Intelligence on Sick Staff at Wuhan Lab Fuels Debate on Covid-19 Origin
wsj.com
wsj.com
It's forever going to confound me how early on in this so many were certain that the lab leak hypothesis was a "conspiracy theory" or had been "debunked by the 'experts'". We still don't have any actual data from the lab? It's a tremendous indictment of the journalist class that this happened, since knowing the point of origin - be it natural or a lab accident or something else - has tremendous scientific value. If it was natural that tells us something, just as a lab leak would tell us about the risks and value of that kind of research. It's an awful example of the continued hijacking of scientific inquiry to drive what are many times partisan political objectives (not offending China, making Trump look stupid). I honestly want to know what changed so suddenly such that it's now okay to discuss the lab leak hypothesis in polite company.
One journalist who is clear eyed and a fantastic communicator about this case, based on having heard his interview on the Joe Rogan podcast, is Josh Rogin. Yeah similar names but no relation. Even though it’s a three hour conversation, by the end you’ll be wanting more.
And if you consider this is part of the cost for the walls against Trump to 'save democracy'( https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ ) - some think it's a small price to pay I guess.
I never understood how media just couldn't come out and say "odds of lab creation are 1 in 500 billion, so it's more likely trump is wrong - instead it was all a solid - debunked - wrong, racist, not a chance, yada yada."
Seeing the time piece I guess it makes more sense. I wonder how many memes copy pasta to how many people to influence with this not-half-truth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeuwqHDIRSQ
Media’s Lab-Leak Failure Is [like ramifications from] Next Iraq WMD
from the Hill / Rising with Krystal and Saagar
[brackets words added by me, not in original title, also uncapped some words]
It's simply because Trump hinted at this theory, so we say it's conspiracist and racist.
The same thing happened to "China virus". It is racist because Trump said it. Indian-variant of covid is not racist because Trump hasn't said that yet.
If his policy was slightly not in favour for China, the policy would be called racist immediately.
Boom. We will immediately stop using the word like "India variant" (and etc.).
To be clear, I have no problem using country-origin variant names, as long as we use the same standard for Covid-19. This is very similar to GOP trying to whitewash the Jan-6th thing, that now we're talking about UK, South Africa, India, Brazil variants, but the original is just COVID-19, no mention of China. This may seem unimportant now as everyone knows it came from China, but in 20-30 years will we remember, No!!
Even recently, when the ex-CDC Director Redfield talked about China lab-origin, CNN went to great lengths to question it and make a note that no evidence was presented. Even Fauci was quoted saying it's just an opinion: https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-much-more-lik...
https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV...
(I encourage anybody interested in the lab-leak scenario to read more of the reddit post below, not just this one section. There a ToC link at the bottom of the post.)
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
It’s incredible to me how just last year and up until a couple months ago, journalists and social media users viciously attacked those who proposed the lab leak hypothesis. It resulted in numerous acts of censorship (for example Zero Hedge’s ban from Twitter around a year ago), and was also incorrectly used to attack Trump (presumably for political gain in an election year). It allowed the WHO to perform a poor, biased site visit that misled the world, as the CCP tightly limited what investigation they could perform. This entire sad saga of information warfare highlights the need to limit the blind trust we put in journalists, news industry, and fact checkers. We should be especially wary of those who seek to censor views that are unpopular, disagreeable, or speculative.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/politics/trump-intelligence-c...
Regards, Ministry of Truth
The proximate cause? Probably the reporting of Nicholas Wade, whose article is targeted at the mainstream and which brings together some pretty hefty and complex topics around lab leaks in an accessible way.
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
If you look at the sources he cites, they're not really accessible to the mainstream. Yuri Deigin's essay for example is 34 pages printed out and filled with dense micro-biological evidence. You have to be really dedicated to read the whole thing.
Wade's article is also very long but at only 15 pages, it's still much more accessible. It also brings together a lot of different strands of evidence into a coherent and convincing narrative. I don't think anyone can read it and not be left with a deep impression of suspicious scientific wrongdoing. Additionally, lab leaks were first being discussed and dismissed a year ago. In the last year a lot of people have to come to realize just how unreliable public health researchers actually are. Some very well educated people learned that not only can they read the scientific papers forming public policy directly, but that when they do they keep discovering really huge mistakes and/or outright manipulations. So a lot of people who would previously have loyally dismissed any suggestion of scientific malpractice are newly open to the possibility.
