The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?
thebulletin.org
thebulletin.org
More than a year after the initial documented cases in Wuhan, the source of SARS-CoV-2 has yet to be identified, and the search for a direct or intermediate host in nature has been so far unsuccessful.
The low binding affinity of SARS-CoV-2 to bat ACE2 studied to date does not support Chiroptera as a direct zoonotic agent. Furthermore, the reliance on pangolin coronavirus receptor binding domain (RBD) similarity to SARS-CoV-2 as evidence for natural zoonotic spillover is flawed, as pangolins are unlikely to play a role in SARS-CoV-2′s origin and recombination is not supported by recent analysis.
At the same time, genomic analyses pointed out that SARS-CoV-2 exhibits multiple peculiar characteristics not found in other Sarbecoviruses.
A novel multibasic furin cleavage site (FCS) confers numerous pathogenetically advantageous capabilities, the existence of which is difficult to explain though natural evolution...
source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0
I looked into these lab origin theories for the furin cleavage site last year. The problem with it being a laboratory insertion was that although performing an insertion is relatively easy once you know what to insert, generally it’s beyond current science to independently create mutations for a specific purpose.
It’s a bit beyond me as a non-biologist but my feeling based on the literature was that the lab origin was unlikely. However it is pushed in certain circles partly for ideological reasons, based on evidence that is plausible at first glance but with a lot more digging not entirely convincing evidence.
However, there didn’t really seem to be much neutral expert analysis of the evidence.
>“Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory,” writes Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2.
> “At least 11 gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infective, are published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
> Such furin-mediated activation is unusual in that it occurs in part during virus entry. Our findings may explain the polytropic nature, pathogenicity, and life cycle of this zoonotic coronavirus.
MERS-CoV uses furin cleavage of S1/S2 but it does not bind to ACE2 like SARS-CoV-2.
At the same time, China risks looking guilty because they are defensive and try to control the information. All this leaves this kind of article with a seemingly plausible scientific and ideological basis that is difficult for laymen and even scientific journalists to evaluate due to the complexity of the science involved, and not many scientists interested in spelling out why the reasoning might be flawed.
You also see in the quote from the article:
“Yes, but your wording makes this sound unlikely — viruses are specialists at unusual events,” is the riposte of David L. Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow who regards lab escape as a conspiracy theory.
Usually the more interesting questions are of the kind of what -isn’t- being said, of what information isn’t being related or investigated.
If I'm right the reason it's not being analysed or investigated is that from a scientific perspective it's just not an interesting question, rather than for a deeper ideological reason as suggested in this article.
I drew the conclusion that this furin cleavage site theory wasn't actually convincing after a few days of wading through scientific literature, but as a non-expert I was pretty disappointed that there wasn't more accessible analysis of well-written arguments as presented in the article that would put it into a more objective perspective. It would have been great if that scientist they quote would have provided a more detailed rebuttal.
The problem is it actually isn't the job of scientists to dispel wrong or inaccurate information for the most part. They do detailed esoteric studies and write them up for specialists. It's nobody's job to rebut bad arguments, and that's the problem.
At best, it demonstrates intellectual laziness, at worst a political / ideological conviction, neither of which is a hallmark of a good scientist.
The scientist provides a scientific explanation (“Recombination is naturally very, very frequent in these viruses, there are recombination breakpoints in the spike protein and these codons appear unusual exactly because we’ve not sampled enough.”).
But let's flip this round as the author here is openly heavily weighing his dismissal of scientific support for natural origin by claiming that it is supported by ideological reasons. That's exactly the same as someone dismissing the lab claim for ideological/conspiracy reasons, just the other way round. Natural origin doesn't support the author's ideology, so he dismisses it and has a bias towards evidence for lab origin. The author has previous done this exact some thing with his previous writings, taking a fringe position and dismissing scientific objection that aligns with the scientific consensus as ideology. Basically, this is a subjective opinion piece, not objective analysis.
What makes you think that they are a concept developed by the CIA?
How many people (lab technicians, doctors, 'police') would know it is from a lab and are hiding that information? If the answer is 'hundreds' then the chances of it being kept hidden are very low. That is what labeling it a conspiracy theory means.
The transition from arresting doctors to locking down cities doesn’t make much sense otherwise. You could argue they had motivation to arrest doctors talking about a natural infection if they thought they were spreading fear and disrupting lunar new year festivities, but going to locking down whole cities is about as fear inducing and disruptive as it gets. If that were the motivations for arrest, I’d expect more reluctant and less heavy handed mitigation efforts.
If this were a natural disease and the motivations were to control it as quickly as possible, I’d expect early doctors to be painted as national heroes/propagandized positively very early, similarly to the portrayal of the people that built extra hospital spaces early on.
It’s possible there were different officials involved that changed motivations halfway through, but the lab leak hypothesis offers a more consistent explanation. It makes sense that they would have tried to control the virus quietly if it were a lab leak/wanted to keep it secret, and that they would engage in drastic measures to control it when that didn’t work.
China has the added wrinkle that it's so large that national authorities policies' can vary wildly from local and regional responses for a long time while the bureaucrats play a game of telephone.
I still think the response is more consistent with a lab leak, even when bureaucratic schizophrenia is accounted for, but that expected level of noise makes it impossible to conclude anything definitively.
I'm ambivalent about the two hypotheses, but China's early behaviour fits either, I think. I do think that the instinct of the regional bureaucracy is to control the flow of information, and punish those that proceed outside the party hierarchy (even if there was no foul play/bad conscience/anything to hide).
The disappearance of Huang Yan Ling is another bit of evidence that pushes me towards the lab leak.
If I were to assign a percentage to it, I’d say about 60% chance lab origin is true, 40% chance natural origin is true.
Do you actually have any evidence in which to compare and contrast how a government behaves when trying to cover up a manmade virus vs how a government behaves when trying to cover up a natural virus that has hopped species? Genuinely asking because we absolutely need to be pinning conclusions on evidence and not conjecture here.
My counterpoint is Ai Wei Wei was disappeared for barely anything at all, dude was producing art that people don’t like. And Jack Ma also disappeared for a period of time right? The Chinese government disappears people like I have coffee in the morning. I would need more evidence to presume this disappearance of a doctor is somehow more significant.
I’m not GP, but GP used the term “lab escape”, not “man made”. Lab escape could just as easily apply to a naturally occurring disease that was being studied in the lab.
The CCP has a huge incentive to have her come forward and make some kind of a statement that she's fine and that the outbreak has nothing to do with the lab/those are all rumors, similar to what the lead researcher Shi Zhengli did. The expected behavior if she were the target of a rumor that she was patient zero would be to squash it immediately in the strongest way possible, whether or not it were true. Huang Yan Ling making a statement and talking about that silly rumor would be the strongest way to squash that rumor.
The fact that has not happened suggests she isn't able to because she is no longer alive.
As to more generic comparisons about behavior during a natural virus vs an accidentally released virus, I don't have anything stronger than conjecture, but think a comparison to SARS would shed some light. Again, it is my understanding that during that outbreak, in which a natural virus hopped species, there was heavy handed action and repression of information about how bad things were getting, but that was after things had gotten bad. I don't believe there were doctors that were being silenced before the outbreak got severe. If you want to prevent the severity of a natural outbreak you need and want doctors to be jumping on the issue early, and I would imagine you would want to exaggerate the effectiveness of their early intervention rather than silence doctors trying to mount an early intervention.
Later discovering they really did have a problem and it was even worse than SARS going to a full lockdown at the main crossroads city right before Chinese New Year (the largest human migration event).
The motivation feels very normal/predicable for China. And also similar to their SARS response. So is SARS also an intentional self inflicted lab leak? And is MERS a secret belt and road initiative?
Seems weird there is a conspiracy about the third deadly coronavirus but not the first two... or the common cold for that matter? Where did that come from and was that a lab leak?
Whole thing smells of lazy arm chair enquiry with a touch of xenophobia
There’s nothing particularly new about lab escapes, they happen quite frequently. And given the presence of a bio-lab studying coronaviruses just a short distance from the site of the first reported cases, why would any rational person not consider that as a possibility?
I don’t think you even have to go down the “bio weapon” route here. It could be as simple as a worker infecting themselves with a natural sample unwittingly. Following your logic then, I think China would be incredibly unlikely to admit a lab escape of a natural sample now given the devastation it has caused. It’d be a huge loss of face and draw questions towards China’s competence.
The main difference from SARS is we know there is a virology lab in Wuhan researching coronaviruses right across from the wet market considered the epicenter.
I don’t know enough about the reaction to SARS to know how similar it was, but my understanding was they were similarly draconian internally, and were trying to keep it relatively quiet, but I am not aware of any arrests of doctors early on in SARS outbreaks.
The plausibility of Covid escaping from a lab does not make all viruses plausibly escaped from labs. The reason it’s more plausible for covid are the initial reactions and the proximity of the epicenter to a virology lab studying covid.
I fail to see how it’s xenophobic to consider the lab leak plausible. If anything a natural spread relies on the assumption that the wet market was engaged in unhygienic practices and that someone foreign may have eaten an infected bat.
It is not true that there are never going to be reasonable motivations to deploy a virus:-
It could be viewed as a tool to alter population demographics in an ageing society.
It might be deployed against an adversary.
It might be used to reduce the human population to avoid a predicted ecological disaster.
There are probably dozens of very reasonable motivations.
I think it’s unreasonable to think there was a motivation to intentionally release Covid.
I don’t think there’s reasonable motivation given when and where the outbreak started, how the virus works, China’s response, etc.
I think the particular scenarios you’re painting are also quite extreme/unlikely, so any claim that a virus was released intentionally would require extraordinary evidence in most cases/I’d rarely entertain that hypothesis. There are less drastic and risky ways with less blowback of dealing with all of those issues, even if you assume a very capable bad actor and ignore the normal and expected amount of incompetence and error.
If you are familiar with Wuhan, you’d know you are talking crap. The virology lab is on the East side of the river in the University sector of the city.
The market is on the west side of the river and is in the cbd sector of the city.
We are talking 10km distance apart, with a huge river between. And there are many other wet markets between that would more likely service the community closer to the lab.
That particular wet market takes a lot of shipments straight off boats and from outside the city.
But sure. If by “right across” you meant “on the other side of the CBD, across the largest river in China, and on the opposite side of the largest University campus in China” then I agree.
https://www.breakingasia.com/wp-content/uploads/Wuhan-Virolo...
A virology lab studying the human transmissibility of bat corona viruses ~10km away from the purported epicenter of the outbreak of a bat related coronavirus is notable.
How come no one at the lab? Or the University got it? How come initially it was Hankou (west side) that was locked down and not Wuchang (east side)?
Surely the folks leaking (given the equivalent of the cdc is in the same location) it would have thought of that and locked it down first?
Sorry that facts keep spoiling the juicy narrative.
No doctors were arrested early on. Few got cold tea lectures about spreading rumors that literal SARs returned not novel SARs like virus. Signed boilerplate paperwork and was released back to work. This is generic behavior for "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" tier infractions. Not particularly heavy handed at all as far as PRC behavior is concerned. Folks get talks with cyber security for far less. Arguably warranted, had covid not been once in generation virus, spreading panic based on rumors to some critical mass before CNY is pretty egregious. The fact these doctors got slap on risk treatment shows officials were essentially oblivious of severity of novel virus. If there was foreknowledge of a lab leak, these doctors would be under surveillance and stashed away in safe house away from family/friends/work for months/years like in other politically sensitive cases.
The following happened to Doctor Li Wenliang:
> On 3 January 2020, police from the Wuhan Public Security Bureau investigating the case interrogated Li, issued a formal written warning and censuring him for "publishing untrue statements about seven confirmed SARS cases at the Huanan Seafood Market." He was made to sign a letter of admonition promising not to do it again. The police warned him that any recalcitrant behavior would result in a prosecution.
Being detained and forced to sign a letter on threat of prosecution is the practical equivalent of being arrested.
> If there was foreknowledge of a lab leak, these doctors would be under surveillance and stashed away in safe house away from family/friends/work for months/years like in other politically sensitive cases.
There is no evidence that doctors like Doctor Li Wenliang had knowledge of the origin, and were targeted for reporting on the virus.
Huang Yan Ling was a researcher at the virology lab in Wuhan that has been missing since right before the outbreak.
Huang Yan Ling stopped working at WIV in 2015. The only reason she's noteworthy is conspiracy theorist tried to link her as patient 0. People have some expectation that PRC should indulge in random conspiracy theory by parading her around. Like is US going open up fort Detrick for scrutiny? No because entertaining the whims of yahoos is ridiculous.
That's a lie.
Oh that's easy: an authoritarian state would be arresting irrespective of the origin. They want to control the message , no matter what. The truth is a distraction in that case.
Once things flip, and the public becomes aware, then they can re-write history and make them national hero's. Chinese citizens are apparently skeptical of their own government, and get pissed off a lot, I suggest the Doctor who made the discovery is a little bit of a populist hero already.
The CCP's actions demonstrate they are fully authoritarian, that's about it.
It was more likely putting evolutionary pressure on Coronaviruses in order to change it's properties and behaviour.
Regarding selection pressure people do that all the time, in fact it is far from easy to artificially apply environmental pressure and obtain highly functional new variants. In cancer research, xenograft are extremely tricky to do with immunodeficient animal models, let alone human tissue in the lab. Sure you can have some success but it's difficult enough to reproduce. His point is that even if an artificially selected highly viable variant was obtained, it is very unlikely it can prevail in real world nature selection (large scale too). I'm no expert but happy to read about any paper if it's not the case.
(1) Which category (if either) has an advantage by Occam's razor? (2) Which category (if either) is more easily falsifiable? (Meaning easier to determine improbable, since it is hard to falsify them entirely)
For me, I see neither having an advantage on (1), but on (2) there are a finite number of relevant, well-known lab techniques that could be investigated.
