The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
1. Direct-jump from bat population
2. Started in bats, came to humans through intermediate animal
3. Came from frozen food outside of China
4. Lab accident.
I used to think the lab accident theory was crazy, because it sounds like a science fiction movie. Not an impossible theory, just a crazy one.
But according to this article, despite a year of investigation, (1) is unlikely because we haven't found anyone that interacted with the nearest bat population hundred of miles away that didn't work in the virus lab in Wuhan and that caught the virus, (2) is unlikely because we would have found the intermediate animal by now, (3) is unlikely because the first case found was in China (and not somewhere else... if frozen food had the virus, the food would have had it before it was frozen, and someone else would have had it), and (4) is unlikely because a government famous for blocking information and is paranoid about how it is perceived domestically and internationally says "No, trust us on this one."
At some point, crazy theories become the most likely. Hopefully I'm wrong though, and they find an explanation that isn't "lab accident." It seems like we should be studying viruses and sharing that information with each other, and accidents like this will make it more likely that such research doesn't happen.
https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Esc...
Typical Western hypocrisy would be at play and China has no motivation whatsoever to subject itself to that.
Also, SARS-1 escaped twice, in Singapore and Beijing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...
Distance doesn't matter so much in today's world, when cities are connected by planes.
I doubt there is some legal paragraph which would work here, even in International Law.
https://www.axios.com/timeline-the-early-days-of-chinas-coro...
"Shouldn't they be held liable?"
There's a lot of accidents that happened in the West, specifically the US. Some known, some not.
The West just got lucky but would never admit it either.
Accidents happen. Even if it was a lab accident, it's not a reason to be outraged with the Chinese government.
I think in parallel to searching for the origin, they should also look into the reports that Chinese government tried to hid it under the carpet and only admitting that it couldn't control it after it was already spread all over the world.
That's the real crime of the Chinese government in regards to Covid and that's what people should be outraged about.
But yeah, good luck getting an unbiased report on that.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronav...
Not sure what said statements were, but as described, that is not at all a reason to ban someone. On the internet, legitimate criticism very frequently leads to harassment. That is not at all the fault of the critic, and as long as they didn't intend to cause harassment, it's no reason to ban them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
Coincidentally, the local Communist Party also placed the blame on meat from the local farmers' market.
Oh, yes it is.
It would be 'manslaughter' on a mass scale.
The largest ever seen.
If this were due to their negligence, then millions of dead, 10's of millions out of work, Trillions in lost productivity is unavoidably consequential.
It would be the worst 'accident' in human history and the responsibility would be squarely on their shoulders.
If you're experimenting with bombs and you blow up all your neighbours homes by accident - that's manslaughter, a very serious crime.
The geopolitical fallout would be unimaginable.
Almost all pandemics started in China in the history, apperantly habitat is suitable for that. You knew that but still play with deadly viruses there, then accidently it spreads and you try to cover up and make it worse and cause millions of deaths. Fair mistake, it is an accident!
If it is originated from a lab, I think people should not find out this. I’m not sure. It will trigger some feelings against China, hopefully it won’t turn into something racist.
If the US was directly involved in establishing safety procedures, then yes, that would be something.
But by and large, this is a China problem.
I doubt we will never know the answer.
If Trump had any kind of material evidence, he would have used it. Team Biden would be super strategic about it, I have no idea how they would communicate the intelligence. They would be wary of the populist consequences.
In a weird way, it might be better if we never found out that was true.
Wait and be killed.
Agreed! Whatever did cause COVID-19, the outbreak was made worse by a lack of transparency by the CCP. It seems like no matter what, the WHO report is unlikely to discuss that much. Which is a shame, because with more transparency into what happened we would be better able to stop the next COVID-19 from happening.
It really is though. If you're going to experiment with viruses that can be lethal to humans, you'd better have a damn good set of safety protocols so they don't get out. If you can't do that, don't experiment on the viruses. Given the infectiousness, there are even theories they were experimenting with making it more virulent.
There are almost 3,000,000 deaths globally. That's equivalent to launching a Little Boy at a city the size of Hiroshima every day for 42 days. It's a third of the number of soldiers who died in WW1.
There is no conceivable way that this could be declared an "oopsie" moment. This is a colossal fuck up, even by international scales.
It has nothing to do with it specifically being China. If it was the EU, I'd be pissed at them too. Lab leaks aren't particularly uncommon, which is a problem basically everywhere. I'm concerned that Russia is allegedly messing around with anthrax, but at least they seem to be able to keep it in their labs. I would prefer that no-one in the world was working on biological weapons, but I think that's a pipedream.
SARS escaped Beijing lab twice
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7096887/
The diplomats and scientists were worried about the safety of the lab's research on coronaviruses in animals like bats as early as January 2018.
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-officials-raised-alarms-a...
We are living in a strange world where a very plausible theory is considered as conspiracy.
It just reinforces the idea that misinformation is fine as long as it gets people to behave the "right" way, and only bad if it could cause someone to do something wrong.
https://www.businessinsider.com/former-cdc-director-redfield...
I think the Chinese's response was very good considering they had no warning. And western countries did far worse when they had 4-6 weeks of warning.
It took 4 years to find the immediate species in the case of SARS (2002->2006)
This is simply untrue. People work and live in close proximity to bats throughout much of China and Southeast Asia, including in Yunnan province. The mine workers who got sick in Mojiang in 2012 (where RaTG13 was discovered) were literally cleaning out massive mounds of bat poop.[1] There is research that shows that a non-negligible fraction (up to a few percent) of the population in some areas of Yunnan province have antibodies to novel SARS-related coronaviruses.[2,3] Interestingly, it is not known how the people in these studies were infected, and before they were randomly tested for these studies, they were not aware that they had ever been infected.
