The Lab Leak Hypothesis | Hacker News Reader

The Lab Leak Hypothesis

nymag.com

213 pointsapi229 comments

> There is no direct evidence for these zoonotic possibilities, just as there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap

But there is so much more opportunity for the zoonotic possibilities. In fact, this is the seventh time we've seen Betacoronavirus cross from bats, through another animal, and then into humans. SARS came via palm civets. MERS came via camels. Four more types cause a mild cold only and so they don't get sexy names or a deep investigation as to how humans became hosts.

So why would Covid-19 even need to come from a lab? We (humans) had wet markets filled with animals, including the very bats that carry the base virus. It's the perfect breeding ground to create a pandemic-level virus and probably a few thousand more viruses of lesser impact.

> A lab accident — a dropped flask, a needle prick, a mouse bite, an illegibly labeled bottle — is apolitical.

Oh, I disagree. If the root cause is Big Government meddling where they ought not to, that tells us one story. If the root cause is unregulated wet markets with viruses crossing species freely, that tells a very different story.

Smaller government solves one problem, and more regulations solves the other. There are a lot of people who want each story to be the truth.

Except this is not just a USA story. The reality is that China is shutting down any research into the origins of the virus - at least by doctors not loyal to the government. They are arresting journalists who don’t tell the story they want to tell.

In the vacuum of information, it’s fair to point out that the market not being the source means something else was - and - there was a lab that had the closest variant to the virus within the same city.

If smallpox broke out in Atlanta, so you think anyone on earth wouldn’t immediately come to the conclusion that the CDC had a accident with their BSl? And there are 14 in the USA. Just one in China - and it’s Wuhan.

Let’s not act like this is a story about American regulation or deregulation.

Never mind that the author is dealing with a country that is committing genocide right now simply because some Muslims believe in Allah and not the state.

If I've understood it correctly, China isn't persecuting Muslims, but Uyghurs, and their main justification for it is the East Turkestan independence movement. There are plenty of Muslims in other parts of China living normal lives.

There are plenty of Uyghurs living normal lives. Don't forget that even the highest estimates of a million targeted amount to maybe 10% of the total population. There are also plenty of ethnic Kazakh and Kyrgyz Muslims among the eyewitnesses interviewed in Western media, as well as restrictions on religious freedom all over the country: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-uighur-m... Of course having their mosque closed for illegal religious activity and eating halal food that says 清真 instead of حلال on the packaging still leaves people with what might be considered a "normal life", even though it is different from the normal life they knew before.

The CCP is also discriminating against Uyghur marriages. That’s impacting people outside of internment camps. A policy which removes some pressure from the excess male births from the rest of the country and destroys an unwanted ethnic group. Combined with some forced sterilization and forced contraception and you get a “mild” form of genocide that destroys a people without producing mass graves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide

Chinese government statistics show that from 2015 to 2018, birth rates in the mostly Uyghur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60%.

> The CCP is also discriminating against Uyghur marriages.

I assume you're referring to this part of your link:

> In March 2017, Salamet Memetimin, an ethnic Uyghur and the Communist Party Secretary for Chaka township's Bekchan village in Qira County, Hotan Prefecture, was relieved of her duties for taking her nikah marriage vows at her home. In interviews with Radio Free Asia in 2020, residents and officials of Shufu County (Kona Sheher), Kashgar Prefecture (Kashi) stated that it was no longer possible to perform traditional Uyghur nikah marriage rites in the county.

Such a policy against nikah marriages would also affect other Muslims, not just Uyghurs.

> Combined with some forced sterilization and forced contraception and you get a “mild” form of genocide that destroys a people without producing mass graves.

Similarly, forced sterilization has been part of government restrictions on reproduction for decades, and although the limit has been raised with the abandonment of the one-child policy, there's still a limit. So it doesn't just affect all non-Uyghur Muslims in China as well, but actually everyone. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/world/asia/after-one-chil...

First there is plenty of evidence on the marriage thing with the most well documented being marriage subsidies and propaganda, the Wikipedia link was for context and the quote. Anyway, a 60% drop in births isn’t part of a wider national trend, this is extremely targeted.

The 60% drop is not part of a wider national trend only because national birth rates started dropping when the government first implemented birth control policies in the 1960s: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CBRT.IN?view=cha... Xinjiang is slightly lagging behind, but it's very much the same policies in play.

In the New York Times article I linked above, it is mentioned that "From 1980 to 2014, according to official statistics, 324 million Chinese women were fitted with IUDs. And 107 million underwent tubal ligations or, as is commonly said, got their “tubes tied.”" Most of those cannot have been Uyghur women, since those figures vastly exceed the total Uyghur population.

So other parts of China simply suffered their sterilization campaigns much earlier. Birth rates in Xinjiang only dropped slightly from 17.57 per thousand in 2000 to 15.88 in 2017, but then to 10.69 in 2018 and further to 8.14 in 2019: https://data.stats.gov.cn/easyquery.htm?cn=E0103&zb=A0302&re... , which is a fast drop; but in Beijing, the maximum birth rate over the past 20 years was 9.32 in 2016, and their 2019 birth rate was still below Xinjiang's at 8.12: https://data.stats.gov.cn/easyquery.htm?cn=E0103&zb=A0302&re...

National birth rates where 13 in 2016 vs 9.3 in Beijing demonstrating it’s a poor fit for national trends. It’s an interesting spin attempt, but clearly fails even when looking at the data you provided.

In terms of IUD rates. 324 million IUD’s over 34 years vs a current population of 1.4 billion don’t on their own get 60% drop in birth rates. Further, it isn’t like Xinjinang was completely outside of the national trends and suddenly caught up, this is clearly deliberate genocide based on openly available data.

> National birth rates where 13 in 2016 vs 9.3 in Beijing demonstrating it’s a poor fit for national trends.

Yes, it's harder to avoid the government's wrath if you live right under their eyes in the capital, so national policies are more likely to be enforced in Beijing than elsewhere.

> In terms of IUD rates. 324 million IUD’s over 34 years vs a current population of 1.4 billion don’t on their own get 60% drop in birth rates.

Did you do the math on that? 1.4 billion population total corresponds to roughly 700 million women; adding 324 million IUDs and 107 million tubal ligations amounts to 431 million sterilizations, about 62% of all Chinese women.

Of course it's not just the sterilizations that cause a drop in birth rates, but also having to pay a fine per "superfluous" child, not qualifying for government benefits, the rising cost of living making raising a child more expensive etc. It's no wonder that many women would choose to have no or fewer children under these circumstances, especially if they know other women who can tell them exactly what it's like.

> Further, it isn’t like Xinjinang was completely outside of the national trends and suddenly caught up,

I do think they were outside national trends in terms of percentage of women sterilized and "caught up" by sterilizing women en masse even when they gave birth years ago; while those sterilizations would have happened routinely after childbirth in Beijing.

I guess we'll see whether birth rates in Xinjiang will continue to drop below even the level of Beijing, stagnate at the current level or bounce back slightly once the figures for 2020 are published (but then there's the pandemic as a confounder...)

Hey, if you want to say the Chinese government are corrupt, genocidal assholes, I'm with you.

What they want to cover up is any hint of fault. They want everyone to stay in line and question nothing, regardless of anything else.

I just don't think there's any real evidence of this being a man made pandemic either.

Perhaps paradoxically the fact that other betacoronaviruses have made the jump to humans naturally, would increase the probability that this was a lab accident: scientists want to study the most likely candidates for a pandemic.

> So why would Covid-19 even need to come from a lab? We (humans) had wet markets filled with animals, including the very bats that carry the base virus. It's the perfect breeding ground to create a pandemic-level virus and probably a few thousand more viruses of lesser impact.

The question of how it got to Wuhan all the way from Southern China remains unanswered. There weren't any bats sold on the wet markets, nor has any other host animal been identified.

The virologists working in Wuhan did travel all the way to Southern China to collect bat coronavirus samples and they did perform gain-of-function experiments. Viruses - even highly pathogenic ones - have escaped labs on numerous occasions. There is a plausible scenario here.

There is another plausible scenario, which is that "ground zero" for Sars-CoV-2 is actually Southern China, just like Sars-CoV-1. However, the virus wasn't discovered there first, because it didn't cause enough illness. The outbreak in Wuhan, the 9th largest city in China, would've been discovered by chance.

Good points, and I tend to think the 'escaped from a lab' case is at least as strong as the zoonotic one.

A small counterpoint though -- the market is the Huanan market, i.e. specialising in south china sourced or styled food. I would not be surprised if some exotic animals were there but never admitted to.

Although reasonable, one theory ("the bat coronavirus was transported by scientists to the lab that studies bat coronaviruses") involves no illigal activity. On the other hand the counter-theory ("there was illegal bat trafficking from a small mine in Yunnan") involves speculation that something happened that we don't know about. Strictly speaking, the lab leak theory has more observed evidence. Presumably the Chinese government would have identified and explained if they found bat traffickers.

We know the lab was aware of RaTG13 - they produced a sequence quickly that no-one else had seen. I know nothing about the situation but it would be interesting to know where exactly the sample was being sequenced. I doubt they did it in the mine, samples must have been transported to some lab.

I used to think 99% chance zoonotic, but the fact the similar virus was known to the lab was enough to drag me to thinking it is probably a toss up. Lab leaks do happen, this lab was studying bat coronaviruses. It is possible.

> On the other hand the counter-theory ("there was illegal bat trafficking from a small mine in Yunnan")

One theory is that people mine bat guano from caves, so there's no need for them to ever touch a dead bat.

>he similar virus was known to the lab was enough to drag me to thinking it is probably a toss up.

A human generated virus wouldn't be similar in this way to a wild one. You would take a candidate virus and splice in genetic material from a different one. The new virus would match 100% in most places and then be completely different in a few places.

This is not how they conduct gain of function research. It's uses serial passage (using biological hosts and the virus's own variations). This produces vary little evidence of manipulation.

>>"The virologists working in Wuhan did travel all the way to Southern China to collect bat coronavirus samples and they did perform gain-of-function experiments. Viruses - even highly pathogenic ones - have escaped labs on numerous occasions. There is a plausible scenario here."

Another plausible scenario, in my opinion, is that the virus was brought to Wuhan by the virologists (in the virologist or their helpers) but never escaped from the lab itself.

If you have a bunch of people periodically going to interact with the bats, how improbable is that they get infected of something (unknowingly) on site?

It's very unlikely that you'd get a one step transfer from a bat that yielded a spike protein with the level of affinity it has for human ACE2. If you look at that protein alone, the most-likely proximal hosts are primates. If we seriously believe in zoonotic transfer, we should be looking at those populations, and understanding how orangutans and bonobos infiltrated Wuhan and transmitted the virus to unwitting humans.