I think that branch is past what scientific dialog really covers, and it's probably the methods and standards of proof from legal exploration that might be the way to progress the discussion. Unfortunately, the world is missing a moderator that folks would broadly trust to facilitate that conversation.
Labs are the places where people go to push the boundaries. If we go with lab-leak, it is extremely possible that they had figured something new out. They were doing something novel in there, because they were paid money to do novel things.
It would be trivially easy for a hostile power to covertly release a pathogen in another country.
It would also be trivially easy to engineer simultaneous release in multiple locations.
It would be less easy but not impossible to take an existing pathogen during a pandemic, engineer a variant, and release it in another country.
There would always be ambiguity and uncertainty about the source, because there are no telltale markers that unambiguously define an origin, or even whether a pathogen is natural or man-made.
I am not suggesting any of this happened. But I am pointing out that biowarfare has some unexpected covert possibilities.
While Covid may or may not be an example - insufficient data - any defensive strategy should consider the possibility that some other pathogen might be seeded deliberately.
I would say that it's more likely that this was a natural mutation that got its chance to survive natural selection because of the lasting and intense contact with human researchers in the Wuhan lab. There are some media sources that show that researches didn't take too many precautions with avoiding this contact. E.g. there are pictures of researchers without wearing gloves and one that's even showing bites from bats.
No it isn't.
I think a lot of people dismiss the lab leak hypothesis based on the idea that a lab-created virus must have an engineered genome rather than an evolved one.
I've done some separate reading that this is a legitimate way that viruses can adapt to a new species, but I don't have any background to evaluate the argument much beyond face value.
Some of the adjacent comments shed some doubt there as it sounds like bats aren't a plausible source because of the spike protein genetics.
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/a-propos...
In fact, the paper [3] cited in the top comment has the following response to the Wu and Zhao paper you cited:
> The recent acquisition of the FCS by SARS-CoV-2 via a natural insert was proposed by Wu and Zhao (2021) on the basis of the existence of FCS in other, more distant Betacoronaviruses with different loop positions to SARS-CoV-2 and the existence of a partial natural insert in the same region in RmYN02 (Zhou et al. 2020a). The reliability of the conclusions of Zhou et al. (2020a) has been questioned by Deigin and Segreto (2020), who particularly challenge the claim that RmYN02 has an insertion around the site of the FCS insertion in SARS-CoV-2 and instead point to a two amino acid deletion in RmYN02 at that locus. Therefore, RmYN02 should not be used as evidence of the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2′s FCS until its claimed insertion is properly validated.
Disclaimer: I’m no biologist/virologist.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.05.023
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.00627
[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0
[1] https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1197631383470034951?s...
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
They exist in the human HCoV-HKU1, HCoV-OC43, MERS-CoV and appear to have evolved independently at least 6 times in betacoronaviruses.
Furthermore while this article claims that the furin cleavage site has not found in any sarbecoviruses, that is now outdated information:
> "Evidence for SARS-CoV-2 related coronaviruses circulating in bats and pangolins in Southeast Asia"
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7873279/
Both RacCS203 (91.5% similar to SARS-CoV-2) and RmYN02 (93.3% similar to SARS-CoV-2) have furin cleavage sites. So we're up to 7-to-9 times now that evolution has evolved a furin cleavage site in betacoronaviruses, including 3 sarbecoviruses that may or may not be directly related.
The whole "furin cleavage site is an indication of human engineering" argument is just falsified at this point.
I don't think the FCS is determinative, and I agree Wade's article overstates its significance. In a Bayesian analysis, it still seems to me like it points weakly (at least 3x prevalence?) towards lab origin, though.
The significance is zero. Nature itself knows how to figure it out.
> but rare among such viruses in nature.
This assertion is false. It is common among betacoronaviruses in nature, not rare. That was the point of those two articles.
We have even found two sarbecoviruses now (directly related to SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2) in bats in Thailand which have an FCS.
It points literally 0% towards lab origin.
It would be nice if each individual piece of evidence were all or nothing, either perfect evidence of lab origin in itself or perfectly irrelevant. I don't think real evidence usually comes that way, so it seems valuable to me to try to quantify even weak evidence.
And not that Nobel laureates don't have an unfortunate history of incorrect beliefs later in life: but I assume you're aware David Baltimore considers the FCS significant? He doesn't seem to have said anything else obviously crazy (unlike Mullis, Pauling, etc.), at least.
Even given the CGG codon? Sorry, not buying it. You can argue that its evidentiary value is weaker than the article suggests, but it's not 0%.
"The natural emergence theory battles a bristling array of implausibilities."
This is a fantastic article, but amazingly almost all of it is year-old news. Most of this was known in March 2020, and nearly all of it by the end of 2020. How does it take so long for the truth to win?
I published a meta-analysis covering much of the same ground in November 2020 and this was only after waiting and expecting for several months that someone with a better platform would do so first. The article above covers the most important points but the story does go deeper: https://followtheplot.org/covid19
Now that things slowly are getting back to normal, at least in some Western countries, our focus shifts to the origins.
I was also very skeptical in the beginning about the escape theory tbh. But after reading a couple of pieces I’m opening up to the possibility.
No on-the-ground analysis has been allowed in China.
It isn't proof. But it is a data point, not lack of data.
For SARS and MERS we had data within months.
We don't have data on animals because it was a lab-escape event.
The claim that lab workers got flu-like symptoms in late 2019 blew my mind.
I wish I had time to investigate myself, but I'm 90% convinced that the reporter is correct and this is a lab-escape event.
US government had many perverse reasons to believe things that turned out to be false.
I'm putting exactly zero trust in what US government says about what happens or happened in other countries especially those deemed by them as adversarial.
And even if such thing happened it's way more probable that it was just common seasonal illness.
It was used as an example of “fake news”: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/technology/biden-reality-...
> “ 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.”
What makes my blood boil about this is the NYT is supposed to be able to tell the difference - this kind of self righteous stupidity explains the rise of trump and distrust of media orgs more than anything else, it’s what lays the groundwork for baseless conspiracy.
Yes there were dumb conspiracies about a manufactured and intentionally released bio weapon, but the accidental release from the lab that actually exists and studies these exact viruses in Wuhan and the additional context of the lies from the CCP about the Pangolin (and just general suspicious blocking of access) made it a reasonable hypothesis.
What irony that in a piece pushing support for a “reality czar” (presumably to censor certain stories?) is the position of the NYT so divorced from reality itself.
Pair this with the WHO rep being afraid to say the word Taiwan and it looks bad there too: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-ta...
In a lot of ways it feels like the west is under constant attack from disinformation and self-inflicted censorship (movies, Apple, nba, etc. all afraid to be critical of the CCP) and doesn’t even realize what’s going on. I think the CCP understands what they’re doing.
This is an ideological war, we’re already under attack, and the west is losing. The CCP (and Russia to a lesser extent) understand where our vulnerabilities lie and they’re exploiting them.
Edit: Whenever this comment reaches +1 it’s quickly downvoted to -2, dang - if you see this do you have a way to tell if this is legitimate (users behaving as they wish to) or something else? I only consistently see this behavior on comments that mention the CCP.
2020 will be forever the year I lost total trust in mainstream media. It's one thing to just "get it wrong" it's an entirely different thing when the powers that be are actively trying to promote a false narrative.
And then to turn around and label actual journalism and truth seeking as "conspiracy-theorist" and "crack pots" it is just too much to bear.
Filling the news with endless critiques and shaming of the proper way and material of mask to wear but deflect any attempts at uncovering, How the Hell this thing Started in the First Place!
They have become the anti-thesis of news and journalism and a driving force of division in the United States.
A pillar of democracy and free speech has become the thing it was intended to prevent and is now firmly a Fifth Column [1].
However I think the CCP are overplaying their hand now. They are doing too much too fast too aggressively. Hong kong, NBA, now going after Australia. It's going to backfire IMO.
Especially if you start to think about non first world countries. What's india going to do once they're massive covid wave is over? Is it going to improve india-china relations? You are going to have 1bn people with a border with China very very pissed I think at them.
We are only 1 year into this pandemic, and I think many geopolitical issues haven't been worked through yet.
If you just repeat the same thing over and over from different sources, people come to accept it as true. Whether they believe it or not doesn't matter, behavior is still dictated by what we're told, and no one wants to be the nail sticking out.
>Ex-C.D.C. Director Favors Debunked Virus Origin Theory
Basically trying to portray the ex-CDC director - a virologist - as an unhinged nutjob for saying such a thing.
After a ton of backlash, they relented and changed it from "debunked" to "unproven" and added an editor's note of "The theory is unproven, not debunked", which took a bit of the wind out of their original angle.
>What irony that in a piece pushing support for a “reality czar” (presumably to censor certain stories?) is the position of the NYT so divorced from reality itself.
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong with a Ministry of Truth?
I also downvoted the comment, by the way, so I can explain at least one of the downvotes. It wasn't because I disagree with you. It was because ideological battle is against the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
When your blood is boiling, that's not a good state in which to post to HN. Better to wait for it to cool and then post in the key of curiosity. That's what HN is supposed to be for. I mean, I know you know this. But it's not so easy in practice, especially when you feel like you're under attack and your side is losing [1].
It's in your interest, though. Boiling-blood comments are like a Maxwell's demon who not only has energy to separate molecules into disjoint compartments, but enough left over to keep them buzzing angrily. You'll get upvotes and praise from people who already agree with you, and downvotes and anger from people who already disagree. But what you should be doing instead, if you want to help your own view, is trying to persuade the persuadable. That requires an entirely different, molecule-enticing strategy. A Maxwell's angel perhaps?
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[1] I don't know how many of us would have guessed it, but one thing has become apparent from trying to keep HN interesting: functioning curiously requires developing one's ability to experience difficult feelings and somehow carry them and not let them drive you into reaction—which is a pretty deep human task. It turns out that simply trying to optimize HN for one thing—curiosity—has counterintuitive consequences, some of which ask a lot of us.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I wrote about some of those consequences here, if anyone is interested in reading further: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
Unfortunately you won't find it on Google Maps but anyone who is able to read Chinese can check this themselves. All the early cases were centered around this area, including the hospital that treated the first cases. It's absurd that this is almost never talked about anywhere. On the CDC website they had an open position looking for a researcher to study, among others, exactly the kind of bat CoV that's been identified as most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. This has since been deleted but it could still be accessed during the early days of the outbreak.
Would the logical conclusion from the "escaped a lab" theory be that China shouldn't be allowed to have virology research? Should any nation? Who gets to decide? Exactly what actionable conclusion depends on knowing if the origin of the virus was a lab or not?
There are maybe one in a dozen proponents of the lab theory that are legitimately interested in these questions. For the remaining 11 out of 12, the Wuhan Lab theory is just a belief that they wear in public to signal "China bad". An alarming number of people think China created the virus and released it on purpose. I once heard someone say China released the virus just to prove that our healthcare system is bad. Let me highlight the absurdity here. This person believes China engineered a virus and then released it on their own people in a city most foreigners were unaware of so that it would eventually make it to the US. They did all this just to prove some politically left point about socialized healthcare. That's not a real belief about how the world works. That's thinly veiled "I hate liberals and China".
Most of these people are trying to reach a conclusion that the world should punish China with sanctions or (in extreme cases) war. More than a few of them are using the lab theory as a fig leaf over blatant racism. There's a huge overlap between people who believe the lab theory and people who insist on calling it the "China virus" or "Wuhan Flu". That's not a coincidence. In short, the majority of the people agreeing with your theory aren't actually on your side. When you say "How does it take so long for the truth to win?", they have a very different idea of what "the truth" means.
Don't give them legitimacy or talking points. Being honest about the lab theory in the face of people who will use your words dishonestly is a fools errand. Don't be the fool who thinks he can be nuanced enough to pull it off. Until you know you are talking with someone who cares about the lab theory for the right reasons, the correct thing to say is "it absolutely evolved naturally and did not escape a lab".
EDIT: If a kid crashes a car, you sure as hell are going to make them take more driving lessons before letting them drive again. And hearing them then say “it was a cosmic accident, why should anyone be allowed to drive” is not going to absolve them of negligence
Edit: Should any nation do "independent unsupervised virology". I've heard people in this very thread say that the lab theory, if true, means we should "stop funding this research in China". I take that to mean no longer having a CDC outpost that cooperates with them. So which one is it. should we cut the CDC out of there completely, or should we not let them be independent and unsupervised? The lab origin theory can't imply both at the same time.
A certified truck driver crashes their truck because they didn't follow the strict safety procedures that the trucking regulatory body set to prevent said crash. They were hauling Anhydrous Ammonia. The resulting blast kills 4 million people globally.
Are you going to make them take more safety lessons before letting them haul again?
Or will hearing them then say “it was a cosmic accident, why should anyone be allowed to haul” absolve them of negligence?
Maybe to further your point, should everyone stop hauling Anhydrous Ammonia, or should just the person who let the accident happen?
Is this a serious question?
How about, if this is true the US government should not be funding any research like this in China.
How about, the research must be done at BSL-4 instead of 2/3 as noted in the paper.
How about, we need to massively step up our surveillance efforts on the current state of respiratory viruses going forward. Something like the Seattle Flu Study at national scale. This last point is true regardless of the origin story for SARS-CoV-2.
You literally just proved my point. The origin story isn't actually all that relevant to preventing future pandemics.
At the very least, people are concerned with the origin story far above and beyond its practical importance. It is at a point where you can safely assume that anyone preoccupied with the origin story is mostly interested in tribal shit-slinging.
>How about, if this is true the US government should not be funding any research like this in China.
Do you have a short list of countries the CDC shouldn't cooperate with? What exactly is your criteria? What change could China possibly enact that would get it off this list?
> "Don't give them legitimacy or talking points. Being honest about the lab theory in the face of people who will use your words dishonestly is a fools errand. Don't be the fool who thinks he can be nuanced enough to pull it off. Until you know you are talking with someone who cares about the lab theory for the right reasons, the correct thing to say is "it absolutely evolved naturally and did not escape a lab"."
