More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Then you have other academics in the comments saying nothing is certain yet, and other prominents labs like Gupta Labs at Cambridge and Bloom Lab from Seattle saying there could be multiple explanations.
I know the issue is politicised and that's wrong as Ecohealth alliance from the US sponsored this research so there is no "single country at fault" - no need to avoid topics.
It's not "chinas fault" it's more like, what on earth was the US based Ecohealth alliance doing with this research, why so many previous lab leaks with little attention, what is the history if the Wuhan lab, whats the actual facts about Gain of Function research etc. All topics that the press is not looking into for some reason.
On Ecohealth alliance:
“ It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.””
Idea 1: SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab
Idea 2: SARS-CoV-2 was in/around/related to WIV and escaped
Idea 1 was widely debunked by American scientists.
Idea 2 is an idea that there is a considerable body of circumstantial evidence supporting and is certainly the most likely origin in my estimation.
> why these weird rumors about Gain of Function research that no one seemingly looks into etc.
You can read one such yourself: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/
we investigated the receptor usage of the SL-CoV S by
combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus
system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules
of human, civet, or horseshoe bat.
Our own American scientists said this process would likely result in biomarkers that were not found in the circulating virus (my layman, not expert, understanding).
The "Wuhan Institute of Virology" is named in a couple of news articles and scientific publications. However what is rarely discussed is that the Wuhan CDC (武汉市疾病预防控制中心), which also has a virus lab and was also researching coronaviruses is in walking distance from that wet market! I took a screenshot of it, in the top right is the Huanan Seafood Market, in the bottom the CDC, which includes a virus lab: https://i.imgur.com/smODVQe.png
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.
FYI, this really doesn't match my experience. I got curious and Googled about the lab's location myself about a year ago, not long after the outbreak, and found the hypothesis tantalizing, even in the absence of hard evidence.
I've seen ongoing discussion about this since then on various blogs and on Twitter.
As a more meta-comment, we're all in tiny, personalized information silos nowadays based on the sites and communities we frequent. Even a pseudo-public forum like Twitter is not really public - you only see the slice that you follow.
IMO 'nobody is talking about it' is more about how you've curated your own info-stream, rather than about the world at large.
Not all that rarely IME, and certainly not "almost never". It's popped up every now and then for over a year now; here on HN among other places. (OTOH, maybe that was you I saw. :-)
Webarchive links are in the comments.
On the other hand, the WIV has recently published papers about creating new coronaviruses by combining a gene from one virus with the rest of another virus, as well as other types of modifications to existing coronaviruses. They have active grants to continue with this type of research. They also have acknowledged performing this work in BSL-2 labs, which would not be secure enough to contain SARS-CoV-2 if it were to have been the result of one of these experiments.
> Before 2020, the rules followed by virologists in China and elsewhere required that experiments with the SARS1 and MERS viruses be conducted in BSL3 conditions. But all other bat coronaviruses could be studied in BSL2, the next level down. BSL2 requires taking fairly minimal safety precautions, such as wearing lab coats and gloves, not sucking up liquids in a pipette, and putting up biohazard warning signs. Yet a gain-of-function experiment conducted in BSL2 might produce an agent more infectious than either SARS1 or MERS. And if it did, then lab workers would stand a high chance of infection, especially if unvaccinated. Much of Shi [Zheng-li, head researcher at WIV]’s work on gain-of-function in coronaviruses was performed at the BSL2 safety level, as is stated in her publications and other documents. She has said in an interview with Science magazine that “[t]he coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories.”
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
WIV has acknowledged that at least some of their bat coronavirus research was conducted in their BSL-2 labs which have a far, far lower level of security.
I don't personally doubt it's a conspiracy theory but would you clarify exactly where "American scientists" debunked this - is it in the link you provided, it's not clear, it appears to only deal with claim 2?
In this discussion and the older threads he links in there, Bedford basically rules out an 'engineered' virus, does not rule out a lab leak, but leans towards zoonosis (pathogen jumping from animal to human).
-
Here are Thread reader links for the older threads he references:
Were parts of HIV inserted into SARS-CoV-2? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1223666856923291648.html
What do the number of amino acid and nucleotide changes tell us? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1224207086013149184.html
Which data point are consistent with zoonosis or lab escape? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1230634136102064128.html
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
The other links you provide are rebuttals of particular arguments, but in no way settle the entire question. Knowing that bits of HIV weren't inserted into SARS-CoV2, for example, tells you nothing about whether this virus may have emerged from natural selection experiments in the lab. There are good arguments on both sides, but Twitter, in particular, seems stuck on the pronouncements of early 2020, when nobody knew much of anything about the virus and a certain prominent politician was speculating wildly, thus setting up a left/right polarization over what should be a factual debate.
We need to stop this hostile form of "scientific debate" where one person's opinion is held up as "the science", while all other voices are dismissed as fringe.
This is a very strange word. When I read history of science books, this word was almost never used. Change of scientific consensus is not uncommon in the history of science. Scientists disagree with each other, debate with each other, but they don't claim they debunk each other.
I don't believe people use this word in good faith. It seems to be politically loaded power grab.
If it was bred in a lab via humanized mice engineered with human ACE 2 receptors, would you consider that? What about forms of "no seeum" splicing?
Where are all these animals in the wild (since the lab theory has been "debunked") with SARS-CoV-2?
I'd imagine we'd have found tons of them by now, right?