The other recent coronavirus spillovers actually have rather low infectivity that increases with the course of the epidemic through adaptive mutations. But amazingly, with SARS2, it appeared already fully adapted.

The phylogenetic tree makes a clear statement about how long SARS2 has been circulating in humans. At the publication of the genome sequence there were only a handful (~4?) of mutations known and most SARS-CoV-2 genomes were, incredibly, nearly identical. See https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global. If we tend to see one mutation per transmission, that would mean that the spillover happened in October or November 2019, and almost certainly in Wuhan. All SARS-CoV-2 we've observed fits into this single tree, and there is no evidence of any previous progenitor strains. This means that SARS-CoV-2 was fully-adapted from its most-recent common ancestor. What are the odds of that happening directly from a bat?

We're only now seeing, with b1117, a big phenotypic jump related to changes in the spike protein. It has arisen in a context that suggests that it may also be the result of strange environmental conditions for the virus that are capable of accelerating its exploration of the solution space. A widely-considered hypothesis is that it arose in an immunocompromised patient receiving antibody treatment and convalescent plasma, both standard practice in the UK. In this context the virus could have achieved extremely high population (~ many candidate solutions, faster evolutionary computation) and feedback about the immune response of the entire population (to the degree that they would have received multiple donations of plasma).

>>"It's very unlikely that you'd get a one step transfer from a bat that yielded a spike protein with the level of affinity it has for human ACE2. If you look at that protein alone, the most-likely proximal hosts are primates"

I'm not qualified to have an opinion about that, but it seems to me that if we accept that premise, and the primate jump looks improbable, the conclusion is that the virus have to come from a lab where it has been modified.

On the other hand, many experts are saying "we don't know, it's probably natural". So, it seems to me that the scientific consensus is giving different prior probabilities to zoonotic transfer that you gave in that statement.

This is an anonymous appeal to authority, but FWIW I am a biologist and I am not convinced of any origin story. We lack evidence in every direction. Although our prior is that it's zoonotic, other experts I know acknowledge the possibility that we are looking at a lab leak. We simply don't have enough information to say.

However, there is very strong pressure to reassure the public that it's not lab-based, which would look bad for scientists and our generally pro-social efforts to help the world. I think this is misguided, because people are not stupid. They also can also observe the profound lack of evidence for zoonotic transfer, which frankly makes these assertions look like a coverup. It would be helpful if the scientific community were more honest and scientific about this issue. We should not jump to conclusions without evidence.

Yeah. Unfortunately public health researchers/biologists have very little credibility at this point so appeals to their authority won't work. In particular arguments of the form "we need more evidence" look weak given how many enormous leaps of faith the supposedly scientific establishment has been willing to make on the basis of no evidence at all for the past year, e.g. masks, lockdowns, asymptomatic infection (apparently now contradicted by a large study of >90% of the entire population of Wuhan!), now vaccines are being advertised as totally safe even though trial protocols are being abandoned left and right.

Public health research is really worrying, frankly. The quality gap between epidemiology papers I read in the last 12 months and computer science papers are shocking. Epidemiology routinely publishes papers that contain major errors that the authors clearly knew about and chose to ignore or cover up. The Flaxman paper is an example of how absurdly fraudulent it can get, yet we're told constantly that the "experts" have reached a "consensus" that isn't to be questioned.

At this point I'm pretty much ready to believe it came from a lab simply because scientists are claiming it didn't. My prior for public health researchers being honest has dropped through the floor.

I just indicated that I have spent much of my life thinking about these things. You don't have to believe that this gives me any insight, but like I said it might help you understand that I'm not just parroting some theory I've read, I'm working on it directly.

I understand your concerns about public health research. Have you thought about it could be done better? Curious what you think.

Computer science papers have their own quality problems. A shocking percentage of them don't include source code even when they describe experimental results. Here you have a field that could realize an ancient dream of perfectly describing their work, and yet they fail to do it. This is an obvious way that it could improve. What's the equivalent for epi?

Not reliably sharing source code is a big problem in health modelling too, it's an issue across academia. The last set of CS papers I read did all publish their code though, at least for the ones where I cared to look. Perhaps this problem is fading away with time.

Yeah, places like DeepMind or OpenAI don't, partly because their papers are extended press releases rather than precise descriptions of how to recreate their results. OK, that's fine, they aren't academia so they're paying for their own work. If they choose to write a paper at all it's a pure bonus over what's basically expected of them. For government funded research it's different of course.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about what could be done better and how. The problem is there's this overwhelming number of problems that track back to a few root causes that are basically intractable in the current social environment. Take bogus citations, or use of obsolete data. Completely standard in epidemiology to write papers that use values for IFR or other key variables that are 8 months old when far more up to date data is available. Or what about claims with citations in which the cited paper doesn't support the claim being made, or even contradicts it. I never see this in CS papers. I've seen it regularly whilst reading epi papers. Or papers where the key claim in the abstract is just fraudulent, like the Flaxman claims about the efficacy of lockdowns which just assumed its own conclusions in the construction of the model, and relied on assigning Sweden a ludicrously huge country-specific fudge factor in the model (4000x). Right, and the fact that this was done wasn't mentioned anywhere in the paper nor supplementary materials ... you had to read the code to find it (at least the code was open that time!).

You can tut and say well that shouldn't have happened, but of course there will be people who are tempted to dress up their chosen conclusion in the clothes of science. The question is really what mechanisms are responsible for detecting and preventing a fall in standards. But in science the only such mechanism is peer review and journals, which are hardly effective. Everyone is a part of the same system with the same incentives and there are no penalties for incorrect work, so bad papers are getting published in Nature and Science all the time, especially when aligned with the prevailing ideology of these institutions. University administrators are responsible in theory, or maybe granting bodies, but same problem: none of them have any stake in output quality. Ultimately to fix these problems you need to tie the rewards in academia to the correctness of results, but academia isn't culturally anywhere near ready to even think about that. Academic freedom implies the freedom to be wrong your entire career, of course.

The only thing we REALLY know is that these types of coronaviruses originate in Southern China and somehow got to the point of being suspiciously well adapted to ACE2 by the time it exploded in Wuhan.

That, however, can also be achieved purely by natural causes over a long time - not just in a lab. Maybe Wuhan is simply the point at which the first very infectious form of SARS-CoV-2 occurred - not the first overall occurrence of any SARS-CoV-2 variant. And it provided a perfect environment to spread at its wet markets. If the virus originated in the West, maybe we would be shitting all over meat processing facilities now?

So, how many people would need to get infected to facilitate these mutations? We could possibly have missed SARS-CoV-2 infections with earlier virus strains that were vastly less infectious. It would take quite a lot of people to raise suspicions of anything other going on than nominal incidents of flu-like symptoms. So maybe the initial SARS-2 was basically SARS-1 with much less incidence of severe symptoms - so it slipped under the radar until it mutated, exploded in incidence and suddenly produced overwhelming hospitilization rates.

It's plausible, and could be proven very easily that this happened. Presumably, some progenitor strain is out there, spreading more slowly and making less of a mess. Eventually, a SARS-CoV-2 screen will turn it up and we'll sequence it. Then we will see a strain that's diverged from all other sequences in the phylogenetic tree, with a common ancestor back further than ~1ya.

But this depends on catching that strain and evolution has likely led to its near full displacement by more infectious strains at this time.

A friend of mine who once lived in China quipped that maybe some low-level tech from the lab was selling animals from the lab at the wet market. Not likely, but he says given what he saw in China it would not surprise him much.

The famous lab animal selling was "A top academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering earned 10.17 million yuan ($1.46 million) by illegally selling off lab animals" rather than a low level tech. Pigs though. Still it suggests standards may be a bit variable.

> The question of how it got to Wuhan all the way from Southern China remains unanswered.

It's also important to remember that the related virus we're talking about in southern China was identified in 2013. More than six years before the outbreak.

It didn't stay still. It hopped around, bat to bat, maybe to other animals. We don't have the history of the virus since then. It could have very well made the jump the humans or some other animal, years ago but only recently made the last few mutations to become the beast it is now.

Plus, it's a virus. It didn't take one path, it took all of them that it could. Each virus created a million more, repeat ad-infinitum.

So the idea that there's some mystery to how it traveled to Wuhan doesn't bother me. Viruses get around.

> The question of how it got to Wuhan all the way from Southern China remains unanswered.

There are coronavirus-carrying bats in Hubei province.

There are thousands of wet markets in China, but very few virus labs. Out of all the wet markets in China, the virus just happened to originate at the one right next to the virus lab? That alone is enough evidence to make the lab escape theory the most likely origin. Though it's far from certain.

The virus likely didn't originate at the wildlife market, because many of the early patients had no connection to it.

There is a building of the Wuhan CDC (not the WIV) near the wildlife market, but the Wuhan CDC has numerous buildings and this particular one doesn't seem to be implicated in coronavirus research.

2 good points. Being in the same city as the virus lab is a lot less suspicious than being across the street.

Regardless of the lab theory it's pretty clear that the wet market was simply the first known super spreader location and not necessarily the origin given how a third of the first known patients had no connection to the wet market.

Snopes.com points out that the market wasn't "right next to the virus lab."

It was in fact a full seven miles away.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/01/covid-19-bioweapon/

Back in Feb 2020, a rumor circulating on Chinese social media said that there was another lab in the city near the market, which was a competitor to the lab of Wuhan Institute of Virology that is most widely mentioned, under the umbrella of a university of agriculture/forestry/geology (I don't remember the exact details).

I am not sure about the validity of the rumor, though.

A couple of examples of Snopes intellectual dishonesty.

Mixture https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-smash-phon...

Mixture https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harris-believe-biden-accus...

There are thousands of wet markets in China, but very few provincial capital cities (Wuhan is one). Out of all the wet markets in China, the virus just happened to originate at the one next to the provincial administrative office? That alone is enough evidence to make the provincial administrative office the most likely origin of the virus, right?

If they handle coronaviruses in the provincial administrative office, then yes. Do they?

Maybe they do secretly handle coronaviruses in the provincial administrative office; they can't prove they don't anyways.

This isn't a logical comparison.

The lab specifically collected live bat coronaviruses for testing. The provincial administrative office did not.

Yes but the jumps typically flame out. This virus has an extremely well adapted human furin site well outside of typical Bat Corona virus. This is more in line with gain of function research.

>We (humans) had wet markets filled with animals, including the very bats that carry the base virus.

That's not in evidence.