This kind of second order thinking and attempted manipulation is a big reason the mainstream press has lost all of its trust.
The same nonsense was why people tried to justify saying "masks don't work" was okay. "Well, we need the masks for healthcare workers so just lie to the public so they don't try to buy too many".
There are a lot of problems with this.
1. First I think it's largely a lie, the people making these arguments are not masterminds working on 3 levels, they're making stupid tribal arguments of a similar depth to the people blaming China out of "China bad".
2. It fails, the attempted manipulation is obvious and comes out as wrong - this further discredits the press and weakens the trust of the public in institutions. This plays directly into the hands of the 'people who will use your words dishonestly'.
3. We should give a shit about the truth independent of tribal affiliation, second order manipulations are stupid - people that act to cover that up are not as clever as they think they are.
As the sister reply to your comment suggests, there should be consequences for negligence that leads to a global pandemic killing millions.
We should, but the reality is we don't. (the general we, not the specific you and me). There would be far more people (in the West) accepting the natural origin theory if the virus started in the EU or US. People give a shit about "the truth"^{tm} only when it suits them.
Some people in China have done some really spurious gene sequencing studies to try and prove the virus actually started anywhere-but-China. Their theory of "it must have started outside of China" is just as much motivated reasoning as "it must have been a malicious/incompetent act by China". Of course everyone involved really pretends to give a shit about the truth. Anyone who actually cares about the truth knows better than to wade into that cesspool. Being earnest in this context only results in you getting covered in shit.
>As the sister reply to your comment suggests, there should be consequences for negligence that leads to a global pandemic killing millions.
That really gets to the heart of it. Was it negligence, or was it just a thing that could have happened at any of the BSL labs with some small probability? What exactly is the mistake rate in similar labs around the world? Was it really more likely to have happened in WuHan, or is that just where the cosmic dice landed? There's this pervasive assumption in your comment and others that the virus escaping a Chinese lab must have been due to the incompetence of the Chinese government. Yet the Chinese governments response to the virus was more serious and more competently executed than almost anywhere else. They practically reopened months ago. How do you square that circle?
When someone is only looking at theories which have someone to blame, they aren't really being disinterested seekers of truth. Trying to explain the nuance of "there is some evidence it might have escaped a lab but that by itself doesn't necessarily imply anyone is at fault" isn't worth my time. Additionally explaining the difference between "I don't reject the lab theory" and "I believe the lab theory" also isn't worth my time. I already know 11 out of 12 aren't really listening / digesting the nuance. The only thing I can say that won't get lost in translation is "it evolved in bats, full stop".
Blame thinking is easy. Wouldn't it be great if we could just fix all our future problems by finding the people who do the wrong thing and punishing them until there's no more sinners left. The alternative of a fundamentally random universe where bad things happen for no reason is a bitter pill to swallow.
This is precisely why the truth matters and learning about the origins is important.
The cover up and lies out of China don’t necessarily mean it wasn’t a “cosmic dice” situation, but it doesn’t inspire confidence. The false PR about it having to have originated outside of the country makes it look even worse.
Maybe their response was more serious and competent because they had a better understanding of what they were dealing with? They also suppressed information - it wasn’t until the doctor went public that we began to learn the truth of its severity.
A lot of their measures (fever tents, mandatory isolation) play to the strengths of an authoritarian society.
Without knowing the truth it’s hard to evaluate the level of negligence. The western media should not be participating (wittingly or not) in the CCP’s disinformation.
> “Trying to explain the nuance of "there is some evidence it might have escaped a lab but that by itself doesn't necessarily imply anyone is at fault" isn't worth my time”
I’d argue this is the only thing worth your time. The truth absent political tribalism is the thing that can persuade people. Nuance is important, it helps make you more persuasive, even when the people you’re trying to persuade are mostly driven by motivated reasoning.
Anyway we could look at the "cosmic dice rate" for all the labs we do know about. But the funny thing about that is we can ask and reasonably answer the question about low-probability but ultra-high risk research without ever needing to investigate this particular outbreaks origin story. Conversely, even if tomorrow some one dug up smoking gun evidence that it evolved naturally in the wild and had nothing to do with any lab, the question about lab risks and future pandemics would still be worth asking. Could you imagine anyone saying "well I used to be in favor of reviewing our risk factors, but now that I know coronavirus was all natural I no longer give any shits about the safety risks of this research."?
If you care about future pandemics, there's a million better ways to spend your energy than trying to figure out if there was or wasn't a coverup in a (formerly) obscure lab in a (formerly) obscure city over a year ago in a country that isn't known for transparency. Anyone who actively contributes to the "debate" is being counterproductive. In my view, the main practical use of the lab origin theory is as an inadvertent shibboleth to identify who's hooked on tribalism / motivated reasoning / spurious logic.
>The truth absent political tribalism is the thing that can persuade people.
This sounds like the sort of thing I would have said before "post-factual" entered our lexicon. Behind every cynic is a disappointed idealist.
""" Since SHC014 could not be success fully isolated, a recombinant virus (rWIV1-SHC014S) was constructed based on the WIV1 backbone with the replacement of SHC014S gene, as described previously (Zengetal.,2016). The S sequence of SHC014 was amplified with primer pair (F-SHC014-Bsa I, 5′-AGTGGTCTCAACGAA-CATGAAATTGTTAGTTTTAGTTTTTGCTAC-3′ and R-SHC014-Bsa I, 5′-TCAGGTCTCAGTTCGTTTATGTG-TAATGTAATTTGACACCCTTG-3′), digested with BsaI, and inserted into an artificial bacterial chromosome along with the other viral cDNA fragments."""
One analogy for developers: Bad persons are using git to develop ransomware, and company X is also using git, therefore company X is developing ransomware.
Which ever way you frame it, it is correlation, not causation. Poor evidence at best.
Out of all the wet markets that serve that much population, the coronavirus just happened to appear at the market nearest to the lab studying coronaviruses. To have such a coincidence is like winning the lottery.
It's not evidence, sure, it's correlation at best. But this alone should make you investigate that lab much much better, it should be the first possible cause you research.
But looking at the lab first might be hard if you have a severe conflict of interest https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4119101
I am not saying this to "make China pay". After all, the US itself was sponsoring coronavirus research at that lab. But we should establish a worldwide safety standard in dealing with such research, and establish periodical inspections. Just like we do with Nuclear power plants, only better.
Then why did they cover up and downplay the seriousness at the start?
An analogous example would be a hit and run by a drive. The driver may have driven recklessly but not have meant to do damage to others, after damage is done the driver doesn’t want to be discovered. Similarly if this was a lab escape, the government doesn’t want their recklessness to be known.
On the one hand we have unsanitary food markets and the questionable production and sale of exotic animals for human consumption.
On the other extreme we have the potential escape of a genetically modified virus from a research lab.
Honestly I find the second scenario more reassuring, if it did escape from a lab then the Chinese and the international community can put measures in place to prevent it from happening again.
If the virus made the jump from a wild animal somewhere in China's exotic animal industry then what is the recourse? Can the Chinese Government clamp down on that industry enough to prevent it from happening again? Will the Chinese culturally be willing to give up consuming animals like bats and pangolins that are frequent reservoirs for coronaviruses?
I think the world should demand more openness from China on the matter and demand a plan to prevent another outbreak like this from happening again. The latest estimate is 7 million people dead world wide and trillions of dollars lost. Surely that should justify some hard lines drawn and the threat of economic sanctions if the world can't be given some kind of re-assurance that this won't happen again.
Lab negligence is just a pure fuck up. Very hard to spin that and not take responsibility.
https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the...
Origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus
And unlike the arrticle here, this report is based upon interviews with employees at the lab and various form of documentation provided by the lab. Including health records of the employees.
For more from one of the WHO people:
https://theconversation.com/i-was-the-australian-doctor-on-t...
I was the Australian doctor on the WHO’s COVID-19 mission to China. Here’s what we found about the origins of the coronavirus
> We visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is an impressive research facility, and looks to be run well, with due regard to staff health. We spoke to the scientists there. We heard that scientists’ blood samples, which are routinely taken and stored, were tested for signs they had been infected. No evidence of antibodies to the coronavirus was found. We looked at their biosecurity audits. No evidence.
So this is what they were told, but did they actually test the samples, and confirm that they belonged to the right people and originated from the given date? Apparently no.
> We looked at the closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 they were working on — the virus RaTG13 — which had been detected in caves in southern China where some miners had died seven years previously. But all the scientists had was a genetic sequence for this virus. They hadn’t managed to grow it in culture.
This is probably the most convincing argument: if they actually had worked on viruses similar enough to plausible be modified into SARS-CoV-2, this would have left evidence in scientific papers etc.
> While viruses certainly do escape from laboratories, this is rare. So, we concluded it was extremely unlikely this had happened in Wuhan.
This is incredibly weak: "lab escapes are rare, so it's extremely unlikely" is not much of an argument.
It seems that proponents of the lab leak theory wants to turn the burden of proof upside down: I am claiming conspiracy starting with Anthony Fauci and ending up in a Chinese lab. It is up to you to provide hard evidence on why it is not so.
Sure you can do that as in freedom of thought and speech. But honestly; this is not really a constructive way to go about things.
There is an investegative group from the WHO interviewing the Wuhan lab people and looking at various form of documentation.
The lab leak proponents claim that they are all lying and all the documents are fraudulent.
The lab leak proponents have the burden of proof and IMHO kinda should shut up until they can carry that burden.
Insanity!
It's the media's job to investigate conflicts of interest, so the fact that they didn't looked into that, and that they took Daszak's original so-called debunking at face value, is bad optics on another level. It has left a credibility vacuum, so it's unsurprising that articles like the current one are coming in from the margins.
Saying there is no benefit is like saying there is no benefit for people people who switch jobs just so they get paid more.
> The prior probability of a lab escape is low
but the prior probability of "a pandemic from natural causes envelops the world" is also low, say below 1% a year. But now, given that "a pandemic does envelop the world", the posterior probability of lab escape and natural cause of course rises dramatically... and then saying "we didn't see much evidence for it" on a superficial tour organised by those responsible for the lab does not strike me as a very powerful rebuttal.
It's akin to "the prior probability of labour camps is low", and "on our tour of North Korea (accompanied by several North Korean tour guides showing us just those places they wanted to show us when they wanted to show us) we didn't see any labour camps, therefore we conclude that the probability of labour camps in North Korea is low".
While we're invoking statistics: Take the null H_0 = "the virus emerged naturally in any large Chinese city with > 1m inhabitants". In 2017, there were 102 of those. Thus, the probability under H_0 that the virus emerged in the one city in China with a level 4 biolab has p < 0.01.
It is akin to saying "Pliny the Younger didn't die in Pompeii overtaken by a volcano because there is so many other cities he could have died in and other causes of death." Statistically, that would have been true, up until we learned that it happened. Then the low probability ceases to matter, since it becomes an observation.
Statistically, this is due to both priors rising, proportional to their original values, such that now the sum P(lab escape)+P(natural cause) == 1 and their average is a coin-toss (50-50). So without outside information, the prior statistical probability isn't low: it is exactly neutral between the options.
We've also seen viruses arise in small villages. This is even more unlikely to be predictable in advance which village with p << 0.0001.
Exactly, that's what I was getting at - the prior for lab escape is low, but given that the pandemic happened, it the posterior for lab escape is 1 - posterior for natural.
And we had about as many examples for lab escapes as for natural epidemics in the last few decades, it seems to me.
If I remember correctly, wasn't there no evidence in scientific papers etc that the virus RaTG13, which is the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2, actually existed until after the Covid pandemic started and they suddenly published information about it?
However, the evidence is pretty clear that this was found and published earlier. It was originally described as "BtCoV/4991" and it was described and published as far as I can find as far back as 2016. (The name was changed to RaTG13 to describe that it was collected in 2013 in Tongguan).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/983856042 <-- partial RaTG13 sequence in 2016
Possibly also worth to consider that there are very high incentives to publishing in China, as far as I understand authors can often get rewarded for publications
a) Did it form in nature or in a lab?
b) Did it become more communicable via nature or via the lab?
c) Did it make it to humans through nature (or wet market) or via the lab?
d) If it came from the lab was it on purpose or an accident?
as simply "OMG IT CAME FROM A LAB" and then claimed it's all a conspiracy theory.
The media as a whole shot themselves in the foot on this one and we'll all be worse off for it.
I don't have any evidence of this, but I don't think it was as accidental as shooting yourself in the foot. Media people know what they're doing.
This isn't something I'm celebrating, though. It's not a sign of a successful state when everyone is losing confidence in the press.
One the one hand, there's the critique that media institutions are becoming more commercialized, dumbed-down, and turned in to infotainment, where serious discussion and inquiry is thrown out the window in favor of shouting matches and sensationalism.
There's another critique that media is in service or left-wing, right-wing, capitalist, or corporate special interests and parrots the party line.
Yet another critique is that the media doesn't give marginalized voices enough air time.
So when you say "everyone is losing confidence in the press" that may be true in general, but different people are doing so for very different reasons.
The grandparent comment seems to be a critique of the third category, where they seem to want the mainstream media to give more air time to conspiracy theories in direct contravention to the consensus of the scientific community: which is that SARS-CoV-2 came from nature, not from a lab.
My actual criticism was closer to your first category: "where serious discussion and inquiry is thrown out the window in favor of shouting matches and sensationalism"
But thank you for demonstrating my point by re-collapsing all four questions into one.
Sensationlism is squarely on the side of the conspiracy theores.
Read past the "a)" because those are way more important and may be discoverable.
(1) either confirmed, debunked or unproven;
(2) either originating from an authoritative source, originating from a non-authoritative source, or of unknown origin;
(3) either promoted, downplayed, or ignored by any particular media outlet.