And yeah then there's the Trump effect.
Obviously it would be in their interest to do that again, but instead, they have been uncooperative to outsiders and have gagged insiders. IMO, this supports the lab leak version of events.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-...
‘Not Wuhan lab, uh ... a fish market in Wuhan’.
I don’t get it. The truth is going to be strange as shit.
(Genetic evidence, 1200 mutations from the nearest related bat virus, receptor optimized for multiple species, evidence it was first seen in humans hundreds of miles form Wuhan, etc)
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
> My priors:
> Lab leak 60% (⬆ +20%) > Natural origin 40% (⬇ -20%)
For example, section 4.4 [1] under Q4 in his table of contents explains how the strains of covid-19 from the Wuhan meat market are genetic descendants of earlier covid-19 patient samples from hundreds of miles away.
There's a lot of good information in this post, I'd encourage anyone interested in this topic to read it.
I have yet to see a fraction of the evidence presented by Dr. Duehr's reddit post in any article blaming the Wuhan lab. That includes this article, which quotes circumstantial evidence provided by unnamed and unconfirmed intelligence sources.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
Root Claim puts it’s at an 83% chance it’s a lab leak based on circumstantial evidence: https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV...
It’s not definitive but it’s far from conspiracy theory territory.
His explanations seem to have much more detail than the one you provided.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
I don’t know the ins and outs of the lab or publishing research but it seems possible that other unpublished research could have been conducted.
We’re a far cry from proving that the virus came from a lab leak, but I’ve read parts of this thread too and the author’s response to certain criticisms and while the author could be right I didn’t come away thinking that a lab leak was near 0% probable.
> there are 931 synonymous substitutions and 145 missense substitutions between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13. The other ORF regions (90%) are identical between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13
Nobody does 931 + 145 substitutions for function of gain, do they? Dr Duehr says "this many differences or mutations (the mosaic) in the virus, can only reasonably have been made in nature." There was another section of his post that talked about how the receptor was optimized to work with multiple species (bat, pangolin, etc), something it would do evolving in nature.
Now I'm not going to insist that there are never lab leaks. In fact, reading one article on this subject, I was shocked by how many lab leaks there are, every year, even right here in the U.S. [1]:
> Young pointed to documents she recently obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, which revealed that laboratories in the United States "reported more than 450 accidents during 2015 through 2019 while experimenting with some of the world's most dangerous pathogens."
> Such pathogens, Young revealed, included anthrax, Ebola, plague, and more.
> "In nearly all reported cases, regulators deemed the breaches serious enough to put workers at risk of becoming infected," she wrote. "As a result, more than 660 U.S. scientists and other lab workers involved in the incidents underwent medical assessment or treatment with preventative medications."
Based on Dr. Deuhr's thoroughly documented post I just don't think that covid-19 was a lab leak. Some viruses jump between animals and humans, this looks like it was just another one.
I would rather that we talk about all the other lab leaks that go on. Who's making the decisions to put the public at risk? Is there anything we can do about any of this? There was a flu in the mid-1970s due to a lab leak. It's only a matter of time until something else happens.
[0] https://www.futuremedicine.com/doi/full/10.2217/fvl-2020-006...
[1] https://www.theblaze.com/news/investigative-reporter-lab-lea...
1. Furin Cleavage
> SARS-CoV-2 has a furin cleavage site - an amino acid sequence that causes the protease furin to cut the virus in a way that facilitates its entry into cells. This feature is missing in related coronaviruses, and its placement in the genetic code looks like an insertion rather than a mutation, making it less likely to develop in nature.
2. Adapted to humans from 1st known case
> It appears that there was one index case of COVID-19, rather than multiple jumps from nature to humans, as was the case in many other pandemics. Additionally, SARS-CoV-2 was already well adapted for human infection from the first known cases.
3. Wuhan Lab
> There is some weak evidence regarding lax security and procedures at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
> The WIV explicitly stated that they were not working on SARS-CoV-2 prior to the outbreak.
> However, on December 30, when Dr. Shi Zheng-Li was informed of the COVID-19 outbreak, changes were made to her bat virus database, making it look like she was trying to dissociate her lab's research from the COVID-19 outbreak.
> Then, in January 2020, WIV researchers published a paper claiming to have found a previously unknown coronavirus named RaTG13 that was a 96% match with SARS-CoV-2.