>Bats were initially suggested to be the source of the virus, although it remains unclear if bats were sold there (Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market).

>Despite the role that the market played in the pandemic, it is yet unclear whether the novel coronavirus outbreak started in the market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanan_Seafood_Wholesale_Marke...

> In fact, this is the seventh time we've seen Betacoronavirus cross from bats.

This is also not the first time a lab leak caused an outbreak, the 2004 SARS outbreak was caused by a lab leak [1]

[1]: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...

The main point here is that the lab escape hypothesis has been hitherto dismissed out of hand when it ought not to be.

I agree that the natural zoonotic contamination hypothesis is more plausible to begin with, but since it has not been confirmed (as in: no natural reservoir has been identified), the less plausible but nonetheless not implausible lab escape hypothesis should still be on the table.

The President of the United States is on record as saying it came from a lab.

I’m not sure how that translates to “dismissed out of hand”.

The President says a lot of things...

I treat Trump's grunts like the output of a Markov chain random text generator and don't consider them official signifiers either for or against anything. He blathers and lies and then contradicts himself with different lies an hour later. He's a classic bullshitter.

Dismissed by the intelligentsia, like everything he says. Usually they are right to do so, but occasionally I think there is a touch of "orange man bad" syndrome.

You have no questions about the validity of data coming out of China?

The fact that there is China's first biosaftey level 4 lab in the same town where the virus originated doesn't arouse any suspicion whatsoever?

> We (humans) had wet markets filled with animals, including the very bats that carry the base virus.

No wet markets here where I am ... so maybe speak for yourself.

So your country doesn't have stores or markets that carry live fish or display meat on a counter?

Look up the definition of what a wet market is. for example, most markets in the UK can be classed as wet, as well as many large supermarkets with a meat or fish counter

Can you explain how this virus became (instantly) better adapted to humans than it is to bats?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06199

Looks like it didn't become better adapted. Already was. In lots of species, it's less well adapted. This is a non-story.

There is circumstantial evidence to indicate that the OC43 beta coronavirus crossed from animals in 1889 and killed about a million people worldwide. It can still be fatal to elderly or immunocompromised patients. The only reason it doesn't kill many people today is that most of us are infected as children and build up a level of immunity, so subsequent reinfections tend to have mild symptoms. Just like SARS-CoV-2.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

Maybe that's how SARS-CoV-2 will end up - people will get it as kids and become immunized.

SARS has leaked from Chinese labs multiple times. And the only lab in the world specializing in coronaviruses was ~1000 ft away from the first cases. The leaked US diplomatic cables urge the US to help China with this very lab because biosecurity there was so concerning to visiting scientists. It's also the only BSL4 lab in China. In addition the head of that lab has published numerous papers about generic engineering of coronaviruses. That lab also discovered the closest ancestor of COVID.

COVID is also interestingly contagious among minks and ferrets, common lab animals used for serial passage. It's also undergone remarkably little generic drift since the pandemic began. Since the moment it was released it was already human adapted. Extremely suspicious for a brand new virus.

For SARS, MERS, etc we were able to find a 99.9% identical virus in nature. The closest one we have to COVID is 96%, quite distant genetically.

The last time we couldn't find the virus in nature was the 1976 flu pandemic. 20 years later scientists began admitting that it was triggered by a lab leak. When genetic engineering became advanced enough it was obvious that the strain was identical to a pandemic flu strain from the 50's.

In reality, the scientist new from the beginning that the 1976 pandemic was a lab leak but the information was thoroughly suppressed so that the soviet union would cooperate with monitoring. This is exactly what happened with China early in the pandemic. Nobody wanted to criticize people being welded into their homes because China was providing data on the virus. I am completely convinced that this is why the lab leak hypothesis for COVID is being "debunked"

To me there is overwhelming evidence that COVID is a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. IMO the only reason everybody is denying it is the severe political repercussions for China essentially killing more people than WWII. US researchers are co-authors on many of the institutes papers on coronavirus genetic manipulation. The US was funding some of their research, presumably because gain of function research is banned in the states.

Are you referring to the 1976 or 1977 influenza? There is evidence of a lab leak or other human origin for the 1977 strain but the original source was never definitively identified.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/

https://mbio.asm.org/content/6/4/e01013-15.full

Sorry 1977 you are correct

> SARS has leaked from Chinese labs multiple times. And the only lab in the world specializing in coronaviruses was ~1000 ft away from the first cases. The leaked US diplomatic cables urge the US to help China with this very lab because biosecurity there was so concerning to visiting scientists. It's also the only BSL4 lab in China. In addition the head of that lab has published numerous papers about generic engineering of coronaviruses. That lab also discovered the closest ancestor of COVID.

Can you kindly cite literally every sentence of this? I googled, but my Google-fu is weak.

The virologist "bat lady" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Zhengli

SARS leaks https://www.the-scientist.com/news-analysis/sars-escaped-bei...

Leaked cables https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/state-depar...

US coronavirus research collaboration https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02473-4

Wuhan Institute of Virology employees are cited in a huge number of Coronavirus research papers. Some research may be done elsewhere but AFAIK it's the only lab in the world doing lots of work with SARS and relatives. The "batwoman" researcher who works at WIV is somewhat famous for gathering thousands of bat viruses from caves across China.

In addition RATg13, the closest related virus to COVID, wasn't published by the lab until after the pandemic outbreak. Even though the sample was supposedly collected years ago. If they're sitting on random unpublished coronavirus genomes doesn't it seem likely that COVID was one of these?

Theres too many coincidences for me. I would bet money that it's a lab leak

Use DuckDuckGo if you ever want to search for something controversial since they don't filter their results like Google.

Also an MIT alum, and in July I was considering the bayesian priors of the situation:

Roll a dice representing all the possible bat-human interaction sites in the world.

How often do you get a result so incredibly close to one of the few sites in the world that intentionally collects these things?

I have worked in clean room environments for years. Everyone eventually has an off day (lack of sleep, usually) where you experience a near miss... (glad I don’t work in bio).

Apparently you're being downvoted for pointing out that scientists are human. I am so sorry this is happening to you.

This is the geographic dimension, but there is also the time one. The time dimension can seem to link the outbreak to the start of gain-of-function research in labs around the world.

Roll a dice representing all the possible years of bat-human interaction.

How often do you get a result so incredibly close to the start of related gain-of-function research?

> How often do you get a result so incredibly close to one of the few sites in the world that intentionally collects these things?

Very often for organizations like that who have labs and offices over much of the country. Take a look at the CDC locations for instance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_for_Disease_Control_an...) , if an outbreak were to start anywhere in the US there would be a "suspicious" CDC office nearby.

Even higher when you consider these things tend to be near major cities and that's where a new virus is most likely to be discovered and grow exponentially. It could have been spreading among rural areas for months with no one noticing, until one contagious person travels to a large city.

Except China has only 2 BSL4 labs and though both are in big cities by Western standards, neither are near the costal population centers in which the majority of China actually resides.

Non-BSL4 labs shouldn't be ignored, though. Back in Feb 2020, a rumor circulating on Chinese social media said that there was a Non-BSL4 lab involved in researching bat viruses in the city. See my other comment as well.

Well, is there anywhere else in China other than Wuhan that could/would identify a new virus like this before it goes mega-exponential?

AIDS, for example, only got flagged because a normally extremely healthy group started appearing with diseases associated with the very old and failing immune systems. And, even then, it took quite a while to figure out that it was a virus.

In the middle of flu season, COVID probably wouldn't flag until your hospitals suddenly fill up for no reason. And even then most people would just write it off as a nasty flu. Otherwise, COVID is just a fairly invisible bump in your mortality rates for people with comorbidities and age. Do you really think China is gonna look too hard into a few extra old and/or sick people dying for some reason?

Given that a full hospital is likely to be the first point where someone will start looking for cause, that really has no relation to origin point.

And, I would argue, China is worse than that. A local party leader in China will absolutely not bump something like COVID up the chain until absolutely forced to. It is quite possible that there were other flare ups that were covered up and the Wuhan one was simply large enough to be uncontainable, close enough to a virology lab to get flagged, and occurred right before Chinese New Year which forced a government response.

> Well, is there anywhere else in China other than Wuhan that could/would identify a new virus like this before it goes mega-exponential?

As far as I know, the WIV wasn't involved in identifying the virus. That happened in Beijing after weeks of doctors sounding alarm bells about a new disease in Wuhan.

Otherwise, COVID is just a fairly invisible bump in your mortality rates for people with comorbidities and age.

What does the age distribution look like for the Wuhan region? I think I read somewhere that the percentage of old (70+) people is a lot smaller than in e.g. Europe, which might be another data point why this wasn't flagged earlier.

I do not have a strong opinion on lab origin vs zoonotic, but I think the idea that the virus didn't originate in Wuhan, or at least very near to Wuhan, is unlikely. China successfully contained COVID — enough to prevent their own population from getting much of it, at least — by implementing draconian lockdown measures for the Hubei province (of which Wuhan is the capital). I know people who had family trapped in Hubei: the highways were shut down and blockaded by government forces. Guards patrolled people entering and leaving their houses and apartments. In some cases, apartment buildings had their doors welded shut to prevent residents from leaving at all.

That didn't happen in Beijing, or Shanghai, or Guangzhou or anywhere else in China, because it didn't need to. The outbreak started somewhere in Hubei. The most likely place of anywhere in Hubei for it to have started is Wuhan, just statistically; it's the largest city, with the most people living in it (not to mention it had the first recorded outbreak). But if it wasn't Wuhan, it was somewhere nearby.

Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance researching the origins of pandemics, pointed out in April that nearly 3% of the population in China's rural farming regions near wild animals already had antibodies to coronaviruses similar to SARS. "We're finding 1 to 7 million people exposed to these viruses every year in Southeast Asia; that's the pathway. It's just so obvious to all of us working in the field..."

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296...

Weren't there antibody studies of people in the US around that same time frame that claimed 30%+ (somewhere in that range if I recall) of the American public already had covid-19? There was some sort of issue with cross-reactivity that later came out. Did the above link take that into account?

Daszak and EcoHealth have been working with Shi Zhengli for over 15 years[0]. He is not a neutral observer on this particular issue. And this year he has made a number of statements (like the one you quote) which do nothing to refute the lab leak hypothesis, and which only serve to direct attention elsewhere.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02473-4

Being similar to SARS is not meaningful evidence to draw a conclusion about COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2 virus). His data is from 2015 and cannot possibly indicate that anyone had been afflicted with COVID-19 at that time.

What he is saying is that animal-to-human coronavirus transmission is common - which most people agree upon. ...and possibly implying that there may be cross-immunity protection - also as many suspect.