There is debate about that. Interesting article here:
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
(It also suggests that one of the loudest early detractors of the "escaped from lab" theory, the main author of the Feb 19, 2020 Lancet letter, had an undeclared conflict of interest because he is president of an organisation which funded Coronavirus research at WIV)
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
It's a long read but a worthy one. Exploring all the options better than the NYT article.
The lack of biomarkers is not proof either way.
There were a lot of them on twitter, and frankly, they disqualified themselves from the adult table. They've chosen politics over science.
If someone is telling people who already only believe that conclusion then that makes sense.
It's important to ask people that do this stuff to be very specific about their motivations in the moment, document them, and hold them accountable at a later date when the dust settles.
The childishness of telling people to unfollow you on Twitter is undeniable, but isn’t really related, and is just what you get when you’re reading Twitter.
Even ones who claim to be activists will ignore any good faith questions, because every second they spend engaging in meaningful dialogue doesn't allow them to sit there and attack others for points from their followers.
Would be interesting to dig further into who is funding their research.
I guess that's pretty popular, but I have to say I don't care for it.
Many people are still in the bargaining stage of COVID response -- if we find that some person made this virus and released it into the wild, we just send them to prison and the problem goes away. That's a very human reaction to the problem, but unfortunately it doesn't actually work. We have to clean up this colossal mess regardless of whether it was man-made or not, and we have to reckon with the millions that died and will never come back.
Finding someone to blame is just a distraction, and I imagine that many people want to move past that distraction and eradicate the disease. The learning can come later when we're collectively more calm.
I doubt that anyone was funded to create SARS-CoV-2 and then try to suppress discussion about it on Twitter. I think the "unfollow me if you think it's man-made" is just a short-circuit to avoid flamewars and distraction. It probably isn't a belief against doing a blameless postmortem so that we can handle things like this better in the future.
It's not about removing, it's about finding who they are speaking out for.
Finding someone to blame as you say is not really the key issue. If you want to prevent this from happening again you might just possibly want to know where this virus came from.
4 months after SARS 1 we knew the intermediate host was a civet. 9 months after MERS, we knew the intermediate host was a camel. As of now not a single intermediate zoonotic host has been identified.
At this point the probability threshold has shifted towards a lab leak. We can acknowledge this fact or we can collectively acknowledge that maybe just maybe a research center with a quarter of a billion dollars in funding from the United States government for evolving Corona viruses from bats to infect humanized mice might have had something to do with the virus that broke out in the exact same city.
I mean it really is absurd how quickly people dismiss this rather obvious fact.
Figuring out where this virus came from is extremely relevant considering that the gain of function research that in all likelihood created it is going to be increased in funding as a result of the pandemic. If the public knew that the virus was almost certainly not a naturally transmitted one from a wild animal host, they probably wouldn't be on board with funding more of the research that created it.
No, what I was getting at is that they might have a financial incentive to discredit the lab escape theory. For instance, some of this researcher's funding or his institution's funding might be from CCP-backed entities.
> We have to clean up this colossal mess regardless of whether it was man-made or not, and we have to reckon with the millions that died and will never come back. Finding someone to blame is just a distraction, and I imagine that many people want to move past that distraction and eradicate the disease. The learning can come later when we're collectively more calm.
This, trying to push the idea that fighting the virus or investigating the outbreak theory are mutually exclusive, is also a rhetoric I would expect to be pushed from the party responsible for the outbreak.
Truth is, why obstruct investigation efforts and try to hide the facts if the origin of the virus is natural?
The controversy around Peter Daszak goes deeper. First off, he was the only American on the WHO team that visited Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) earlier this year. Per the WSJ (https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-china-hunt-covid-origins-11...) the WHO rejected three different nominees from the Trump administration and instead chose Daszak. That seems suspicious to me, because Daszak's prior work with WIV means there is a clear conflict of interest, and it puts the WHO's judgment into doubt since it would seem like a convenient pick for the CCP, given how tightly they managed the WHO's visit and subsequent report.
Furthermore, Daszak's name appears as an author on a WIV paper that concerns coronavirus research (https://jvi.asm.org/content/jvi/90/6/3253.full.pdf), and the text within suggests WIV was actively performing gain of function research with SARS-like (SL) viruses:
> "We recently isolated a bat SL-CoV strain (WIV1) and constructed an infectious clone of another strain (SHC014); significantly, these strains are closely related to SARS-CoV and capable of using the same cellular receptor (angiotensin-convert-ing enzyme 2 [ACE2]) as SARS-CoV"
Note that EcoHealth's grant was omitted from the oversight process concerning research involving dangerous pathogens (https://news.yahoo.com/hhs-board-never-approved-wuhan-155055...). Per this article, Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard H. Ebright said that NIH and NIAID "systematically thwarted — indeed systematically nullified — the HHS P3CO Framework by declining to flag and forward proposals for review."
-
While all of this could just be strange coincidence, incorrect speculation, or reasonably explained with more information, it has all the markers of something that deserves scrutiny and transparency. I feel like everyone who was and still is quick to shut down the lab leak possibility is acting against the spirit of open inquiry and thwarting the best understanding that we could have from this entire saga.
Some are pretty obviously wrong:
- they say the virus hasn't mutated to become more suitable or transmissible in humans
- they imply the first cases of COVID-19 were hospitalizations and imply that asymptomatic spread of the disease is not possible
Then also the article claims that science hasn't tracked gene mutations of the virus that took place in bats. I think that has indeed happened.
The logic of the people they blame us contradictory too. They say the base DNA could have been concealed by making a novel base but then they say by that this was a researcher doing public, documented research, which suggests they would indeed use standard practices and the signatures would be there.