> But RaTG13 is a new name given to BtCoV/4991, a coronavirus that the WIV discovered (along with many other viruses) when they examined a bat cave after six miners contracted a pneumonia-like disease and three died. This, and other anomalies surrounding WIV’s handling of RaTG13, are indicative of attempts to minimize WIV involvement.
BTW, if you think they’re wrong, you can contact them here and win a potential $100k: https://www.rootclaim.com/think_rootclaim_is_wrong
> Second, what about the polybasic cleavage site and the o-linked glycan? We have seen, with other viruses, the ability to develop polybasic cleavage sites when put under just the right conditions for long periods of time. While unlikely, this piece of the virus could plausibly be developed through selection in a lab setting. However, what is near impossible is the development of the o-linked glycan addition motif. This is because the pressure to develop this glycan shield requires avoiding an intact immune system. This type of selection cannot occur using cell culture, and there is no known animal model that would allow for selection of human-like ACE2 binding and avoidance of immune recognition. This strongly implies SARS-CoV-2 could not have been developed in a lab, even by a system of simulated natural selection
This was a really informative source. I keep finding sources like this explaining that the genetics (the most trustable evidence) point to a natural evolution of this virus as the much more likely origin. Occam's razor.
I personally don't have $100k to take rootclaim up on the challenge of proving them wrong. I appreciate their presentation, which is much more thorough than other sources, but I don't think they are giving fair weight to contradictory genetic evidence and explanations (like the o-linked glycan mentioned above, which seems to invalidate their point on the cleavage site being made in a lab). For their genetic-based points (cleavage and adaptation) they admit a chance of being wrong in both cases, that nature could have done this. But this is probably what happened, there are hundreds of coronaviruses and hundreds of animals that can host them [1].
>So what’s the best hypothesis? The available data suggests a two-step process that may have given rise to SARS-CoV-2:
A bat coronavirus likely infected an intermediary animal (potentially a Malayan pangolin) where it recombined with a non-bat coronavirus.
Over time, either in the intermediary animal or while in humans, SARS-CoV-2 developed additional mutations: a polybasic cleavage site and a nearby o-linked glycan addition site.
It’s worth noting there are actually two competing hypotheses. In hypothesis 1, SARS-CoV-2 gains its new tools before spillover into humans. In hypothesis 2, SARS-CoV-2 gains these tools while amplifying in humans.
If hypothesis 2 is correct, then when SARS-CoV-2 first infected humans, it probably replicated and spread less well (like MERS, another human coronavirus). Over multiple replication cycles, the virus made mistakes and some mutants gained the advantage and began spreading efficiently among humans. If this is true, then we can implement better measures to monitor humans for new infections, and catch spillover viruses before they “get good” at spreading in humans.
Most scientists will look at the data gathered so far and say we’re on the right track because:
All the current data fits our hypotheses
Our hypotheses are the most parsimonious and best satisfy Occam’s Razor
Our hypotheses are testable and falsifiable
This strongly implies the virus was not designed or modified in a lab
A follow up section digs into two methods of man-made virus engineering. The article addresses each individually and concludes neither in isolation fits the bill. It does not address both in combination. Which is a glaring omission given that both methodologies being well defined mean that they can be applied in a staged manner trivially, and in fact, doing so would be, to me, the most practicable way to innovate. Apply every tool I know in discrete steps to leverage the best aspects of both methods.
Then there is this section:
>Second, what about the polybasic cleavage site and the o-linked glycan? We have seen, with other viruses, the ability to develop polybasic cleavage sites when put under just the right conditions for long periods of time. While unlikely, this piece of the virus could plausibly be developed through selection in a lab setting. However, what is near impossible is the development of the o-linked glycan addition motif. This is because the pressure to develop this glycan shield requires avoiding an intact immune system. This type of selection cannot occur using cell culture, and there is no known animal model that would allow for selection of human-like ACE2 binding and avoidance of immune recognition. This strongly implies SARS-CoV-2 could not have been developed in a lab, even by a system of simulated natural selection.
Which did not touch on whether O-linked glycan formation is a trait exclusive to human immune systems and not present in bats or pangolins, which are both jawed mammals in possesion of adaptive immune systems, capable of applying said pressure as far as I am aware.
This may be blatantly obvious to a zoologist, or immunologist, but the answer to such a question is not at all obvious to me. If there is someone with said knowledge or who knows someone with it, it would be much obliged for a sharing thereof.
Especially given that the chemical reaction is not exactly uncommon apparently.