...but for COVID-19 specifically, there is no evidence that it circulated in rural China prior to entering Wuhan.

...and sadly China is blocking the collection of samples for exactly that sort of serology/antibody analysis.

This is a good, balanced article. I've been of a similar mind for over a year now.

The chances of the CCP releasing a self-harming bioweapon in order to harm the US seems silly. But an accident involving a well-intentioned gain-of-function experiment seems quite possible and was something that the US was concerned about with its own gain-of-function research.

In any case, this, like so much of this other nonsense around Covid [lockdowns in Contra Costa County when the major hospitals were empty-ish; no gradual escalation of lockdown given mid-January knowledge of Covid], seems pretty amenable to a calm, clear analysis...

    Hypothesis                    | Evidence                               | Likelihood
    ------------------------------+----------------------------------------+-----------------
    CCP Virus                     | [That'd be 360 degree dumb of the CCP] | *low*
    Gain of function lab accident | [Existing concerns and experience]     | *moderate*
    Zoonotic transfer             | [No likely vector for extant virus]    | *moderate-low*

Doesn't seem too difficult...

The "likely vector" would be the millions of peasants living near bat caves in rural China (who actually have already been shown to have antibodies to bat viruses). And some of whom traveled to the market.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296...

So I would upgrade that quite a bit from "moderate-low." (One of the researchers in this NPR article seems to rate it as an obvious suspect, so I'd call that "high likelihood.")

Those millions of peasants living near bat caves would have traveled to thousands of markets all over China, but the virus originated at the one market in China that is basically across the street from a virus lab? It's not impossible, but my money is on the lab.

The lab was not "across the street." It was a full seven miles away.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/01/covid-19-bioweapon/

A whole 7 miles away? Wow It's almost as far as i go to my office every day. Or to some shops in the town centre. Or various other "everyday activities".

If Wikipedia is to be trusted [1]:

"AIDS was first clinically reported on June 5, 1981, with five cases in the United States"

"Both HIV-1 and HIV-2 are believed to have originated in non-human primates in West-central Africa and were transferred to humans in the early 20th century."

If HIV, a relatively less infectious virus, can make its way across the Atlantic Ocean to land on America shores, I wouldn't be surprised SARS-CoV-2 could do the same. Another explanation could be that SARS-CoV-2 is a lot more common than we think --- many people might have caught it before but it didn't manage to spread, but this time the virus just hit the jackpot.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS#History

According to the article, the bat caves are nearly a thousand miles away. It seems unlikely peasants were traveling a thousand miles for the purpose of visting the market.

It also presents some reasons why bat viruses on their own were unlikely to become as contagious as COVID, citing the example of RaTG13's discovery.

So the "zoonotic transfer from bats" theory requires an extraordinary new strain (possible!) to travel a thousand miles before spreading enough to be detected.

Also not mentioned in the article but bats are in hibernation at the time of year when the spread started, making it even less likely.

It’s too late to edit, but I’d like to ask downvoters to respond instead of downvoting. The submission references and contradicts the information provided in the GPs link and discusses how the politicization of the origin led to these organizations making much stronger statements than the evidence warranted. I cited some of the information the OP mentions that contradicts assertions made by the GP.

If I am wrong or misinformed, I would like to know it. The submission is an excellent article. I have no dog in this fight but it did shift the needle of uncertainty for me, particularly when I learned about prior leaks and the suppression of investigations in China. It’s a long article but worth the read.

> The chances of the CCP releasing a self-harming bioweapon in order to harm the US seems silly.

But to harm someone else?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/04/health/coronavirus-neande...

]] Dr. Paabo said the DNA segment may account in part for why people of Bangladeshi descent are dying at a high rate of Covid-19 in the United Kingdom.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/oios-tan0930...

]] IMAGE: THESE GENETIC VARIANTS ARE ALMOST COMPLETELY ABSENT IN AFRICA AND OCCUR IN THE HIGHEST FREQUENCY IN BANGLADESH.

https://media.eurekalert.org/multimedia_prod/pub/web/244496_...

But, uh, Bangladesh itself has a lower rate, by far, than the U.K. While I greatly admire Dr. Paabo's work, this part seems pretty speculative.

Not disagreeing with your Likelihoods but I'm not sure your evidence really makes sense. It does not really follow that a self-harm would always be avoided, the game of chess is all about sacrifice. Perhaps China thinks the West is short-sighted and would be politically bound to act against its long term interest, so why not? Maybe there are other reasons why you think the "CCP Virus" hypothesis is 360 stupid besides "self-harm"?

Wouldn't it be way easier and more logical to start the infection on a foreign soil? All the previous similar epidemics were successfully contained before reaching Europe, and if there was not for quite serious fuck ups in the beginning (Italian dude not even showing up on the meetings, etc.) perhaps even this one could have been stopped early on. So if it was China wanting to hurt US, then they'd have to be seriously stupid to first infect themselves and hope it will somehow reach US over Europe. It'd be like a terrorist who sends a bomb to their own address in hope that it will somehow eventually reach their enemies. It makes zero sense.

Not really wanting to play devil's advocate too much longer ... but if this virus popped up in let's say Spain rather than China wouldn't we wonder how the fuck it got there, what's the vector? I'm not sure if these things can be fingerprinted, would intelligence anyway trace it to China? Perhaps (to China) a clear oops backstory is more preferable to a murky "this thing definitely came from China but how?" backstory.

So the solution to that is to make it extremely suspicious by releasing the virus in Wuhan, city far away from the bat caves where they have a virus lab and which isn't really well known for outside travel?

Wouldn't it be much more logical to release it in one of the southern cities, Hong Kong or Macau. Hong Kong would be a perfect candidate as it would allow China to institute strict lockdown in the city which had decent amount of protests in the past years.

> if this virus popped up in let's say Spain rather than China

It may well have:

Coronavirus traces found in March 2019 sewage sample, Spanish study shows: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...

Sentinel surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater anticipates the occurrence of COVID-19 cases: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...

(SARS-CoV-2 was also detected in blood samples taken in Italy in September 2019: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03008916209747... )

> wouldn't we wonder how the fuck it got there, what's the vector?

Apparently we wouldn't.

There are two possibilities: either the virus really was circulating in Spain in March 2019, or the result is a false positive. I'm still waiting for either confirmation, or a retraction of the paper. Why the lack of curiosity?

Given that it took a year for the virus to have any effect in Spain, then all of a sudden it was very intense, wouldn't it be more likely that the test was botched?

There are a lot of false positives with PCR (0.8 - 4% according to this article https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...), so that makes a lot more sense than the virus being more or less dormant for a year then going wild.

> wouldn't it be more likely that the test was botched?

That's what I want to find out. From what you just wrote, the probability the test result is correct is at least 96%. But, as the result is so surprising and the tests aren't 100% reliable, it should still be checked.

You shouldn't assume it's a false positive simply because it doesn't fit in with our current understanding. Maybe our current understanding is wrong.

"Then they ran tests on samples taken between January 2018 and December 2019 and found the presence of the virus genome in one of them, collected on March 12, 2019."

If they did 100 samples you would expect between 1 and 4 false positives. (It doesn't go into detail about how many, but it's clearly more than one).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZoKM7zOUnU

This is not my literal belief; it is only a logical extension of the discussion so . . .

If covid mostly kills old or otherwise compromised individuals then a socialist country could see it in their interest to release a virus that eliminates the least productive part of the population. It would not be as much self harm as an exercise to increase the strength of the whole.

Where the hell was the research on who it mostly kills conducted? You don't look at the DNA sequence and go "ah yes, this will get everyone over 65..."

Was there any evidence of say, the interment camps operating as biosecure facilities while they experimented on finding out mortalities?

> then a socialist country [..] eliminates the least productive part of the population

I swear I heard some of my left leaning friends argue that a capitalist country would reason that way (and I'm pretty sure they would point historical anectodetes to prove their point)

Could it be, perhaps, that such conclusions about how appealing the opposite political belief is just the product of sectarian thinking and fear mongering? Humans are generally decent people who care about each other; and also often ruthless people who couldn't care less about the well-being of the fellow citizens. The only correlation I see between these two behavioral traits and the political doctrine, is the circumstance where a person is born and the environment where events unfold.

The third most common death from firearms in the USA is accidental discharge. This is where people have firearms, are trained in using them, but some circumstance led to the firearm being discharged without intent and injuring or killing someone.

There’s every reason to believe that a country attempting to develop bio weapons may accidentally release that bio weapon against its own people for the same reason: mistakes were made.

It may also be the case that the bio weapon was successfully deployed in the USA months before some unsuspecting American went on their tour of China thinking they will get over that mild flu in the clean air of Wuhan.

The USA health care system is basically designed to ensure that a pandemic will spread as quickly as possible, since the expense of medical care means people will actively avoid seeing a doctor unless they are literally dying.

So engineer a virus that affects wet membranes, limit its symptoms to “mild flu” and you will get maximal transmission even without propaganda suggesting that no action needs to be taken to control the disease because it’s not really that bad.

So in this hypothetical scenario it is not “360 dumb of the CCP” at all. They know how dangerous it is and how to contain it when it inevitably arrives on their shores. They have a vaccine but they won’t use it until a believable amount of time has passed. The future of warfare isn’t drones circling in the skies with guns pointed at the people on the ground.

> The third most common death from firearms in the USA is accidental discharge.

What is the fourth most common death from firearms in the USA?

I'm not sure what the second would be. The first is presumably "deliberate discharge," and then...?

Yeah, I just found that statement so weird that I had to reply.

If I had to guess first and second are deliberate suicide and deliberate homicide. But I suspect there's a huge fall from those numbers to what is the third and presumably last rank.

COVID is a terrible bioweapon. It's fragile, with an outer lipid membrane that has to be preserved. It's not very lethal to people of military age, and spreads readily between people making collateral damage inevitable.

It was great at making everyone forget about Hong Kong though.

Still, it appears to be very good at disrupting the enemy's economy.

Not that I think it was engineered as a bioweapon, but it does show that bioweapons don't have to be deadly to be effective.

One of the best bioweapons is Tularemia, and part of that reason is its general lack of lethality. It temporarily renders the exposed population incapable of putting up a good fight, but it kills relatively few. Escape isn't that big a deal (because again, it's not very lethal), and it's easy enough to inoculate one's own troops against the particular flavor being used.

Many of the "accidental discharge" deaths are actually intentional suicides or homicides but the investigators just couldn't prove what happened. And unfortunately it's common for people with no real training to possess firearms.