From the article titled "Scientists: 'Exactly zero' evidence COVID-19 came from a lab"[1]:
> But that was before he learned more about COVID-19 and related coronaviruses, which have features already seen in nature. "There are lots of data and lots of evidence, as well as previous examples of this coming from nature," he said. "We have exactly zero evidence or data of this having any connection to a lab."
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/05/scientis...
I mean, I suppose from a pragmatic standpoint (the world as it is) it's starting to get into the realm of enlightenment, but if friggin' scientists can't think clearly, then perhaps their new found "five star", god-tier status in society should be knocked down to four or four and a half stars.
Everything can be and is politicized. Even local news about a petty theft or changes to a small park ends up being very political in the media or some local discussion board (looking at Nextdoor). If it crosses the border, it becomes international politics.
There are existing cases when coronaviruses leaked from the labs before and it is a known concern: [1], [2] The debate on the risking of such research has been going on for years [3] and in 2014 the US even paused funding selected gain-of-function research [4]. It happened before more than once, denying that it could have happened again in 2019, because there are no evidence, is simply lazy. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Why it matters? Because only in 2016 China adopted national guidelines for treatment of lab animals [5].
Knowing what happens critically important to make sure it does not happen again. Any system, that wants to adapt needs to analyze and find root cause of the mistake. Take rules and regulations in Aviation, all decisions about safety are driven by experience and past mistakes. If something is a pilot's mistake, then either there is a safeguard added, protocol or training altered, or everything above; but it's not customary to downplay or avoid highlighting human error. It is a common-sense approach used in any area, from aviation to military to sea navigation, etc. Either actors learn or the system learns by eliminating actors. Only in case of virus research, humanity is an actor that either needs to learn or ...
And I don't understand, why it is so important not o blame Chinese government? Do we not want to blame the Soviet government for the handling and the fallout of Chernobyl? Or those, who made risky decisions while operation the plant? If it is leaked from the lab, amend must be made to the facility, protocols, guidelines. Nevertheless, if it turns out that it is someone's gross negligence, the person or group of people should be reprimanded.
The US industrial farming can be a culprit of another "pig" or "chicken" flu or something more deadly. I would not be surprised, if some industrial farm with a string of sanitary and animal rights violations breeds a new virus. In this case, I want them to be reprimanded; if a state has loose regulations to prevent it, I want that state to be reprimanded by the federal government. And I would expect the US to take financial loss and pressure from the international community as an incentive to learn from mistake.
[1] SARS escaped Beijing lab twice (2004) https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...
[2] https://www.who.int/csr/don/2003_09_24/en/
[3] Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research (2015) https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...
[4] http://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Documents/gain-of-function.pdf
[5] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/china-finally-settin...
You'd believe scientists should know better that it's not about "China is guilty, they should pay for their crime" at all but "Let' us understand the origins so that we might prepare and protect ourselves better for another pandemic outbreak."
I mean: you seriously cannot make that up.
That being said, from what I've read it appears that a lab escape is a very real possibility. Though I doubt that we'll ever find out
Via @Ayjchan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1394327680456220672?s=20
I find that argument hard to corroborate and there are other parsimonious explanations, like WIV was located in Wuhan because Wuhan is a major world city with high quality institutions of higher education.
But i too think it all too likely that we won't be any wiser about the origins.
Though it would be great if a timeline could be established, i don't remember seeing a good explanation on Covid in Italy being discovered in 2019.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
The hypothesis that COVID-19 came from an animal, namely a bat, in Wuhan China is independently suggested by multiple areas of science (genetics and epidemiology). It's also in line with similar outbreaks that happened in the past. The science of this is about as "unsettled" as the the theory of evolution vs creationism.
Also, here's your falsifiability: when it can be shown that the virus is zoonotic in origin, the other theories of its origin are falsified.
I do not believe that the virus was engineered in a lab at this point, but turning this into tribe warfare will not help anything. Saying that the opinion you disagree with is unscientific and comparing it to creationism just shows you aren't looking to have an actual conversation.
A real scientist with close knowledge of the virus and the lab offered this.
I can only find sources saying that the Furin cleavage site doesn’t rule out engineering, or sources saying the Furin cleave site could be naturally occurring. Sounds like we don’t know yet.
This is becoming more and more common, Pure Science is almost never practiced anymore. The Hard sciences like Immunology, virology, general medicine used to be some what insulated from politics however in the last few years all sciences are no longer data driven.
You form a conclusion then find the facts that fit your narrative, and if your narrative is not the "correct" one you better not release your facts...
[1] https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2020/09/18/what...
[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/handwashi...
[3] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e...
If you’re interested, here is a more recent example of “politics vs science” and politics losing badly: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Abe-declares-e...
Here’s a fun quote from the article:
"We have managed to bring the outbreak under control within just one and a half months. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the Japan model,"
Meanwhile at the time of writing Japan is experiencing a surge in coronavirus cases and Abe has resigned.
APA (and WHO, and...) will say no. But you'll see curious notes about recommendations to monitor bone density, and curious usages of auxiliary drugs whose purpose is to combat osteoporosis. Turns out, the therapies are well known to permanently and negatively affect bone density and long term effects-- while assumed to include osteoporosis and more frequent fractures-- are simply unknown.
But the science and statistics cannot be allowed to trump the politics, so you will see no mention of this in complete contravention of traditional Hippocratic responsibilities and medical ethics.