> is unlikely because we would have found the intermediate animal by now
There's no reason to expect we'd have found the intermediate species by now. Finding intermediate hosts can be very difficult. For example, it took four decades to identify the likely host species of Ebola, and even so, there's still a huge amount of uncertainty about whether there are multiple host species, and how spillover occurs.[4]
> (3) is unlikely because the first case found was in China
The frozen food hypothesis that the WHO is looking at is that animals that were raised or caught in Yunnan province, slaughtered and frozen, and sent to Wuhan might have been carrying the virus.
Option 4 is unlikely because nobody knew about this virus before it appeared in December 2019. The researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology work closely with international scientists (including in the US, Australia, France and Singapore). They regularly publish identifying RNA fragments of the viruses they discover. The viruses that they have isolated and cultured in the lab are well known, because they've published on them extensively, and because they collaborate with international researchers. They have only isolated three SARS-related coronaviruses (the vast majority of the viruses they discover are only detected as RNA fragments, not "live" virus particles), and those viruses are all much more closely related to the original SARS than they are to SARS-CoV-2. The reason for this is that before this pandemic, researchers focused their attention on viruses that were close to the original SARS (such as WIV-1[5,6]). SARS-CoV-2 and its closely related viruses would have been far less interesting to them. The lab leak theory really is a conspiracy theory, because it requires the scientists at WIV to have discovered a virus that they didn't tell anyone about, including their close collaborators abroad, for them to have secretly isolated it, for it to have escaped from a highly secure laboratory, and then for them to have covered it up. You can assert that all these things happened, but there's precisely zero evidence for it.
The alternative is that one of the millions of people who regularly interact with animals that harbor SARS-related coronaviruses got infected, and that as is usually the case, it takes time and painstaking work to determine how, when and where that happened.
1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2951-z
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259005361...
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4014719/
This is a generally informative and helpful comment, but I think there's a flaw in this argument. If WIV isolates viruses (from samples), there could be the possibility that a virus escapes before it is isolated and sequenced, or that the virus is not successfully isolated and sequenced but escapes and infects somebody. We do not need to suggest that they had preexisting records of SARS-CoV-2, which I would agree is clearly beyond reasonable speculation.
For the scenario in your second paragraph to play out, the WIV would have to have isolated the virus, then leaked it, but for nothing to published or communicated to collaborators about it for months. This is very unlikely.
I really don't have any reason to believe or disbelieve it came from a lab. But that possibility certainly is not crazy.
Hey, Russian Federation still exists on the map.
2) is also likely, for some viruses it took years and years, sometimes even more than a decade to find the actual intermediate animal.
4) is unlikely because further analysis cannot produce a likely scenario. If the virus was from an animal source known to the lab, we would know already, and if it was due to a gain-of-function experiment, it would be quite unlikely for the virus to take so much time to adapt to humans (it still hasn't fully done so), and there is still a lot of function to be gained. Besides, there is no obvious marker for genetic engineering (the furin cleavage sites are perfectly well described by both 1 and 2), and the fact the virus does not seem to be at a local optima yet indicates that it's probably not the result of engineering by repeated selection.
They found 2.7% seropositivity simply for people living near bat colonies.
There is also this event in mine workers that handled bats and bat dropping : https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.5815...
All in all, antibodies to bat coronaviruses to people in contact with bats are quite common.
Researchers at the same lab published a study in 2017 where they tested the infectivity of 8 artificial coronaviruses (having been edited with 8 different spike proteins) on primate and human cell lines [2].
[1] https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1197631383470034951?s...
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... "Rescue of bat SARSr-CoVs and virus infectivity experiments"
If it did come from this research, which is being done openly with the help of many international collaborators, I don't understand how this could have happened without the virus being known to many more people, especially given the amount of time that passed from the first human infection to detection (which was enough for it even reach Europe!). It would be very surprising for no one else to know about it whereas normally such results are shared quite rapidly.
This is why the very person you quoted, and other people that were involved in such research that live outside of China, find the theory of a lab escape from this kind of research exceedingly unlikely.
The WIV simply doesn't hide samples for long enough for this to be a likely scenario.
By the way, it's estimated there's multiple hundred infections by novel coronavirus pathogens in China every year. So why would the much lower number of viral escapes be considered beyond it when we have the additional constrait of the sample not having been shared with anyone, whereas normally this is done?
4-6 weeks is lower than what we've seen abroad - in Italy between the likely patient zero in September 2019 and the first official case in late february, 5 months had gone.
Unless they started commanding to destroy samples, and sharing sequences of captured bats after the pandemic started.
> it would be quite unlikely for the virus to take so much time to adapt to humans
All experts agree that SARS-COV-2 is extremely adapted to human infection. Like it appeared out of nowhere, not the gradual result of a natural spill-over. To pose: "It could have been even more infectious" as an argument against gain-of-function is not very strong. And if we agree that China did not deliberately release a finished product, it would be weird to see optimal adaptivity.
> there is no obvious marker for genetic engineering
Gain-of-function does not create obvious marker. It is known possible to increase GoF of coronavirus using techniques that produce no markers at all. It is also tying it too closely to engineered bioweapons (vanilla SARS-COV is a bioweapon itself, even if collected from civet cats by terrorists), because the lab leak could also have been from a collected sample and accidental escape. There is no genetic engineering there at all.
Which is exactly what they started doing back in February (2020). The two labs in Wuhan were ordered to destroy all samples they had. So even if the theory were to turn out to be the most likely origin, we'd have no way to find out for sure.
The pandemic started months after first escape, and the WIV shares research findings internationally. By the time the pandemic was detected, it was way too late to destroy samples, months already went by. And that's assuming the escape happened as soon as the samples reached the WIV, which is very generous.