These are, again, three orthogonal axes that you are implicitly, and stubbornly, conflating.
Anyone sensible is not even asking themselves if "conspiracy theories" are true. They're asking themselves where the hell they come from, why are they so contagious, what prevents societies from effectively containing them, and what are the long-term effects on our societies' health.
Or maybe anyone sensible is looking to profit from the confusion, and I'm a raving lunatic... Have you considered becoming one yourself?
We only are led to think that because the media repeated it so often.
Human-to-human transmission started (almost certainly) with one human, not one animal transmitting to multiple humans.
Science reporters don't generally understand science, and nuanced takes don't generate clicks. The "media" is the absolute worst place for this discussion to take place.
The true problem is those professional scientists who jumped on the "lol conspiratard" bandwagon and probably ended up carrying water for the CCP, albeit unwittingly. I'm talking about the government who cried "racism" when other countries started closing their borders to China — the first one to do that was of course Taiwan AKA Republic of China, who are by that token racist against Chinese people, I guess.
This is news to me. Wtf?
I'm sorry, that essay (which is an opinion piece, not a work of investigative journalism) says absolutely nothing of the sort. What's your source on that? That's a pretty ridiculous accusation if you don't have evidence.
Yeah, this didn't happen.
So I choose to believe that you're just wrong about what he said. Again, Fauci covertly directing funds to an area of research that the medical community has recognized as ethically problematic for decades would be huge news. And all you have is a podcast? Seriously?
According to Rogin, Fauci did not so much covertly direct funds, but rather, quietly reinstated gain a function research which was stopped by the Obama administration (without approval from the Trump administration). He also doubled down with new grants in the same area as a response to the pandemic.
I personally find none of this particularly difficult to believe given other positions the medical establishment has taken over the coarse of the pandemic and the extreme lack of curiosity in the press.
So there's a hidden truth that happens to confirm the priors of a bunch of highly-on-the-internet people, but without any evidence in public. And the fact that the evidence doesn't exist is being cited as an argument that it must exist because of asserted suppression.
Well, for sure someone's going to be labelled as a conspiracy theorist. Seriously: it doesn't surprise you that the same folks that were so into Q a few months back are suddenly all aflutter with this omg-Fauci-created-covid nonsense?
No, its not "the fact that it doesn't exist" that lends credence to existence. The incentives involved for everyone who ostensibly would look for its existence align to have them look the other way. Given other circumstantial evidence, that is suspicious!
> Seriously: it doesn't surprise you that the same folks that were so into Q a few months back are suddenly all aflutter with this omg-Fauci-created-covid nonsense?
As near as I can tell, your argument here is: create a crazy conspiracy theory, attribute it to Rogin, point to the conspiracy theory as proof that Rogin is crazy. No one in this thread nor Rogin have claimed that Fauci literally created the corona virus. The claims are 1. Fuaci is a proponent of research that Obama shut down because its of little value and dangerous, 2. a lab in china with shit opsec was doing the same research on corona viruses which happened to be where the outbreak started, 3. Fauci re-instituted the research program under Trump without input from the Trump administration.
I watched the Joe Rogan Josh Rogin clip you linked to. It's very interesting. But what Rogin says is that Fauci "found a way to turn gain-of-function research back on". He doesn't say that Fauci did anything covertly. He's describing effective bureaucratic maneuvering, which Fauci must be good at. He couldn't have stayed in his job for decades otherwise.
"Covert" means something very different, for example if he had taken money that was assigned to different research, funneled it to gain-of-function labs, and then falsified reports about how the money was spent. Some outrageous scenario like that is what you're implying with that word. Rogin implies nothing of the sort. Actually, from the facts in the OP article, which are drawn from public reports, it's clear Fauci got what he wanted overtly. That's how effective bureaucrats get things done.
By overstating the claim, you distracted from the significant thing, which is that Fauci was a major funder of gain-of-function research and, in the dispute between virologists about whether it was too risky or not, was strongly on the side that advocated for it. The other side managed to get the research shut down for a while, and then Fauci managed to get it turned back on. There's no suggestion or evidence that he did so in bad faith, as Rogin is careful to point out. But it does mean that he has a conflict of interest in dismissing the lab leak hypothesis, just like Daszak does. That's already a very strong point, and a lot for people to take. If you say that it was "covert" on top of that, you're acting like the very conspiracy theorist they want to tell everyone you are, and helpfully providing them with a bit that is easily debunked.
I'm sorry, but I've been digging and I just don't see any major justification here. I'm sure there's subtlety, but there's just no one in the research world coming out to say this. There are no accusations being made. There's no memo with his name on it. There's no specific study cited that he pushed. There's nothing. No one is covering this.
This is just the next conspiracy theory, isn't it? It's not falsifiable, so everyone is going to believe it anyway. This is how we got Q. You're doing it again.
Didn't anybody think it was weird that the head of the NIH, a research institution, not a public health institution, became the top public health communicator during COVID instead of the heads of the CDC? He had a massive conflict of interest and wanted to protect it.
1. How does being the "top public health communicator" protect his conflict of interest?
2. Fauci isn't the head of the NIH, his position was "Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases"
3. Sure, it might sound weird, but what does previous pandemics show? Who was "top public health communicator" during the previous pandemics?
2. I was wrong. Wikipedia shows that the NIAID is part of the NIH. Still a research organization, not a public health organization.
3. Previous outbreaks, such as Ebola, SARS, MERS, etc. have _all_ been spearheaded by the CDC. The CDC is the branch of government responsible for managing disease outbreaks. The CDC head is therefore the "top public health communicator." It's worth noting that being a "communicator" here is much more than about talking to the public; it's also about who talks to the politicians.
No matter how much posturing and geopolitical theatre is going the same fragmented transnational elite is continuing actual resource oriented realpolitics completely outside of the narratives presented in the media that is owned by this class.
Whatever the purspose of this gain of function research is - it's not even discussed in MSM media even though you can go read the docs right out in the open. Same with the EMA bird flu pharma scandal that no one talks about these day that just happened 10 years ago.
Regarding the research it seems it's obviously not about bilateral war, as both complexes in China and the US is "in on it", could be everything from a push towards surveillance, depopulation, centralisation to stock manipulation. Who knows, when there is seemingly no actual research journalists left. The ones who do question things, are quickly removed from Google, banned from Twitter and deleted from Facebook.
Actual oldschool journalism today will make you a "conspiracy theorist" by todays standards because a small minority of people are stupid and being actively misled. Dystopian!
For example, here's another one of those odd coincidences that gets easily dismissed as a conspiracy theory: September 2019 there was a pandemic wargame called "Outbreak 2019", specifically based around an infectious disease that causes respiratory failure.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/04/01/naval-war-col...
Where are all the bats infected with this virus? It it came from a bat, it would have had to be circulating in the bat population a LOT to mutate enough to jump to humans, right?
So...why not go find a bad, identify the parent virus, and close this whole thing out?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
Guess who found the bat host? Shi Zhengli of the very WIV in question.
"In late 2006, scientists from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention of Hong Kong University and the Guangzhou Centre for Disease Control and Prevention established a genetic link between the SARS coronavirus appearing in civets and humans, bearing out claims that the disease had jumped across species.[62]"
It goes on to state that the bat link was confirmed in 2017.
> In late May 2003, studies were conducted using samples of wild animals sold as food in the local market in Guangdong, China. The results found that the SARS coronavirus could be isolated from masked palm civets (Paguma sp.)
and
> The SARS epidemic began in the Guangdong province of China in November 2002 ... Chinese government officials did not inform the World Health Organization of the outbreak until February 2003.
That's six months from the start of the outbreak, and less than four months from WHO being informed, not three years.
Where did you get your "three years" figure from?
I did plenty of these gain-of-function experiments in my postgrad studies. Mice tumours cells given genes to super-express certain cell adhesion molecules. Without this kind of approach, it is difficult to impossible to study these reactions. You just gotta be careful.
So a very likely explanation is some low level employees grabbed some bats, got their suits and vehicles contaminated didn't clean things properly, drove down to the Wuhan laboratory, and rested in town spreading virus contaminated dust or if they were already sick, their virus filled respiration about.
No lab leak needed, just the regular practices when "Wuhan Institute of Virology in China sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across the country", and those doing so were being sloppy, as they have been known to be repeatably.
[0] Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus — and suggests new outbreak could occur - December 2017 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9
Also, my understanding (quite possibly wrong) is that while humans can get sick from bats, as cave workers did in Southern China, those viruses aren't contagious in the sense that the sick humans go on to infect others. "Since no case of an epidemic caused by direct bat-to-human transmission has yet been demonstrated, it is thought that the transfer to humans more probably took place via an intermediate host species in which the virus could evolve and move towards forms likely to infect human cells." [1] If that's right then your explanation of spilled bat samples is incomplete: it doesn't explain what caused the bat samples to adapt into a form that could spread among humans. That sort of puts us back at square 1. Another way of saying this is that if your explanation is likely, then we'd have expected the pandemic to have started where the bats are - through sick cave workers or something similar. But in fact it started far away.
[1] https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-is-be...
The leader of the Wuhan team went there with a team to collect samples and animals. In the early days of Covid, those samples were re-examined and it turned out that the genome of the Covid strain was very similar to the Covid 19 virus. So the conclusion was taken that those bats must have been the origin where Corona somehow started. Somehow nobody at that time thought much about the fact that those samples were kept in Wuhan, exactly where the outbreak started.
Bats have a very unusual immune system in that they can harbor viruses without the virus killing the bat or the bat killing the virus.
It's one of the things that makes them ferociously good incubators for a cross-species mammalian plague. The other things are that they fly (so can cover larger distances than most mammals) and have communal living (so can transmit to each other very readily).
Hence I didn't say we evolved from chimpanzees, even though it'd've suited the snow clone better
But then, we should probably also apply Hanlon's razor [2] "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
Rhetorically speaking, Hanlon's razor doesn't quite have the same weight as Occam's, if only because people tend to view behavior they don't understand as stupid. But I'll add another "razor": don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to self-interested.
My point was more that the dichotomy stupidity vs. malice seems to imply that e.g. playing music, or having dinner is either stupid or bad. Many things get done out of self-interest without being malicious, or without malicious intent.
The remakes are always worse.
So we'd a priori expect coronavirus to originate in the area with coronavirus hosts, whether it was through the lab or the market...
Also while there are other species of bats near Wuhan, they are in hibernation in winter.
Every neighbourhood in every city in Asia has a wet market. Well other than Japan and Singapore, I guess. I live in Asia and there are two wet markets within walking distance of my house.
Wet markets are as omnipresent as convenience stores in America.
Since its rather trivial to compare viruses and I haven't seen mention about it being a different variant, I assume its still the same virus as original Wuhan ones.
Even to my rather ignorant eyes this makes Wuhan just a place it got spread to wider public, and not much more. Definitely not some patient-0 situation and most probably not even ground-0 one. Now I don't claim to understand why it didn't explode in those early days like it did afterwards, but this fact can't be ignored when evaluating this topic. I wonder why there isn't a single mention of this in article.
The other big inconsistency is that the epidemic did not become nonticeable in Italy until late February 2020. If COVID was already present in September 2019, why didn't it spread rapidly like it did anywhere else?
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03008916209877...
Heh, what is the Razor or other applicable language construct when someone gives two options and then suggests there's one they think is obviously correct, without saying which one or why - leaving it completely opaque or confusing to the casual reader?
I legit do not know which of the two cases here you think Occam's Razor applies straightforwardly. I can make easy cases for both sides being the simplest explanation.
e.g., "it seems simplest that the leading world centre would have excellent safety protocols and thus the chaotic wet market in a region known for those viruses is more likely the source", vs "it seems simplest that human error in a research environment studying these viruses compared to a wet market where, if that was a likely vector, we'd surely be seeing these things way more often", kind of thing.
There’s an unnecessarily large assumption being made here. We can look at the Wuhan institute’s past and the history of comparable labs to get an estimation of lab leak frequency.
Similarly, there’s a whole bunch of context around things like: what kind of samples did the lab have in its freezers when covid was discovered? In the wetmarket case, what’s the transmission chain from a reservoir through to the market have to look like?
Once you compile all this context, then Occam’s Razor becomes a good tool. But before that it’s just a shot in the dark (kinda like you hint at). I’m not sure any single HN comment is really capable of giving sufficient context for this particular case.
https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan...
Escape from an incompetently-secured and reckless lab definitely falls under "stupidity". There is nothing malicious about it.
The conclusion that "the coronavirus originated in Wuhan therefore the Wuhan Institute caused the virus" could be backwards even if the correlation is real. It could be the virology institute is in Wuhan because there are bat coronaviruses near there.
And still without any speculation, one of those hypothesis could potentially be confirmed if only the main suspect did let us look at the crime scene. In any criminal trial, said suspect would get a guilty verdict from the jury in minutes.
No, since in a criminal trial the standard is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That hasn't been met here.
This article certainly makes a prima facie case which would be enough to trigger discovery in a civil case. A reasonable person could also think that it has provided proof on the balance of probabilities, which would be enough for civil but not criminal liability.
But wet markets and virus laboratories are still on...
And let's not even begin to think what will happen if there were to be evidence that this was an intentional release.
But don't you think it's important to know this?
The most scary path would be intentional. I can't think of any other aftermath except for WWIII.
Yeah sure. We've just lost 3 million lives, let's kill the rest of the planet as consolation. As fucked up as our politicians are I hope they are not ready to die.
More likely result is that most of the world would stop trading with them. Nobody would want to see a Made in China tag on anything. Which would in turn be very bad for the economy in China and lead to unrest.
So the more likely outcome would be civil war in China.
One of the things Wade demonstrates is that China was most likely doing research on CoV viruses in ordinary labs with nothing more than gloves and a white lab coat. The standard photo of Dr Shi is of her in a pressurised bubble suit but that's bsl4 and virologists don't like working in those conditions because it slows them down. So the research grants say the work will be done at much lower safety levels.