The sorts of science that the public finds most interesting are those with a human backstory and politics is the best kind of story.
Take a similar situation, imagine you were a structural engineer a decade ago and you tweeted "If you think 9/11 was an inside job because jet fuel can't melt steel beams, please unfollow me" or an astronaut tweeting "if you think we didn't land on the moon, please unfollow me" - whether the particular issue they've mentioned is true or false doesn't actually matter. They're trying to avoid the confrontationalists/conspiracy theorists following them/replying to their tweets. They're pretty much tweeting "don't @ me"
That's a pretty bad analogy. It's not like a lab leak is an extremely unlikely possibility at all.
You should rather check who is funding the people who are making certain statements like that. Follow the money trail.
The tweet was talking about the virus being engineered in a lab, not the possibility it escaped from a lab. Their opinion on the possibility of lab leak seems [1] quite reasonable to me - they believe it's possible but unlikely, and link to more info.
> You should rather check who is funding the people who are making certain statements like that.
Sure - do you have more info on his sources of grants etc?
[1] https://twitter.com/macroliter/status/1391777097434152963
> A video released two years before the start of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic shows Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) scientists being cavalier toward protective equipment and being bitten by bats that carry deadly viruses such as SARS, demonstrating a lax safety culture in the lab.
> On Dec. 29, 2017, Chinese state-run TV released a video designed to showcase Shi Zhengli, (石正麗), also known as "Bat Woman," and her team of scientists at the WIV in their quest to find the origin of SARS. Despite the fact that the scientists work in a biosafety level 4 lab, they show a shocking disregard for safety when handling potentially infectious bats both in the wild and in the lab.
> From 4:45 to 4:56, a scientist can be seen holding a bat with his bare hands. Team members from 7:44 to 7:50 can be seen collecting potentially highly infectious bat feces while wearing short sleeves and shorts and with no noticeable personal protective equipment (PPE) other than gloves.
> Virus researcher Cui Jie (崔杰) relates his experiences of being bitten from 8:47 to 8:50. He said that the bat's fangs went right through his glove, which was likely nitrile. He described the feeling as "like being jabbed with a needle." The video then cuts to a person's limb showing swelling after a bat bite.
That provides a plausible origin scenario of the pandemic: In October 2019, a researcher at the Wuhan Lab was bitten by a bat, got infected (asymptomatically), went home and unknowingly infected other people in the community, and the virus spread from there.
Sadly, I don't think we'll ever know what happened. Those who were directly involved with the early stage of the outbreak will never speak up, because Beijing issued a complete gag order on what happened. Anyone that speaks about the early stages of the pandemic be charged with espionage, and if found guilty, they can receive the death penalty. https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/11/9833532bb925-chin...
> The recent announcement of nine cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome linked to China's National Institute of Virology brings to three the number of lab outbreaks of the disease in the past eight months.
It's also happened dozens of times in the US, UK, and former Soviet Union. Tuberculosis, Smallpox, various flu viruses have all escaped from "secure" labs. [2] [3]
Maybe studying viruses isn't as safe as we thought.
---
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/05/29/s...
[2] https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-virology-research-center-hit...
[3] https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/29/1978-accidenta...
Oh, also viruses don't get virulent in the new host the moment the zoonotic transfer occurs. It takes a bit of time to evolve and adapt.
Given that the amount of evidence is exactly zero, anyone can spin their favorite "unsurprising" theories all day long.
But this makes any admission of an error and, by extension, any useful reflection on it very, very improbable. I think if the lab origin is true and at some point becomes common knowledge, it will be treated like the Iraq war. The people responsible for botching the response and the message will fail up and treat the pandemic as if it were a tsunami, rather then human error.
Nobody will be able to look at this rationally until nobody cares either way. That’s what makes history interesting. It always changes.
The data have already been destroyed. The Wuhan lab where this research was taking place also had a leadership change, and is now run by someone in the military. That happened in March or April of 2020, IIRC.
Chinese researchers and journalists disappeared in that time frame (their work was deleted from online archives, their names removed from public employment listings... etc.).
I have family in China, and we watched all this happen. These are the things that happened in public. The Western press was too busy with "oh my gosh, we should probably stop flights now" to take serious notice. Then the whole thing became politicized (in the U.S., at least) and if you made statements like "this started in Wuhan, in the lab there, not in the animal market next to it," you were called racist, even though race had nothing to do with it.
We can ask until the cows come hom. The evidence is gone, disposed of by a series of decisions made more than a year ago.
You don't know that. You'd need an investigation to conclude that. Using it as an excuse not to investigate seems like assuming the conclusion.
Even if some data have been destroyed, it doesn't follow that every last piece of data everywhere has. Who knows what might turn out to be significant? There may well be relevant data in many countries, too, since the research was international.
You're justifying that censorship saying that the "wrongthink people" were close to this so that's why it was mostly shunned.
It's disingenuous. This whole year and counting (specially in places with slow vaccine rollouts) has been full of instances where certain challenges to the official local government doctrine where combated heavily with not much argument other than personal attacks and requests for faith in the "one true narrative".
Honestly I always felt like "a scientist working with dangerous pathogens had an accident" is way less racist than "someone ate a weird animal from a wet market"... And yet the backlash was stronger for the lab leak scenario, almost as if the opinions were influenced by someone.
I don't think we will get the true answer or an answer that is going to satisfy everyone, just a lot of geopolitical posturing.
For ordinary citizens, of course not.
Politics will be inexorably intertwined in such an investigation.