>All experts agree that SARS-COV-2 is extremely adapted to human infection. Like it appeared out of nowhere, not the gradual result of a natural spill-over. To pose: "It could have been even more infectious" as an argument against gain-of-function is not very strong. And if we agree that China did not deliberately release a finished product, it would be weird to see optimal adaptivity.
It is now, but it wasn't at first zoonosis. It took months for the virus to ramp up to an epidemic, whereas clearly the current iteration of the virus can do so much faster especially in dirty environments. Besides, the virus is still, one year in, nowhere near maximum adaptivity, with significantly more infectious variants still appearing. It's not that it could have been more infectious, is that it now is significantly more infections. As far as "deliberately releasing a finished product", there is no reason for it to matter - the last iteration of a given strain will be subject to experimentation for a long time.
Moreso, SARS-CoV-2 clearly has an insanely high potential for zoonosis, as we've seen it infect an incredibly large cross section of animals. This is not what you would expect from a virus that previously was only ever in one species and that was engineered to be specifically adapted to humans only.
>Gain-of-function does not create obvious marker. It is known possible to increase GoF of coronavirus using techniques that produce no markers at all. It is also tying it too closely to engineered bioweapons (vanilla SARS-COV is a bioweapon itself, even if collected from civet cats by terrorists), because the lab leak could also have been from a collected sample and accidental escape. There is no genetic engineering there at all.
You're stretching the definition of bioweapon way beyond any reasonable definition. Both SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 make really poor bioweapons, many naturally occuring viruses are far superior. If the lab leak was from a collected sample that accidentally escaped, you would again expect it to be of known origin - China could point to a specific source and say "Hey, we found it, it comes from here!", and likely collaborators would know about it. Additonally, if it came from GoF, you would expect it to find and expend single-base-pair mutations with a high impact on pathogenicity already, yet we still had many crop up.
Often heard this, including from experts in bioscience (I am not one, you sound more like it).
So early on I did a search on Google Scholar for things like: SARS bioweapon to see what I could come up with. Turns out there is a lot of biosecurity and biowarfare literature from before the outbreak, which have entire chapters for SARS coronavirus as a weapon.
I really think if you tried to give some reasons for coronavirus being a poor bioweapon, it would expose either an inflated sense of expertise, or those reasons are precisely the reason coronaviruses are seen as attractive (and relatively cheaply available) bioweapon.
In a: don't do what I say, do what I do-manner: US military is warned not to use DNA tests from companies that offer cheap tests due to Chinese government funding. It may leave them open to "identification" and "attack". How poor would a gene-targeted coronavirus actually be?
The rest of your posts seems to gather support for other hypothesis, not as much attacking the lab leak theory as highly unlikely.
There is biosecurity and biowarfare literature on pretty much every single virus you can imagine - generally it's about how it might be modified to be used as a bioweapon. And really, coronaviruses are quite good platforms for making debilitating airborne weapons.
SARS-CoV itself as a bioweapon is simply not infectious enough, it was sucessfully contained dozens of times. It's also not that lethal to military-age men, for 20-29 year olds CFR is around 1% and for 30-39 year olds it's around 3% (taking data from infections in the PRC and in HK as there is the least low-detection bias). But it definitely has a lot of potential if you engineer it. For reference, the average age of a soldier in WW2 was 26.
SARS-CoV-2 is complete trash as a bioweapon, an entire carrier was infected and no one died. Debilitation was minimal. It's infectious enough, but it's very bad at actually killing military aged people.
But certainly, they could be engineered to be suitable. That's not the claim I was replying to - the claim I was replying to was that in it's natural form it was a bioweapon.
>The rest of your posts seems to gather support for other hypothesis, not as much attacking the lab leak theory as highly unlikely.
Likelihoods are relative. Everyone agrees that likelihood for a lab escape is fairly low - those are relatively rare. The argument is that the normal process for viruses to reach humans - which was the case for literally every single other pandemic ever - is unlikely thus making lab escape more likely relatively.
I did, however, add a few points that go against the likelihood of an undetected lab escape - which is that the existence of the sample would almost certaintly be known.
No known treatment or vaccine. Targets the decision makers (presidents and ministers and military generals are older, and a virus is easier to reach them, than a bullet is). SARS-CoV has super-spreader events, and asymptomatic spread, making it very difficult to contain. It spreads incredibly easily (near-airborne), in confined spaces such as airplanes, but even the toilet plumbing, or shared airco. It offers plausible deniability, by pointing to a natural spill-over event or unsanitary meat markets. It causes enormous economic damage (the economy, not the cannon fodder, being the subject of modern warfare) and cultural damage (tracking and containment is costly and invasive as it damages trust in a free society). It is most readily available to small states and terrorist groups by extracting from live civet cats. Military-aged terrorists spreading SARS-CoV by simply boarding airplanes and visiting hot spots, and not even dying themselves, so they can do it all over again. SARS-CoV in first stages has vague symptoms, similar to other, more common viruses, which would give a pandemic a head start. Pandemics are good PR for fear-based terrorism. The strain on the hospitals is enormous, and military-aged men are too worried to reserve a bed for their elderly parents or their recovery.
More in the vast literature.
> SARS-CoV-2 is complete trash as a bioweapon.
If complete trash, I would not be afraid of Iran being able to press a button and release SARS-CoV-3 for a 2020 repeat. Even if looking at viral bioweapons from the comical anthrax perspective: SARS-CoV-2 killed over 2 million people.
> that the existence of the sample would almost certaintly be known.
Yes. It would make sense that it would be known. And if it would be known, that would probably sufficiently proof the lab leak hypothesis and end this quarrel. We wouldn't need to talk about probabilities much anymore. But that same argument kinda also works against the zoonotic origin hypothesis. It would make a lot of sense that after a year, we found the intermediate host, or patient 0. If there was a clear epidemiological explanation for a zoonotic origin, it would almost certainly be known. Maybe there really isn't.