Many people over estimate our capabilities regarding manipulation of biological systems. A gain function is extremely difficult to get right. It is more likely that zoonotic transfer occurred. Either within a wet market or people operating in that industry or a lab worker accidentally exposing him/herself.

Sequence analysis show a unique mutation that increased receptor binding affinity that was not predicted by previous models. It just shows, nature knows best.

I find this debate extremely stupid. We always known that as natural habitats are being encroached upon, the more likely diseases like this will emerge. By focusing on our human conspiracies, I am afraid we will ignore Nature's conspiracy to get us.

Then can you explain how this virus became (instantly) better adapted to humans than it is to bats?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06199

Yet another hypothesis being pushed by the CCP party-state is the seafood imports hypothesis. Although the motivation behind CCP's push is questionable, this hypothesis shall be treated seriously, given that in the early investigation before the ban, signs of the virus were detected at stores selling seafood instead of stores selling illegal games.

Back in March or so, I wrote a comment about this [1], citing some even earlier (January 2020-ish) HN commentary.

My conclusion: Lab leak's not inconsistent with the evidence, but there's no smoking gun.

China's behavior is highly suggestive of guilt -- the moving location on Google Maps, destroying records, and not permitting any outside investigation.

However, China could actually be completely innocent and just doing things that make them look guilty, because "we need to do something to get people to stop talking about this" may be a strong motive of their government.

For the record, personally I'm a little cheesed off that our politicians aren't making a bigger deal out of this. (E.g. give China a binary choice: Pick one, either (a) provide us a complete explanation of why you did the things that make you look guilty and let us see some evidence to back up that explanation, or (b) we'll assume it was negligence, and try to recover the costs of the virus by putting a ton of tariffs on your goods.) I don't even think Trump's said the words "Chinese virus" for months.

But who knows, maybe world powers have some secret agreements about how to handle bioweapon accidents? Maybe China's people and our people got together back in March or April, they privately admitted it was an accident and privately made some concessions, on the condition we don't publicly blame them, keep everything they said super classified for at least 70 years, and they don't publicly criticize US bioweapons programs if we don't criticize theirs? I'm just guessing here, but it seems plausible.

The one new argument I've heard only today is the argument "But how did it get all the way from where wild bats are to Wuhan?" (From two different sources, OP is one of them, I believe the other one was from CBS News on Youtube.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22805043

I can't imagine the US government letting the Chinese government come in to investigate, so that's not the strongest argument

My view for China's actions is that they're likely by individual bureaucrats trying to hide their own incompetence from everyone

I can completely see an team of international scientists coming to the US to investigate the origins of an outbreak.

> the moving location on Google Maps

Note that China intentionally fudges all locations, apparently you can see that in HK (where Maps is available), locations across the border are completely wrong (in the sea, etc)

Western countries (and particularly the US) have been conducting similar research for years. Despite imposing bans and other restrictions on their own soil, they may want the option to continue doing this in less regulated places, e.g. China. In the same way and for the same reasons that our manufacturers have outsourced hazardous production processes to less regulated countries. Personally I think it needs to be banned everywhere, urgently, and an inspection regime imposed.

The US may also have been complicit in this particular experiment. There was a lot of collaboration with Chinese researchers working in US labs and the US sponsoring the WIV, etc.

I'm about as far as you can get politically from Trump but I agree that China needs to be much more transparent and accountable about this.

> Maybe China's people and our people got together back in March or April, they privately admitted it was an accident and privately made some concessions, on the condition we don't publicly blame them, keep everything they said super classified for at least 70 years, and they don't publicly criticize US bioweapons programs if we don't criticize theirs?

Not true. State friendly media and even state media here in China regularly push the narrative of foreign origin. They even claimed this a US bioweapon during height of their bullsh*t. And yes, a non-insignificant amount of people buy into this (data point of two: my parents).

I would implore those who are skeptical of a lab leak hypothesis to listen to the evolutionary biologist Bret Weinsteins Darkhorse Podcast with Yuri Deigin on the subject:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bret-weinstein-and-yur...

Related article by Deigin:

https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...

The podcast is a much easier listen then the deep dive that is in the article. All in all, the facts do not rule out lab leak, and there are definitely mysteries to explain.

Note that Bret is also a bit of a contrarian with a habit of 'just asking questions' (It is not clear their was substantial fraud in the 2020 U.S. election, but it is clear there is valid reason for concern. Why is there not broad, bipartisan interest in finding out?)

Doesn't mean he's necessarily wrong, and many of his takes are pretty reasonable, but personally, I nevertheless do take his opinions with an additional grain of salt...

Deigin conflates RNA samples with viral isolates that can be used to infect lab animals. Weinstein seems to be stuck on bat respiratory disease that spreads in roosting caves. He does not consider gastrointestinal infections spread by bat guano at night in their feeding range which is shared by nocturnal/arboreal pangolins and palm civets. Bat to human direct infection is also just as plausible near the horseshoe bat’s natural habitat.

The Barker article is confused about a 7-hour train ride not being compatible with a 4.5 day average incubation period.

I see no mysteries to explain just the hard work of animal surveillance required to connect the dots.

And the well adapted to humans furin site is just plain luck? Its not like this has not happen before, SARS like virus's have crossed species within modern history that we have detected, and they all flame out eventually. I'm no virologist, but I believe its typically because of selection pressure and the mutations needed to start to adapt to humans don't come easily once a jump occurs, it usually takes a few jumps to get it right. This one came out already well adapted to humans and has a furin site not seen in other bat corona viruses, plus 4 additional amino acid chains that give it even more ability to infect cells. This is why Elon Musk got egg on his face for making the prediction that it would be over within a few months, that was based on past outbreaks.

Bret is very clear that yes, this can happen naturally, but the chances are very slim that such a alignment of events occurred in proximity to a lab that was performing gain of function research which does this very thing of combining aspects of multiple viruses and rapidly adapting them in either other animal hosts or petri dishes of cells, including human cells.

Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses [1]

> The spike protein is a focused target of COVID-19, a pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2. A 12-nt insertion at S1/S2 in the spike coding sequence yields a furin cleavage site, which raised controversy views on origin of the virus. Here we analyzed the phylogenetic relationships of coronavirus spike proteins and mapped furin recognition motif on the tree. Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2.

Not "just plain luck" but a relatively rare recombination event that can occur in nature with co-infection. I have no problem with the lab hypothesis but I expect to see clear signs of a recent lineage recombination in the full SARS-CoV-2 genome. The lab theory requires not only a lab leak but the active suppression of the sequence(s) of the viral isolate(s) used in the hypothetical gain-of-function experiment.

Wuhan is no more unlikely than the mainland near Hong Kong where SARS-1 emerged. Any major city center in China that is accessible from Kunming, Yunnan [2] is a likely outbreak hotspot.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunming#Transport

You have to quantify "relatively rare". Its closest relatives of high genetic match do not have this furin site, as they admit in the paper you linked to, only the sister clade does:

"Moreover, SARS-CoV-2 is the only virus in subgenus Sarbecovirus having this feature, while even its closest relatives, bat coronavirus RaTG13 (sequence identity 97.7%) and pangolin coronaviruses (92.9%–90.7%), do not have furin site. However, in Hibecovirus, the sister clade of Sarbecovirus, a Hipposideros bat coronavirus collected in 2013 at Zhejiang Province in China has furin site at S1/S2. Interestingly, the other member in Hibecovirus lacks such site, similar to the situation of SARS-CoV-2 and its close relatives. Interestingly, the other member in Hibecovirus lacks such site, similar to the situation of SARS-CoV-2 and its close relatives. "

Notice they don't publish the genetic match of the sister clade. Howe exactly does it jump clade when its closest relatives don't have the site?

This is what they point out in the podcast. Can it occur naturally, yes, but what are the chances if its closest relatives do not have it at all and none in the same clade? What exactly is the mechanism that this can occure? Its not just the furin site, they also discuss 4 other amino acid chains present that expanded its infectiousness. If this was a relatively chance combination of bat and pangolin incubated mutation that someone also gained the furin site and 4 other amino chains, why has it not flamed out like past jumps such as MERS which had the same? Pretty fortunate for a new mutation.

>>The lab theory requires not only a lab leak but the active suppression of the sequence(s) of the viral isolate(s) used in the hypothetical gain-of-function experiment.

Agreed, and although I don't necessarily think highly of the sources (Daily Mail), there does appear to be suppression of evidence even recently:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9129681/New-cover-f...

I believe Bret's podcast also talks about a database that was also taken down shortly after the outbreak from the Wuhan lab that may contain the sequence of the virus SARS Cov 2, which is standard practice for engineered viruses for study. I've also heard that there were samples destroyed in China during the early outbreak. If they were truly transparent they would release all records and backups of their databases going back a year or 2 before the outbreak to prove no such sequencing took place. So far I have not seen that. Keep in mind that all these level 4 labs globally are at risk of being shut down if any of this gets proved. They become political hot potatoes. If the public became fully aware (as in the laymen on the street knew) that multiple companies exist that can print any virus DNA sequence for $30,000 USD, and one of them escaped, they would likely be horrified.

I do agree that this can arise naturally, but the confluence of rare events arising a couple blocks from a level 4 lab studying exactly this gives me pause.

To update your reference class of how likely this is and what kind of countries this can happen in— one or more of the outbreaks of foot and mouth disease in the UK were caused by lab leaks.

2007: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2007/08/report-l...

2011: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/countryside-i...

Also 2004: SARS in in China. - https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20040423/china-sars-death

This is from a country that lets its state officials run wild with claims that it was imported from the US army into Wuhan, while keeping a tight enough leash to disappear any citizen when they cross arbitrary lines, and whose official line is now that it came to Wuhan through imported frozen seafood. We'll never know the origins, realistically.

I'm not convinced either way, but posting because this is an articulate well written non-sensational discussion of the idea.

If it is true, it was almost certainly an accident. Nobody really benefited from this (even if China really has eradicated it, it's damaged their export-heavy economy badly), and if it was terrorists they would have claimed responsibility since that's the point of terrorism. Biological warfare is dumb anyway. It's like trying to use a grenade as a handgun. Yes it does damage the enemy, but...

However, the state-sponsored gain-of-function research towards particular properties is not an accident.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology has published papers on how they were able to modify a bat virus to achieve more dangerous properties [77][88].

[77] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/

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

That always did strike me as reckless. It reminds me of 1950s and 1960s atomic testing: yes, there is value in the knowledge gained, but the method of gaining it was a bit YOLO.

Nature.com says:

> Editors’ note, March 2020: We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.

which seems to be unscientific editorializing. There is some evidence, as presented in the OP for example, and there is "no evidence" for any other origin theory either. And the Chinese government in Wuhan showed from the start with Li Wenliang's experience, that any evidence that pointed to imperfect competence in Wuhan would be destroyed by the totalitarian government.