If Wuhan lab leak were 'truth' - without hard evidence and a bold international campaign to forcefully make people aware ... then China would be able to hide behind a cloud of whataboutery and changing the subject.
Unless there is some kind of genetic linkage etc..
I also feel that some US authorities wouldn't want the truth to be fully known lest there be unpredictable repercussions and 'worries about Anti Asian Hate Crime' and those kinds of things, preferring to handle it 'behind closed doors'.
It would be great if we could arrive at some kind of objective truth, not holding my breath.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlO8sKRynBY
So far, the lab origin story sounds the most plausible and has the least holes in it. Now innocent until proven guilty is a thing, but is not like the PRC would ever agree to a fair trial.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 - May 2021 (536 comments)
That's not to say that I think it didn't come from the WIV, just that they'd act the same way regardless of where the first transmission occurred.
https://farside.ph.utexas.edu/books/Syntaxis/Almagest/node4....
I have to wonder though if the wet market was a CCP smoke screen... why wasn’t it further from their lab doing exactly this type of viral work? IDK, maybe that was the point to cause suspicion? I’m not crafty enough to know my ability to write world deceiving half-truths.
1. We have strong suspicion that the virus was going around in early December, away from the Wuhan wet market.
2. If the source was natural and zootonic, we would have expected to find the intermediate animal by now. For Sars1 and Mers, we found that animal within 4 months and 9 months respectively. It's been 18 months since Covid19, and we have no clue what that animal despite better science and astronomically more investment.
Only if you assume it's both widespread and endemic in the intermediate animal population.
If it's spreading at low levels through that population for some reason (like being a less social animal) then it's trying to find a needle in a haystack, and that's on top of the needle/haystack of identifying the correct animal and population.
If it's not endemic we may never find it, perhaps the intermediate population were well on their way to herd immunity before the virus jumped to humans leaving little to no trace.
There are some other possibilities too, like it could have been transmitting undetected among relatively isolated humans (like small farming villages) for some time before an infected farmer visited a market. This would significantly broaden the scope of when and where the infected animal population was.
That we haven't found the source yet is incredibly weak evidence.
You seem to ignore the fact that there's exactly zero evidence either pro or contra. The fame of the "media person" is the kind of argument you typically see invoked in Facebook and Youtube comments.
However, lab origin should not be totally dismissed, so we can have a discussion about safety of gain-of-function research now, rather than waiting for some verifiable event to happen in the future.
The Wuhan Lab was funded through the american Ecohealth alliance, and a dozen american scientists probably know just as much as the Chinese do.
1) Regardless of whether or not this virus came from a lab, could such a thing plausibly happen in the future? Unquestionably yes.
2) Do we have international bodies to do inspection of the safety standards of any lab doing this kind of work? Ones that have the authority to require changes, or even shut down a lab, if those safety standards are not met? Unquestionably no, we have no such international body.
3) Could we make one? Yes, if China and Russia and the USA all agree to make one, it could be made binding on the rest of the world.
So, let's get on with that. I fear that the discussion of the origin of covid-19, while it has certainly been useful in showing what the potential future problems are, may get in the way of setting up something to prevent it happening (again?) in the future.
I know the quote "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" and all, but if we deem it important to get to the bottom of individual deaths, accidental or not, than it is important to get to the bottom of millions of deaths.
>"... no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching..."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11...
Edit: Added source.
Sars1: Prof. Zheng-Li Shi from Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Prof. Shu-Yi Zhang from the Institute of Zoology, and some researchers from Australia also tracked the source of SARS virus to bats, and their findings were published in Science in September 2005
>"As no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching and as RNA recombination is frequent within coronaviruses, it is highly likely that SARS-CoV newly emerged through recombination of bat SARSr-CoVs in this or other yet-to-be-identified bat caves"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11...
>"No direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations, but WIV16 was found in a cave in Yunnan province, China between 2013 and 2016, and has a 96% genetically similar virus strain."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
Dark matter/energy also frequently fall into this sort of argument. There is no evidence that they do exist, which does not suggest the absence of their existence.
Suppose that I remember leaving $5000 in plain sight on a table. My initial priors are a 90% chance that it is there, a 9% chance that I put it somewhere else by accident, and a 1% that my friend Bob took it. I conduct a search that would have found it with 100% odds if it was on the table, 95% odds if I had put it somewhere else by accident, and a 0% chance if Bob took it. Add in the evidence of the search and all of a sudden the new odds are 0% chance that it is where I thought it was, about a 31% chance that I put it somewhere else, and a 69% chance that Bob took it.
This is the first major disease to jump to humans in the last 20 years that we haven't quickly tracked down the path to us. We're good at it. The fact that we didn't succeed this time when more effort was put into the search is something that should give us pause.
This is contrary but I'm open to debate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747529/
Bigfoot has entered the chat.
> Dark matter/energy...There is no evidence that they do exist,
Except there is plenty of evidence for dark matter. It's stuff that has observable mass and is found in countless galaxy rotation curve studies, gravitational lensing, etc.
While we agree gain for function is bad. Do you think China will stop it now? Sort of a new arms race.
ETA: Does no one else remember those videos out of China with people foaming at the mouth, convulsing, and literally lying dead in the street? Does anyone seriously think that was some weird organic for-fun deception? I have no proof that was a state run for-western media campaign.... buuuuttt...
That's just a data point, but it goes to show how political the debate is.
can somebody shed light on what's going on there?
(1) if it *was* released from a lab, its highly suspect that it was intentional due to it infecting China's own citizens; if it was some kind of "attack" you would think they would plant it somewhere else.