I guess at some point you enter a gray area where gross negligence and intentionality blur together. But the bioweapon idea shouldn't take hold because it's obviously wrong on its face: the virus has no characteristics that would make for a good weapon of any kind. For it to be intentional would require some kind of theory involving vaccinations but Europe's irrational shutdowns of their own vaccine programmes throws a wrench in the typical vaccine related conspiracy theories.
> the virus has no characteristics that would make for a good weapon of any kind.
Quite the contrary. The virus clearly favors authoritarian societies whose citizens will let their government weld them into their apartments. Just look at the death rate in China compared to the US and Europe. The only free societies that have come out unscathed are isolated islands (NZ, Taiwan).
That said, there is zero chance that the CPC had foreknowledge of this. They got very, very lucky.
Eastern European countries are topping the death-per-capita charts (and the ones that don't are still topping excess-death charts).
African countries are doing "okay" because their ratio of people above age 65 is 2-3% rather than the 20% in Europe, and case numbers are low because they don't have the money to mass test.
Over time, I have seen these numbers level out. Of course, there's still some disparities in how countries manage the epidemic, but it seems more a case of when a country will be hit, not if. The countries that managed their first wave well (Poland, Czechia, Ukraine, Turkey) have been hit harder in the second wave than other countries.
It seems that Covid spread and fatality nicely correlates with how integrated and mobile a country's society is. Which shouldn't be that surprising, I guess. The only countries bucking this trend are in East-Asia (not just South Korea, but Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, etc), probably due to their experiences with earlier outbreaks.
This happens to be a virus which focuses most of its harm on elderly people who can be triaged out of care where resources are stretched in conflict situations, causes relatively few issues for combatants and spreads in an unpredictable manner well beyond the target population. Its clearly insufficient to undermine the actual fighting fitness of the societies which make no effort to stop its spread, but at the same time it goes round the world killing random noncombatants and likely gets back to your own population via neutral countries. Clearly far worse as a bioweapon than many naturally occurring viruses, especially when you apparently don't have an antidote and your potential adversaries can develop one faster
Mind you, I'm becoming increasingly convinced it was an accidental lab leak due to negligence, so this isn't my attempt at defending China in any way.
Global power shifts to their favor by slowing down democratic economies, sacrificing parts of their own population and economy in the short term. As a collectivist dictatorship tracking every move of its population a pandemic is easier to handle.
Both sources are capable of being the origin, we should work on reducing the chance that either cause a similar pandemic.
It's obviously very risky to do, but we should focus on adopting and enforcing better security practices to minimize the risks, not ban GoF altogether.
I see somewhat of a parallel with security research for computers -- you can try to ban it, and it will probably reduce the total research volume, but it will also decrease the level of openness and harm mitigation of the research that does remain.
If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if), the nation or lab it happened in is just the proximate cause. Deeper responsibility would lie with the institutions and individuals that pushed it despite the risks. No one knows the answer to this (edit: I mean to whether covid escaped from a lab), but it's an open question that deserves credible investigation. Having the investigator be one of the principal funders of the research being investigated is such...bad optics, to put it nicely, that one wonders how anyone thought that would be ok.
[1] https://mbio.asm.org/content/3/5/e00360-12
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/an-enginee...
However i would not let China off the hook until we have figured out exactly what happened. If nobody is held "accountable" (for a certain definition of this word) it is bound to happen again and the next time it most certainly will be "biological warfare".
This needs to be treated as seriously and as comprehensively the way we treat Nuclear Weapons.
In the beginning of January 2020, president Trump was already informed by an advisor who had close contacts in Wuhan that the outbreak was much more severe than China made it look like. But he chose not to act on that, because the USA were in the middle of closing a trade deal with China. However later that month he changed his mind when the first infections in the USA happened, and later even more when a Chinese official came out with a theory that it might actually have been an USA sports team that visited Wuhan in late 2019 that was the source of the Corona outbreak (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-ch...)
So this is not about 'people making this about China', it has been China from the start trying to cover this up and trying to make it about other countries. A more transparent Chinese policy would have given other countries the chance to react early and save thousands of lives.
Military games / Fort Detrick vaping disease troll was in response to Tom Cotton and co. formally spewing lab leak theory. Note earlier date in Feb.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...
US politicized first, when soft measures failed a month after warning Wuhan lockdown. There was ample warning, enough that many of PRC neighbors with high traffic contained well with at least some effort in coordination. PRC position up until then was let science figure it out, Wuhan was very covid19 was first discovered but doesn't mean originated there. The brief domestic deflection in early Feb was possible import from ASEAN. Even early PRC "dis"info campaigns emphasized harsh lockdown not lockdown skepticism. Countries that didn't take Wuhan lockdown seriously got burned. Queue west being prominent source of exporting covid world wide by taking lax measures. This is seen in import statistic of every country that rigorously tracked imported covid cases - PRC exported very little cases, and essentially none few weeks after lockdown. North America / Europe, magnitudes more.
This isn't a China thing. It's a human thing. No one wants to be known as the person who destroyed the world like this.
There are many videos and articles on this site about how SARS-2-CoV was not zoonotic. I don't necessarily blame China, but the funders of the research.
https://www.peakprosperity.com/more-evidence-covid-19-may-no...
I'm not sure you can get more credible or independent than his work.
That's the rational response. The fact that it can be played for political gain means it will be played for political gain, regardless of how rational it is.
Look at the whole mask debacle of the last year. If we assume people can and do act rationally, then both sides wouldn't have played it up as much and made it a defining issue or lied about portions of it, but instead we had both people and organizations/parties using it to rally their base (on both sides) and an authority that decided to use half-truths to trick people into doing what they thought they should do given the resources available at the time (to put it kindly).
That's the reality of the world we lived in for the last 12 months, and I see no reason to assume it's all of a sudden different. I'm not sure that means we shouldn't know, but let's be real clear on what the the likely outcome is if it's found to have escaped from some lab in China, regardless of who funded what or who was working on it, and that's that it would be a complete and utter shit show for the West and China, and possibly the entire world.
It seems like we don't have evidence, but the natural evolutionary experiment that's occurred provides a staggering amount. We can see from the virus phylogeny that:
1. The virus entered the human population in October 2019. All known SARS2 sequences are related in a single clade that, under very soft assumptions about mutation rate, would coalesce in late fall 2019. The first sequences we got, in early 2020, had only a handful of mutations between them. Nothing has ever arisen outside of this clade.
2. The virus entered humans with it's spike protein already fully adapted to the human ACE receptor protein. We can see this because there was not an accelerated evolution in this protein. We did not see changes in the viral genome resulting in a significant phenotypic change until the b.1.1.7 and other "third wave" variants arose. This stands in intense contrast to every other zoonotic transfer we know of. Adaptation always occurs because biology is different enough that different viral configurations provide immediate gain, and through continuous mutation the virus is exploring a huge space of these all the time. The fact that it doesn't mutate rapidly indicates it is near a strong local optimum.
One way of understanding the significance of this is by thinking of the virus as a learned model which is learning a solution to the problem of its own survival. What this evidence shows is that is appeared already optimized. We see this because over an incredible number of update steps (many quadrillions perhaps, with each human infection being like a minibatch, and each viral replication like a step) there was no significant reduction in test loss (viral survival). We randomly picked a perfect initial model. Either that first virus was lucky in a way that is similar to guessing a perfect solution, which has a probability so low as to be fanciful, or it had already in incorporated all the readily-usa le information about the human ACE receptor.
Do we have evidence? What is the probability of this pattern occuring in the case of a natural spillover? It's 1:atoms-in-the universe level. Finding a virus already so optimized to humans by randomly sampling from existing ones is like the kind of collision probability level that we comfortably use to build cryptocurrency castles that assume key non-collision. In the case of a virus optimized by serial passage in the lab? Frankly it's indistinguishable from that.
In this case, as the article mentions, there was a conflict of interest as well that might well have motivated some leading scientists in the field to campaign against the theory that the Wuhan lab was the source of the outbreak.
This is untrue. I'd point to this quote:
“It’s pretty apparent that there’s this evolutionary arms race between the receptor binding domain and ACE2 that’s happening within the bats themselves,” says Tyler Starr, a postdoc in the lab of genome scientist Jesse Bloom at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “Whatever it’s doing is ratcheting up this evolution and sometimes spitting out things that can bind potentially to many different ACE2s, including ours.”[1]
The unique thing about COVID is the transmission and the long incubation time.
There are plenty of naturally occurring mutations that have occurred that are more contagious than COVID (AIDS R0=~4.5, Ebola=~2.5 are two major ones that spring to mind). And SARS1 had a very similar binding behaviour, and the jumping behavior via civets is very similar to COVID.
[1] https://cen.acs.org/biological-chemistry/infectious-disease/...
This is a good summary of the current consensus:
It is clear from our analysis that viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been circulating in horseshoe bats for many decades. The unsampled diversity descended from the SARS-CoV-2/RaTG13 common ancestor forms a clade of bat sarbecoviruses with generalist properties—with respect to their ability to infect a range of mammalian cells—that facilitated its jump to humans and may do so again. Although the human ACE2-compatible RBD was very likely to have been present in a bat sarbecovirus lineage that ultimately led to SARS-CoV-2, this RBD sequence has hitherto been found in only a few pangolin viruses. Furthermore, the other key feature thought to be instrumental in the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to infect humans—a polybasic cleavage site insertion in the S protein—has not yet been seen in another close bat relative of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
b) Genetic analysis indicates that it most likely came from bats directly to humans, but picked up the ACE2 receptors from a Pangolin virus that was passed back to bats, evolved there and then infected humans. To quote the same nature article I lined above:
However, on closer inspection, the relative divergences in the phylogenetic tree (Fig. 2, bottom) show that SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely to have acquired the variable loop from an ancestor of Pangolin-2019 because these two sequences are approximately 10–15% divergent throughout the entire S protein (excluding the N-terminal domain). It is RaTG13 that is more divergent in the variable-loop region (Extended Data Fig. 1) and thus likely to be the product of recombination, acquiring a divergent variable loop from a hitherto unsampled bat sarbecovirus28. This is notable because the variable-loop region contains the six key contact residues in the RBD that give SARS-CoV-2 its ACE2-binding specificity27,37. These residues are also in the Pangolin Guangdong 2019 sequence. The most parsimonious explanation for these shared ACE2-specific residues is that they were present in the common ancestors of SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13 and Pangolin Guangdong 2019, and were lost through recombination in the lineage leading to RaTG13. This provides compelling support for the SARS-CoV-2 lineage being the consequence of a direct or nearly-direct zoonotic jump from bats, because the key ACE2-binding residues were present in viruses circulating in bats.
and:
Although the human ACE2-compatible RBD was very likely to have been present in a bat sarbecovirus lineage that ultimately led to SARS-CoV-2, this RBD sequence has hitherto been found in only a few pangolin viruses.
There are plenty of viruses from animals known to infect humans, viruses that have never been in humans and are not evolved to infect them, this happens alarmingly regularly. Here's a couple you've probably never heard of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_bat_lyssavirus , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendra_virus
There is absolutely nothing amazing about covid being able to infect humans, it's exceptional because it can pass from human to human and because it's airborne(ish).
Yes, absolutely. AFAIK that's where almost all viruses that infect humans come from.
> it's exceptional because it can pass from human to human
With extremely high efficiency, from the first appearance of the virus! If it were not already optimal, then the initial transmission rate would have been lower, and the genome would have had to rapidly change in the process of surviving. This was seen with SARS1. It's seen with other epidemics. The fact that it isn't seen here is very, very weird. Why did SARS2 not have to adapt to its new host?
> The virus entered humans with it's spike protein already fully adapted to the human ACE receptor protein.
1. Is a partially functional (still infectious) spike receptor protein possible? (you don't know, and present no evidence in this rant)
2. How do you know the virus shows "no accelerated evolution"...partially effective viruses would have a lower replication factor, and not become global pandemic, and would not spread far enough to preserved within the human population as anything of interest.
3. How do you know that a natural virus which was only partially effective at replication didn't in fact encounter favorable conditions when it encountered humans, having accidentally been better adapted for them?
> The fact that it doesn't mutate rapidly indicates it is near a strong local optimum.
4. How do you know that the spike protein - which is highly conserved amongst coronaviruses - can even have a range of mutations and still retain function (allowing viral entry to the cell for infectious purposes)? (you don't, research finds that the spike protein has suboptimal binding to ACE receptors - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7239051/)
> This stands in intense contrast to every other zoonotic transfer we know of.
5. Does it? Because no research is proposing this. Research in fact finds that analysis of similar coronaviruses shows that the spike protein is likely the result of multiple recombinations between a few species (https://academic.oup.com/emph/article/2020/1/290/5956769).
> Do we have evidence? What is the probability of this pattern occuring in the case of a natural spillover?
6. Do you? Apparently not because there's not a single shred of peer reviewed research you care to link to support your position here, and you've done none of the legwork to support the logic part of your conclusions.
That's not really true. It was adapted to ACE but not perfectly. As the B117 shows it could do better. Coronaviruses mutate slowly and random mutation in the spike protein is a lot more likely to make non-functional than to improve it. It's good enough, not perfect. Evolution likes good enough.
EDIT: but you do raise a good point with how much better than the known coronaviruses' spikes it is. Perhaps there is another intermediate host with ACE2 closer to humans? Sars-Cov-2 infects pretty well lots of animals - almost all the cats, minks, ...
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/36/22311
Evolution doesn't require anything beyond "good enough", but it's surprising for a virus to be better-adapted to humans than to its animal hosts at the moment of its zoonotic jump--before the jump, where could that pressure come from? I don't think this is determinative, but it points weakly in favor of lab origin (e.g., from culture in human cells or in mice genetically engineered to express human ACE2).