How close are we to DIY viruses?

If I was a teenager interested in biology, and I wanted to maybe build a "harmless" virus just to see if I could do it, how achievable might that be?

I watched computer viruses go from:

researchers -> tinkerers -> vandals -> criminals -> governments

At this point we just assume every computer is compromised, and we carve out enclaves of varying security for whatever risk level we're willing to assume.

I can imagine a future where pandemics happen at the same frequency as school shootings do today. How far away is that?

You can make a superflu with a ready supply of ferrets and warehouse.

It does not take genetic engineering to do.

The bats do it for free.

With the COVID vaccine, we’re now very close to being able to infect someone with vCJD through a pinprick, with technology that within a couple of years someone will be able to make at home.

The difficulty with what you’ve asked is we don’t have the API in the same way as with computers. I suspect that for many many iterations of computing power and biological understanding we are going to be a long way from being able to determine how to make something dangerous from scratch (although it should be easier to make something dangerous become more dangerous)

The interesting thing for me is the contrast in the behavior of the Chinese government between the previous viral leaks from China. I'm citing a few references from before 2020: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-analysis/sars-escaped-bei... https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/20/18260669/deadly...

The previous behavior was to acknowledge the leaks and try to contain them. The current behavior is to arrest people who document the government cover up. Why the change in behavior, unless the government absolutely knows what happened and is trying to control the information?

Your China article is from 2004. China's regime's ability to control media and its residents is stronger now than then, and the people in charge are more insecure and defensive. That may be enough to explain the change in PR strategy.

Alternatively, past leaks simply weren't bad enough to embarrass the State and could be blamed on local officials. This one got so big so fast that a more defensive posture was required.

China is now an authoritarian strongman dictatorship since 2004.

> Nobody really benefited from this (even if China really has eradicated it, it's damaged their export-heavy economy badly)

This narrative has to stop: the CCP just illegally annexed Hong Kong 27 years ahead of the hand over and violated it's autonomy in direct violation of the internationally recognized treaty, which may arguably require China to return HK to British control--but the UK is entirely destroyed due to COIVD and yet another lockdown and post Brexit economic downturn so they've been neutralized. The CCP set a very dangerous precedent, especially with regards to Taiwan in that region, along the lines of what Russia did when in annexed Crimea, which resulted in several years of armed conflict and even more untold human rights violations.

The CCP committed Crimes against Humanity to do so and passed the National Security Law which has removed rule of Law in what was once a beacon of Western values in an geographic and ethnically Eastern province, which had served as an experimental working model that proved the two systems and cultures could operate alongside one another which also served as the gateway for Western Investment into the Chinese Economy.

I've gone in depth in earlier posts, so look at it for a more elaborated view. But, this tired narrative breaks down under the most basic amount of scrutiny and needs to stop bein repeated: China as a collective may not have gained a lot, but the CCP has without a doubt consolidated a great deal of power and proven itself to be (for the time being until de-coupling takes place in earnest) an indispensable component due to its concentration to serve as the manufacturing hub of the World. And this is detrimental for many reasons I've outlined before.

As for no evidence, I honestly do not know what to make of Dr. Yan's work, especially because of who backed her, but her story is not only very compelling as a whole but it is also inline with the typical MO the CCP follows when they want to dissapear someone. And her involvement at the WHO as well as work in HK is what speaks volume, she elaborated quite a lot about the gain of function work that was being done in several labs where she and her other colleagues worked at, including Hong Kong, by the CCP with Corona based viruses--specifically those found in bats.

I'm completely out of my depth and only took basic virology courses in my undergrad so I cannot speak to the validity of her research papers, but what I can say, especially after SARS and H1N1 in my recent memory is that in retrospect is the CCP has always been an opportunistic bad actor during these pandemics, and its behaviour with the forced border opening, quarantine exemptions, mandatory contact tracing of locals with continued crossings from the mainland into Hong Kong exemplified to what lengths it will go to see that it's will be done, consequences be damned.

It wanted the protests to stop, the threat of secession from the CCP was real espcially with Billionaires like Jimmy Lai openly getting involved in the yellow movement (which is why he had to be made an example of) so the NSL had to be passed at all costs, and now we're seeing what that looks like as more and more Hongkongers fear for their lives as they are being imprisoned retroactively for something that was completely legal--protesting, even non-violent ones as in the case of Agnes Chow. As well as the removal of politicians and placing enforcement of financial censorship as it sees fit.

> Nobody really benefited from this

Nobody benefits but who gets hurt the least? Totalitarian regimes are inherently more capable of dealing with the problem for obvious reasons.

In 2019, I would have guessed wrong about how a hypothetical COVID-19 would play out.

I'd have pointed out that the US would unequivocally be one of the best nations at recovering from such a challenge:

    - Spent the prior 4 years warning the world that something like this could happen
    - Well prepared for this eventuality (stockpiles), have recently conducted dry run rehearsals for this exact eventuality, until recently had a funded unit of government for exactly this scenario
    - Has world leading healthcare
    - Has world leading pharma industry
    - Has money, scientists, doctors & other resources out the wazoo
    - Is a competent nation with a history of excellent execution in almost all theatres

Conversely i'd have argued totalitarian regimes would have performed the worst because of the politics of a regime like that - everything gets covered up. You'd have insufficient visibility to even begin to mount an effective response.

Everything you said is true but add a populist crackpot President, a huge alt-medicine quackery industry, and a significant fraction of the population that believes absolutely asinine things about vaccines and medicine. The USA would have had a great response to COVID if it weren't for American anti-intellectualism.

Not all totalitarian regimes have been handling COVID well. Russia hasn't done any better than most European countries and may have done worse if they're cooking their numbers (which is likely). Iran has done poorly. The thing that I think made China do well is a combination of an obedient authoritarian society and a large number of scientists and engineers in positions of authority. An authoritarian society is very good at problems of the form "have everyone do X," but that only works if X is the right thing.

https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-lab...

Coronavirus a have escaped labs on at least ten occasions. At least four times from China.

Why is this article controversial and this comment being downvoted - Other then China doesn’t like it? Isn’t it reasonable to think they might have been a eleventh?

Also see the HN thread Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it [1].

Novelist Nicholson Barker has written a beautifully worded article but it lacks critical thinking.

Lab gain-of-function experiments begin with one or more known isolates that have been sequenced. One of these sequences will match large swathes of non-functional RNA in SARS-CoV-2 if the lab is the source. This is the evidence I personally need to consider the lab hypothesis plausible. Until then, the natural spillover hypothesis fits based on Occam’s razor.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25585833

I think the closest natural virus was 95% similar. 5% seems pretty far for mutations. Is there a historical track record for finding the natural virus to a 99.9% similarity?

We see around one base pair mutation per host transmission, so that would likely already put us outside 99.9% similarity even among humans with coronavirus wouldn't it?

Rough estimate:

(29,000 base pairs, just assuming 3.5 days between generations, 395 days since first affected person (probably it was a bit more), would be 112 mutations = 99.6% similarity)

And I think we'd expect more changes to be selected for in the early period of host adaptation.

Your first sentence is missing the number, did you mean 'one bas pair'?

Yes thanks, fixed

Two answers.

First, it was 96% identical. But that was in 2013. Presume it's being passed bat to bat every few days for 6 years, then at some point made the jump to another species, most likely in a wet market. It's really not unreasonable to imagine a 4% drift in that time.

Second, we don't identify every virus or every strain of every virus. Just because we found one that was 96% similar doesn't mean that all the other bats carry an identical virus. It's quite likely we found a distant cousin of the umpteenth-grand-parent of covid-19, and sequenced it.

Can you explain how that evolutionary path led to the virus becoming better adapted to humans than it is to bats, and can you explain how all the samples we have ever found, from the very beginning of this outbreak, are uniquely adapted to humans?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06199

You’ve asked the same question in 3 spots. You’re asking the question backwards and not reading the other comments here (for example, the particular response you responded to) There are some very good reasonable answers for why and how this could have happened, unless you’re a biologist and are going to tell us how it happened (which the paper you cited doesn’t) you’re beating on a painful drum

Ok, if there are very reasonable answers, perhaps you can point to them?

It's not an unreasonable question. But my own guess? Selection bias applies.

Viruses grow by the millions, billions, and mutations occur frequently. This virus's ancestor might have hopped around civets for months. Then, a few random mutations on one got lucky and made it really good at infecting humans. That's when it made the leap. We don't see the billions of attempts and mutations that sucked at infecting humans. We see the one that did.

Now, my own bias is that my honours thesis was on evolutionary algorithms and I spent a lot of time being amazed at how well random mutations can lead to optimal answers.

> Is there a historical track record for finding the natural virus

SARS-1 [1]:

> The viral outbreak was subsequently genetically traced to a colony of cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Yunnan, China.

The Guardian reference [2] states:

> Hence the efforts of Chinese scientists – led by Shi Zheng-Li and Cui Jie of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China – to trace the source of the outbreak. Scientists initially suspected that civet cats, sold in markets in China, were the source of the virus but later turned their attention to bats, which they realised were the prime source of the virus. Civets were merely an intermediary.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syn...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/10/sars-virus-bat...

https://project-evidence.github.io/

I'm only up to chapter 9 of 14 chapters, but this is a very thorough, well-researched, sober, long-form article that's very accessible to non-experts.

Great read, highly recommended.

There isn't any direct evidence that it was leaked from a lab, but there isn't any evidence that it wasn't...

Sheesh. We're in Glenn Beck territory now.

There is a large amount of circumstantial evidence that the virus was leaked from the same lab which had been involved in gain of function research on exactly these viruses (specifically to make them more infectious to humans). Direct evidence cannot be obtained, because the CCP has not allowed any access to the labs or records.

No evidence has been presented for any alternative theory, and the stories the CCP have put out have been discredited very quickly.

This article does a really good job, IMO, of addressing the controversy inherent in the title and the implications therein.

But rather than just reading the headline, it’s a really well written article on “Gain of Function” research, and the history of contemporary bioweapons and infectious disease institutions. Particularly the funding, beginning in the 50’s, and exploding during the war on terror. It’s simply fascinating.

The desire to place blame, the political implications (plenty bipartisan), the funding — it’s not very hard to see why this subject provokes such strong reactions. But dismissing it out-of-hand misses the opportunity to delve deep into a field that is as consequential as nuclear weapons research.