(2) this is somewhat of the price we (as a society) pay for experimentation on diseases and viruses. It suffers from it-could-happen-here-ism where COVID or a COVID-like disease could be released by any other country and we'd still be in the exact same situation.
So, in my mind, the only definitive issue is whether it was released maliciously or by accident. If it was malicious, that's a completely different, crimes against humanity, type problem. If it was not, then I don't think it matters really how COVID happened.
China has ways to stop this class of research internally. It's very likely to happen. That's the entire point.
China does not need to admit, discuss, have referendums, or partake in any other self-harming activities.
In the end, this discussion doesn't even matter. The fact is that we, the non-specialists with no access to hard evidence, will probably never know what happened, and in fact it does not matter at all.
The origin of the virus is completely irrelevant to its consequences and the potential for accidental or purposeful releases of new viruses, engineered or not, is still there regardless. We're lucky(?) we got ample warning of what biological threats can do, and we got it with a low mortality and morbidity virus.
After all, trying to infer the origin of the virus by it's mutations and features is a bit like trying to infer if a computer virus is made in Russian by the inclusion of Cyrillic variable names or something, anyone can put them in there, so it's basically not even evidence.
People imagine Chinese social media as something that is completely locked down when in reality it was abuzz with information when a new mysterious disease was appearing in Wuhan. Countries like Taiwan were suspicious and taking action as early as December.
Here is a set of evidence I have a hard time poking holes in:
https://project-evidence.github.io/
There are some pieces of evidence that are compelling alone:
- beyond a reasonable doubt, coronavirus research was done at WIV.
- beyond a reasonable doubt, collection of coronavirus from bats was done for the lab.
- beyond a reasonable doubt, there have been instances of poor PPE/safety measures.The counterpoint to this is that this lab was setup in this location for the exact reason that a novel coronavirus would potentially emerge from bats in the region. This would require both miraculous forethought on the potential for bats in the region to produce novel coronaviruses, and a strange desire to place the virology lab near the location.
Most high level virology labs are centered based on considerations such as ability to hire talent and security/land concerns. It's relatively straightforward to organize expeditions to any region of the world at this point to collect samples.
Which means that for the standard explanation to hold true.
- A virology lab was created to study potentially dangerous versions of coronavirus (WIV founded 1956)
- The virology lab must have been placed near the location where animals were producing interesting virus strains. (WIV studying coronaviruses from all over China since 2005 including Horshoe bats from Yunnan province carrying progenitor strains of the SARS virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology)
- A novel coronavirus emerged near the WIV lab in Q4 2019 due to unrelated sales of locally hunted bats.
Strange things occur, but this would be strange enough as to require plausible studies identifying animal sources of Covid-19 to take at face value.
The origin was politicized in the US and taboo to even question it, so few did. It was labeled a crazy conspiracy theory by the media and that shut the door on open inquiry until recently.
Conspiracy is political ammunition, skepticism is healthy debate and gladly welcomes more data.
- What other kinds of virus research besides coronavirus was done at the WIV? - What proportion of coronaviruses are anyway derived from bats? - What were the outcomes of the instances of poor PPE/safety measures with regard to containment?
Without this calibration, all you've written is innuendo.
Plus, the site always seems to see "causation" whenever there is correlation, and never even stops to admit that there's the possibility they got the chain of causation backwards: if there was a lot of coronavirus-carrying bats in the region wouldn't it make sense to build a research institute there? And publish on all the findings? The site goes on to cite papers and job postings that are exactly the kinds of research (and job postings) you'd expect from a site that focuses on coronavirus related research. Yet the linked site makes it sound ominous, when it is utterly mundane.
So one has to ask who actually produced this site to begin with? To quote the page:
> "We are an anonymous group of researchers"
Very convenient. In other words, no-one with a serious research background could be convinced to put their name on this nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#SA...
Appeals to authority are one of the failings of modern science, The data and facts should stand up to independent review no need for "credentials"
It also helped them that mainland China was limiting travel at the time for political reasons.
Perhaps the most interesting point is the discussion of the furin cleavage site.
What this letter fails to establish is a success criterion. Nobody is going to invest in a "proper investigation", much less one tinged with politics, without even knowing something will come out of it.
We've learn't a lot more about viral transmission in places like Australia with very low COVID incidences and very strong contact tracing when an infected person does go out into the community. It's very clear now that many people are extremely poor at spreading the virus - out in the community for 2 weeks with one of the infectious variants - in restaurants, pubs etc. - and only manage to infect 1 person, who is a close contact. Others are super spreaders, that infect many many people (but these people seem much rarer).
I can easily see how it could get 1000km away from the source. A person who had the virus with no symptoms could simply have traveled to Wuhan. Didn't infect anyone on the way. Infected a close contact once there. Gets to a super spreader, then off it goes.
I get the feeling that the lab leak hypothesis ignores the unevenness of transmission that is now evident.
Such manipulation would leak some information into the virus. Already it seems like the virus has great difficulty spreading outdoors while great success spreading indoors.
It may be a coincidence but evolution does encode environmental assumptions into the genes of an organism under selective pressure.
It may turn out that the virus makes certain assumptions about its environment and if those assumptions are not compatible with open spaces in nature - where animals live, but relies on closed environments (certain humidity range, absent air currents, lack of any resistance to sunlight spectra) depending on how many of these assumptions are present a natural explanation for the virus may be all but ruled out.