Not true - there are basically known vaccines to SARS-CoV, they just never got to human efficacy trials because the disease went extinct. But, given their efficacy when repurposed as SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, they were probably quite effective.
As for super-spreading events, this is a double edged sword. It makes it very infectious when nothing is being done to try and stop it, but it means that if there are even cursory measures the chances of the infection stalling are much higher as you're relying on a low number of people actually spreading it.
SARS-CoV may have vague symptoms in the early stages - but it has symptoms. You want a virus that can spread asymptomatically for it to be a major burden, so that makes it less useful.
If your goal is to strain hospitals and create fear, by far the best tools would be humanized avian flu, or a vaccine resistant strain of measles.
>Yes. It would make sense that it would be known. And if it would be known, that would probably sufficiently proof the lab leak hypothesis and end this quarrel. We wouldn't need to talk about probabilities much anymore. But that same argument kinda also works against the zoonotic origin hypothesis. It would make a lot of sense that after a year, we found the intermediate host, or patient 0. If there was a clear epidemiological explanation for a zoonotic origin, it would almost certainly be known. Maybe there really isn't.
I think you're missing the point. If there was a lab escape, the likelihood for the sample to be known is very high. This means that given priors of no known samples, the likelihood for a lab escape is lower.
It's also completely unrealistic to expect to find the host or patient zero after a year for a zoonosis. It took 40 years to find the intermediate host for Ebola, and four years to find it for SARS. For some epidemics, we never found a solid intermediate host. Patient zeros are basically never found, either, unless the disease is incredibly pathogenic and virulent - which SARS-CoV-2 isn't. If you look towards past epidemics that originated from zoonosis with a similar disease profile, you will find that it takes years to decades to conclusively find an intermediate host, and that patient zero is basically never found with any degree of certainty, meaning that the current scenario is perfectly congruent with expectations.
When you think about how common the basic symptoms are, I think it could take quite a while before someone wondered whether it was different from the common cold and went testing.
IMO Its a perfectly reasonable theory that it was spreading slowly through China for months, from some distant province, and it wasn't recognised as a new virus until it arrived somewhere there was the expertise to look at it in the right way.
That would mean that the reason it was found in Wuhan and not anywhere else is just because Wuhan was the first place with people who had the expertise and the interest to investigate and figure out it was new.
Whatever the truth is, that is just as good a theory as any other, and it explains the apparent evidence for the virus appearing a few months earlier in some countries.
Evidence SARS-CoV-2 Emerged From a Biological Laboratory in Wuhan, China. Available at: https://project-evidence.github.io/
Option 5: Bioweapon.
> But according to this article, despite a year of investigation
One year of investigation is not long, especially if you have a party who has a significant interesst to hinder your investigation into certain directions.
The first to point this out, in February 2020, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology:
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12250-020-002...
This strange furin cleave site allows the virus to bind to human ACE2 receptors. An interesting scientific reading on this, which does not rule out genetic manipulation in a lab:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bies.2020002...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-UK1 both have them and they've likely evolved several times over in parallel evolution (or as the result of multiple infection and recombination maybe?)
It is almost as if Sarbecovirus acquired portions of the Hipposideros genome. You'll note your article also says this did not come from pangolins or its closest bat relatives, which shoots down another media narrative.
> Strains of SARS-CoV-2 (we also added sequences from the GISAID database) have furin cleavage sites at spike S1/S2. 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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/health/WHO-covid-daszak-c...
Apparently China's disease-control center had done a great deal of investigating of the Wuhan market, a WHO team member told the New York Times:
They'd actually done over 900 swabs in the end, a huge amount of work. They had been through the sewage system. They'd been into the air ventilation shaft to look for bats. They'd caught animals around the market. They'd caught cats, stray cats, rats, they even caught one weasel. They'd sampled snakes. People had live snakes at the market, live turtles, live frogs. Rabbits were there, rabbit carcasses... Animals were coming into that market that could have carried the coronavirus. They could have been infected by bats somewhere else in China and brought it in. So that's clue No. 1... Some of these are coming from places where we know the nearest relatives of the virus are found. So there's the real red flag...
There were other markets. And we do know that some of the patients had links to other markets.
[1] https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/scientists-outraged-pe...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...
That isn't proof of anything but all of this makes for interesting reading.
The cables were simply arguing that the US should continue to fund its training program for the lab's staff (they're trained at the premiere US high-biocontainment laboratory, in Galveston, Texas). The cables did not point to any safety problems with the lab. The people who visited the lab and wrote the cables wouldn't have known how to identify safety problems anyways - they were just diplomats. They simply stated that the US training program was important and to emphasize that, they stated that the not-yet-opened lab did not yet have enough technicians.
Rogin has been trying to spin this into some sort of dire warning, but that's simply a willful misreading of the cables.
Part (6) in the cable specifically warns with regard to WIV scientists studying SARS viruses that interact with human ACE2 receptors.
The cable is here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-state-depart...
Talk about an understatement.
"Beijing’s joint research with the WHO “is completely insufficient as far as a credible investigation.”
"Instead, Beijing and the WHO agreed last summer to a series of scientific studies that were carried out in China. When the foreign members visited Wuhan in January, it was to help in a joint assessment of the evidence China had found, not to scour the city for new facts. “There was no freedom at all to wander around,” Watson has said."
This outcome would literally shape world history - it would change trade alliances, security posture, it might get them punted from the UN security council, it would severely tarnish China's ambitions for decades and the event would ring through history like 9/11 x 1000. It could very well start a war.
Can you imagine how the plebes around the world will react when they find out masses of their peers have died due to 'China'? That they've lost their livelihoods? There would be mass riots around the world, blood on the streets in a few places at least.