Yes, it's a great article. Too bad many commenters won't have read it ;)

The most interesting part to me wasn't actually the lab leak part. That's been widely discussed for some time. The more interesting bit was how the anthrax scare turned out to be a lab worker who had a financial stake in vaccine research and apparently wanted funding to be increased ... and how that scare was used by the USG to justify drastic increases in funding towards bio-defence. If anyone has ever managed to more successfully or more cheaply achieve their goals through terrorism it's hard to think of an example!

That part made me sit up in my chair — I remember that era, the anthrax scare, and yet never heard about that scientist!

Here's an article from August 2019.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ebola-henipah-china-...

The RCMP arrested 2 Chinese nationals who illegally sent highest risk viruses to Wuhan. Their security clearance was revoked and the University cut ties with them. the university stopped paying them immediately. Reassigned their students. Let that sink in... the university didnt fight at all.

Meanwhile the lab and public health was claiming that all policies and procedures were followed and they were innocent and yet nothing changed. They never got back into the lab. There's obviously no link at all to covid19, or is there?

In fact that 'investigation' never ever completed. There's no coincidences. The CBC reported on it because they caught wind of it via non-government sources. The students are the ones who originally broke the story. So why is the government tight lipped on this one?

For those who think these concerns are fringe, see also this piece from the Washington Post Editorial Board a couple days ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/we-c...

https://archive.is/j4l6T

I don't see any evidence for the speculation it was lab created (or modified into it's current form) except for an acknowledgement that the capability to do so exists.

I don't doubt the possibility of such a thing occurring, but I just haven't seen any evidence to support this.

I assume you mean to say “the speculation that it was...”?

Yep, corrected, thanks.

For any skeptics out there, take an open-minded look at this article:

https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/blog/scientific-evidence-and...

It goes quite deep into the genetic analysis of SARS-CoV-2 relative to existing bat coronaviruses, laying out the case that it is definitely of a non-natural origin.

I am not anywhere near knowledgeable enough to fully evaluate the claims, but I would really enjoy seeing a rebuttal that is as clearly written to make the case for a natural cause. To me the Nature article just says 'nah, evolution is random, therefore SARS-CoV-2 randomly happened.' but it would be nice to see more detail. Especially with the closest ancestor of RaTG13 being decades of evolution away. (not to mention the questions around the origin of RaTG13 on the author's site...)

This is a good one as well with some more explanation.

https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...

My prior for this is that it's unlikely that we know all the bat viruses that exist.

If you find another virus that's closer, it no longer matters that the old ones were far away

Oh please, these reporters can't even get the story of Dr Li Wenliang straight, and still call him a whistleblower even though the timeline happened as follows:

30th December 2019 - Li Wenliang, an eye doctor sent a wechat message to colleagues warning there might be SARS going around

31st December 2019 - Wuhan made public statement about a "pneumonia of unknown cause", which was subsequently picked up by WHO https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

2st January 2020 - Li Wenliang was invited to the police station and asked to not spread rumours about the new illness

Let's review this timeline. Wuhan had made public of a "pneumonia of unknown cause" on the 31st December 2019, yet Li Wenliang is still called a whistleblower by many media news outlets https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-51403795

If anyone also want to mention Taiwan warning the WHO earlier than 31st December 2019, one need to just look at WHO's official statement here https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcr... (just search Taiwan).

What's my point in all of this? Well, from what I am seeing is that we are constantly presented with manufactured fake information wrapped in well articulated articles that is bought by the masses. How can we trust what any of these guys write when the evidence is circumstancial at best? I mean it's like me saying "gee, this Nicholson Baker claims he is not a satan worshipping paedophile, but what if..."

I'd like to ask everyone commenting on this article: who wrote it?

Seriously -- what do you know about the author of these words? (There's no "author's bio" anywhere on the page, or even if you click on his name.) So what do any of us know about him?

If you look him up on Wikipedia, it lists his occupation as novelist and fiction writer, as well as an "essayist." ("His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization....")

"Out of a total of ten fiction books, he also wrote three erotic novels."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholson_Baker

His nonfiction works include a book about his more-famous fiction-writer friend John Updike, and a book about public libraries.

My favorite part of the article is where he says "there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap..."

Followed a few words later by the word "Nevertheless..."

A stark contrast with all the direct evidence for zoonotic origins?

So we're just going to ignore circumstantial evidence? If someone died in on my property and then I under threat of violence prevented police from collecting evidence and simultaneously is that not grounds for further suspicion or scruitney?

China has from the beginning barred neutral third parties from visiting the site and collecting samples - even of the disease itself and continues to do so while peddling conspiracies on state media that make Trump sound positively sane.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-guarding-ancient-bat-caves-...

Thanks for pointing this out. I'm not going to read the article.

This long-form stuff is particularly sticky. If the story is told well, you're likely going to remember it as true (or at least credible) even the story wasn't credible in the first place.

I recently read the Atlantic piece about semi-rich kids getting world-class coaches of prep school sports (crew, lacrosse, etc.) so they might be able to get on the team at elite colleges. Oops. At least it sounded like the general gist of the story was accurate.

The truth of a story does not depend on the credibility of its narrator. To assert otherwise is the definition of ad hominem.

Claims asserted may nonetheless be untrue or may not be as strong as claimed. But that requires careful, critical examination.

I'm perplexed by this reaction, as if reading something with a critical eye is impossible. Or, worse, that reading something by someone without a particular status or pedigree might become as infectious as SARS-2 itself and turn us into zombies or something.

> The truth of a story does not depend on the credibility of its narrator.

It actually does. I'm going to respect the opinions of serious scientists, doctors, journalists, lawyers, etc on topics of their expertise.

> But that requires careful, critical examination.

That was my whole point. By stating claims as an elaborate story that requires time investment as a reader, with a lot of flourish from a professional writer, you're undermining careful and critical examination.

You're also risking the story being memorable and sticking with you, in the same way that people watch historical movies and then internalize that as what actually happened. Even though you know most movies are fictional, if it's the reference you feel an emotional attachment to, you'll justify it as true to yourself.

Humans aren't good at purging information once they've been exposed to it, especially if it resonates with them.

> I'm perplexed by this reaction, as if reading something with a critical eye is impossible.

It's not impossible, it's just impractical. If I read something by a well-respected person with expertise, then the point of reading is to retain as much shared knowledge as possible. If I read pieces like this, then I get to live in their narrative for a little while, but I have to be careful not to absorb too much of it or take plausible sounding things as true, at least pending fact-checking.

> Or, worse, that reading something by someone without a particular status or pedigree might become as infectious as SARS-2 itself and turn us into zombies or something.

Indeed, that is what's happening. We used to value expertise. Now everyone's opinion is equally valid.

One who does not trust in public reason or accepts authority as a be-all end all as opposed to simply a fallible but time saving heuristic cannot claim to be a practitioner of science which is all about zero trust and verifiability, the two positions are fundamentally incompatible.

In science every individual has a personal and moral duty to derive, reproduce or otherwise inquire of the world so as too bootstrap themselves including sometimes theories to which they find too obvious or implausible, and from sources too and notm for without regularly doing so because that is the single thing fundamentally sperating us from antivaxers and flat eathers besides some luck in initial authority.

> > The truth of a story does not depend on the credibility of its narrator. > > It actually does. I'm going to respect the opinions of serious scientists, doctors, journalists, lawyers, etc on topics of their expertise.

No, this is just wrong. If a homeless person tells you that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, this is just as true as if a Stanford physics professor says it, despite the latter having much more credibility than the former. The truth of a statement is independent of the speaker.

In fact, your causality is exactly backwards. Credibility depends (in part) on someone stating the truth repeatedly.

Abstractly speaking you are right, of course.

However, how could you even begin to fairly judge the author’s argument if you yourself aren’t knowledgeable about the topic at hand?

If you aren’t an expert looking at the author’s credentials and making an inference from there is totally fair since you will never be able to even begin to appreciate that argument.

Which to me means in this case: I want to hear from virologists or epidemiologists or similar people about this topic and no one else. Maybe an article that heavily relies on quotes and interviews with such people would be fine, too.

> "Out of a total of ten fiction books, he also wrote three erotic novels."

I recently listened to the 99% Invisible mini stories episode, and one was on novel adaptations of films. One of the points about the authors who write them is they often take the work to pay the bills.

I read Baker's 'House of Holes' in 2014 and enjoyed it a lot. At least among a certain set, he's a well-known & respected author (here's a NYT review of House of Holes [0]). It's perfectly intelligible for a book about sex to be whimsical, raunchy, and intellectually serious all at once. He's also written a pacifist take on the Allies' involvement in WW II [1].

I agree that neglecting to include a bio was a strange choice. But, as Jim Geraghty at National Review points out today [2], The venue (New York Magazine) is what puts this hypothesis into the mainstream. Conservatives have been suggesting this was a possibility for a long time, but a NYM piece (potentially) legitimizes the idea to a very different audience:

> Baker is pretty blunt about the fact that many scientists have had these suspicions, or at least concerns, since the beginning of the pandemic, but didn’t want to speak publicly about the possibility of a lab accident while the Trump administration was touting the same idea... New York magazine reaches a different audience from National Review, and it is good that a more left-of-center audience will be exposed to all of the evidence and arguments about this possibility. The possibility of a lab accident should not be seen as another crackpot conspiracy theory in a year full of them.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/books/house-of-holes-nich...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/books/review/Toibin-t.htm...

[2] https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/the-wuhan-lab-leak-hy...

You point out the author lacks credentials. That’s a fair point. What isn’t relevant is whether he’s written novels...erotic or otherwise. No need to being that up.

He's a fiction writer.

I think that's relevant.

Many writers have done both journalism and fiction. There's a long tradition of it.

True. But not the author of this article.

So by your logic, it seems like if you value journalism experience...then you should value this article less.

Would it have killed you to do a simple search on the matter?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholson_Baker#Non-fiction

Mind you, you're reading comments by people who aren't even writers

If the proximity to China's only BSL-4 lab wasn't a tip-off, and the Chinese gov't coverup wasn't a tip-off, then maybe at the very least this kind of desperate ad hominem you're peddling will tip people off?

If the zoonotic hypothesis were true, I'd expect to see (1) a transparent international investigation of the Wuhan lab, and (2) a fundamental recognition that journalists are allowed to ask questions, no matter their credentials prior to undertaking an inquiry. Given that we've apparently had neither, the zoonotic explanation is severely weakened.

Your comment is merely an ad hominem against the author, not the content.

Estimating the credibility of the author is a great heuristic for deciding what writing should get my limited attention.

I mean that's what investigative journalism is. Do you only read political pieces written by political scientists? Or articles on accidents & disasters from experts in those fields? The author cited experts & scientists, asked them questions and well... investigated?