It almost sounds to me like a semantics argument arguing whether injection molding is manufacturing or applied physics.
A chimera followed by gain of function would be engineering as well.
The transmission vector can be anything.
https://twitter.com/brendancarrfcc/status/124844281241420186...
Spoiler: They are all “mysteriously” missing or at least have disappeared from their normal lives.
That's not something to be brushed off lightly.
Not only because of the effects on them personally and (best case scenario) their careers.
But also because of the chilling impact on scientific and public discourse.
Far from helping out its neighbours it has tried to expand its territory. Any offer of help is more of an extortion.
Even in countries with otherwise porous borders, the virus seems to obey political boundaries.
I have no doubt that it is a controlled bioweapon.
Just from a scientific perspective, we should know where covid-19 came from. If it hopped from bats to people in a wet market, that tells us something about the likelihood of this type of virus spreading from contact with wild animals. If it was accidentally released from a lab, that tells us something different.
In a healthy geopolitical environment, an impartial investigative team that's able to pinpoint the source of the original transmission could make this information public so that everyone can learn how to avoid this happening again. If the pandemic happened because policy enforcement at the virus lab in Wuhan was weak, this is worth knowing. Not to to lay blame and point fingers, but to help labs worldwide identify potential weak points in their own procedures.
The danger is that if evidence points to an accidental lab release, some Western politicians will seize on the opportunity to shame China just for the sake of national chauvinism. This will accomplish nothing positive. The Chinese Communist Party is very thin skinned and essentially amoral so they'll have no compunctions about covering up any evidence of a lab leak in order to save face. All of this political stuff risks getting in the way of helping the scientific community understand where covid-19 came from so we'll have a better understanding of how to reduce the chances of this happening again.
If COVID-19 was, in fact, a lab release then that's a strong argument for shutting the research down.
That is not the assertion being made by the scientists pushing for the investigation. The assertion is that this is a chimeric virus that very much does NOT show up in nature and its lab-made qualities are precisely why it became a global pandemic.
Or would you take it as pure coincidence that the first truly global pandemic in however many decades you'd like just happened to be lab made?
https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-experiments...
This is disputed.
It is sickening that millions of people died, more will die, hundreds of millions of people have been pushed below poverty line, almost every single person's life on the planet is affected in some way and some people think it's unnecessary to investigate.
a.) It was covered up,
b.) The people responsible hid crucial information which could have helped contain the spread in the early days and find treatments,
c.) The people assuring us that lab creation was an impossible "conspiracy theory" at the very least have egg on their face, and at worst have no credibility or were engaged in a campaign of mis/disinformation.
And that's without getting into questions of whether the "leak" story is being used to cover for "intentional release."
> It was covered up
This is not actionable.
> The people responsible hid crucial information which could have helped contain the spread in the early days and find treatments
You imply in punishing those people? In the case it was a leak, the people interested in punishing them don't have that power, the people with that power were the same suppressing the information, so no, that won't happen.
> The people assuring us that lab creation was an impossible "conspiracy theory" at the very least have egg on their face, and at worst have no credibility or were engaged in a campaign of mis/disinformation
You should already remove any credibility from anybody claiming it was impossible, as well as from anybody claiming any other kind of certainty. What actually happened won't change that.
What we should do is take a good new look at the containment procedures of those labs, reevaluate them, verify if they are followed and fix what is not. We should also press uncooperative countries, like China, to open those up for inspection. Again, whether this one virus came from a lab leak or not is not relevant, we know that best practices are still leaky, and we have seen how problematic a leak would be.
All this politics game of "did | did not" is very counterproductive.
Who should do that, exactly? The same people you seem to think we should not to attempt to investigate or hold accountable in any way?
> We should also press uncooperative countries, like China, to open those up for inspection.
If China was demanding to have a bunch of their inspectors let into Fort Detrick to poke around, we wouldn't be any more welcoming than they have been. It's silly to allow imperial powers to engage in bioweapons research and then expect them to show each other all their cards.
(1) people like dramatic scandalous stories, in general. (2) knowing such might drive some prevention of whatever mistake lead to such from recurring.
There exists a class of people who, without necessarily being driven by other motivations, generally try to find out what is really going on. We call such people scientists.
No need to focus on motivation. Curiosity should be enough.
The only reason I see why we should want to remain ignorant is it will possibly embarrass China.
I think there's also something more insidious at play. In western countries lot of people have become rich by exporting manufacturing to China. If somehow it is found that COVID was a lab-leak, there'd be a huge amount of backlash against China. It will harm the business, who are doing their manufacturing in China. There's a lot of money involved if lab-leak hypothesis turned out true.
It's not like you can leave finger prints or a "made in China" sticker on a virus right?
If it was full-on engineered, as in splicing RNA from different viruses together (or other such direct modifications), there would actually be fingerprints based around the method of splicing used.
Artificial selective pressure (introducing a virus to different hosts and selecting for desired random mutations) would look natural.
The information the process of evolution imparts on the genes/features of an organism differs based on whether it was natural or artificial.
* highly transmissible
* not very deadly
* similar to know viruses in the proposed natural sources
A lot of people seem to really want covid to be an engineered thing. But I'm not seeing any evidence to support that. And I would highly support action against China so I am bias in favour of this theory...
If you want to go all "judicial" on this, "on the balance of probabilities" in the context of an ongoing political and trade dispute between the parties, feels to me like an attempt to appeal to pseudo rational claims, more than an actual, dispassionate declaration of likelihood.