There's way too much at stake, I'm wary if we will ever find the truth.
If we do ultimately find out - the means by which is going to be conveyed will be a master class in Public Relations. How do you let a such a shocking bit of information out? I think it might be best to let rumours swirl first, then indicate 'maybe there is evidence' and only allow the final, official, judicial truth to come out once the plausibility has already been widely accepted.
1) it wouldn't feel good
2) it wouldn't do good things for my prospects of getting more funding for my lab
3) it would cause a bunch of new onerous regulations to come down on the way I get to work in my lab
4) it would make me wonder if friends and family and neighbors and etc. now regard my profession as the cause of a disaster
I don't think we can expect bankers to decide that excess financial complexity was the cause of the 2008 Fiscal Crisis, or intelligence agencies to decide that excessive meddling in other countries fueled terrorism. It is expecting quite a lot to think that scientists will decide that scientific research is what caused this problem.
CBS News, yesterday:
Kristian G. Andersen, director of the infectious disease genomics, translational research institute at Scripps Research, noted that "We know that the first epidemiologically linked cluster of cases came from the Hunan market and we know the virus was found in environmental samples — including animal cages — at the market," he said. "Any 'lab leak' theory would have to account for that scenario — which it simply can't, without invoking a major conspiracy and cover up by Chinese scientists and authorities."
The BSL-4 high-security lab was 7 miles away.
So, perfectly valid scenario:
1. Scientists do controversial Gain-of-function research by collecting viruses from miles away and importing them to Wuhan.
2. Lab leak happens
3. First linked clusters pop up a few miles away in a rather unsanitary market, with plenty of reservoirs and infection possibilities.
4. Virus is found in environmental samples, including animal cages and pets and frozen foods, in Hunan market and else.
The only thing indirectly invoking a major conspiracy here, is the possibility: lab leak happens.
Or you know, you can account for a scenario, where Chinese authorities covered up a major conspiracy (Don't be afraid! It's only reason over authority!). I thought we were already at the point where this is common sense knowledge. Or else we would know what exactly is going on in those Uyghur concentration camps, but all we can do is estimate the extend of this inhumane conspiracy.
https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/contentious-hunt-for-co...
Scientists tracing the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic believe they’ve identified a possible transmission source: China’s thriving wildlife trade... The most plausible theory, say experts involved in the mission, concerns China’s wildlife trade for food, furs and traditional medicine, a business worth about 520 billion yuan ($80 billion) in 2016. Live animals susceptible to coronavirus infection were present at the Huanan food market in downtown Wuhan, the city where the first major Covid-19 outbreak was detected. It’s possible they acted as conduits for the virus, carrying it from bats -- likely the primary source, says a zoologist who was part of the joint research effort... "The main conclusion from this stage of the work -- and it’s not over yet of course -- is that the exact same pathway by which SARS emerged was alive and well for the emergence of Covid...."
Farmed and wild-caught civets, a small, nocturnal mammal consumed in China, were blamed for spreading the SARS virus in a market in the southern province of Guangdong in 2003. Scientists later found the infection originated in horseshoe bats, a natural reservoir of coronaviruses.
The two species likely collided in markets where live animals are caged in crowded conditions, potentially allowing the bat-borne virus to adapt and amplify before it spilled over to humans, initially among workers and those handling the animals. Scientists working on the origin hunt say a similar scenario may have played out with Covid-19. A study of the first 99 patients treated at an infectious diseases hospital in Wuhan found half were linked to the Huanan seafood market, which also reportedly sold live animals, some illegally captured in the wild and slaughtered in front of customers.
The counter-argument is still always, "Yes, yes, but what if instead of that maybe it somehow came from a badly-run lab instead?"
- Ah.. It came from the meat market (official positions) - Likely from live bats - Who are not sold at that meat market - Who are hybernating - Who come from a cave 900 miles away
Yes, yes, but what if instead it maybe came from a badly-run lab studying that exact bat just a few miles away?
- We strongly condemn any theory that may lead to the suggestion that it came from the lab. You are directly insulting the work of our Chinese colleagues, threatening our relations in Gain-of-Function research and funding, and furthering harmful conspiracy theories accusing the Chinese authorities of a cover-up. I, Peter Daszak, will do a thorough investigation into the origins, which all responsible scientists have already concluded is natural in origin.
Former CDC chief says "most likely" cause of coronavirus is that it "escaped" from a lab:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-lab-theory-robert-redfiel...
> Nor have the labs been entirely forthcoming about what viruses they do know about. The Wuhan Institute of Virology possesses gene information about similar viruses that it has not released publicly. Other information disappeared from view when the institute took a database offline in late 2019, just before the outbreak started.
That's... one hell of a coincidence (in timing). It continues:
> One problem with the lab leak theory is that it presumes the Chinese are lying or hiding facts, a position incompatible with a joint scientific effort. This may have been why the WHO team, for instance, never asked to see the offline database.
There are a number of problems here:
1. "... lying or hiding facts". My suspicion is that it's most likely no one knows but, more importantly, no one wants to find out. Think about it: what's the upside of turning over those particular rocks?
This sort of thing happens all the time. Here's an example from the Columbia shuttle disaster [1]:
> Several people within NASA pushed to get pictures of the breached wing in orbit. The Department of Defense was reportedly prepared to use its orbital spy cameras to get a closer look. However, NASA officials in charge declined the offer, according to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) and "Comm Check," a 2008 book by space journalists Michael Cabbage and William Harwood, about the disaster. The landing proceeded without further inspection.
A certain breed of manager will just not want certain questions asked.
2. As for a "joint scientific effort", that means something different in the West vs China. In China, everything from companies to sports to "scientific efforts" is an extension of the state. There simply is no independence to the same degree we'd expect.