Also: major changes in he spike protein could impact the ability of the virus to infect humans, so -- there is that.
This article suggests that lvl2 protocols were indeed used for lvl4 biohazards.
The US is a major global center of trade and travel, and in the end, much of the spread around the world is because there was basically no attempt to stop it from spreading through there.
All roads lead to Rome.
A similar, though obviously still very different, example that came to my mind is Chernobyl. The incident made bad reactor designs and their consequences visible to all, and in the long run, it improved nuclear reactors' safety. How would you feel that after Chernobyl, there was no research on why it happened, and people would have said "well, what's happened happened, there is no way to change that, so why investigate"?
If we never figure out (and we don't even attempt) how the virus came to be (wet market, lab accident, intentional release, eating raw exotic animal, or just a normal mutation, I don't know, I'm not an expert, but saying the options I heard so far), the same circumstances will be continue to be available, and sooner or later, another (potentially worse) pandemic will hit us.
However, as you mentioned, there are negative effects of knowing things, so I wish whenever we do find out what and how happened, nations could do a "blameless post-mortem" (in case it was unintentional).
This is legitimate reason to have a good investigation and find out the real cause of the virus. From pure technical point of view it is absolutely right.
However because of the cognitional defects of our cave man brain due to the quick social and technology progress outpaced the nature evolution process, the OP's strategy shows wisdom. Let me explain:
There are 3 cases that can present the same reason:
1.Your case which I think it's sincere request for improvement of the procedure to avoid future disaster.
2.There's a known hidden agenda based on some ideology but asking for investigation. A good example is what Dick Cheney and a group of his associates did. They had no interests to understand truth. A reason for investigation is a excuse for fool people
3.(This one is difficult to understand) There's an unintentional hidden agenda mixed with the legitimate reason that the guy who ask for truth might not be aware of hidden agenda. There are a lot of example in another community not available to English reader. The closest example is Australia Prime minister Morrison. It's very controversial and speculative. Most HNers' won't have the necessary insight to understand this example but I believe presenting a weak example is better than nothing.
With case 2 and especially 3, OP's strategy is better than yours. That's why I said OP's shows wisdom: Avoid conflicts and more loss as a whole.
Sometime a correct conclusion in the scope of leaf could be a wrong conclusion in the scope of tree. But maybe correct again in the scope of Forest. I'm not claiming my conclusion is better than yours. I might be in the "tree" level. I'm saying you are looking at a pure technical point of view. OP's thinking is bigger.
(edit) reformat and word correction
And before anyone accuses me of racism: I am speaking about the Chinese government, not Chinese people, who are the first victims of the government.
The Truth and Reconciliation tribunals the UN puts on (e.g. South African apartheid) are a good example. Just achieving a common understanding of what happened has value all by itself.
If we are playing the blame game we should be playing it right.
China may not be able to fully compensate the world financially, but if you win a billion dollar lawsuit against me, you won't get your money, but you will still get my car and anything else I own.
https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-is-be...
A tech accidently knocking over a beaker? A tiny rip in a bio-suite thrown in a trash, missed the can, and picked up and put back on the shelf by another worker? A leaking containment vessel, known to need replacing, but still worked "good enough"? An animal infected with the virus, handled by someone who wasn't aware of what it had?
Endless possibilities, but likely something so small and seemingly insignificant.
There has been an extensive analysis by a virologist on Reddit[¹], who claimed that, very simply, SARS-COV2 is a so-called "mosaic" virus, while man-made viruses are inevitably "chimera" ones. The article does not seem to make this distinction.
The virologist also chimed on HN (besides, calling BS on people who were, out of ignorance, spreading false beliefs), but it seems he's not participating to this post.
It'd be best to have the opinion of a specialized scientist, in order to to have scientific clarity before starting the political arguments.
[¹]=https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
The link you provided does discuss the probability of the virus accidentally leaking from a laboratory, however the reasons provided does not really provide much facts, seemingly more speculation (except for facts regarding who we think is patient zero):
"The WIV, and Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi’s lab group, are extremely well-respected in the virology community. As well respected as many US scientists.
● All the WIV’s sampling of bats and the genomes that they find in bats are publicly available information. Why isn’t SARS-CoV-2 on any of those lists? We would know.
● This doesn’t look anything like any laboratory accident that we’ve seen before.
● The evidence we have points to Patient Zero being nowhere near the City of Wuhan." (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kAHSEx9-eIyVIahczH8itHaUm9j...)
Occam's Razor, to me, suggests that it's more likely the virus came from the nearby infectious disease lab than from the wet market that operated probably for centuries.
You've generated 2 possible outcomes and gone "yes these are the only possibilities". But why? There was a whole train of transportation bringing things into the city for the lab.
Of course, if it was from that timeline, then the whole "lab escape" thing becomes a bit problematic doesn't it? Because, why would it need to be by activities of the lab specifically? It wouldn't - coz it could really just have rode in on anything. Which would of course mean that actually, it's probably way more likely that a virus which can infect humans, starting out in the wild, and being sample by a lab, probably infected a bunch of humans anyway because it didn't stop being in the wild when it was collected by researchers...
On your latter point, I'll just say that the virus likely needed some time to mutate into a human infectious form, and most of what we're talking about is, where and how did that happen?
You're not taking a logical position, you're starting from one conclusion "it was a Chinese lab!" and iterating around that, for the sole reason that the only reason the lab is being considered was the usual suspects of conspiracy theory began pushing "Chinese bioweapon" from the outset (and we all know bioweapons require labs, so one had to be found).
Forgive my preference not to generate verbal diarrhea into the page for your reading pleasure. It should be simple to extrapolate many more possibilities from what I stated if someone were willing to put an ounce of thought into it. Which you already did.
Anyway, I presume you are reacting to my summation of comparing the wet market vs lab theories and stating that one, when expanded to include several closely related possibilities, seemed far more likely to me. I stand by my framing, which doesn't preclude that there is another third possible factor, or many more.
I'm not starting from any conclusion like that, and in fact, my whole post was saying that it was likely NOT a bioweapon even if there was a lab escape. Please stop imputing talking points you have heard elsewhere to my argument. It's actually quite rude.
If I take a known virus and make a single mutation (insertion of a furin site in this case), then I wind up with the same virus, + a furin. If I take that mutated virus, and then passage it through multiple generations in lab grown hosts, it will mutate at random throughout the genome.
The exact rate and the time it would take is heavily debated, but one important note is that viruses with an RNA-dependant RNA polymerase are, as an evolutionary strategy, quite poor at preserving their own genetic information. They have the highest error rate of replication of any known organism. Which means, after some discrete amount of generations, you could wind up with some sort of "mosaic" + "chimeric" virus. Again though, how many generations is under hot dispute. And how long that would take in nature vs in a laboratory is also under hot dispute.
100% of the evidence for lab leak is circumstantial. But we know two things:
1) If I set out to design a SARS-CoV 2, it's technically feasible. And there's reason to be interested in this type of research. And lab accidents involving pathogens can and do happen.
2) There's no single piece of evidence concretely and completely ruling it out. Which is unfortunate.
I'm a structural biologist, I primarily study viruses, I also engaged heavily in that topic you mentioned (against my better judgement). At the moment, I have a mental probability (which is probably incorrect) of wild virus 90% chance, lab leak 10% chance. I'd be extremely surprised if it was a lab leak, but I also can't sufficiently falsify that hypothesis to complete write it off.
Wouldn't the fact that it started in Wuhan point the razor in the direction of lab-escape theory?
I just have a hard time understanding why so clear evidence of the epidemic starting outside Wuhan is missing from the debate, so I'd appreciate if you could comment on it.
He does come off as very arrogant, a lot of his replies were like "yeah but we'd know".
Every other theory requires involving many more unsupported hypotheses.
This would be obvious to the majority of the HN population in most cases, but the disinformation in this case is apparently quite effective.
It doesn't make much sense to single it out here, the most plausible version of the lab leak hypothesis is that covid is the result of cooperative research undertaken by American and Chinese scientists and funded by both governments
Edit: I'd love to receive a substantive counterargument from the downvoters
I'm saying there's a paper trail establishing joint American-Chinese gain of function research taking place in Wuhan, and if we're going to judge the lab leak hypothesis plausible, I see no good reason not to ascribe similar motivations to cover it up to the US government as well as to the Chinese
As for the Americans, their culpability in helping make the lab I think would be seen as a small thing.
Paradoxically, it may be in everyone's interest for the plebes to never find out the truth. If there was magically some 'hard evidence' to appear, right now, that made China culpable ... we would be heading into another, massive recession. There would be riots around the world, Asians in every continent would face threats of violence and attacks for a decade. Forget America where those things are talked about ... you can forget being Chinese in Poland, it would be painful.
The populism would be intense and ferocious, but not only that, regular institutions, businesses, CEOs etc would also be upset for very good reason. I can see China facing lawsuits for literally Trillions of dollars.
It could feasibly lead to a chain of events sparking a war.
This is completely conspiratorial, but I honestly wonder if the West actively doesn't want to push for the truth because it would do more damage than good. If China knows 'they did it' they're probably going to make the changes necessary so it doesn't happen again, for their own benefit, and it's unlikely they need international pressure or the threat of litigation to improve those pressures. But that's just a fantastical idea.
Basically 'The Truth' is a different thing than 'The Impact of Public Information' and both of those things matter. It's a scary thought but it's the Realpolitik of information.
> It could feasibly lead to a chain of events sparking a war.
The American stance as it stands could very well lead to war, with or without covid as an aggravating factor
Exclusive attention to questions of Chinese culpability without turning a critical eye to the United States, as in the comment I responded to, feeds directly into the sort of tensions you claim to want to avoid
The sort of "realpolitik of information" you describe may be necessary for the maintenance of political order precisely insofar as its subjects believe themselves to participate freely and voluntarily
More importantly this is raw populism, not details.
If there were conclusive evidence that mapped COVID to the lab ... I think literally Chinese people would be murdered the same day in violent outbreaks in Philippines, Malaysia and India for example. There would be anti-Chinese riots literally the world over, every Chinese business would be wary of having it's windows smashed in, politicians would have to balance tamping down the violence with doing politically populist acts of retaliation etc..
It would be really ugly. I can see people on CNN begging to stop the violence.
That America sponsored some of the specific research I don't think would much factor in either in the US or anywhere else.
Business between China and the rest of the world would have to transform quite dramatically.
All actual facts aside, that would be my big worry.
Yes, and the same can surely be said of Chinese- we must consider whether to allow this kind of research in the future however
A conclusive "reveal" is unlikely given the variety and saturation of information channels- and with respect although your description of the risks is overstated imo the level of detail you go into makes your comment read uncomfortably like a threat
I think the global distribution of opinion regarding the U.S. and China portends a very different reaction to a hypothetical reveal than the one you describe
Let's strive neither to put actual facts aside nor to grasp for certainty where little exists
No - if a Chinese lab/company let the virus out, it's not really comparable to America's involvement. It would be 'mostly that agency's fault', objectively speaking.
Internationally, people would see it as 'China' not the specific agency.
If we did in fact find that this is a 'Wuhan Lab' issue - it would be a seminal geopolitical event - on par with the dropping of Nuclear Weapons.
It would be a major global realignment in so many areas, even without the populism.
The issues around populism are not a 'threat' it's a 'concern'.
3 Million people have died from this, there are grieving families all around the world - there are 100's of millions unemployed - and they will be told 'It's China's fault' - what do you think is going to happen? Since we're already seeing light anti Asian sentiment around the world, what will happen when we are told that 'China' is culpable?
On the day after 9/11 the only flights out of the US allowed were those back to Saudi Arabia. G. Bush basically told the Saudi Embassy and many student nationals etc. to 'get everyone out in 24 hours' for fear of populist reprisals.
BLM protests broke out, billions in damage and several dead over a police shooting ... and that's in the US.
So I don't think it's that much of a stretch to say it would be dangerous to be Chinese in many places in the world. It's certainly not a threat, it's the reality of the world we live in. There are ethnic riots all over the world, all the time.
What's the reason the lab is located in that city? Is there an underlying causal connection?
For example, is Wuhan prone to novel coronoviruses because of the local bat population, and so that was the logical place to site a coronavirus research lab?
If so, Occam's Razor would suggest that common connection as the more simple explanation.
Similarly, Sverdlovsk lab (the ground zero of 1979 anthrax outbreak) wasn't located there because Sverdlovsk specifically suspect to anthrax. An interesting tidbit, the party blamed the local farmer (wet) market for the outbreak there.
I don’t know the reason that lab is located in Wuhan specifically. But if you want to find the answer, I think you have to look into who funded the research.
I thought so initially, but then:
1. look at the size of China; even assuming bats are found only in half of it, and maybe that Wuhan has more bats than other cities, that's still pretty fucking unlucky.
2. the bats in question are not from the same province anyway
How do we know that the virus (or a precursor) wasn't already circulating in China, and was simply detected in Wuhan because of the fact that there are experts in coronaviruses who reside there?
(Also I'm not entirely sure your statement about the gain of function research is correct. A Google search doesn't seem to provide any evidence one way or another.)
I think it also bears pointing out that, in the US at least, we largely failed to detect that the virus was spreading inside the country for some time - even after knowing said virus existed and with plenty of warning, so you have to wonder in retrospect how effective some of these so-called surveillance systems even are. It's easy to not find anything amiss when you aren't looking.
In the beginning, they arresting doctors in Wuhan who spoke about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang
The virus was location tracked to the wet market which is Right next to this virology lab.
Now correlation does not equal causation. But correlation and common sense is strong evidence for causation.
Chemo therapy is correlated with cancer deaths. It does not mean chemo causes cancer. The common sense does not match up, but it does for covid and it is highly unwise not to consider this lab as the causative source of the pandemic.
Even if true, that would not explain the elaborate story, regarding the wet market there and species-jumping.
