raise their estimate from 1.4% to 42%(!) lab made chance although it does not establish cause at all and does not even consider this inherent bias in sensitivity to detection.
SARS has a distinct clinical pathology different form ordinary pneumonia. Physician Ai Fen was the first to identify pneumonia cases in Wuhan as SARS, based on her clinical experience. This was then publicized by colleague Li Wenliang. Only later was the virus identified as distinct from previous SARS viruses by virologists.
Put it very concretely, say patient 0 was infected in a village a hundred miles away, is asymptomatic like most patients, travels to Wuhan, infects someone, that person is the officially first detected case.
Remember, you're using this argument to dismiss the fact that the outbreak happened in the one city where the world's top virologists on the topic of bat coronaviruses were performing gain-of-function experiments. The virus samples were obtained hundreds of miles away in Southern China, where these bats actually live and where the SARS1 outbreak originated. There are no bats in Wuhan, no bats were found in the food markets and no other intermediate host has been identified.
That's a lot of circumstance that isn't dismissed quite as easily.
The time that the virus stays incubated, already transmiting, but with not sympthons, is like is was designed to break quarentine protocols.
That sayed, if it is a bio weapon, I also think it got out by accident. The lab that in Wuhan alread have problems with employes selling animals that should be euthanized.
So I think is something like Chernobyl. Someone made a stupid mistake, but fear of repercutions, delay action that could avoid the spread of the virus.