3. The WHO team not asking to see the offline database is... mind-blowing. There are a lot of problems with the WHO's response to the coronavirus. In the early days of the pandemic, the WHO went out of their way to accept and spread China's versions of events with little scrutiny [2]. It's one reason this article uses the term "patsy".
Again, I'm not claiming the lab theory is accurate or even likely but... due diligence would mean you try to independently verify anything that's told to you no? I imagine it was a political deal for the WHO to not, for example, examine the offline database but... really?
The other problematic part of this is how long it took for this investigation to start. It's also interesting (although not necessarily damning) about how China came down hard on Australia for asking for an inquiry [3]. Like.. that's just not a good look.
But again it's not necessarily guilt. I imagine China just doesn't want to set the precedent that it's accountable to any outside authority and will punish anyone for trying to make that happen. Still... that doesn't help your case if you're trying to disprove the theory that one of your labs was responsible for the leak.
[1]: https://www.space.com/19436-columbia-disaster.html
[2]: https://www.who.int/news/item/29-06-2020-covidtimeline
[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/29/trade-war-with-china-austral...
The known RaTG13 sample came from caves 900km away and was 96% similar.
That viruses existence does not preclude the existence of a 99% similar sarbecovirus in the bats in Hubei.
Sarbecoviruses do exist in Rhinolophus bats in Hubei:
COVID19 is part of a long-running CCP bioweapon unrestricted warfare program with benefits such as damaging open Western societies and providing pretexts for anti-dissident crackdown and social control. Other viruses originating in China have likely also been this kind of bioweapon.
COVID19 was a deliberate release intended to infect the US competitors in the Wuhan military games to frame the USA for a biowarfare attack on China. The US contestants were infected in China and then the infection was suppressed via HCQ as part of a "malaria treatment". The intent being they would return to the USA and then spread the virus.
However, execution was poor, and as a result Wuhan was hit first, and the CCP was unable to credibly blame the USA.
The timing was intended to collaborate with Democrats to prevent the reelection of Trump, to crack down on the HK dissident movement, to deal with economic pressure from Trump's negotiations, etc.
Ideally, China would have been seen as an international savior, with a ready vaccine and a model response. CCP leadership were protected via HCQ and suffered minimal casualties.
Are you saying we should now listen to every conspiracy theory on the internet on the off chance it might be right?
(I'm not attacking you, I don't know what was your exact argument)
I'd say that it's very likely that you did not present any concrete evidence for the lab theory last year, neither do you have any now. So as far as I'm concerned you're still in conspiracy theory territory.
Here is the real problem, though: It's not really a common sense view. The only reasonable common sense view is to remain agnostic in such matters until enough evidence is discovered. If you have thousands of conspiracy theorists throwing around thousands of different claims around about something, then surely one or two may in hindsight turn out to be right. That doesn't mean they presented a reasonable view or aren't conspiracy theorists.
Just to make this clear, I'm not talking about you personally, of course. Maybe you argued very well and convincingly and presented some great evidence a year ago. But the fallacious thought pattern is a huge problem in online discussions. Sometimes you don't even need to consider thousands of conspiracy theorists, some people are so prolific online that they make a lot of different claims about a lot of of different topics, and then, when they happen to be right in hindsight once, feel confirmed.
On a side note (not related to the above post at all), another issue in online debates I've grown to really hate is that many people online have become extremely dismissive towards experts and come up with extremely obvious counter-arguments as if the experts hadn't considered them. In every single case they have, of course. It's crazy how much stupidity some people tend to attribute to experts but not to themselves.
LOLOLOLOL Excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor. Doesn’t the default assumption about an authoritarian government have to be that it is lying and hiding facts that would harm it?
You can call them all authoritarian, but then the word loses all meaning, you would just say "any strong modern government is authoritarian"
- taking away kids from "bad" families and sending them in foster care just to be used as slaves by the foster homes. Apparently the slavery part was pretty widespread in the 70s. Granted, this is not happening anymore
- a colleague of mine did prison time because he refused to enroll in the army based on personal beliefs. Now you can do community service instead, but that prison time was not that long ago.
Just because you have approval from the majority of Swiss, it doesn't make it right to do either of those 2 things. It's the kind of stuff authoritarians do. I am pretty sure I can find much more dirt if I use Google, I just used what I know first or second hand.
>On 11 January, Edward C. Holmes contacted Zhang for permission to publish the virus's genome. Zhang granted permission, and Holmes published the genome on virological.org that day.[1][3] The Chinese government had prohibited labs from publishing information about the new coronavirus, though Zhang later said he did not know about the prohibition.[3] The next day, the Shanghai Health Commission ordered Zhang's laboratory to close temporarily for "rectification".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Yongzhen#COVID-19_pandem...
That would open an interesting can of worms.
1. It is common under many (most?) legal systems for those harmed by another's negligence to have a duty to mitigate damages.
For example, if I'm burning something on my property and an ember from my fire sets something on fire on your property, which you see happen, and you could put the fire out before it causes much damage easily with your garden hose but instead just watch it burn, I'm probably only going to by liable for that portion of the damage that would have happened had you used the hose.
A few governments could make a case for full reparations, such as South Korea, Vietnam, and a few others. The US, most of Europe, and much of South America, on the other hand, would have a hard time arguing that most of their harm, especially after the first wave, was not due to their own poor handling of the pandemic.
2. If the release was accidental but not negligent, the "Act of God" principle may apply.
That principle is that some failures are just expected in the course of some activity that is commonly done, and if the failure is not caused by negligence it is written off as an act of God, and it is up the victim to deal with.
For example, my neighbor has several 100 ft (30 m) tall trees that when I look at them from my back door I have to look up at a 60 degree angle to see their tops, which means that they are much closer than 100 ft (30 m) from my house.. If one of those trees fell over in my direction the damage to my house (and me depending on where I was at the time) would be extensive.