I just don't see how that's problematic, and while I don't usually think that appeals to authority are fallacious, suggesting that only scientists should be listened to regardless of the arguments presented by the author is a perfect example of a fallacious appeal to authoritity imo. Especially when the author presents quite a few scientific sources to support his claims.

You can obviously argue that those sources are not valid, which is obviously possible and even likely, but we should focus on attacking the argument not the person presenting it, seemingly in good faith.

I don’t know who you are so I will just ignore the evidence you presented me.

This article is a masterpiece of disinformation.

Which always makes me incredulous why nobody ever breaks these down piece by piece if it's so obvious. Education is much more effective than proof by repeated assertions.

Because it’s an extremely long article and it’s a lot of work for me to do for no reward.

Just giving an empty comment serves no purpose. If it's too hard or time consuming to debunk the whole article, then pick the most consequential point or the point that's the easiest to disprove.

"This article is disinformation. For example they claim X when in reality !X as you can see here." Is a way more persuasive and valuable comment.

The author actually says that there is no direct evidence for this.

That's why he even included the word "hypothesis" in the title.

He's not even trying to provide evidence.

You should elaborate on that.

I might have missed this in the article - but I believe a separate recent article pointed out that none of the animals tested from the market had any signs of this virus - this China was looking at other sites.

Just not the wuhan lab which is a few hundred yards from the market?

There were also articles about a year before covid about how people were dealing out about the lax security of the Wuhan lab.

https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-lab...

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

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/opinions...

It's probably more helpful if you can share the URLs of the articles you're citing.

Snopes.com delved into the one about lax security, and it turned out to just be something somebody shared on a social media web site. (It had the name "ResearchGate", which many wrongly assumed meant it was an actual research paper when it was just a social media post.)

https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/01/covid-19-bioweapon/

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

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/opinions...

“ What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic”

"Full Text of US State Department Cables Finally Released, Showing Safety In Chinese Lab."

https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/07/20/0611205/full-text-o...

After the full text of the cables were released, it proved they'd been heavily (and misleadingly) edited. IT Wire attributed that to political actors trying to create a specific story line.

https://www.itwire.com/health/us-leaked-parts-of-cables-to-p...

The article you're citing is misleadingly edited and contains only a single claimed quote from the cables, which is actually two separate sentence fragments that are many paragraphs separated from each other, strung together to look as if they composed a single sentence. Also, one of the sentence fragments is in fact a misquote, edited to make it appear that it's talking about a shortage of technicians, when in fact the sentence it's taken from was talking about a shortage in viruses: the cables do talk about a shortage of both, but the technician shortage isn't presented in a positive light.

Other than that one edited, incorrect quote, its only citations are tweets.

The cables are both less immediately damning than the original leaked quotes, and considerably more damning than the article you're linking to claims. Here's a direct excerpt from the cables, downloaded from https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-state-depart... FWIW I'm only citing the last sections of the cables here, which talk about the technician shortages and impact on coronavirus research (the virus shortages are mentioned earlier).

<Blank> noted that the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory. University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston (UTMB), which has one of several well-established BSL-4 labs in the United States (supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID of NIH)), has scientific collaborations with WIV, which may help alleviate this talent gap over time. Reportedly, researchers from GTMB are helping train technicians who work in the WIV BSL-4 lab. Despite this, <blank> they would welcome more help from the U.S. and international organizations as they establish "gold standard" operating procedures and training courses for the first time in China. As China is building more BSL-4 labs, including one in Harbin Veterinary Research Institute subordinated to the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) for veterinary use <blank> the training for technicians and investigators working on dangerous pathogens will certainly be in demand.

6. (SBU) The ability of WIV scientists to undertake productive research despite limitations on the use of the new BSL-4 facility is demonstrated by a recent publication on the origin of SARS. Over a five-year study, <blank> (and their research team) widely sampled bats in Yunan province with funding support from NIAID/NIH, USAID, and several Chinese funding agencies. The study results were published in PLoS Pathogens online on Nov. 30, 2017 (1), and it demonstrated that a SARS-like coronavirus isolated from horseshoe bats in a single cave contain all the building blocks of the pandemic SARS-coronavirus genome that caused the human outbreak. These results strongly suggest that the highly pathogenic SARS-coronavirus originated in this bat population. Most importantly, researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like disease. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention. <blank> WIV scientists are allowed to study the SARS-like coronaviruses isolated from bats while they are precluded from studying human-disease causing SARS coronavirus in their new BSL-4 lab until permission for such work is granted by the NHFCP.

I hadn't actually read the cables until just now, and to be honest they're a bit scarier than I had assumed. Notably, the scientists weren't studying the already-discovered, human SARS, but they were studying SARS-like coronaviruses isolated from bats (where both original SARS and COVID-19 are believed to come from) and their interactions with ACE2, which is the receptor that both original SARS targeted and COVID-19 targets. Now, one might argue: anyone studying SARS would at some point study ACE2, since that's the receptor SARS targeted! And if you weren't allowed to study SARS, you might study coronaviruses you isolated from bats and try to get them to target ACE2, since bats are probably where SARS came from. But... Oof, that the city where the outbreak started had China's first BSL-4 lab ever, and it was studying SARS-like coronaviruses isolated from bats targeting ACE2, and they continued to study SARS-like coronaviruses since 2018 because they weren't allowed to use real SARS due to lack of technicians and investigators able to safely operate a high containment lab? That's... at least a little bit of a scary coincidence.

I think zoonotic origin is still also a fairly plausible and likely scenario, but I'm more suspicious of the lab than I was before. At the very least, studying SARS-like coronaviruses isolated from bats, made to target ACE2, seems to be a complete failure from the perspective of "emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention," which the cables note as the reason the lab exists. A SARS-like coronavirus from bats targeting ACE2 emerged literally under their noses, and they didn't predict or prevent it! Best case this is a pretty bad failure of the purpose of the lab.

Edit (although I've also edited somewhat before this): I just re-read the article after reading the cables, because something about the "sampled bats in Yunan" from the cables tickled my brain. In the article, they mention that "Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology published a paper saying that the novel coronavirus was 96 percent identical to a bat virus, RaTG13, found in Yunnan province in southern China."

That line gets tossed out like a throwaway; like it just so happened to be that WIV had taken a sample from Yunan. But it didn't just so happen to be from Yunan: all of the coronaviruses WIV used in their five-year study on making novel SARS-like coronaviruses from bats target ACE2 receptors were from bats in Yunan. And the closest living relative to COVID-19, a novel SARS-like coronavirus targeting the ACE2 receptor, is also from a bat from Yunan? That's... one hell of a coincidence.

I mean, yes, of course we'd only be able to match against samples we actually have collected. But... WIV has samples from other places too, they just didn't use them in their experiments making bat coronaviruses target ACE2; the article mentions they had also collected samples from Orlando and NYC as well, for example. So it's not entirely selection bias.

We'll probably never really know if it was a lab escape or random mutation in the wild, but that's super spooky.

To dive deeper down the rabbit hole, I read WIV's 2017 paper on their coronavirus research that the cables reference. https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... TL;DR they constructed chimeras from multiple versions of bat coronaviruses to create different variations in the "receptor binding domain," specifically the genes encoding the spike protein and ORF8a. They also analyze ORF8b and ORF3b sequences, specifically noting versions of ORF3b they've studied can "antagonize interferon function" (interferons boost immune system response) and discussing their own previous studies on ORF3b. The aim of the chimeras is to create a virus targeting the human ACE2 receptor like SARS-CoV did. They succeed — noting that some of their variants "have a stronger effect than SARS-CoV" — and also note "It is very interesting to investigate in further studies whether [one wild virus variant's] ORF3b and other versions of truncated ORF3b such as [their chimeric virus variants] also show [interferon] antagonism profiles."

Reading a paper from NIH on COVID-19 sequencing — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7180649/ — guess what gets implicated?

"The SARS-CoV-2 genome was reported to possess 14 ORFs encoding 27 proteins ... When researchers compare the SARS-CoV-2 with the SARS-CoV at the amino acid level, they found the SARS-CoV-2 was quite similar to the SARS-CoV, but there were some notable differences in the 8a, 8b, and 3b protein. [Emphasis mine.]"

I don't know a lot about this subject. But as a layperson, it seems a little suspicious that WIV was making SARS-like coronaviruses in Wuhan, where the outbreak started, from bat viruses collected from Yunan, where the closest living relative of COVID-19 is from, and experimenting specifically with the proteins that are the most-novel in COVID-19 as compared to SARS?

In April 2004, China reported a case of SARS in a nurse who had cared for a researcher at the Chinese National Institute of Virology (NIV). While ill, the researcher had traveled twice by train from Beijing to Anhui province, where she was nursed by her mother, a physician, who fell ill and died. The nurse in turn infected five third-generation cases, causing no deaths.

Subsequent investigation uncovered three unrelated laboratory infections in different researchers at the NIV. At least of two primary patients had never worked with live SARS virus. Many shortcomings in biosecurity were found at the NIV, and the specific cause of the outbreak was traced to an inadequately inactivated preparation of SARS virus that was used in general (that is, not biosecure) laboratory areas, including one where the primary cases worked. It had not been tested to confirm its safety after inactivation, as it should have been.

While we're discussing racist coronavirus conspiracies which can't explain the positive COVID results of Italian and French patients in November 2019, why don't we go all the way instead and discuss the conspiracies used by Trump supporters? The virus was clearly manufactured by the deep state to steal the election from Trump, to take away person freedoms and to implement a global reset. I find that theory to be much more believable and interesting than this Pottinger paid hit piece on China.

If you think Trump supporters are bad you should take a look at some of the CCTV archives.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/06/world/asia/china-covid-or...

Wow! Another propaganda piece which repeat same falsehoods about COVID origins from China without providing meaningful substance. It's from the NYTimes too, a reputable fake news source which also slanders Trump. Could it be they are also in on the conspiracy to engineer this global reset by stealing the election from Trump using a lab engineered virus?

What on earth was that?!

So.. let me try to understand this theory.

China was so smart, that their scientists were able to identify the virus from nature, and isolate it into a vial. Then, they let it leak out of the lab.

But yet, reports now indicate that the virus existed in Europe, before it was identified in Wuhan. [1]

Any one else scratching their head here about this logic?

Oh wait.. I got it. A Chinese spy carried the vial to Europe, and release it into the population of Italy and Spain, months before they “accidentally” released it in Wuhan.

This must be the most plausible explanation for how it leaked out of a Chinese lab, and infected people in Europe, before it infected people in Wuhan.

[1] https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1345438947137236993

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