The article says "keep an open mind" which strongly suggests the "evidence" is equivocal. If you're not a virologist or scientist who works in the primary field, and I am not one either, you're at BEST attempting to interpret science at second or third hand. Science often uses words differently to colloquial speech. The word "must" for instance, has no normative force always. This "must" be because blah blah blah is not saying "causative" unless it actually says so. If it doesn't say WHY it MUST mean something, it's opinion. If it says MUST because of the balance of probabilities it's actually MAY in any case.
If you want to refer to something you said in a previous context, that's fine and is what links are for.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If having openly racist culture and running concentration camps has done nothing to their reputation, I don't think anything will.
> I don't think they did this intentionally.
Regardless if this was intentional or not, they should take responsibility. Imagine if Russia dropped a nuclear bomb on Europe by mistake. This is the same calibre of "oops my bad.". It's not a secret that these viruses were researched as a potential bio-weapon. In that sense whether it was intentional or not, it has done immense damage to worldwide economy, which is exactly the goal of such bio-weapon.
If we're to have a thoughtful, substantive conversation about a topic as sensitive as the OP, not jumping straight into the flames of hell is...rather a precondition.
I think most people just don't know about the Uyghur camps.
Bureacracies like WHO will NEVER EVER say that it came from a Chinese lab. The "inquiry" will say that it's unlikely and try to bury the issue, and then it will just keep popping its head out in news articles that get ultimately ignored.
To find a source we need a host. We haven't even found a host from SARS yet even though that happened back in 2002. All we have is a very closely related one (96% match?) and that was found in 2020. It takes a lot of work by scientists living among wild animals for years in often very remote locations. Stating it was from a lab after so little time has past and so little work has been done is at a minimum jumping to conclusions.
Why do you care if you will NEVER EVER believe it didn't?
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
I don't think this is true. A hypothesis can be unfalsifiable without being unprovable. (Think of a "needle in a haystack" existence hypothesis: it's unfalsifiable, at least practically speaking, but it can be proven simply by finding the needle.)
The sudden revelation that China screwed up and lied to the world is too shocking for the vast majority of people. The global public's response would not be optimal.
The slow reveal gives societies around the world time to adjust to the new reality.
If we were all thrown into that reality overnight it would get messy.
Speaking of governments... does the US funding of gain of function research change nothing in the discussion of vaccines?
The US RNA vaccines were funded by BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority) for 10+ years, the tech is not open-source, and only a few politically connected companies are allowed to manufacture them. Any criticism of these very new, never tried before vaccines are censored online. Censorship is so bad it's reaching great firewall of China levels on social media.
So we have a PsyOps campaign looking to move the US towards required vaccination, a government that funded the research that allowed a virus like this to exist, and we're still yelling "trust the science" at anyone who questions authority?
Politics is too deeply entrenched, it will be an impossibility to uncover the truth.
If we don't get open cooperation from China, it's also extremely useful information and helps all other nations recalibrate their levels of trust and ties.
Because if a future lab release happens, it could be so, so much worse. If it seems impossible, disease was a contributing factor in 31 species' extinctions that we know of, and those diseases were of natural origin.[1] The Plague of Justinian, also of natural origin, is estimated to have killed up to half the world's population at the time. After the last year, can we really afford to take these risks lightly anymore?
[1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
Thanks for the thoughtful post
But, also, wouldn't it be better to determine the cause of this one so we know not to do whatever it was that caused this? For example, try to discourage exotic meats that might be host to the virus and/or eliminate or strictly control gain of function research, depending on the actual cause (or some other cause that isn't actually either of these)?
In software terms, if you have a bug that breaks the production and the response is messy and slow, you absolutely need to spend time and effort to change your response process. But you also need to know how this type of a bug became possible in the first place.
The risks of such research have been in open debate for years, and the Obama administration even banned it for a while. It's not a far-fetched possibility, and it's a shame that the discussion about it became such a political casualty for the first year or so. The fact that heads are cooling a little now is clearly the precondition for scientists to be able to start writing letters like the OP.
Do you have a source for this? Because if true this would be extremely frightening, even if Covid is natural the research is just too risky. GoF research should be banned, I mean it's entire justification for conducting this research in the first place is that it "helps predict new emergent diseases and develop vaccines" but it failed to predict this pandemic and did nothing towards vaccine development.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/cong...
This was actually the reason we stopped the research in the US in 2014: Risky with no clear benefit. It was restarted in 2017 after investigations and new guidelines for the research to hopefully improve safety measures.
Sampling bias acknowledged.
I think many academics and scientists are so emotionally invested in the side they took they will defend it no matter of the evidence.
I think it's very wrong to shy away from inquiry of the truth out of fear of politics.
If it's expensive to mitigate and hard to quantify, it's always going to be an uphill battle.
Also, what do you mean by "improving air filtration"?
[1] https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
>"As no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching and as RNA recombination is frequent within coronaviruses, it is highly likely that SARS-CoV newly emerged through recombination of bat SARSr-CoVs in this or other yet-to-be-identified bat caves."
They also write...
>"After the causative agent of SARS was identified, SARS-CoV and/or anti-SARS-CoV antibodies were found in masked palm civets (Paguma larvata) and animal handlers in a market place. However, later, wide-reaching investigations of farmed and wild-caught civets revealed that the SARS-CoV strains found in market civets were transmitted to them by other animals."
Sorry if I made a mess of this as I'm on my phone and commented on more than on post too quickly really..
Edit: Woops, forgot the source. I knew it would be a mess..
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11...