Whether my neighbor would pay for that damage or I would depends on the health of the tree. If the tree was dying or dead then the neighbor would be liable. They are supposed to watch for those things and have such trees safely removed. If the tree was healthy and just caught a bad break with the wind then I have to deal with it. An act of God brought it down and it is my problem.
Several countries operate labs working with potential pandemic causing viruses. Accidents have happened before, and will happen again, but they all continue operating those labs. They know at the time they build these labs that these accidents happen even in the best run labs, they calculate about how often they will happen, and decide that the benefits (often military benefits) are worth it in the long run.
I could see a country that has one of those accidents argue that at least in relation to other countries that also run such labs that their release was one of those "normal" accidents, not a negligent accident, and so each country that itself runs such labs is responsible for handling its own damages.
3. Some of the countries that would most like to receive reparations also do or have done things that have caused widespread harm outside their countries, which one might argue should lead to reparations. It may be hard to find a way to set the boundary on what should or should not require reparations that has COVID on the "yes" side and the things that they have done on the "no" side. They may decide it is better to keep the lid firmly on that Pandora's box.
This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Edit: Because the former doesn't sound like much of a conspiracy, aside from a cover-up afterwards.
From there, the only safe bet is to act as if it were intentional.
This is a controversial concept, but it is the rational choice. Never assume that someone who harms you is doing it accidentally. Even though it is more often than not the case, you still have to protect yourself with the possibility of malice in mind.
For one, if we assume it was released from a lab and that was intentional, the what was the intent?
If it was to do what happened — kill millions and devastate the global economy — then the right reaction is a very severe cold war or possibly outright war. We literally could not allow it to happen again.
But if it was released from a lab unintentionally, the right reaction is to spare no expense, regulation and treaty to secure such labs from this ever happening again. This would go for all labs like this, not just Chinese ones.
These are entirely different reactions with entirely different costs and long-term ramifications for peace and stability for our world.
Not to mention, the intentional release scenario doesn’t really make sense. E.g., China couldn’t damage our economy without damaging their own. And if you’re going to choose where to start the pandemic, why start it in your own country near a bio-research lab? If it was started intentionally, it makes more sense that China was framed. (Still doesn’t make a lot of sense though because what’s the rational motivation?)
Working with the default hypothesis of "everybody is out there to destroy me" is not only a sign of paranoia, but in most cases also wrong (because in reality not everything is about you and accidents happen).
So starting with the default hypothesis of malice has the serious downside that you will constantly feel threatened even if looking back there was no rational reason to feel threatened. This is not only incredibly exhausting, it also will lead to a "crying wolf"-type of problem, if the perceived threat rarely turns out to be one. And when something really dangerous is going to happen, you might not be able to react in a rational way (because all your previous reactions were irrational ones).
What I think is important to rationally tackle that question is also to factor in confidence. I will always assume innocence (just because it makes me a happier person), but that doesn't mean my confidence in the other person being innocent is always big. If there are signs that other person is acting in malice, my confidence that they are innocent will shrink. Once that confidence crosses a certain threshold I will assume malice. This can also happen within a split second, so I don't see how this would not be the rational way to do this. If you go get bread at the bakery, you wouldn't assume the baker wants to poison you per default right? So you would assume their innocence unless there are clear indicators they are a baker that poisons their customers. The other way around, if a man jumps out of a bush in a dark alley and comes at you with a knife, you wouldn't assume they are innocent, because there are really strong indicators they are not.
So what is irrational is to have incredible high confidence in either innocence or malice when in fact you are in a situation with lack of evidence to either direction. And this is the case in this situation.
Just like assassination of Austro-Hungarian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand brought domino effect and caused First World war the same would happen now.
No, because at the same time they'd simultaneously make it look accidental; with a dictatorial, authoritarian country like China they could keep the evidence that it was premedicated from coming to light _and_ they could count on their politically fractured victims reacting in such a way as to further their goals.
I notice that the matter of HCQ getting effectively shut down in the US due to the fraudulent Surgisphere paper and it _didn't raise any alarms at HN where someone asked WHY someone went through the trouble of planting a fake paper IN THE LANCET_.
It's been brought up here but noone notices the implications.
When did Hacker News become so damn intellectually incurious about these sorts of things?
expanded abilities of law enforcement to surveil, including by tapping domestic and international phones;
eased interagency communication to allow federal agencies to more effectively use all available resources in counterterrorism efforts; and
increased penalties for terrorism crimes and an expanded list of activities which would qualify someone to be charged with terrorism.[1]
The critic of Bush who spent the first three years of his term under investigation by the US's intelligence agencies was. If they'd have been doing their job maybe we'd know more about who commissioned the Surgisphere paper, and it would have actually made the news.
I believe there's a logical fallacy for that:
Motivation affects how we react to a theory with no evidence, when coming from Tom Cotton vs. a former CDC director.
Btw, Tom Cotton's claim was that it was a government biochemical weapon's lab, that's not Redfield's theory.
I have edited my comment to reflect that.
> Motivation affects how we react to a theory with no evidence, when coming from Tom Cotton vs. a former CDC director.
There's another fallacy for that:
The news prints these stories then they become the truth in the minds of many people.
Let's go with "hypothesis" for the sake of argument:
In this case, we have a basket of competing hypotheses, none of which have any solid evidence going for them.
Yet, some of these hypotheses have not been dismissed as conspiracy theories. Those were the hypotheses that conveniently fit a "humans encroach on wildlife"-narrative.
I'm just pointing this out as "interesting", I'm not arguing that this circumstance gives validity to one hypothesis over another.
So we have prior evidence...so we give more weight...
The investigators should examine all possibilities, of course.
Repeating the most “exciting” theory on Opinion News night after night...