Also, seems unlikely, as there'd have to be reason to suspect a new virus was circulating at scale that required investigation by these scientists, which could have happened anywhere in the country. I mean, it's hard to understand what mechanism you're proposing for scientists residing in the city leading to the discovery of the virus circulating among the population there. It's not like the scientists simply roam the streets with some superhuman ability to detect new viruses in people.
And, that it's a "common story" of how new diseases emerge has exactly zero bearing on whether this specific disease so evolved. You must know that form of argument is just syllogistically unsound.
So, basically, you're saying that (many, we know how contagious covid 19 is) people got sick and put into hospital/died with a novel respiratory disease in another (or several other) chinese cities first. However, that was covered up or unnoticed _until_ it reached wuhan, and for some reason a researcher who works with coronaviruses at the lab saw a sick patient (at the hospital?), realized "that looks like a novel coronavirus" and decided to raise the alarm? Additionally, after that only Wuhan got shut down, while the other city or cities which should have had a raging epidemic by now still went unnoticed?
That's what I mean, these other theories to explain away what is the most staightforward explanation makes no sense, and invokes too many unlikely scenarios or coincidences.
Regarding gain-of-function, see [nature article from 2015](https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...) questioning the safety of gain-of-function research, and the article that [triggered the reaction](https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985). Part of that research took place in the Wuhan lab.
(Then there are the conflicts of interest of the WHO investigator Peter Daszak, who is very quick to discredit any theory that the virus might have escaped from the lab...)
Again, this is a farce, and it would almost be funny if it weren't for all the dead and the generally shitty situation for most of the world at the moment.
What China and the CCP wants though is to have this debate centered around if it was lab produced or not. They can rely on western scientists to debunk the lab created hypothesis. That leaves their own theories about it originated in Italy as the standing theory for their own domestic consumption. And that avoids looking at their animal farming practices and keeps them from having to crack down on that whole economy, which would be highly disruptive.
And this keeps factory farming conveniently entirely off the radar as a cause of this pandemic. The next pandemic could easily be a virus that hops to humans from pigs or chickens in the USA. All the yelling both ways about lab origins is a very effective smokescreen to avoid doing anything to prevent a future pandemic. NOTHING will happen to prevent future pandemics over yelling about lab causes other than making some people in America very, very angry about China. What we should be doing is thinking about factory farming practices and reducing our diet of meat and animal products.
This would mean that we might have to admit that the insufferable vegans were right all along, and then change our own behavior -- so its much easier to just get super angry at China.
Bats — aside from the few blood-drinking bats which aren't implicated, and aren't they New-World species anyway — don't tend to interact much with other mammals or with birds. Without human intervention, there's not much opportunity for them to infect humans or any other animals. Carnivores (raptors, felines, to a lesser extent maybe even canines) do eat bats, but not commonly, and they're unlikely to spread disease further due to their lack of social behavior.
Neither bats nor pangolins are factory farmed (it seems some people have tried with pangolins, given their delicacy status, but they're not easy enough to raise in captivity to make it worthwhile). Bush meat and wet markets create other disease risks, but not the concentrated disease reservoir effect you're pointing out as a problem in factory farming, i.e. typically swine or fowl. There are many reasons to reduce factory farming (meat consumption per capita); disease risk is just one of them. Diseases in factory farms can be monitored, particularly these days with cheap DNA/RNA sequencing. Diseases from wild animals sold in wet markets... no surveillance... greater risk.
Given the bats are the most likely original source, and given that Wuhan lab scientists travelled and collected bat virus samples from where those species of bats actually live, the obvious most likely theory is that there was an accidental leak of a natural or derived virus from the WIV (or at least from WIV scientists on return from one of their trips if you cling to the theory that SARS-CoV-2 is of entirely natural origin).
This is incorrect.
Bat (Rhinolophus) sarbecoviruses have been isolated and sequenced in Hubei:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/DQ648856
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/DQ648857
The closest KNOWN bat sarbecovirus was found in Yunnan, but it was only 96% identical. That doesn't preclude the actual 98-99% identical progenitor virus of SARS-CoV-2 from living in Hubei.
Rhinolophus bats are all over southern China, and neighboring countries with a very wide range, and the all carry SARS-CoV-like viruses.
Also nothing precludes the species jump from bats to farmed animals happening in Yunnan and then infected animals being transported to farms in Hubei.
I also never mentioned pangolins or wet markets because we know at this point that neither of those are related. The animals to focus on would be minks and other mustelids or raccoon dogs or other farmed animals.
And we already know that SARS-CoV-1 likely originated in bats in Yunnan (where the "WIV1" coronavirus was found) while the leap to humans from an intermediate animal is thought to have happened in Guangdong. Again we have here a problem of "how did the virus in Yunnan jump to people 700+ miles away?" but in the SARS-CoV-1 case there's no weapons laboratory distraction. It happened back then with SARS-CoV-1 so therefore any objections you can have about coronavirus jumping species and geography is just falsified. It is unlikely clearly or this would just happen every other year.
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli...
Anyways, the point isn't that a natural zoonotic jump in Wuhan is perfectly impossible. Even if we assumed (wrongly, at least if you believe Dr. Shi) that natural zoonosis was equally probable in any city in China, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan is still evidence in favor of a lab accident. To a good first approximation, the WIV does 100% of the research on novel SARS-like viruses in China, so an outbreak due to a lab accident would probably emerge there. So whatever your Bayesian prior was for natural vs. lab accident, its emergence in Wuhan should update that by a factor of ~100 (i.e., the population of China divided by the population of Wuhan).
And I'm not sure why you think farmed animals are likely intermediate hosts? China has been sampling extensively, and while it's not necessarily easy to find the intermediate host (e.g., for Ebola), that should be far easier in a factory farm than in the wilderness. So why haven't they found that?
Finally, I don't think anyone brought up weapons here except you? That seems like a deliberate conflation, introducing outlandish theories for which no evidence exists ("SARS-CoV-2 was designed as a bioweapon") to discredit the more likely theory actually being discussed ("SARS-CoV-2 originated from a lab accident during internationally-funded basic research").
And again there's the SARS-CoV-1 where bat viruses in Yunnan jumped to people in Guangdong, 700+ miles away. And you'd have to look at the whole population around Wuhan where it is the closest major city (and Wuhan itself is the largest major city in central China, which makes it comparable to massive cities like NYC).
The probability is likely closer to 10%, and SARS-CoV-1 already lost that die roll and wound up in Guangdong. This time you rolled and got a 10% result. That isn't very unsurprising. Your p value is not significant.
And, yeah, I don't think that they've done everything they can to survey broadly. The studies that they've done tend to collect a bunch of bats from a particular cave and sequence the viruses in them and then draw broad conclusions about the whole province. There's only two sarbecoviruses sequences they've found in Hubei. I'd be much more comfortable with statements that SARS-CoV-2-like sarbecoviruses aren't found in Hubei if they'd sequenced 100 of them.
EDIT: Yeah so Wuhan is 6% of the population of all cities in China of roughly its size. But Shanghai is father away so its 24M should be weighted less, so with Tianjin and Nanjing. Beijing is way further away and its weighting should be fairly negligible. Chengdu and Chongqing are slightly closer. Of the top 10 Guangzhou and Shenzhen are both similarly close and in Guangdong where the SARS-CoV-1 spillover happened. My 10% gut estimate still looks pretty good -- "pick a random top 20 city in China somewhat near Yunnan where the bats are" and Wuhan is not that improbable at all.
As to specific numbers, 10% seems too low to me--Wuhan is 6% of the population of Chinese cities at least as big as Wuhan, disregarding smaller cities entirely, including Foshan where the original SARS emerged, and disregarding Dr. Shi's expectation that origin closer to Yunnan was more likely. But at least we're within an order of magnitude of each other.
Knowing nothing whatsoever except that a pandemic emerged, what's your prior for lab vs. natural origin? It depends how you count, but we've had perhaps a dozen pandemics in the last fifty years, and one (the 1977 flu) was near-certainly lab-origin. So even with extreme optimism as to lab safety improvements, I can't see how you'd estimate less than e.g. 1%. For SARS-CoV-2, you'd perhaps adjust down for the novelty of the pathogen (since most lab work is with known pathogens--though most of the WIV's seems not to have been). It doesn't take that many p = 10% coincidences up to get to even odds or better, though.
So these experts didn't notice/detect a virus right under their noses, or they knew about its existence but could not tell anyone because of fear of the CCCP
No it doesn't.
All it takes is bats around farmed animals like minks or raccoon dogs.
That sets up a natural "gain of function" experiment with the bats passing viruses off to the farmed animals who pass it sequentially through the entire farm.
The humans who work at those farms then bring in human coronaviruses which could have recombined with the viruses in the farm.
You have large bioreactors doing gain of function experiments all over China right out in plain view, with Charles Darwin overseeing the lab work.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it would seem that if 'minks' were the problem, there would be trail of evidence to pick up on.
Hence the notion of speculation / Occam's Razor.
There just hasn't been that much of an investigation. China seems to have done enough to provide an air of cooperation with WHO, while not producing anything solid.
For their domestic consumption they've also accomplished their propaganda goals. The global scientific community (outside of fringe articles like here) has generally dismissed the idea that it came from a lab, which China can amplify in front of its population. Then they just muddy the waters with the idea that it came in frozen seafood from Italy and they can move on. There's no incentive to investigating the zoonotic orgins.
And its the same thing here in reverse. Politically we just get articles like this to get people very made at China over the lab release hypothesis, which deflects from our own pandemic response.
Politically there seems to be very little will on the planet towards finding a zoonotic source.
And how does that explain its affinity for human ACE2? At least initially (right after it makes the zoonotic jump), the virus would probably show highest affinity for its animal host, and lower affinity for human ACE2. But SARS-CoV-2 shows highest affinity for human ACE2, and only primates with ACE2 very similar to humans show comparable affinity:
> The very high classification had at least 23/25 ACE2 residues identical to human ACE2 and other constraints at SARS-CoV-2 S-binding hot spots (Materials and Methods). The 18 species predicted as very high were all Old-World primates and great apes with ACE2 proteins identical to human ACE2 across all 25 binding residues.
And we know that we didn't detect the virus early, it didn't originate in the wet market event. That market event was just big enough right in the middle of Wuhan so it made it unmistakable.
The only way you get that high of an affinity is through serial passage through actual humans, not through the lab.
And this should not be that surprising since we know that it takes several months for the virus to spread before it starts to cause massive numbers of deaths, the IFR is actually low compared to SARS-1 and MERS, and it tends to spread asymptomatically and undetected.
We know pretty much for certain now that it was spreading cyrptically in the area around Wuhan in Nov, and I would bet that the zoonotic jump was Oct or earlier.
And that is also why I suspect an intermediate animal with a more similar ACE2 to humans like minks being involved. So serial passage through one of those animals to get it close, followed by serial passage through humans to refine it.
Mink seem very unlikely to me, since I've seen papers reporting evidence of host adaptation on mink farms:
https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/7/1/veaa094/6025194
So if the virus first evolved in mink, it would have to have evolved enough in humans not just to favor human ACE2 but also to lose its affinity for mink (to the point it has to regain it later), all during that couple months of cryptic spread.
And do you really think China is doing a bad job looking for the intermediate host? I don't think that's impossible--for example, the true origin could be some agricultural practice so horrible that they consider the present uncertainty better than disclosing that. Lab origin has become strongly associated with anti-China political sentiment, though. (That seems stupid to me, considering that the USA was funding the WIV; but here we are.) So I'd be surprised that the CCP would pass up a chance to disprove that.
I wonder how the Wuhan laboratory was set up, legally. I wonder how other similar laboratories around the world are set up.
Another thought: I have so many times seen people write that if COVID was the result of an accident in a laboratory then "China" would be to blame. Would people blaim "Germany" for an accident in a German laboratory? I don't think so, at least not to the same extent. People seem to subconsciously think that China is the borg, or something.
Not "easily" in the sense that it's easy to pinpoint the exact recipe, but "easily" in that the opposite outcomes would have been far more unlikely
Here's one way to look at it: if we had asked "how will China respond?" back in the beginning, how well would you have been able to predict their response if you had known the virus was of zoonotic origin? What if you had known the virus was of lab origin? I would think in the second case you'd have a lot more people betting that we'd get a swift (& deflective) response than in the former case, but it sounds like you disagree?
The suppression of information and subsequent deflection, I find much more problematic. They can also be explained by China’s dictatorship and their aggressive PR management, but still... one of the easiest ways for China to dispel any “lab leak/release hypotheses” would be full transparency. So far they haven’t done that. But refusal to do so can again easily be explained by accidential lab leak / accident hypothesis, whereas the original parent was proposing that China had superior information in advance... again, possible, but not necessary to explain the current sequence of events.
They probably were aware the risks of a highly infectious disease and possibly had contingencies drawn up for this very thing.
The UK had planned for what would happen during a global outbreak and the Conservative government scrapped them and 140,000 people died.
Whether the existence of a group of 15 MPs including such luminaries as Michael Gove, Matt Hancock and Gavin Williamson would have made a marked difference is not so obvious.
Existing plans were not scrapped and some believe using these plans actually was a big factor in the lacklustre initial response. The plans were too specific on what had come before (SARS most recently) and didn't allow accommodation of the differences of covid. It took a notable amount of time to change direction.
I'm sure there's plenty of blame to go around if one was inclined to do so, but I don't think disbanding one committee (despite its prescient name) was particularly notable.
For example: China built makeshift hospitals in very short period of time. This one is not filtered. Even Fauci suggested India should do that but in reality not many country can mobilize the resources. Another example is by strict locked down, Wuhan was sacrificed for the sake of all nation. Meanwhile the hospitals over the all country supplied volunteer medical personals and equipment pouring to Wuhan. There were too many registered volunteers even beyond the organizers requested. With enough resource concentrated in one place, covid was quickly under control.