Assigning weights to these circumstances can be done arbitrarily, to the point where the lab escape hypothesis becomes the most plausible one:
https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV...
Speculate all you want.
I’ve never heard of the escapes. Perhaps we watch different news sources and you spend a lot of time reading different stories.
I’ve got 55 years of hearing about viruses jumping from animals so my priors are different.
AIDS, SARS, swine flu,...
By the way, the last thing I want to be shown is some random sight on the Internet as evidence. Climate change deniers live by these sites
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note these:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
$TOPIC -> Trump -> Hitler is a textbook example of what that last guideline is asking you not to do. We're trying for an end state other than default internet hell.
Understandably, there are few researchers who would like their scientific speculation to become part the often colourful narratives Donald Trump and his followers tell each others.
Edit: edited to reduce snarkiness and polemic phrases
[1] For an example of Trump trying to find "material" that he can use for the stories he tells his following, see this transcript of Trumps call to the Georgia election official at the bottom of the page: https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-tr...
Dismissing the theory outright has never and will never be an option. I don’t like that this is what the team decided to do, and I suspect there is a lot of tension in this investigation.
You must've missed out on previous HN discussions. I remember these guys in particular being paraded around:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBQplOe8-LE
I did find their tone quite dismissive, and the verdict in the title leaves little room for interpretation.
> What was dangerous was pointing the finger at China and saying “this is all their fault!” without any evidence.
True, but that's irrelevant to the plausibility of the hypothesis.
> There STILL is not evidence, but that doesn’t mean it should not be investigated as a source.
Arguably, it's still dangerous to do exactly that.
The latter is simpler—it is reasonable to think a lab that maintains and studies viruses similar to Covid-19 accidentally allowed one to be released. It does not imply an intent to misuse the virus.
I have not watched the video, I’m sorry. I’ll try and get to it later.
It doesn't imply intent to use as a bioweapon, much less release it in their own population.
The hypothesis that this was a gain-of-function experiment that went awry due to lax security still does put a lot of pressure on Chinese authorities, on top of the poor handling at the beginning of the outbreak.
There was at least one paper calling it "natural selection", and some folks who read it agreed that it ruled out laboratory accidents:
"The high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
https://twitter.com/ehundman/status/1246597925288816640
https://www.newsweek.com/claim-that-coronavirus-came-lab-chi...
That's literally what a gain-of-function experiment is. These are done to study how viruses interact with humans so that we can deal with them better. There's nothing sinister about it, such experiments are happening all over the world and they did happen in Wuhan.
Did you just reply to the sentence I quoted or did you click the links? The tweets are very obviously not limited to that: https://twitter.com/ehundman/status/1246598376377831425
And honestly, it's hard to go from "this happened via natural selection" to "nobody dismissed this coming from a lab". Even if it's technically possible, surely you can understand why readers' message from this is not "this could have come from a lab".
> Hoaxes, lies and collective delusions aren’t new, but the extent to which millions of Americans have embraced them may be. Thirty percent of Republicans have a favorable view of QAnon, according to a recent YouGov poll. According to other polls, more than 70 percent of Republicans believe Mr. Trump legitimately won the election, and 40 percent of Americans — including plenty of Democrats — believe the baseless theory that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/technology/biden-reality-...
https://stratechery.com/2021/mistakes-memes-and-foreign-grou...
> The poll gave people a sort of test to see if they could spot misinformation like the coronavirus was created in a lab or that voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.
> 40% of poll respondents believe one of the biggest conspiracy theories that's out there about the virus, that it was made in a lab in China. There is no evidence for this. And scientists say that the virus was transmitted to humans from another species. But I talked to people all over the country who responded to our poll and they still believe this.
> Wait, what was that last one? “The baseless theory that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab”? I feel pretty certain that COVID-19 wasn’t deliberately manufactured and deployed as some sort of biological attack, but where does “gain-of-function” experiments end and “manufacturing” begin? Even if it ends up being true that the lab-leak hypothesis is wrong there is actually zero question that the Wuhan lab was manipulating coronaviruses to make them more lethal. To that end, the primary evidence we have that the lab-leak hypothesis is false is that China says it is false.
This gives a new perspective to Roose’s recommendations (well technically, the recommendation of the experts he consulted, which all happen to align with Roose’s previously stated beliefs) that the Biden administration set up a “truth commission”, appoint a “reality czar”, audit tech company algorithms, and “fix people’s problems” with a social stimulus.
The lab was doing gain of function experiments, which most people would agree would constitute “being made in a lab”.
I don’t necessarily think the lab leak hypothesis is the truth, but it certainly is a real possibility. And if it was an accidental leak then it would very likely have been a virus modified via gain of function.
China and WHO spit in the face of the world. And world smiled back and greeted them.
The WHO is also a vital resource for developing nations which lack the technical infrastructure and know-how to do their own research or develop their own policies, and depend on support from the WHO to advise and provide resources to deal with medical crises. It's out there saving lives across the developing world every day.
Both of these things are true, but the reason the WHO is a political football is because the nation states it depends on for funding and resources keep kicking it about for their own political purposes. The WHO is the organisation our countries have built, organised the way we structured it, vulnerable to nation state interference so that our nations can interfere with them when we want to.
The only way to get the job the WHO are tasked with done properly is to stop kicking them about and actually support them in their efforts. Insist they be freed from nation state interference, stop blaming them for being kicked about, and go after the nation states interfering with and undermining them. That also means reforming the WHO itself and better resourcing it. We need to stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution.
It's infuriating. The only entity of significant influence that offered some resistance was Trump, but his leadership was compromised and had little to none net support to make a difference.
My comment didn't disintegrate and destroyed more commons than said status quo. Inaction and censorship did.
When will smart people start to get curious and start to wonder if virus particles were ever the cause of illness to begin with.