It's mainly due to dictatorship system that other countries can not easily duplicate. This can explain most countries are "incompetent".
What I found absolutely baffling is that we in west saw what China was doing and haven't got our shit together until months later (with exceptions). Instead the discourse was about how much the Chinese eat unsavory things and how much pollution is there so it wouldn't be the same if it got here at all.
The expectation should be that officials would act once they determined it was fast spreading, not once thousands of people are sick.
Of course this mistake was repeated in many countries.
All of their speed was on the time between the decision and implementation, they din't display any prescience.
What is the likelihood that a novel SARS virus happens to emerge in the same major metropolitan area that also happens to host a BSL4 lab, which happens to be in a couple try with a long history of labs leaking SARS viruses?
You have the causality the wrong way around.
The lab is there [Wuhan] because that is where the coronaviruses reservoirs are.
“Shi was surprised that the outbreak was local, she said: “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” The bat hiding places that she’d been visiting were, after all, as far away as Orlando, Florida, is from New York City. Could this new virus, she wondered, have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records and found no exact matches. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink for days.””
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...
The COVID presents as the flu, the symptoms are the same, so that means without a test there needs to be some other way to identify that a new virus is spreading.
The way to identify if a new virus is spreading is basically 3 ways:
Dramatic increase in cases:
In the U.S. for the last 20 years there has been a low of 9.3M cases and a high of 45M cases. China has had similar numbers, so in order to get someone's attention we'd need a ridiculous spike in cases in a very short time, and in October, November, and early December China did not have that ridiculous spike in cases. So they would not have known a new virus was circulating based on cases.
Different symptoms:
Covid presents as the flu, so there was no way to know that a new virus was circulating based on symptoms
Increased deaths:
In the U.S. for the last 20 years we've seen a range of 12,000 to 65,0000 deaths, a pretty wide range. China has seen similar numbers, so in order to get someone's attention we'd need to see a huge spike in deaths before it would get someone's attention, and again in October, November and early December China did not have a huge spike in deaths.
Basically the 3 ways to know something different is happening, didn't take place.
Which leads me to he most important question no one is asking, "How did China know they had a problem when there wasn't any data that would tell them something different was happening?"
This for me is the real question. IMHO the only way China was able to discover they had something different going on is because they had prior knowledge or information.
I don't think this was malicious, I think they were studying the virus in the lab, and a Jr. member of the team did something dumb or had an accident, and wanting to avoid getting into trouble the Jr. member of the team covered up what happened.
Then that Jr. member of the team got sick, and some other people they knew got sick, probably other members of the lab team and it was at his point Lab management knew they had a problem. This is how China knew they had a problem when only a handful of people are sick.
https://www.cartalk.com/radio/letter/andy-letter
Original section of the episode: https://www.cartalk.com/sites/default/files/bestmoments/2019...
Some questions for people that know more about this.
How many Institutes of Virology exist around the world?
Is there a way to know how and by who are they funded?
Is there a way to know which ones were/had been working with coronavirus/sars?
He retweeted a tweet that pointed out Nicholas Wade has been accused in the past of grossly misrepresenting research.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/08/geneticists-decry-bo...
If the research that supposedly protects us from zoonotic spillovers is in fact increasing the net pandemic risk (due to human error, accident, etc), then that research needs to be halted. At the very least, it should be limited and done only under tightly controlled conditions. This would require international agreement, and perhaps an auditing regime with actual teeth.
One thing is for sure though: we will never sort this out if we leave it to the WHO, and to certain researchers who have a personal/financial stake in preserving the status quo.“
The institution like china, lancet, the virologist community ... is what worry me more. Accident happened. But if this is nuclear accident ... but it seems we can let Soviet Union covered up the investigation to the nuclear plant accident because it is funded by America.
Without fixing the institution all is lost.
And it seemed instead of fixing it the America would let the technology that grounded the other “dangerous” way of making vaccines to everyone without ip protection. Commerical interest whilst is not the best way to protect is still an alternative to this scientific community that seems not able to. At least sine did not.
Government, public institutions, medical, scientific, commercial, social, media ... what is left.
Good luck humanity.
In this case there is no smoking gun either way and a natural origin is much harder to trace than lab origin. That lack of absolute certainty, which science is often comfortable working with, leaves room for alternative theories to circulate and attach to those who like the sound of them for various reasons. It is a common human flaw that being aware that an event could hypothetically occur can be mistaken for proof that event actually occurred.
Even if we're 50/50 on the source of the virus, maybe we should still ban or regulate GoF research, and consider banning or regulating some types of wet markets.
As to 50/50 being reason to take large scale regulatory action, would you accept this level of proof to enact any law? That seems a low bar to me.
The point is that we should consider both the cost and the benefit of any regulation, in an expected value sense. Cars do kill people, but they also provide transportation that we've judged is worth that cost. But there's little indication that the WIV's (USA-funded!) risky research has delivered any significant benefit--the predicted coronavirus pandemic has indeed occurred, whatever the cause, and has anything from the WIV's work help us deal with that? On the other hand, even a small chance that their work caused this pandemic is a hugely negative expected value.
Long before the pandemic, there was obscure, academic debate over whether certain types of research with potential pandemic pathogens were worth the risk. Even with the evidence available at that time, I believe the 2014 ban was good, and its 2017 lifting was bad; but that debate now that takes on terrible new significance.
Speeding is common (difficult to prevent) and exhibits low downside risk. An intruder in the house is rare and carries an enormous downside risk. Which one is more analogous to the escape of a dangerous virus from a lab?
Why do you think that? Natural origin should leave closely-related viruses in nature, and animal sampling should find that. Such evidence was found for both the original SARS (palm civets) and MERS (camels) within about a year. For SARS-CoV-2, after about the same time and a much more intensive effort, we're still waiting.
Lab-accident origin is easy to trace only if the people working in the lab disclose everything they were working with. This requires both perfect honesty and perfect knowledge. The WIV did lots of work sampling viruses from nature, in remote bat caves that very few other humans would ever enter--around Yunnan to be clear, about 900 miles from Wuhan--and they could have leaked a novel virus before they even had a chance to sequence it. Of course that's still more likely to imply someone's lying, thus the accusations of "conspiracy theory"; but by that standard every human deception in history is conspiracy theory, including every intelligence operation, every Ponzi scheme, every cheating spouse, etc.
I'd put lab origin and natural origin around equal probability myself, and I'd consider anything between 10/90 and 90/10 reasonable. What would you estimate?
It would only be a conspiracy theory if there was intent - plenty of room for accident without making it a conspiracy.
This was a rhetorical bludgeon (like so much from that administration) to avoid dealing with the problem, with the likely added effect of fomenting reprisals towards Asians. So the science and media had to (or chose to) avoid the issue for fear of the baggage entailed.
Now it's becoming safe to question scientists again without looking like you're on the side of the crazies. So we are elevating these voices now. There are many things to take away from this, but institutional rot and bad incentives from the top start shading everybody's actions.
I'd like to be able to share an article from a website that doesn't also write about Trump and facebook.
REad more: https://www.genxsentinel.news/govt-of-india-has-so-far-provi...
> To investigate the importance of the spike polybasic CS of SARS-CoV-2 (PRRAR), a number of spike mutants predicted to modulate the efficiency of furin cleavage were generated (Fig. 1a), including: substituting two upstream arginines to produce a monobasic CS similar to SARS-CoV spike (monoCS), replacing the tribasic CS with the furin CS of a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza haemagglutinin containing seven basic amino acids (H5CS) and two naturally occurring deletions seen following passage in Vero E6 cells and/or in clinical isolates21,26. The first deletion removes eight amino acids including all three arginines of the PRRAR site (ΔCS), while the other removes five flanking amino acids but retains the tribasic CS (Δflank). The mutations were engineered into a spike expression plasmid to enable cell surface expression and generation of coronavirus lentiviral PVs. In addition, to study the importance of the PRRAR motif in the context of live virus, we used a naturally occurring Vero-cell-adapted mutant SARS-CoV-2, ΔCS26. This variant and the wild-type (WT) virus from which it was derived were cloned by limiting dilution to enable studies using individual genotypes.
This is the horror of in vitro and in vivo viral lab research and the result is a magnificent advancement of our understanding of SARS-CoV-2, the furin cleavage site, and its role in TMPRSS2 assisted membrane entry. This research follows the equally eye-opening paper covered in TWiV 715 that explained why hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) failed; Vero E6 cells lack TMPRRS2 so HCQ fully blocks entry via endocytosis. It should be noted that this study includes MERS-CoV which also has a furin cleavage site; falsifying one of the claims of Wade's article.
Regardless, lab experiments begin with one or more viral isolates and molecular clock techniques should show that the original Wuhan variant has almost identical non-coding genome segments compared to existing lab isolates. The RaTG13 sequence is a very distant relative using this measure. Also, RaTG13 is not an isolate, only an RNA sample collected in wild bat anal swabs. Conflating viral isolates with RNA samples seems to be a common error; an entry in a genetic database does not imply that a viable viral line exists in a lab. A RaTG13 lab isolate would have been an important achievement to further our scientific understanding.
I'm confused by the dismissals of the natural origins hypothesis. The horseshoe bat roosts, that are studied, are mostly found in or near Kunming, Yunnan. This lush wild area is part of the Lancang/Mekong River watershed/ecosystem shared by nocturnal bats and nocturnal arboreal mammals like palm civets, pangolins, and raccoon dogs. The nearby villages contain people engaged in guano collection, the wildlife trade, and domestic livestock farming.
The average incubation time of COVID-19 is 4.5 days. Armed with Google maps and a basic understanding of planes, trains, and automobiles we can gauge travel time from Kunming Airport to either Wuhan Tianhe International Airport (2 hr 5 min) or Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport (2 hrs). In 2003, SARS-1 emerged in Guangzhou (near Hong Kong) and the now demonized Dr. Zheng-li Shi and her team traced the origins to palm civets (the intermediate host). Why is this so hard? Why do we not ridicule the assumption that travel between major Chinese transportation hubs must leave a wake of infections along the path?
Finally, Wade's article mentions a U.S. State Department claim [2]:
> The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.
If true, this is an important early super-spreader event but the remainder of the release consists of a facile analysis performed by people more knowledgeable in geopolitics than science.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-00908-w
[2] https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan...
Can't help feeling sad, and bewildered in capacity of humans to cause damage at this level - the havoc this (human-made) virus is inflicting on people - close and faraway.
Why did they start consuming it? Because of the lack of food.
Why was there a lack of food? Because of poverty
Why was there poverty? Multiple years of bad rule.
Why was there so much bad rule? Multiple years of invasions which hooked the population on poppy drugs.
Why were they hooked on these drugs and made poor? So another country could get rich.
Thats the reason we have Covid today. Its called Karma.
We need to be figuring out how to deal with that. Wondering where it came from is mostly neither here nor there.
We aren't going to magically stop doing lab experiments if we can know for certain that it started in a lab. If we can determine for certain that this jumped species, welp, it isn't the first time and it won't be the last.
It seems intuitive that knowing the origin of the virus (sample escaping a lab or pure nature) could help prevent similar cases in the future or deal with them more efficiently. Is my intuition wrong here?
It would mean countries that have labs would either be forced to allow constant audits and reasonable regulations (such as don't have labs in cities) or face isolation.
It would also mean quite a heavy political response towards china if it indeed escaped a lab (which is why they're sabotaging everything even if it didn't...)
The threat of such a response to me is part of the problem. This incentivises an insecure player to act counter to the common goal by concealing the facts in order to avoid a scenario of being attacked by other players.
In the end we’re all human and mistakes happen. Regulations, audits, this can be implemented transparently for everyone; if that was the end of it and there was no perceived potential of repercussions, perhaps we wouldn’t have this problem.
(Not to say this somehow justifies the obstruction of the investigation, but IMO it’s something to keep in mind.)
Communist party rule will be in big danger if chinese people start blaming it for this clusterfuck.
Externally, its not controllable, US invaded 2 countries after 9/11, it would be easy to think that politicians will do something or someone more radical will get elected.
My assertion is that where it started is unlikely to yield real solutions because I don't think that's what caused it to turn into a giant and ongoing global crisis. I would like more focus on solutions and I don't think finding someone to pin the blame on is likely to move that needle at all.
My life experience suggests that finding a scapegoat tends to do the opposite: After someone's head is on a pike and calls for "justice" have been thereby nominally satisfied, the problem will rage on. Meanwhile, people may make less effort to solve it because they got some sense of satisfaction out of watching heads roll and justice get loudly declared.
Putting heads on a pike won't stop the spread of the virus. It's what many people want because millions have died.
It's not what I want and it has nothing to do with politics. I want people to live and be healthy and I simply don't think this is how that is most likely to be achieved.
This strikes me as just the latest stage of that process (or the latest chapter in that story).
If it turns out to have walked out of a lab, then perhaps it points to a need to harden containment. You can’t cancel virology, because we still need to deal with pathogens from nature.
There are no good and no bad guys, of course, but the topic is a very specific event and concrete facts, so shades and “what about X?” can go elsewhere as far as I’m concerned.
No magic required, we can just stop. Or better yet and more realistic, update and enforce regulations on this type of research.
Personally, I don't care whether it was a lab or not. The fact we haven't disproven it means it's not all that unlikely, and I think we should reform research practices now. We don't need to prove it did happen if we already know it could happen.
"Hmmmm. On one hand, Wuhan Institute of Virology is located where the outbreak started. On the other hand, they did have some markets where people sold animals. Tough call."
Then they'll laugh and joke about how badly people were manipulated.
The propaganda from the CCP played a major part of that “shaping.” It’s critical that the influence of the CCP on the head of the WHO not be ignored. Reporters seem to ignore the potential conflict of interest given that the WHO head was the former foreign minister of Ethiopia and oversaw billions in Chinese investment in that country. It’s not inconceivable that he was personally enriched with Chinese money during his days overseeing the Chinese “investment.”